An article of 23 May 1918 points to the first possibility. In it Mussolini argued that ‘we have never demanded dictatorship under the species of eternity, we have never invoked dictatorship as a permanent political regime, we have only ever invoked it as a necessary exceptional regime for the exceptional period which is the war’ (OO, XI: 88-90). But as Procacci notes, the social projection of a world in which conspirators and plotters are on the rampage often contains within itself a counterproposition for a new type of social order. It is in an imagined future society underpinned by ‘a new hierarchy of values’ and ‘purified of corrupting agents’ that the generators of the present myth rediscover the identity and security which they have lost in the here and now (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 367). Other of Mussolini’s pieces suggest that his intensified ‘war culture’ in 1917 and 1918 formed the basis of one such palingenesis. As regards enemy subjects on Italian soil, for example, he insisted on 25 August 1918 that the State’s commandeering of their property should not be a temporary affair and that it was unthinkable that ‘once the war is over the Germans can come back again - assuming they left in the first place - and, in their factories, in their villas and in their companies, recommence the work interrupted in May 1915’ (OO, XI: 306-8). This internal subject had as its external corollary the continued exclusion of Germany from a future international political formation. Indeed, one of the reasons for Mussolini’s scepticism about the formation of the League of Nations was that in his view it could not possibly exist, since Germany and its allies would perforce have to be excluded (OO, XI: 175-8, 179-81, 182-6). But it should be noted that Mussolini’s aversion to the League of Nations also reflected Italy’s weak position in relation to its allies in the conflict over territorial issues. His article of 13 January 1918 insisted on Italy’s rights to territorial expansion over against suggestions that the League would do away with the need for petty squabbling over who owned this or that sector of a frontier (OO, X: 227-9). The demonization of Germany and of German subjects on Italian soil was, therefore, bound up with a more general suspicion that the post-war international order would be marked by any number of objections to Italy’s territorial ambitions on the part of an increasing number of rivals in the present.
On 29 October 1917 Mussolini called on all Italians to put aside their political discords and form a national pact to face the crisis: ‘What matter our doctrinal differences? . . . Today Italy is on the line, the Italy of today and tomorrow.’ Here, despite the apparently non-prejudicial form (everybody was to leave aside their previously held beliefs), Mussolini called on all political persuasions to base themselves on the nation. Moreover, this proposed national alliance appears to have been informed by deep-rooted strategically nationalist considerations. On 2 November Mussolini presented the nation in biological terms, as an ‘organism’, as ‘physical flesh’ which had been ‘torn’ and upon which had been inflicted ‘the most ferocious torture’ (OO, X: 14-16). In a speech of 30 November he argued that ‘man cannot ignore the Nation like a tree cannot ignore the soil that feeds it . . . To deny the Nation means to deny one’s mother, especially when the Nation is passing through a critical hour’ (OO, X: 98-101). The nation also had a militarily social content both in the present and the future. In the here and now ‘the Nation must be the army, just as the army is the Nation’ (OO, IX: 307-9). On 9 November Mussolini demanded: ‘the whole Nation must be militarized (OO, X: 36-8; Mussolini’s emphasis). As regards the future, right in the days when the fascio di difesa nazionale was forming Mussolini had argued for a post-war society based on what he termed the ‘trenchocracy’ which, as he saw it, was being forged at the front. As we saw in Chapter 5, Mussolini had developed this concept in late 1916 and in his war diary had pinpointed the junior officers as the elites in question. Now, a year later, he suggested that this ‘trenchocracy’ would be altogether different from previous social phenomena given expression in a political label: ‘The words republic, democracy, radicalism, liberalism, “socialism” itself, have no more sense: they may have one tomorrow, but it will be that given to them by the millions of “returnees”. And it may be a completely different definition.’ When exemplifying, however, he chose only to redefine socialism which ‘might be an anti-Marxist and national socialism, for example. The millions of workers who will return to the furrows of the fields will, after being in the furrows of the trenches, realise the synthesis of the antithesis: class and nation’ (OO, X: 140-42).
