Two formally distinct schools of nationalist thought predominated in Europe from the eighteenth century up to the First World War. One was closely identified with France, and pointed to the nation as a contract of individuals based on rights and freedoms. The other derived primarily from Germany and saw the nation as an a priori immutable and eternal product of nature which could not be put to the test of plebiscites and human will (Tamborra, 1963). Mazzini’s understanding of nationhood betrayed elements of both these trends. Without liberty, for Mazzini there could be no nation. The latter, in his view, was a common principle developed in a common experience and tradition; it was primarily a faith and a duty, of which territory was but an expression. While, to be sure, he argued that Italy’s borders had been clearly defined by nature, he did not subordinate human will to geography, but understood these boundaries to be a guarantee against Italian usurpation of other peoples’ rights and freedoms. Since Fiume and Dalmatia fell outside these borders, he argued that they should be conceded to the Slavs as part of a future Yugoslav federation, and he did not push for Italian domination in Istria, hoping instead that the inhabitants there would one day unite with Italy of their own accord (Chabod 1961: 71-2, 78, 80-4). Be that as it may, Mazzinian thinking could not avoid the underlying problems associated with the geographical understanding of nationhood, and most particularly those arising when the transition from the abstract ‘nation’ to the geo-political ‘nation state’ has to be effected in ethnically mixed zones. When claiming that Italy’s borders had been ‘traced by the hand of God’, Mazzini downplayed the contradictions in his Deity’s handiwork by underestimating the Germanspeaking majority in South Tyrol. He favoured Italy in areas where linguistic borders did not coincide with strategic ones, but disallowed France’s strategic claims to Nice and Austria’s to Trieste. Moreover, Mazzini’s claims to Malta, Corsica and Nice all conflicted not with his arch-enemy Austria - the defeat of which was so closely identified with his crucial category of Italy’s international humanitarian ‘mission’ - but with Britain and France (Chabod, 1961: 217; Mack Smith, 1994: esp. Ch. 19).
Adherence to Mazzinianism was not, therefore, synonymous with political and programmatic coherence. It was, rather, an easily adaptable system of ideas open to varying interpretations. On 28 November 1914 Mussolini argued that victory over Germany would create the conditions in which ‘peoples will be reconstituted within their natural borders’ (OO, VII: 54-5). What did this imply? Were all peoples outside their ‘natural borders’ to return home? And if so, was this to be by forceful expulsion if they in fact wanted to stay where they were? Or perhaps the presence of an ethnic majority or even minority in a given territory defined the ‘natural’ characteristics of that territory? Either way, Mussolini certainly held some racially informed notions of what lay at the heart of conflicts between nations. In late December he referred to the ‘irrepressible dispute between races’ and to the ‘eternal dispute between Latins and Germans’ (OO, VII: 97-110). Two weeks earlier he had argued that national consciousness and culture were an expression of a nation’s recognition of its own economic interests over against those of other nations, all of which led to the ‘closing in’ of the ‘psychological and moral unity’ of peoples (OO, VII: 76-83). In short, a nation’s perception of itself issued from its negative perception of the external other. Moreover, in an article of 14 February 1915 Mussolini wrote that, in the event of war, ‘it is necessary to win but more important to fight’. His point was that ‘the titles of nobility and greatness of peoples’ were achievable only ‘with the blood of armies’. Avoiding intervention in order not to lose a whole generation of youth ‘may keep Italian mothers happy’ but at the cost of ‘humiliating a people’. By ‘demonstrating to the world that she is capable of making war, a great war: I repeat: a great war’ (Mussolini’s italics), Italy would ‘cancel the ignoble legend that Italians can’t fight’ (OO, VII: 196-8). On 6 March he wrote that war ‘tempers’ a people in a ‘burning forge’, and that this had pride of place over ‘all other necessities of an economic, political, territorial and military character that are used to justify and speed up intervention’ (OO, VII: 235-7). Were the rights of other peoples to be subordinated, in a decidedly non- Mazzinian fashion, to Italy’s drive for Great Power status?
