The March on Rome

The "mutilated victory" and the Red Biennium

Italy was among the victors of the First World War, but when the Treaty of Saint-Germain of 1919 gave it South Tyrol, Trentino, Istria, Trieste and Zara and not Fiume or Dalmatia, nationalists spoke of a "mutilated victory". Veterans of the wartime shock troops, the Arditi, were angry at the state of post-war Italy. Prices soared, mass demobilisation swelled unemployment, and by the end of 1918 some observers believed Italy to be on the brink of revolution. 1 2

During the "Red Biennium" of 1919–1920 the Italian Socialist Party grew to 250,000 members and the socialist General Confederation of Labour to two million, while the anarchist Italian Syndicalist Union gathered between 300,000 and 500,000. In December 1919 the anarchist propagandist Errico Malatesta returned from exile. Industrial strikes rose from 810 in 1913 to 1,663 in 1919 and 1,881 in 1920; more than a million peasants struck in the countryside, and 27,000 hectares of uncultivated land were seized in 1919 alone. On 20–21 July 1919 a general strike was called in solidarity with the Russian Revolution. 2

In Turin and Milan factory councils appeared, which Antonio Gramsci saw as the Italian equivalent of the Russian soviets. In April 1920 Fiat metalworkers struck for recognition of the councils, a demand the Socialist Party and the Confederation did not support. The movement peaked in August and September 1920, when armed metalworkers occupied their factories in answer to an employers' lockout. Some 400,000 metalworkers and 100,000 others took part across the north-western "industrial triangle", and on 3 September 185 metalworking factories were occupied in Turin alone. The Socialist leadership failed to extend the movement to the rest of the country, and amid the industrial crisis, mass layoffs and wage cuts of 1921 it ebbed away. 2

Nationalist armed action broke out first at Fiume. On 12 September 1919 the poet Gabriele D'Annunzio led 186 "legionaries" from Ronchi into Fiume; other units soon joined him and his force grew to 2,500. Having forced out the Allied occupiers, he set up the Italian Regency of Carnaro with himself as Duce. When the Italo-Yugoslav Treaty of Rapallo of 12 November 1920 made Fiume a free state, D'Annunzio declared war on Italy, and on 24 December the government of Giovanni Giolitti sent in the army and had the navy bombard the city to drive him out. The occupation of Fiume served as a partial "precedent and inspiration" for the March on Rome two years later. 3 4 5

From Piazza San Sepolcro to the action squads

On 23 March 1919 Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento with between fifty and two hundred supporters in a hall on Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan. A pre-war Socialist leader expelled from the party for championing intervention in the war, he argued that the men of the trenches should form a new ruling class. The founding programme mixed leftist demands such as women's suffrage, abolition of the Senate and a republic with nationalist claims to Fiume and Dalmatia. On 15 April Fascists led by Marinetti and others wrecked the offices and presses of the Socialist daily Avanti!, which Mussolini called "the first material achievement of the fascist revolution". 1 6

The general election of November 1919 was a rout for the Fascists. In Milan, where the Socialists won 190,000 votes, Mussolini's list gathered fewer than 5,000 and no seats. Socialists carried a coffin bearing Mussolini's name past his apartment in a mock funeral, and by the end of the year the Fasci had fewer than 4,000 members. Mussolini briefly considered leaving politics and emigrating. But the Socialists' emergence as the largest party alarmed the conservatives, who looked for new allies, and Mussolini turned the Fasci away from the left towards an alliance with the traditional right. 1 5

From the autumn of 1920 the Fasci turned to the countryside. Paid by landowners at war with the socialist farm unions and tolerated by the police, action squads of thirty to fifty men, often led by former army officers, went on "punitive expeditions" to burn socialist headquarters and labour chambers and to beat and kill union organisers. They answered to local chiefs called ras, a title borrowed from the Ethiopian nobility: Italo Balbo in Ferrara, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona and Dino Grandi in Bologna were among the best known, and the Cremona squads were among the most brutal in Italy. Fascist membership grew tenfold in the last seven months of 1920. 1 7 6 8

