Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

The resulting political system was one envisaged neither by the radical wing of fascism nor by the conservatives. The former thought they would get rid of the monarchy, of the old ruling classes, of clericalism, of a timorous bourgeoisie which had sold Italy to foreigners. The new fascist society, so they dreamed, would demarcate itself sharply from the pathetic liberal Italy which had achieved so little in its sixty years or so of existence. The March on Rome became their foundation myth. In truth it had been – as we have seen – little more than a paltry gathering of useful idiots, but in the telling and the retelling of it, the March was transformed into a revolutionary movement, the vanguard of patriotic Italians of all classes, concerned and dismayed by the corruption and decadence of the old liberal state. According to this narrative, they had rallied around a new leader, Mussolini, and his new party, the unsullied and uncorrupted Partito nazionale fascista, that had denounced the inability of the old governing classes to stand up to the Great Powers and to make Italy great again. In so doing these patriots had also definitively repulsed the menace of Bolshevism and socialism, and the strikes and subversion which had threatened hard–working citizens and led the country to the verge of the abyss. Responding to the call of destiny, the Duce had led thousands, perhaps tens of thousands – even, in some hyperbolic accounts, 300,000 – to Rome (the Corriere della sera estimated the number of demonstrators to be between 45,000 and 50,00032). With the country at his feet, Mussolini could have, as he declared later, transformed Parliament into a bivouac for his legions. Instead he demonstrated his love of country and his sense of responsibility and accepted the offer to become the King’s Prime Minister.

Power, however, is seldom found in a single place, a handy central control room whose keys, once acquired, provide one with complete mastery. Even in a dictatorship, especially one in which the conventions are always changing, power is the result of a constant and extenuating negotiating process. The real losers are the outsiders. Isolated from the power structure, they do not see the compromises, the bargaining, the positioning, the back–stabbing, the fear of losing, the joy of winning, and the ephemeral nature of what appears permanent. From the outside a dictatorship looks like a formidable ‘totalitarian’ machine, in control and unassailable. When it crumbles (one thinks of Portugal in 1974–75, Spain in 1975–77, Iran in 1979, the Soviet Union in 1989–91, and South Africa in 1990–94), almost everyone is taken by surprise, except perhaps the more alert among those who led the old regime.

The key question to be addressed here is not how the dictatorship was consolidated, or why Mussolini succeeded in transforming a constitutional government into an undemocratic regime, or even why he was able to maintain himself in office so effectively for twenty years, and lost power only because he dragged his country into a devastating war. The key question is why Mussolini obtained office in the first place; that is, why, given the circumstances described, the leader of an electorally unpopular party, with no nationwide support and no control over the military, became Prime Minister.

Events developed in the way they did because of a unique conjuncture in which each participant, unlike a chess grandmaster, could not plan his next move in advance, with the knowledge that commonly agreed rules bind the players, that each must wait his turn, that only certain moves are allowed. Like all political grand games, the Italian crisis of 1922 brought to the fore a multiplicity of actors, with no fixed rules, with no clear boundary between friend and foe, and no obvious resolution. Only later, when the dust had settled, could each side count its losses and its gains, curse the wrong moves made or congratulate itself on its mettle and luck.

Mussolini realised – partly from experience, partly by instinct – that in order to be accepted by all as the supreme leader, he had to please those who had not been entirely convinced by his performance so far, and inevitably to disappoint some of his supporters. The views of the country began to matter to him more than those of the party. By 1923 he was warning his supporters that ‘The country can tolerate one Mussolini at most, not several dozen.’33

What were the circumstances which made reasonable and rational people hold the view that the country had become ungovernable, or at least that it could not be governed in the old way? In 1920 Lenin, who knew a thing or two about revolutions, explained to some of his excessively enthusiastic followers that one cannot make a revolution at will, but that it can only occur when two conditions are fulfilled: ‘It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).’34

