Biennio Rosso
붉은 2년
The two years of 1919 and 1920 of intense social conflict in Italy after the First World War, marked by strikes, peasant land occupations and factory occupations. It was followed by the violent reaction of the Fascist Blackshirt squads and eventually by Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922.
In depth
Amid soaring prices and unemployment the Socialist Party and the General Confederation of Labour grew rapidly, and the Socialists became the largest party in the 1919 election. In September 1920 hundreds of thousands of metalworkers, centred on Turin and Milan, occupied their factories and kept production going themselves, while in Turin Gramsci’s L’Ordine Nuovo led the factory council movement. When Giolitti’s government stayed out and ended the occupations through negotiation, the revolutionary wave ebbed, and frightened landowners and industrialists began to fund the Fascist squads.