Le leggi razziali e la Costituzione italiana

The history of the Republican Constitution has always been presented, in the dominant public and scholarly representation, as a moment of total discontinuity from the fascist regime and, therefore, also from the so-called ‘racial laws’. It is vigorously recalled whenever the subject resurfaces in the public and scientific debate, that the Italian Constitution rejects fascism in all its possible forms; it rather builds a democratic order, in which the principle of the division of powers, the centrality of Parliament, the autonomy of the judges, the guarantee of the rights of the person are affirmed. The rigidity of the Constitution was imagined as a safeguard to protect the organisation of powers and the protection of rights from contingent political majorities, which acting without any limits can adopt unjust measures. And yet, both history and constitutional actuality present, without solution of continuity, elements of great contradiction.