An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth

An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth is a retaliatory formula whose force in the book comes from how readily it turns grievance into a demand for action. It appears amid political violence in 1920, then becomes an explicit rallying cry in Florence: Dino Perrone Compagni invokes it as Fascist squads prepare to impose their own version of justice. Its blunt symmetry lends revenge the sound of a rule, even as the surrounding events reveal a struggle over who may claim authority to enforce it.

The phrase in public rhetoric

The November 24 material places the formula in a denunciation of violence surrounding Palazzo d’Accursio, followed by a call to drive out the barbarians. Its clipped, balanced structure makes retaliation sound immediate and self-evident: an injury on one side calls for an answering injury on the other. In a sequence that identifies Filippo Turati’s speech to the Chamber and a Catholic newspaper, the phrase belongs to a public argument in which accusations of brutality and demands for reprisal meet.

That rhetoric unfolds against a wider postwar crisis. The narrative describes Europe as a stage emptied by the war and points to five million returning soldiers bearing down on national borders. In that unsettled political landscape, the formula offers a starkly simple answer to disorder: rather than waiting for a common authority to act, someone must repay the injury. Its simplicity is also its danger, because it leaves the identity and legitimacy of that someone unresolved.

Florence: retaliation claimed as public order

The phrase returns forcefully in Florence after the local Fascist movement, previously split between aristocratic connections and more marginal militants, finds common ground in hatred and payback. Dino Perrone Compagni is brought forward to help heal the division. He calls for an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, promising that the Bolshevik leaders will pay for the latest outrage. The formula here is not merely a description of revenge; it is the opening move in a mobilization.

Perrone Compagni then claims that the Fascists must act before the police and Carabinieri, presenting their actions as the enforcement of public order and justice. As he speaks, he unbuttons his jacket to show the revolver at his belt. The contrast between the language of justice and the display of a weapon makes the claim’s practical meaning unmistakable: the squads intend to substitute their own force for the authorities’ lawful role.

The militants divide into five squads despite politicians’ appeals not to burn Florence in pursuit of revenge. Amerigo Dumini establishes headquarters at Café Gambrinus with Umberto Banchelli and Luigi Pontecchi. During the afternoon, squads order shops to close for mourning, demand flags at half-mast, and clear restaurants; they also inspect people’s documents as though they were policemen and beat those who protest. Streets empty, while armored cars, floodlights, and machine-gun positions at the bridges deepen the atmosphere of coercion. The phrase’s promised symmetry thus gives way to a broader seizure of everyday civic authority.

From revenge to political order

Across the narrative, the language surrounding the phrase sits beside competing ways of imagining Italy’s future. Gabriele D’Annunzio presents Fiume as passion, youth, and life in contrast to the decrepitude he associates with Versailles; later, Benito Mussolini describes Fascism as using violence to bury earlier methods and declares, in his account of the state, that the Fascists are the state. These are not repetitions of the eye-for-an-eye formula, but they place its retaliatory logic within a larger political vocabulary in which force is represented as an answer to an exhausted order.

That vocabulary increasingly joins violence to national renewal. Mussolini’s image of the new man opposes youth and vigor to decline, while a later speech in Piazza Belgioioso recasts the growth of the movement as a resurrection: a few early followers have become legions, a multitude, and a people becoming a nation and then a state. Set against those expansive promises, the eye-for-an-eye formula remains narrower and more immediate. Its distinct contribution is to translate a grievance into permission for reprisal; Florence shows how quickly that permission can expand into a claim to govern.