In a 1917 letter to Prezzolini, Mussolini cited Leonardo and La Voce as lying at the core of his own political-cultural formation (E. Gentile, 1999: 107). In 1909, during his period in the Trentino, Mussolini promoted La Voce, and with the highest of praise for Prezzolini, Papini and Leonardo (OO, II: 53-6). Even before the war, then, Mussolini was profoundly influenced by the anti-liberal, antisocialist cultural avant-garde, itself open to Corradini’s nationalism. True, while Corradini, Prezzolini and Papini were celebrating the Libyan war, on 18 November 1911 Mussolini was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for his opposition to it (of which he served four months). Arguably, therefore, the influence of these circles was at that stage still somewhat limited. Yet it should be noted that Mussolini was arrested precisely for his agitations in favour of a ‘general strike’ against the war, terminology which in his Sorelian vocabulary meant anything but a generalized downing of tools, as we have seen. Furthermore, from his prison cell Mussolini began a biography, noting that he had been born on 29 July 1883, that is ‘when the sun had been in the constellation of Leo for eight days’ (OO, XXXIII: 220). This was clearly an ambitious petty bourgeois intellectual who had a strongly individualist sense of his own importance. While it cannot have been an easy stretch, the prison time did him no harm in terms of publicity, immensely aiding his popularity among radical socialists and hence his ‘revolutionary’ (but as we have seen ideologically pro-capitalist) campaign against socialist reformism at the PSI’s Reggio Emilia congress of July 1912 and, from there, his ascension to the position of chief editor of Avanti! (Bosworth, 2002: 83-9).
That said, Richard Bosworth is undoubtedly right to warn against the danger of overstretching the evidence in favour of interpreting Mussolini’s pre-1914-war political culture as already marked by national socialism (Bosworth, 2002: esp. Chs 2-4). But Bosworth does not then identify the point at which this political culture crystallized into fascism. Indeed, he is convinced that Mussolini’s entire political career was caught up in a ‘structure’, substantially devoid of ‘intention’ and hence marked by the absence of any real network of guiding principles and ideas. He thus underestimates the role which the Great War might have played in forging Mussolini’s pre-war pot-pourri of latent nationalism and rhetorical ‘socialism’ into a system of ideas and related practical consequences identifiable with fascism (O’Brien, 2002b). While, to be sure, the name of Corradini does not appear in Mussolini’s writings before an article of 26 August 1914, and even then only for purposes of polemic (OO, VI: 339-43), on the basis of the foregoing analysis it is legitimate to hypothesize that a Corradini-type renewal of political authority and State legitimacy lay at the heart of Mussolini’s advocacy of intervention in the European war.
Mussolini was keenly aware of the radical divide between State and society which had issued from Italian unification. The latter had in fact been effected from above by the ruling elites of the penninsula in alliance with the monarchy of Piedmont. In December 1914 he referred to the State’s ‘organic incapacity’ to resolve ‘the fundamental problems of our national existence’ (OO, VII: 72-5). This was true from various points of view. The ruling elites had always seen the masses of workers and peasants as a threat to the State which the founding fathers of unification had taken so many pains to bring into being. An at times sincere desire to oversee improvements in the living conditions of the masses was overwhelmed by a more ardent ambition to defend at all costs the economic and political interests of the dominant classes through violent State repression of popular protest. This strategy had most recently marked the turn-of-the-century governments of di Rudini, Pelloux and Saracco (E. Gentile, 1990: Ch. 1). The Piedmontese Constitution of 1848, which was imposed on the rest of Italy between 1859 and 1861, certainly recognized individual and collective liberties, including a free press and the right of association. But its clauses then made these rights dependent on laws outside the Constitution itself, a flexibility which allowed collusion between political elites and the military resulting in the arbitrary (but perfectly legal) imposition of martial law in cases of civilian disorder. In 1898, and again in 1902, strike threats by railway and telegraph workers saw those sectors militarized and hence subject to the military penal system (Violante, 1976). This approach failed, however, to guarantee either social order or an expanding internal market in the wake of a major take-off in the Italian economy beginning around 1894. This goes a good way towards explaining the rise of Giolitti from 1901 onwards. Giolitti inaugurated pro-worker social reform, decreased State repression against strikes for higher wages, and expanded suffrage. His concessions were nevertheless made possible by the economic boom, and from the outset they met with resistance from the power interests upon which they tended to impinge (E. Gentile, 1990: Ch. 2). Moreover, the Italian economy was marked by sharp crisis and increasing unemployment from 1907 onwards, and by 1914 Italy had succeeded only in laying important infrastructural foundations, but not in reaching full industrialization (Cafagna, 1970). By that year GNP per capita was only half that of Britain and only two-thirds that of Germany (Procacci, Gv., 1997: 3). Statistics for 1911 show that 38 per cent of Italians were still illiterate, and in some areas of the peninsula illiteracy was almost total. Between 1912 and 1913 over 1.5 million people emigrated (Corner, 2002: 20-21). The vast majority of Italians continued to identify primarily with their local town (paese) and not their nation. Even when universal manhood suffrage was first applied in the elections of October 1913 the results still reflected the lack of national integration: no peasants were either present or represented (Bosworth, 1983: 89). The Giolittian experiment had evidently reached objective limits within the existing socio-economic and political frameworks, and it was upon these contradictions that the far right drew in order to challenge the inadequacy of Giolittism to prepare Italy to stake its place in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry.