What, in terms of social organization, was meant by ‘national socialism’? When dealing in 1918 with the post-war society Mussolini betrayed something of an obsession with the working class. He feared what he saw as its potentially destructive power and was concerned to redirect it onto the safe terrain of the nation. Moreover he furnished evidence for the submission of sectors of the industrial proletariat to this vision. On 23 April 1918 pro-war workers in Genoa were described as ‘authentic workers’ in as much as ‘they plant themselves solidly on the national terrain’ (OO, XI: 21-2). And on 12 May he showed that anti-Germanism could still provide a useful culturally mobilizing tool in the post-war period. He conflated the Italian working class’ interests with those of Italian businessmen in an alliance of mutual interest against German capitalism. He praised those national syndicalist workers and formerly ‘revolutionary socialists’ who ‘concern themselves . . . with the destiny of industries after the war’, since it would be ‘an unforgivable crime - above all from the working class’ point of view - to strike to death the marvellous Italian industrial creation which, in time of peace, must frustrate every possible new attempt at penetration and German hegemony’ (OO, XI: 54-6). But for Mussolini, not even pro-war workers ought to dabble in politics. Writing on 12 June he argued that the syndicalism he had in mind for the future was best expressed by the UIL precisely because of that organization’s ‘a-political nature’. While declaring its adhesion to the war, the UIL ‘does not wave the interventionist flag’, as interventionism ‘is an essentially political phenomenon’. Rather, ‘it is important that [workers] do what they are doing: their duty.’ Discipline ‘must be accepted’ and where necessary, ‘imposed’ (OO, XI: 117-19). This ‘duty’ was best expressed when workers ‘work in silence’ (OO, XI: 128-9). In an article of 1 May he argued that if workers took over production, then ‘after a week the national economy would be drained of its blood to the point of starvation, to the point of chaos’. This was because workers ‘have neither the muscles nor the brains’ to ‘ensure the maximum individual and social wellbeing’ (OO, XI: 33-6; Mussolini’s emphasis).
In an article of 1 August 1918 he announced the removal of the subtitle ‘Socialist daily’ from the front page of IL Popolo d’Italia, replacing it with ‘Combatants’ and producers’ daily’, whose meaning he explained as follows: ‘To defend the producers means to combat the parasites: the parasites of blood, among which the socialists are the first, and the parasites on labour who can be bourgeois or socialists’ (OO, XI: 241-3). He returned to these themes in other articles before the end of the war (OO, XI: 348-50, 354-5, 356-60, 366). To prove his point that disaster would be unleashed on the nation if the working class meddled in politics, Mussolini dedicated various articles to the Bolshevik Revolution. The thesis was a straightforward one: when not subjective agents of the Kaiser, the Russian revolutionaries were at best objective ones; working-class political independence and revolutionary politics could therefore only ever aid the enemy and lead to ‘horror’ and the necessary prostration in front of German threats, such as had occurred at Brest-Litovsk. ‘International socialism’, he claimed on 2 March 1918, ‘is a German weapon. It is a German invention’ (OO, X: 111-13). Again, he returned to the same theme on various occasions before the end of the war (OO, X: 148-51, 202-3, 336-8, 350-52, 358-60, 361-2, 372-4, 384-6, 392-4; XI: 8-9, 60-64, 71-3, 190-93, 247-9, 341-4, 395-6).