In Italy in 1922, the first condition was no longer extant. The ‘lower’ classes, the workers and peasants to whom Lenin had successfully appealed in Russia in 1917 and in the immediately succeeding years, had been soundly defeated. The trade union unrest which had manifested itself in the ‘red years’ of 1918–20 had been quelled. As for the agricultural workers of central and northern Italy, they had been brutally put down by sheer fascist violence, violence which was often justified in terms of re–establishing order. The rural workers of the south had remained silent, barely aware of the momentous political game being played elsewhere. The second condition (‘the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’) applied to a limited extent. The ‘upper classes’, if one can use this terminology to designate interlocking elites seldom able to present a monolithic face, realised that they could no longer go on in the old way, but they were not sure what the new way might be. They looked for an option whereby, to paraphrase Tancredi’s famous remark in Tommaso de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, ‘Everything must change so that everything remains the same.’ As the uncertainty of the elites grew, their unity, never their strongest card, faltered. Mussolini was one of several options they considered. They hoped that he would clear the ground from under the socialist and communist rabble, wipe out those trade unions before which they had trembled, and would then settle down, content with the trappings of power, cutting ribbons, strutting around, visiting schools, ennobling friends and relatives. Mussolini’s assigned role was to cleanse the country of the red menace and then turn himself into a figurehead. The old establishment would rule in the shadows, as it had always done.

Mussolini’s capture of power was seen by many of his contemporaries, at home and abroad, as the result of his exceptional qualities of leadership. He was the true ‘man of destiny’, the embodiment of die Weltseele (the World Spirit), to use Hegel’s description of Napoleon when he saw the Emperor riding through the city of Jena on 13 October 1806, the eve of the battle.35 Mussolini was one of the first modern leaders to achieve power in exceptional circumstances, outside the normal rules of politics. He had not been anointed by divine right, as under the ancien régime, nor – as in most democracies – gone through the legitimate process of succession as the leader of a major established political party. In the course of the twentieth century such men of destiny appeared with alarming regularity, and they continue to do so in the twenty–first. But Mussolini’s predecessors were rare. Only in Latin America had dictators or caudillos come to the fore in the course of the nineteenth century, men like Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Antonio de Santa Anna in Mexico and Jose Antonio Páez in Venezuela; but they all owed their accession to their military positions. Like the first Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell, they were men on horseback. Louis Napoleon (who eventually crowned himself Napoleon III) did achieve office, like Mussolini, by exploiting a paralysis among the leading political forces, but unlike Mussolini he obtained power by winning a genuine presidential election – in 1848, with an overwhelming popular mandate, to the surprise of the political establishment. Only then did he proceed, on 2 December 1851, to stage a coup d’etat. Unlike Mussolini he had no organised party to back him, nor did he need to compromise with an existing monarchy.

The nearest European predecessor of Mussolini was his contemporary Primo de Rivera, who in September 1923 was appointed dictator by the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII; but his dictatorship was short–lived. In Poland Józef Pilsudski was, like Mussolini, a former socialist leader, but unlike him he became a national hero in the course of the Soviet–Polish war of 1919–21, at the end of which he proclaimed an independent Polish republic and became the first head of state of the newly resurgent Poland. Having resigned this position in 1922 he returned to power in 1926, when the country, like Italy, was in the throes of parliamentary paralysis, and controlled the destiny of Poland until his death in 1935. Thus there were few if any historical precedents for Mussolini. This explains, at least in part, both his rapid rise and the difficulties even his contemporaries faced in trying to explain the phenomenon.