As regards national rites, ceremonies and cultural representations, it was not that the liberal State had ignored such questions following unification. Along with the celebration of the Constitution of 1848 there were attempts to glorify the 1870 incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom (Caracciolo, 1996). However, there is no evidence to suggest that the State seriously interested itself in the creation of a system of national worship (E. Gentile, 1993: 5-25). A massive renaming of streets after the leading figures of the Risorgimento was undertaken in the first two decades of national life, but this seems to have been the outcome of local initiatives by patriotic mayors (Rafaelli, 1996). Also, the national flag, a tricolour which originally aspired to the democratic values of the French Revolution, was soon incorporated into the individual materialization of national unity which was the Soldier-King (Oliva, 1996). Stamps and postcards were not utilized to diffuse the incarnation of Italy in the allegory of the turreted lady (as they were in France with Marianne); rather, in accordance with an authoritarian vision in which the consensus of the masses was deemed unnecessary, the Italian ruling elites saw to it that the Monarchy, and not Italy as such, was exalted in an affirmation and reaffirmation of dynastic power (Gibelli, 1998: 94-5). Italy, in short, would not enter the European war with a union sacree; there would be no generalized mobilization of pro-war sentiment around national traditions, founding myths or political institutions. Indeed, on the eve of the war popular anti-State sentiment was as widespread as ever. In June 1914 demonstrations against militarist celebrations of the Constitution were met with brute force by the authorities. This resulted in a general strike and the proclamation of independent republics in areas of Emilia and Romagna during the so-called ‘Red week’.
For Mussolini, this entire inheritance represented a grave danger for the efficacy of the imminent Italian campaign. He argued in December 1914 that ‘“peoples and States” have everywhere realized a fusion into a block of ‘national unanimity”’, and that ‘the distinction between governments and governed is no longer possible’ (OO, VII: 72-5). But, he stressed in April 1915, ‘there has been no moral preparation. Worse, the government has not wanted it and has impeded it’ (OO, VII: 311-13). Yet the only war possible in modern times was, in his view, a war ‘felt by the people, made by the people, through the State’ (OO, VII: 341-3). France represented an important reference point for Mussolini, as witnessed by the striking straplines placed on the front page of II Popolo d’ltalia in November 1914. In the top left- hand corner was written ‘He who has iron has bread’, a dictum attributed to the French insurrectionist socialist Auguste Blanqui. In the top right-hand corner, Napoleon Bonaparte was quoted as saying ‘Revolution is an idea which has found bayonets’. A daring interpretation of these subtitles could be that Italy’s agrarian question (‘bread’) would be resolved following industrialization (‘iron’) to be achieved not by an internal social revolution but via victory in the war (‘bayonets’). This process was to be overseen by a strong and ostensibly super partes State (Napoleon) but with the indispensable aid of men of action (Blanqui), whose heroic, individualistic gestures would, much like Mazzini’s, be presented as a mobilizing surrogate for the raising of issues of a socio-economic and political nature that might concern those mobilized. Before examining Mussolini’s other uses of French history, let us first explore the role of the men of action between State and society in the context of the 11 April 1915 interventionist demonstration in Milan.
