Fascism: Rise of Mussolini [1922a]

 Fascism.  The name has long been understood as the antithesis of  democratic society.  In this episode - the first of several exploring  the topic, we examine the rise of fascism in Italy in the early 1920s.   Topics covered include: the Intro (0:50), What is Fascism (14:58),  Italian Nation-building (25:39), Italy in World War I (32:32), Postwar  Italy (42:30), Gabriele D'Annunzio (1:05:48), Benito Mussolini  (1:14:36), the March on Rome (1:21:46). 

Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome back to History Off the Page.  That was of John Williams’ iconic  “Imperial March” from the Star Wars series.  Incidentally it’s actually from the 1980 film Empire Strikes Back, not the original 1977 release A New Hope.  But that doesn’t really matter, because it’s become so iconic it’s literally the entrance music for one of the world’s premier soccer clubs: Real Madrid.  And it’s not hard to understand why the music is so popular.  You probably don’t even have to close your eyes to imagine the scene: hundreds of faceless storm troopers lined up neatly into columns, ubiquitous imperial officers who all seem to blend into one, all marching around, trying to seize power over the galaxy [one of my favorite parts is where all the imperial bigwigs are sitting around, and one asks how “the Emperor [will] maintain control without the bureaucracy?”  Because of course we need bureaucracy.  And Grand Moff Tarkin answers that: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line].  The image is familiar to us not only because it was really well done from a visual perspective, but also because it uses history as its model.  When we think about the Empire in Star Wars – at least until recently – we see a modern projection of fascism.  think about it: the lack of individuality, the quest solely for power for its own sake, the lack of belief or concern for the value of life, the visual displays of order demonstrated through all those faceless columns.  In fact, the term stormtrooper is actually borrowed from German history, as these were elite German soldiers from World War I.  And part of what makes the movie so great – despite of the awful dialogue, is the contrast between the two sides.  The Empire is fascism, the rebels are a projection of a liberal democratic movement that embraces individualism, freedom, diversity, tolerance, the right to life, etc.  

Now for those of us who grew up in the 1980s, this contrast: good vs. evil, fascism vs. democracy seemed pretty distant from our own lives.  Fascism was discredited by Hitler, and its totalitarian brother Communism by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.  And yet, here we are 30 years later, and as I’m sure you’re aware, people are talking a lot about fascism again these days.  Not as something abstract or distant – in a galaxy far far away, but as something potentially on the immediate political horizon.  And it’s kind of interesting, because this discourse transcends the political spectrum, you’ll find anxieties about fascism expressed by both the Left and the Right.  It also transcends geographical or political boundaries, so that people talk about it in the US, Europe, really globally.  

To some extent, this sentiment is historically understandable.  That generation that grew up in the 1980s never thought we could get to this place; we grew up in a world defined by optimism and certainty.  We thought we understood the times we were living through.  We had witnessed not only the fall of Communism, but also of apartheid, peace seemed to be at hand in the middle east, and for the first time in living memory (three generations), there seemed to be consensus about what the future would look like.  Democracy, capitalism, classic liberalism – the latter understood as a society based on the rule of law and natural rights, these seemed to be the foundations of the future world we’d inhabit.  And of course a great example of this is the a book by the philosopher Francis Fukuyama called The End of History and the Last Man from 1992 that made this explicit argument.  

And yet, what has the 21st century brought us?  In both the United States and Europe, the answer has often been disenchantment.  Time and time again it seems “authorities” and “elites” have failed the people they are supposed to look after.  Looking at American history, people don’t seem to think that tax cuts and deregulation have produced widespread wealth; instead critics will contend that much of that has gone to elites – whether you define that as “the 1%” or whether you think of them as the coastal, urban elites and you live in “flyover country.”  All the experts who told us the Iraq war would be easy (and to some extent Afghanistan), that we would be greeted as liberators and that the war would usher in a “new American century” were horribly wrong.  Instead we got a decade of war, suffering and frustration.  But it’s not all politics.  The supersmart guys from the Ivy Leagues that ran wall street told us all the best way to manage our money, and then watched as we lost it in stock market bubbles and then the Great recession.  Main street paid the price for their credit default swaps, while big banks got bailed out because they were just “too big to fail.”  And at the highest levels, democratic politics seems to have led only to paralysis; regardless of your political leanings, it is undeniable that major issues such as illegal immigration, mass shootings, and climate change have not been addressed; rather than producing solutions, politicians grandstand and gaslight and posture.  Like WWE characters they have become very good at giving performances.  The story is pretty similar in Europe btw, where one could add to this list the failures and complications of Brexit, or failures to respond to the 2015 Syrian migrant crisis.