On 24 January 1915 Mussolini was involved in a debate at the founding meeting of the fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria, nuclei of self-proclaimed revolutionary interventionists. A motion was passed which stated that national problems needed to be resolved in Italy and elsewhere ‘for the ideals of justice and liberty for which oppressed peoples must acquire the right to belong to those national communities from which they descended’ (OO, VII: 308-9). It is noteworthy, however, that the fasci meeting did not then define its territorial aspirations in relation to the topic of ‘descent’. Commenting on the proceedings, Mussolini wrote that ‘the difficult question of irredentism was posed and resolved in the ambit of ideals of socialism and liberty which do not however exclude the safeguarding of a positive national interest’. Hence claims to ‘positive interest’, even when undefined, could be made on the basis of ‘ideals’ of ‘justice’ and ‘liberty’. Mussolini affirmed that ‘it would not have been completely superfluous to specify and delimit our irredentism from the territorial point of view’, since in this way irredentism would not ‘collapse into nationalism or imperialism’. But he then argued that the issue of territory was in any case ‘a “subordinate” question which does not remove the importance and value of the fundamental principle [of the motion]’ (OO, VII: 150-53). He therefore based himself on the very ‘principles’ and ‘ideals’ which the motion had posited in place of stating its territorial ambitions, and which he himself had argued to contain nationalist and imperialist implications.
The practical consequences of this became apparent when, on 29 January, Mussolini responded to a letter from Giuseppe Prezzolini, former editor of the intellectual review La Voce (and of whom more presently). Prezzolini had argued that for economic, commercial, ethnic, ideal and national reasons Italian claims in the Adriatic should include Fiume. Mussolini wrote that while at the fasci meeting he had said nothing on Fiume, this did not mean that he was ignoring the question: ‘I thought someone else would have spoken on the argument to convince me; but that didn’t happen, since the issue of irredentism was brought onto the terrain of ideals.’ However, Mussolini then accepted Prezzolini’s claim to Fiume, specifying, however, that this was ‘more for the second order of ideal reasons . . . than for reasons of an economic character’ (OO, VII: 156). Hence Mussolini explained his non-commitment on the Fiume question by making reference to the fasci affirmations of ‘principle’ and ‘ideals’, and then made a territorial claim to Fiume precisely on the basis of those ‘ideals’.
Mussolini’s claim to Trieste was anything but trouble-free, and even involved potential conflict with the Slavs. In March he expressed not so much joy as concern over Russia’s victory at Przemysl. This contradictory sentiment was due to the fact that a Russian ‘re-evaluation of the Serb point of view - already in part accepted by the Russian press - could cause serious embarrassment for Italy’ (OO, VII: 283-5). Yugoslav Committee representative Frano Supilo’s busy itinerary had in fact brought him from London to Belgrade to Petrograd where he received support (albeit ambiguous at that point) for Southern Slav claims to Trieste (Boro Petrovich, 1963). Mussolini argued that Russia’s support for Southern Slav claims was also the expression of ‘pan-Slav politics’ and went on to state that Trieste ‘must be, and will be Italian through war against the Austrians and, if necessary, against the Slavs’ (OO, VII: 290-93).
With Fiume and Trieste on the annexation list, Mussolini turned to Dalmatia in an article of 6 April. He claimed that even a majority of Italian speakers was ‘not a good enough reason to claim exclusive possession of all of Dalmatia’ (Mussolini’s emphasis). Here a concession on one issue (Italy could not claim all of Dalmatia even if it had had a majority Italian-speaking population there) was a territorial claim on another (Italy was entitled to parts of Dalmatia because there were Italian-speaking populations to be found there). He in fact had ‘no objections’ to Italy claiming a vast section of the Dalmatian coast and the whole of the Archipelago. ‘Italian cities’ in Dalmatia were required as Italy’s ‘stepping-stone’ to ‘economic and cultural expansion’ in the Balkans once the war was over (OO, VII: 308-9). All this means that his 24 January assertion to the effect that the war was for ‘the liberation of the unredeemed peoples of Trentino and Istria’ (OO, VII: 139-41) left open the unmentioned possibility of territorial claims to the latter which, it will be remembered, did not form part of Mazzini’s national vision. Wherever there were ‘Italians’, there was Italy.
