The San Sepolcro meeting seems, therefore, to have represented a merger between Mussolini and certain middle-class interests, upon which the presence of UIL representatives has no significant bearing. It is noteworthy in this regard that the programme of March 1919 makes no reference to the labouring classes or to agrarian reform. No certain data exists for the social composition of the Italian Army during the Great War, though rough estimates see the peasants as having represented about 46 per cent of Italy’s fighting army and they thus account for the vast majority of casualties (Serpieri, 1930: 41-2; 48ff). Mussolini knew that the peasants had provided the majority of Italy’s combatants: ‘The immense masses of infantry’, he remarked on 16 November 1918, ‘were recruited from the agricultural proletariat of the Po Valley and southern Italy where three quarters are agricultural labourers or day workers’. Yet this article did not call for a radical, pro-peasant transformation of relations on the land, in particular the expropriation of southernlatifondisti and the breaking up of their large, technologically backward and historically anchronistic estates. It limited itself, rather, to demanding a reduction of the working day which, it stated, ‘would represent the first step towards a less bestial life’ for Italy’s peasants (OO, XII: 9-10). A week before the appearance of this piece, Mussolini claimed that ‘the project of “land to the peasants” has been supported in these columns’, though we are not given to know when and where, and it is not listed among the same article’s socio-economic demands, such as the eight-hour day by 1920, an improvement in working conditions and a minimum wage (OO, XI: 469-72). In any case, in April Mussolini informed readers that ‘we don’t have land to offer to the peasants’ (OO, XIII: 35-6). In a pioneering article in 1963 Giorgio Rumi seriously questioned the historiographical orthodoxy being uncritically reproduced in that period concerning the existence of a presumed ‘fascist’ programme which included a call for land to the peasants. Rumi discovered that a similar programme appeared only in the newspaper Battaglie, the organ of the UIL, and further observed that in his spoken comments on the San Sepolcro programme Mussolini only generically alluded to the UIL’s demands when stating that ‘we have already made this programme ours’. For Rumi, this deliberately avoided dealing concretely with the issue in the here and now. Rumi also noted that a resolution proposed by Mussolini in favour of accepting the UIL’s claims was said to have been voted upon and passed unanimously, but that the text of this motion cannot be found in IL Popolo d’ltalia. In short, the UIL programme was not the programme of San Sepolcro (Rumi, 1963: 21-4, esp. n. 77).
While, as we have seen, nothing concrete was mentioned in the programme of San Sepolcro about the industrial proletariat, Mussolini’s speeches at the meeting supported the eight-hour day, old-age and invalidity pensions, and even workers’ control over industries. He also came out in favour of an expropriation of war profits (OO, XII: 320-27). However, such proposals were few and far between after mid-November, when his proposed Constituent Assembly of Interventionism had come to nought (OO, XI: 469-72; XII: 3-5, 9-10, 172-4, 193-6, 222-4, 242-5, 249-52, 256-8). Moreover, other types of discourse were contained alongside and within Mussolini’s ‘pro-worker’ utterances. In his 9 November 1918 article, for example, he defined the war as revolutionary ‘in terms of what it demolished and created in the international political field’. The question, however, was ‘how to impede - now - the “social” repercussions of this revolution initiated and completed by the victorious war’ (OO, XI: 469-72). Not social revolution but calls for a pre-emptive re-channelling of imminent social grievance before it got out of control and veered towards anti-State militancy characterized Mussolini’s ‘pro-worker’ writings. His 14 November article noted that the purpose of calling for the minimum wage and a reduction of the working week was ‘to keep the proletariat on the [national terrain]’ (OO, XII: 3-5). Three days later he wrote that this ‘economic democracy’ was aimed at ‘renovation, not revolution’ (OO, XII: 11-14). In his article of 18 March 1919 he wrote that by ‘political democracy’ he meant ‘conducting the masses towards the State’ (OO, XII: 308-11). On 1 April he admonished Orlando for what he saw as the lethargy with which social issues were being tackled by the State: ‘If you don’t [accept social reforms], then without having to be prophets we believe that you will compromise the fate of the institutions and it will be all your fault because we told you how you could direct the movement towards a peaceful outcome’ (OO, XIII: 52-4).