And then of course 2020 happened.  Where the government and its experts struggled to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic, shifting guidelines, being inconsistent in applying lockdowns, sometimes ignoring their own restrictions, and generally failing to communicate with the public in a consistent and reassuring manner.  And so at the end of all this turbulence, we find ourselves living through a time of instability.  A time when faith in democratic institutions has waned, when they no longer seem certain to persist, a time when the specter of change through violence has once again returned.  

Of course, we’ve been here before.  In the 1920s, the world was beset by disenchantment with traditional authorities, a time of dramatic cultural and social change, and a time of political uncertainty.  It was a time of fear and anxiety, when the threat of Communism was lived experience in many countries.  And that time produced the phenomenon we now call fascism.

Now this isn’t a political podcast, and I don’t want to get into labelling various contemporary political groups fascist.  Lord knows there is already plenty of that online.  But as I said interest in, and fear of the return of fascism is quite strong in contemporary US and European society.  So this discussion of the origins of fascism that we will begin today is not abstract or philosophical.  It’s a core concept to understanding the moment we are living through, and so I think it’s important to understand in a detailed way exactly what did or did not happen in the 1920s and 30s.  to understand what exactly fascism was and why people turned to it in such large numbers.  I hope you’ll find this discussion informative, and feel free to post or email questions to me if there are additional areas I can address.  You can find our email address on our website www.historyoffthepage.com.  So with that set up, let us dive into this critically important subject.

What is fascism?

So let’s begin by talking about what fascism is, then we’ll get into the history.  Fascism is notoriously hard to define, because unlike its main historical rival – communism, it did not emerge from an intellectual or philosophical basis.  There is no fascist equivalent of Karl Marx, who as we’ve seen provided socialism with an ideological foundation.  Rather, fascism is best understood as something of an organic reaction to both the rise of Communism and the perceived failures of liberal democracies.  A lot of its appeal was tied to the notion that contemporary governments were weak, corrupt, ineffective or impotent, and that they were not capable of responding to the violent challenge of Communism.  And so fascists tended to emphasize radicalism, a willingness to break or exceed existing norms about what was political or socially acceptable.  The rule of law, the long-standing aversion to violence in Western politics since the French Revolution, these norms were seen as secondary to the more existential question of defeating communism.  To put this another way, fascists would argue that these liberal sensibilities are what kept liberalism from stopping communism, that the rule of law was what made democracies weak.  To use an American example, how can you let a criminal go just because you didn’t read him his Miranda rights?  Instead, fascists praised the idea and exercise of power.  They yearned for a world in which a strong, centralized and national government would focus the attention of its people on the thing that most mattered: the future survival of the national community.  To do this most effectively, power should be concentrated in the hands of a single individual, who providence would guide to achieve the most favorable results.  This leader – the duce in Italian, the Fuhrer or leader in Germany, Poglavnik in Croatia – exercised complete control, and often oversaw the establishment of a cult of personality around their themselves.  Finally, the last major component of defining “fascism” is that it focused on the idea of national community, often defined by racial or genetic factors.  In other words, whereas today we would say one could become French or Polish or German, fascists understood the nation as an organic unit that was formed naturally and immediately at birth.  All loyalty they would argue should be given first and foremost to this body, even to the point of sacrificing one’s life.  Individuals, in this sense, were more like cells in a body, where their overall survival or experiences don’t matter beyond their ability to contribute to the health of the overall body.   Again, this helps us understand why things like the rule of law seemed so inconsequential – because the overall experiences of any particular individual were only important in so far as they related to the national community as a whole.