The turning point came at Bologna on 21 November 1920. On the day the new city government of the maximalist Socialist Enio Gnudi took office, Fascist squads attacked the crowd in Piazza Maggiore before the town hall, Palazzo d'Accursio. In the chaos ten Socialist supporters and the right-wing councillor Giulio Giordani were killed and some sixty people wounded. The police, though aware of the situation, did not intervene, and the Fascists made Giordani their first "martyr". Across the Po Valley the squads then attacked socialist municipal administrators and union organisers until local government could no longer function. In October 1921 a deputy from Budrio telegraphed the prime minister that "unions and socialist clubs [were] ordered to dissolve themselves within 48 hours or face physical destruction". 9 5

The National Blocs and the Pact of Pacification, 1921

Ahead of the May 1921 election Giovanni Giolitti formed the "National Blocs" of Liberals, Mussolini's Fasci and the Italian Nationalist Association, aiming to halt the growth of the Socialist Party. Allied with the government, the Fascists could intimidate opponents with impunity: the police lent them trucks, army units gave them weapons, and judges usually acquitted them. There were 207 political killings during the campaign, with far more Socialist than Fascist victims. The Fascists won 7 per cent of the vote and 35 of 535 seats, and Mussolini entered parliament for the first time, but Giolitti's list took only 19.1 per cent and he stepped down. 4 1 7

That January, at the Seventeenth Congress of the Italian Socialist Party in Livorno, the majority refused the Comintern's demand to expel Turati's reformists, and the communist faction led by Amadeo Bordiga walked out to found the Communist Party of Italy. Giacinto Menotti Serrati's maximalists had wanted to delay the split, fearing that expelling the reformists would alienate many workers. The labour movement entered the height of the Fascist offensive divided into three. 10

At the end of June 1921 anarchists, socialists, communists, republicans and some former officers founded the armed anti-fascist Arditi del Popolo, which gathered about 20,000 members by the summer. Yet neither the Socialist nor the Communist party backed them. The Socialist press criticised them, and the Communist Party ordered its members to leave because non-communists were in the ranks. In an article that August Vladimir Lenin praised the Arditi del Popolo as a unified action of the whole proletariat and criticised the Bordigan line, and in October the Comintern too rebuked the "sectarian policy" of the Italian party. 11

On 2–3 August Mussolini signed a "Pact of Pacification" with the Socialist Party and the Confederation of Labour to halt violence on both sides, deriding the provincial squads and their landowning allies as "the dullest, deafest, most miserable caste that exists in Italy". Ras such as Grandi, Balbo and Farinacci refused to recognise the pact, and posters in Bologna denounced Mussolini as "a traitor to Fascism". Grandi and Balbo went to D'Annunzio and asked him to lead an "insurrectionary march on Rome". Mussolini went as far as resigning from the leadership on 18 August, but at the Third Congress in Rome on 7–10 November 1921 he gave way to the ras. The movement was reorganised as the National Fascist Party, an association of the fasci and their squads, and in return Mussolini was recognised as its undisputed leader. The party had 320,000 members by the end of 1921, and the pact was formally repudiated on 15 November. 12 7 5

Summer 1922: the defeat of the legalitarian strike

When Bonomi's cabinet fell in early 1922 the Liberals proposed Giolitti again, but Luigi Sturzo of the Italian People's Party blocked him, and on 26 February the king entrusted the cabinet to the Liberal Luigi Facta, a close friend of Giolitti. Meanwhile the squads seized one northern and central town after another, and the police either stood by or supplied the Fascists with weapons. On 31 July the Alliance of Labour, the union front of the left, called a legalitarian strike "against Fascist violence" and "the indifference of the State towards it". 4 5 13

