Italy emerges as both a parliamentary state and a contested social landscape: a country where elections, official decrees, and legislative speeches continue, even as organized violence increasingly determines what those institutions can accomplish. The account follows the weakening of liberal authority from the return of millions of soldiers after the war to the Fascist entry into parliament and the isolation of its opponents.

A country remade by war and mass politics

The postwar setting is defined first by absence and return. The dead of the Carso, Ortigara, and the Isonzo fill the narrator’s image of a sacred mound, while five million returning veterans approach the country’s borders as a political force. The old liberal order appears unable to answer them: established politicians and moderates are cast as figures of a discredited past, confronted by a mass of survivors who have learned to speak in brief, forceful bursts and then fall silent. Italy’s crisis is thus presented not simply as a contest among parties but as a struggle over who can represent a society transformed by mass death and demobilization.

A rival image of the postwar future appears in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s address to his legionnaires at the beginning of 1920. He sets the passion and imagined renewal of Fiume against the exhausted diplomacy of Versailles, linking the city to youth, faith, and the future generations still to come. Yet the account immediately qualifies the force of that vision: Italians have not followed D’Annunzio, and his claim to embody youth is undercut by the political success of the “reds.” Italy is therefore not represented as united behind a single national myth. Its competing movements make incompatible claims on the country’s future.

Rural conflict and organized mobilization

The divide between town and countryside is especially sharp in the account of Bologna and Ferrara. Bologna’s Fascist organization is described as nearly collapsing after its republican founders depart: six members remain, without enough money to rent an office, and Leandro Arpinati receives his mail at the trattoria where he eats lunch. At the same time, the city is marked by labor militancy, competing chambers of labor, pressure to occupy elegant homes, and the denial of bread to people without union cards. The middle classes and employers face mounting pressure, with some business owners preferring to sell rather than remain exposed to ruin.

In the surrounding countryside, socialist leagues and their associated institutions have much wider reach. Ferrara’s farm laborers, tenants, and sharecroppers press for control over hiring and working conditions. In Emilia, socialists control 223 of 280 municipalities; farmhands average only 120 days of work a year, making employment conditions a question of survival as well as political power. The leagues regulate labor placement, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. Their compulsory rules can also punish those who accept lower wages: a baker may refuse them bread, neighbors may avoid them, and they may be driven to emigrate. By mid-May, Ferrara’s leagues of proletarian unity have 81,000 registered members, more than twice their number a decade earlier. Their gains extend beyond wages to recruitment, crop choices, and the terms on which landowners can use their own land.

Fascist organization grows in this climate through resources and coordinated force. On January 23, 1921, a punitive expedition sets out from Ferrara toward rural communities, using trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association and a plan to strike several peasant leagues at once. The operation is organized around surprise and armed concentration rather than an improvised local clash. Its preparations also reveal divisions within the Fascist movement: Olao Gaggioli, founder of Ferrara’s Fascio and a veteran of both the war and Fiume, has resigned in protest against Benito Mussolini’s break with D’Annunzio and the agrarians’ influence.

A later mobilization brings the countryside physically into Ferrara. Beginning at midnight on May 11, thousands of impoverished farm laborers travel on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges toward the city. By morning, an estimated fifty thousand have arrived. Italo Balbo’s forces control the movement, cut telephone lines, requisition schools for lodging, and close shops and businesses. The occupation paralyzes the city and surrounds the castle with a mass of hungry demonstrators. The episode makes rural numbers and organization visible as direct political leverage, while also showing how Fascist leaders could coordinate those forces for a planned confrontation.

Electoral entry and the weakening of the state

The May 1921 election brings Fascism into parliament through a process still formally electoral. After prolonged negotiations with Giovanni Giolitti’s emissaries, Cesarino Rossi secures places for eighty Fascist candidates on national lists; at least forty are elected. The results leave the Socialists the largest party, with 25 percent of the vote, while the Popular Party holds 20 percent, the Communists receive 3 percent, and the Republicans 2 percent. The national bloc reaches only 47 percent. The account nevertheless identifies the Fascists as the winners: their elected deputies include young squad commanders, and their arrival marks the entry of armed political organizers into parliamentary life.

That entry is accompanied by lethal violence. On election day alone, clashes in several cities leave twenty-nine people dead and 104 wounded. The narrative links this bloodshed to the movement’s appeal among new sympathizers and small landowners, while presenting the result as a failure of Giolitti’s attempt to use Fascists against the Socialists and then contain them. Instead, parliament is divided among hostile parties and factions. Mussolini’s own electoral success is striking: he receives 197,000 votes at the top of the Milan list and 173,000 in Bologna, placing third among the ten leading national candidates.

The state’s inability to enforce its own rules becomes more explicit under Ivanoe Bonomi. On December 15, he issues a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and including Fascist paramilitary groups among illegal formations. Michele Bianchi, the National Fascist Party’s newly elected secretary general, counters by declaring that party sections and combat squads are inseparable; the directive is published openly in Il Popolo d’Italia. Rather than arrest those claiming to maintain an armed militia, the government issues a further circular on December 21 complaining that its public-order instructions have not been obeyed. Even the routine display of clubs and maces during Sunday promenades remains beyond its effective control.

In 1922, a general strike called by the Labor Alliance is presented as a final attempt to defend political and trade-union liberties. Its organizers call it a legalitarian strike, but advance disclosure disrupts their plans. The king summons Luigi Facta and presses him to form a new cabinet without the Socialists; Facta produces a ministry nearly identical to its predecessor. Fascist leaders exploit the strike as an opportunity to challenge state authority, issuing an ultimatum that threatens to replace a government they describe as impotent. Mussolini, meanwhile, publicly promises to contain the squadristi as he seeks entry into government by legal means, while privately ordering Roberto Farinacci to demobilize from Cremona and threatening him when he initially refuses. The contrast exposes the double pressure shaping national politics: public claims of legality coexist with the mobilization and coercion of armed squads.

Parliamentary spectacle and the narrowing of opposition

During the crisis of the March on Rome, Facta’s government prepares a state of siege intended to place defense of the capital under military authority. Shortly after six in the morning, Facta sends General Emanuele Pugliese written defense orders; a telegram directing prefects to arrest those responsible for sedition follows, and by 8:30 a.m. a manifesto announcing the state of siege is posted in Rome. These measures show that constitutional mechanisms have not disappeared, but their outcome depends on royal assent. The king’s signature is still required for the planned response to take effect.

Fifteen days after the march, parliament receives Mussolini amid a packed chamber and public galleries. Deputies other than those of the left rise to applaud; the galleries join them. The festive spectacle of the new government’s arrival stands beside a less celebratory record: during those same fifteen days, Rome has had nineteen people killed and twenty seriously injured. The rapid reframing of the march as a bloodless or comic revolution threatens to make that violence disappear from public memory even as the new government is welcomed inside the legislature.

The narrowing of opposition remains visible in the Chamber of Deputies on May 30, 1924, when Giacomo Matteotti is given the floor. His four years in office have included 106 lengthy speeches, often devoted to finance and budgets; he is nevertheless widely regarded as irritating and obsessive, including by members of his own party. The murmuring begins before he speaks, making his isolation part of the scene. Italy’s parliament remains a place where an opponent can formally address the chamber, but the reception surrounding Matteotti shows how little procedural access guarantees political acceptance or safety. Across these episodes, the country’s institutional continuity is real but increasingly hollow: votes are counted, decrees are drafted, and speeches are delivered while violence and intimidation reshape the conditions under which political competition takes place.