20th Century

The 20th Century appears as more than a measure of years: it is the name given to a struggle over what should follow mass death, political exhaustion, and social upheaval. The book makes the century a contested stage on which veterans, crowds, artists, and new rulers imagine sharply different futures, while the promise of renewal repeatedly draws on the violence and losses of the past.

A Century Opened by Rupture

The opening image is a Europe emptied of its old public figures and submerged beneath the dead of the Great War. Eleven million corpses form a sacred mound; beyond them, five million returning veterans approach the borders, a population whose arrival threatens to overrun the established political order. In this vision, the old moderates and parliamentary figures have lost the authority to delay what is coming. The future divides between those who belonged to the old world and those who will make the new one.

The survivors are not described as a settled political constituency. They are former soldiers and social remnants, capable of brief, forceful declarations but also of falling back into silence. The opening voice recognizes them as its own people and senses an audience even in a nearly empty room. That tension—between political exhaustion and the need to mobilize—gives the century its unstable beginning: the old order has been declared spent, but no successor has yet secured the future.

Fiume and the Rival Futures of 1919

On January 1, 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio interprets the preceding year as a contest between two kinds of time. In his address to the legionnaires, 1919 belongs not to the negotiations at Versailles but to Fiume. Versailles stands for a fearful, weakened Europe and the bargaining of victorious powers; Fiume is presented as youth, beauty, faith, song, and a future populated by the unborn. The contrast turns a political dispute into a choice between decline and a new beginning.

The narrative immediately complicates that triumphant account. D’Annunzio has chosen to remain in Fiume despite the wishes of the Fiumani, but the Italians have not followed him; the appeal of the reds has displaced his rhetoric, and the figure hailed as a prince of youth is rendered an old man overtaken by events. The century’s promised rebirth is therefore not a single, settled movement. Fiume can be celebrated as a beginning and, at the same time, shown as a project losing its audience.

The Century as a Fascist Program

At the birth of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini presents Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing earlier political methods and remaking the country. The program links the completion of Italian national identity to imperial ambition: regional identities are to yield to Italians as a single people, while national greatness is tied to an imperial idea. The Roman Church, previously a target of anticlerical politics, is brought within that expansive account of national power.

His program also recasts the relations among state, economy, and population. The state is asserted as the defining political authority; the economy is described in terms of classical liberalism. The masses, meanwhile, are to be served and educated, but also disciplined when they are judged to be wrong. The account extends even to the health of the national bloodline, making ethnicity part of the material from which history is to be constructed. The century’s new order is thus imagined as national consolidation and social transformation, but also as a hierarchy empowered to discipline those it claims to represent.

The speech ends by making Mussolini himself the final point of the future program, even as he says he wants to disappear from the new organization so that it can take responsibility on its own. The tension is pointed: a movement presented as larger than any individual places its founder at the center of its projected future. Elsewhere, political action is described as a performance in which threats, mobilization, and actual violence must make a fiction believable. The century’s revolutionary language therefore carries a warning within it: spectacle can demand real blood, while the movement still seeks to control how far upheaval goes.

Power, Modernity, and Retrospective Time

The ascent of Mussolini to government gives this political drama a date and a threshold. At 11:05 a.m. on October 30, 1922, at thirty-nine and with little experience of government, he climbs the Quirinale stairs to receive the charge of governing Italy. He wears the black shirt of an armed party. The narrative treats this moment as both the beginning of a new century and the ending of the old one in his wake: an individual accession is made to stand for a transformation in the political age.

That claim of a new beginning coexists with the material changes of the postwar world. In Milan, accelerated industry, circulating money, automobiles, radios, phonographs, cinema, and new forms of leisure signal a culture being remade by technology and consumption. The account places these developments beside the political promise of a new Italian century. At Lino Pesaro’s gallery, Mussolini argues that a great nation cannot be made from an insignificant people and that government cannot ignore art. Yet the scene also reveals Margherita Sarfatti’s role: she has assembled the seven painters, supplied the typed remarks he reads, and framed the exhibition as a new Renaissance and a modern classicism associated with order. The public voice of the ruler and the cultural work behind it are not the same.

The century is later measured through a return to Piazza Belgioioso, where Mussolini recalls a rally held four years earlier. Then, a few hundred had gathered; now, thousands stand before him. The movement’s growth is narrated as a passage from small groups to legions, from a handful of believers to a multitude, and from a people into a nation and then a state. Repetition turns the piazza into a marker of elapsed political time: the past is summoned not as a finished memory but as proof of expansion. Across these scenes, the 20th Century remains both a promise of collective renewal and a struggle to decide who controls that promise—and what violence, discipline, or cultural authority will be used to realize it.