Mussolini declared that the Fascists would suppress the strike themselves if the government did not stop it at once, casting his party as the defender of law and order. On 2 August squads from the countryside razed every building the Socialists occupied in Ancona, and the same was repeated in Genoa and other cities. In Milan, after street fighting on 3 and 4 August, the Fascists smashed the presses of Avanti! and burned its building, then with the support of local businessmen expelled the elected Socialist administration from the town hall. The strike failed, and the government in Rome did nothing. 5

Parma was the exception. In early August squads mobilised by the Fascist Party from the surrounding provinces besieged the city and Balbo took over the command, but the Arditi del Popolo under Guido Picelli and Antonio Cieri, with the population behind them, threw up barricades and held them off. Italian Wikipedia puts the Fascist force at about 10,000 and English Wikipedia at 20,000 against 350 defenders. On 6 August the Fascists, realising that taking the city would mean a real war, handed public order to the army and withdrew. Parma remained one of the last victorious stands against the squads. 13 11

The march on Rome

The government's inaction prompted Mussolini to plan a march on Rome. From their base in Milan the Fascists gathered money from large companies determined to fight "strikes, bolshevism and nationalization", and two days before the march a delegation from the General Confederation of Italian Industry met Mussolini. When he learned that Facta had given D'Annunzio the task of organising a great victory rally on 4 November, he decided to act at once. On 24 October, before 60,000 militants at a Fascist rally in Naples, he declared: "Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy." The next day he appointed Emilio De Bono, Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi and Cesare Maria De Vecchi as the Quadrumvirs at the head of the march, while he himself went to Milan. 5

On 26 October the former prime minister Antonio Salandra warned that Mussolini was demanding Facta's resignation and preparing to march on Rome, but Facta thought Mussolini would settle for a ministry in his cabinet. As the Blackshirts gathered around Rome and occupied strategic points across the country, Facta, who had resigned but still held office, had a decree of martial law for Rome drawn up with the cabinet's unanimous backing. On the morning of 28 October, however, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign it. The king doubted that the army could contain the uprising without setting off a civil war; he has also been said to have feared for the army's loyalty and the ambitions of his pro-Fascist cousin, the Duke of Aosta, and Denis Mack Smith suggests he wanted to be rid of the weak Facta government, knowing that Salandra had agreed to form a cabinet including Mussolini. 5 14 15

That day in Milan Mussolini received a delegation of industrialists who urged him to reach a compromise with Salandra, and refused. Having appeared willing to take a junior ministry, he demanded the premiership; he was asked to form a cabinet on 29 October and appointed prime minister on the 30th. The marchers numbered fewer than 30,000, but some 25,000 Blackshirts paraded in Rome, and on the 31st they marched through the city while Mussolini formed his coalition government. Mussolini himself did not take part in the march, though he allowed pictures to be taken of him marching. 5

Mussolini thus reached power legally, in accordance with the Statuto Albertino. The March on Rome was not the seizure of power that Fascism later celebrated but the precipitating force behind a transfer of power within the framework of the constitution, made possible by the surrender of public authorities to Fascist intimidation. The king handed power to a Mussolini backed by the military, the business class and the right, and many business and financial leaders believed they could manipulate a man whose early speeches emphasised the free market and laissez-faire. 5

From coalition cabinet to the Acerbo Law, 1922–1924

Mussolini's first cabinet was a coalition of the Italian right. The only leading Fascist of ministerial rank was Mussolini himself, as prime minister, foreign minister and interior minister; posts went to conservatives and nationalists such as Giovanni Gentile at Education, Luigi Federzoni at the Colonies and Armando Diaz at War, to the right wing of the Popular Party and to most Liberal groups. On 16 November he threatened to turn the Chamber at any time into "a bivouac for my squadre" and demanded full powers. On the 24th only Socialist and Communist deputies voted against powers that ran until the end of 1923; seven Liberals including Francesco Saverio Nitti and Giovanni Amendola abstained, and five former prime ministers, Giolitti, Salandra, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, Ivanoe Bonomi and Facta, voted in favour. 6