In February 1919 Mussolini wrote that economic concessions were necessary so that ‘the function of the workers is not tyrannical or destructive’ (OO, XII: 242-5). What this ‘tyrannical’ and ‘destructive’ tendency amounted to had already been clarified in an article of 17 November when he described ‘political socialism’ as ‘destructive’. In his view, the working class had to ‘reject the confused and ridiculous “anticipation” of socialist politics’ and it was his and his supporters’ job to ‘fight without truce the [PSI] that continues its sordid speculation to the detriment of the working class’ (OO, XII: 11-14). Conversely, when the working class rejected political interference it could be ‘creative’. What all this meant practically was evidenced during the occupation of the Franchi-Gregorini steelworks in Dalmine, Bergamo, between 14 and 17 March 1919. Workers’ demands included the eight-hour day, Saturdays off, a minimum wage, union recognition and the right to be consulted on the implementation of new technology. Influenced as they were by the national syndicalism and interventionism of the UIL, strikers continued production, even raising the national flag over the occupied plant (Pozzi, 1921: 33-96). In an unsigned article of 19 March (which is attributed to him in the list contained in OO, XII: 335, but which can be consulted only in II Popolo d’ltalia) Mussolini defined the strike as a ‘likeable gesture’ because it had not interfered with production and because it had demonstrated the ability of the workers to run a factory without the supervision of the owners. But Mussolini said nothing about the Dalmine workers or the workers in general being ready to take over production. And rather than call for an extension of the agitation to other factories and industries, he passively settled for the fact that the strike had come to an end due to ‘the inexorable exigencies of the class law which today dominates social life’. He argued that the decision to raise the national flag was ‘more than a likeable gesture’ because it had been done in a period when ‘a pile of bastards, of vipers and chimpanzees blaspheme and deride more obscenely than ever the triumphs, the fortunes and the future of their own country’.
Mussolini was obviously concerned to see the Dalmine strike end as quickly as possible to then use it for propagandistic purposes of a nationalistic, pro-war, antistrike and anti-socialist nature. This was evidenced by his reference to Italy’s fallen soldiers during his visit to Dalmine on 20 March (hence after the strike was over). He stated that the Dalmine workers were right not to deny the nation ‘after 500,000 of our men have died for it’. These dead men he then linked symbolically to the national flag which the workers had raised over the factory: ‘The national flag is not a rag even if by chance it was dragged through the mud by the bourgeoisie and its political representatives: it is the symbol of the sacrifice of thousands and thousands of men.’ Most important of all, he praised the workers for the fact that they had ‘kept away from the games of political influences’. The PSI, he added, ‘despoils the dead’ and was ‘an instrument of the Kaiser’ during the war. For this reason, ‘I won’t cease the war against it.’ Mussolini’s visit was thus transformed into a pro-war and anti-German ceremony. Indeed, there was something of a military atmosphere about the event: on his arrival at Dalmine Mussolini was met by a number of students and officers and was greeted by strike leader Secondo Nosengo who was wearing military uniform (OO, XII: 314-16).
Why did Mussolini base himself on the arditi and the futurists and not on the Associazione Nazionale Combattenti (ANC) which was being formed in the same period? While the ANC was a new organization, it was a direct emanation of the Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra (ANMIG), the central committee of which was behind the 12 November 1918 declaration of the imminent birth of the ANC. The ANMIG had been founded in June 1917 under the surveillance and with the consent of the government and the High Command, and on the understanding that it would adopt a strictly non-aligned approach to the political parties. This it did, and its declared aim was to organize all future returnees irrespective of their interventionist or neutralist background. The ANMIG saw all combatants as the basis of a new society, and believed that this noble, altruistic and self-sacrificing fraternity had already been realized in the trenches as a living and functioning reality. But the organizers themselves were urban petty bourgeois junior grade officers, and the ideology of the organization reflected their worldview: the programme issuing from the ANMIG as it announced its dissolution into the ANC was in fact vacuous, ingenuous and profoundly cautious at both the political and social levels. Despite the fact that the ANC grew most rapidly in those areas where the land question was most acutely felt (such as Apulia), programmatic vagueness is once again what defines the document emerging from its first congress in June 1919 (Sabbatucci, 1974: 54, 64-78, 390-93).
