Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

Initially the majority of members of Parliament had declared themselves against the war, unlike their counterparts in the belligerent countries. Neither Giolitti’s liberals, the dominant faction in Parliament, nor the socialists had been in a mood for entering the conflict. They argued that the Italian economy was much too weak, and too delicately balanced between the need to import raw materials and the need to export food (mainly to central Europe) in order to pay for imports. The labouring masses had only recently seen their conditions of life improve, and were not yet ready to feel part of a single nation. Besides, the war was seen as a struggle between two empires, the British (and/or the French) and the Germans, and there was no reason to shed Italian blood. The Church tried to maintain a degree of neutrality, since there were Catholics on both sides (in France, much of Austria–Hungary and southern Germany).

Interventionism, however, was not just supported by the military and the arms lobby, but also by a significant section of public opinion. It is unlikely that this was representative of the country as whole, since the rural masses were not in a position to express a choice, and few Italians participated in any pro–war demonstrations. The pro–war elements of the nation, however, were vociferous, and connected their inter–ventionism to a widespread lack of confidence in the existing institutions of the state, above all in Parliament, widely seen as the repository of corrupt practices and dominated by untrustworthy politicians.

Salandra and Sonnino were in tune with such sentiments, since they negotiated Italy’s entry into the war in the spring of 1915 without consulting Parliament. They thought the war would not last long, even though by then such views had less foundation than they appeared to have in 1914. It was widely held – and not only in Paris and London, but also in Rome –that one more push along the southern flank of the Central Powers and Germany would have to send troops to help its Austrian allies (outnumbered by the Italians), and would end up fighting on three fronts.19

Italian foreign policy had been auctioned off to the highest bidder. Germany and Austria had been prepared to concede Italy significant gains as long as she kept out of the war. The French and the British promised more: not just the Trentino with its Italian–speaking majority, but also the south Tyrol (Alto Adige) all the way to the alpine pass of the Brennero (Cisalpine Tyrol’s geographical and natural frontier); Trieste, Venetia–Giulia, Dalmatia and various Adriatic islands (but not Fiume); recognition of Italian sovereignty over the Dodecanese islands; a part of the Turkish region of Adalia (now Antalya) in the event of a partition of Turkey in Asia; a share of any eventual war indemnity; and, ‘in the event of France and Great Britain increasing their colonial territories in Africa at the expense of Germany, those two Powers agree in principle that Italy may claim some equitable compensation’. This, plus the promise of a loan of £50 million, sealed the deal. Article 16 of the Treaty of London, signed in April 1915, which sanctioned Italy’s intervention, stated quite simply: ‘The present arrangement shall be held secret.’20 Italy entered the conflict on 24 May, declaring war on Austria. The hope that Italy’s intervention on the southern flank of the Central Powers would lead to the quick collapse of Austria turned out to be unfounded.

In Great Britain, Germany, France, Belgium and Austria, the war united the population until the end of the conflict. Afterwards the inevitable recriminations, at least among the victors, remained relatively muted. Even in Germany, where the image of ‘the stab in the back’ was used by nationalists and later by the Nazis to berate social–democrats and pacifists, the war did not engender permanent divisions. Not so in Italy. Neutralists and interventionists existed in all parties, and remained bitterly at odds after the war. The weeks preceding Italy’s entry into the war had been characterised by a climate on the verge of civil war. As participation in the conflict seemed increasingly inevitable, the neutralists virtually gave up the fight. There was a general strike against the war on 17–18 May. Then there was an eerie calm. The socialists adopted the slogan of nè aderire nè sabotare (‘neither supporting the war nor sabotaging it’). The Catholics declared that they would be loyal to the state – though the Italian state had been created in the face of opposition from the Catholic Church.21 As the troops marched off to war, it became difficult to preach an anti–war message. The pull of national unity was almost irresistible.

Later, as the war turned sour, anti–interventionists could declare that ‘our boys’ were dying in a useless conflict for the benefit of arms manufacturers, while interventionists maintained that divisions on the home front demoralised the troops and encouraged the enemy. But when the war started, patriotic pressures were difficult to resist and opposition was muted. Few had the courage to appear disloyal. The formula nè aderire nè sabotare was an invitation to do nothing. Giolitti, who had opposed the war, announced, from his self–imposed quasi–retirement in his constituency in Piedmont, that he would support King and country. Some notable neutralists, such as the literary critic Cesare De Lollis, head of the anti–war ‘Italia Nostra’, volunteered for the front. Yet the events leading to the war confirm that Italy had entered it in a less exalted mood than other participants. War fever was confined to the more active part of the population: politicians, journalists, students, the urban middle classes. Various reports, including some from foreign diplomats, suggest that most Italians chose to remain silent, apathetic or indifferent. Those who supported the war found it easy to express their views. Those who did not found it preferable to remain silent. As for the apathetic many … How does one voice apathy? How does one measure it?

