Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership in a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism, besides being a system of government, is also, and above all, a system of thought . . . Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people . . . Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes) . . . For Fascism, the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality, and its opposite a sign of decadence . . . But empire demands discipline, the coordination of all forces and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice: this fact explains many aspects of the practical working of the regime, the character of many forces in the State, and the necessarily severe measures which must be taken against those who would oppose the spontaneous and inevitable movement of Italy in the twentieth century.
Mussolini, Dottrina del fascismo, 1932
In 1925 Giovanni Gentile, philosopher, former Minister for Education, and fascist ideologue, argued that fascism had emerged as the expression of a search for a renewal of Italian political and spiritual life. He contrasted this project with the failure of the liberal State to realize the nation-building project of the small group of idealists who had led the struggle to unite Italy. Recalling the religious-style language of ‘sacrifice’ and national ‘mission’ of Giuseppe Mazzini’s Young Italy movement, Gentile went on to aver that this was directly comparable to the youthful ideals, romanticism and heroism of the fascist squads. These in turn were wearing black shirts reminiscent of the elitist arditi founded as special shock troop units during the Great War. The actions of these men were thus informed by reference to the memory of the experience of that conflict, now mythologized as the great founding event of fascism but nonetheless rooted, via Mazzini, in the very origins of Italian unity (G. Gentile, 1975).
How justified were these fascist claims to Italy’s past? In his analysis of the means by which the regime sought consensus and consolidation through a cosmos of cultural representations, Pier Giorgio Zunino argues that the themes of the Great War and Mazzini were components of a discourse to which fascism itself was essentially extraneous. But Zunino also concedes that while fascism sometimes stretched the heritage of Mazzini to suit itself, many aspects of that tradition, such as the nation seen as an organic whole, were ‘anything but outlandish’ in their applicability to the regime (Zunino, 1985: 90, 99-107). Might it not also be true, therefore, that fascism’s claim to the cultural legacy of the Great War - codified in the subcategories of Intervention, Victory and the Cult of the Fallen Soldier (E. Gentile, 1993) - was not altogether unfounded? It is with this and related issues - in particular the historical question concerning the role played by the Great War in the transition from the liberal to the fascist State (Procacci, Giu., 1966; Rochat, 1976: 82-6; Vivarelli, 1981; 1995; Fava, 1982; Procacci, Gv., 1989), and the crucial problem of ‘continuity’ and ‘fracture’ between the liberal and fascist periods in general (E. Gentile, 1986: 195ff) - that the present study will engage.
The approach adopted follows those which seek to reassess the significance of the First World War from the point of view of political and cultural mobilization. By this is meant both a commitment to political action and the means for translating this commitment into action. Symbols and cultural representations are called upon in order to communicate the values and goals of the mobilization to those who are to be mobilized into achieving them. Since this involves specific groups, classes or even entire societies, political and cultural mobilization entails a social interaction in which roles may be crystallized, and structures and collectivities altered. While, therefore, mobilization, as thus defined, is generally articulated through ruling structures, it is also a social, political and cultural process in which the authority of political organizations, and perhaps even the State, is reconfirmed and reinforced, or contested and undermined (Nettl, 1967: 32-3 and Ch. 5, esp. p. 143). However, political and cultural mobilization is not necessarily effected through State organizations and structures. In countries such as Britain, France and Germany, the outbreak of war in 1914 saw significant levels of what has been termed political and cultural ‘self-mobilization’ on the part of broad sectors of the population, including intellectuals, artists, school teachers, workers’ organizations and ethnic minority groups (Horne, 1997: esp. Introduction and Parts. 1 and 2). The degree to which this ‘self-mobilization’ was effective in any given country depended, naturally, on the character of political and cultural development in the period preceding the outbreak of the war. The decades prior to the conflict had seen the ruling classes of the above-mentioned countries involved in the veritable invention of traditions which sought to bind the population to the nation and national institutions. This enterprise formed part of a practical response to the failures of empiricism and rationalism to provide theories of social cohesion in the wake of industrialization and mass involvement in political activity (Hobsbawm, 1983).
