We cannot accept humanitarian morality, Tolstoyan morality, the morality of slaves. We, in time of war, adopt the Socratic formula: be better than one’s friends, be worse than one’s enemies.
Mussolini, Speech in Milan, 4 October 1922
One can say of Enrico Corradini that he appears at the beginning of the present century as the prophet of an imminent new period . . . It was inevitable that the encounter of 1915 would be repeated in 1922.
Mussolini, Speech to the Senate, 15 December 1931
The Fascist State is a will to power and to government . . . Fascism is opposed to Socialism . . . and analogously it is opposed to class syndicalism.
Mussolini, Dottrina del fascismo, 1932
He who has iron has bread; but when the iron is well tempered, he will also probably find gold.
Mussolini, Speech in Bologna, 25 October 1936.
At the time of the international diplomatic crisis of July 1914 Mussolini was the leading propagandist of the revolutionary wing of the PSI and, since December 1912, editor of Avanti!. Under his tutelage the paper’s distribution had doubled to between sixty and seventy-five thousand daily, with some issues reaching 90,000 and even 100,000 copies (Farinelli, Paccagnini, Santambrogio, Villa, 1997: 239-40). In the same period, PSI membership had increased from 20,459 to 47,724, and with a decidedly anti-militarist programme the youth section, led by Amadeo Bordiga, stood at over 10,000 members (Tranfaglia, 1995: 10-11). Not surprisingly, therefore, with the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia known among the public, and with the war drums beating, Mussolini declared on 26 July that the Italian working class would give ‘not a man, not a penny!’ and that it would spill ‘not one drop of blood’ for a cause ‘that has nothing to do with it’. He demanded a declaration of absolute neutrality from the Italian government and warned that if this were not forthcoming the proletariat would ‘impose it by all means necessary’ (OO, VI: 287-8). He subsequently issued slogans such as ‘Down with the war!’, ‘Long live the international solidarity of the proletariat! Long live socialism!’ (OO, VI: 289, 290-93).
Within little more than a week of Serbia’s 25 July rejection of the Austrian ultimatum, German backing of Austro-Hungarian intransigence turned the Balkan crisis into a European war triggering a chain reaction of invasions dominated by the German offensive against Belgium and France. Yet one nation that was fully implicated in the balance of power hung back: on 3 August Italy announced its neutrality. Mussolini had therefore got his wish. But all was not quiet in the socialist camp. On 19 August the Prefect of Milan wrote to the Ministry of the Interior concerning a socialist youth meeting which had been held two days previously. While participants had voted down a motion calling for volunteers to help Italy’s ‘Latin sister’ (i.e. France), a pro-war current had, the Prefect claimed, left its mark on the participants, who had gone home with an sense of ‘unease’ (ACS, A5G, b. 107, fasc. 225, s.fasc. 25, doc. 133). It is difficult to know how much credence to lend to the Prefect’s report. Either way, Mussolini seems not to have been influenced at this stage by any such pro-war sentiments. On the contrary, in a letter of 3 September to PSI Secretary Costantino Lazzari he averred that Francophilia was beginning to have ‘a devastating effect’ among socialist ranks, and that this ‘risks lumping us in the same basket as the warmongers!’ (OO, VI: 442). The PSI’s 21 September anti-war Manifesto, which was drafted by Mussolini and co-signed by the reformist parliamentarians, asserted a ‘profound antithesis between war and socialism’; war, it stated, amounted to ‘the annihilation of individual autonomy and the sacrifice of freedom of thought to the State and militarism’ (OO, VI: 366-8). On 25 September Mussolini suggested that two months of ‘warmongering campaigns’ by subversives and radical democrats meant that tacit PSI disapproval of the war was no longer enough. He demanded that workers’ organizations furnish Avanti! with ‘an affirmative or negative reply as to whether it is a good thing or not for Italy to maintain absolute neutrality’. The undoubtedly positive response to this plebiscite was to be thrown in the face of those who had ‘renounced their ideals of yesterday’ (OO, VI: 369).
It should be noted, however, that it was Mussolini, and not the Italian proletariat, who here posed the question of intervention or neutrality. Indeed, Mussolini had begun to question socialist anti-militarism even before the outbreak of the war. In November 1913 he founded a periodical, Utopia, in which he expressed his own (as distinct from the PSI’s) views more freely, including on war. In the May 1914 issue he published an article by Sergio Panunzio in which the revolutionary syndicalist argued that a war would create a revolutionary situation and that ‘who cries Down with war! is thus the most ferocious conservative’ (Panunzio, 1914a).
Correspondence between Mussolini and Panunzio in May 1914 reveals that Mussolini personally identified with this thesis (Perfetti, 1986: 157-8). In August Mussolini, this time as editor of Avanti!, refused to publish an article by Panunzio. It is likely, according to Francesco Perfetti (1986: 145-7), that the piece in question was the same one published by Mussolini in the August-September 1914 issue of Utopia, in which Panunzio argued that ‘we need to universally follow the only admissible logic: the logic of war’ (Panunzio, 1914b). In a series of anonymous ‘war notes’ written between 3 and 11 August, again in Utopia, Mussolini offered no serious opposition to the war. The notes of 6 and 8 August rejected the general strike in the event of an enemy invasion and argued that to effect territorial changes, ‘and not only “peripheral” touch-ups’, it would be necessary ‘to “blow up” Austria-Hungary’ (OO, VI: 321-5). In an 8 September letter to his friend Cesare Berti, he seems to have hinted that he was in fact keeping his real opinions on the war under wraps. Referring to a misunderstanding over a bill of exchange for which he had acted as guarantor and which he mistakenly thought Berti had already paid off, Mussolini wrote: ‘You too have adopted my system: you have many things to tell me, but . . . you keep them in your pen’ (OO, VI: 442). Furthermore, excusing himself for reasons of illness Mussolini did not go to Lugano, Switzerland, for the 27 September meeting of socialists from neutral countries. The final resolution, whose compromise content was reasonably foreseeable given that the meeting was attended by Italian reformist parliamentarians and maximalists, and by German- and French-speaking Swiss socialists, rejected the concept of national defence in capitalist regimes and saw all the belligerents as involved in inter-imperialist rivalries. It did not even mention the Austrian attack on Serbia or the German invasion of Belgium, let alone stigmatize them (Valiani, 1977: 65-8).
