The Creation of the Voluntary Militia for National Security was the proposed institutional transformation of Fascist squad violence into a force directed by Benito Mussolini. Presented as a means to defend the Fascist revolution and maintain public order, the militia was also designed to disarm local squad leaders of independent authority while keeping organized coercion at the government’s disposal. Its creation exposed the tension between imposing order and preserving the threat of violence that had helped bring Mussolini to power.

Causes and Political Context

The plan followed the Turin massacres of December 1922. After two Fascists were killed in a street clash, Piero Brandimarte assembled 3,000 blackshirts, and his squads carried out raids and other acts of violence across the city. Mussolini publicly repudiated the killings and threatened punishment. Three days after the violence ended, however, he proclaimed a general amnesty for politically motivated blood crimes committed for national purposes. On December 28, he sent the first decree for creating the militia to the Council of Ministers. The sequence made the government’s dilemma plain: it condemned uncontrolled squad violence while protecting its perpetrators from full accountability and preparing to incorporate them into a new institution.

The political context extended beyond Turin. The narrative presents the postwar period as a struggle between returning veterans, revolutionary mass movements, and established liberal institutions. In July 1919, the government had already urged Fascist cooperation in repressing revolutionary attempts, provided the Fascists accepted official command. In Ferrara, meanwhile, new Fascist sections had grown rapidly after violence at the Castello Estense; agrarian interests supplied material support, and 20,000 lire had entered local Fascist coffers by December 20. These earlier arrangements show how Fascist organization drew on both state accommodation and local resources, even as Mussolini sought to make the movement answer to him.

Announcement and Organization

The proposal was announced to Fascist leaders in mid-December and approved by the Council of Ministers on December 28. At the first meeting of the Grand Council of Fascism, Emilio De Bono presented its organizational plan. Its stated purposes were to defend the Fascist revolution and maintain public order. That duty would be removed from the army, while the Royal Guard of Italy, which had performed it in recent years, would be disbanded.

Recruitment was described as voluntary but limited to members of Fascist military formations. The existing squads were to be dissolved; Fascists who wished to remain in the movement would have to join the militia. Senior officers would come from the army, alongside some Fascist consuls promoted to colonel. Members would swear allegiance to Italy and, above all, to Mussolini as prime minister, with obedience defined as absolute. The structure thus joined military personnel and Fascist organizers under a command relationship centered on the head of government.

The announcement unsettled leaders who had expected to enjoy the results of their victory rather than continue a struggle framed as potentially lasting a generation. Mussolini also directed a pointed warning at Roberto Farinacci, a prominent opponent of normalization who sat in the back row. The plan was not simply a response to public disorder: it was a bid to limit the provincial leaders’ independent control of armed squads.

Centralization and Its Contradictions

Mussolini’s design sought to legalize Fascist violence while regulating it. By transferring squad members into a state-linked militia, he could present their force as an instrument of public order and draw them away from local commanders. At the same time, the militia would remain bound personally to the prime minister. The project therefore centralized armed power without separating it from Fascist party loyalty.

The arrangement was deliberately double-edged. Mussolini needed to restrain squads that refused to disarm after returning to their home towns, lest provincial leaders use them against him. Yet he also depended on the squads as a continuing threat against Parliament and the monarchy. The narrative stresses that the prospect of civil conflict remained a guarantee of his power. The militia was intended to make violence governable, not to remove it from politics.

Decree and Aftermath

The militia’s formation was not yet complete when the plan reached the Grand Council. Three weeks after the Council of Ministers approved the decree, it was still on the king’s desk awaiting signature. The proposed institution therefore stood between political announcement and formal authorization: its organization had been laid out, but the decree had not yet cleared the royal stage described in the account.

The measure answered the immediate aftermath of the Turin killings by recasting the squads as a prospective national force. The combination of repudiation, amnesty, and institutional incorporation made the government’s response especially consequential: it promised to end uncontrolled violence by assigning armed Fascists a sanctioned role in public order. The plan’s significance lies in this conversion of movement violence into an instrument of state power, under a command structure intended to secure Mussolini’s control.