Now traditionally, fascism has been understood as an “ideology of the right,” especially because of this emphasis on the nation and on safeguarding the traditional body politic from the “leftwing” radicalism of communism or socialism.  However, other academics would argue that this left/right dichotomy is problematic, and that a better way to understand both communism and fascism is through the lens of totalitarianism, i.e. the notion that regardless of their ideological basis, both fascism and communism tended to share a lot of similarities in terms of governance.  They both centralize power, they both regard individuals as unimportant, they both celebrate the use of violence as a key tool to solve social problems, and on and on.  The key name who first advanced this theory was the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, and just to lay my cards on the table I’ll admit I largely agree with her assessment.  One of the things that we saw with Communism in the USSR and that we’ll see in fascism in both Germany and Italy is that while the ideology was important, it often took a backseat to the accumulation and exercise of power.

Bourgeois Italy.

OK.  So having talked about the general theory of fascism, let’s get into some history.  Fascism, one can generally say, was invented in Italy in the course of the 1920s, and the most common name associated with it was Benito Mussolini; how much he “invented” vs. “inherited” it is a matter of perspective, but he’s the first leader it comes together around successfully.  Anyway, I know we haven’t spent much time discussing Italian history, though I do want to go back and do one about Italian unification.  What you need to understand about Italian history in order to understand the rise of fascism is that Italy on the verge of World War I was a country still wrestling with the onset of modernity.  And there were a variety of ways this was experienced, first and foremost though was the idea of national unity, which despite unification had largely not been achieved.  In 1867 the Italian stateman Massimo d’Azeglio had famous written that ‘having made Italy, it was now time to make Italians’.  And for two generations, the Italian state had tried to do this through common strategies that included universal primary education, building roads and bridges to better connect Italians, etc.  Yet by 1914, these efforts had mostly failed.  Industrialization had exacerbated rather than overcome the historical gap between the industrial north and the agrarian south.  In this environment, regional identities and loyalties persisted, as did religious disagreement over the role of the Pope and Catholicism in a modern secular state.  Creating Italy, after all, had dispossessed the Pope, leading to hostility between the Church and the state.  Finally, the industrialization of the north and the adoption of modern production techniques by companies like Fiat created large working class movements that favored socialism or outright communism.  The class divide in Italy therefore took on regional dimensions.  Add in the turbulence of life in a 19th century capitalist society – with its economic booms and busts and you had the recipe for a great deal of disappointment.  In a surprise to many Italian liberals, unified Italy did not wrap itself in glory after 1870.  Indeed, the Italian army had been humiliated by the Ethiopians at the battle of Adwa in 1896 – one of the few instances where native forces defeated a European invader.  

The antidote to this situation of malaise, many Italian politicians imagined in 1914, was participation in the Great War.  The war, they hoped, would rally Italians to the national cause, awakening in them a sense of patriotism that transcended local identities.  At the same time, it would open a new, glorious chapter in Italian history, when the nation would finally be made whole, even expanding its colonial domains to take its place alongside the great powers of Europe.  Italy thus began negotiating with Britain and France, leading to the secret Treaty of London.  In exchange for joining the Entente side, Italy would receive Trentino, south Tyrol and large sections of Dalmatia.   And so when Italy entered the war in late May 1915, the liberal presses celebrated the moment with exuberant enthusiasm.  Crowds gathered in major cities to celebrate the event, with the expectation that Italy would quickly triumph.  

