“A temperate barbarism”

“A temperate barbarism” names the calculated balance at the heart of Benito Mussolini’s proposed seizure of power: fascism must appear revolutionary and use force, but it must not risk making the country seem to be collapsing beyond control. The phrase joins violence to performance, then turns that combination toward political organization. Its significance lies in the tension it cannot resolve: the movement needs force to prevail, yet needs to contain the forces it unleashes.

A revolution with limits

The phrase emerges from a discussion of how to take power without staking everything on a single decisive gamble. Fascism, the passage insists, is a revolution, but enthusiasm for its first phase could give way to panic if the impression of complete collapse took hold. The desired barbarism is therefore temperate: forceful enough to overthrow political weakness, bounded enough to preserve a firm point of stability.

That balance is not moderation in the sense of renouncing violence. It is a strategy for using violence without letting it dictate the movement’s entire course. The formula gives a name to a political problem: how to unleash a revolutionary appearance while maintaining control over what the appearance sets in motion.

Threat, spectacle, and action

The surrounding account frames political action as a mixture of threat and enactment. Proclamation, mobilization, arms, and even limited bloodshed can make a threatened march seem real; a staged or partial action can then become an actual march, or the reverse. The point is not that violence is merely imaginary. Rather, the spectacle must contain enough reality to persuade an audience that it is true. The phrase condenses this deliberate slippage between bluff and force.

The narrative’s other scenes show the climate in which such a strategy operated. At the Bridge of the Sirenette, Albino Volpi watches a socialist procession while carrying two Thévenot bombs and a dagger. The crowd’s red flags, singing, and disorder are filtered through his contemptuous view of its members as a mob rather than a people; the passage also establishes his openness to violence. The contrast makes the phrase’s political work legible: it answers mass politics not simply with argument, but with a performance of disciplined force that can turn menace into action.

The spectacle of political force also depends on who is imagined to belong in public life. In the account of the socialist march, the presence of women and children at the head of the procession unsettles the authoritarian, patriarchal spectators, who read their anti-militarist protest as a future that excludes them. The same struggle over public authority appears in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s attack on women’s clothing before a male audience, with Margherita Sarfatti the only woman at the table. These scenes do not define the phrase, but show how the wider political culture joined hierarchy, gendered authority, and competing claims to command the crowd.

From movement to party

The formula also helps explain why Mussolini sought to transform the fascist movement into a party. He argued that governing required an organization capable of restricting squad violence and gathering adherents from different doctrines under an anti-party banner. The aim was not to discard the movement’s coercive power, but to give it a political body that could harness disorder. The resulting dilemma was whether fascism should become a party or an army; the proposed solution was a party capable of turning its members into soldiers when violence demanded it.

Events exposed how unstable that arrangement was. In December 1921, Ivanoe Bonomi tried to restrict the use of truncheons and classify fascist paramilitary formations as illegal. Within forty-eight hours, Michele Bianchi had declared party sections and combat squads inseparable, and the directive appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia. Bonomi’s state did not arrest the party’s secretary for announcing an armed militia; it issued another circular complaining that its public-order orders had not been obeyed. The contrast between formal authority and the organized force challenging it shows the limits of temperance: restraint could serve as a tactic, but it did not restore the state’s command over violence.

The formula tested in power

The movement’s advance into parliamentary politics illustrates the other side of the strategy. In 1921, Mussolini treated the acceptance of fascist candidates into the national blocs as proof that fascism had moved from the trenches into Parliament. The entry was achieved through a political alliance, even as liberal resistance to joining forces with advocates of violence weakened. The movement could enter established institutions without abandoning the threat that had helped make its entry consequential.

The March on Rome brought the calculation to a crisis. On October 28, 1922, the government prepared a state of siege: orders for Rome’s defense were sent shortly after six in the morning, arrest instructions followed, and the proclamation was posted at 8:30. Yet Mussolini received the king’s charge to form a government on October 30, at the Quirinale, wearing the black shirt of an armed party. The transfer of office had the outward form of a constitutional appointment, while the armed movement remained present behind it. The following day, the squadristi were allowed to enter Rome after Mussolini argued that denying them a march could provoke their reaction. The capital’s spectacle of triumph followed days in which they had waited in the rain outside the city.

The contrast between staged triumph and actual cost persists in the account of the new government’s first parliamentary appearance. On November 16, the Chamber of Deputies was crowded with spectators and filled with an ovation for Mussolini, while the left did not rise to applaud. Only fifteen days had passed since the March on Rome; in that time, Rome alone had recorded nineteen dead and twenty seriously injured. “A temperate barbarism” thus reads less as a promise that violence can be made harmless than as a method for keeping its visible excess compatible with political ascent. The phrase’s composure is part of its danger: it presents the management of coercion as a way to govern, even as the violence that makes the performance credible continues to exact its price.