General Confederation of Labour

The General Confederation of Labour (CGdL) is a labor confederation whose presence in the book is marked by two developments: its role as a forum for socialist labor leadership and the loss of members and affiliated groups to the expanding Fascist movement. It is shown not as an isolated institution but as part of a contested labor landscape in which strikes, union membership, and control of employment became matters of political power.

Position in the Labor Movement

The confederation appears directly through its congress, where socialist reformist leader Rinaldo Rigola addressed delegates on March 1, 1921. His assessment was that public order had become more troubled since the Fascists assumed a role in restoring it. The episode places the CGdL within a movement confronting not only disputes over work but also the growing intervention of organized Fascism in public life.

The surrounding labor system was varied rather than unified. In Bologna, two chambers of labor competed amid increasingly radical politics, while union membership could shape access to basic necessities: people without a union card could be denied bread. In the countryside, peasant leagues organized hiring and regulated work. These bodies and local institutions form the wider setting for the CGdL’s appearances, but the account does not identify them all as branches of the confederation.

Membership and Fascist Competition

The clearest evidence of the CGdL’s weakening is the movement of workers and trade-union groups toward Fascist organizations. After violent events in Bologna and Ferrara, Fascist membership rose sharply: cards sold increased from 1,065 in October and November to 10,860 in December, and the movement reported 20,000 members across 88 sections. At the same time, groups left socialist chambers of labor, and municipal and provincial employees, customs officials, professors, police, teachers, and charity workers gave up their CGdL cards to join the Fascists.

This shift was more than a change in individual affiliation. It brought occupational groups that had previously belonged to organized labor into a rival political network. The account presents fear of social revolution and the appeal of Fascist mobilization as part of this changing environment, while making clear that the confederation’s cards were among the affiliations being abandoned.

Labor Mobilization and Repression

The book also shows the risks facing organized labor beyond the confederation itself. In Ferrara, a massacre was followed by a three-day general strike across the province. The deaths prompted farmers, employers, merchants, professionals, public employees, and homeowners to organize a self-defense association, which then appealed to the government over socialist violence. The sequence shows how labor conflict could widen into a confrontation over who would claim the authority to defend the public.

In the countryside, peasant leagues exercised substantial influence over hiring, work schedules, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. Fascist squads responded with planned expeditions against league organizations, using armed groups and trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. These campaigns targeted the leagues, not the CGdL in the evidence presented, but they demonstrate the coercive conditions in which labor organizations operated.

Declining Influence in a Polarized Conflict

The confederation’s membership losses occurred amid continuing, broad-based labor action. In July 1922, the Labor Alliance called a nationwide general strike in the name of defending political and union liberties, bringing workers’ and peasants’ organizations together. The account does not assign that call specifically to the CGdL; it instead places the confederation within a wider field of labor mobilization and political resistance.

Taken together, the CGdL’s congress, the abandonment of its membership cards, and the surrounding conflicts trace the pressures on organized labor. The confederation remained a recognized platform for labor leadership, but the expansion of Fascist organizations and their efforts to impose order by force made that position increasingly vulnerable.