Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

DONALD SASSOON

Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

Cover

Title Page

ONE The Conjuncture

TWO A Divisive War – a Lost Victory

THREE The Parliamentary Crisis

FOUR The Advance of Fascism

FIVE ‘We Need a Strong Government’

Notes

Bibliography Of Works Cited

Index

About the Author

By The Same Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE The Conjuncture

On the morning of 30 October 1922 Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome, not on horseback, as he may have originally fantasised, but on the overnight wagon–lit from Milan, aware that King Victor Emmanuel III was to appoint him Prime Minister and entrust him with the formation of a coalition government.

While the future Duce was discussing strategy with his fellow travellers and meditating in his sleeping compartment, his supporters were converging towards the capital, some by car, others walking, but mostly by special trains, chartered with the help of the government. It was the so–called ‘March on Rome’ which had started on 28 October.

Ten years later, in a diary written with more hindsight than is usually the case, Italo Balbo, one of the more violent followers of the Duce, wrote that, from the beginning, fascism possessed the certitude that its destiny was the conquest of power through a violent insurrectionary act that would mark a caesura between old Italy and a new emerging country.1

It is often the case that those who proceed illegally try to find some legal reasons why they acted as they did. Sometimes revolutionaries insist on the legality of their actions, ignoring the short cuts they had to take. In Mussolini’s case it was almost the reverse. He preferred to pretend that he had taken power by force, and that power had been given to him because he had already won it on the battlefield. But Mussolini’s advent to power was – strictly speaking – quite legal. As the great liberal politician and former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti explained to his constituents on 16 March 1924, Mussolini had been appointed constitutionally, had sworn allegiance to the King and the constitution, and had presented his programme to Parliament, from which he had asked and obtained full powers.2

Yet the language used by the fascists at the time and in the following years depicted an uprising and celebrated revolutionary violence – one of several influences of the Bolshevik Revolution on the fascists. On 29 October 1922, Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, announced that ‘The whole of central Italy, Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, and northern Latium is occupied by the Blackshirts,’ conjuring up an image of armed occupation.3 To a reporter of the Milan daily Corriere delta sera Mussolini declared: ‘Tell the truth. We have made a revolution unparalleled in the whole world … We have made a revolution while public services continued to function, without stopping trade, and with employees remaining at their desks, workers in their factories, and peasants peacefully tilling their fields. It is a new style of revolution.’4

This image of turmoil and radical change was reinforced with the passing of time. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, writing in 1924, claimed that the March had been a reaction ‘against all the ideologies of the previous century: democracy, socialism, positivism, and rationalism; it was the vindication of idealist philosophy’.5 The preface to a collection of Mussolini’s main speeches published in 1928 enthused thus:

In 1922 He marches on Rome. He is Italy on the move. The Revolution continues. After half a century of lethargy the nation creates its own regime. The State of the Italians arises. Their power emerges. Their virtues appear. Their empire is in the making. This great renaissance … shall have His name. Throughout the world an Italian century is opening up: the century of Mussolini. 6

And when Mussolini addressed the Senate on 5 July 1924 he boasted that fascism obtained power by an ‘unquestionably revolutionary act’, by force of arms, marching on Rome ‘armata manu’.7

Twenty years later, in 1944, as the Duce faced defeat, more sober thoughts surfaced. Having escaped from the prison where he had been confined by the same monarch who had originally appointed him, Mussolini, now a pathetic Nazi puppet, recognised that fascism had not come to power by revolution. A true revolution, he wrote, would have required a fundamental change in the institutional framework of the state, but this had been left untouched by the events of October 1922: ‘There was a monarchy before and there was a monarchy afterwards.’8 He forgot to add that the King would not have turned against him had not the Grand Fascist Council forced him to resign. The great dictator had come to power legally, and was removed legally, not just by an old institution, the monarchy, but also by one, the Grand Fascist Council, which he had himself created.

Mussolini had given up on the ‘revolution’ well before his train approached Rome on that fateful late–October morning. The seductive appeal of power had made itself felt some time before, when he had become aware that he could get what he wanted more easily and speedily by compromising with the monarchy – one of the gestures that decisively propelled much of the political establishment into granting him full powers. Mussolini had realised there was no point in launching a major enterprise to grab power if power was his for the taking. His more naive followers had not grasped this strategic point. As they marched under incessant rain they assumed they were making history, but the Duce arrived in Rome before them in his wagon–lit to be driven to the palace, where he declared himself to be His Majesty’s ‘loyal servant’.9

This was no act of renunciation. Mussolini claimed that he had wanted to avoid a civil war, but in reality he could not have taken power any other way. His ‘army’ of fascists was not strong enough. They could have been easily thwarted, and Mussolini himself could have been arrested without difficulty in Civitavecchia–halfway between Pisa and Rome – where the army had blocked the line so as to be able to prevent the camice nere (Blackshirts) converging on Rome if necessary. Mussolini could have been stopped at any time.

