On 31 October 1917 Mussolini argued that if anything ‘positive’ had come out of Caporetto and the invasion of a sizeable portion of national territory it was that Italian socialism had been shown up as ‘a localized state of mind of determined groups’ which was not yet ‘a general tendency of the masses’. Indeed, he felt that the invasion had begun to undermine support for the PSI. This was proven by the fact that workers now understood that ‘the proletariat is in the Nation, not outside it’ (OO, X: 8-10). On 4 November he returned to this theme, arguing that the defeatists’ work ‘of corruption and moral demolition, prosecuted tenaciously for thirty months’ had not penetrated ‘the heart of the masses’ and had not managed ‘to halt the generous yearnings of the proletarian soul’ (OO, X: 23-5). He urged the government to inaugurate a ‘war policy’ and argued that refusal to do this out of fear of a socialist reaction was ‘shortsighted’, since ‘the industrial proletariat has turned its back on the PSI’ (OO, X: 73-4). Yet despite this presumed decline in the PSI’s prestige among workers, Mussolini asserted that ‘official Italian socialism . . . must be treated as a more dangerous enemy than the one pitched on the left bank of the Piave’. He asked if Orlando intended to tolerate the weakening of the nation’s morale, and finished by declaring that ‘we demand reaction. Perfectly [censorship]. We demand “reaction” against the few [censorship] to save the “liberty” of 36 million Italians’ (OO, X: 80-82). On 24 December he referred to Claudio Treves as ‘the parliamentarian of Caporetto’ (OO, X: 164-5). This was because in a speech of 12 July 1917 Treves had declared: ‘Next winter no more trenches’ (Treves, 1983: 107). On Christmas Day Mussolini wrote that ‘our army, which . . . has rediscovered its warlike spirit, must be protected in the rear from the underhanded and criminal blows of the Italian Lenins. Caporetto must not happen again’ (OO, X: 166-8).
We shall return to the socialists and the working class presently. For the moment, it is worth noting that on 7 December Mussolini gave greater theoretical vent to his view on the internal enemy, which was not limited to socialists. He suggested that the people living on Italian soil were divisible into two categories: ‘Italians and foreigners/enemies.’ The enemies, however, could be ‘Italians or Germans’ all of whom ‘circulate freely in our cities, wallowing in our momentary disasters, undermining our resistance with every type of manoeuvre, and sanguineously insulting us with their very presence’ (OO, X: 121-3). In the days and weeks after Caporetto Mussolini spilt quite a bit of ink over enemy subjects on Italian soil. In so doing he resorted to a cultural and political remobilization of a kind not envisaged earlier in 1917 as part of his response to the February Revolution in Russia. On 22 December 1917 he wrote:
So that Italy is Italy, so that Italians become Italians, so that, in short, it is possible to be ourselves, and not only in terms of laughable political indulgence but in terms of the more substantial aspects of economic and spiritual autonomy, we must impress an anti- German character on our war, a character of liberation from Germanism which, in its different forms - from the universities to the workshops, from the banks to the docks - had reduced us to one of its commodities. The anti-German ‘military’ war must be completed within. The arrest of enemy subjects, the confiscation of their goods are some of the forms of this war. (OO, X: 158-60)
He returned to this question on various occasions. On 2 November, for example, he argued that ‘throughout the whole of Italy subjects of enemy states roam freely, spying and carrying out highly dangerous work of moral sabotage’ (OO, X: 17). At the beginning of December he asked: ‘Has or hasn’t the government made a decision to move against enemy subjects? The increased surveillance which has been announced from the official agencies is insufficient. It is the presence of these gentlemen, the simple fact of their presence, as innocuous as you like (which is highly unlikely and in many cases to be excluded), which strikes and offends Italian citizens’ (OO, X: 105-6).
