Who were the fascists of San Sepolcro? And what does their social and ideological composition tell us about the origins and nature of the fascist programme of 23 March 1919? On 24 March II Popolo d’ltalia claimed that ‘many friends, officers, soldiers and workers’ had attended the previous day’s assembly. It went on to provide a list of names, of which we have counted ninety-seven (OO, XII, Appendix: 337-40). This does not mean that there were only ninety-seven people at the meeting, and a contemporary police report gave the number as around 300, though to be sure this included journalists and curious passers-by (De Felice, 1965: 504). The list in IL Popolo d’ltalia can, however, provide a useful analytical source. Taking workers first, a look down the roster shows the presence only of representatives of the Milanese section of the Unione Italiana del Lavoro (UIL). This was a national syndicalist organization founded in September 1914 by Filippo Corridoni and Alceste De Ambris after they had failed to convince the majority of the Unione sindacalista italiana (formed in November 1912 following a split by ‘revolutionary syndicalists’ from the Confederazione Generale del Lavoro) of the need for workers to support intervention in the ‘revolutionary war’ (De Felice, 1965: 163ff, 237ff). These representatives did not speak at the meeting. Out of the ninety-seven identifiable people we find perhaps three ‘soldiers’, none of whom bore military rank. Then there are the names of sixty or so people without any professional title or military rank (the Unione Sindacale Milanese representatives included). There are seven lieutenants and five captains, plus a lieutenant colonel and two majors. Also present were two members of parliament and one senator. The rest of the list is composed of the middle-class professions: six are ‘prof.’ (university lecturers or schoolteachers), and of these one was both a lieutenant colonel and doctor, while another also bore the title ‘aw’ (lawyer); another six were in fact lawyers, one of whom was also a captain, another of whom was one of the abovementioned soldiers without rank, and yet another of whom was the already-mentioned ‘prof. avv.’; there was also one ‘mg.’ (an engineer), and four people bearing the title ‘dott.’ or ‘dottor’ (either university graduates in letters or medical doctors). Thus despite the presence of UIL representatives, when officers are taken together with the professions the list becomes very much a middle-class one. Since many of the names without professional titles or military rank were delegates from the cities and towns of Italy, it is likely that they, too, were from the middle classes.
In the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF) in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Rome are contained 222 documents of various nature (long and short letters, postcards, telegrams, notes) which declare allegiance to fascism in the spring of 1919. These tend to confirm the above sociological analysis and moreover reveal the understanding of nascent fascism nurtured by those who recognized themselves in it. A certain Torgelio Seniade, for example, told Mussolini on 25 March that ‘whoever understands and follows you is Italian, whoever understands you and doesn’t follow you is a false Greek who croaks the song of the socialists and the renunciators: i.e. the song of the enemy . .. Whoever sabotaged, whoever betrayed, whoever thanked the enemy, will have their hands full in today’s supreme hour’ (ACS, MRF, b. 17, s.fasc. 18). On 11 April Lieutenant Pietro Gorgolini assured Mussolini that he could count on 100 or so officers and university students to form a local fascio di combattimento. Gorgolini boasted of having ‘slapped a Bolshevik without pity’ and of having ‘labelled as infamous’ four socialists (ACS, MRF, b. 17, s.fasc. 30). From other letters to Mussolini dated 5 April and 13 May we discover that Gorgolini was part of a pro-Fiume and Dalmatia society whose governing body was made up of a university dean, a lieutenant colonel and a number of officer students. He himself was just finishing his law degree (ACS, MRF, b. 17, s.fasc. 16 and b. 20, s.fasc. 206). Amedeo Rebora wrote to Mussolini on 3 April of the local anti-German action league among whose ‘best and most combative friends’ were nationalists and monarchists who, while being unable to adhere loyally to the fascio, ‘nevertheless share our general postulates’ (ACS, MRF, b. 19, s.fasc. 117). An undated list of members of the Rome section of the fascio di combattimento reveals men with titles such as cap. avv. (a captain and lawyer), ten. rag (a lieutenant and accountant) and cap. rag (a captain and accountant), all of whom were keen to guarantee Italy’s ‘territorial and economic compensation’ against the ‘internal and external enemies’ (ACS, MRF, b. 19, s.fasc. 122).
In short, while many of these documents simply ask for assistance in the formation of a local fascio, those which reveal a political content are overtly antisocialist and in open opposition to what is deemed an external and internal plot to rob Italy of the fruits of its ‘victory’. There is no organized support from members of the working class or the peasantry. Only one document, dated 14 June, asked for ‘pamphlets and books for socialist propaganda’ (ACS, MRF, b. 20, s.fasc. 179). These are the letters, postcards and telegrams of reactionary elements of the middle and lower middle classes, many of whom were former officers, and junior officers in particular.
One of the few speeches made at the meeting of 23 March (published in II Popolo d’ltalia the following day) was by Michele Bianchi, who in obvious reference to Mussolini (since only Mussolini spoke at length) demanded that the meeting not make demagogic promises to workers that it was unable to keep. De Felice defines this as ‘more realistic’ than Mussolini’s contributions (1965: 508). Another way of looking at it, however, is that Bianchi wanted to make no commitments whatever to the labouring classes, whom he defined as ‘incapable’. But the real reason is undoubtedly to be found in Bianchi’s political past. A one-time ‘revolutionary syndicalist’, between 1910 and 1912 he led the Camera del lavoro in Ferrara. He was later involved in an immense political and ideological shift which culminated in the issue of intervention in the war in 1915. This concerned the forging of an alliance between local landowners, the Catholic Church, urban- based lawyers, teachers and the commercial classes of Ferrara. The genesis of this coalition went back to a reaction against the farm workers’ strike of 1897 and it solidified even further after 1901 when those same workers began to organize into socialist leagues. When the interventionist crisis arose between 1914 and 1915, the shift by many middle class ‘friends of labour’ to the side of anti-socialist nationalism completed the realignment of forces into this aggressively conservative and now pro-war bloc. Bianchi was among those who made the transition (Corner, 1975: Ch. 1).
