The invasion was a political shock to Italy’s governing elites, and to Mussolini in his dual capacity as soldier and political activist. Invasion and heavy casualties might have been expected to supply the linguistic basis of a call to popular mobilization against the enemy. The invasion of national territory together with the commission of atrocities against French and Belgian civilians supplied just such a hermeneutic structure for the French in 1914, the nation in arms coming up against attempted violation by the barbarian enemy (Horne, 2000: 73-9). In the Italian case, further material for a mobilization of spirits was ostensibly provided by the anniversary of entry into the war, which fell during the Austrian offensive. In Mussolini’s absence, an anonymous IL Popolo d’ltalia author in fact related the two events. He noted on 24 May that the ‘sacred anniversary falls just when the enemy is making its extreme effort’, and with a language of ‘blood’ and ‘sacrifice’ he managed to connect the real or imaginary sacred union of 24 May 1915 with the same real or imaginary Italy ‘still serenely prepared for resistance’ and poised for inevitable ‘victory’. That same day IL Popolo d’ltalia printed the text of IL manifesto deipartiti d’estrema published and affixed by various interventionist parties and groups which included the fasci interventisti. This poster opened by mentioning the invasion which required ‘regroupment for the decisive effort’. But Mussolini the soldier remained silent, with no entries in the war diary, which in fact came to a halt after 14 May. The language of offensive as elaborated by Mussolini was clearly inappropriate to the experience of retreat and desperate defence of the national territory. Little or nothing was happening in the Carnia during the invasion: in the month between the beginning of the Strafexpedition and the end of the Italian ‘counter-offensive’ there were no deaths and only one injury in Mussolini’s regiment (AUSSME, entries of 15 May-16 June 1916). In a period of military crisis and intense activity from Verdun to the Trentino, for Mussolini to say something from a relatively idle sector would only have further underlined his non-heroic location.
The shock of invasion and near defeat threw the Italian government into crisis. Parliament re-opened on 6 June and after four days of deliberations in which any attempts to raise the Strafexpedition were shouted down in a hail of abuse, Salandra had to present budget proposals. He could therefore no longer hold off discussion of the invasion and who was responsible for it. His criticisms that day of Cadorna were, however, half-hearted. He stated that ‘if nothing else, better prepared defences would have held off the [enemy offensive] for longer and further from the margins of the mountain zone’. In some respects his pusillanimity is understandable. Already that year Cadorna had scored a heavy victory over the government by successfully ridding himself of Minister for War, Zuppelli, who since 6 January had been criticizing his failed strategy and in particular his dispersal of forces over too broad a front. Cadorna responded to this (and to Salandra’s 30 January letter to the King which identified Cadorna’s fruitless Carso assaults as the cause of bad morale in the army) by calling on journalist Ugo Ojetti to organize a press campaign which would present him favourably to public opinion. IL Corriere della Sera, IL Secolo, IL Popolo d’ltalia and L’ldea Nazionale all responded positively. When Cadorna’s demands for Zuppelli’s removal were resisted by Salandra, Cadorna replied: ‘Either Zupelli goes or I go.’ Zuppelli resigned on 9 March and was replaced by Cadorna’s friend and admirer, General Paolo Morrone. An important precedent thus existed to show how any attempt to challenge Cadorna head-on meant danger for the political assailant. Indeed, not even Salandra’s 10 June attempts at semi-diplomacy were enough to save his job, and the government, and he along with it, fell with 158 votes in favour and 197 against (Melograni, 1969: Ch. 3; Rocca, 1985: 140ff).
