Fascist Actionism

Fascist Actionism names the priority the fascists gave to action over a settled political identity. In the book’s account, this was not simply a call to energetic conduct: it was a way to avoid binding the movement to consistent principles, while making action itself the basis of its appeal and political method. Its flexibility helped the fascists move between different constituencies and circumstances, but also left them without a defined account of the future they intended to build.

Identity Without a Fixed Program

Cesare Rossi argued that the fascists should turn toward the agrarians and rewrite the Program of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, leaving behind the movement’s left-wing inheritance. Benito Mussolini resisted the premise of Rossi’s argument. For him, defining what the fascists were risked making identity and self-examination more important than the ability to act. He described the movement as an anti-party and anti-political: its identity, in this formulation, did not need to extend into a coherent doctrine.

The program therefore mattered less as a binding plan than as a provisional document. The book presents the San Sepolcro program as an embarrassing preamble whose demands could be set aside when circumstances changed. The movement could be revolutionary or reactionary as opportunity dictated, and could make no firm promises while avoiding the obligation to keep them. Rossi correctly recognized that the fasci had no clear destination; the narrative’s irony is that this apparent weakness became a source of political adaptability rather than an immediate cause of failure.

Action as Political Method

Gabriele D’Annunzio offered a complementary version of the principle: instead of resolving political uncertainty by rewriting a platform, he placed the emphasis on action. His call appealed to young people drawn toward life and motion. In the book’s account, this approach reduced the importance of theoretical disputes: thought gave way to action, and political choice could be made through immediate response rather than a settled program.

At the Teatro Olimpia, Mussolini described the fascists as antidoctrinal, dynamic, practical, and modern. He presented them not as republicans, socialists, democrats, conservatives, or nationalists, but as a synthesis able to take elements from different positions. The speech made the doctrine’s practical consequence explicit: the movement would not accept a preconceived body of ideas as its guide. Yet this flexibility did not mean that Mussolini promised to serve the bourgeoisie. He rejected the expectation that fascists would act as its bodyguard, especially for the nouveau riche, and argued that those unable to defend themselves should not assume the movement would do so for them.

Actionism also had an organizational and coercive dimension. In Bologna, where socialist organizations exerted strong influence in the city and countryside, Mussolini pressed Leandro Arpinati to manage the local fascio despite its tiny membership, lack of office funds, and republican defections. He urged the creation of civic-defense militias in response to strikes. The contrast between Arpinati’s preference for action and his discomfort with excessive talk fits the movement’s broader rejection of prolonged ideological definition in favor of local organization and intervention.

Mobilization, Resources, and Force

The principle took a more organized form in the Ferrara countryside. The book describes the peasant leagues’ control of hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crop planting, against a background of insecure seasonal employment and intense conflict over labor conditions. In Emilia, socialists controlled 223 of 280 municipalities; farmhands worked an average of 120 days a year. These conditions show the material setting in which fascist actionism operated: political mobilization competed with existing organizations that already coordinated rural work and collective pressure.

A Ferrara punitive expedition in January 1921 was planned using military methods. Dozens of armed men were to strike multiple rural targets at once, relying on surprise and trucks supplied by the Ferrara Agrarian Association. The episode shows actionism joined to resources and advance organization, not merely spontaneous fervor. It also shows the movement’s reliance on agrarian support even as Mussolini had rejected the notion that fascism should simply defend bourgeois interests.

In May, the method shifted from a targeted expedition to mass mobilization. Beginning at midnight, thousands of impoverished farmworkers set out from scattered farmhouses on foot, bicycles, wagons, and barges. Ferrara awoke to an occupation by roughly fifty thousand laborers. The march paralyzed the city: telephone lines were cut, schools requisitioned for billeting, and shops and businesses ordered closed. Its success depended on coordination across the countryside and on the visible concentration of people in the urban center. Action here meant the ability to convert local networks and material hardship into a demonstration of power.

Crisis, Spectacle, and Political Direction

Actionism drew force from the broader postwar crisis. The book depicts Europe as a stage emptied by mass death and confronted by millions of returning veterans. The old political class appears exhausted, while survivors and demobilized soldiers form a potential constituency for new forms of collective action. D’Annunzio’s contrast between the negotiations at Versailles and the passion of Fiume similarly recasts postwar politics as a choice between a tired old order and a supposedly youthful, vital future.

The movement’s public language turned this contrast into a spectacle of national renewal. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini’s panoramic speech connected violence, national unity, empire, the state, the masses, and the health of the national bloodline. He called for the absorption of regional identities into an Italian nation and declared that the fascists were the state. In this vision, political action was not only a means of gaining influence; it was also presented as the process through which a renewed nation would be made.

The book later depicts Mussolini as the public embodiment of that promise: a new man set against the supposedly senile politicians of old Italy, an arbiter who would turn disorder into peace. A commemorative speech in Piazza Belgioioso recast the movement’s growth as a passage from a few faithful supporters to legions, from a small group to a multitude, and from people to nation and state. This rhetoric gives actionism a regenerative meaning, but the earlier episodes keep its practical mechanism in view: political flexibility, organization, access to resources, mass mobilization, and force. The movement’s ability to act without a consistent program was both its freedom and its unresolved contradiction.