Something was clearly amiss, and things began to come to a head on 4 October when Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, a university lecturer in pedagogy who had recently left the PSI over its neutrality, reported in a conservative newspaper that he had been having an epistolary exchange with a key PSI figure. The unnamed person, who was in fact Mussolini, had assured him that if Italy went to war against Austria there would be ‘“no obstacles from the socialists. No revolts, no strikes in case of mobilization”’ (Lombardo Radice, 1914). On 7 October an open letter to Mussolini from pro-intervention anarchist Libero Tancredi was published in another conservative newspaper. It accused the Avanti! editor of being ‘a man of straw’ (un uomo di paglia). This term implies someone who lends his name to positions which are not his, while leaving it to others to express what he truly believes (Zingarelli, 2000: 1,251, 1,968). Tancredi stated that Mussolini had spoken of the classes that would need to be mobilized for intervention and had said he would fight with enthusiasm in a war against Austria-Hungary. The Manifesto of 21 September and the proletarian ‘referendum’ of 25 September were, for Tancredi, complete hypocrisy; while the ‘illness’ that had prevented Mussolini from going to Lugano was, he claimed, just one in a long stream of imaginary maladies invoked by Mussolini to avoid speaking at neutralist meetings (Tancredi, 1914).
In a press interview of 6 October Mussolini revealed that he was the socialist about whom Lombardo Radice had written. He stated that ‘the truth of the matter is that from the beginning of the war . . . socialist neutrality has been affected by a clear as day “partiality”: it has always been “conditional” . . . Sympathy for France, hostility towards Austria’ (OO, VI: 376-9). In his replies to Tancredi he defended himself only against the accusation of two-facedness without challenging the central thrust of Tancredi’s polemic (OO, VI: 381-5, 386, 388-92). Finally, on 18 October Mussolini published a long and crucial article that urged the PSI to redefine neutrality, replacing an absolute principle with a contingent and tactical policy - ‘active and operating neutrality’. He claimed that he was not asking the party to change position, but to draw the right conclusions from the partiality towards the Entente which, as far as he was concerned, it had always held (OO, VI: 393-403). Not the PSI, but Mussolini could indeed be found, from the very beginning of the conflict, dividing the belligerent blocks into defenders and offenders, between those who tried to stop the war and those who wanted it. In a speech of 29 July he expressed total perplexity at the mere suggestion that Italy would ‘give its children to Austria against Serbia or against France’ (OO, VI: 290-93). On 1 August he praised British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey for doing ‘everything humanly possible’ to avoid the generalization of the conflict (OO, VI: 294). Three days later he made it clear that Germany’s demand for free passage through Belgium was a ‘pan-Germanist’ plan that Belgium could not accept (OO, VI: 297). Between Germany and Belgium, therefore, he was not neutral. On 5 August he extended the same distinction to France (OO, VI: 305-6). On 1 September he claimed that the PSI and Avanti! ‘continue their propaganda for neutrality and against the war, conceding only one hypothesis: a war required to fight off a possible invasion’ (OO, VI: 349), a thesis which he had also expounded as early as 3 August (OO, VI: 295). By 18 October his recognition of Italy’s ‘right’ to mobilize in order to ‘defend’ its neutrality was now understood as the right and necessity to ‘practically oppose’ the invasion before it happened, that is ‘to free ourselves “in advance and for always” from such possible future reprisals’ (OO, VI: 393-403).
Hence the article of 18 October 1914 was not a sudden shift from neutrality to a call for preventive war, but a coherent drawing together of a latent pro-intervention argument which had pervaded Mussolini’s writings since the beginning of the conflict. Before deciding to reveal his pro-war position he had no doubt been awaiting the outcome of events on the Franco-German front, an issue which came to a head in early September at the Battle of the Marne, when Anglo-French troops halted what to that point had been the seemingly unstoppable German offensive into Belgium and then northern France. Indeed, in his article of 3 August one argument he gave in favour of ‘neutrality’ was the possibility of an Austro-German victory on all fronts (OO, VI: 295). A letter of 28 August to parliamentarian Mario Piccinato warned against the ‘risk’ and ‘danger’ of propaganda for war against Austria-Hungary and Germany (OO, VI: 441). Rather, as he wrote to Mario Missiroli, a journalist friend, on 26 August, ‘Italy cannot but wait and prepare itself’ (OO, VI: 440-41). To what degree, however, did the ‘socialist revolutionary’ Mussolini’s ‘neutrality’ and interventionism, Austrophobia and Francophilia differ from the policy of Italy’s rulers? And with what consequences for understanding the nature of Mussolini’s political trajectory?