What type of government was to oversee this social system in which workers kept out of politics and got on with their work without wreaking havoc on the nation? In place of potential ‘chaos’, Mussolini envisaged a heavily structured social formation. In the 1 May article he wrote:
One shouldn’t speak of equality among men in the sense of removing class distinctions, but of establishing strong hierarchies and social discipline. As long as men are born with different ‘talents’, there will always be a hierarchy of abilities. This leads to a hierarchy of functions and the hierarchy of functions - listen! listen! - will logically, naturally, fatally provoke a hierarchy of powers with associated categories and subcategories. We’re talking about organizing the State . . . . (Mussolini’s emphasis)
Mussolini informed workers that ‘you are not everything . . . There are others who cannot be left out of consideration’ (OO, XI: 33-6). Were these others, like the workers, ‘only a part of the economic game’ in the ‘enormously complex organisms’ which were modern societies? For Mussolini, the answer was emphatically no. Rather, these ‘others’ were to be the organizers of the new State. First of all, however, this militarily disciplined ‘hierarchy’ of ‘talents’ required a leader. On 27 November Mussolini argued that the urgency of the present hour showed that something - or rather someone - completely different from the present form of government was indicated: ‘In this moment the Italian people is a mass of precious minerals. It needs to be forged, cleaned, worked. A work of art is still possible. But a government is needed. A man. A man who, when it occurs, has the delicate touch of an artist, and the heavy fist of a warrior. Sensitive and volitional. A man who knows the people, loves the people, and can direct and fold it - with violence if necessary.’ This man could head ‘a war government which lives only for the war. A government which prefers truth to lies and brutality to euphemism. A flexible government which adjusts its actions to circumstances and environment. Propaganda for the ingenuous and the ignorant, lead for the traitors’ (OO, X: 86-8).
Someone like who? A great industrialist perhaps? In an article of 21 January 1918 Mussolini certainly had the highest of praise for this category. With the Lombardy bourgeoisie sizing up to make a huge financial contribution to the war Mussolini wrote: ‘We are pleased that the industrial class, that is the class of the bosses - producers (and not only “exploiters”, as was said in the old jargon of socialism) - is becoming aware of its strength, of its importance, of its historical task’ (OO, X: 258-60). In the article of 1 August 1918 his programme for ‘defending the producers’ was said to amount to ‘allowing the bourgeoisie to complete its historical function’ (OO, XI: 241-3). In this very same period Mussolini seems to have solidified links with Ansaldo, an arms manufacturer in Genoa. Following Caporetto, Ansaldo obtained important advertising space in IL Popolo d’ltalia (De Felice, 1965: 415). Mussolini visited Ansaldo on various other occasions in the spring and summer of 1918. The ‘authentic workers’ to which he referred in his article of 23 April 1918 were those of Ansaldo whose representatives supplied the flag for presentation to a gun battery, the weapons for which were supplied by Ansaldo itself. Mussolini was the speaker at the ceremony (OO, XI: 18-20). He flew to Genoa on 1 July, an experience that merited an article on 3 July in praise of Ansaldo which, he claimed, formed part of the ‘new Italian race of producers, builders, creators’ (OO, XI: 169-71). On 31 July he announced the closure of the Rome edition of IL Popolo d’ltalia (which had opened in October 1917 as a reaction to the Papal note), specifying that it was a now superfluous dead weight (OO, XI: 239-40). According to Renzo De Felice, on the other hand, the proximity of this announcement to the 1 August article in which he openly rejected socialism in favour of a society of combatants and producers is better understood in terms of the unashamed identification with Ansaldo. On 1 August Mussolini was again in Genoa, this time to open a new editorial office of IL Popolo d’ltalia (OO, XI: 508-10). Neither was Ansaldo his only source of advertising revenue. In an article of 26 July Mussolini boasted of the noteworthy increase in his newspaper’s advertising income from 5,728 lire in January 1918 to 43,783 in March. In the first half of 1918 he earned a grand total of 166,944 lire thanks to advertisements from industrial, commercial and financial sectors of the bourgeoisie. He made these figures public in an article of 26 July 1918 (OO, XI: 223-5).