Italy in the war.  However, this enthusiasm was misplaced, as Italy faltered badly right from the start.  There were a couple reasons for this.  1) they face huge problems with morale.  Unlike most of the other combatants, Italians did not possess a strong sense of national identity, 2) nor was the reason for Italian participation clearly communicated (in fact, to join the Entente side Italy essentially betrayed its former German and Austrian allies…so some explanation or cause for the war was really necessary).  Both Catholics and socialists tended to reject the war, and for many peasants all it meant was loved ones being conscripted and taken away.  3) the Italian army was never that strong to begin with.  As we mentioned, they were defeated by Ethiopia in 1896, they had some successes in Libya in 1913, but overall not a great tradition of conquest since the 1860s.  So poorly armed and not properly motivated, the Italian army failed miserably on the battlefield.  Over the course of two and a half years the Italian army struggled to move up the Isonzo river (near Slovenia), before collapsing in October 1917 at the battle of Caporetto.  By mid-November Italy had suffered over 900,000 casualties, and German and Austro-Hungarian troops had broken Italian lines, threatening Venice.   

These failures served to radicalize opinions about the war within Italy.  Obviously for those who opposed intervention, they were a clear sign that the liberal politicians and political institutions had made a giant mistake.  The feelings parallel in some ways many Americans beliefs about the 2003 Iraq War.  For nationalists, however, the suffering was a necessary step in the path towards greater unity; it was a motivational moment, an emergency that should inspire increased dedication, commitment to the national cause.  Think about how many Americans felt after 9/11.  Yes it was a tragedy, but it put so many things into perspective, it awakened feelings of patriotism that might otherwise have been dormant.  In the Italian context, the defeat at Caporetto also inspires increasing radicalism, i.e. the idea that a fundamental break needed to take place with traditional liberal norms, especially related to the rule of the law and prohibitions on violence.  Caporetto, as one future fascist wrote, should inspire Italians to dedicate themselves to “killing, killing, killing.” They must accept that their “men, fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers, sons die” to achieve a holy “massacre of the barbarian, a butchering of the aggressor, a shambles of the race of prey.”  Notice the violence and extremism of the language here from Paolo Orano, which both normalizes death and dehumanizes the enemy from the battlefield.  This would be common tropes in fascist and proto-fascist literature.  And so in the fascist mindset, rechristened in this new purpose, Italy would then achieve the success it had so far lacked; another element to the radicalization which followed Caporetto was increasing hostility towards the nation’s internal enemies, especially the socialists who had opposed the war.  In popular right-wing presses they were derided as “agents of defeat” who were “doing the Germans work for them.”  in the end, the Italian army did manage to stabilize the front at Piave, and in October 1918 they would finally break the Austro-Hungarians at the battle of Vittorio Veneto.  But the damage was done.  Men and women who had long thought of themselves as national liberals began to abandon their faith in liberalism and democracy; the rule of law no longer seemed to matter compared to the existential challenges facing the country.  The war had provided a model for what a unified Italy could look like.  What was missing was a savior, a decisive leader who could bring glory to the nation by crushing its internal and external enemies.

Italy after 1918.  We’ll get into who that savior was in just a moment.  But first I want to continue this thought about what Italy was like in the immediate postwar period, and how that provided an incubator for fascist sentiments.  Because as frustrated as Italians were with their performance during the war, their postwar experiences were just as disappointing.  To begin with, although Italy had emerged on the winning side of the war, they did not get the big glorious payoff they expected.  Instead, Woodrow Wilson and his call for national self-determination limited Italian gains, especially in Dalmatia, where you had a lot of Slavic-speaking Slovenes and croats.  In particular, Italians were frustrated by their exclusion from the port city of Fiume, which is today known as Rijeka.  Italy did not expand its colonial empire, instead it was forced to watch Britain and France expand theirs.  And, to make matters even worse, the country was hit hard by a wave of inflation in the summer of 1919, which combined with spiking unemployment (driven in part by soldiers returning from the war).  Italy’s liberal leaders reacted poorly to the situation, with Prime Minister Francesco Nitti simply recommending that Italians “produce more, consumer less.”  

