“Sell the grain and buy a revolver”

“Sell the grain and buy a revolver” is the sentence Giacomo Matteotti delivers to peasants in Polesine, joining the immediate problem of grain to the prospect of armed struggle. Its force comes from the tension around it: Matteotti rejects the promise of an effortless, immediate revolution, yet speaks in a sharper register among people whose deprivation and anger have made gradual change feel remote.

Setting: work, hunger, and rural power

In the countryside described around the speech, conflict is rooted in the organization of work as much as in political doctrine. Farmhands can find work for an average of only about 120 days a year, making wages and employment during idle months matters of survival. The peasant leagues have secured control over hiring and increasingly direct work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crop planting. Their rules aim to prevent employers from breaking collective agreements by hiring workers at lower wages; those who breach them may face fines and social boycotts.

That system has grown amid intense struggles over land and labor. In Ferrara, a February 1920 strike halted sowing of hemp and sugar beet. The settlement that followed included wage increases, worker-managed hiring centers, and a requirement that landowners employ five workers for every thirty hectares during the months when agricultural work was scarce. By mid-May, the leagues of proletarian unity had recorded 81,000 members, including farmworkers, tenants, sharecroppers, and small landowners. Their gains meant that landowners increasingly supplied capital while workers’ organizations shaped employment and production.

The account also shows how coercive the struggle could become. In August, harvested grain lay unthreshed and rotting in the heat, while a strike left cows unmilked. The broader dispute could bring harassment, fines, and forced departure from a town for those judged to have broken the leagues’ rules; other episodes included burned barns and attacks on people and animals. These details place Matteotti’s appeal within a landscape of material desperation and escalating retaliation, rather than an abstract debate about revolutionary theory.

The speech and its political tension

Matteotti is explicitly distinguished from a maximalist who stakes everything on revolution in the present. He believes instead in the gradual liberation of the oppressed through a long, difficult process demanding further sacrifice and struggle. He also understands that a future proletarian revolution would not be a blissful triumph. In Parliament, the narrative describes him as speaking with moderation and sound judgment.

In Polesine, however, he addresses peasants who expect a word of redemption from him. The narrative connects that expectation to the hardships they have endured and to Matteotti’s own childhood memory of seeing a buried animal carcass quartered. The change in setting matters: the measured parliamentary deputy speaks among a rural audience living with hunger and conflict over work. His appeal, “Comrades, sell the grain. Sell the grain and buy a revolver,” is therefore not presented as a full program or proof that he has abandoned gradualism. It is a startling utterance at the point where his longer political horizon meets the immediate pressure of his audience’s circumstances.

What the imperative joins

The sentence puts two actions side by side. Grain is a source of livelihood, but the phrase turns its sale into a means of acquiring a weapon. That compressed movement makes the material stakes of politics unmistakable: the struggle is taking place over food, wages, employment, and control of the countryside, while the language of resistance carries the possibility of force. The text does not establish that the peasants followed the instruction, or that Matteotti organized an armed action; the significance lies in what he says and in the contrast with his stated preference for arduous, gradual liberation.

The surrounding account gives the line a social setting in which neither side’s power is merely rhetorical. The leagues can regulate hiring and impose penalties; landowners and their opponents are caught in a conflict that reaches into the use of land and the availability of bread. The phrase condenses that wider contest into a memorable directive without resolving its contradictions: it speaks in the language of immediate action, while the speaker’s articulated politics remain gradualist.

A wider politics of mass action

Elsewhere, the book places rural mobilization within a broader postwar transformation. It describes millions of returning veterans and a political field in which older parliamentary figures seem unable to contain the pressure of mass politics. It also sets Gabriele D’Annunzio’s celebration of Fiume as a youthful alternative to the faltering negotiations at Versailles against the judgment that Italians did not follow him. The emphasis on crowds, veterans, and new political alignments supplies a wider context for the period, though it does not make Matteotti’s line an expression of the same politics.

Later episodes show how different political forces mobilize people through the material crisis of the countryside. In 1921, Italo Balbo proposed occupying Ferrara to compel the government to fund public works for tens of thousands of unemployed farm laborers. The subsequent mobilization brought about 50,000 hungry workers into the city and demanded work and public order under Fascist direction. That episode is not shown as a consequence of Matteotti’s words; rather, its contrast clarifies the stakes of a period in which food, employment, organized crowds, and force became intertwined. The expression remains a concentrated image of that pressure, spoken by a socialist deputy whose outlook the narrative identifies as gradualist.