The Italian General Strike of 20 July 1919, known as the scioperissimo, was intended as a show of solidarity with Soviet Russia and a protest against foreign support for counterrevolution there. Its significance in the book lies in the gap between the approaching cataclysm imagined by its participants and the limited action that actually followed. While socialist leaders presented revolution as imminent, Nicola Bombacci told workers that this particular strike was a demonstration, not the expropriating strike. The stoppage came to little, but the days around it exposed a country where even a planned protest could prompt bomb plots, political maneuvering, and expectations of insurrection.

Causes and preparations

The call for the strike was framed as a European protest against intervention in Russia. By the eve of the action, however, the international support its organizers expected had weakened: the French General Confederation of Labour and British trade unions withdrew, leaving Italian workers to demonstrate in support of their Russian counterparts. Socialist newspapers nevertheless gave the event an expansive, urgent frame. The Turin edition of Avanti! announced that the red flag would triumph, while the Florentine socialist paper La Difesa urged proletarians to make imminent action decisive. The rhetoric amplified the sense that the stoppage might become more than a demonstration.

Violence was already being prepared on the opposing side. On the eve of the strike, Cesare Rossi, formerly a leading figure in the most militant wing of a railway workers’ union, went to Milan Central Station to retrieve ten bombs hidden there since before the war. The explosives had originally been intended for sabotage during a railway strike. Now, angered by the announced socialist stoppage, Rossi planned to use them against the offices of Avanti! and the labor union headquarters. He carried the bombs one by one to an accomplice waiting with a suitcase on the station square; the explosives were then kept in the accomplice’s home on Via Durini, near the newspaper offices.

Benito Mussolini stopped the plan before it was carried out. Rossi defended the proposed attack by arguing that the newspaper’s printers were militant socialists and that only enemies of fascism went to the union. The episode does not establish that the strike itself produced a bombing or a confrontation: the bombs remained hidden, and Mussolini intervened. It does show how the approaching stoppage helped turn political hostility into a concrete plan for an attack on labor institutions, and how the line between organized politics and clandestine violence was already dangerously thin.

Mussolini’s competing course

Mussolini opposed the scioperissimo while also trying to keep open a route into electoral politics. At the first conference of the fasci of Central and Northern Italy, held in Milan on 17 July, he took a hard line against the strike and against socialist agitators. The attendance was small in relation to the movement’s registered membership: no more than a dozen cities were represented, although the fasci had members in a few hundred. The conference nevertheless marked a turn toward a more forceful anti-socialist stance.

At the same time, Mussolini renewed his proposal for a pre-electoral committee with factions of left-wing interventionism. Leaders who had supported Italy’s entry into the war in 1915, despite the official socialist position, met on the eve of the stoppage in the great hall of Liceo Beccaria in Milan. Mussolini proposed a social and economic reorganization centered on workers’ welfare but free of Bolshevik influence. The gathering briefly seemed to offer a way past old divisions and even the prospect of standing together in the November elections. Thus, opposition to the strike did not mean that Mussolini had abandoned political coalition-building; he was trying to resist the socialist mobilization while assembling a different alliance.

His dealings with the authorities pointed in another direction. Acting on his instructions, Michele Bianchi had reached an agreement with Milan’s prefect to make the fasci available for maintaining public order. The prefect disclosed a confidential government circular that urged fascist cooperation in suppressing revolutionary attempts, even by violent means, on condition that the fascists accept the authorities’ command. The liberal state was therefore prepared to use fascist organizations against the advance of the left. The strike’s approach brought these parallel strategies into view: Mussolini opposed the workers’ action, negotiated with left interventionists, and made fascist forces available to the state.

The Milan demonstration

On 20 July, a crowd gathered at 11 a.m. outside the Labor Office on Via Manfredo Fanti, in premises made available by the Humanitarian Society. Red flags rose over the assembly. The atmosphere was described not as mutinous but as festive: workers smoked and enjoyed an unusual idle morning, while troops on horseback patrolled the surrounding streets without encountering an opposing force. The scale of the expectations surrounding the strike therefore contrasted with the comparatively calm character of the Milan gathering.

The meeting’s speakers represented different currents within socialism. Claudio Treves, the refined leader of the reformist faction, and Giacinto Menotti Serrati, head of the maximalist section, had already addressed the crowd. The workers were waiting for Bombacci, whose standing among them gave his words particular weight. Born to a humble farming family, he had been a seminarian, an elementary schoolteacher, a trade unionist, and a leader of the maximalist faction that took command of the Socialist Party after the war. His political work among farm laborers and industrial workers, including women in cotton mills, helped make him a trusted advocate for the poor.

Bombacci spoke in the patient manner of a schoolteacher. He interpreted the war as the signal that revolution had entered Europe and described the old order as approaching collapse. Russia offered the example of a revolution already accomplished; in Italy, he argued, the leaders of the party and the General Confederation of Labour could form its vanguard and army. His language gave the crowd an image of imminent transformation, and the assembly responded with enthusiasm, though its excitement was accompanied by unease about whether a new life was truly beginning.

Demonstration, not revolution

After pausing for water, Bombacci qualified the promise his speech had seemed to make. The strike of 20 July, he explained, was meant to be a demonstration, not the expropriating strike. It might prepare the way for such a strike, but it did not constitute one. He still presented revolution as a historical necessity, likely to emerge from changing economic and political conditions, but asked the workers to wait. The clarification mattered: it drew a boundary between solidarity in action that day and the decisive seizure of power that some in the crowd had been led to anticipate.

The book makes the result plain. The scioperissimo came to nothing, and the anticipated revolution was postponed. Mussolini attributed its failure to socialist leaders’ timidity and to what he regarded as Italy’s incapacity for revolution. He contrasted the Italian summer with the Russian seizure of the Winter Palace in 1917, using the difference to mock the recurring postponement of action. This judgment is partisan, but it captures the event’s central reversal: a stoppage announced in the language of imminent decisive action ended without becoming a revolution.

The episode also leaves two opposed readings of political patience. To Bombacci, delay was a tactical distinction between a demonstration and an expropriating strike that was not yet due. To Mussolini, the strike’s failure showed that revolutionary language could not by itself produce revolutionary action. Between these positions stood the workers who had gathered in Milan: urged to expect a transformed world, then told that the decisive moment lay ahead. The strike’s immediate result was limited, but its preparation and rhetoric reveal how the postwar conflict linked mass mobilization, fear of revolution, state cooperation with fascists, and the search for political alliances.