Not that Mussolini’s territorial ambitions were limited to those areas where ethnic Italian speakers were present. He saw the Entente as a vehicle for Italy’s territorial aggrandizement, and for this reason he was keen to see Italy declare war not solely against Austria-Hungary but also, and in fact primarily, against Germany (OO, VII: 136-8, 202-4, 298-300, 301-3, 320-22). In an article of 4 March he explained that ‘to those who accuse us of being “hypnotized” by the Adriatic . . . we reply that while war against both of the Central Powers can give us exclusive dominion in the Adriatic, it also places us side by side with the Triple Entente in the Mediterranean basin, looking towards the east, where Italian expansion can find vast and fertile soil for its energies’ (OO, VII: 232-4).
What was to be the internal social corollary of this open-ended programme of territorial expansion? And what, more specifically, was the role Mussolini ascribed to ‘Mazzini’ in the formulation of this vision? Mazzini’s notions of society and politics were of a mystic and ethereal character. While he saw the working class as a significant new force in history, he was keen to offset its moves towards independent political organization, imploring it, in his I doveri dell’uomo of 1860, to subordinate its material wellbeing to its ‘duties’ (Mazzini, 1961: 191-203). As regards the peasantry, Mazzini certainly endowed it with a great revolutionary potential (Mack Smith, 1994: 278ff), though he saw it as limited by its desire for social and economic betterment and as therefore closed to his impervious mystic patriotism. In his Interessi e principii of 1836 Mazzini wrote that ‘to instill a single principle into the soul of a people or in the mind of its educators and its writers will be far more valuable for that people . . . than the presentation of a whole list of interests and rights to each individual’ (Mazzini, 1961: 83). Anyone who thought of mobilizing peasants or workers around their economic aspirations was, for Mazzini, a base materialist and potential dictator. Materialism, he opined in his Questione morale of 1866, was an ‘old historical phenomenon inseparable from the agony of a dogma’ (Mazzini, 1961: 162). A keen adversary of Marx, he opposed non-religious, non-mystic, and class conflict socialism, this contrast being conceived of as a type of cosmic battle of spirit over matter and liberty over tyranny (Mack Smith, 1994: 271ff, 277ff). The mobilization of the masses would, he averred in Interessi e principii, occur by an inculcation of ‘faith’ which, ‘revealing itself in the acts [of small groups of conspirators]’, would ‘set forces in motion’ (Mazzini, 1961: 83).
There is an uncanny similarity between Mussolini’s and Mazzini’s socio-political terminology and method. In January 1915 Mussolini argued that the primary task of the fasci was to create a pro-war state of mind among the working masses via ‘many words, but more important again gestures and examples’ (OO, VII: 139-41). He wrote in March that in the period of the Risorgimental wars a ‘sleeping people’ was ‘shaken’ by Mazzini and other patriots and ‘dragged to the battlefields with the virtue of the word and with the even more efficient and persuasive one of example’ (OO, VII: 275-7). The point here is that, like Mazzini, Mussolini’s proposals for popular participation in the war contain a socially conservative thrust in that they substitute gestures and words for mass political mobilization and far-reaching social reform, which in the Italy of the day undoubtedly amounted to land reform, especially given that the majority of the Italian Army would be made up of peasants. Also like Mazzini, Mussolini saw the leaders of socialist organizations as dogmatists and enemies of free thought. He argued in December 1914 that the PSI’s rejection of the war derived from its adoption of an ‘analytical category’ when, according to Mussolini, the outbreak of the conflict had put an end to ‘everything that was solid, fixed, what we believed to be dogma’ (OO, VII: 97-110). Mussolini placed Mazzini at the top of a list of French, Russian and English libertarian, anarchist and utopian socialists ranging from Proudhon to Bakunin to Fourier, to Saint Simon, to Owen. He cited these in order to show how pro-intervention socialists like himself were roaming in ‘the field of unconfined spirit’ and were in favour of ‘infinite liberty!’ to ‘repudiate Marx’ and ‘return to Mazzini’ (OO, VII: 150-55).