Now as if all this wasn’t bad enough, in this environment, it is not surprising that the socialist party experienced tremendous growth, trebling their number of seats in the nov. 1919 Parliamentary elections. And while today socialist parties gain and lose seats quite regularly, maybe you like it, maybe you don’t, remember that socialism in 1919 has a violent, even revolutionary streak to it.  we are not talking about adjustments to marginal tax rates, we are talking about land redistribution, factory takeovers, even full blown communism.  Owner-worker relations in the early 20s get really heated, fed by inflation.  So for example in 1920, a series of strikes in March had been followed by mass lockouts, leading workers to occupy the factories in September.   [More?]  In the countryside, the situation was also tense, as peasants and peasant unions clashed with large landowners, often resulting in violence.

Squadrism. So if you’re not a socialist, what do you do?  The liberal parties don’t seem to be particularly effective, are you going to stand back and watch as society burns?  For a significant number of Italian nationalists, the answer was obviously no.  and so you have to begin building something different, something new, that would take power and stop socialism.  It’s in this climate that you start to see, at the local level, the formation of the first fasci di combattimento, which are small cells or groups, mostly men, who decided to take matters into their own hands.  Sometimes they are referred to as squadrists.  This means you don’t wait for the rule of law, for the police or for trials, you become the law yourselves.  In practice, this often meant using violence.  So in April 1919, for example, a group of fascists in Milan get together and attack the offices of Mussolini’s former socialist paper Avanti!.  In another episode from 1921, squadrists from Florence drove out to the small neighboring town of Empoli in order to avenge the beating of two truckloads of sailors.  There they begin what they refer to as a “cleansing action,”  beating and intimidating local communists.  Street brawling became commonplace in many Italian cities.  Sometimes you have examples of assassinations, sometimes you burn down your opponents’ offices or kidnap members of his family.  Kind of like gangsters, you send a message that socialism is not socially or politically acceptable in your town.  

Now we should take a moment to develop our understanding of who these men were a bit more, because it’s easy to fall into stereotypes about left and right, or to apply modern political identities such as liberal and conservative to each side.  But the men of 1919 in Italy are a little more complicated than that.  Because they don’t have a rigid ideology to base their movement on.  as I said, there is no Karl Marx for fascism, no St. Peter or Nicaean council that lays out the specifics of fascist dogma.  What we can say is that these men tended to share several core values: 1) was obviously faith in the nation; 2) was disenchantment with existing authorities and politics.  Even before the Great war, many of these men were already convinced that the existing order needed radical change.  But that’s basically it.  in terms of policy, in terms of objectives, they don’t really have a formal program at this point.  So it’s for this reason you get this fascinating contradiction, where many of the early fascists like Benito Mussolini actually come from a socialist background, and yet, they are incredibly hostile to the establish socialist parties.  In fact, many early fascists in both Italy and Germany actually like quite a bit of the socialist program – the 8 hr work day, a minimum wage; Italian fascists proposed that aristocrats who left land uncultivated should have it seized by the state and redistributed to the poor, in Germany there were calls to take actions against banks, to limit interest rates and foreclosures, etc.  So how do we square this odd contradiction?

A big part of the answer, in my opinion, is that fascism again, is not about ideology as much as it is the idea of power; the idea of centralizing power in an authority figure yes, but even below that, at the individual level, I’d argue so much of it is really about power and masculinity.  The idea that in the modern world, when as I an individual am so beset by so many forces – cultural, economic, social, etc., when it seems like I’m drowning and how can you possible fight against the ocean – fascism is in some ways the belief that I still can control the world around me.  That we can overcome the threat of depression or economic stagnation; the threat of communism; the threat of foreign enemies and being the subject of colonization; the threat of social change, of economic competition from new sources, both foreign and domestic.  And so one of the things you tend to find when you study fascism is that there is a real emphasis on masculinity.  Fascist men tended to prize strength, assertiveness, determination, sexual prowess.  They love the idea of action; that rather than reacting to the world around you, you embrace the idea of willpower, you make the world what you want it to be, and you do that not through intrigue or invention or calculus, you do it by sheer force of will.  By violence.  Which is not something to be feared, it was something to be embraced.  It was a tool that could lead to social harmony through the elimination or intimidation of its enemies.