The converse of the enemy subject is evidenced in the same article. It is to be identified with the Italian refugees from the invaded regions of Friuli and Veneto. On 28 November, indeed, Mussolini called on Italians to ‘love the refugees’. The latter functioned to galvanize national fraternal sentiment: ‘The enemy invasion must make [this warm air of love] more delicate and deep, it must tighten even more the link between the people from the Alps to Sicily, today united in common pain and in the common prospect of fighting and winning’ (OO, X: 89-91). In the 2 December piece he asked: ‘Isn’t it inhuman to ask refugees from Friuli to sleep on straw in the depths of winter?’ He proposed to ‘requisition the apartments of Germans, strongly disinfect them and give them to the refugees of our invaded lands’ (OO, X: 105-6). He inserted this particular enemy category into his call for a conflation of all areas of the national territory into a ‘war zone’. What this implied was made clear on 8 December when he wrote:
The ‘war zone’ must be an oxygenated zone, where the atmosphere must not be polluted by the presence of Germans, be they male or female, large or small, adults or children. And because many of them wear the comfortable mask of Italian naturalization [censorship] put on at the eve of the war or later, it is necessary to ‘review’ these naturalizations and adopt radical provisions against these ‘naturalized’ people without distinctions of any sort, since ‘naturalization’ only makes them more dangerous still. In short, in Milan alone these phoney naturalized enemy subjects [censorship] exceed perhaps a thousand people. A good strong sweep of a brush is what is needed for this enemy ballast. And please do not begin, in the name of heavens, to cite exceptions, to listen to recommendations, even if coming from parliamentarians or senators, to adopt a new ‘take it case by case’ in order to establish the greater or lesser levels of enemy subject innocuousness. It is a singular principal canon of war that in all ways and in all forms the enemy must be damaged. The enemy subjects which remain here among us - with relative authorizations from German or Austrian authorities - are belligerents. They don’t fight with guns, but they use other arms to help Germany. Forbearing, indulgence and humanity towards them is as stupid as it is criminal. We await daily the arrival of this high, true, deep and no longer deferrable operation of ‘urban cleansing’. (OO, X: 124-6)
Mussolini’s argument culminated in 1918 with a call to intern enemy nationals in concentration camps (OO, X: 191-3, 199-201, 210-11, 252-4; XI: 214-16, 217-19, 253-4, 306-8).
Two observations are appropriate here. First, in order to sustain his view on the supposedly new-found patriotism of the working class Mussolini had to put the best gloss on anti-worker repression. Workers certainly undersigned patriotic initiatives in the period after Caporetto, but these were organized by pro-war employers who in turn had the backing of the most severe legislation ‘against defeatism’. The latter, the so-called Sacchi decree, had been issued on 4 October 1917 by the Boselli government. Anyone caught in the act of ‘depressing the public spirit’ by even the most innocuous of previously acceptable utterances was liable to prosecution (Melograni, 1969: 444). Hence on pain of months or even years of imprisonment, workers were blackmailed into signing declarations, contributing to the national loan, and not uttering even the most inoffensive of antinational phrases. Despite these pro-war attestations, workers for the most part remained untouched by Italian patriotism. Their positive response to calls to aid refugees from the invaded regions should be seen as action informed by humanitarian values (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 338-9). Secondly, and as we have seen, in the days after the unleashing of the Austro-German offensive Mussolini, like everyone else on the home front, did not actually know what was going on and even demanded that the government provide an explanation. Yet despite his professed lack of knowledge, he identified Italian socialists and enemy nationals on Italian territory as the cause of the defeat. Hence notwithstanding his difference with Cadorna over the alleged responsibility of the soldiers, he agreed with the latter who, like frustrated commanders in other countries, raised the spectre of a ‘stab in the back’. In a telegram to Boselli on 27 October 1917, Cadorna had in fact affirmed that ‘the army falls not under the blows of the external enemy, but of the internal enemy’(quoted in Melograni, 1969: 397-8).
Not surprisingly, therefore, Mussolini quickly aligned with other forces who had reached identical conclusions. On 18 December he wrote an article in praise of the fascio parlamentare. The framework in which this acclamation unfolded was once again that of a ‘war culture’ polarization which left no room for grey areas: ‘In short’, he wrote, ‘there is a new fact which determines a new situation. “Parliamentary union” on the one side, “Fascio di difesa nazionale” on the other.’ Mussolini saw the fascio as a response to the false ‘semi-national, a-national or anti-national’ unity of ‘those who wish for, or prepare, a peace of betrayal and shame’. The government would now have to choose between ‘the patriots’ and ‘the defeatists’. Orlando could not think of arbitrating between the two, since the die had finally been cast: ‘He must base himself on the “fascists” and above all seek the . . . aid of the Nation . . . A bit of energy on the part of the “fascists”; a bit of energy on the part of the Government, and overt defeatism will be reduced to silence and innocuousness’ (OO, X: 146-8; Mussolini’s emphasis). Did Mussolini’s construction of a polarized world of national and anti-national ins and outs represent a temporary attempt at cultural remobilization in response to the crisis of Caporetto with the sole aim of securing victory? Or was Caporetto a catalyst for testing out proposals for a continuous state of cultural mobilization, of permanent ‘war culture’, as a model and vision for the post-war future?