If more or less mangled words suffice to hang a man, out with the pole and the noose! If fascism has been nothing but castor oil and truncheons, and not rather a superb passion of the best Italian youth, the guilt is mine! If fascism has been an association for delinquents, I am the leader of this association! If all the violence has been the result of a given historical, political and moral climate, very well I am responsible for this, because this historical, political and moral climate was created by me with propaganda that goes from intervention to today.
Mussolini, Speech in Parliament (inauguration of the dictatorship), 3 January 1925
In his L’ltalia nella Prima Guerra Mondiale Italian military historian Piero Pieri argued that the democratic interventionists were at the vanguard of the call for intervention during the period of Italian neutrality. By these he meant ‘the republicans, radicals and Garibaldines; in other words, the representatives of the tradition of the old Action Party [of Mazzini and Garibaldi]’. All other interventionist tendencies then ‘followed’ this call. And while the nationalist imperialists made reference to the same Risorgimental and irredentist tradition during the interventionist ‘debate’, Pieri insisted that that democratic inheritance was ‘safe in the hands of others!’ (Pieri, 1968: 51-6).
Yet if this was so, why did post-war Italy finish in fascism? One obvious response is that it need not have. But for Italy to take the path of ‘democracy’ as a political expression and continuation of a Mazzinian democratic war, forces would have been required that could have presented a relative and viable programme. It seems, on the other hand, that Bissolati, the key figure of democratic interventionism, was left with little to offer but his resignation from a government in which he had in any case always been isolated. Whenever he had found support, this had not been from a mass democratic movement, but from the authoritarian and profoundly right-wing Generalissimo, Luigi Cadorna (Rocca, 1985: Ch. 10), and from Mussolini who admired him for his ‘Jacobin’ outbursts in October 1917 against the socialist enemy within (OO, IX: 275, 276-8, 279-81). It is interesting in this regard that Pieri never linked his patriotic rhetoric with an account of his own combat experience in the First World War. The same was true of Adolfo Omodeo, who cited the Garibaldine letters of any number of NCOs to back up his characterization of the war as ‘The Fourth War of the Risorgimento’, but who never linked this definition to an account of his own combat experience (Omodeo, 1934). According to Giorgio Rochat, this is explained by the fact that both Pieri and Omodeo feared what such an analysis might have uncovered (Rochat, 1976: 37). Not even a democratic interventionist who did leave an account of his combat experience manages to convey a democratic message. Emilio Lussu’s 1938 novel, Un anno sull’Altipiano, bequeaths a vision of an isolated individual who is incapable of giving expression to revolt against the anti-democratic effects of the war’s political character (Lussu, 2000).
Democratic interventionism could not offer a programmatic option either during or after the conflict because the conflict had nothing to do with democracy. Mass demands for radical and even revolutionary social and political change after the armistice came not from adherents of interventionism, but from workers and peasants, that is from those broad sectors of society deeply opposed to the war. The character of Italy’s war as one of aggression is reflected in the continuous presence of Sonnino as Foreign Minister, in the military strategy of offensive warfare, and in the authoritarian domestic aims of the social, political and military elites. Yet if the democratic interventionists were incapable of transforming their imagined war into a political programme, other forces were seeking to draw programmatic conclusions precisely from the war’s real nature.
At the Paris peace conference Italy’s status as a relatively minor imperial power was underlined when her ambitions for hegemony in the Balkans were thwarted by the United States. This much at least was obvious to Alfredo Rocco in December 1918, as we saw in Chapter 1. But if, by preparing to recommence the war, the elites were to reap the fruits of their imperialist and anti-democratic endeavours of 1915-18, a new type of political authority was required, since the traditional forms of liberal government had shown themselves to be inadequate, and would soon prove to be incapable of reaffirming State authority in the war’s aftermath. This, indeed, was Rocco and Corradini’s point, and they wished to see the State oversee a reorganization of society in readiness to reaffirm Italy’s claims to imperial supremacy. The power of the Italian Nationalist Association lay precisely in Corradini’s perception of the need for clearly stated aims and programmatic clarity. Rocco, indeed, would later become the architect of the fascist totalitarian and authoritarian State. What was missing from this programme as the reorganization of society for war? Rocco would go on to design the fascist State, but he would not be the leader of it. That task fell to another man - Benito Mussolini. As we saw in Chapter 1, the Italian Nationalist Association dissolved into the Fascist National Party soon after the March on Rome, and before disappearing into political oblivion Corradini dedicated his 1925 volume of speeches to Mussolini. Somewhere along the line, another programmatic proposal, another form of political authority - Mussolini’s - had won the day.
