Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti: former enemies in limited cooperation

Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Giolitti: former enemies in limited cooperation describes a relationship shaped less by trust than by political timing. Long opposed over Italy’s entry into the Libyan war and the later interventionist campaign, they found a temporary point of alignment when Giolitti returned to government amid strikes and revolutionary unrest. Mussolini publicly welcomed Giolitti as a restorer of order, while privately keeping his options open. Their convergence helped make Fascism appear compatible with the liberal state even as Mussolini prepared to exploit its crises.

From Enmity to a Tactical Opening

In June, after Francesco Saverio Nitti’s government fell, the king appointed Giolitti to form his fifth government. Eighty years old and a dominant figure in Italian politics for decades, Giolitti had built his authority on mediation, compromise, and command of parliamentary procedure. His opposition to Italy’s entry into the war in 1915 had made him a target of nationalists, and he had seemed politically finished. Yet the prospect of revolution and a starving country brought the bourgeoisie back to the experienced mediator.

Mussolini had reason to regard Giolitti as an adversary: the book identifies their antagonism with both the Libyan war and interventionism. His response to Giolitti’s appointment was nevertheless strikingly accommodating. At a meeting at the headquarters of Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini welcomed Giolitti’s return as the work of the one statesman capable of restoring social equilibrium and internal order. This was a public endorsement of Giolitti’s authority, not evidence that their older disagreements had disappeared. It gave Mussolini room to present himself as a defender of order while withholding a firm commitment to Giolitti’s political camp.

The Strikes and Mussolini’s Deliberate Ambiguity

Giolitti faced factory occupations and demands from industrialists for forceful suppression. He refused to put down the strikes by bloody means. Instead, at a meeting in Turin’s Hotel Bologna, he secured an agreement with industrialists Giovanni Agnelli, De Benedetti, and Pirelli: workers would receive wage increases and regulatory improvements, along with promises of worker control and profit sharing, in exchange for returning the factories. The latter commitments were intended to remain promises. For workers, the settlement brought economic concessions but ended the immediate political prospect of revolution.

Mussolini did not join either side decisively. He had begun to sit tight after Giolitti’s appointment, and through September he moved among radical Fascists, red unionists, workers, and Trieste nationalists without aligning himself fully with any of them. In Cremona he threatened those who attacked Fascists; in Milan, at a secret meeting with Bruno Buozzi, head of the metalworkers’ union, he expressed support for workers’ struggles only so long as they remained outside politics. Two days later in Trieste, he ridiculed the possibility of communism in Italy. The positions did not amount to a stable program of cooperation with Giolitti. Rather, they show Mussolini adapting his language and contacts to a crisis in which Giolitti was trying to preserve order through compromise.

Fiume: Cooperation with Conditions

The distinction between public alignment and private calculation became sharper over Fiume. At the end of September, Gabriele D’Annunzio sent a plan for a revolutionary movement in Italy, with himself at its center and Fiume’s political model as the basis for a new order. Mussolini returned the draft with changes: the Central Committee of the Fasci di Combattimento, rather than D’Annunzio alone, would organize the volunteer forces. D’Annunzio accepted this revision.

Mussolini also knew, through the foreign minister, that Giolitti was massing troops near Fiume while negotiating an agreement with Yugoslavia. He therefore set a further condition: a coup or march on Rome by Fascists and legionnaires should be attempted only if Giolitti’s negotiations produced an unfair settlement of the Adriatic dispute. D’Annunzio, who did not know that negotiations were under way, agreed to the condition. This was not a documented partnership between Mussolini and Giolitti; it was a tactical calculation made in response to Giolitti’s simultaneous use of military pressure and diplomacy. Mussolini continued to declare publicly that he would defend Fiume, but the account emphasizes that he did not intend to commit Fascism to an insurrection likely to fail.

Public Order and the Limits of Alignment

By October, Mussolini was presenting the Fascists as a force against the Bolsheviks and in defense of the liberal state. After socialist demonstrations in support of Soviet Russia and violent clashes in several cities, he told Milan prefect Alfredo Lusignoli that the Fascists would oppose the country’s ruin by whatever means necessary. Lusignoli relayed the assurance to Giolitti. The contact shows Mussolini making his movement’s usefulness legible to the government; it does not establish that Giolitti controlled, or formally allied with, the Fascist squads.

The relationship’s political significance lay in that narrow space between opposition and accommodation. Giolitti’s government sought to contain conflict through mediation and negotiation. Mussolini could welcome Giolitti’s return, signal support for public order, and make his movement available against the left while retaining the option of violence and insurrection. In the following political season, Fascists entered the national blocs Giolitti intended to strengthen against the socialists, after resistance to their inclusion had weakened. The movement’s passage from the trenches into parliamentary politics thus accompanied, rather than replaced, its coercive methods. Their limited cooperation was consequential precisely because it did not reconcile their underlying aims: it helped bring Fascism into the political order while leaving Mussolini free to press against that order from within and beyond it.