Reading Order
The ConformistMoravia The Conformist Reading Order
Alberto Moravia's The Conformist (1951) is the great Italian novel of fascism — the story of Marcello Clerici, a young Roman who has decided to be normal at any cost, and whose desire for conformity leads him to agree to the assassination of his former philosophy professor, who has become an anti-fascist exile in Paris. Moravia — one of the most prolific and politically engaged Italian writers of the twentieth century — uses Marcello's case to analyze the psychological roots of fascism: the way the desire to be like everyone else, to fit in, to be accepted as normal, creates the conditions for complicity in state violence. The novel was the basis of Bernardo Bertolucci's celebrated 1970 film.
Where to start
The Conformist
Complete The Conformist Book List
- 1Buy
The Conformist
Alberto Moravia·1951·Moravia's most celebrated novel — Marcello Clerici's fatal desire for conformity and his complicity in fascist murder; the great Italian psychological analysis of how ordinary people become complicit in political violence - 2Buy
Agostino
Alberto Moravia·1944·Moravia's short novel about a boy's loss of innocence — Agostino's discovery of his mother's sexuality and his subsequent initiation into cruelty by a group of lower-class boys; short, brutal, and psychologically precise - 3Buy
Two Women
Alberto Moravia·1957·Moravia's most moving novel — a mother and daughter's experience of the last year of the Second World War near Rome; the companion to The Conformist in its concern with what fascism and war do to ordinary people, approached from the experience of women rather than men - 4Buy
The Woman of Rome
Alberto Moravia·1947·Moravia's portrait of a Roman prostitute — Adriana's matter-of-fact acceptance of her life as a meditation on survival, dignity, and desire; the companion to The Conformist's male perspective on the same Rome in the same period
The Conformist — Frequently Asked Questions
Is The Conformist based on a true story?
The Conformist is fictional but draws on historical reality: the OVRA, Mussolini's secret police, did use informers and assassins to eliminate anti-fascist exiles in France in the 1930s. The character of Professor Quadri and his anti-fascist circle in Paris is fictional, but the political context — Mussolini's Italy using violence against exiles — is historical.
What is The Conformist about?
The Conformist follows Marcello Clerici, a young Roman bureaucrat in Mussolini's Italy who has decided that what he wants most is to be normal — to have a normal wife, a normal job, a normal life. When he is recruited by the OVRA (Mussolini's secret police) and given the task of assassinating his former philosophy professor in Paris, his desire for conformity and his assignment converge in a way that is both psychologically and morally catastrophic.
Was The Conformist made into a film?
Yes — Bernardo Bertolucci's 1970 film The Conformist, starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, is one of the most celebrated Italian films of the 1970s and is often ranked among the greatest films ever made. The film is more overtly stylized and erotic than the novel but captures Moravia's central concern with the psychology of conformity and its relationship to fascist violence.
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