But this evidence suggests that Mussolini’s admiration for the bourgeoisie was not unrequited. While he looked to the capitalists to fulfil their ‘historical mission’, important capitalists were looking to him. In Mussolini’s vision of the future the bourgeoisie was certainly to keep its effective social and economic power, but it should be remembered that in the 27 November 1917 article he wrote of an ‘artist’, not an industrialist, as the required leader of a nation at war. Who did he mean by this? Perhaps the nationalist imperialist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio fitted the bill? Or better, the futurist Marinetti who had shown himself capable of moulding war, industry and nationalism into an art? As we saw in Chapter 1, futurism placed artists at the head of a new social organization in a continuous state of struggle and war. Mussolini, however, did not see things this way, or at least not fully. In a speech in Bologna on 19 May 1918 he identified a third figure, who, in the context of the war, had shown himself to be smarter and more far-sighted than either industrialist or poet:
What this war means, in its historical import, in its development, has been intuited by two categories of persons, beyond, that is, the people: the poets and the industrialists. By the poets, who, with their exquisitely sensitive souls, grasp the still dark truths before the average person does; by the industrialists who understood that this was a war of machines. Between the two let us place the journalists; who are poets enough not to be industrialists and industrialists enough not to be poets. And the journalists have on many occasions preceded the government. I speak of the great journalists who had the outer ear always open in the direction of the vibrations emanating from the outer world. The journalist has at times foreseen what those in charge have unfortunately seen too late. (OO, XI: 79 87)
The shortlist of candidates was rapidly being reduced to one - Mussolini himself. He had obviously decided to redimension the persona of the charismatic war hero and to focus instead on that other persona, the home front journalist, that had accompanied him throughout the war. The war diary had collapsed, as had the warrior credentials of its creator, its artist, whose self-mythologizing portrayal of a charismatic hero at the centre of a warrior community had failed to live up to military stasis and neurosyphilis. Now he was ready to take his talents as an ‘artist’, reinvest them in the role of journalist which he had fully reassumed after February 1917, and launch himself as the leader of a future society whose common denominator would be war. What other pictures did the artist paint of the future society and his function in it?
An examination of Mussolini’s position on the land question suggests that he was already practising his proposed ‘flexible’ ‘art’just after Caporetto. On 16 November he sought to explain the rout in terms of the peasants’ lack of identity with the nation. To counter this he argued that ‘to weld the peasants to the nation, the land must be given to the peasants’ (OO, X: 55-7; Mussolini’s italics). But apart from support on 20 November for the proposals put forward by parliamentarian Ettore Ciccotti for the opening of a pro-peasant credit institute (OO, X: 67-8) we read no more about the land question. The theme disappears from Mussolini’s writings. In planning for the post-war demobilization, Mussolini argued on 14 May 1918 that two million agricultural workers would be returning to the fields, but the point of his observation was that farmhands would easily find work due to increased demand and shortage of labour (OO, XI: 57-9). When dealing with the question of soldiers’ material interests on 5 August he limited his claims to a pay bonus when they were standing guard in the front line (OO, XI: 250-52). This suggests that the slogan ‘Land to the peasants’ only ever had the demagogic function of remobilizing peasant sentiment for the war, and that once the main military danger had passed Mussolini ‘artistically’ adjusted his actions ‘to circumstances and environment’ by conveniently leaving the land question aside.
As regards the ‘lead for the traitors’ which the ‘man’ was to be ready to dole out, on 1 March 1918 Mussolini demanded that the government use the news that silk and cotton dealers had been secretly supplying the enemy in order to give an example of how far it was prepared to go when dealing with treason. ‘How much blood cries for revenge! We invoke an example. A summary trial: execution’ (OO, X: 355-7). On 17 May he rejected the findings of a military court which had sentenced a certain Cesare Santoro to twenty years’ imprisonment for espionage. Santoro escaped the death sentence because his services had not been useful to the enemy. Mussolini latched onto a parliamentary question from the ‘fascist’ Angelo Abisso who described the sentence as ‘bland’. Since deserters got the firing squad, ‘why not do likewise with a traitor?’, Mussolini asked, since desertion and betrayal ‘amount to the same thing?’ (OO, XI: 68-70).