However, Mussolini’s adoption of anti-dogmatic ‘free thinking’ was not, as he suggested, a consequence of the outbreak of the European war. In November 1908 he wrote a review of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, praising the German philosopher’s thinking precisely because, as he saw it, it lacked a system, or what he declared to be ‘all that is rotten, sterile and negative in all philosophies’. Mussolini described the Superman as Nietzsche’s ‘greatest creation’ and ‘the hope of our redemption’ (OO, I: 174-84). This suggests that when, in 1914-15, Mussolini wrote or spoke of ‘Mazzini’, the ‘Mazzini’ in question had been re-elaborated through the grid of the otherwise unmentioned a-moral Nietzschean Superman. Hence the social issues associated with Mazzini would take on an entirely new significance in congruence with the expansionist war for which Mussolini campaigned. Three considerations add weight to this hypothesis.
First, in the 1908 review Mussolini argued that the Nietzschean ideal would only be understood by ‘a new species of “free spirits”’ who would be ‘fortified in war’. The ‘free thinkers’ or ‘unprejudiced spirits’ which Mussolini associated with his 1914-15 ‘return to Mazzini’ are arguably, therefore, the Freigeist which Nietzsche first developed in 1878 in his Human, all too human, and which was developed fully between 1883 and 1885 in the figure of his Superman of Thus spoke Zarathustra, the book reviewed by Mussolini in 1908. Secondly, in calling for war against Germany and Austria-Hungary it is unlikely that Mussolini would have argued for a ‘return to Nietzsche’ in his ‘anti-dogma’ crusade against the PSI. By pointing to figures such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Owen, Mussolini clearly played on the fact that all of these figures were located within Entente countries and within the ‘anti-dogma’ petty bourgeois socialist tradition. Nietzsche, on the other hand, had the double disadvantage of being non-socialist and a German. Finally, Mussolini’s refusal to raise the slogan of land reform is commensurate with Mazzini and Nietzsche; both of them rejected appeals to what they saw as the low materialist morality of the masses, and both were easily adaptable to Mussolini’s understanding of Italian intervention as based on something other than a necessary mobilization of the peasantry around the concrete socio-economic issues which directly concerned it.
This distortion of Mazzini can be said, therefore, to have issued from the impact of power reproduction processes on symbols and representations, or what in our Introduction we defined as ideology. Other evidence supports this interpretation. In 1909 Mussolini wrote about the work of French ‘revolutionary syndicalist’ Georges Sorel, himself greatly influenced by Nietzsche. In his Reflexions sur la violence written in 1905 Sorel argued that the myth of the general strike derived its strength from the power of the images of an undefined future that it provoked among the proletariat. The myth would create a continued state of proletarian class consciousness in readiness for a Napoleonic-style battle to the death with the bourgeois adversary (Sorel, 1999). However, in Sorel’s myth the proletariat, as Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci noted, has ‘no active and constructive phase of its own’ (Gramsci, 1979: 127). While Sorel adopted formally revolutionary proletarian terminology replete with references to Marx and Engels, this lack of political independence and strategy for the working class strongly suggests that his myth was in substance a call on what he saw as a degenerate and fearful bourgeoisie to augment its class consciousness and to make no reforming concessions to workers.
This indeed is how Mussolini interpreted it. In his review of Sorel’s book Mussolini argued that working-class beliefs in democracy and socialist reformism could only find their material origins in ‘bourgeois degeneration’ while ‘we syndicalists . . . don’t want to inherit the patrimony of the bourgeoisie in a period of decadence’. It was therefore necessary for the bourgeoisie ‘to reach the apex of its power’ to only then fall under the fatal blow of the working class. The function of ‘proletarian violence’ was that of ‘forcing capitalism to remain ardent in the industrial struggle and to concern itself with the productive function’. Mussolini berated what he called ‘this fearful, humanitarian, philanthropic bourgeoisie . . . , this good-hearted bourgeoisie which makes useless charity instead of accelerating the rhythm of economic activity’ (OO, II: 163-8). Thus long before the outbreak of the Great War Mussolini had been looking to capitalist forces as the kernel of his vision of ‘socialism’ while contemporaneously challenging a fundamental tenet of Mazzinian ideology, namely humanitarianism. Indeed, in his review of Nietzsche’s work he likewise argued that one obstacle to the Superman’s ambitions was the fact that the ‘common people’ were incapable of understanding the necessity of a ‘greater level of wicked deeds’ due to their being ‘Christianized and humanitarian’. Most importantly, in an article written a month before the review of Sorel’s book, and in which he fused Nietzsche with syndicalist theory, Mussolini argued that ‘men’ were required to keep alight the mythical flame of the general strike (OO, II: 123-7). It is legitimate to conclude, therefore, that buried somewhere not too deep below the surface of Mussolini’s pre-1914 socialism lay a recognition of himself as a Nietzschean Superman, understood as a self-appointed mobilizing functionary of a weak-willed bourgeoisie which was failing to stand up to the proletariat and its political and economic organizations.
