Liberal state

The liberal state is the embattled political order against which Fascism defines itself and whose collapse makes its rise possible. In the book, it is not merely an opponent in political argument: it is an authority whose laws and institutions remain visible while their power to enforce rules, protect political competition, and contain organized violence steadily diminishes. Fascism calls that order an empty mask and claims the task of creating a state anew; the narrative shows how that claim becomes credible as the existing state repeatedly fails to act decisively.

A discredited order

The state’s crisis is set against a wider postwar sense of historical exhaustion. The returning veterans appear as a mass pressing against the borders of a Europe whose established political figures have lost their authority. Liberals are grouped among the old political generation, associated with delay and the fear of confronting an approaching crisis. The contrast is not simply between one party and another: it is between a worn-out order and a projected future in which the veterans, and those who can organize them, will determine what comes next.

The contrast is given a vivid parallel in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of 1919. He makes Fiume signify youth, life, and a new beginning, while Versailles stands for a Europe weakened by suspicion and exhausted negotiation. The narrative also registers the failure of that promise to command Italy: D’Annunzio’s appeal does not carry the country with him. The scene helps establish a political atmosphere in which the liberal order’s procedures look old and ineffectual, while claims of passion, youth, and national renewal possess a potent appeal.

The fascist diagnosis and its promise

Fascist rhetoric turns this atmosphere into a case against liberal government. In September 1922, Benito Mussolini presents the liberal state as a mask with nothing behind it. He attacks its willingness to extend liberty even to those who would use it to overthrow the system, while insisting that universal suffrage may continue. The distinction is consequential: voting is not formally abolished in this account, but Fascism promises a policy of reaction and severity that divides Italians into indifferent people who stay home, sympathizers who may circulate, and enemies who may not. Electoral procedure remains in view, yet political freedom is narrowed by the threat of exclusion and coercion.

The promised replacement is not simply a better-working version of the old liberal state. At the Fascist National Party’s founding congress, Mussolini describes Fascism as a synthesis that can absorb liberalism after violence has buried earlier methods. He calls for the nationalization of Italians, invokes imperial expansion, and incorporates the Roman Church into the imperial vision. He also declares that Fascists are the state. His economic position, by contrast, is described as liberal in the classical sense. This combination makes the break selective: liberal economic language can remain, even as political liberty and the limits on state power are repudiated.

The language of renewal gives the repudiation emotional force. Mussolini is presented as the vigorous new man set against the exhausted politicians of old Italy, and the rise of Fascism as rebirth after decline. At a later commemorative gathering, he describes the transformation from a small group into legions, from a people into a nation, and from a nation into a state. In this vision, the state is not chiefly a framework of restraints and competing rights. It is the culmination of national unity and expansion, brought into being by a disciplined movement.

Institutions present, authority failing

The account tests Fascist claims against the state’s practical response to organized violence. In December 1921, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi tries to restrict the squads through a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and including Fascist paramilitary groups among illegal formations. Within forty-eight hours, Michele Bianchi, the newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, counters that party sections and combat squads are inseparable; the directive appears publicly in Il Popolo d’Italia. The state does not arrest the party leadership for openly asserting an armed organization. Bonomi instead issues another circular complaining that his public-order instructions have not been obeyed, including the prohibition on the routine carrying of clubs and maces on Sunday promenades.

This failure is more than administrative disarray. The state’s authority depends on its ability to make public rules effective, yet here it cannot ensure compliance with its own instructions. The narrative notes that the Carabinieri are converting to Fascism, a Disciplinary Council absolves them, and the judiciary is impotent. The institutions have not vanished; their inability to act coherently makes their continued existence look increasingly ceremonial. Against this background, the Fascist claim that the war has not ended acquires political meaning: the squads behave as though armed conflict continues, while the state lacks the means or will to impose a common peace.

The advance toward Rome sharpens the contradiction. Fascist leaders describe the capital as already infected and the march as a necessary attack on an inept liberal order. Luigi Facta, meanwhile, continues to hope for Fascist participation in government. On the morning of the crisis, he sends General Emanuele Pugliese written orders to defend Rome, has arrest orders for those responsible for sedition sent to the prefects, and prepares the state-of-siege notification and a public manifesto. The sequence shows that the government can still issue orders and prepare an exceptional legal measure; it also shows how late and precarious its response has become. The contemplated measure requires the king’s signature, and the state’s capacity to defend itself hangs on a decision not yet secured.

From parliamentary inclusion to insurrection

The liberal order is also weakened by the political choices made within its own parliamentary system. In 1921, acceptance of the Fascists into the national blocs marks, for Mussolini, their passage from the trenches into Parliament. A liberal senator and newspaper publisher who had resisted that inclusion now urges readers to tolerate the alliance between liberals and Fascists. The episode does not show the old order simply defeated from outside: established politicians and institutions help normalize the movement they had treated as a threat. Parliamentary entry offers Fascism a route into recognized politics without requiring it to abandon the violence on which its power rests.

After the March on Rome, Benito Mussolini describes the outcome as evidence that the state in Italy no longer existed. His formulation turns institutional failure into retrospective justification: had the state truly wished to defend itself, he says, it could have done so and would have won. The contemporary reaction recorded in the book is less triumphant. La Stampa describes a national wound opened by years of treating violence as a means of advancement or solution, and Luigi Albertini condemns the public’s acquiescent indifference to the insurrection and the collapse of state authority. The same events can thus be narrated as a Fascist seizure made possible by state absence and as a public humiliation of the state’s remaining powers.

Yet parliamentary forms persist. Fifteen days after the march, the Chamber of Deputies is crowded for Mussolini’s appearance as head of government; most deputies rise to applaud, while representatives of the left remain seated. The spectacle of institutional welcome stands beside the cost that threatens to disappear from memory: during those fifteen days, Rome has had nineteen dead and twenty seriously injured. The narrative’s juxtaposition makes the chamber’s continued operation no proof that political life has returned to normal. It instead shows how the appearance of a parliamentary transfer can eclipse the violence that has shaped it.

A state hollowed out, not simply gone

The liberal state’s decline is therefore both material and representational. It loses practical authority when orders go unenforced and armed party formations operate openly; it loses legitimacy when liberals admit the Fascists into electoral alliances; and it loses narrative ground when Fascism recasts weakness as evidence that a new, stronger state must be created. The old institutions continue to convene, issue orders, and receive political leaders, but the conditions under which they can constrain those leaders have deteriorated.

The later parliamentary scene in May 1924 preserves this tension. The Chamber’s president grants Giacomo Matteotti the floor, and the formal procedure of debate is still present. The book gives no content of his speech in this moment, so the significance lies in the limited fact of the scene: parliamentary opposition can still formally speak, even within a political order transformed by the preceding years of violence and Fascist consolidation. The liberal state is not represented as disappearing in a single stroke. Its vocabulary and machinery endure, while its capacity to guarantee meaningful liberty and resist coercion is progressively emptied out.