Now legitimating the use of violence is a bit tricky, especially in a European society where violence had long been taboo.  As a result, dehumanization and brutalization also play a key role in what makes fascism possible.  You have to portray your rivals not as wrong or incorrect, but as enemies, traitors, people who are a threat to the national good.  Language is so so important in fascist societies, because it helps shape the mentality of those who follow it.  Many of you will be familiar with George Orwell’s 1984, which is basically about totalitarian society, and you will remember how important the idea of controlling language is to the party in the book.  This comes from fascism and communism, which both led to this sort of militarization and embrace of the idea of violence.  Note too the destructive side, the Nihilims.  There’s a great scene from the 1997 film The Fifth Element, where the main villain makes this argument that destruction leads to creativity.  It isn’t 100% taken from fascism, but that faith that destruction inspires renewal is there.  As the Italian fascist Italo Balbo remarked: “Better to deny all, destroy all, renew all, from the base.”  

The other thing that made fascism appealing, we should mention, is that it makes people feel part of something larger than themselves.  Let’s face it, we as individuals have our ordinary concerns, our daily lives, worries, pleasures, etc.  but somewhere deep inside, we are also social animals.  We care about our communities, about people who are “like us,” and we want to leave the world in a better place than we found it.  We want to feel like our lives have meaning.  And so there is this real attraction to being a part of a larger movement, a selfless movement on behalf of the nation.  

Let me bring all these threads together will an illustrative quote from a young fascist in 1919: “For us, the great conflict – meaning the war – isn’t over.  Where there were external enemies, now there are internal foes…On one side real Italians, lovers of their country. On the other, their enemies, the cowards who seek to blow to pieces our national grandeur…Direct action is needed against them, energetic, decisive and courageous action.  And we, the interventionists of the first hour, must accept the sacred task.”

D’Annunzio.

OK.  So as we mentioned, proto-fascists in 1919 were looking for a national savior.  Initially, that man was actually not Benito Mussolini.  The son of a blacksmith and a Catholic school teacher, young Benito grew up in a socialist household that also celebrated Italian national heroes such as Garibaldi and Guiseppe Mazzini. As a young man he became active in socialist politics, ironically first in Switzerland where he had moved to escape conscription.  There he was supposedly introduced to Vladimir Lenin, who was also an exile.  In 1904, Mussolini returned to Italy during an amnesty, which also required him to serve two years in the army.  He then became active in socialist politics, working as a journalist for the socialist newspaper Avanti! In 1912.  When war came two years later, Mussolini broke with many of his comrades, celebrating Italian intervention as both good for the nation, and for the causes of socialism in general.  As this rift with the official party grew, Mussolini was expelled, leading him to found his own nationalist paper Il Popolo D’Italia in Nov. 1914.  In 1915 Mussolini volunteered to rejoin the army, and he later saw action on the Isonzo front that year.  After being wounded in 1917, he was discharged and returned to his paper.  By this point Mussolini was no longer a nobody, but neither was he the focus of the nascent fascist movement.

Instead, that honor would fall to the poet and writer Gabrielle D’Annunzio.  Born to a well-off family in 1863 on Italy’s eastern coast, he was a bright student who soon became a successful if controversial author.  He was an eccentric man who enjoyed pushing cultural boundaries, arguing for incest for example where beauty was involved.  He was a notorious womanizer who kept a sign reading something like “ne me frego” above his bed, which translates to something like “I don’t give a fuck” (but it also has strong sexual connotations, since frego is to rub).  This rebelliousness in his writings led to him having several of his works placed on the Papal list of forbidden works.  But he also flew on an early flight with one of the Wright brothers, and later joined the Italian air force during the Great War.  Is it surprising then to learn that he also entered politics,  elected in 1897 to the Italian chamber of deputies as an independent.  In short, he was a larger than life media star, who openly admitted economics and day to day routine bored him.  