Where, then, might the mass support base for this artist-journalist national leader be identified? Who were the ‘others’ that would organize the State while the working class got on silently with its work? On 10 November 1917 Mussolini made reference to a social stratum which identified fully with the war, knew what it was about and was ready to volunteer to fight it. He called for the formation of a volunteer army and claimed that he had received any number of supporters for this project:
Adhesions are pouring in by the hundreds. They are young students of the classes not yet called up who offer themselves in groups; they are clerks who ask to renounce the privileges of their forms; they are professionals and bourgeois who declare themselves ready for all renunciations and sacrifices; they are old men who want to lavish their remaining energies on the cause of the Nation invaded and ravaged by the enemy. (OO, X: 39-40)
Or again, in the already mentioned article of 14 May 1918, Mussolini argued that the government commission which had been set up to deal with the post-war period after demobilization needed to ‘take advantage of suggestions from below’. Not from workers and peasants, however, but ‘from those who are in direct contact with the population, who know its needs and, even more, its psychology’ (OO, XI: 57-9). Obviously an intermediary stratum between the ruling and lower classes. This is why it is important that in his 14 June article on workers’ duty and discipline Mussolini argued that ‘the manual worker must obey the architect’ (OO, XI: 117-19). Similarly, in his 1 August piece he opined that among the ‘producers’ in a society of ‘producers’ pride of place was to be given to those whose labour ‘doesn’t make the forehead sweat and doesn’t bring warts to the hands’, but ‘whose social utility is certainly superior to that which can be supplied by a day’s work of a Libyan labourer’ (OO, XI: 241-3).
Mussolini was no doubt pinpointing elements of the professional classes which Procacci has evidenced as lying behind the many national committees that surfaced in Italy after Caporetto (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 317-50). The affinity between their eschatological vision and Mussolini’s ‘war culture’ is evident. Even before Caporetto Mussolini had identified these social subjects as the potential reorganizers of post-war Italian society with him as their head. It will be remembered in this regard that in his war diary he had ascribed a pivotal role to the middle- and lower-middle class lieutenants and captains as the cement of a warrior community. Then, as now, a socially and politically exclusive trenchocracy of junior officers recognized the centrality of Mussolini and his newspaper. We have seen that the fasci meetings in various Italian cities shared much in common with Mussolini’s project. Other evidence supports the view that this ideological allegiance was now reproduced in the various committees which appeared all around the country after Caporetto. The Prefect of Florence reported to the Minister of the Interior on 10 December 1917 that a ‘committee of assistance and civil resistance’ of around thirty people had just been formed under the leadership of Michele Terzaghi, a lawyer. The following demands were made on the government: ‘1. Removal of enemy subjects and revision of naturalization; 2. Confiscation of their goods and property to build a fund for combatants and their families; 3. Energetic action to indicate to all of the people the absolute duty of resistance for undoubted victory, for the salvation of the Homeland, liberty and civilization’ (ACS, A5G, b. 96, fasc. 212, s.fasc. 10, ins. 2). On 26 December the same Prefect noted that ‘a vast association of interventionists’ was being built ‘in all the cities of the Kingdom, but with headquarters in Milan or Rome. Their declared aims were ‘victory at all costs’ which did ‘not exclude, where deemed necessary, the assumption of an antagonistic approach to the constituted powers’. The Prefect of Milan reported on 11 February 1918 that the localfascio had set itself the task of ‘combating defeatists and enemy subjects who to this day reside in the Kingdom’. He noted the presence of Ottavio Dinale, one of Mussolini’s closest collaborators (ACS, A5G, b. 96, fasc. 212; b. 41, fasc. 77). The ‘fascio of professionals for national defence’ was in fact founded in Milan on 17 January 1918 by doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects, commissioners for oaths, vets, chemists, building foremen and land surveyors (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 323, n. 9). In response to widespread insecurity the middle-class committees demanded a hierarchical reorganization of society based on reassuring traditional values (Procacci, Gv., 1999: 324-5).