Rome was well defended. General Emanuele Pugliese was given the job of organising the defence of the capital; not an arduous task, since the columns of marching fascists were slow–moving. The army occupied public buildings, set up barbed wire, coordinated troop movements. Pugliese assured the Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, that he would have had no problems in restoring order. In Milan it was no better for the fascists. They had entered into the barracks of the Alpini only to face an irate colonel who told them that if they did not leave immediately they would be arrested. They left sheepishly.10

General Pugliese, loyal to the crown, had more than 10,000 troops under his command.11 A further 28,000 troops controlled the roads to the capital. Pugliese ordered the railway lines to Rome to be cut fifty kilometres north of the city, and four hundred policemen would have been sufficient to bring the so–called March on Rome to a complete halt.12 Thus, as clearly established by army documents, the army was in complete control of the ‘marchers’.13 Had it been instructed to stop the fascists, the march would have been halted.14

General Pugliese had leaflets distributed to officers and soldiers:

In these grave hours everyone must bear in mind the oath of loyalty to the Sacred Majesty the King and to the Statute, fundamental law of the state which safeguards the freedom and the independence of Italy. No one has ever dared march against Rome, mother of civilisation, and suffocate the idea of freedom she represents.

You must defend Rome to the last drop of your blood and be worthy of her history.

Major–General Emanuele Pugliese, commander of the Division. 15

The marchers were left free to camp outside Rome. They numbered 30,000 to 40,000. They were amateur soldiers playing at revolution, poorly armed (hunting rifles, old army guns, little ammunition) and no match for regular troops – as the more aware among the marchers realised only too well. A diary kept by a student noted that the marchers were frequently reassured that the army would never fire upon them.16 In turn the fascists were reminded by their leaders that ‘the Army is the supreme defender of the Nation’, that ‘it must not be involved in the struggle’, that fascism had high esteem for the army, and that ‘fascism does not march against the forces of public order’.17 Indeed, troops were often used to provide food for the Blackshirts, pitifully soaked by the ceaseless rain.

Mussolini was perfectly aware of the weakness of his ‘troops’, which is why he took little interest in their military preparedness and efficacy, receiving only two messages from the marching fascists.18 He had chosen to concentrate on the ‘political’ front, remaining aloof in Milan, almost as if to signal that he was not a postulant.

The tragicomic aspects of the March should not lead one to underestimate its political significance. The fascists occupied towns of the importance of Cremona, Pisa and Siena, and cut the telegraph and telephone wires connecting Pisa to Genoa and Florence. The link was quickly re–established, without diminishing the symbolic impact of the fascist advance. Cars and trucks were requisitioned and used to convey supporters towards Rome. Fascist activists were freed from the Bologna prison where they had been incarcerated.19 Much of this encountered little opposition. The fascists had in fact been allowed to behave as a state within a state, parading uniformed supporters, talking openly of ‘seizing’ Rome, negotiating with local authorities and in some cases being welcomed by them. No left–wing force would have been allowed to behave like this. The legitimisation of the fascists could not have been more obvious.

So lacking in revolutionary secrecy was the preparation for the March that the chief conspirators, when they met a few weeks earlier in Bordighera on the Italian Riviera, were invited to lunch by Queen Margherita, the Queen Mother, whose villa was nearby and who openly sympathised with the fascists.20

It is difficult to stage a coup against an army, particularly in the absence of civil war, desertion, economic catastrophe or widespread civil disorder. The March on Rome was little more than an ill–coordinated demonstration aimed at increasing the pressures on the politicians in Rome. Mussolini – who had considerable strategic flair – realised that much was to be gained by remaining broadly inside the limits of legality while permitting regular forays outside it. But such a strategy could only work if wider liberal opinion had been prepared to tolerate the fascists’ ambiguous attitude to legality.

The outgoing government of Luigi Facta had drafted a decree declaring a state of emergency which would have empowered the army to take drastic measures against the marchers. The King had been expected to sign it, but he refused. Instead he asked Mussolini, the leader of one of the smallest parties in Parliament, to form the next government.

When Mussolini arrived in Rome he was welcomed by a few hundred well–wishers. The reporter of the Corriere della sera – a paper that despised Mussolini but had come to regard him as an inevitable and necessary evil, indispensable to keep the socialists at bay – described the welcoming crowd as ‘immense’, the image enhanced by the description of women throwing flowers at the man of destiny.21

The ‘march’ had not been in vain. It was part of a symbolic theatre aimed at highlighting the exceptional circumstances surrounding the Duce’s accession to power. Its purpose was not to conquer Rome but to provide the choreography, the necessary human material, for what was later glorified as la Marcia su Roma.