As is now well known, Italian intervention into the Great War in May 1915 was marked by sharp divisions between the minority of Italians who wanted the war and the vast majority of the population, especially (but not only) the working population, which did not. For its part, the State, controlled as it was by anti-popular conservative elites, deemed mass political mobilization to be both unnecessary and dangerous (Corner and Procacci, 1997). ‘Self-mobilization’ in Italy was, therefore, always going to be something of a subversive phenomenon. In his analysis of the Italian primary school system between 1915 and 1918, Andrea Fava deals with the implications arising from the fact that the mobilization of national values through the schools to a large extent fell on the teachers themselves. He reaches the conclusion that while, during the war, the teachers were to a considerable extent victims of what he calls a ‘false consciousness’ concerning the level of autonomy they believed they exercised with respect to the State, their crucial role in the process of cultural mobilization nonetheless laid the basis for a delegitimation of the ruling elites. This was accompanied by a rejection of the pre-war optimistic positivism of the governing class associated with the name of the moderate liberal Giovanni Giolitti. Fascist education was one possible alternative to this cleavage, as it provided a nationalistic response both to the unwillingness of liberal conservative elitism to mobilize popular sentiment, and to the socio-political evolutionism and universalist humanitarianism of Giolitti who, it was believed, had failed to forge a national consciousness and had left Italy unprepared to conduct a national war (Fava, 1997).
This approach provides methodological keys for the present book. Fava does not begin from war’s end in order to investigate the manner in which the conflict was retrospectively reflected upon, but examines the ways in which meaning was produced during the conflagration. It is also noteworthy that while Fava is concerned with the social production of beliefs and values through symbol and signification, he takes the issue beyond sociological observation and description and stresses an epistemological approach. This seeks to establish how conflicts in the realm of signification, including the role of ‘false consciousness’, come to bear on the legitimation or delegitimation of the political authority of the State. The present book can therefore be defined as a study in political legitimacy as expressed in and through the process of political and cultural mobilization within the war. It will attempt to identify the social and political character of a ‘self-mobilization’ which sought to bridge the cultural and political cleft between State and society, and will assess the extent to which that response helped generate fascism.
Before coming to a discussion of the main subject of the book, it is necessary to define four key terms: fascism, State, imperialism and ideology. Only the meanings used in this book are explained here, since a justification of the terms would take us into enormous and contentious debates on political theory. The general definition of ‘fascism’ informing this study will be the one outlined by Mussolini in his Dottrina del fascismo in 1932, some key quotations from which have been presented at the beginning of this Introduction (Oakeshott, 1972; Kreis, 2003). We can add to this the further theorization of fascism elucidated by Leon Trotsky in the 1930s. Fascism, in this view, is a seizure of political power in order to alter the conditions of capitalist production in favour of the ruling classes in a period of systemic crisis. This type of power is, however, unachievable by a normal military or police dictatorship. Fascism emerges as a movement which adopts methods of physical confrontation to terrorize and crush workers’ organizations. It is in terms of the social character of this movement that fascism is best understood, since it is not readily identifiable with the capitalist interests that it represents. Fascism derives its numbers primarily from the lower middle classes who have been hit by the profound economic crisis and who are psychologically mobilized through resentment, nationalism, crusades against real or perceived internal enemies, and quite often anti-capitalist phraseology. Once power has been consolidated and opposition crushed, fascism’s historical mission is to reorganize society militarily, industrially and psychologically in preparation for imperialist war (Trotsky, 1971).
