It should be noted that the government also awaited the outcome of the Marne battle before definitively deciding to prepare for war (Salandra, 1928: 173-4; Albertini, 1951, Part 2, Vol. I: 333-45; Malagodi, 1960: 21-2). Italy’s coalition with Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance, in force since 1882, had come under serious strain during what by 1914 had been a fifteen-year antagonism marked by suspicions, jealousies and rivalries over influence in the Balkans. This increasingly anti-Austrian foreign policy had been accompanied during the same period by a gradual realignment with France (Serra, 1950; Chabod, 1952: 19-49; Askew, 1959; Vigezzi, 1969: 3-52; Bosworth, 1979; E. Gentile, 1990, Ch. 8; Ruffo, 1998). In short, Mussolini’s political stance between July and October 1914 saw him aligned with the Italian State on the key issues of foreign policy. Adventitious convergence and nothing more? The confusion of the times? Or real political alliance with Italy’s rulers? One way of exploring this further is to ask about Mussolini’s and the State’s respective approaches to domestic policy in relation to Italian intervention. Antonio Salandra, who became Prime Minister in March 1914, saw a war regime as an ideal opportunity for re-establishing liberal-conservative values around a strong and anti-popular political centre. He wanted to free himself from ongoing dependence on the parliamentary majority headed by Giovanni Giolitti and to reverse the progressive political integration of the labouring classes that had underlain Giolitti’s premierships. Salandra claimed in his memoirs that this was because parliamentary democracy stood ‘in irreconcilable contradiction with the authority of the State’ (Salandra, 1928: 201-15). As we have seen, Mussolini’s 21 September Manifesto referred to the ‘profound antithesis’ between war, the State and militarism on the one hand, and socialism on the other. Did his openly declared interventionism now imply adherence to Pro-State and anti-socialist militarism?
During a meeting in Bologna on 19 and 20 October it became clear that the vast majority of the PSI leadership did not accept Mussolini’s interpretation of ‘neutrality’. At the 19 October session Mussolini insisted that if his motion for active and operating neutrality were not accepted he would resign his post as Avanti! editor. This he did after the ballot of the following day in which his motion received only one vote (his). On 15 November 1914 newspaper stalls were selling the first edition of Mussolini’s own newspaper, IL Popolo d'italia. On 24 November the PSI expelled Mussolini at a meeting of the Milanese section. His paper was deemed to be in open conflict with the party on a life and death issue and to be a treacherous attempt to split the working class. Before expelling him, however, Avanti! had asked ‘Who’s the paymaster?’ (Lazzari, 1914). The answer is that while, as relatively recent research has confirmed, Mussolini also received support from government-backed sources in France (Nemeth, 1998), it is now undisputed that his main technical and administrative help came from Filippo Naldi, managing director of the Bologna-based newspaper IL Resto del Carlino (De Felice, 1965: 269ff; Valiani, 1977: 71 and n. 130 for bibliography; Bosworth, 2002: 105-7). In August 1909 IL Resto del Carlino, which to that time had supported the moderate policies of Giolitti, came under the control of Bolognese agrarians. Following the socialist success in the Emilia region in the October 1913 general election, the paper went into crisis. It was saved by Naldi who introduced large sugar-producing concerns from Turin. These became the majority (60 per cent) shareholders as part of their endeavour to gain greater control over the Italian press with a view to generating pro-nationalist opinion (Malatesta, 1977: Part 2, Ch. 1). Through Naldi’s connections, Mussolini’s paper was supported by the Agenzia Italiana di Pubblicita, which in turn was backed by a number of industrialists and arms manufacturers all pushing for Italian intervention (De Felice, 1965: 276ff). Not only were they interested in expanding foreign markets and fields of investment for Italian capital, and in releasing Italian capitalism from dependency on Germany, but they were also concerned to impose a strong war regime in the factories, a strategy which would perforce require a definitive weakening of the PSI’s influence among the labouring classes (Webster, 1975: Ch. 5; Gibelli, 1999: 26-8).