Power did not end the violence. On 18–20 December 1922 in Turin the squads of Piero Brandimarte, encouraged by De Vecchi, killed 14 workers and wounded 26, burning the labour chamber and wrecking the offices of Gramsci's L'Ordine Nuovo; at the industrialists' request the prefect had promised not to deploy the police, and thousands of Fascists were amnestied before the year was out. On 1 February 1923 the squads were turned into a national militia, the Voluntary Militia for National Security, the Blackshirts, and the same month Mussolini created the Fascist Grand Council as a forum for the ras left out of the cabinet. 16 17 6 18

In March 1923 the Fascist Party absorbed the Italian Nationalist Association, gaining figures connected to the army, the court and the bureaucracy, among them Alfredo Rocco, who would lay the legal and ideological foundations of the regime. When the Popular Party reaffirmed an anti-fascist line at its Turin congress in April, Mussolini expelled its ministers, and Sturzo, after consulting the Holy See, resigned as party leader on 10 July. Fascist Party membership rose from under 300,000 in October 1922 to 783,000 by the end of 1923. 6 19

The Acerbo Law, proposed by Baron Giacomo Acerbo and passed in 1923, gave two-thirds of the seats to the party with the most votes provided it won at least 25 per cent. With armed squadristi present in the Chamber, the Socialists voted against but made no effort to rally other parties, the Popular Party, leaderless after Sturzo's removal, was told to abstain yet saw 14 deputies vote in favour, and the small Liberal parties generally voted for it. In the election of 6 April 1924 the National List of Fascists and some Liberals, amid voter intimidation and fraud, took 64.94 per cent of the vote and 374 seats; the Socialists fell from 123 seats to 22 and the Popular Party from 108 to 39. It was Italy's last multi-party election until 1946. 20 15

The Matteotti crisis and the Aventine Secession

On 30 May 1924 Giacomo Matteotti, secretary of the Unitary Socialist Party, denounced the violence and fraud of the election in the Chamber and demanded that it be annulled. Eleven days later, on 10 June, on his way to parliament, he was seized on the Lungotevere by a Fascist squad led by Amerigo Dumini and stabbed to death in the car. Mussolini told parliament the next day that he knew nothing, but the identification of the kidnappers' car led the investigation to his antechamber within days. The body was found on 16 August near Riano, some 23 kilometres north of Rome. 21 6

On 27 June most opposition deputies, led by Giovanni Amendola and Filippo Turati, began the "Aventine Secession", refusing to take part in the Chamber's work until constitutional legality and democratic freedoms had been restored. They counted on constitutional pressure rather than insurrection to make the king dismiss Mussolini. The Communists proposed a separate "anti-parliament" and, when it was rejected, returned to the Chamber in November. De Bono, chief of police and commander of the militia, was tried over the affair but refused to implicate his superiors and was acquitted in 1925. 22 23

The king, however, did not act: the government held a large majority in the Chamber and nearly all of the Senate, and he feared that forcing Mussolini out could lead to civil war between the army and the Blackshirts. On 27 December Amendola published the memorandum of Cesare Rossi implicating the Fascist leadership, and Bonomi brought the material to the king, without result. On 31 December militia consuls came to Mussolini with an ultimatum: crush the opposition or they would do it without him. 6 24 22

On 3 January 1925 Mussolini told the Chamber that he assumed "political, moral and historical responsibility" for what had happened and dared the opposition to impeach him. He warned that "within forty-eight hours of this speech the situation will be clarified", and the interior minister Federzoni at once instructed the prefects to suppress opposition meetings and organisations. The speech was not a judicial admission that he had ordered the murder, but Italian historiography counts it as the beginning of the Fascist dictatorship. 22 25 6

