“Italy is neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat”

The expression Italy is neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat condenses a central fascist claim in the book: that national identity can supersede class division. Benito Mussolini deploys it not as an abstract definition but as part of a political address to fascists mourning their dead, where the language of unity links national greatness to sacrifice, force, and a projected renewal of Italy.

Meaning and Formulation

The statement rejects bourgeoisie and proletariat as sufficient descriptions of the nation. In the same address, Mussolini extends the formulation by presenting Italy through race, history, pride, passion, and greatness inherited from the past. The movement is from class categories to a collective national identity, expressed as something larger than either the governing individual or the social groups conventionally understood to contend for power.

The expression therefore offers a synthesis rather than a detailed account of how class interests might be reconciled. Its rhetorical force lies in shifting the terms of political belonging: Italians are addressed first as members of a nation whose history and future are supposed to bind them together. The book places that claim alongside fascism's intention to reshape public life, rather than treating it as a detached slogan.

The Funeral Address

Mussolini delivers the statement in Modena on September 28, 1920, at the funerals of eight fascists. Two days earlier, squadristi had raised their truncheons against a captain of the Royal Guard, who then shot them. At the funeral gathering in Piazza Sant’Agostino, soldiers and hundreds of pennants surround the coffins as Mussolini speaks of the dead and those who survived. The expression thus makes national unity an answer to a recent episode of political violence and loss.

The address's broader wording gives that answer a historical and emotional register: the nation is made to signify pride, passion, and past greatness, rather than a temporary settlement among competing social classes. The setting matters. Spoken over the coffins of fascists killed in a confrontation with state forces, the claim binds the dead to the movement's representation of Italy and turns mourning into an argument about who can speak for the nation.

A Program of Nationalization

The book connects this claim to Mussolini's later account of fascism's program. He presents fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, while arguing that violence has buried earlier methods. He calls for the nationalization of Italians: regional identities are to give way to a single national identity, and that identity is to look beyond Italy's borders toward an imperial ideal. The expression's rejection of class as the nation's defining division belongs to this wider effort to organize political life around nationhood.

This program also places the state, the masses, and the Roman Church within the same national-imperial vision. Mussolini describes the state as identified with fascism and says the masses should be served and educated, but also disciplined when judged to be wrong. He further makes the health of the bloodline part of the movement's historical project. These elements show that national unity is not presented as a neutral accommodation among groups: it is to be constructed and directed by fascism.

Renewal, Violence, and Political Ritual

The expression resonates with the book's recurring contrast between national decline and rebirth. In the postwar account, Europe appears emptied by mass death, while millions of returning veterans press toward the borders and the old political generation is depicted as spent. In Mussolini's later image of the new man, youth and rebirth oppose the old order; in another speech, the growth from small groups into legions is described as a people becoming a nation and then a state. The formula about class is part of this larger promise that a new collective identity will emerge from crisis.

That promise remains closely tied to coercion. At the National Fascist Party's founding congress, Mussolini describes fascism as absorbing liberalism through violence, and the book sets his claims beside the political violence that made the movement's expansion possible. The national unity implied by the expression is therefore both a language of inclusion and a means of subordinating rival political identities to a single movement-led account of Italy.

The book also places this politics within acts of collective remembrance. Five days before the party's founding congress, the Unknown Soldier was buried in a ceremony that made an unidentifiable fallen soldier represent the war dead. Mussolini and other party founders later knelt at the tomb; the narrative identifies the scene as evidence that politics was becoming a religion. Read beside that ritual, the expression's appeal to a shared national identity belongs to a political culture in which sacrifice, collective memory, and mass participation could be made to reinforce one another.