Book. In Sicily, the mafia has long coexisted with its double. This structured criminal organization has developed at the same time as speeches denying to its existence. Its members have masked their actions behind a folklore built by a massive cultural production approaching mafia themes.
The founding myths of Cosa Nostra have superimposed on the rare data documented on its origins, while its violence, episodically exploding, left behind it with missing pieces, nourishing fantasies and conspiracy hypotheses, founded or not. The mafia is therefore a difficult historical object to grasp on which academics did not look until the 1980s.
In his fascinating History of the mafia (Fayard, 384 pages, 22.90 euros),, Jean-Yves Frétigné seized it, using the sources available to delimit the historical trajectory of a secret organization. By studying the shadow that she projected on imaginations and political discourses, the historian plunges the reader into a rich popular culture.
A foreman's class
Far from the myths that would raise the mafia to the 13the A century, it was rather a product of modernity, which appeared in favor of social and economic transformations linked to Italian unity. When the kingdom of Italy was founded in 1861 after the annexation of the territories governed by the Bourbons in the south of the peninsula and in Sicily, the old agrarian aristocracy declines while a class of foreman.
With representatives of other professions in a dominant position compared to the small people, they found a secret society, matrix of this mafia which soon infiltrates all island powers, including Church. It plays a role of social control and, backing under fascism, adapts after the war to the new democratic and capitalist deal. With political power, it makes entrism. With the State, it intends to negotiate. Until magistrates inhabited by the defense of the Republic began to attack it methodically at the dawn of the 1980s.
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Source: Lemonde