Thus at eleven on the morning of 31 October, Mussolini, a black shirt visible under his formal suit, as if to symbolise the two faces of fascism – respectability and barely concealed violence – turned up at the Quirinale Palace to receive his new appointment and submit the list of ministers who would serve in the new government. ‘I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness,’ he said, ‘if I am still wearing my black shirt, but I come from a battle which, fortunately, has left no casualties… I am Your Majesty’s loyal servant.’22

The new government was a genuine coalition. The fascists were far too weak to hog for themselves the lion’s share of ministries. Apart from Mussolini – who kept the Foreign and Interior ministries – only three ‘real’ fascists obtained portfolios: Aldo Oviglio (Justice), Alberto De Stefani (Finance) and Giovanni Giuriati (in charge of ‘recently liberated lands’, i.e. those which had been under Austrian rule until the end of the Great War). There were also two members of the armed forces (General Armando Diaz at the War Ministry and Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel at the Navy), one nationalist (Luigi Federzoni at the Colonies), one right–wing liberal (Giuseppe De Capitani at Agriculture), and two Catholics of the Partito popolare (Vincenzo Tangorra at the Treasury and Stefano Cavazzoni in charge of Labour and Social Security).

It looked almost like a ‘normal’ conservative government. Many of the ‘true’ fascists were disappointed, but the political elites were relieved. Mussolini’s deferential behaviour towards the institutions seemed to confirm their belief that, while mouthing revolutionary rhetoric, he would be able to check the black–shirted hotheads surrounding him.

He had, after all, repeatedly given signs of moderation. And when, on 3 August 1921, he had negotiated a pact (the patto di pacificazione) with the socialists aimed at bringing violence on both sides under control, he had irritated the more militant squadristi, people such as Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo and Roberto Farinacci, who did not hesitate to accuse him of being excessively accommodating. Faced with what amounted to an internal revolt he had threatened to resign, thereby resolving the crisis.23 The opposition he had faced showed that his control was not yet absolute, but the incident played into his hands because it confirmed that, unlike his acolytes, he was a shrewd politician able to play on several registers at once.

With their man now Prime Minister, the foot–soldiers of fascism went home triumphantly, confident that this was the first stage of a revolution that would sweep throughout Italy, transforming the country. Many of their comrades, however, were quickly seduced by the charms of the political establishment they had sought to destroy. They began to experience the pleasures of wielding power, of being feared and envied, and of basking in the respect of those they had hitherto viewed with awe.

The old elites, of course, despised Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and a schoolmistress. They were alarmed by his plebeian tones and his rough and populist language, yet they recognised him as someone prepared to do the dirty work they themselves were not able or willing to do. Some intellectuals openly admired him, or were not prepared to criticise him. The distinguished historian Gioacchino Volpe praised Mussolini well before the March on Rome.24 Benedetto Croce, the most revered philosopher in Italy, sent his good wishes to the new Prime Minister, while keeping his distance. Writing in 1944 of his contacts with Mussolini, Croce, in what were essentially self–justificatory notes, while barely able to disguise his pleasure at being esteemed by the Duce, explained that he had refrained from ever meeting him because they just did not belong to the same social circles: ‘There were differences between us to do with differences of social milieu, family and culture; and I have always held the view that men get on together if they have had a similar education rather than if they share the same abstract ideas.’25

Mussolini too made sure that everyone knew he did not belong to the same class as Croce. In 1931, wildly overemphasising his antecedents as a ‘man of the people’, he wrote with some pride that he belonged to the class of those who shared a bedroom that doubled up as a kitchen, and whose evening meal was a simple vegetable soup.26 It is true that life in his native Predappio, a small town near Forli, was hard, but in reality his parents were not poor: they both worked – his father as a blacksmith, his mother as a teacher – and his father owned a bit of land which he rented out.27 Mussolini was baptised in the local church and received a religious education. Yet his father was a socialist, who had named his son Benito after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez, and given him the middle names Amilcare and Andrea after two Italian socialist leaders, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.

Locally, Mussolini’s parents were people of some importance, not quite the dispossessed peasants described in later hagiographies; yet compared to the politicians who had ruled Italy since its unification, Mussolini was certainly a ‘man of the people’. The twenty–five Prime Ministers who preceded him may have been very different from each other, but they all belonged to Italy’s elites. Some, such as Cavour, De Rudini, Menabrea, Ricasoli, Sonnino and Lamarmora, were aristocrats; the majority were grands bourgeois – lawyers, academics, doctors and army officers. All had university degrees or had been to the military academy. Mussolini had left school at eighteen to be a primary school teacher. For a man of such humble origins to have become Prime Minister was a remarkable feat.

