Why in Italy you don’t read Furet, historian against the “revolutionary catechism”

Signaling to readers the return to bookstores, in a single volume, of the three historical novels that Hilary Mantel dedicated to the French Revolution, the Friday of the Republic took the opportunity to liquidate the work of François Furet in a few words. In fact, the French historian is defined, in an article by Massimo Raffaeli, as the bearer of “the reactionary idea (…), established for some time in common sense, according to which the French Revolution, and indeed every revolution, fatally harbors the totalitarian germ”. Anyone who had never heard of Furet before might think that we are referring to a counter-revolutionary scholar, instead of one of the major historians of the last decades of the twentieth century. So a judgment like the one just mentioned could simply be ignored, like one of the many opinionated nonsense that sometimes happen to read. And yet those words are also the indicator of the mistrust that ended up surrounding Furet’s works in Italy, which have not been reprinted for some time.