Botte, botte, botte sempre botte

“Botte, botte, botte sempre botte” is a chant associated with the Squadristi that turns repeated violence into a test of political loyalty. In the book, it surfaces in a discussion of the 1921 Fascist-Socialist Pacification Pact, where its threat toward Benito Mussolini exposes the pressure exerted on him by the very movement he sought to lead.## Meaning and Political Context The chant appears as Benito Mussolini and Pietro Nenni reflect on the breakdown of the 1921 Fascist-Socialist Pacification Pact. The Squadristi had opposed the agreement from the beginning, while socialists had signed it for tactical reasons and communists attacked them for doing so. The slogan’s warning is directed not only at political opponents: it also promises punishment for Mussolini if he refuses to march with his followers. The accompanying posters in Bologna, declaring that “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” make the same pressure public. Together, chant and posters present violence as an internal discipline of the movement as well as a threat to its enemies.

This context gives the expression a specific political function. It registers the danger that Mussolini could lose control if he tried to restrain the Squadristi, and it recalls the account that he had to follow the temper of his troops to stay in power. Nenni’s criticism of Mussolini’s individualism and lack of justice sharpens the contrast: political authority is contested not only over the pact itself, but over whether a movement founded on violent action can accept limits.## From Postwar Ruin to Collective Mobilization The chant belongs to a wider postwar atmosphere in which veterans and political movements are imagined as forces capable of overwhelming the old order. The narrative evokes five million returning soldiers pressing toward Italy’s borders and describes the future as divided between those who belonged to the past and those who would shape what came next. In that setting, the demand to march together suggests a politics of synchronization: separate people are to become a disciplined mass, with dissent treated as a breach of allegiance.

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of 1919 offers a contrasting, but related, language of collective renewal. He sets Fiume against Versailles, presenting the city as youth, life, and a future carried forward by the dead and by generations yet unborn. The chant’s blunt insistence on repeated blows sits far from that lyrical promise, but both draw on the same postwar struggle to bind sacrifice, action, and collective identity. One makes violence an immediate command; the other turns it into part of a larger story of rebirth.## Violence and the Promise of Order The later Fascist program expands that story into a project of national and political transformation. Benito Mussolini describes Fascism as a synthesis that will absorb liberalism, complete the nationalization of Italians, and direct the nation toward empire. His account also claims authority over the state and the masses. Set beside the chant, this political vision reveals a tension between the promise of unity and the means used to enforce it: a single nation is imagined, but the movement’s own followers must be kept in line through threats of force.

That tension persists in the image of Benito Mussolini as the “new man,” whose advertised vigor and command of violence are meant to restore order. The image presents him as both the one who can master disorder and the leader whose authority depends on a political world shaped by confrontation. The chant makes the movement’s coercive underside unusually plain. It is not a detailed program or a developed argument; its force lies in repetition, turning a demand for action into a compact measure of belonging.## Echoes of the Chant At a later commemorative gathering in Piazza Belgioioso, Benito Mussolini recalls the movement’s growth from a few faithful supporters into legions. He presents their shared passion as something almost religious and describes a people becoming a nation, then a state, expanding outward into the world. The scene transforms militant commitment into a public ritual of belonging, with the crowd’s response confirming the speaker’s authority.

Read alongside that affirmation, “Botte, botte, botte sempre botte” recalls the harsher terms of collective discipline. The later rhetoric promises resurrection, unity, and willing sacrifice; the earlier chant shows how dissent could be answered within the movement itself. Its recurrence therefore links Fascism’s language of renewal to the coercion that helped sustain its political cohesion, without allowing the promise of national rebirth to erase the threat embedded in the movement’s own words.