For the purposes of the present study the term ‘State’ will be used to distinguish the political formation and the repressive and legal apparatuses (army, police, bureaucracy, courts etc.) from society both before and during the war. As thus defined, State will appear throughout the book with a capital S, whereas ‘state’ defined as the totality of social, economic and political relations within a given territory will appear with a small s and will apply to such phenomena as the endeavours of the southern Slavs to form a state. We can add to this one further analytical specification, given that along with the above-mentioned restructuring of power the fascist State would develop new forms of authority and political mobilization. While, to be sure, fascism’s historical function was one of violence, terror, repression and war, it also sought consent through language, gesture and symbol. Fascism attempted to dissolve society into the State, or, in short, to edify a totalitarian State. Following the overthrow of the pre-existing political regime and the installation of a system of terror to safeguard the new State against the ‘enemy within’, the politics of the totalitarian party and State are, to use Emilio Gentile’s definition, based on the idea that ‘the meanings and purpose of human life are expressed in myths and values that constitute a secular religion whose aim is to make the individual and the masses one’. The totalitarian State ‘aims to bring about an anthropological revolution that will create a new type of human being, totally dedicated to achieving the political aims of the totalitarian party’ (E. Gentile, 2002: 143). Gentile perhaps overstresses the symbolic dimension to the issue. Indeed, his study on the fascist system of political religion tends to divorce the analysis of the relative symbols from their social significance, thus allowing the realm of cultural representation to become too free-floating and self-referential (E. Gentile, 1993). The same can arguably be said, to give one further example, of George Mosse’s trailblazing study on the Myth of the Fallen Soldier in modern European history (Mosse, 1990). At any rate, while for the present study we have defined State as distinct from society, we also need to assess the degree to which the process of political and cultural mobilization in the Great War revealed elements of their envisaged conflation, and to analyze the social and political character of the symbols called upon in this process.
The term ‘imperialism’ will be used to define the essence of the era under examination. It expresses the nature of the world economy as dominated not by laissez faire liberalism but by giant monopolies and multinational corporations based in a small number of economically powerful countries. The process of concentration, which began around the 1870s, witnessed a transformation in the role of the banks and their increasing intermeshing with major industrial firms. By imperialism, then, is meant the growing fusion of banks with industry and the dominating effects of this on the life of nations and continents. However, since different economic powers had different spheres of influence and interest, imperialism did not stop at the phase of ‘competition’ between finance capitals but went on to create the conditions for military conflict between states, and this defines the character of the 1914-18 war (Lenin, 1974; Etherington, 1984). The way imperialism, thus defined, developed in Italy in the decade leading up to the First World War has been documented by Robert Webster (1975).
Finally, since we are dealing with the role of cultural representations in the transition from one form of political rule to another, it becomes crucial to isolate the conjuncture between power and representations or, in a word, ideology. From here on ideology will mean the point at which issues related to the production and reproduction of dominant social and political relations have imposed themselves upon language and cultural representations, and where the latter ‘spontaneously’ readjust their meaning to conform to the power-reproduction process (Eagleton, 1991).
The aim of this book is not so much to offer a new interpretation of fascism as to contribute to a better understanding of the circumstances of its origins. To this end it will attempt to answer its broader questions through an analysis of the writings and speeches of Benito Mussolini between July 1914 and June 1919. Much ink has been spilt over Mussolini’s political career and personality, but there has been no in-depth and critical study of his activities in the First World War. The early biographical endeavours of Emilio Settimelli (1922), Antonio Beltramelli (1923) and Giuseppe Prezzolini (1925) are not historical biographies at all, but hagiographies which focus mainly on Mussolini’s physical features, on the influences of family and childhood environment, and on explaining away his changes of mind, with particular reference to his break with socialism in October to November 1914. Also in this category is Margherita Sarfatti’s Dux, which dedicates over thirty pages to the war, replete with Mussolini quotations which, however, unfold in an unexplained and in any case clearly uncritical framework (Sarfatti, 1926: 162-92). Guido Dorso’s Benito Mussolini alla conquista del potere is a more interesting and fast-moving account which nevertheless remains substantially descriptive and far from exhaustive in the material it examines (Dorso, 1949: 127-72). In 1950 Paolo Monelli gave a brief analysis of Mussolini in the war, though not with a view to understanding the possible origins of fascism. Rather, he was concerned to ridicule ‘Mussolini the petty bourgeois’ as a shirker and contradictory hypocrite (Monelli, 1950: 83-5). Much more detailed and documented on Mussolini in the First World War is the first of Giorgio Pini and Duilio Susmel’s four biographical volumes. Unfortunately, this work’s formally scholarly bent does not conceal the fact that it is a descriptive narrative as uncritical as it is hero-worshipping (Pini and Susmel, 1953, I: Chs 10-11). Christopher Hibbert’s 1962 biography refers to Mussolini’s position in relation to Italian intervention in terms of ‘the seed of Fascism [being] sown’. But this tantalizing statement is dissipated by the end of the first paragraph of the following page when Mussolini is already out of the war (Hibbert, 1962: 39-40).