Mussolini was systematically underestimated by both allies and opponents. The initial reaction of the Italian Communist Party was muted. The Theses of Rome (March 1922) – the communists’ founding document – do not mention fascism at all. Even an astute thinker like Antonio Gramsci, at the time of the seizure of power, dismissed the possibility that Mussolini might hold the fascist movement together, and like many commentators assumed that eventually it would split between an intransigent wing and a legalistic one. Writing in August 1921, Gramsci had suggested that by concentrating on Bologna instead of Milan, fascism was ‘in fact freeing itself from elements like Mussolini – always uncertain, always hesitating as a result of their taste for intellectualist adventures and their irrepressible need for general ideologies – and becoming a homogeneous organisation supporting the agrarian bourgeoisie, without ideological weaknesses or uncertainties in action’.36

Even in 1924, when the construction of the regime was well under way, Gramsci’s writings on Mussolini stressed the importance of the image of the dictator, rather than his policies:

He was then, as today, the quintessential model of the Italian petty bourgeois: a rabid, ferocious mixture of all the detritus left on the national soil by the centuries of domination by foreigners and priests. He could not be the leader of the proletariat; he became the dictator of the bourgeoisie, which loves ferocious faces when it becomes Bourbon again, and which hoped to see the same terror in the working class which it itself had felt before those rolling eyes and that clenched fist raised in menace? 37

This is not to say that the image or the personality of the new leader was unimportant. While it is true that the seizure of power would not have taken place without a favourable conjuncture, personalities do matter. Mussolini was in the right place at the right time, but he was also the right man. Marx, who tended to overestimate impersonal forces in history at the expense of personalities, perceptively pointed out, in the second paragraph of his famous 1852 essay on Louis Bonaparte, that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self–selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’

In this book I will follow this suggestion and seek to reconstruct the ‘circumstances given and transmitted from the past’ – the conjuncture – that enabled Mussolini to reach power. But no inevitability or determinism is assumed here. Matters could have gone differently. Circumstances made it possible for Mussolini to become Prime Minister of Italy, and further factors made possible the subsequent itinerary of the regime; but there is a world of difference between the possibility of an event and that event occurring.

Mussolini did not just appear as a new leader. He was a new, modern leader, one who possessed, to use a word now abused but then recently given a new meaning, ‘charisma’, a magnetic personality exuding power not because power had been foisted upon him by established political rules, but by virtue of some God–given, unfathomable qualities. Max Weber had defined charismatic authority – contrasting it with more usual forms of authority (traditional and legal–rational) – as a quality of ‘an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.38

Mussolini’s merit was to have exploited to the full the cards that fate (history) had handed him. There was, of course, an element of luck – a concept seldom deployed by historians – for even the ablest of men cannot be aware of all the possibilities. In the end, one has a ‘good’ hunch and acts accordingly. After all, Mussolini’s demise came about, at least in part, because of a ‘bad’ hunch: a miscalculation regarding the probable outcome of the Second World War. His initial (correct) instinct had been to keep out of it, just as his instinct almost twenty five years earlier had been to enter a war. Of course, in 1940 it was not unreasonable to assume that Hitler would win the war, and that it would be more advantageous to be in than out. But Nazism was defeated, dragging along with it into the maelstrom fascism and its man of destiny. Another dictator, Francisco Franco, had tried to join in Hitler’s war, but, luckily for him, he was rebuffed by the Germans.39 He thus ruled Spain until his dying days, allowing his apologists to celebrate his cunning in staying out of the war.

Italian fascism was wiped out by a world war, but it was also born out of war. Of all the factors that made fascism possible, the First World War was the most important. The war accelerated changes in Italian society, destabilised the country’s parliamentary system and realigned its politics, thus contributing decisively to the conjuncture which enabled Mussolini to become Prime Minister in 1922. But it was far from being the sole factor. The changes brought about by the war made it difficult to return to the unstable system which had preceded it. Without the war, Italy may have had the opportunity to evolve otherwise and to follow a different, liberal, path towards modernity. Equally, it would have been possible to resolve the post–war crisis without creating the conditions for a fascist takeover of the state. As Paul Corner has argued, ‘The identification of possible origins of fascism in the decades before 1922 is a very different matter from suggesting that these origins had a necessary and inevitable outcome in the March on Rome.’40

