“Violence is the midwife of history”

“Violence is the midwife of history” is the maxim Benedetto Croce uses to reassure Giustino Fortunato during a speech by Benito Mussolini. In the scene, its significance lies in the collision between philosophical language and political force: the statement makes violence sound like a historical necessity even as the crowd’s applause lends that idea immediate political weight. Across the surrounding narrative, the phrase resonates with a fascist vision of national rebirth, but the book also places that vision against the mass death and exhaustion left by war.

The phrase in the assembly

Mussolini has rejected the idea of entering government quietly or abandoning the movement’s original ideals for ministerial positions. A crowd of seven thousand cheers. In a second-tier box, Croce, a leading liberal thinker who despises Mussolini, applauds too. Beside him, Fortunato shudders at the violence in the room. Croce responds by invoking Marx’s image of violence as history’s midwife. The exchange makes the maxim more than an abstract observation: it becomes an explanation offered at the very moment political violence is being publicly acclaimed.

The scene gives the phrase an uneasy double edge. Croce’s reassurance draws on a language of historical transformation, while the people applauding Mussolini are responding to a political movement that refuses to separate its ambitions from force. Afterward, Luigi Russo questions Croce’s applause. Croce answers that politics is theater and politicians are actors, placing the speech—and his own reaction to it—within a spectacle of performance as well as conviction. The maxim thus appears inside a scene where violence is not only argued about but staged before an audience.

War’s aftermath and the promise of renewal

The phrase’s force is prepared by the book’s account of the war’s aftermath. The imagined stage is empty beneath eleven million dead, while five million returning veterans press toward Italy’s borders. The old political class is depicted as exhausted and unable to avert further crisis; the future, the narrator suggests, will divide those who belong to the past from those who are coming. In this setting, violence can be cast as the means of breaking with a discredited order. But the underlying image is inseparable from the corpses and survivors that make such a promise possible.

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s contrast between Versailles and Fiume supplies another version of the same renewal narrative. Versailles stands for an exhausted Europe of suspicion and bargaining; Fiume is associated with youth, light, life, and a future carried by the dead and the unborn. The book notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio, and that his authority was already waning. The contrast nevertheless echoes the maxim’s logic: a supposedly new age is imagined as emerging from the wreckage of the old, though political enthusiasm does not guarantee that the promised future will arrive.

From political program to national regeneration

Mussolini’s program for the newly born Fascist National Party gives this regenerative language a political form. He presents fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism after violence has buried earlier methods. The program seeks to replace regional identities with a single Italian identity, links national greatness to an imperial ambition, and brings the Roman Church within that imperial vision. It also claims that the state is fascist, assigns the movement a role in educating and disciplining the masses, and treats the health of the bloodline as material for making history.

The maxim is not presented as a formal party slogan in these passages. Rather, it clarifies a recurring premise in the movement’s claims: force is described as the instrument through which a new political and national order can be made. The program’s reach—from state and economy to mass politics and ethnicity—shows how broad that promised transformation is. Its scale also sharpens the contradiction: a language of national renewal is being built from a politics that accepts coercion as one of its methods.

The recurring image of a new age

Later, at Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini returns to the site of an early fascist rally. The change in scale is striking: a few hundred followers had gathered there four years earlier; now the crowd is measured in thousands, and the speaker compares the movement’s former small groups with its present legions. He describes the volunteers as an army with a religious quality and casts the gathering as the resurrection of a people into a nation and then a state expanding in the world.

That scene recalls the earlier promise of history remade through force, but turns the emphasis toward growth, belonging, and collective destiny. In the same broader portrait, Mussolini is fashioned as a new man and an arbiter of chaos, while the old politicians are reduced to relics of a dead era. The maxim’s enduring significance is therefore not that it settles whether violence can create a better order. It shows how the book’s political actors and spectators make violence intelligible—as a threshold between decline and renewal—and how the promise of rebirth can gather authority from the very crisis and destruction it claims to overcome.