Romain Bonnet

Romain Bonnet completed his doctorate in June 2016 at the European University Institute of Florence (EUI), at the Department of History and Civilization. His dissertation, entitled “La Terre et le Plomb. Violence politique, question agraire et crise du parlementarisme liberal dans l’Italie du premier après-guerre (1918-1922) et dans l’Espagne républicaine (1931-1936)“, was completed under the supervision of Professor Heinz-Gerhard Haupt (History and Civilization, EUI and Universität Bielefeld) and the co-supervision of Professor Donatella Della Porta (Sociology and Political Science, EUI and Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa).

His research engages an interdisciplinary, comparative and transnational approach to the history of political violence in the mainly rural societies after the First World War in Italy (1918-1922) and in the Spanish Second Republic (1931-1936). This helps explaining the “Solid Mediterranean” (Lucien Febvre) and the persistence of a Southern European Question. In the framework of the PrewArAs project, he will apply a comparative approach to the study and understanding of the processes of  political violence. Focusing on the area of France and its colonies during the so-called Belle Époque (1870-1914), he is considering a variety of case studies that should allow to think historically about political violence, pursuing a personal contribution to “a comparative history of European societies” (Marc Bloch).