TWO A Divisive War – a Lost Victory

The war that erupted in 1914 had been widely expected. In many countries it had even been welcomed. Imperialist rivalries, an arms race, the inexorable crumbling of the Ottoman Empire which opened a new political vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean, the growth of nationalism – particularly disruptive for the Austro–Hungarian Empire – the visible weakness of Russia (defeated by Japan in 1905), and a complex and unstable system of alliances all contributed to the outbreak of war after Gavrilo Princip’s bullet pierced Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s jugular vein at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

Seldom was the start of a war so popular – at least in cities; peasants remained indifferent, and women were probably more dubious than men.1 It was widely held that the war would be short, and crowds in Paris, St Petersburg, Vienna and London cheered the beginning of the conflict. In Berlin crowds of between 2,000 and 10,000 people joined in patriotic demonstrations.2 Outside Buckingham Palace there were people shouting ‘We want war!’3 The citizens of the belligerent countries accepted the onset of war, though perhaps not with the massive enthusiasm described in numerous recollections.4 Recent scholarship notes that the evidence, at least in the United Kingdom, of popular joy at the prospect of war ‘is surprisingly weak’.5 But, at least when war broke out, there was sufficient public enthusiasm to attract the notice of newspapers, and those who opposed it were subdued, divided and resigned.6

Jean–Jacques Becker’s 1914: Comment les Français sont entrés dans la guerre, still, after more than thirty years, the most thorough study of public opinion in a particular country at the start of the First World War, gives a complex picture of the divergent attitudes in France. These included sadness and resignation as well as patriotic enthusiasm, the latter being far less widespread than was commonly thought.7 But some were thrilled with excitement. Adolf Hitler, writing in Mein Kampf in 1924, recalled his elation at the news: ‘To me those hours seemed like a release from the painful feelings of my youth. Even today I am not ashamed to say that, overpowered by stormy enthusiasm, I fell down on my knees and thanked Heaven … for granting me the good fortune of being permitted to live at this time.’8 Hitler’s enthusiasm may not be surprising, but more sober minds were also caught up in the ferment, including intellectuals of the calibre of Stefan Zweig and Max Weber.9 Max Beckmann, the Expressionist painter, was exhilarated.10 Rupert Brooke, in October 1914, wrote in his famous sonnet ‘Peace’: ‘Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour’. Rainer Maria Rilke celebrated the advent of the conflict in his Five Cantos in August 1914: ‘… the battle–God suddenly grasps us’. The Viennese playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Rudyard Kipling, turned into war propagandists. Thomas Mann declared: ‘How could the artist, the soldier in the artist, not praise God for the collapse of a peaceful world with which he was fed up…’ Sigmund Freud too, at least initially, rejoiced in partisanship.11 And during the war the French philosopher of perception Henri Bergson travelled repeatedly to the USA to encourage Washington to enter the hostilities on the side of the Allies.

The popularity of the war can be gauged by the behaviour of the socialists. Before the eruption of the conflict they had repeatedly committed themselves to averting war by all possible means. However, on 3 August 1914 the parliamentary group of the German Social–Democratic Party stood unanimously behind their Emperor in defence of Germany. The French, Belgian and Austrian socialists also adopted a vigorous patriotic position. In Great Britain Labour MPs and the trade unions did the same (though some Labour leaders, such as Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald, did not).

In spite of the war fever raging elsewhere, in Italy a wait–and–see attitude prevailed at first. This unwillingness to be plunged into the fighting was paralleled in other European states such as Holland, Spain and Sweden, which stayed out for the duration, and Romania, Greece and Portugal, which, like Italy, eventually joined in.

