Italian Carabinieri Corps

The Italian Carabinieri Corps is presented as an instrument of public order caught between political confrontation and the breakdown of state control. At Milan’s Piazza del Duomo, its cordon briefly separated a socialist procession from a smaller counter-demonstration; in the countryside near San Giovanni in Persiceto, the positioning of its men preceded a deadly confrontation with farmworkers. Across these scenes, the Corps’s presence does not prevent violence and at times becomes part of its escalation.

Public Order and the Limits of Restraint

At Piazza del Duomo, the Carabinieri blocked the outlet from Via dei Mercanti as thousands of socialist marchers approached a much smaller gathering of officers, Arditi, and Futurists. The two groups faced one another on opposite sides of the cordon. When it opened, uniformed officers and Arditi advanced with revolvers; the brief clash began with stones and a few clubs from the socialist side, followed by gunfire from the other. The episode casts the cordon as a fragile boundary: it holds the opposing crowds apart only momentarily, and its opening gives way to a confrontation in which the marchers fall silent and the public-order presence does not prevent the violence.

The Decima Confrontation and Its Political Aftermath

At a rally in Decima di San Giovanni in Persiceto over a collective farm agreement, the Carabinieri intervened after speakers moved from agrarian issues to revolutionary appeals. The officer in charge first removed one speaker from the platform; when a second speaker repeated the appeal, he too was taken down. The crowd included about 1,500 farmhands, while the officer had only twenty men. After a soda siphon struck the wall beside the line of Carabinieri and splintered, the confrontation escalated. The Carabinieri fired about fifty shots, from pistols and machine guns. Eight people died and around thirty were injured; the first speaker was killed with a bayonet. The authorities later described the shooting as self-defense, though most of the dead had been shot in the back.

The deaths prompted the Chamber of Labor to call a three-day general strike across the province, suspending public and private services for seventy-two hours. The episode also drove local business owners, farmers, professionals, public employees, and homeowners to organize independently. On April 8, the Bolognese Association of Social Defense was founded at a meeting promoted by the Chamber of Commerce; a week later its delegation told Prime Minister Nitti that the state had failed to confront socialist violence and declared its readiness to replace the state in self-defense. The Carabinieri’s intervention thus became part of a wider contest over who could claim to preserve public order.

Between State Authority and Fascist Power

In 1919, the Italian Carabinieri Corps stood within a state increasingly willing to enlist the political forces challenging its authority. A confidential government circular urged the Fascists to help suppress revolutionary attempts, including by force, on condition that they accepted command by public officials. The arrangement made the Corps part of a public-order system that was no longer acting alone: the liberal state was authorizing a movement with its own armed formations to assist against mass opposition. In later attempts to regulate political violence, the government’s measures proved difficult to enforce. Bonomi’s December 1921 circular treated truncheons as weapons requiring a license and classified Fascist paramilitary groups as illegal, but a party directive soon asserted that party sections and combat squads formed an inseparable unit.

Local episodes show how unevenly the Corps’s authority operated. In one town, after a night of disorder, Cigheri’s wife arrived with the Carabinieri; Marshal Cocchi and a squad of soldiers escorted Amerigo Dumini and his men to the adjacent barracks while armed townspeople watched from across the piazza. In Cremona, by contrast, Carabinieri and the Royal Guard of Italy allowed Fascists into the prefecture during a power seizure, despite being taken by surprise. Once military reinforcements arrived, the prefect arrested forty of the intruders. The episode exposed a gap between local accommodation and the state’s capacity to reassert control: the Fascists had entered without resistance, yet their hold on the prefecture did not survive the arrival of troops.

By the time the March on Rome was under way, the Carabinieri were one element in a much larger defensive force. The division assigned to protect the capital included soldiers, Carabinieri, finance guards, and the Royal Guard of Italy, altogether 28,000 men with machine guns, artillery, and armored cars. The scale of that force contrasted with the poorly equipped Fascist columns, but it did not settle the political crisis by itself. In Bologna, even after Benito Mussolini had received the king’s message inviting him to form a government, eight Fascists led by Leandro Arpinati were killed in attacks on Carabinieri barracks and ammunition depots. The Corps thus appears both within the state’s remaining defenses and at the center of a contested order in which government authority, local complicity, and armed party action no longer aligned.

Allegiance and the Erosion of Enforcement

The weakening of public authority is measured not only by the forces the state enlisted but also by the loyalties it could no longer command. By the winter of 1921, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi’s effort to regulate political violence had met a direct challenge from the National Fascist Party: its secretary general declared party sections and combat squads inseparable. The narrative also notes that Carabinieri were converting to Fascism and that the Disciplinary Council absolved them. Rules could still be issued, but neither discipline nor allegiance was reliably secured; the state’s instruments of enforcement were themselves becoming part of the political realignment.

During the crisis of October 1922, the Carabinieri appear in a quieter but telling tableau at the railway station. The morning alarm had subsided, Fascist special trains had been diverted, and idle Carabinieri gathered around the buffet windows. Their presence registers the interval between alarm and action: the capital’s defenses existed, but at this moment its public-order forces were waiting while events outside the station continued to unfold.