This is why it is crucial to note that a similar distortion of Mazzini through the Nietzschean grid lay at the heart of nationalist imperialist ideology as formulated by Enrico Corradini in the decade leading up to and including 1914. Corradini argued in 1914 that liberal values had created the conditions for the class struggle where ‘the foreign voice of Karl Marx drowns out the Italian voice of Giuseppe Mazzini’ (Corradini, 1925: 255). To remedy this, he had argued in 1911 in favour of a lay theocracy as the national ideal: ‘The religious devotee knows that every act must answer to God, and therefore tries to do good deeds according to the will of God . . . In a similar fashion, by explaining that certain acts of theirs must answer to the nation so that the latter can fulfil its task, national consciousness can and must activate in citizens the sentiment of duty and thus the way of discipline’ (Corradini, 1925: 115). Yet while his terminology was more or less unvaried with respect to Mazzini’s, Corradini’s notion of religious ‘devotion’ and ‘mission’ could be seen developing in a moral scale going from the individual to the nation via the family, at which point the discourse halted. Corradini argued in 1905 that to go beyond the nation towards the rest of humanity was not possible because ‘at present an organic body . . . like the individual, the family, the nation . . . and whose name is humanity does not exist, and will not exist even in the future’ (Corradini, 1925: 43).
Why this alteration? A central theme to Corradini’s schema was Italian industrialization. This was not to issue from a radical transformation of social relations in Italy, and one can scour Corradini’s writings and speeches in vain for any such notions. For Corradini, rather, speaking in 1909, industrialization was inseparable from ‘an industrial imperialism which today appears the definitively modern form of imperialism and which tomorrow will be only the first step of new military, political and general imperialisms’. In his view, however, Italy lacked ‘a will to imperialism’ and hence needed to develop a spirit ‘which is precisely of peoples in whom the vigour of life is naturally joined with the will to make the first part of world history and not the last’ (Corradini, 1925: 86-7). Clearly, there was no place for Mazzinian humanitarianism in this project. Corradini made no bones about his desire to transfer national wealth towards the financial and industrial oligarchies, important sectors of which propped up his political movement. When the latter’s newspaper,L’ldea Nazionale, was transformed into a daily in 1914 its board of directors consisted of Corradini and four industrialists, one of whom was Dante Ferraris, president of the car and arms manufacturer Fiat and of the employers’ federation Lega Industriale (De Grand, 1978: 51). Corradini placed no limits on Italian expansion, seeing open-ended territorial demands as an opportunity for the State to impose greater internal repression and increased military spending (De Grand, 1971: 403). The high point of the domestic dimension to this policy was the destruction of the economic and political organizations of the working class. Again in 1909 Corradini declared his movement to be ‘in antagonism with socialism and in accordance with the clear indications of the historical period’ (Corradini, 1925: 86). With direct reference to Sorel he called that same year for a revolutionary stand-off between bourgeoisie and proletariat: ‘What solidarity, what peace, what social legislation! War, war between the classes!’ (Corradini, 1925: 86). A politically and economically defeated workers’ movement was to accept its role as part of what he often called a ‘proletarian nation’ in struggle with ‘the great bourgeois, banking, mercantile and plutocratic Europe’ (Corradini, 1925: 100, 221).