This latter initiative was countered by the PSI. Police intervened, killing one man, Innocente Marcora, an electrician. Mussolini was absolutely furious. He argued that the State’s violence had been ‘cold and meditated’ (OO, VII: 329-31), and an examination of the archive documentation relative to the causes of Marcora’s death suggests that he was absolutely right (ACS, A5G, b. 107, fasc. 225, s.fasc. 23). Marcora’s death united interventionists and neutralists in a mass one-day stoppage and demonstration in Milan called for on 14 April. Mussolini supported the demonstration as did the fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria, who were referred to by Mussolini as the ‘fascists’ (which he put in inverted commas). On 14 April he argued that the demonstration had been called in order to ‘safeguard the fundamental rights of citizens, and to “protest” against systems which must cease once and for all’. He called for the ‘transformation or breaking up of most of the State machine’ (OO, VII: 329-31). To begin with, the Police Commissioner and Prefect of Milan both had to pack their bags (OO, VII: 332-4). However, Mussolini’s portrayal of himself as being in conflict with the repressive apparatus of the State needs to be treated with caution. For one thing, it will be noted that the above quotation sees the word ‘protest’ in inverted commas. Indeed, the defence of citizens’ democratic rights was not the main reason for the participation by the ‘fascists’ in the 14 April demonstration. Mussolini wrote that ‘it doesn’t take much to understand that the people of Milan did not direct its protest against the State, but against a special organ of the State: the police’. By their presence the ‘fascists’ guaranteed the demonstration’s ‘absolute apolitical character’ in relation to neutrality or intervention (OO, VII: 332-4). Mussolini argued that police violence ‘“sabotages” the regime and digs the grave of the institutions better and quicker than any . . . subversive’ (OO, VII: 329-31). Mussolini and the ‘fascists’ were therefore primarily present as self-appointed representatives and defenders of State authority, but from within society and, where necessary, in tactical disagreement with the State on how best to achieve this.
Mussolini’s dependence on France and its history included no small amount of references to republicanism. In November 1914 he argued that the war would ‘perhaps see a few more crowns fall to pieces’ (OO, VII: 39-41). On 7 April he inveighed not only againstsacro egoismo and against Salandra’s elitist secrecy but against the King who was described as a pro-German ‘Philistine’ (OO, VII: 311-13). The following day he accused the Monarch of being ‘foreign’ and ‘neutral’. Mussolini reminded Vittorio Emanuele III that Camille Desmoulins had once exclaimed that ‘“In 1789 only twelve of us were republicans”’, then adding that only three years later ‘the Monarchy fell under the guillotine’ (OO, VII: 314-16). Interestingly, however, in all of Mussolini’s other anti-royal articles from the period of Italian neutrality the King was always given one last chance to see the interventionist light (OO, VII: 22-3, 97-110, 139-41, 142-8, 220-21, 243-6, 386, 389-90). Against this constantly renewed stay of execution, in December 1914 Mussolini joked about the beheading of Louis XVI and Charles I. He also opined that by virtue of the war ‘Russia will be overturned . . . in its feudal and Tsarist scaffold’. But he mentioned nothing about the inevitable proclamation of an Italian republic or the erection of a gallows in Rome. The full consequences of his ‘republicanism’ were, therefore, only really applicable to Russia and the Central Powers, the latter being described as ‘feudal nations’ at war with the ‘democratic nations’ (OO, VII: 96-110). It is of crucial importance, therefore, that another French theme accompanied Mussolini’s rhetorical attacks on the Italian Monarchy. On 16 April he remarked that should certain ‘cowards’ and ‘fomenters of panic’ insist on ‘serving up - either in public or in private - their lugubrious prophecies’, there was ‘a very simple way to reduce them to silence’, and ‘even in this case we are inspired by the example of republican France’ (OO, VII: 335-7).
