Anti-Parliamentarism

Anti-parliamentarism in the book is not a rejection of parliamentary politics with one stable meaning. It is a language and tactic claimed by opposed movements: socialists present parliament as an exhausted obstacle to revolution, while Benito Mussolini’s Fascists condemn it even as they enter its chambers and exploit its authority. The contrast gives the concept its political force. For one side, leaving parliament is meant to announce a coming transformation; for the other, participation becomes a way to carry an anti-parliamentary struggle inside the institution and reshape the state around it.

Postwar disillusion and the mass outside parliament

The concept grows from a crisis of confidence in the political order after the First World War. The narrative pictures Europe as a stage emptied of its old political actors and crowded instead by millions of returning soldiers. The old leaders, parliamentary moderates, and politicians who defer decisions appear unable to meet the new conditions. In this account, the veterans are not simply an audience waiting to be represented: their sheer numbers make them a political force that could overrun the inherited order. Anti-parliamentary language draws its urgency from that gap between an institution still claiming authority and a society remade by war, mass mobilization, and conflict.

The book does not treat that disillusion as a single, coherent program. Its crowded political landscape includes socialists who seek a proletarian revolution, veterans and activists drawn to street action, and Fascists who move from hostility to parliamentary compromise. The same institution can therefore be described as obsolete by one speaker, entered by another, and used by both as a public platform. The shifting meanings matter: anti-parliamentarism names a conflict over where political legitimacy resides, not merely a refusal to take part in parliamentary proceedings.

Socialist rupture and revolutionary expectation

A dramatic expression of socialist repudiation occurs when the red-carnation deputies remain seated during the royal acclamation and then leave the chamber. Nicola Bombacci leads the dissidents past Vittorio Emanuele III and proclaims the socialist republic. More than one hundred thousand Italians are described as leaving Montecitorio with him, and the king is left to deliver his speech to a half-empty hall. The walkout makes rejection visible and collective: the deputies refuse to recognize the monarch through the parliamentary ceremony, turning their departure into a public challenge to the political order.

The scene also exposes the limits of repudiation as a political strategy. Outside, the departing deputies celebrate the prospect of a free and just life, but their exhilaration lasts only briefly. They have no plan for what to do next, and that afternoon nationalist gangs attack them in the streets. The book’s juxtaposition is pointed: the exit makes a powerful declaration, but it does not itself establish an alternative government or protect its advocates from violence. A general strike follows; factories stop, Milan waits with weapons at hand, and Bombacci argues that revolution is historically necessary and that parliament belongs to the past. The subsequent deaths in several cities, added to the earlier toll of street clashes, place the rhetoric of institutional rupture amid escalating physical conflict.

Bombacci develops the argument again at a socialist assembly in Milan. He faults moderates for imagining that a new revolution can be achieved through parliament, and instead advocates a movement toward proletarian dictatorship. Yet Palmiro Togliatti’s criticism, reported in the book, identifies a weakness in Bombacci’s formulation: it gives revolutionary form and language priority over the material transformation of social relations. The councils Bombacci wishes to create are characterized as insubstantial, a shadow rather than an organized change in economic life. The episode distinguishes rejection of parliament from the capacity to build an effective alternative. Anti-parliamentary conviction alone cannot supply the institutions, resources, or social relations that a revolution would require.

Fascist hostility and tactical participation

The Fascist movement’s relationship to parliament develops in a markedly different direction. At the second national congress, Mussolini argues for cooperation between proletarian and bourgeois productive forces, says the bourgeois ship should not be sunk, and abandons any fixed institutional commitment: Fascists may prefer a republic but are prepared to retain the monarchy. In less than twenty minutes, the book observes, little remains of the original San Sepolcro program. The next day, the congress closes with a changed central committee: only ten of the original nineteen members are reelected, and the nine new members are all from the right. Anti-parliamentary origins are thus already being altered by organizational realignment and political accommodation.

The turn becomes explicit when Mussolini backs participation in Giolitti’s national blocs before the 1921 election. He frames compromise as necessary political experience, while Giolitti hopes to draw Fascist lawlessness into the constitutional order. Mussolini’s own strategy, as the narrative presents it, is to unleash disorder and then claim the ability to control it. Fascist squads remain fiercely hostile to parliament and indifferent to how many Fascist deputies enter it; Mussolini reassures them that their objective has not changed, only their route. They can go into parliament to denounce parliament. The contradiction is not incidental: the institution supplies a platform and political leverage for a movement that rejects its legitimacy.

Mussolini’s first parliamentary speech makes that method concrete. He declares himself reactionary, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist, then defines his anti-socialism as opposition to Giolitti, the movement’s chief electoral ally. He attacks Giolitti’s foreign policy and accuses him of failing to defend Italy’s standing and interests. The alliance has enabled Fascists to enter the chamber, but it does not bind Mussolini to his ally’s parliamentary strategy. His denunciation arrives almost immediately, and Giolitti’s attempt to tame the movement through electoral incorporation fails. Parliament is treated at once as a useful arena and as a target whose conventions need not restrain the speaker.

From opposition to power within the state

The founding of the National Fascist Party sharpens rather than resolves the tension. In Mussolini’s account of the movement’s future, Fascism claims to synthesize other political traditions and to absorb liberalism after violence has buried earlier methods. He presents the state as something Fascists themselves embody, while endorsing liberalism in economic affairs, an imperial national ambition, and a more accommodating relationship with the Roman Church. His program does not simply abolish every existing institution. It asserts a new political supremacy that can use inherited structures while subordinating them to the movement’s conception of the state.

The distinction between parliamentary presence and parliamentary restraint becomes clearer as the liberal state struggles to control the armed party organization. Prime Minister Bonomi issues a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and identifying Fascist paramilitary formations as illegal. Michele Bianchi, secretary general of the National Fascist Party, answers by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable; the directive is published openly. The state’s failure to enforce its own restrictions is presented as evidence that formal authority has weakened. Here anti-parliamentarism is connected not only to speeches but to a challenge to the state’s monopoly over organized force.

After the March on Rome, parliament nevertheless remains a functioning stage. Fifteen days after the event, Mussolini enters a packed Chamber of Deputies as head of government, accompanied by his ministers and welcomed by an ovation from deputies other than those on the left. The festive spectacle obscures the recent cost: in Rome alone, nineteen people have died and twenty have been seriously injured during those fifteen days. The sequence captures the distinction between institutional continuity and democratic security. Parliament convenes and applauds; violence and coercive pressure have already altered the conditions under which political power is exercised.

Meaning and limits

Anti-parliamentarism in these episodes is therefore both a doctrine of rupture and a practice of political conversion. The socialist walkout dramatizes refusal but leaves the dissidents without a plan for the immediate political aftermath. Bombacci’s speeches make parliament’s overthrow a revolutionary horizon, while Togliatti’s criticism insists that rhetoric cannot substitute for material organization. Mussolini, by contrast, makes anti-parliamentary hostility compatible with elections, alliances, speeches, and office. He can reassure the squads that the march continues while entering parliament, and can attack an ally from the chamber he has entered.

The book’s central contrast is not between participation and abstention alone, but between competing uses of political institutions under conditions of violence. Formal parliamentary life persists even as its authority is challenged, its procedures become instruments of political advance, and armed party structures evade state control. The concept consequently marks a route by which opposition to parliamentary democracy can be voiced from within its institutions and eventually claim the state itself. The recurring parliamentary scenes do not present this transition as a clean break: they show old forms surviving, while the balance of power and the meaning of participation change around them.