After the war, D’Annunzio continued his activism in politics.  One of the reasons, as we noted, that Italy had joined the Entente side was the promise of territorial expansion.  Yet when the Treaty of Saint-German was signed in Sept. 1919, it left the Dalmatian port city of Fiume or Rijeka in the hands of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.  Refusing to accept this slap in the face, D’Annunzio organized a group of 2,000 Italian veterans and seized the city by force.  Sixteen months later he and his men would be ejected by the Italian army, but the attempt made him a national superstar among Italian nationalists.  Here was a man of action, a man who did not play by rules but who did what was necessary to secure the national destiny.  It was a blueprint for fascism at the very moment fascism itself was first beginning to form.

Now at this point, Mussolini was not himself a celebrity.  But he had the desire to become one, and his passionate orations and writings soon began to win more adherents.  In particularly, he provided a unifying voice to the nascent movement, which tended to be very local at first.  Mussolini is a well read intellectual, he thinks about the bigger picture.  And was able to articulate the values of the revolution in a succinct and effective way.  At a famous speech in March 1919 at the Piazza San Sepolcro, he made no secret of his desire to carry out a national revolution: “We demand the right and proclaim the duty to transform Italian life, if it proves inevitable using revolutionary methods.”  This transformation was to bring together those who belonged to the “nation, the war and the Victory” in a sort of holy crusade for national glory.  And of course, it also included sharp denunciations of the communists and socialists, who he argued only served to divide and weaken the national community.  But at the same time, when it comes to policy, he is also very flexible about what the values mean in practice.  He wrote, for example that fascists were “no a priori for class struggle or for class cooperation.  One or the other tactic may be adopted according to the circumstances.”  Later he argued that fascism did not have a doctrine, and would only acquire one “when it has time to elaborate and coordinate its ideas.”  “We permit ourselves the luxury,” he claimed, “of being aristocrats and democrats, conservatives and progressives, those who follow legal process and those who do not, according to the circumstances of place and surroundings.”  

By the summer of 1920, these small fascist groups began to grow into a more powerful and coordinated movement, eventually joining an electoral block with more traditional rightwing parties.  In Nov. 1921, Mussolini helped coordinate the founding of an official political party, the Partito Nationaliste Fascisme or PNF (he had one before this, but renamed it).  As conditions in Italy grew more polarized, the PNF began to grow, aided by support from wealthy landowners and businesses who feared communism.  It even began to attract at least support from more moderate Italian political figures, including the King, the Pope, the leaders of the army and most importantly the liberal democrats, who saw Mussolini as something of a moderate fascist who could be trusted with the reigns of power.  They therefore offered to partner with him in a coalition government, leading to his election to parliament in 1921.    

March on Rome.  Mussolini, of course, was not content to share power, let alone be the junior member of any association.  At the start of August 1922 a series of anti-fascist strikes presented the man with his moment.  Mussolini demanded the government arrest the strikers, or he threatened to suppress it himself.  Which he then did, with fascist squadrists attacking socialists across Italy.  When the liberal government made no reaction to these efforts, he decided to overthrow it.  The culminating event was a re-enactment of Italian history, attempting as Guiseppe Garibaldi had once done to March on Rome.  In late October 1922, he gathered a 30,000 man column of “blackshirts” in Naples to begin this procession, although the column itself was led by other fascist leaders.  Faced with the threat of revolution the Italian Prime Minister Luigi Facta asked the king to declare martial law, but the king reneged on the idea in order to prevent bloodshed.  On Oct. 28th he was named Prime Minister.  Soon afterwards he would convince the parliament – which actually had relatively few fascist deputies to award him the power to rule by decree.  Invested with enormous powers, he then set about completing the first fascist revolution in history.  

How he did that will be the subject of our next episode.  But before we get there, let us recap some of the major points of this episode: 1) fascism emerged somewhat organically as both a reaction to communism and to the weakness of liberal democracy. 2) only communism, it was not overly concerned with dogma or ideology; instead, feeling, masculinity and the desire for action formed its key pillars.  3) fascists praised the idea of violence, and rejected longstanding European taboos about its use as a means of solving social problems.

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