The 1920 Ferrara Local Elections took place amid intense Socialist organization in the province and revealed how little electoral support the anti-revolutionary parties had won by November. Their result became a striking measure of the gap between the ballot box and the expanding power of Fascist mobilization: only a month later, 14,000 people attended the funeral of three Fascists killed in a clash with Socialists.

Background: Socialist strength in the province

The local vote followed a year in which the Socialist Party had demonstrated formidable support in Ferrara. In the parliamentary election of November 1919, it received 43,000 votes in the province—three out of every four votes cast. Rural organization reinforced that electoral strength: Socialist leagues, unions, cooperatives, and local political groups were influential across the countryside.

The conflict was also rooted in disputes over work and control of the land. In 1920, seasonal farmworkers and sharecroppers had pressed landowners to renew the collective farm agreement. The resulting settlement included wage increases, worker-managed hiring centers, and a required labor quota for landowners during the months when farm work was scarce. As the leagues extended their influence over hiring and other parts of rural economic life, the struggle reached beyond wages to the authority of landowners and the organization of the province.

The November result

At the local administrative elections in November 1920, the bloc of anti-revolutionary parties received fewer than 7,000 votes across the province. Against the Socialist Party’s 43,000 votes in 1919, the figure records the weakness of the anti-revolutionary electoral camp. The two totals belong to different elections, but the book sets them beside one another to show the scale of the Socialist lead and the difficulty of turning opposition to Socialist influence into votes.

That weakness did not mean the political conflict had been settled at the polls. Electoral support measured one kind of power; the capacity to mobilize, intimidate, and occupy public space was increasingly another. In Ferrara, the contrast would become visible within weeks.

A different measure of power

On December 22, about a month after the local elections, 14,000 people attended the funeral of three Fascists killed in clashes with Socialists in front of Estense Castle. The book presents the turnout as evidence that the balance of power was being reversed and that authority now had to be demonstrated day by day. The crowd did not erase the anti-revolutionary bloc’s poor showing at the ballot box; it showed that the electoral result could not, by itself, describe the movement’s growing street presence.

The clash was attributed to Fascist squads from Bologna led by Leandro Arpinati. The discovery of grenades brought to Estense Castle by Socialists preparing to defend themselves helped the attackers shift public responsibility for the fighting. The government removed Ferrara’s prefect, and a reward of 20,000 lire was offered for information about those described in the bourgeois and Fascist press as the perpetrators of a premeditated massacre. Socialist leaders faced insults and threats, the local Socialist daily stopped publishing, and the death of a Socialist nurse in the clashes was attributed to the Popular Party.

Significance

The elections mark a moment when electoral evidence and political momentum pointed in different directions. In 1919, the Socialist Party had dominated the vote; in November 1920, its anti-revolutionary opponents remained electorally weak. But the funeral crowd and the ensuing pressure on Socialist institutions showed how public mobilization and political violence could alter the practical balance without a corresponding electoral victory. Ferrara’s local vote therefore sits within a wider contest over who could organize the countryside, command the streets, and define responsibility for violence.