The crisis leading to Salandra’s downfall created a major problem for Mussolini the political journalist. Where did responsibility for the invasion lie? If he attacked Cadorna and the government, this would alter the relationship to the home front that he had defined through IL Popolo d’ltalia during his winter leave, and even before. In the event, neither he nor IL Popolo d’Italia did anything of the sort. Before Salandra’s downfall Mussolini wrote nothing, barring a handful of letters, one to Michele Bianchi published in IL Popolo d’Italia on 22 May (OO, VIII: 303), one to his brother-in-law dated 1 June (Mancini Mussolini, 1957: 62) and one to his friend Torquato Nanni on 5 June (OO, VIII: 303). As for his newspaper staff, on 18 May they defended Cadorna. A paragraph entitled ‘L’offensiva austriaca’ is creative indeed: ‘The Austrian offensive . .. does not surprise the Italians . .. Our private information on health provisions confirms that the generalissimo foresaw and acted, organizing defences and reserves.’ Following the removal of Salandra IL Popolo d’Italia again focused on defending Cadorna’s reputation and, moreover, using Cadorna’s theories. In the main article of the 11 June edition it argued that ‘if the lack of preparation has been denounced by the High Command, then it must have been determined by political intrusion’. Mussolini’s response to the crisis unfolded in a similar vein. The importance of Salandra’s fall led him to adjust his creation of a military persona by announcing, on 14 June, that, exceptionally, he would suspend his apolitical role as an ordinary soldier and comment on political events. He wrote a long letter to IL Popolo d’Italia in which he expressed his approval of the government collapse. This was because, in his view, ‘with the enemy at the door’ the resolution to the crisis could only be ‘an interventionistone’ which ‘reinforces and improves all of our political and military action’ (Mussolini’s emphases). But despite this reference to ‘political and military action’, the letter made no further mention of the military disaster or the responsibilities of the military hierarchy. Salandra was Mussolini’s fall guy, though it should be noted that this was only after he had fallen. Mussolini took the popular character of the May 1915 demonstrations and pitted it against the elitist cause of Salandra’s downfall: ‘He had to choose between Parliament and Country, between the discipline of persuasion and that of coercion . . . The people offered itself [in May 1915], but Salandra didn’t accept . . . All he had left was the Parliament, where his position was infinitely worse in a hostile and refractory environment’ (OO, VIII, 234-7).
This letter-article is proof that despite his silence Mussolini had been watching events closely and chose to move when the military crisis had attenuated and when his comment would ratify a blame which had already been apportioned. But the article is interesting for another reason. Mussolini advocated Bissolati as the new head of government. It was not to be. The 78-year-old Paolo Boselli, a moderate liberal interventionist, formed a government of national unity, which took office on 19 June. Bissolati was given a junior ministry with responsibilities for government relations with the High Command. In a letter to Bissolati dated 20 June, Mussolini suggested that the cause of military failures lay on the home front and that it was there that they had to be forcefully resolved. He saw in Bissolati a chance to end a policy which ‘by depressing the morale of the country wound up depressing the morale of the combatants, and instead of bringing victory nearer made it improbable or in any case far off’. He asked Bissolati to ensure that the nation be furnished with ‘the maximum material and moral war efficiency’. He argued that this would be best achieved ‘by limiting - with firmness and severity - the Germanizing not to mention insidious and dangerous peace mongering and by removing - without remission - all those who - out of conviction or inability - are not up to the task’ (OO, VIII, 304-5). In short, on account of the invasion Mussolini was increasingly becoming less open to the methods of persuasion vis- a-vis the internal enemy with which he had experimented during his 1915-16 winter convalescence. As with the Austrian air incursions over Milan in February, neither military nor political spheres were primarily censurable; real responsibility lay with the enemy within. At the height of the Austro-Hungarian offensive, the ‘fascists’ met in congress and drew similar conclusions.