The theme of ‘men’, or even a ‘man’, which, as we have seen, Mussolini had stressed as part of his pre-war redefinition of the task of socialist leaders, had also been elucidated in politico-cultural circles close to Mussolini and, for that matter, Corradini. Writing in Corradini’s IL Regno in 1904 Prezzolini argued that the pusillanimous bourgeoisie needed to realize that the class struggle was a two-way affair. To stand its ground against socialism it needed to physically rearm (Prezzolini, 1904b). While arguing that the repressive apparatus of the State was an instrument at the bourgeoisie’s disposal (1904a), Prezzolini insisted that what was needed was ‘direct action on the part of the despoiled class’. By the latter he meant not landless peasants or unemployed farmhands but the bourgeoisie and the agrarians who were to form an anti-socialist alliance: ‘We need to begin to act and to finish asking the State to act on our behalf.’ The mass base of this direct confrontation with socialism was to be found ‘above all among the organizers [of society]’. At the head of this armed middle- and lower-middle class intelligentsia was to stand ‘an example and a voice: that is, a man’ (Prezzolini, 1904c; Prezzolini’s italics).
True, Prezzolini eventually dissociated himself from Corradini’s IL Regno and founded La Voce in 1908. But this practice of separation was old, and rather unconvincing, hat. In 1903 Prezzolini initiated the periodical Leonardo with another intellectual, Giovanni Papini. In an article of that year Papini called for an ‘intellectual empire’ and the ‘imperialist ideal’ as distinct from what he declared to be Corradini’s conception of force as ‘essentially material and exterior’. However, he concluded his piece by affirming that his thesis was ‘not a statement of unfriendliness’ towards the nationalists (with whom his article was effectively trying to engage), but an expression of ‘the need for separation’. He specified that while Corradini was an adversary of modern civilization and democracy, ‘we too are ferocious enemies of such things’. Thus when he declared to Corradini that ‘we are not and will not be with you’ (Papini, 1903a) it is difficult to imagine who exactly he thought he was fooling. When Papini was not using IL Regno to reiterate his anti-socialist discourses already expounded in Leonardo (Papini, 1903b), he was using it to restate Corradini’s theories concerning the relation between class and nation, the centrality of the bourgeoisie as the ruling class, and the need to recognize that ‘the army is the most important organ we possess’ (Papini, 1904b). He also expressed his conviction that the Catholic Church was a bulwark of conservatism which the ‘great party of the bourgeoisie’ could use to its favour (Papini, 1904c).
Prezzolini played a similar double game. Writing in IL Regno in 1903 he used his own name to repeat exactly the same themes he had dealt with as the more ‘philosophical’ ‘Giuliano IL sofista’ in Leonardo: namely, ‘however reduced the bourgeoisie is, however beaten it is’ that ‘it still has a long way to go’ (Prezzolini, 1903). Neither did La Voce represent a definitive rupture with Corradini. Prezzolini’s considerations in 1910 on the formation of the nationalist imperialists into a political organization were not only not negative, but he even claimed credit for himself and Papini for what he saw as the positive side of Italian nationalism, that is ‘the concern for economic and cultural interests’ (Prezzolini, 1910c). La Voce’s original ‘opposition’ to the Italian 1911 invasion of Libya was based not on anti-imperialist considerations but on the lack of fertile soil in Libya and on a rejection of the bad taste of Corradini’s war rhetoric (La Voce, 1911a, b). An editorial in fact announced the review’s discipline, insisting that once war had started all internal opposition, especially socialist opposition, was to cease (La Voce, 1911c). La Voce conceded freedom of action to the government and hoped that Italy would go to Tripoli ‘with honour’ (La Voce, 1911d). Prezzolini resigned as chief editor in March 1912. However, on his return to the helm in November of that year his rhetoric was a testimony to the influence of his mentor: ‘And war elevates all hearts! One cannot but feel, in these days, the greatness of war. How happy I am to have been born in a generation which was the first to reject the commonplaces of pacifism, when to speak of the valour of war seemed a heresy!’ (Prezzolini, 1912). When war broke out in 1914 Prezzolini again resigned as editor of La Voce. Dazzled by Mussolini’s ability to hatch a new paper from nought, he went to work for ILPopolo d’Italia. Referring to Mussolini in an open letter to his former colleagues he wrote: ‘Do you know that he is a “man”?’ (Prezzolini, 1914). Prezzolini had found his ‘man’.