The exceptional laws and the one-party state, 1925–1926

After 3 January the opposition deputies lost any way back into parliament. Following a censorship decree of 10 January 1925 the major Liberal newspapers dismissed their remaining opposition editors, and the press law of 31 December 1925 allowed only persons acceptable to the government to act as a newspaper's responsible editor. On 20 July Amendola was beaten with clubs by fifteen Blackshirts, and he died of his injuries at Cannes on 7 April 1926. From 1925 Mussolini adopted "totalitarian", a word coined by anti-fascists in 1923, as a description of his regime. 6 26 24

The so-called leggi fascistissime remade the state. The law of 24 December 1925 turned the prime minister into a "Head of Government" answerable only to the king, who set the agenda of parliament, and the law of 31 January 1926 gave the government power to issue decrees with the force of law. The law of 4 February abolished elected mayors and councils in favour of government-appointed podestà. After the Palazzo Vidoni pact of 2 October 1925 had made the industrialists' confederation and the Fascist unions each other's sole bargaining partners, the law of 3 April 1926 banned strikes and lockouts and reserved collective contracts to the "legally recognised" Fascist unions. 26

In 1926 there were repeated attempts on Mussolini's life: Violet Gibson on 7 April, the anarchist Gino Lucetti on 11 September, and on 31 October in Bologna the fifteen-year-old Anteo Zamboni, who was lynched on the spot. The regime used them to push through its final measures. The public security law of 6 November empowered prefects to dissolve every party and association acting against the regime and to send anti-fascists into internal exile; on 9 November the Chamber stripped 123 Aventine deputies and the Communist deputies of their mandates; and the law of 25 November set up the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State, empowered to pass death sentences. 6 11 26 22

Despite his parliamentary immunity the police arrested the Communist leader Gramsci, whose prosecutor told the court: "For twenty years we must stop this brain from functioning." Palmiro Togliatti, in Moscow at the time, escaped arrest. Turati fled to France in 1926 with the help of Carlo Rosselli, Sandro Pertini and others, and Sturzo had already left for London in October 1924. Meanwhile, on 30 March 1926, Mussolini removed the party secretary Farinacci, ousting the hardliners who wanted a genuine party dictatorship. Italy was a one-party state in practice from 1925 and in law from November 1926, and the electoral law of 1928 replaced parliamentary elections with a plebiscite on a single list chosen by the Fascist Grand Council. 27 28 29 19 6

Assessment

Whether the March on Rome was a "revolution" is still disputed. Fascist intellectuals and the historian Renzo De Felice called the period the "Fascist Revolution", and Emilio Gentile, Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse described it as a "totalitarian" revolution of the right. Gaetano Arfé replied that Italian historiography had not accepted the term, and Enzo Traverso objected that no fascist movement came to power without the support of the traditional elites, faulting these historians for ignoring fascism's conservative component. Of the march itself, the common verdict is that it was a transfer of power within the constitution made possible by the surrender of public authorities. 28 5

Socially, Fascism in power reversed the gains of the Red Biennium. According to the economist Clara Mattei, average nominal daily industrial wages had quintupled over pre-war levels by 1921, but after the Fascist austerity of 1922–1928 the workers' wage share had fallen back to its 1913 level by 1929. The squads were financed by landowners and industrialists, and the Fascists reached state power only after destroying the farm unions and socialist councils one by one. As the historian Stanley Payne put it, the new mass Fascism of the countryside "had not been created by Mussolini" but had "sprung up around him". 2 12

For the socialist movement Italy was the first lesson. The Socialists signed a peace pact with the squads, Bordiga's Communists abandoned the Arditi del Popolo, and the Aventine opposition waited for the king to intervene. Gramsci, sent to Moscow in 1922, returned with instructions to build a united front of the left against fascism, and in January 1926 the Lyon congress adopted his theses for a united front to restore democracy, too late. The anti-fascist Amendola defined Fascism in 1923 as a "totalitarian" system fundamentally different from conventional dictatorships, a word Gentile turned to positive use. The squads inspired Hitler's Sturmabteilung, and the Nazi Party's Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923 was inspired by the March on Rome. 11 22 27 24 7 5