“Party or army”

The party-or-army dilemma captures a defining problem in Italian Fascism’s development: how to turn a violent movement into a political instrument without disarming the forces that had made it powerful. In 1921, Benito Mussolini argued for a disciplined party that could, when required, become an army. The proposed solution did not choose between political organization and armed action; it sought to make each available through the other.

A movement shaped by postwar crisis

The debate arose amid a political landscape transformed by war and mass mobilization. The returning veterans were described as a force of five million, bearing down on borders and old political arrangements alike. The narrative presents the prewar political generation as exhausted and anticipates further conflict: the country would have to move in step with a new mass of survivors, while war remained on the agenda. In this setting, the question was not simply how fascism should be represented in parliament, but how it could organize and direct the energies of people who had come to politics through conflict.

The movement’s growth also depended on local conditions and allies. In Bologna and the surrounding countryside, socialist organizations had built a dense network of unions, cooperatives, meeting places, and local groups. Their influence extended into employment and agricultural agreements; the rules governing seasonal work could determine wages, hiring, and the use of land. Small landowners and employers felt increasingly exposed, while workers’ organizations could mobilize collective pressure. The account emphasizes that these struggles were material as well as ideological: farmworkers often had only about 120 days of work a year, making wages during the working season a matter of survival through idle months.

The state itself helped open a path for fascist action. A confidential government circular urged fascist groups to assist in suppressing revolutionary attempts, including by force, on condition that they submit to official command. This arrangement made the movement useful to authorities seeking to contain the left, while also giving fascists an opening to present themselves as an instrument of public order. In Ferrara, the organized violence acquired military form: a January 1921 expedition used trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association and planned simultaneous attacks on several rural leagues. The organization required men, transport, coordination, and a willingness to use premeditated force—not merely a political platform.

The dilemma becomes explicit

On September 7, 1921, Mussolini proposed transforming the fascist movement into a party during a discussion of the parliamentary group. The proposal passed, though not unanimously, and still required approval by the national council and a congress. The resistance came from two directions. Some leaders feared that a party would betray the movement’s original spirit; in Bologna, Dino Grandi and his followers opposed the pacification pact regardless. More consequentially, the armed squadristi represented a force that a party might not be able to command.

The immediate demonstration of that problem came on September 12. To mark both the anniversary of the Fiume occupation and the centenary of Dante’s death, Italo Balbo and Dino Grandi assembled three thousand squadristi and marched them in military formation toward Ravenna. For the first time, Balbo arranged for all to wear the black shirt as a uniform. The procession made the movement’s military capacity visible and disciplined its appearance, but it also raised the prospect that the armed organization might become a rival to the party. The question was therefore not an abstract choice between electoral politics and violence: a force already capable of marching in formation could resist political restraint.

Mussolini’s formulation, published in Il Popolo d’Italia in August, set out the compromise before the September dispute reached its climax. A party, he argued, should be organized and disciplined enough to transform itself, when necessary, into an army capable of fighting in the arena of violence. The idea of a convertible party, or party-militia, answered both sides of the crisis. It offered a political structure capable of containing factional disorder, while refusing to separate that structure from the squads’ capacity for action.

From movement to party-militia

The new organization was meant to do more than secure parliamentary standing. The narrative describes the party as a way to harness the movement’s disorder and to restrict squad violence without abandoning it. It would gather adherents from competing traditions under an expansive doctrine, while retaining the ability to mobilize them as fighters. This was a shift from the movement’s anti-party origins, but not a renunciation of its methods: the party was conceived as an instrument that could move between political organization and armed confrontation.

At the founding congress, the National Fascist Party was declared, and Mussolini supplied a wide-ranging program. Fascism would absorb liberalism after violence had buried earlier methods; it would unify Italians across regional identities and pursue national greatness through an imperial ambition. The program also made room for the Roman Church, rejected anticlericalism, and described the state as something fascists themselves embodied. Its treatment of the masses likewise joined service to discipline: the masses were to be educated and represented, but also corrected when they were considered to be wrong. This breadth helped the new party claim that it could incorporate political groups and social constituencies that a narrower movement could not.

The party’s military potential was not only a theory. In May 1922, thousands of impoverished farmworkers travelled from the Ferrara countryside toward the city by foot, bicycle, wagon, and barge. Fifty thousand arrived in a column; fascist detachments controlled the march, and Balbo’s organizers had ordered telephone lines cut and public buildings used for accommodation. The episode demonstrates the scale of mobilization the movement could command, as well as its ability to coordinate people and resources beyond a conventional political meeting. It also reveals the social dependence behind that capacity: the mobilized crowd consisted of impoverished rural laborers, not simply an abstract national following.

The meaning and limits of the formula

The party-or-army expression marks a tension that the proposed structure did not resolve so much as institutionalize. A party promised discipline, political reach, and the capacity to govern; an army promised the concentrated force that had helped the movement challenge its opponents. The party-militia design bound those functions together, making organized political life capable of becoming organized violence. The earlier state circular had already illustrated a related ambiguity: fascists could operate under official command while presenting themselves as substitutes for a state deemed incapable of acting.

Later fascist rhetoric drew on the same fusion of political organization and military imagery. At a commemorative gathering in Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini contrasted the small group of early adherents with the legions of the present and described the volunteers as an army ready for anything. The crowd’s response turned the claim into a public ritual of collective commitment. The scene does not erase the earlier question of who would command the armed force; it shows how the party-militia ideal could be presented as national rebirth, converting organizational growth into a story of a people becoming a nation and a state. The formula’s lasting significance lies in that conversion: it made the movement’s political ascent inseparable from its capacity for coercive mobilization.