In 1914 Europeans were not used to expressing their opinions. There were, after all, hardly any channels through which to do so. Demonstrations needed to be called and organised by the politically active. Opinion polls were in their infancy. Writing letters to newspapers was confined to an elite. Confiding to one’s elected representatives was a prerogative used by very few. Italians were less inclined than many other Europeans to participate. Not only was illiteracy very high, but so was electoral abstentionism, even when the suffrage increased from less than two million in 1909 to over five million in 1913. The division between neutralists and interventionists was confined to a relatively narrow section of the population. But this was the section that mattered: the opinion–formers, the intellectuals, the army officers, the students – above all those in the north.22

The interventionists were by no means all nationalistic right–wingers. They included some belonging to the left – the so–called ‘democratic interventionists’ such as Leonida Bissolati and Gaetano Salvemini – both of whom volunteered. Bissolati had been the first editor of the socialist paper Avantil (1896–1904), then the leader of the reformist faction of the PSI. Expelled from the party in 1912, he founded, with Ivanoè Bonomi, the Partito socialista riformista. By 1916 he was in the government. Salvemini, who had left the Socialist Party in 1911 because it had not opposed the adventure in Libya energetically enough, had urged Italy’s entry into the war on the side of the Entente. Like the other democratic interventionists he hoped that Italy would be able to complete the programme of the Risorgimento: the union of all Italians under a single flag, with the ‘return’ of the Trentino to Italy, as well as Trieste and all territories on the Dalmatia coast where the Italian language prevailed.

The position of democratic interventionism could be traced back to Mazzini and his desire to remove from the map of Europe a ‘reactionary’ empire such as that of Austria, which many felt would pave the way for a series of revolutions throughout central Europe. This seemed to justify joining the side in the conflict which included both the Tsarist and the Ottoman Empires, arguably more ‘reactionary’ than that of the Austrians.

Interventionists did not hesitate in advocating firm measures against the pacifists and the neutralists. In some cases democratic interventionists turned out to be even more authoritarian than right–wing nationalists. Thus Bissolati, in December 1916, thought that Avanti! should have been suspended, and complained that the reason Salandra, the Prime Minister, had not done so was because he thought the war would not last very long.23

The Church had hesitated to take sides in the conflict. Austria and Italy were both Catholic countries, but Italian Catholics had fewer qualms than Pope Benedict XV. Don Luigi Sturzo, the priest who would found the Partito popolare italiano (PPI) in 1919, was an interventionist himself. Military chaplains were in fact as war–loving as nationalist officers. Mussolini recollected in his diary that the most patriotic speech he had heard in sixteen months of war was in a church, on 31 December 1916, when he went to hear Mass.24

Thus the interventionist front was variegated. Its main pillar was constituted, of course, by the nationalist bloc, but alongside it was a motley crew of liberals and socialists of various hues. The interventionists had the advantage which in times of war always goes with those who wrap themselves in the national flag, since every defeat can be attributed to the demoralisation induced by the opponents of the war, while every victory is a vindication of one’s position. Thus the debacle suffered by the Italian armies at Caporetto in October 1917, essentially due to military causes, had spectacular political consequences, not only because it led to the replacement of General Luigi Cadorna as Chief of Staff and the resignation of Paolo Boselli as Prime Minister, but because it was used to excoriate the entire political establishment. The defeat, it was widely held, was due not just to Cadorna, but also to the defeatist attitude and the lack of patriotism of so many Italians (a view enhanced by the surrender of a large number of Italian troops at Caporetto), to the weakness and pusillanimity of those who had ruled Italy since unification – a judgement made not only by Cadorna, as was to be expected, but also by communists such as Antonio Gramsci and liberals such as Luigi Albertini, editor of the Corriere della sera.25 Caporetto led to a renewed bout of febrile patriotism. By then this had also overtaken most socialist members of Parliament, including the veteran leader Filippo Turati, and leading trade unionists, even though the PSI refused to abandon, at least officially, the slogan of nè aderire nè sabotare. But there was also a corresponding surge of anti–war feeling. Economic difficulties compounded the opposition to the war, causing unrest in the countryside and in factories. Emergency measures and legislation permitting the banning by the military of religious processions and military–style parades were introduced. Legally binding agreements were introduced to achieve some social peace in the countryside.26