Paradoxically, before the Nationalist Association could be convinced of Mussolini’s programme, he had to be convinced of theirs. We have shown that Mussolini’s transition to the nationalist-imperialist vision was completed on the outbreak of the war, which crystallized the far-right political and cultural tendencies towards which he had already inclined, albeit tentatively and inconclusively, before 1914. For this reason, it is difficult to imagine the emergence of fascism without the war, and Mussolini himself was of this view. In informing readers of the upcoming fascist meeting of 23 March 1919, he remarked on 18 March that fascism’s task would be to bring to successful completion the ‘revolution’ whose ‘first phase’ had begun with Italian intervention in May 1915 (OO, XII: 309-11). On 18 April 1919 he wrote that the fascist attack on the socialist demonstration and the Avanti! offices was an expression of ‘popular interventionism, the good old interventionism of 1915’ (OO, XIII: 64-6). Or again, when it became clear that he was in favour of Italian realignment with Germany in 1919 to prepare a new war against Italy’s former allies, he turned once again to 1915: on 24 May, the fourth anniversary of Italian intervention, he argued that that date ‘remains the decisive date not only of the history of Italy but of the human species’, and that it was this which rendered ‘completely artificial’ the entire policy of the victorious allies at Versailles (OO, XIII: 147-9).
That Italian intervention would create a rupture with Italy’s past had been argued by Mussolini even before intervention itself. The personal and national renewal represented by the event was then given symbolic expression by Mussolini in his war diary, most especially in the baptismal ceremony on the Isonzo in 1915. Similarly, the pride of place afforded to Italy’s fallen soldiers in the fascist programme of March 1919 was the programmatic crystallization of what Mussolini argued after 24 May 1915: like the sacred waters of the river Isonzo, they, too, represented a newly expanded Italy, as their blood staked an unquestionable right to the territory on which it had been spilt. They were moreover the heavenly projection of an ideal social situation on earth, representing, as they did, a class society based on war but devoid of class antagonism. With the war over, the dead were remobilized into service as a primary element in the call to take up arms against the ‘plutocratic’ nations who had defrauded Italy of its ‘rights’ based on its ‘victory’. One of the dead remobilized was Mazzini, the figurehead of the ideal community bound together not by class interest but by sentiment and religious- based brotherhood. Of course, even this ‘Mazzini’ had been defined in the war, as incontrovertible proof of the ‘democratic’ nature of Italy’s pretensions to territorial expansion. But this was a Mazzini reinterpreted through the grid of the Nietzschean Superman and the will to imperialist power, both of which he had come to represent for Mussolini and many others in the pre-war cultural ferment.