It would be wrong to assume that pacifism had much to do with Italy’s reluctance to go to war. There were, at the time, two main strands of opinion which might be labelled ‘pacifist’: the Catholic and the socialist – but neither was committed to pacifism as a matter of principle. Catholics accepted the idea of just wars, but were hostile to the Italian state, whose foundation originated from a war of conquest against the Papacy. Socialists accepted the possibility of revolutionary violence, but regarded wars as the result of capitalist greed. There was also (and there still is) a common perception that Italians were ill–suited to wars and had a predisposition towards non–bellicose activities: Italians as ‘brava gente’, that is decent and good–hearted folk.12 Such stereotypical attitudes occasionally had the imprimatur of major philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant, who remarked that Italians had put their genius ‘in music, painting, sculpture and architecture’.13 Italian intellectuals had often lamented the lack of warlike qualities in their fellow countrymen. Even Alessandro Manzoni, a Catholic novelist and playwright consecrated by Italian nationalism and revered by all, despaired at how centuries of foreign invasions had reinforced the supine attitude of Italians. In the first chorus of his 1822 tragedy Adelchi he described the Italians as ‘a scattered people with no name’ (‘un volgo disperso che nome non ha’), uncertain, timorous and undecided, eternally waiting for a foreign invader to liberate them.

The reluctance to enter the war could more profitably be explained in terms of Italy’s past rather than of national stereotypes. Italy’s recent forays into imperial adventures had not turned out to be successful. In March 1896 at Adua in Ethiopia a large Italian expeditionary force of 17,700 men was annihilated by the armies of Emperor Menelik, the most scorching defeat of any European army in Africa. The dead and some of the prisoners were castrated in traditional Ethiopian custom. The disaster ended the political career of the then Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi.14 The rush to colonies divided Italy far more than it divided Great Britain, Germany or France. In 1911–12 Italy declared war on Turkey and occupied Libya, Rhodes and the islands of the Dodecanese. This proved an easier enterprise than Ethiopia, but almost as controversial. The shame of Adua was redeemed, and Italy had become a colonial power, albeit a second–ranking one. Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, who had agreed to the war on Libya with some reluctance, had been supported by the liberal press, above all by Luigi Albertini’s Corriere delta sera, as well as by some Catholic organisations who saw the expedition as another crusade against the heathens. Libya, however, did little for Giolitti’s prestige, while considerably enhancing the influence and power of Italian nationalists. Organisations such as Enrico Corradini’s Associazione nazionalista italiana exploited the Libyan adventure, thereby assuming a much greater weight in national life than its numbers warranted, and made inroads into the civil service, the armed forces and intellectual life: ‘By the conclusion of the war, the nationalist movement had burrowed its way into Turinese, Milanese, Venetian, Roman and Neapolitan centres of journalism.’15

Intellectuals played a role in legitimising a bellicose attitude. The futurists, who were against bourgeois conventions, including liberalism, parliamentarism and pacifism, glorified war and violence, regarding the artist, seen as a kind of Nietzschean superman, as in charge of his own destiny and showing the future to others.16 Artists were supposed to abandon their ivory towers, approach the masses and lead them with deliberately shocking slogans worshipping war and violence – ideas soon annexed by the fascists. In the Futurist Manifesto, published in the Figaro in Paris on 20 February 1909, Marinetti, with the evident desire to épater les bourgeois, wrote that the futurists ‘will glorify war – the only hygiene of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of libertarians, the beautiful ideas that kill, and contempt for woman’.17 Marinetti also wrote enthusiastically about the Italian conquest of Libya in 1911 as the correspondent for the right–wing Paris newspaper L’intransigeant. Much of this provided a fertile intellectual ground for fascist ideas. But such a nationalist position was far from being the sole prerogative of futurists and modernists. Giosuè Carducci, Nobel Prize–winner (1906) and revered man of letters whose influence on Italian education and intellectual life cannot be overestimated, often glorified patriotic and warlike themes, evoked the greatness of ancient Rome and exhibited a ‘visceral dislike of parliamentary institutions’.18

The Italian election of 1913, the first held under universal male suffrage, demonstrated, however, that the extreme nationalists had been kept in check: the liberals, though deeply divided, still had a majority, while the socialists improved their position considerably. This explains, at least in part, why the Prime Minister Antonio Salandra, a right–wing liberal, and the Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino, also a man of the right, felt that the country was not strong enough to enter the war in 1914, and declared that it would remain neutral. Meanwhile they prepared the terrain for intervention.