“Politics is becoming a religion”

“Politics is becoming a religion” describes a transformation in which political allegiance is enacted not only through programs and institutions but through ritual, collective feeling, and reverence for the dead. The book makes the idea concrete in the founders of the National Fascist Party kneeling at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, while Fascist squads brawl elsewhere in Rome. The scene joins mourning to political identity: the nation’s dead become the focus of a ceremony through which the movement presents itself as a community of shared sacrifice and destiny.

The dead as a political presence

The burial of the Unknown Soldier gave this transformation a national setting. On November 4, the body of an unidentified fallen soldier, chosen by lot to represent the war dead, was carried across Italy by special train amid cheering crowds and buried in a solemn ceremony. The anonymous body stood for the millions who could not be individually named. The book describes the marble coffin as an altar suited to a war in which killing had become mechanical and death collective and impersonal. Public mourning thus offered a common object of devotion where private losses could be gathered into an image of the nation.

Five days later, the founders of the National Fascist Party came to the center of Rome and knelt on the soldier’s marble tomb for more than half an hour. Their posture made a political gathering resemble a devotional observance. The contrast in the scene is deliberate: while Fascist squads from the north, beyond their leaders’ command, provoked fights in working-class streets, the party’s founders prayed at the national monument. Political violence and reverence for the war dead appear side by side, rather than as separate worlds. The ceremony presented the movement as capable of converting the experience of war into a disciplined, sacred bond.

From street action to collective belonging

The book places this ritualized politics against the unsettled street scenes of 1919. On April 15, a large socialist procession in Milan broke apart as several thousand demonstrators moved toward the Duomo without a prearranged plan. At the confrontation, women led the socialist column with a portrait of Vladimir Lenin and a red flag, singing for a better life for their children. Opposite them stood a smaller group of officers, Arditi, and Futurists. The encounter became a brief armed clash. The different groups’ relationship to death, shaped by the war experience of the men on the opposing side, is presented as an abyss between them.

That confrontation does not itself constitute a religious ceremony. Its significance lies in the way it shows political identity taking bodily and collective form: people move in processions, carry images and flags, sing, and meet as opposing communities. The book also recalls a war flare rising over Milan before Ferruccio Vecchi addressed an assembled crowd. The flare, once used to illuminate the space between trenches, served as the signal for the gathering’s next act. In such scenes, symbols and staged gestures lend political action a force that goes beyond argument.

Renewal, nation, and the leader

The language of rebirth supplies another dimension of the religious comparison. In January 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio described 1919 as the year of Fiume and set its youth, beauty, light, and life against the weariness and suspicion he associated with Versailles. His account made political belonging a promise of a new age, sustained by the dead behind the living and by those yet to be born. The book notes the tension between this exalted vision and the fact that Italians did not follow him in the numbers his rhetoric implied.

When the National Fascist Party was founded, Benito Mussolini’s three-hour account of its future extended the promise of renewal into a political program. It presented Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, called for the national unification of Italians beyond regional identities, and connected national greatness to an imperial idea. The Roman Church was included in this vision, while Mussolini declared that the Fascists were the state. In this setting, political authority, national identity, and religious tradition were brought into the same expansive account of collective purpose.

The leader’s public image reinforced the language of a new beginning. The book describes the crowds drawn to Mussolini in Rome and the contrast between the figure of the vigorous new man and the exhausted politicians of old Italy. Four years after the first Fascist rally in Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini returned to speak there before a crowd grown from a few hundred to thousands. He portrayed the movement’s growth as a passage from small groups to legions, from a people to a nation and then to a state. The repeated gathering turned a place associated with the movement’s origins into a marker of its ascent, while the crowd’s response made political allegiance visible as collective enthusiasm.

A contested political faith

The phrase does not mean that every political gathering in the book is equivalent to religious worship. It identifies a pattern in which ceremony and belief help create political community. That pattern belongs to a wider landscape of conflict: after deaths at a rural demonstration, a general strike spread across a province, and local bourgeois groups organized in the name of self-defense. In Ferrara, newly formed Fascist sections received material support from agrarians and drew in landowners, sharecroppers, shopkeepers, and tenants. Political affiliation was thus tied not only to symbols and speeches but also to organization, resources, and the struggle over who would command public life.

The pattern also has a counterpoint in the 1924 funeral of Giacomo Matteotti. At his wife’s insistence, Matteotti was buried in Fratta Polesine rather than given the political burial proposed for Rome. Crowds of workers and peasants accompanied the coffin and called for vengeance, justice, and liberty. This ceremony likewise gathered grief into public political meaning, but around a figure whose death stood against Fascist power. The book’s account therefore treats political sacralization as a contested form: rituals can make a movement appear destined and unified, but mourning and public remembrance can also sustain demands for justice and liberty.