In an unsigned article of 13 May 1916 dedicated to the upcoming national fasci congress to be held in Milan on 21-22 May, IL Popolo d’ltalia argued that the fasci were needed in order to accomplish ‘the most difficult’ task, namely, that of ‘paralyzing the daily attempts of neutralists to frighten the nation’. It affirmed fascism’s readiness ‘to go onto the streets and disperse the hordes of peace criers’. In his introductory address to the 21 May sitting of the congress, reproduced in IL Popolo d’ltalia the following day, Michele Bianchi remarked that, strictly speaking, the fasci should not exist, as once war was declared all dissent was to have disappeared. Since it had not, fascism had been forced to resurface. But that ‘fascism’ was a less temporary and ephemeral project than Bianchi was suggesting here is seen in the fact that instead of re-emerging to respond to a real threat of neutralism, the congress furnished the conditions for fascism’s existence by recreating the neutralist enemy as a mobilizing and self-mobilizing myth even when that enemy was most definitely quiescent (for which see Melograni, 1969: 241-51). While having little to go on as regards the invasion the congress nevertheless had sufficient information (as far as those present were concerned) with which to allot blame: ‘Neutralists’, it was claimed at the 21 May sitting, were ‘spreading false news’. But the false news about events and responsibilities was being spread by Cadorna’s bulletins and by the interventionist press, including IL Popolo d’ltalia, as we have seen. A certain Prof. Lomini, who spoke on behalf of the Turinfascio, referred to La Stampa as ‘a German paper’, when an examination of La Stampa reveals that unlike, say, Avanti! or IL Popolo d’Italia, it invariably went uncensored, and clearly, therefore, met with the approval of the military and government authorities. As for Giolitti, the real object of any attack on La Stampa, he had retreated from the political scene, and had nothing to say about this period in his memoirs (Giolitti, 1967: 334-5). At any rate, if Mussolini’s few comments in this period are anything to go by, proposals for physical confrontation with neutralists were viewed as not strictly relevant to the present at all. They represented, rather, a programme for post-war revenge against socialism. His already-mentioned innocuous 14 June critique of Salandra and his silence over the High Command’s responsibilities for leaving the Trentino undefended stood in sharp contrast to his references to ‘the Sudekumised official socialists’. (Albert Sudekum was a German socialist who had visited Italy between late August and early September 1914 as part of a German government propaganda campaign designed to convince Italian socialists that Germany was conducting a war of defence and that Italy should remain neutral. See Valiani, 1977: 45ff). Mussolini further referred to the Italian socialists as ‘Croats’ and ‘agents of the foreigner’ with whom ‘we will settle accounts after the war’. In a postcard of late June to some citizens from the Romagna he referred, indeed, to the ‘terrible day of reckoning’ on which ‘the Italian Austrians’ would get their comeuppance (OO, VIII: 305; Mussolini’s emphasis).
It is also noteworthy that despite the fact that the enemy was at the door neither Mussolini nor the fascist congress of May felt obliged to introduce a socio-economic and political content to the theme of popular mobilization. The congress was devoid of any social programme, barring Bianchi’s call on the bourgeoisie to be grateful to the proletariat after the war. The Strafexpedition did not, therefore, provide a basis for challenging the most recent expression of politically backed agrarian conservativism, namely the parliamentary debate of March 1916. Despite being what Antonio Papa describes as ‘disturbed and in a certain sense surprised’ when informed of the enormous price being paid by the peasant soldiers, the Parliament did not raise the slogan of land reform. The nationalist imperialist Luigi Federzoni took upon himself the ‘moral debt of the nation towards the combatants’, while Salandra assured the house rather generically (and hence with no concrete commitment whatsoever) that something should and would be done for the peasants (Papa, 1969: 6-8).
Archive documentation for this period reveals something of the social character of the movement behind the conservative, authoritarian and street confrontation strategy of the fascist congress. In a 3 April letter to the Ministry of the Interior, for example, the Prefect of Ferrara listed the professions of the men who had been chosen to form the leading committee of the local fascio. These included a schoolteacher, a technical institute teacher, a law student, an accountant, a lawyer with the title of Cavaliere (a bit like Sir), a railway clerk and a shopkeeper (ACS, A5G, b. 94, fasc. 211, s.fasc. 7). A 14 June letter from the Prefect of Genoa to the Ministry of the Interior reported that of the seventy people who attended a recent meeting the main ones to be noted were lawyers, schoolteachers or university lecturers, and an accountant (ACS, A5G, b. 99, fasc. 215, s.fasc. 9). While it is not clear from these documents whether these sections shared the Milan congress’ discussion of street violence (the Ferrara fascio reiterated support for Salandra and the Genoa meeting for Sonnino) it is nevertheless the case that, as we saw in Chapter 1, Ferrara was an area in which the middle and lower middle classes had long since struck up an anti-worker and anti-peasant alliance with landowners and the clergy. Bianchi, as we also saw in Chapter 1, was involved in the genesis of that coalition. The fasci therefore represented a conservative coalition of middle-class elements, who, while criticizing the State’s unwillingness to mobilize popular sentiment for the war, were themselves seeking to bolster State authority and reproduced existing socio-economic relations by redirecting responsibilities for failed mobilization and consequent military disaster onto a mythically aggrandized enemy within. To deal with this enemy in the wake of State frailty, fascists would go onto the streets after the war to confront ‘neutralists’ - identifiable almost exclusively with the socialists - on what Mussolini promised would be a ‘terrible day of reckoning’.