The task of disseminating this conservative and anti-socialist vision among the fighting men was once again ascribed, and self-ascribed, to the middle-class intelligentsia who went on to form the Servizio P (Propaganda Service) and the closely related trench journals. These two phenomena represent what has been described as a ‘return of the intellectuals’ to a position of protagonism after two and a half years of obscurity (Isnenghi and Rochat, 2000: 401). The middle-class individual educator had rediscovered his/her social identity at the service of the nation and in privileged relation to the anonymous mass. The Servizio P was primarily oral in nature. Officers were to go among the men and discreetly raise pro-war discussions whose content had already been planned around theServizio P table. The nature of the operation left few records, so it is difficult to know what was said, how it was delivered and, most importantly, how it was received. For this reason, Gianluigi Gatti’s ground-breaking study on the Servizio P dedicates virtually no space to the theme of propaganda production. At the present state of research only guesses can be hazarded as to the effectiveness of the service in relation to more concrete issues which directly concerned the men under the Diaz command (such as the end of futile offensives, better insurance payments and food). But Gatti gives the following circular of the 2nd Army in March 1918 as best summarizing the strategy of the P officers: ‘Aims: To defeatist propaganda and to the natural apathy deriving from the prolongation of the war counterpose obligatory, organized, unitary, easy, convincing and practical propaganda, in such a way as to create “public opinion” in the units and, through this, raise the spirit of the country and acquire trustworthy data on the morale of the troops’ (emphasis in the original). Gatti points to a profoundly opportunistic strategy which suggests that any ostensibly democratic themes that might have been discussed in the ‘casual’ conversations were only ever harnessed to the immediate task of fighting the war. On 3 August 1918, for example, a circular from the 8th Army on the Piave stated: ‘Propaganda must be WAR ACTION, thus agile, plastic, without fixed schemes, without crystallizations and rhetoric. It must adapt to events, always “blending in” with new moral exigencies’ (capitals in the original). The nationalist imperialist Alfredo Rocco, whom we met in Chapter 1 and who was a Servizio P officer in the 1st Army, is reported to have gone one step further, ordering his men to issue ‘even false news and information’. But within this pliable and opportunistic method resided the dogmatic character of whatever concept was being conveyed. On 17 July 1918 the weekly bulletin of the XII army corps insisted: ‘Do not allow the truth of what you are expounding to be discussed: be careful to distinguish between the ignorance which asks to be enlightened and the sophism which vibrates the viper’s tongue’ (Gatti, 2000: 91 and Ch. 6).
What, then, was this kernel of ‘truth’ that the odd ‘viper’ and ‘sophist’ sceptic was sometimes prepared to question? The papers of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, a figure we met in Chapter 2 and who was central to the formulation of the ‘points of conversation’ to be raised by the officers of the Servizio P, are enlightening in this regard. Lombardo Radice listed about forty ideas, the first of which aimed to generate hatred for the enemy by presenting him as a user of spiked iron clubs, a murderer of women, children and injured men. Other subjects to be raised were the material improvements which had been granted to the soldiers, internal resistance, the negative consequences of a premature peace (‘all those deaths in vain; workshops closed; invasion of German capital and workers; unemployment and hunger for Italian workers’), and the benefits of victory (‘individual and collective wellbeing’). Lombardo Radice insisted on spreading the notion that this was a war of and for the proletariat, and that ‘only a few dangerous imbeciles can speak of imperialism’. While focusing on the penury of the Italian labouring classes his propaganda points identified the cause of this in ‘that bullying congregation of industrialists and salesmen which called itself Mitteleuropa’ (Melograni, 1969: 471-2). Thus while ostensibly rejecting the ‘imperialist’ character of Italy’s war, and while insisting that the Servizio P concentrate on transmitting the notion of an ‘economic’ and ‘non-political’ war, the ‘truth’ which was not to be questioned by the ‘vipers’ was precisely that this was a war through which the social and political power of the Italian bourgeoisie and agrarians was to be reproduced. The flexibility of Servizio P propaganda was informed by the strategy of presenting the geo-politics of inter-imperialist rivalry in such a way as to mobilize the patriotic sentiment of peasant soldiers against the enemy ruling classes.