It is arguably the case, however, that Mussolini did not share the goals of his main financial backers, and that while he may have differed with the PSI leadership he nevertheless remained on fundamentally socialist and democratic terrain. Indeed, Mussolini claimed in the inaugural article of IL Popolo d’ltalia that the paper was ‘independent, extremely free, personal, mine. I’ll answer only to my own conscience and to nobody else’ (OO, VII: 5-7; Mussolini’s italics). A commission of enquiry into the ‘Mussolini case’, made up of socialist members of the Milan council, concluded in February 1915 that Mussolini was indeed free to write what he wished in IL Popolo d’Italia without prior sanctioning from his backers (De Felice, 1965, Appendix: 684-8). Mussolini’s own writings lend weight to this finding. In that same inaugural article he specified that he had ‘no aggressive intentions’ against the PSI, and ‘Socialist daily’ in fact appeared as the main subtitle of the newspaper. Moreover, on 23 November he wrote a polemic against the very bastions of Italian imperialism who were propping up his paper, arguing that ‘the whole nation is in the hands of a small financial-industrial oligarchy based primarily on the steel industry’. This oligarchy was among what Mussolini referred to as the ‘internal enemies of the freedom of the Italian people’ (OO, VII: 29-31). The political independence of IL Popolo d’ltalia seems also to have come at an economic price: archive documentation of unclear origin reveals that in April 1915 the paper was in ‘a dreadful state’, needing 20,000 lire per month to survive and taking in only 1,000 lire from advertisements (ACS, Min. Int. Dir. Gen. Ps, Div. AA. GG. RR., Stampa italiana, F1, 1890-1945, b. 20, fasc. 40.43, ‘IL Popolo d’Italia’, doc. 104). From February 1915 Mussolini had to appeal to sympathetic readers for financial support (OO, VII: 187-8).
But a major clue to the relatively independent voice which IL Popolo d’ltalia provided Mussolini lies in the title of the new paper, which recalled L’ltalia del Popolo of Mazzini (De Felice, 1965: 276, n. 1). If Mazzinianism now defined Mussolini’s position, he was on track for a collision with Italy’s ruling conservative elites, and this in fact transpired. Following the death of Foreign Minister Antonio di San Giuliano on 16 October, Salandra temporarily took over the foreign affairs portfolio. On 18 October he made his infamous speech to Foreign Ministry functionaries in which he nakedly declared the need to act with ‘a spirit emptied of every preconception, of every prejudice, of every sentiment which is not that of the exclusive and unlimited devotion to our Fatherland, of sacro egoismo for Italy’ (Salandra, 1928: 377-8). On 19 November Mussolini declared sacro egoismo to be ‘unacceptable for the socialist proletariat’ (OO, VII: 13-15). This was because, as he claimed in a public speech of 13 December, ‘the law of solidarity cannot stop at competitions of an economic nature, but goes beyond these’ (OO, VII: 76-81). In late December he negatively compared sacro egoismo to the greater sense of duty and sacrifice with which Mazzini had pushed previous generations into war. Mazzini ‘knew well that war was sacrifice, blood, ruin, destruction’; but he also knew that ‘every generation has its ineluctable duties to carry out’. Salandra’s sacro egoismo, on the other hand, was ‘the selfishness of the well-to-do classes, of the Triple Alliance-loving Senate, of the temporal Pope, of the contraband bourgeoisie’ (OO, VII: 97-110).
On 5 November Salandra ceded the Foreign Ministry to agrarian conservative Sidney Sonnino, who proceeded to navigate a profitable course for Italy in the turbulent waters of the European war. Formal negotiations between Italy and Austria- Hungary for territorial compensation under Article VII of the Triple Alliance treaty began in the second week of December 1914. The details of these negotiations have been examined elsewhere (Valiani, 1966b) and need not concern us here. They are characterized by the fact that they had little chance of success if only because neither side was seriously committed to reaching an accord. Italy’s discussions with London, on the other hand, were defined as ‘serious’ even before they got underway (Vigezzi, 1961: 427). As we saw in Chapter 1, the resultant Pact of London conflicted with the aspirations of southern Slavs, who in a 7 December 1914 declaration had announced their intention to create a union of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes on the ruins of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In late April 1915 they founded a Yugoslav Committee in London, an initiative which sought to influence the Great Powers into recognizing an independent Yugoslav state (Vivarelli, 1991, I: 172-3). Mussolini’s writings and speeches during the period of Italian neutrality reveal far greater proximity to the Mazzinian and ‘Yugoslav’ theses than to Sonnino’s peculiarly Austrophile version of Italian imperialism. In contrast to the latter perspective, Mussolini argued in January 1915, in markedly Mazzinian terms, that Italy had to intervene in the war for ‘international and human ends’, which meant ‘contributing to the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the oppressor of nationalities and the bulwark of European reaction’ (OO, VII: 139-41). In March he dealt with the theme of Italy’s ‘mission’ in the world with direct reference to Mazzini. According to Mussolini, Italian unification saw Italy find its ‘place’ in the world; but every ‘place’ created a new ‘hierarchy of forces’ which required a redefinition of one’s ‘place’ and hence of one’s ‘mission’. The ‘mission’ implied in this newly conquered ‘place’ (when, as Mussolini augured, Italy broke with the Triple Alliance) was quoted by Mussolini from Alfredo Oriani’s La lotta politica in Italia (1892): it was the tradition of the French Revolution, democratic politics, the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish Empires, the liberation of the Slav peoples and the completion of Italy’s national-territorial tasks with the conquest of Trento and Trieste (OO, VII: 253-5). On 19 May he referred to the Serbs as ‘the Piedmontese of the Balkans’, by this meaning that he recognized in Serbia the driving force of Balkan unification. ‘Not only this’, he stated, ‘but Italian intervention guarantees their independence, it guarantees Great Serbia a vast outlet onto the Adriatic. With Austria-Hungary crushed, Serbia will have nothing to fear for its national independence’ (OO, VII: 398-400). Not for nothing, then, did the nationalist imperialists accuse Mussolini of being ‘up to his neck in democracy’ (Pancrazi, 1914). For his part, Renzo De Felice defined IL Popolo d’ltalia as ‘the most important organ of revolutionary interventionism and, substantially, also of democratic interventionism’ (De Felice, 1965: 288).
