The agrarian problem is different from region to region and is of a grandiose complexity. Be careful of certain ready-made phrases!
Mussolini, IL fascismo nel 1921, 7 January 1921
So that hierarchs are not dead categories it is necessary for them to flow into a synthesis, make everything converge towards a single aim and have their own soul inserted into the collective soul. This means that the State must express itself in the most elect part of a given society and must be the guide of the lower classes.
Mussolini, Stato, anti-Stato e Fascismo, June 1922
If politics is the art of governing men, that is of orienting, utilizing, educating their passions, their egoism and their interests as part of more general aims which almost always transcend the individual life because projected into the future, if this is politics then there is no doubt that the fundamental element of this art is man.
Mussolini, Preludio al Principe di Machiavelli, 1924
In the silent coordination of all forces, under the guide of one man only, lies the perennial secret of every victory.
Mussolini, Elogio ai gregari, February 1925
In a vote of confidence taken on 25 October 1917 the Boselli government was defeated by 314 votes to 96. Strictly speaking, however, the Orlando government which took office at the end of the month was not the political progeny of Caporetto. The Boselli cabinet was already in its death throes amidst the heated atmosphere of Parliament, which had reopened on 16 October. The debate was still going on when the Austro-German invasion began, but, like the rest of the country, including the military command, neither the government nor the Parliament knew anything of the military situation. As for the origins of the Orlando cabinet, in some respects it was the expression of an attempt at national pacification following a spring and summer of popular anti-war activity on the one hand, and coup plotting on the other. So pressurized were the interventionists, and so reanimated were the socialists and Giolittians after their neutralist thesis had to all intents and purposes been proved right, that Bissolati’s nerves cracked. On 18 October he came out with his notorious phrase against the socialists: ‘To defend the backs of the army I’d even shoot you.’ For this utterance he risked being thrown out of government, and was only saved by, amongst other things, the intervention of the King (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 305ff).
While, therefore, the Orlando government was formulated during the height of the Caporetto crisis, it was very much born of the Turin insurrection, which had in fact dominated the parliamentary debate. The new cabinet’s very inception thus reflected a deep division between workers and the State over the character of the war, a difference which could not be assuaged by a government committed to remobilizing national resources in order to continue that same conflict. Recent research has corrected the erroneous view that the workers’ protest movement was purely economic in motivation (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 147-205). As regards the peasants, it is noteworthy that even Arrigo Serpieri’s paternalistic and socially conservative 1930 assessment of the rural classes at war does not conceal peasant disaffection, the word ‘hate’ coming out strongly in Serpieri’s reconstruction of the peasants’ wartime attitude towards employers, landlords and the State (Serpieri, 1930: 54-61). Paradoxically, calls for ‘Land to the peasants’, which had been raised after the February Revolution by Aurelio Drago, a parliamentarian close to Bissolati, did nothing to attenuate the growing bitterness. Drago’s proposals were undoubtedly demagogic (Papa, 1969: 20-25), but, as Serpieri argues, whether sincere or insincere the ‘Land to the peasants’ slogan penetrated the consciences of peasant soldiers and was further radicalized by the expectation of imminent peace that was widespread in 1917 (Serpieri, 1930: 83-91).
The Orlando government’s project of national reconciliation thus had a utopian ring to it, given that the cabinet came into being at the moment when the divisions in Italian society were reaching a new peak, not abating. Caporetto undid whatever unlikely chance Orlando had of engineering a sacred union. In a country such as Italy, where the manner in which the war was conducted created more lacerating social and political traumas than in other countries, divisions could only deepen following the invasion (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 43-145). The ‘hate’ that peasants felt for bourgeois landlords and property owners intensified, for example, during the October-November retreat from the invaded provinces of the Veneto. For various reasons, including proximity or otherwise to town centres, politically informed citizen misinformation about the gravity of the invasion, and the varying degrees of affective ties to the land, the majority of the approximately 300,000 inhabitants who escaped across the Piave was made up of local politicians, the middle classes and the agrarian landlords, while the 900,000 or so who remained behind were predominantly peasants (Corni, 1992: 7, 10-12). The latter were convinced that their masters had escaped the suffering that they were undergoing during the occupation, and were enraged in their equal conviction that the escapees would return after the war to reclaim the property they had abandoned (Serpieri, 1930: 91-3). What emerged during and after Caporetto was a mass popular transition from satisfaction with peace alone to a conviction that things could never be the same again, and that change was both necessary and inevitable. The defeat of the Italian Army therefore contributed to an intensification of pre-existing eschatological visions of the future to be ushered in after the armistice. This future might be in the form of a new socialist order, especially since the October Revolution in Russia had shown that the taking of power by workers and peasants was a real possibility. Alternatively, more retrogressive options were proposed by catholic fundamentalists who envisioned a peace based on the certainties offered by the more archaic values of order. Or again, pro-Wilson democratic interventionists presaged a world based on peace between the nations, class reconciliation and a renewal of the liberal institutions (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 369ff).