Mussolini’s handling of the slogan ‘Land to the peasants’ was not dissimilar to the general method of the Servizio P. He used it flexibly and as a ‘war action’ device and then, in keeping with the Servizio P maxim of not resorting to ‘crystallizations’, dropped it. Rumours about land to the peasants certainly circulated in the trenches, but these did not have an official character. Antonio Papa’s analysis of the land question in Italy during the war points to demagogy and elision as endemic in the post-Caporetto days. His scrutiny of trench journals concludes that more common than promises of land to the peasants were discussions of life and work in the fields, and how land would be reclaimed and malaria defeated. Alternatively, against the ‘ignorant peasants’ who had brought on Russia’s downfall, Italian peasants were praised for their discipline (Papa, 1969: 29-36). Indeed, it is in the trench journals that the essence of the Servizio P’s conservative function has been best illustrated. In January 1918, on Mount Grappa, there appeared La trincea; in February L’Astico was issued on the plateaus; in March the first large-scale product, La tradotta, made its debut among the ranks of the 3rd Army; La Ghirba came out in the same month, and would eventually reach a production run of up to 40,000 per issue. By the middle of June about fifty such publications were in circulation. Moreover, the High Command struck a deal with some standard newspapers which, in exchange for the publication of propagandistic articles, were rewarded with the purchasing at wholesale price of several thousand copies of their numbers which were then sold to the men at retail price by the High Command. Among these papers were IL Corriere della Sera, IL Resto di Carlino, IL Secolo and L’Arena of Verona (Melograni, 1969: 468-9). So, too, was IL Popolo d’ltalia, which together with the national imperialist L’Idea Nazionale represented an important political source for the more official trench journals (Isnenghi, 1977: 214).
It has been argued that the latter have reflected ‘a process of . . . recomposition of the bourgeoisie . . . its image of itself, its ideological models and its hegemony’ (Isnenghi, 1977: 55). It is not clear, indeed, that the propaganda of the trench journals was aimed primarily at the peasant and worker soldiers at all. Rather, it is likely that junior officers were re-educated by journalists and propagandists of their own class in and through a stereotyped, profoundly conservative and biased caricature of the ‘people’. The same can arguably be said for the Servizio P strategy (Isnenghi, 1977: Pt 1, Ch. 8; Gatti, 2000: Chs 4 and 5). In this sense, both the trench journals and the Servizio P tested programmatic waters, in which reforms such as financial assistance were directed towards incorporating the masses into a well-functioning paternalistic and authoritarian State. Predominant in the trench journals are images of the woman, home fires, the family and the fields, King, Country and Church (Isnenghi, 1997: 96, Pt 2, Chs 1 and 3).
It is in terms of the Catholic Church that we can divine both another element of Mussolini’s future social vision and his ‘artistry’ as a political journalist. On 18 May 1918 he stressed that he was ‘not a priest-eater’ and that he did not practise anti-clericalism (OO, XI: 74-5). While, as we have seen, there was to be no future for socialism if it was not ‘national socialism’, he was prepared to ‘reconcile’ with Benedict XV, despite the clash over the Papal peace note of August 1917. Mussolini never adduced the peace initiative as a possible factor in the collapse of the front in October-November 1917. In summarizing the events of 1917 on New Year’s Eve, he mentioned the ‘Papal manoeuvre’, but merely noted that this had been followed by Italy’s successful conquest of the Bainsizza (OO, X: 182-4): Caporetto was an altogether separate issue. On 6 April 1918 he criticized Benedict XV for his ‘neutrality’, after which the Pope reappeared in the already-quoted article of 18 May and not again until 17 September in a piece which, once again, had nothing to do with Caporetto (OO, X: 428-9). It is legitimate to suspect, therefore, that Mussolini’s diplomacy and potential ‘reconciliation’ with the Catholic Church (see above, Chapter 5) fitted into his broader vision of the post-war society and the role of social control which that organization could exercise.