However, other evidence suggests that the nationalists’ and De Felice’s interpretations are too one-sided. First, Corrado De Biase has convincingly shown that the ‘democratic’ conception of intervention pursued by republicans and revolutionaries eventually conflated into Salandra’s sacro egoismo. He suggests that this occurred by virtue of the national terrain on which those democrats ultimately placed the meaning of Italy’s impending campaign (De Biase, 1964). It should be noted in this regard that already on 23 August, hence long before Salandra’s sacro egoismo speech, Mussolini argued that the anti-war abstract ‘principle’ of the PSI needed to be distinguished from what he termed the ‘reality’ of the ‘national’ terrain (OO, VI: 335-7). In a speech of early September he reminded listeners that ‘we are socialists, and, from a national point of view, Italians’ (OO, VI: 361-3). On 25 October he rejected the label of ‘nationalist’, but nevertheless defined his position as ‘national’ (OO, VI: 420-23). In November he asked if in the future there might not exist a non-internationalist socialism which would act as ‘a point of equilibrium between nation and class’ (OO, VI: 427-9, 430-32).
Secondly, following the 19-20 October Bologna encounter Mussolini claimed in the press that he had left his job at Avanti! because he had been looking for a debate in the PSI and could not get one (OO, VI: 409-12, 413-15, 443). This was clearly false, since despite his protestations to the contrary (OO, VI: 424-6) Mussolini had in fact made a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum when proposing his prowar motion. When the PSI subsequently asked him to explain the origins and nature of IL Popolo d’ltalia, rather than comply and defend his position in the party Mussolini affirmed, the day before his expulsion, that a man like him could ‘never submit supinely to the will of those at the head of the docile socialist herd’ (OO, VII: 32-4). He began to hint at the dubiousness of Avanti!’s funding, insinuating that the paper had ‘its little and big secrets’ (OO, VII: 25-7). At the 24 November meeting he claimed that he had a right to an explanation for the expulsion, even though it was already quite clear at that stage why he was being expelled. A letter of 26 November from the Prefect of Milan to the Ministry of the Interior confirms that Lazzari nevertheless reminded him there and then of the issues at stake (ACS, A5G, b. 107, fasc. 225, s.fasc. 25). The day after that meeting Mussolini repeated that ‘the right to defend myself . . . was violently denied to me’ (OO, VII: 45-6); again this was an untrue affirmation, since despite the meeting’s boisterous character Mussolini was allowed to speak and actually spoke (OO, VII: 39-41). We are faced, in other words, with the proposition that Mussolini’s manoeuvre at Bologna and his subsequent accusations and insinuations reflected the fact that he had already engaged in a public propaganda campaign against Italian socialism and that, together with the campaign for Italian intervention, it is this which defines the character of IL Popolo d’ltalia on its foundation.
Finally, in the August-September 1914 issue of Utopia Mussolini published a long letter from IL Resto del Carlino correspondent Mario Missiroli. Missiroli argued that in order to pursue its own imperialist project in the Mediterranean, Italy should stay in the Triple Alliance, while Austria-Hungary should remain intact in order to defend Italy against Slav expansionism. The war, in his view, would result in ‘the predominance of one race over another’. He argued that ‘the error of democracy consists precisely in holding that liberty is the loosening of ties between State and citizen: on the contrary, these links need to be destroyed’. By this Missiroli did not mean an anarchist-type freedom of the individual from the State, but a conflation of the former into the latter so that ‘every citizen feels the State, the whole State’ (Missiroli’s emphasis). In his introduction to Missiroli’s letter, Mussolini claimed to have a number of differences with the author, but he did not specify what these were. What he did do, however, was to applaud the ‘fresh originality’ of Missiroli’s letter and the ‘magnificent impetus of the passionate scholar who investigates wider horizons’ (OO, VI: 326-30). Fine praise indeed for an imperialist, racist and anti-democratic thesis. Deep ambiguities therefore characterized Mussolini’s ‘Mazzinian’ interventionism which the founding of IL Popolo d’ltalia consecrated, and it is to an analysis of their fuller implications that we now turn.