Mussolini’s early decision to support the war added to the complexity of the pro–war bloc. At first he had been a neutralist, but he soon changed his mind and embraced interventionism on the not unfounded ground that the war would bring about a major social transformation in Italy. As a member of the ‘left’ of the Socialist Party, he had long been disdainful of the timid reformism of traditional socialists like Turati. When, in the pages of the socialist paper Avanti!, Mussolini declared himself a supporter of ‘active neutrality’, arguing that ‘those who win will have a history, those who were absent will have none. If Italy is absent she will be the land of the dead, the land of the cowards,’ he was immediately expelled from the PSI (29 November 1914). Mussolini’s interventionism permitted him to break with the left of the Socialist Party and situated him in a political milieu far more profitable for his subsequent political career, even though at first his ‘revolutionary interventionism’ caused some anxieties in the Ministry of War and the high command of the armed forces.27 He was still a man of the left, but as he was increasingly trusted by the nationalists, he became less and less ‘revolutionary’ and more and more nationalist. By January 1915 the motivations he gave for entering the war had become indistinguishable from those of the traditional nationalist right: ‘We have to decide: either war or let’s stop this farce about being a Great Power. Let’s build casinos, hotels, brothels and let’s get fat. A people can have even such ideals. Getting fat is the ideal of inferior zoological specimens.’28

The language used and the sentiments expressed tallied with the nationalist interventionist narrative which contrasted the new and young Italy, looking optimistically towards the future, with the old Italy – conservative, neutralist, dominated by parliamentary imbeciles whose vacuous debates paralysed the country. Mussolini’s polemical attacks on the old establishment were conducted vigorously from the columns of his new, staunchly pro–war, newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. This made him popular among young veterans as well as modernists and avant–garde poets à la Marinetti.

Intellectuals such as Giovanni Papini and Giuseppe Prezzolini seized upon the occasion of the war to point out how ‘sick’ Italy had become under the existing political establishment. A revolution of ideas had become necessary, and it would have to be one which would not be afraid of using teppisti (thugs), for as Prezzolini wrote in 1914: ‘One doesn’t make revolutions either with scholars or with people who wear white gloves. A teppista counts for more than a university professor when one is trying to throw up a barricade or smash down the doors of a bank …’29 Perhaps Prezzolini was already thinking of Mussolini.

The ambiguity in Mussolini’s ideology, far from being a handicap, turned to his advantage. The ideological realignment occurring in the country as a whole favoured those in search of novelties, and as we know, new ideas are far more flexible and formless than old ones. The Italy which was coming out of the war was quite different from the country which had entered it. The ‘total’ nature of the war was evident in all belligerent countries, but it hit Italy more than France, Germany or Great Britain. Not in the sense that more people died – casualties were proportionately higher in France – but because, before the war, there had been less of a national consciousness in Italy than in most of the other participants. The war helped shape it.

Southern peasants – hitherto barely aware they were Italians – had been drafted in large numbers, dressed in the same uniform beside students and workers from other parts of Italy, and led to fight under one flag in the north–easternmost corner of a country they hardly knew. It is difficult to ascertain the extent to which these recruits developed a strong sense of national consciousness, but they certainly developed a discipline they had never experienced before, and a marked feeling of community for those who fought and died alongside them. They also experienced violence and brutality. The number of Italian casualties in the Great War was extremely high: 650,000 dead and one million wounded. The number of casualties would have been even higher had not the high command acted far more prudently in 1918 (when the casualties fell to 143,000, against 520,000 in 1917). The victory of Vittorio Veneto in 1918 partly compensated for the losses suffered at Caporetto, and was exploited to the utmost by the Italian chiefs of staff. In reality, by then the morale of the Austrian troops had completely collapsed, and many were in open rebellion against their officers.30

War anger united disparate veterans around the vision of a different Italy, where those who had paid a high price would see their suffering recognised by a grateful motherland. Most, of course, saw the war as an inevitable evil over which they had little control. Used to obey and to be subservient, they accepted the war as one accepts a natural catastrophe. Giuseppe Capacci, a soldier in 1915–16, kept a diary written with uncommon literary skill (in civilian life he was a Tuscan sharecropper who had had only three years of schooling), in which there is hardly a word of hatred towards the enemy or a whiff of patriotism. The main theme is a resigned acceptance of his fate: ‘We wanted to know where we would be taken,’ he wrote, ‘but it was useless: a soldier knows nothing until he has arrived. Some thought we were going to Albania, others to the Isonzo …’31 In October 1916 he got lucky: he was wounded in the arm and taken to the relative safety of a military hospital, where the presence of nurses from the Red Cross reminded him of the comfort of feminine company, of mothers and sisters: ‘Those who have not experienced the war do not know how pleasurable it is to return to a semblance of civilian life.’32 The only social criticism he expressed was when, on the train taking him home, he was ejected from the second–class carriage to the third–class to make room for some signori (ladies and gentlemen), though he was visibly wounded: ‘This is the love, the care that these gentlemen have for us soldiers; I shall say no more about this, though I could write much.’33