One of the most important themes in the trench journals, and one dear to the hearts and minds of the remobilized middle classes, was that of a hierarchical society organized for war which was a harbinger of the post-war social order. This, for Isnenghi, is ‘the primary narrative vision’ of the trench journals. But something else was required to sustain it: ‘an irrepressible anti-neutralist rancour’ which amounted to ‘an obsession for the incumbent presence of defeatists in the rear lines and at the front’, plus ‘an only slightly veiled criticism of the weakness of the government’, all combined with ‘anti-Bolshevik fabulation’ and ‘precocious falling out with the parliamentary institution’. In short, a pantheon of ‘disorder’ presented to the soldiers as the real reason for the Caporetto defeat, a vast ‘stab in the back’ by elements of the home front, which would exonerate the soldiers of the accusations of treason that had fallen on them. And since the ‘legal’ forces were incapable of containing this wave of insidiousness, some trench journals proposed to legalize ‘illegal’ violence (Isnenghi, 1977: 214, 231ff).
In the days after the formation of the fascio di difesa parlamentare practical experiments were carried out in this ‘legal’ illegality. On 19 December 1917 Giuseppe Emanuele Modigliani, a socialist parliamentarian, was physically attacked by nationalists when heading to a Rome restaurant. Turati avoided the assault only because he had stayed behind to write to Kuliscioff (Turati and Kuliscioff, 1977, IV, Tome 2: 807). Following Caporetto, Modigliani’s name appeared together with those of Turati and Treves on leaflets which were circulated at the front bearing the slogan ‘we want peace’. On 1 November Turati claimed that this was a campaign of lies conducted by the High Command and aimed at scapegoating the socialists for the defeat (Turati and Kuliscioff, 1977, IV Tome 2: 706). On 14 December, six days before he was attacked, Modigliani’s name appeared in a deprecating article by Mussolini (OO, X: 137-9). Modigliani was not badly beaten (he was back in Parliament the following day). Perhaps this meant that the attack amounted to a warning. This, at least, was the opinion of Anna Kuliscioff, writing to Turati on 21 December. But the attack affected Kuliscioff in a way that it was probably meant to: namely she felt frightened and intimidated. She was convinced that it was tied into the ‘fascist obstructionism’ evident in the two-hour parliamentary speech by fascio member Gian Battista Pirolini, who had punctiliously documented the existence of an enemy spy ring. Pirolini, it should be noted, received Mussolini’s support for his speech (OO, X: 158-60, 169-71, 175-8, 353-4). Kuliscioff theorized, however, that the attack had been carried out by overzealous Carbonari conspirators, diehard secret society nostalgics who in their day had fought for Italian unification but who had now ‘found refuge on the right-wing mountain’. She believed that ‘those surviving Carbonari are as hateful as they are funny’, but what she did not consider funny was a point made by Turati in his speech of 20 December. On that occasion he had declared that if right wingers were thinking of re-evoking the atmosphere of intimidation of the days of May 1915, they would ‘first have to pass over our dead bodies’. Kuliscioff wrote:
What perversion, what bestial impulses, what general degeneration! It makes me shiver just to think that in cold blood, without heat, without passion, without real fanaticism, one can carry out such ignoble and repugnant gestures. Neither do I like your threat about them having to pass over your dead bodies if they want to regurgitate the May days. To make threats of that sort you would need to be sure of having an army of organized proletarians behind you, which may or may not wake up if the Carbonari murder one of the socialists identified as a symbolic expression of defeatism. (Turati and Kuliscioff, 1977, IV, Tome 2: 808-9)
Kuliscioff’s Carbonari theory was an interesting attempt at a conceptualization of what was happening. In hindsight, however, it is more accurate to speak of the ongoing genesis of fascism in the First World War.