While fascism would go on to give a whole new meaning to Italian imperialist foreign policy which would vastly exceed the liberal strategy (Collotti, 2000), it is nevertheless the case that the imperialism of the San Sepolcro programme stemmed directly from Italian war aims at both the political and military levels, as we have seen, and in this sense nascent fascism represented continuity with the liberal State. Indeed, the fascist programme of March 1919 represented a proposal to realize the external and internal vision of a future which had already been imagined within the war, and, indeed, from its very outset. From a very early stage in his campaign for Italian intervention Mussolini was aligned with the national imperialists and the Salandran conservative elites on an interrelated programme of territorial expansion and anti-socialism. Herein lies the error of Renzo De Felice. Convinced that early fascism was a left-wing phenomenon, he could not but continue to characterize the pre-1919 Mussolini as a socialist. De Felice thus misinterpreted Mussolini’s interventionist radicalism as an expression of a cleavage from the left, when it actually resulted from a radical shift towards the far right. While the present book has demonstrated that there is certainly some basis for arguing, pace De Felice, that Mussolini underwent a right-wing involution after Caporetto, we have shown that this was as an intensification of his ‘war culture’, itself an expression of a nationalist imperialist political strategy. The ‘war culture’ adopted by Mussolini even before Caporetto was locked into a vision of present and future society which sought to reaffirm conservative, paternalistic and anti-popular values in a strongly hierarchical, authoritarian and totalitarian political order dominated by the domestic and imperial interests of industrialists and agrarians.
But Mussolini also argued that something more than repression was required if broad sectors of the population were to be convinced of the necessity for the restructuring of the State in readiness for ongoing war. While sharing the strategic vision of the elites, Mussolini rejected their dismissal of mass sentiments and used his newspaper and his war diary to fashion a model for a new type of mobilization: in place of State repression and the inevitable resistance that this would give rise to, Mussolini proposed a form of charismatic authority through which sentiment could be mobilized on a politically and socially conservative basis. When the war finished Mussolini was armed with the programme of Corradini combined with a theory of mobilization that was a substitute for the State while also reconfirming the State’s authority by virtue of the politically innocuous character of the mass mobilization effected.
However, the underlying premise of this mobilization was that on the call to arms the masses had to be deprived of socialist political leadership and organization. The ‘enemy within’ was essential to the ‘war culture’. We have shown that it served as a negative cultural representation for the self-mobilization of the middle and lower middle classes which Mussolini identified as the moral, ethical and intellectual pivot of a future community based on war. Through his newspaper, his speeches and his war diary, Mussolini effected a mythification of himself as a warrior hero and political journalist who, by his very position in the scheme of things, was a potential political leader of a society in which the lower classes knew and passively accepted their place, where diehard oppositionists could expect to meet the physical force of armed militias, and where the middle and dominant classes had their thirst for order satisfied.
But fascism represented a far more definitive rupture with the liberal State in terms of the new form of political authority through which it proposed to reorganize society in order to better pursue the above imperialist strategy. Not only was Mussolini ready to resort to anti-socialist violence using not the police or the army but armed squads recruited from within society, but he was also, unlike both liberals and nationalist imperialists, attuned from an early stage in the First World War to the need to secure popular consent. To this end he projected himself as a charismatic figure and invoked a spectrum of cultural mobilization from ‘Mazzini’ to ‘Victory’ via the moment of ‘Intervention’ and the supreme sacrifice of the ‘Fallen Soldier’. Thus the adoption of the Myth of the Great War as the founding event of fascism and the kernel of the regime’s cosmos of cultural representations was not completely opportunistic. Mussolini clearly exaggerated somewhat when, in the quotation given at the beginning of this Conclusion, he ascribed to himself the sole responsibility for having created, through his writings and oratory activity, ‘the historical, political and moral climate’ for the genesis of fascism. Those conditions emerged, rather, in the Great War as an offshoot of its imperialist character combined with the liberal State’s failure to politically and culturally mobilize the nation in order to pursue it without digging its own grave. They were further enhanced by the failure of the workers’ revolution in the biennio rosso (1919-20) and, indeed, the conditions for fascism’s rise to power itself as a mass movement could only come on the wave of that failed revolution (Trotsky, 1971: esp. 189-92). Fascism was, therefore, an anything but irresistible phenomenon (Behan, 2003). Yet it was certainly Mussolini, through his paper and his speeches, who, from 1914 onwards, gave the most coherent expression to the issues arising throughout the war and who could present his proposal in a programmatic form in the immediate post-war period. This amounted to nothing less than the invention of fascism, an at that time historically novel form of political authority with which he would govern Italy for twenty years and lead it into the next world conflagration.