Holy Sepulchre Program

The Program of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was the platform associated with the movement’s first phase: a program of social and economic reform that still retained a socialist inflection, even as it advanced a nationalist and armed conception of political life. The book presents it not as a settled blueprint but as a point of departure. Within a year, its proposals had been recast for electoral use, and at the May 1920 congress in Milan Benito Mussolini declared a shift that left almost nothing of the original program in place.

Platform and political constituency

The program’s most concrete enumeration appears in the account of the Fascist electoral ticket. Once the decision was made to run candidates on a separate list, selection took only ten minutes. Eighteen of the nineteen candidates had fought at the front; the list included volunteers, decorated veterans, wounded men, and disabled men. That composition tied the platform to the experience and public standing of combatants, rather than presenting it simply as an abstract party manifesto.

The ticket’s platform is described as the San Sepolcro program, cushioned in a socialist framework that Mussolini had not yet abandoned. Its proposals included abolition of the Senate, tax reform, the reduction of great fortunes, confiscation of ecclesiastical property, provision for the wounded, disabled, and veterans, and an armed nation. These demands gathered institutional reform, redistribution, care for those marked by war, and military preparedness into one package. The combination made the program politically elastic: it could appeal to veterans and reform-minded voters while giving the movement a distinct public identity.

Its campaign presentation reinforced that identity. The electoral symbol was a French-made hand grenade issued to the Arditi by the Italian army, and the manifesto directed voters to mark the grenade on the ballot. The image made the armed nation legible at a glance, turning a political platform into a recognizable emblem. At the same time, the list included figures from different social and cultural worlds: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, labor leader Lanzillo, industrialist De Magistris, and Arturo Toscanini. Marinetti persuaded Toscanini to accept candidacy; the conductor also contributed 30,000 lire to the list. The platform therefore circulated not only as a collection of proposals but through a carefully assembled electoral coalition.

A platform in a period of crisis

The program’s early appeal took shape amid a wider struggle over the postwar order. The book describes veterans returning to a political landscape in which old leaders seemed spent and millions of former soldiers formed a new mass constituency. In that setting, a platform that joined veteran provision to social reform and national force could speak to the consequences of the war while claiming to represent a new political beginning. Its promise was not simply to restore the prewar order: it offered reform, but also an armed national community and a forceful break with established political habits.

The surrounding conflict made those proposals more than electoral language. In Bologna, labor organizations and socialist influence shaped both city and countryside; in Ferrara, organized farmworkers secured control over hiring and working conditions, while strikes and confrontations prompted local opponents to organize in response. In Milan, a confidential government circular urged Fascist cooperation in suppressing revolutionary attempts, including by force, under official command. These developments show the setting in which the movement’s reform language coexisted with organized coercion and a growing role in public order. The evidence does not make the program itself a plan for each later action; rather, it places its social promises beside political practices that were rapidly changing the movement’s character.

The May 1920 turn

At the second national congress of the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan, the distance between the initial program and the emerging movement became explicit. Benito Mussolini argued for cooperation between productive workers and the bourgeoisie, acceptance of the monarchy if necessary, and a political strategy that respected the force of the Vatican. The account stresses the speed of the change: in less than twenty minutes, almost nothing remained of the San Sepolcro program. Of the nineteen members of the first central committee, only ten were reelected; two of those, Marinetti and Carli, resigned the following day, while the nine new members came from the provinces and were described as right-wing.

The congress’s closing argument recast the movement’s political task. The bourgeois ship was not to be sunk, but taken over; large strikes were expected to fail, and the immediate issue was restoration. This language differed sharply from the platform’s redistributive measures and its accommodation of veterans. The shift did not erase the movement’s earlier vocabulary so much as reorder its priorities: rather than pursuing the platform’s social program as a limit on established power, Fascism would work with the bourgeois order and seek command of its institutions and machinery.

From program to governing doctrine

The book contrasts the early platform with the broader creed Benito Mussolini presented after the founding of the National Fascist Party. In that later vision, Fascism claimed to synthesize political traditions, complete the nationalization of Italians, and orient the country toward imperial greatness. It also asserted that the state belonged to the Fascists and treated the masses as a constituency to be educated and directed. These later claims are not presented as items in the original platform; their importance lies in showing how far the movement’s political vocabulary had expanded beyond the program’s specific reforms.

The contrast is also visible in the account of the movement’s mobilizing power. In Ferrara, thousands of impoverished farm laborers were organized to march into the city in May 1922, arriving in a column after setting out from the countryside by foot, bicycle, wagon, and barge. That episode involved a different political setting and should not be confused with the platform’s electoral proposals. Yet it makes visible a central change: Fascist politics increasingly relied on disciplined organization and mass action, while the early program’s measures became less prominent in the movement’s stated priorities.

Significance and limits

The program matters as a record of an unsettled political moment, not as a reliable forecast of the later regime. Its combination of Senate abolition, wealth reduction, confiscation of ecclesiastical property, veteran provision, and an armed nation joined reformist aims to militant nationalism. The breadth of that combination helped the movement address more than one constituency, but it also left the platform vulnerable to rapid revision as political alliances and opportunities changed.

The book’s chronology makes that instability central to the program’s significance. First it served as a common platform for a combatant-heavy electoral list; at the Milan congress, it was displaced by accommodation with bourgeois interests, the monarchy, and the Vatican; later Fascist doctrine claimed a much wider project of national transformation and state power. The program thus stands at the threshold between a movement still speaking in the language of social reform and one increasingly organized around restoration, political command, and mass mobilization.