More informative, because based also on documentary material from the Italian State archives opened in the 1960s, is the first volume of Renzo De Felice’s biography. This gives an account of Mussolini’s ‘conversion’ to the cause of the war and touches on his activity in the rest of the period of Italian neutrality between August 1914 and May 1915 (De Felice, 1965: Chs 9-10). However, it is not altogether clear who De Felice’s Mussolini is, since no sooner does the author make a statement than he goes on to affirm its contrary. De Felice’s interpretation of Mussolini and fascism in 1919 as left-wing and revolutionary (Ch. 12) - a characterization which he would go on to apply to Italian fascism as a historical phenomenon (De Felice, 1975) - appears to be more a point of departure than arrival, and as such must perforce colour De Felice’s assessment of Mussolini in the period 1914-15 and thereafter up to 1919. De Felice argues that Mussolini’s right-wing nationalist involution began after Italy’s military defeat at Caporetto in October-November 1917 (1965: Ch. 11), a position which is difficult to reconcile with his left-wing and revolutionary interpretation of Mussolini and fascism in 1919. More puzzling still is the fact that De Felice skips over Mussolini’s experience at the front between September 1915 and February 1917. He notes that a war diary existed without giving one quotation from it or discussing what it might mean in terms of Mussolini’s political evolution in historical context (De Felice, 1965: 322-3). For this period, De Felice refers readers to Pini and Susmel’s biography: an invitation to accept as good coin what is effectively a fascist hagiography. This scholarly abdication deprives us of De Felice’s insights into Mussolini’s political evolution before late 1917. His theory concerning Mussolini’s repositioning in 1917-18 thus loses force, since it remains unsubstantiated with reference to what went before, including Mussolini’s stance on the February Revolution in Russia. Granted, during the war Mussolini wrote virtually nothing about the October Revolution, but, as we shall see in Chapter 6, he was prolific on Russia between March and November 1917. That the entire De Felicean proposal rests on tenuous presuppositions was shown by Roberto Vivarelli, who while ultimately accepting De Felice’s thesis concerning Mussolini’s post-Caporetto political redefinition nonetheless argued in 1967 that Mussolini was drawing upon nationalistic terminology long before 1917 (Vivarelli, 1991, I: Ch. 3).
Emilio Gentile’s painstaking 1975 investigation into the origins of fascist ideology is not dedicated wholly to Mussolini; though to be sure the political formation and ideas of the duce are central to it. While Gentile has tended to reproduce De Felice’s notions according to which scholars who disagree with his (De Felice’s) findings and method are dogmatists who allow politics to interfere with their analyses, whereas those who accept them are blessed with the ‘intellectual courage’ and ‘cultural open-mindedness’ of the ‘new historiography’ (E. Gentile, 1986: 182; 2003a; O’Brien, 2004), in his 1975 book and in later efforts (E. Gentile, 2002; 2003b), Gentile would go on to reassess significant elements of the De Felicean interpretation of fascism. In particular, this involves the latter’s reluctance to define the regime as totalitarian (De Felice, 1968: 9; 1975: 108) or to at most concede that it was a ‘left-wing totalitarianism’ (De Felice, 1975: 105). Gentile’s 1975 book nevertheless borrows heavily from the De Felicean methodological framework, particularly at the point where it argues in favour of Mussolini’s post-Caporetto shift away from socialism and where it theorizes fascism in early 1919 as an ideologically undefined urban phenomenon. It therefore sees Mussolini’s right-wing turn as having begun after Caporetto and having reached full fruition only after the war, more specifically in the early 1920s when the arrival of huge quantities of new (overtly reactionary) members meant that fascism was forced to redefine its programme (E. Gentile, 1975 : 40-41, Ch. 4). Hence Gentile’s book does not go into any significant detail about Mussolini’s war experience, and in fact is dated from 1918 onwards. His more recent studies on fascism as political religion (1993) and on the pre- and post-war radical vision of the authoritarian myth of the new State (1999) likewise leave out any systematic treatment of the war.