Section I of Mussolini’s programme of San Sepolcro was of similar bent, since it stated that the meeting of 23 March ‘declares itself ready to energetically support the claims of a material and moral nature put forward by the combatants’ associations’, without Mussolini then specifying in his spoken comments what the ‘material and moral’ demands might or should be. In other words, by not entering onto the terrain of concrete issues related to the mass peasant base he was taking a similar approach to the ANC leadership itself. It is legitimate to conclude that the reasons for the organizational differentiation between the fasci di combattimento and the ANC lie in the fact that nascent fascism had no intention of allowing its politics to be even remotely informed by, or answerable to, the masses of peasants who were joining the ANC. Where politics was to be pursued this was to be by the self-proclaimed elites of the arditi and the fascists. Not for nothing did the arditi decide to go it alone in forming their own association rather than join the ANC (which nobody prevented them from doing). This act confirmed precisely the extremism of their anti-democratic and elitist patriotism (Rochat, 1981: 118). But there was more to it than just this. When calling on 9 April 1919 for the numerous combatants’ associations to form into one movement, Mussolini claimed that this was necessary ‘if the combatants want to confront the internal danger which amounts to the taking of power by a party to the detriment of the whole nation’ (OO, XIII: 37-9). Yet while the ANC hailed the war and the victory, and while it was at times prepared to inveigh against the PSI for its opposition to the war, with its evolutionist notions of society it did not foresee civil war against ‘Bolshevism’ (Sabbatucci, 1974: 48, 68-9, 72-3, 98-119). It was here, then, that the most profound difference between nascent fascism and the ANC lay. Mussolini’s originally positive judgement of the ANC’s nationalism, its support for the claims to Fiume and Dalmatia and its decision to practise ‘politics’ (which he put in inverted commas) were quickly transformed, in an anonymous article of 24 June, into insult (this article is attributed to Mussolini by Sabbatucci, 1974: 107, correctly in our view, but not by E. and D. Susmel in OO, XIII, where it does not appear). He had in fact come to realize that the ANC was not going to be influenced in a subversive direction (OO, XIII: 201-3, 207-9) and that it did not share the thirst for antisocialist violence of the arditi, the futurists and the fasci di combattimento.
It is worth noting in this regard that Mussolini’s invocation of the fallen soldiers in his Dalmine speech means that we can fine-tune our previous understanding of the role of the dead in the San Sepolcro programme. Not only were they symbolically representative of territorial expansion, but they cut across social divisions, subsuming all classes into their nationalist and anti-socialist religious mystique. On 18 February Mussolini wrote that ‘you cannot give or take away the party card of the dead. They don’t belong to a party but to the Nation.’ Against the socialist ‘hyenas’ who wanted to ‘rummage through the bones of the dead’, he called on war imagery which neatly tied in with his understanding of the conflict as a continuing process not only in the Balkans but also in Italy: he promised to defend ‘all the dead, even if it means digging trenches in the squares and streets of our cities’ (OO, XII: 231-3). One form this ‘defence’ of the dead was to take was the haranguing of Bissolati by Mussolini, futurists and arditi at the Scala Opera House in Milan on 11 January 1919. This, indeed, can be defined as the first act of organized fascist violence (Franzinelli, 2003: 16, 278). What the physical dimension to this strategy of silencing opposition meant on the streets became clear when on 13 April the Milanese socialists took advantage of the government removal of the wartime ban on public meetings and organized a rally which was attacked by the police. By way of protest against the killing of a demonstrator, a one-day strike was called for 15 April to be topped off with a rally in the Arena in Milan. As demonstrators were making their way towards the rally, they were attacked by arditi and futurists, including Marinetti and Carli. These went on to ransack and burn the offices of Avanti! in Milan. Four people died (three workers and one soldier) and thirty-nine were injured (De Felice, 1965: 519-21; Rochat, 1981: 116; Marinetti, 1996: 516-17; Franzinelli, 2003: 22ff). Already on 15 November 1918, the anniversary of the founding of IL Popolo d’ltalia, Mussolini’s article bore the title ‘Audacia’ (Daring), which he had used for his first front-page piece four years previously. In it he argued that ‘violence is immoral when it is cold and calculated, not when it is instinctive and impulsive’ (OO, XII: 6-8). Here, as with the futurist manifestos or the arditi’s mysticism, acts of gratuitous and illegal violence were justified by their arbitrary, irrational and passionate character. However, it is crucial to note that the attack on the Avanti! offices occurred precisely in the period during which Italy’s war aims were being brought up for discussion at the Paris peace conference. On 15 April Mussolini in fact tied the incident into Italy’s territorial dispute with nascent Yugoslavia. He noted that the Milan strike ‘has given Mr [Wickham] Steed [journalist for The Times in London and supporter of the Yugoslav cause] the motive for writing a number of articles aiming to describe Italy as being on the verge of a Bolshevik revolution’ (OO, XIII: 57-9). Mussolini declared that ‘the Leninist horde, which believed and still believes that it can sabotage and mutilate our victory has, from the outset, found itself up against those Italians who are ready to save that victory’s fruits’ (OO, XIII: 60). He remarked that the role of the fascists in the Avanti! incident was to guarantee that the strike did not assume ‘antiinterventionist and anti-national directives’ (OO, XIII: 61-3). The attack was not, therefore, ‘instinctive and impulsive’; rather, Mussolini’s statements show it to have been planned and rational, an example of the sabotage of anti-war and antiexpansionist activism portended by the programme of San Sepolcro.
