Democracy

Democracy is presented as more than the continued existence of elections or a parliament: it depends on citizens’ rights, genuine political competition, and institutions able to constrain force. The book’s central tension is that these forms survive even as their substance is attacked. Fascist leaders enter parliamentary politics, claim to speak for the nation and the masses, and invoke national unity, while using intimidation, manipulated rules and organized violence to narrow the possibility of opposition.

A postwar crisis of representation

The postwar setting makes democracy appear vulnerable before fascism has consolidated power. The narrator describes a Europe emptied of its old political actors and faced with five million returning soldiers. In this account, the former generation of liberal orators and moderate politicians has lost authority; survivors and veterans constitute a new political public, and the old methods seem incapable of answering the crisis. The passage does not present this change as a settled democratic renewal. It frames a contest over who can represent the mass of people returning from war and what political order will claim their allegiance.

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s address to his legionnaires sharpens that contest through a contrast between Versailles and Fiume. The peace negotiations stand for an exhausted order of bargaining and distrust, while Fiume is cast as youth, life, collective passion and a future reaching beyond the war dead. The language offers political belonging through shared fervor and sacrifice rather than through democratic deliberation. Yet the narration also notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio as he wished. His rhetoric could dramatize an alternative to the old order, but it could not by itself establish popular consent.

Entering parliament, changing the party

The parliamentary route becomes decisive in 1921. The party ticket is declared closed to discussion and subject to a vote, while Luigi Albertini’s acceptance of the liberal-fascist alliance signals that fascism has moved from the violence of the trenches into the parliamentary chamber. The alliance is not portrayed as proof that liberalism has absorbed or moderated fascism. Rather, it marks a transaction in which established political actors accept cooperation with a movement whose violence remains central to its identity.

The movement’s transformation into a party answers a practical problem of governing, but also exposes the limits of its anti-party pose. Mussolini argues that a country cannot be ruled through an unrestrained movement alone: a party must contain squad violence and gather otherwise incompatible doctrines under one political body. This proposed party of anti-parties is designed both to broaden fascism’s reach and to make it governable. The tension does not disappear. A march of three thousand black-shirted squadristi in military formation demonstrates that the movement can act as an army as well as a party. The choice is therefore not simply between political organization and violence; it is whether political organization can command, channel and deploy violence.

At the founding congress of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini’s program makes the claims of representation expansive. It promises to make Italians into a single national people, embraces an imperial ambition, and declares the state to be fascist. On the question of the masses, it rejects the idea that either the crowd or the individual hero alone makes history: the masses require an interpreter, and fascists claim the role of educating and directing them. This language acknowledges mass politics while placing authority over the meaning and interests of the masses in the hands of the leader and party. The narrator underscores the personal dimension of that authority: Mussolini presents himself as the final point of the program, even while saying that the new organization should learn to stand on its own.

Institutions under pressure

The gap between democratic form and effective restraint becomes particularly visible in the state’s response to fascist armed organization. Ivanoe Bonomi’s government issues a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and attempting to classify fascist paramilitary groups as illegal. Michele Bianchi responds by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable, and the directive appears in Il Popolo d’Italia. The narrative stresses the state’s inability to enforce its own rules: rather than arrest the party secretary and those claiming to command an armed militia, Bonomi sends another circular lamenting that earlier public-order instructions have not been obeyed. Legal authority remains on paper while organized force tests whether it can be made effective.

During the crisis around the March on Rome, the government prepares more drastic measures. Luigi Facta sends defense orders to General Emanuele Pugliese, dispatches arrest instructions to prefects, and has a state-of-siege manifesto posted in Rome. The sequence makes visible a possible exercise of constitutional authority against the insurrection. The later appointment of Mussolini as prime minister, however, shows the political reversal: at thirty-nine, wearing the black shirt of an armed party, he receives the charge of governing despite having little experience in government and having entered the Chamber of Deputies only sixteen months earlier. The narrative’s image of the century beginning and ending in his ascent captures the scale of the transformation without treating appointment through existing institutions as evidence that democratic limits have survived intact.

The parliamentary welcome that follows is itself part of the story. When Mussolini enters the Chamber of Deputies on November 16, 1922, the galleries are full and most deputies rise to applaud. The public spectacle is festive, while the account recalls that in Rome during the preceding fifteen days there had been nineteen dead and twenty seriously injured. The contrast between ovation and recent casualties shows how easily public enthusiasm can obscure the coercion that has shaped the political moment. Mussolini’s image as a new man, the arbiter of chaos and restorer of order, turns the demand for security into a claim for personal authority. In this political theatre, popular acclaim becomes a visible source of legitimacy even as the conditions under which political choices are made grow less free.

Elections, rights and resistance

The Acerbo electoral reform brings the institutional contradiction into the legislature. The proposed rule would give two-thirds of the seats to the list receiving a relative majority. Its passage could therefore allow a victory under altered rules to produce overwhelming parliamentary control, making the next election potentially the last meaningful one. The threat of a second wave of violence hangs over debate, while black-shirted squadristi sit in the galleries. Giovanni Giolitti’s liberal followers accept the proposal in the hope of taming fascism; the narrative sets this accommodation against the danger that the electoral mechanism itself will magnify the governing party’s power.

Mussolini’s parliamentary speech presents fascism as compatible with elections and parliament, promising that elections can bridge the distance between the chamber and the country. He also argues that liberty has never existed as an absolute condition and appeals to the opposition to help give the country a solid government. The speech draws applause from the right and from parts of the left. Its performance matters: the leader presents himself as conciliatory and as the voice of national responsibility while arguing for a political arrangement that gives his movement structural advantage. Elsewhere, the language of order, hierarchy and discipline explicitly displaces liberty as the value to be revered. The book thus distinguishes popular approval, parliamentary procedure and democratic freedom rather than treating them as interchangeable.

Giacomo Matteotti’s letter to Filippo Turati offers a direct counterclaim. He argues that resistance to dictatorship must become more active, that citizens’ rights must be demanded, and that fascism will not voluntarily disarm or restore legality. His reasoning rejects the hope that each new abuse will be followed by a return to constitutional restraint: success, he warns, encourages further abuses. On May 30, 1924, the Chamber records that Matteotti has asked to speak and gives him the floor. The scene opens with a solitary opposition deputy facing murmurs of annoyance and loathing, a stark contrast to the earlier parliamentary ovation for Mussolini. The supplied account establishes the act of speaking and the hostile setting; its larger significance lies in the insistence that parliamentary opposition remains a form of resistance even when the chamber offers no assurance of equal political standing.

The book’s account therefore treats democracy as a contest over both procedure and power. Elections and parliamentary sessions continue, but threats, party violence and rules that concentrate representation change what those procedures can accomplish. Against fascist claims to embody the masses and restore national unity, Matteotti’s appeal insists on rights and active resistance. The contrast leaves democracy neither a mere ritual nor a guaranteed inheritance: it is a political order whose substance depends on whether opposition can speak, compete and invoke the law without being forced to yield to the organized power of the state and party.