A. James Gregor’s 1979 study on the intellectual life of the young Mussolini was hatched in order to throw further light on what in a 1974 book Gregor had argued to be the ‘progressive revolutionary’ nature of fascism due to its focus on industrialization. But the American scholar’s dependence on abstract sociological typologies is taken to extremes. Not only does he not apply his heuristic model to concrete social relations, but he rather disparagingly dismisses attempts to understand fascism in social, class-struggle and politico-strategic terms (Gregor, 1974: esp. Ch. 5). Yet Gregor’s approach leaves him quoting uncritically from Mussolini’s writings. The latter’s political and military activities during the First World War, touched upon only briefly (Gregor 1979: 205-7), are set within the ‘historically progressive’, i.e. ‘bourgeois industrial’ (in the abstract) categories which Gregor applies to his quotations from Mussolini and, from there, to his interpretation of fascism in general.
Mario Isnenghi’s all too brief 1985 analysis of Mussolini’s 1915-17 war diary approaches the entries as a composite text rather than as a document which responded to the unfolding war. His conclusions, such as that already at that stage Mussolini was behaving like ‘the duce among his people’ or that he ‘brings the world of the officers to the men’, are insightful but remain disconnected from the subject’s broader wartime activity, and we are therefore not told what they imply (Isnenghi, 1985). Luisa Passerini’s treatment of the construction of the Mussolini myth opens with a series of quotes from Mussolini’s war diary and examines the ancient-mythological manner in which his injury of February 1917 was treated by his supporters (descent into the underworld to then re-emerge). But she effectively leaves the diary quotes without comment in relation to the unfolding war, and therefore does not fully enter into the otherwise enticing title to this section, namely ‘Death and resurrection’ (Passerini, 1991: 15-32). Aurelio Lepre’s reconstruction of Mussolini between myth and reality furnishes quotes from the war diary, but not as part of a detailed examination of that text or of Mussolini’s war experience in general. Lepre does, however, concisely observe that from an early point in the war Mussolini had adopted a Manichean perspective - a universe divided into black and white, good and bad, ins and outs, those with us and those against us (Lepre, 1995: 67-73). Finally, the most up-to-date biography, by Richard Bosworth, makes no critical reassessment of the war texts of Mussolini that it cites, and interprets the material as being of no meaningful ideological significance (Bosworth 2002: 114-21).
Drawing upon sociological, anthropological, cultural and literary theory, the present book conducts a contextualized exegesis of Mussolini’s writings and speeches between July 1914 and June 1919. The two main sources of the book are Mussolini’s newspaper, ILPopolo d’ltalia, and his war diary, all of which is published material. Central State Archive documents are also referred to, as is the official diary of Mussolini’s regiment. These unpublished documents nevertheless remain secondary to the far greater quantity of published articles and diary entries whose importance is underscored by their contemporary diffusion and socio-political influence. An exception is represented by Mussolini’s military and health records for 1917, which, however, formed the basis of a previous publication by the author (O’Brien, 2002a; 2003) discussed briefly at the end of Chapter 5. The underlying proposition of this book is that Mussolini textually reinvented himself through the experience of the war in a way that reveals the nidus of fascism, fascist ideology and the system of cultural representations - including Mazzini, Intervention, Victory and the Fallen Soldier - later adopted in the consolidation of the regime. Rejecting dismissals of Mussolini as an empty rhetorician incapable of anything metaphysical or logical (Eco, 1994: xii), the book explores what marked Mussolini out from even the most similar of political militants and how this distinction formed the basis of fascist power.