The full import of this allusion to Jacobinism can be best tackled if we take into consideration Mussolini’s July 1915 characterization of that phenomenon as ‘the vanguard of the bourgeoisie’ (OO, VIII: 74-6). But this was not the only definition of which he was aware. He had argued in 1909 that ‘the proletariat is not Jacobin’ and for this reason ‘it is probable that on its triumph a period of persecutions and red terror will not follow’ (OO, II: 123-8). In his article on Sorel that same year he noted that the revolutionaries of 1793 carried out ‘savage acts . . . when they had power in their hands and were able to use it to oppress the vanquished’ (OO, II: 163-8). For Mussolini, then, Jacobinism involved persecutions and terror, and was a bourgeois revolutionary phenomenon. Gramsci observed that in the Italy of the day Jacobinism was understood as ‘the particular methods of a party and government activity which [the Jacobins] displayed, characterized by extreme energy, decisiveness and resolution, dependent on a fanatical belief in the virtue of the programme and those methods’. However, he also noted that the programmatic and repressive dimensions to Jacobinism had become separated. A ‘Jacobin’ was now any politician who was ‘energetic, resolute and fanatical, because fanatically convinced of the thaumaturgical virtues of his ideas, whatever they might be’ (Gramsci, 1979: 65-6). In this regard, it should be remembered that while Mussolini applied a revolutionary democratic characterization to the war, he had no programme of democratic social reform for Italy, while as regards the overthrow of ‘feudal’ systems he limited this to the imminent transformations to be wrought on the Central Powers and Russia by the conflict, as we have seen.
It stands to reason, therefore, that his application of ‘Jacobinism’ to Italy must have implied distinctly repressive measures as part of a programme for social conservation in and through expansionist war. Repression would not be used against reaction to defend a threatened revolution, but against those who challenged the powerful and their drive towards, and pursuit of, imperialist war. In a word, socialism, redefined as counter-revolutionary ‘reaction’, was the object of this ‘Jacobin’ ardour. In November 1914 Mussolini referred to the PSI leaders as ‘my enemies’ (OO, VII: 35-7), and assured his readers that he would fight them ‘with all my energy’ (OO, VII: 42-3). Following the socialist call to oppose the ‘fascist’ demonstration on 11 April Mussolini wrote that ‘if the war liberates us from a PSI which has become reactionary, then long live the war, let it be welcome and let it come soon’ (OO, VII: 317-19). Indeed, of Mussolini’s 160 articles, speeches and interviews published between the founding of IL Popolo d’ltalia and Italian intervention, eighty-six (53.7 per cent) are either directly or indirectly in confrontation with the PSI and/or Avanti! (OO, VII: 5-7, 9-11, 16-17, 18-19, 20-21, 22-3, 24, 25-7, 28, 32-3, 35-7, 38, 39-41, 42-3, 45-6, 47, 49, 50, 52, 56, 57-8, 59, 60-61, 84-5, 91-3, 94-6, 111, 113-15, 117-19, 120-2, 126-8, 129-32, 133, 134-5, 139-41, 142-8, 149, 150-53, 154-5, 156, 157-9, 160-62, 163-5, 166-70, 174-5, 176-9, 180-82, 183-4, 185-6, 193-5, 211-12, 213-16, 219, 220-21, 222-4, 243-6, 261-3, 264-7, 268-9, 273-4, 278, 280-82, 285, 286-9, 290-93, 294-6, 301-3, 304-7, 317-19, 326-8, 335-7, 344-8, 349-52, 353-5, 356-8, 359-63, 367-9, 382-3, 384-5, 387-8, 389-90, 391-2, 396-7, 398-400, 401-5, 409-10, 414-17). All of this lends weight to Trotsky’s view that fascism ‘contains a reactionary caricature of Jacobinism’ (Trotsky, 1971: 282).
But as with the pre-war anti-liberal and anti-Parliament political culture of the right-wing nationalists, Mussolini’s ‘Jacobinism’ also took the form of anti-Giolittism. His invective reached boiling point when, following the revelation in parliament on 7 May that Italy was preparing to enter the war, Giolitti, who had retreated to his residence in Piedmont, returned to Rome on 9 May, suggesting, through this action, that the neutralist option was still on the table. Over 300 of his parliamentary supporters left calling cards in his Rome residence as a symbolic expression of solidarity. On 13 May Salandra tactically resigned as Prime Minister, effectively daring Giolitti to use his parliamentary majority to guarantee that Italy would stay out of the war. In Rome that same day the right-wing nationalist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio announced that ‘if inciting citizens to violence is a crime, I will boast of this crime, assuming sole responsibility for it . . . All excess of force is legitimate, if it prevents the Nation from being lost’ (D’Annunzio, 1915: 73-4).