A collectivist spirit developed among many of these soldiers who until recently had been peasants. The war was a transforming experience. Removed from their normal situation, affections and interests, soldiers became absorbed in the task at hand. Their rural passivity turned quickly into humble devotion to their officers and love for their fellow soldiers.34

The war was seen as a test of comradeship, youth, discipline and courage. It was celebrated by those who had fought and survived it, and who had been, to some extent, brutalised by it and by the demonisation of the enemy.35 Regardless of the reality of war camaraderie, about which we have only unreliable evidence constructed after the events, what united many veterans of the war was a common narrative. While the soldiers suffered, the ‘others’, the rich, the protected and those with well–placed friends and relations, had managed to avoid – or so it was thought – the pain and suffering of the war, and became richer. War enthusiasts and neutralists alike blamed the politicians who bickered in Rome, far from the trenches. The traditional anti–political attitude of many Italians grew in the trenches.

That the war had been a watershed is not in question, but so was the Second World War; yet, as George Mosse showed in an illuminating essay, the Second World War never generated a myth of shared experience and pooled memories in the way the First did.36 The profusion of war memorials which dotted the countryside and small towns in France, Great Britain and Italy after 1918 was not replicated after 1945.

It was agreed, even at the time, that the conflict of 1914–18 had changed Italy completely. When it was over the then Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, called it ‘the greatest political and social revolution in our history’.37 Salandra, who had taken the country into the war, admitted that it would be impossible to return to the spirit of the pre–war age.38

The new spirit was embodied in the returning soldiers. These veterans would provide the terrain for the proliferation of violent right–wing paramilitary associations from which the fascists recruited their most fervent supporters. Much of the symbolism of the far right was acquired during the war. The black shirts they wore were inspired by the uniform of the elite crack troops – the Arditi – created in the summer of 1917 by General Luigi Capello. The hymn of the Arditi, ‘Giovinezza’ (Youth), became the official anthem of the Fascist Party. The word fascio (bundle or bunch) itself had been somewhat in vogue well before Mussolini appropriated it. It originated during the Risorgimento, and was later used by left–wing protest movements of peasants and workers based mainly in western Sicily – the fasci siciliani crushed in the early 1890s by the Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. In October 1914 some left–wing trade unionists who wanted to join the war founded the Fascio rivoluzionario d’azione internazionalista. Then, in February 1917, a group of eighty pro–war MPs formed the Fascio nazionale di azione, which included not only conservatives but also socialist reformists such as Bissolati and liberal interventionists like Luigi Albertini, the editor of the Corriere della sera. Finally, in December 1917 a large group of nationalist MPs (over 150 deputies and ninety senators) including Salandra formed the Fascio parlamentare di difesa nazionale. They were hailed by Mussolini as ‘the 152 fascist deputies’.39

Thus many of the elements of fascism – symbols, potential recruits, attitudes and ideological elements – were already extant when Mussolini was still barely known and had few followers. Had the fascists been more of a threat they might have been crushed by the ruling political establishment, but it was far more concerned with the danger represented by the left than with what was still an inchoate and ill–defined movement on the nationalist right.

A negotiated end to the war – as urged by the American President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 – would have favoured Giolitti and that section of the old liberal establishment which would have preferred to stay out of it. But the war ended only in 1918. Since Italy had been on the side of the victors, the interventionists appeared to have been vindicated. Before the war Italy was ‘the least of the Great Powers’, or perhaps not even a Great Power at all. Italian nationalism wallowed in a feeling of inferiority.

After the war, the situation was favourable for a complete realignment of the system of international relations in Europe. It is true that the real victors had been the United States – the new Great Power – without whose intervention the war might have gone on for longer, and on whose financial resources many in Europe relied for reviving their economies. It was equally true that, though weakened, Italy’s main imperial rivals, France and Great Britain, had emerged with their colonial empires intact. But all the other Great Powers had been humiliated. From the point of view of Italian diplomacy, the situation for a major improvement in Italy’s international prospects could not have been better. Its main enemy, the Austro–Hungarian Empire, had not only been defeated but was about to be dismembered. Germany had lost the war. Russia, having withdrawn from the war after the Revolution, was in the midst of civil war and, having become a pariah state, was faced with foreign intervention. The impending demise of the Ottoman Empire also offered rich colonial pickings to the victorious coalition. It was therefore perfectly rational for Italian nationalists – such as the Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino – to assume that the higher status they had aspired to for so long could be achieved. After all, Italy had paid a high price in terms of lives lost.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.