There was, however, another eschatological vision on offer. As hundreds of thousands of Italian men made their way towards the rear, and as the Bolsheviks took power in Russia, the Italian ruling class, and large sections of the middle classes, trembled. Not only might they be the object of mass wrath and revolution, but military defeat could mean a separate peace, and hence, as they saw it, national ignominy and shame. Thus right at the moment when anti-war sentiment was accelerating, pro-war currents accentuated their push for national remobilization to continue the war on to victory. And if revolutionaries had Lenin, if catholics had weeping statues, and if democrats had Wilson, the pro-war current, radicalized by the military defeat and by the national and international contexts in which it was set, also had its symbol for political and cultural mobilization - the enemy within (Labanca, 1997: 73-5). The lion was not going to lie down by the lamb.
Around the middle of December a fascio di difesa parlamentare was formed by 150 deputies and ninety senators. It was headed by nationalist imperialist figures such as Matteo Pantaleoni and the former priest Giovanni Preziosi, whose newspaper, La Vita italiana,became the fascio’s organ (De Felice, 1962: 503). The fascio emerged as a response to the 12 December vote which agreed to hold parliamentary sittings in secret sessions. The fascio deemed this to reflect the resurfacing power of neutralists who could now feel safe to speak their anti-war minds behind closed doors (Melograni, 1969: 426). Despite being a minority in the Parliament the fascio was a boisterous, aggressive and, it would appear, effective formation which created an intimidating atmosphere designed to unnerve socialist speakers and pressurize the government. On 16 December socialist deputy Filippo Turati urged his companion Anna Kuliscioff not to worry about his and his colleagues’ ‘skins’, but at the same time he noted that ‘the [anti-socialist] conspiracy, even though well known and exposed [as unfounded] every day by us, is worsening rather than abating’. A few days later he put his name down to speak, but then had second thoughts, since ‘after six or seven hours of this environment no good feeling can last for long; and, if I should now speak, I’d be the most miserable of orators’. He revealed on 21 December that the danger went beyond being shouted down in parliament: ‘We are now surrounded and followed all day and night by an escort of plain-clothes policemen.’ Following his speech of 22 December he remarked that ‘the whole right wing is on top of you like a herd of demons, each sentence is interrupted by cries and shouts . . . [all of which] takes away your voice, your energy . . . the possibility of following any type of logic and of remembering where it was you left off’ (Turati-Kuliscioff, 1977, IV, Tome 2: 791, 803, 811, 812).
The psychological pressure was also felt by the ostensibly conciliating Orlando. In his speech of 22 December, published in the press the following day, he announced that he was not prepared to enter into discussions regarding the responsibilities for the military rout. He deplored generalized attacks on Swiss subjects and on the catholic clergy, but was rather less opposed to generalizations when it came to the PSI. He argued that ‘authoritative socialists have affirmed that the cause of the defeat was the party itself’. When socialists protested, he retorted that this showed how they ‘cannot be considered members of a political party, just affiliates of a criminal association’. It was during Orlando’s premiership, indeed, that repressive measures were taken against PSI leaders: Lazzari and vice-secretary Nicola Bombacci were arrested in mid-January 1918, and in February were given thirty-five and twenty-six month prison sentences respectively, not to mention heavy fines (Melograni, 1969: 444-5).
But of greater significance is the self-remobilization of right-wing forces which occurred in society in the same period. Giovanna Procacci has identified these as the lettered and professional middle classes who in the months after Caporetto rediscovered their social raison d’etre in patriotic sentiment and actions. State functionaries, clerks and pensioners were joined by doctors, engineers, architects and lawyers in a generalized attempt to remedy the effects of a deeply felt responsibility (due to a previous neglect and apathy) for what had happened on the high Isonzo. At one level this took the form of seeking succour in membership of the many private associations and patriotic bodies which sprang up all over Italy after Caporetto. Messages of solidarity and loyalty were accompanied by concrete acts of aid to refugees and the war needy. But the nature of the Caporetto disaster influenced the character of this mobilization in another direction. A profound sense of impotence and anguish combined with group solidarity and identity to cement a sense of belonging which was defined not only in terms of those who formed part of the group, but over against those who did not. This psychological condition became manifest in collective myths which sought to explain the disaster of Caporetto in extraordinary and almost supernatural terms. In an irrational overresponse based on a ‘betrayal of reason’ and a ‘hysteria of hate’, the newly mobilized middle classes vented the rage of their rediscovered pride on the ‘internal enemies’ whose acts of sabotage had, in their schema, led to Caporetto and to the subsequent threat to national identity and culture represented by the invader. So fanatically fired up were they that their activities included spying on neighbours and fellow travellers on buses and trains and reporting presumed treachery to the authorities (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 317-50). It was in this Italy, as polarized in society as it was in the realm of cultural representations, that Mussolini, a journalist veteran of the July days in Russia, the revolt in Turin, two enemy invasions and any number of failed military endeavours, offered his unique response.