Interventionist protests of between 5,000 and 30,000 people took place all over Italy, Giolitti being the common target of their slogans. A significant number of prefects’ reports shows that these demonstrations were formed mainly by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia and students, who for the most part supported intervention for reasons of expansionism and Great Power politics (Vigezzi, 1959; 1960). On 11 May Mussolini demanded that parliamentary deputies be ‘handed over to a war tribunal’. He argued that ‘for the health of Italy a few dozen deputies should be shot: I repeat shot in the back’ (Mussolini’s emphasis), and some ex-ministers (unnamed) ‘sent to jail for life’. By returning to Rome Giolitti, in his view, had ‘sabotaged the spiritual preparation of the Nation for war’ (OO, VII: 379-81). Three days later Mussolini stressed that ‘if [Giolitti] triumphs along with [his] red scoundrel accomplice . . . Italy will be thrown into the most profound convulsion of her history. An epoch of individual and collective retaliations will begin. The traitors will pay for their crime in blood . . . We cannot ease up when the enemies spy and pursue. We must confront them head on and, whatever the price, rout them’ (OO, VII: 387-8). Giolitti declined the invitation to form a government, claiming in his memoirs that a person opposed to the war could not assume the premiership at that time (Giolitti, 1967: 542). The King thus reinstated Salandra on 16 May, and the Parliament, including Giolitti and his followers, voted in favour of war credits four days later. But this did not satisfy Mussolini’s ‘Jacobin’ thirst. On 24 May he accused the socialists of being ‘people who work for Austria- Hungary and Germany’, veritable ‘traitors’ because they had made ‘continuous propaganda which for months and months has been aimed at depressing the energies of the army and the nation’. He argued that while there was still time for ‘individual salvations’ this was on the understanding that ‘for the Party it’s over’. On only one condition could Italian socialism be saved: ‘if the Austrians reach Milan’. In the meantime, he once again evoked the need for ‘firing squads’ for ‘traitors and cowards’ (OO, VII: 414-17; Mussolini’s emphasis).
It should be noted, however, that it was not only through newspaper attacks that Mussolini was prepared to practice and encourage anti-socialist ‘Jacobinism’. In an article of 23 February 1915 he ridiculed the neutralist rallies of 21 February, arguing that they had failed completely (which was not true: they were well attended; see Valiani, 1977: 102). He attributed this to absenteeism and to the fact that ‘while for a whole week Avanti! had sneered at the “lean ranks of the fascists”’ the latter had nevertheless ‘intervened everywhere’. Their ‘debut’ had been ‘brilliant’ and the neutralists had been ‘dispersed’ (OO, VII: 211-12). The fascists showed that they did not fear ‘neutralist violence’ and had managed here and there ‘to impose on the demonstration a precisely opposite character to the one hoped for by the PSI’ (OO, VII: 219). In a report of 1 February 1915 to the Ministry of the Interior, the Prefect of Bologna observed that at a meeting of 30 January the local fascio had passed a motion which deplored socialist talk of resorting to the general strike in case of Italian intervention. The motion affirmed that ‘the Socialist Party tries to distort the general strike - an essentially revolutionary arm in the hand of the international proletariat for its social and political claims - to the benefit of the political and militarist tyranny of the German Empires’. The motion promised to ‘impede, with all means necessary’, what it termed ‘the planned hypocritical and cowardly betrayal’ (ACS, A5G, b. 89, fasc. 199, s.fasc. 14). This terminology is identical to section III of the programme of San Sepolcro which, taken to its logical conclusion, resulted, as we saw in Chapter 1, in the physical attack on the socialist demonstration and the Avanti! offices in April 1919. To be sure, much of this, including Mussolini’s claims in late March 1915 regarding the further dispersal of neutralists by what he termed ‘patrols’ (OO, VII: 294-6), may have been exaggerated. But inserted as it is in a broader system of imperialism, war, anti-socialism, social conservativism and the reproduction and reinforcement of State authority, it is recognizable as fascism, in however embryonic a form.