What are handicaps in some circumstances occasionally turn into advantages. During the First World War Mussolini had shared the lot of the ordinary soldier, the boredom as well as the fear. He could speak about life in the army with some authority, unlike the overwhelming majority of politicians. His war diary has the ring of truth. It avoided the absurd rhetoric of D’Annunzio (who had fought with considerable valour): ‘After two months I am beginning to know my comrades … Do they love war, these men? No. Do they hate it? No. They accept it as a duty that cannot be questioned. Those from the south have a song that goes like this: “And the war must be made, ‘cos that’s what the King wants.” ’28

A humble start in life may have prepared Mussolini to be more in tune with what ordinary people thought, and may have helped him to perform in the public sphere, embellishing his rhetoric with a language more vivid and more readily understandable than that deployed by his socially more polished rivals. But it would be a mistake to assume that rabble–rousing populism was a major factor in Mussolini’s advent to power. Electorally speaking, fascism had not been a great success. The first election the fascists fought, that of 1919, turned out to be disastrous. It is true that the party, or rather the movement – since they refused to call themselves a party until 1921 – had just been founded, but so had the Catholic PPI (the Partito popolare italiano) – and this immediately won a major victory in the 1919 election. If anyone could be deemed to represent the ‘new’ Italy it was, in 1919, not Mussolini but the PPI, which was the de facto representative of the Catholic masses, or perhaps the Partito socialista italiano (PSI), still the main party of the urban workers and the new intelligentsia. The fascists did a little better in the election of May 1921, but only because they were part of Giolitti’s blocco nazionale, along with liberals and right–wing nationalists. Giolitti had hoped to neutralise the fascists, and Mussolini had been ready to compromise to achieve parliamentary gains, though as soon as they were elected the fascist deputies sat at the far right of the Chamber, in opposition to Giolitti. Even so, they had not been able to muster more than thirty–five MPs out of 535. One cannot say that Mussolini had been swept to power by a wave of electoral support.

Votes, of course, are not everything, not even in a democracy. The real strength of the Fascist Party, as measured by the size of its membership, had been growing steadily throughout 1921. In March of that year the fascists numbered 80,000. By June the party had 204,000 members (62 per cent of them in the north). By May 1922 there were 322,000 members, and the Fascist Party had become the strongest in Italy.29 The tipping point had been their inclusion in Giolitti’s national bloc at the May election. This somewhat legitimised them in the eyes of many, for in the course of the electoral campaign they recruited substantially, and at a faster rate than ever before, more than doubling their numbers from March to reach 187,000 at the end of May 1921. This surge was overwhelmingly concentrated in some regions of the north and the centre, so that their activities appeared far more important and greater than if their support had been spread throughout the peninsula.30

The liberal establishment was scared of the fascists, but even more scared of the left and the trade unions. This explains why the violence of the squadristi remained unchecked; and the more unchecked it was, the more it grew. The fascists, while allowed to use violence, were never sufficiently strong to be able to topple the existing political order, yet not so weak as to be ineffectual. Besides, political violence was far more prevalent in the years following the First World War than it is now. When a left–wing revolt threatened the Weimar republic in 1919 even a social democrat such as Friedrich Ebert, then Chancellor, was prepared to use the Freikorps (a right–wing militia of veterans) to crush it, murdering in the process Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

After the fascists came to power, in just over five years, at a speed dictated by events rather than by any carefully–worked–out strategic plan, what was still, technically, a constitutional government turned into a dictatorship. The existing system of proportional representation – the cause of parliamentary fragmentation – was abolished in 1923, and a new electoral system was devised aimed at guaranteeing an overwhelming majority to the victorious coalition. Then, by a combination of brutality and questionable legal proceedings, the opponents of fascism – socialists, communists, trade unionists, democratic liberals and the few conservatives who had repented of their early support for fascism – were eliminated, stripped of power, beaten in the streets by fascist squads, forced into exile, or jailed. New laws and new institutions finished off the old liberal state: a Special Tribunal with reliable judges armed with retroactive legislation cowed what was left of the opposition. Press restrictions muzzled the few remaining independent newspapers. New, pliable, fascist trade unions replaced the rebellious sindicati that had held, or so it was said, the country to ransom. A new law for the ‘defence of the state’ abolished all political parties. Even the Fascist Party lost its importance. The instrument of Mussolini’s seizure of the state, the party had become irrelevant to the wielding of power. As the new social order emerged and the old one withered away, local fascist–led brutalities subsided and law and order were restored. Normality and routine were back on track. By the late 1920s the constitutional regime which existed when Mussolini had become Prime Minister was defunct. As the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti explained, the dictatorship was not established in 1922, but in the years between 1925 and 1930.31 Yet the social, educational and foreign policies Mussolini pursued in government in these first years in power were perfectly in continuity with those of its predecessors.