The foregoing discussion of the ideas and actions of early fascism suggests that De Felice’s characterization of it as ‘markedly left-wing’, plus his view that the original movement represents ‘a guiding thread’ throughout the history of fascism, and that this movement was based on ‘emerging’, that is socially mobile and revolutionary-progressive elements of the middle classes (De Felice, 1975: Ch. 3), are mistaken assumptions. It is noteworthy, indeed, that when asked (twice) by Michael Ledeen, in the well-known and controversial 1975 interview, to explain what type of world these ‘emerging’ middle classes actually envisaged, De Felice went round the question and effectively did not answer it (De Felice, 1975: 31-2). Equally untenable is the biographer’s conviction that the few announcements of Mussolini on 23 March were ‘certainly not sufficient to define [the San Sepolcro programme] as a programme’, and that the real programme was developed in the weeks and months after 23 March, culminating in a document published in II Popolo d’ltalia on 6 June. For De Felice, the latter declaration ‘can be effectively considered the programme of fascism “of the origins” or of San Sepolcro as it has been improperly called’ (1965: 513).
According to Enzo Collotti, however, it is precisely our knowledge of the existence of the San Sepolcro programme which allows us to characterize the early fascist government’s bombastic militarist rhetoric as representing something other than a merely formal transfer of the foreign policy baton from the liberals to the fascists (Collotti 2000: 10). Moreover, in the period between the meeting of San Sepolcro and 6 June, Mussolini published sixty-six pieces of which twenty-three, that is 34.8 per cent, were given over to attacks on the PSI or included such attacks as a significant part of the speech or writing (OO, XIII: 5-9, 12-13, 14-16, 21-4, 28-30, 31-4, 35-6, 37-9, 40-42, 43-4, 45-6, 52-4, 60, 61-3, 64-6, 67-9, 73-4, 77-9, 91-2, 94-7, 120-23, 128-30, 168-70). A further thirty-one, or 47 per cent, were dedicated to the Paris peace conference and/or to issues of a territorial nature (OO, XIII: 10-11, 57-9, 70-72, 75-6, 80-81, 82-4, 88-9, 93-4, 98-9, 101-3, 104, 107-9, 110-12, 115-16, 124-7, 131-3, 134-6, 137-9, 140-41, 142-6, 147-9, 150-53, 154-6, 157-9, 160-61, 162-3, 164-5, 166-7, 171-3). Moving further back, between the end of the war and the meeting of San Sepolcro Mussolini’s campaign for social reforms was, as we have seen, sporadic and unorganized, while his attacks on socialism were substantial and systematic, accounting for nineteen of the 110 pieces, or 17.3 per cent (OO, XII: 29-32, 96-9, 124, 151-2, 180-82, 183-6, 200-202, 203-207, 231-3, 253-5, 259-61, 272-4, 275-8, 285-7, 291-4, 301-5, 314-16, 317, 318-20). During this same period, the Paris peace conference accounted for fifty-nine of the 110 pieces, which amounts to 53.6 per cent (OO, XII: 17-19, 22-3, 25-6, 33-4, 42-4, 45-6, 47-9, 60, 61, 62-3, 64, 67, 68, 71-3, 74-77, 78-9, 82-4, 85-7, 88-90, 91-5, 100-103, 104-6, 107-9, 110-14, 113-15, 116-17, 118-20, 121-3, 125-30, 131-33, 134-6, 137-40, 141-3, 144-5, 153-5, 156-8, 161-3, 164-6, 170-71, 175, 176-9, 187-92, 208-10, 214-16, 217-18, 219-21, 215-27, 228-30, 234-7, 238-41, 262-4, 265-8, 269-71, 279-81, 282-4, 288-90, 295-8, 306-8, 312-13). These two central themes of anti-socialism and territorial expansion combined with the street violence which arditi and futurist participants at the San Sepolcro meeting had long been advocating, and the fascist programme was thus defined in March 1919.
The key issue, therefore, is not whether nascent fascism was right- or left-wing. It was clearly the former. Rather, we need to ask where it sprang from. Did it emerge solely in the late winter and early spring of 1918-1919? Or did it not in fact come from the Great War which had so dominated Italian life since 1915? If it did, to what extent was it an expression of the war’s social, political, military and cultural character? One way of answering these questions is to relate our interpretation of the San Sepolcro programme to the wartime experience and writings of the man who defined it - Benito Mussolini. The initial focus will be on his stance during the tense months between the diplomatic crisis of July 1914 and Italy’s intervention in the war on 24 May 1915.