The foregoing sociological and ideological analysis of the San Sepolcro meeting needs to be taken further, for the meeting was chaired by Feruccio Vecchi, a member of the arditi, who were further represented by Captain Mario Carli, founder of the Associazione Arditi, president of the Fascio futurista politico romano, and editor of Roma futurista. Other futurists present were Achille Funi, Mario Dessy, Gino Chierini (all lieutenants), and the writer and poet Filippo Marinetti, their leader. What exactly did the presence of these two currents represent at the founding meeting of fascism?
The futurists argued for the absolute freedom of the individual from what they perceived to be the obstacles of law and tradition. As in art, so too in politics were all previous forms to be violently swept away. In the Manifesto del Futurismo (1909) Marinetti argued: ‘There is no more beauty, if not in struggle. Any work which does not have an aggressive character cannot be a masterpiece.’ Art itself ‘cannot be but violence, cruelty and injustice’. Futurism’s mission was to reconcile aesthetic individualism with the collectivity by placing the artist at the head of a new social and political formation. The most potent expression of this relationship between the individual, the nation and art was war: ‘We want to glorify war - the only cleanser for the world.’ As part of the break with the stultifying past, Marinetti insisted on the need ‘to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every type’ (1996: 7-14). In a December 1913 speech in defence and celebration of Italy’s invasion and occupation of Libya (1911-12), he demanded ‘a ferociously anti-clerical and anti-socialist Nation’ and warned that the socialists ‘should convince themselves that we representatives of the young Italian artistic youth will fight with all means and without truce their cowardly manoeuvres against the politico-military and colonial prestige of Italy’ (Marinetti, 1996: 499-502).
In short, through his writings and speeches Marinetti made an artistic virtue out of nationalism, imperialism, militarism, anti-socialism, unabashed philistinism and unthinking violence. From the front in December 1915 he, together with a number of other futurist soldiers, issued the document Orgoglio italiano (Italian pride) in which they lauded ‘the superiority of Italian genius’ and promised ‘slaps, punches and shootings in the back’ for anyone who did not express this pride or who worked against its being brought to full fruition (Marinetti, 1996: 502-6). In February 1918 the futurists announced the formation of a political party whose programme repeated previously expressed imperialist, anti-clerical and antisocialist themes (Marinetti, 1996: 345-52). In September the journal Roma futurista was founded to promote the party and the latest version of the programme, also dated September 1918, a medley of demands for electoral reform, sexual parity, anti-clericalism, militarism and vague notions of land reform (De Felice, 1965, Appendix: 738-41). At the beginning of 1919 the Fasci politici futuristi sprang up in various Italian cities, and were mainly composed of petty bourgeois intellectuals and NCOs (E. Gentile, 1975: 109-28; 1999: Ch. 4; Marinetti, 1996: 508-509). These formed the basis of what in March would become the fasci di combattimento.
The arditi were special assault troops founded in 1916 but given greater importance from late 1917 onwards following Italy’s strategic defeat at Caporetto. Their adoption of black standards, skulls with daggers in their teeth, flames and black shirts all symbolized the desire to face danger and overcome death. Seeing themselves as the elect few over against the dormant mass, the arditi were convinced that Italian victory had been very much due to their own heroic acts of individual daring. This was not true, but it did nothing to alter their sense of election, expressed most lucidly in their continuous use of the term ‘religious’. In November 1918 General Francesco Saverio Grazioli called for their demobilization and disbandment, and by March 1919 the only ones remaining were sent to Tripolitana. The arditi, however, had different ideas, forming into a combatants’ association on 1 January 1919. They intended to regroup those who had fought ‘for the greatness of Italy’ and to continue in peacetime ‘the ascension of the great Italian nation’. For thearditi, the war had been a revolution which could not finish in the blink of an eye but which had to continue without, and, if necessary, against the masses. As they saw it, the war had done away with distinctions between bourgeois and proletarian parties and had exalted the nation above both. In particular, they nurtured an enormous bias against the Italian Socialist Party (PSI), which as a mass organization and anti-war party contrasted with their elitism, nationalism and militarism (E. Gentile, 1975: 98-109; Rochat, 1981: 23-7, 118, 123-4, 140-41, Chs 4 and 7). In the week following the end of the war, Mussolini was to be found in the company of a number of arditi at the Caffe della Borsa in Milan. He said, ‘I feel something of you in me and perhaps you recognize yourselves in me’ (OO, XI: 477). On a visit to II Popolo d’ltalia’s offices the following day a group of arditi declared to Mussolini that they wanted to be at his side ‘to fight the civil battles for the greatness of the Fatherland’ (quoted in Rochat, 1981: 115). By mid-January 1919 IL Popolo d’ltaliawas arranging finance for the Milanese arditi from local industrialists, and this probably explains why the arditi only had any real success in Milan (Rochat, 1981: 115-16).