Normalization

Normalization names the attempt to make Fascism governable without making it gentle. In the book, it is a struggle over how a movement born amid postwar upheaval and street violence can become a national political force: discipline its armed followers, absorb its opponents, and present command as the answer to chaos. The promise of order never quite resolves the tension at its center. Fascism seeks to contain violence while continuing to claim it as the source of its authority.

A movement formed in crisis

The project begins in a society portrayed as exhausted by war and crowded with its aftermath. The returning soldiers are not a minor constituency but five million veterans pressing back into political life. For them, the old liberal and parliamentary figures belong to a discredited past; the emerging division is between those who had ruled and those who would take their place. This sense of historical rupture gives normalization its double task: to give the mass of survivors a political form, and to make that form appear capable of ending the instability that produced it.

The early scenes show how little separates political mobilization from confrontation. On April 15, 1919, a breakaway column from a socialist procession moves toward Milan’s cathedral square, where socialists and a smaller gathering of officers, Arditi, and Fascists face each other across a Carabinieri cordon. The confrontation lasts about a minute: stones and clubs come from the socialist side; gunfire from the other. The episode makes visible the gulf between a procession still imagining liberation and men accustomed to daily killing. A later rally in Milan turns a military Very rocket, once used to illuminate no man’s land, into the signal for Ferruccio Vecchi’s address. The spectacle brings the language and equipment of war into public politics. Normalization therefore begins from a movement whose appeal and methods are already inseparable from the memory and performance of violence.

The conflict also has a material and local dimension. In Bologna, the Socialist Party’s reach through labor organizations, cooperatives, and rural leagues leaves Fascists with only six members, no affordable office, and an organization described as unraveling. Meanwhile, labor leagues exert decisive control over hiring and working conditions in the countryside. The account of Emilia’s 223 socialist-controlled municipalities and Ferrara’s 81,000 league members conveys the scale of the rival organization. Fascist normalization is not simply a matter of changing rhetoric: it is an attempt to displace existing networks of authority and make a fragmented movement competitive across both town and countryside.

From passion to national renewal

The language of normalization competes with another political promise: that the postwar crisis can be overcome through a new beginning. On New Year’s Day 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio presents 1919 as a year of passion rather than peace, setting Fiume’s youth, light, and future against the exhaustion and distrust associated with Versailles. The contrast captures the attraction of a politics that treats upheaval as the opening of a new age, not merely a disorder to be settled. It also exposes a limit: D’Annunzio’s claim to speak for the future does not persuade Italy to follow him, and his chosen refuge becomes a sign of political isolation as well as heroic aspiration.

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini offers a more comprehensive version of national renewal. His program joins the absorption of liberalism to the claim that violence has buried earlier political methods; it imagines Italians united beyond regional identities and links national greatness to empire. It also makes the state an explicit object of identification and treats the masses as needing both service and direction. This is not normalization through retreat from radical politics. It is a bid to gather diverse constituencies under a single national project, while assigning the movement and its leader the authority to define what that project requires.

The same logic turns political belonging into a public ritual. Five days before the party gathering, the Unknown Soldier is buried in a ceremony that makes one unidentified body stand for the war dead as a whole. The account presents the marble coffin as an altar for an experience of killing made collective and impersonal. In Rome, the party’s founders kneel at the grave while Fascist squads provoke street clashes elsewhere in the city. The juxtaposition is central to the idea of normalization: solemn national ceremony and uncontrolled factional violence coexist, while the ceremony helps make a political movement appear to embody the nation.

Discipline without demobilization

In March, Mussolini’s appeal shifts back toward confrontation when Luigi Sturzo resists the government’s terms. The book describes a return from the conciliatory posture associated with normalization to a more bellicose politics, in which force and consensus are treated as complementary and liberty as something to be controlled. The change is not presented as an accidental lapse. It reveals the limit of a version of normalization that depends on political consent but reserves coercion as its guarantee.

The party’s internal disputes make that limit tangible. In 1924, Massimo Rocca argues for normalization: Fascists should reconcile with the country they have assaulted, and the party should make peace with the Italy that exists. The party chiefs, led by Roberto Farinacci, expel him. Their victory lasts only hours. Mussolini demands the resignation of the executive council responsible, and the council complies. The sequence shows that normalization is also a contest over who may define the movement’s direction: hard-line leaders can punish the proposal, but Mussolini can overrule them when their decision threatens his authority.

Efforts to impose discipline reach the Fascist militia itself. Italo Balbo administers examinations on regulations and tactics to men who had fought beside him, recording poor performance rather than exempting former comrades. The need for such tests underscores the gap between the movement’s martial self-image and its uneven capacity for organized command. At the same time, rival Fascist groups clash in Rome and Piacenza, and Farinacci defies orders before withdrawing a threatened resignation after Mussolini intervenes. Normalization thus means more than making the movement acceptable to outsiders: it also means trying to make its local armed forces answer to a central leadership.

The leader as an image of order

The movement’s promise of renewal is increasingly condensed into Mussolini himself. The narrative depicts crowds pressing around him in Rome and presents him as the youthful, vigorous figure set against an exhausted political class. His public image turns the claim to restore order into a personal spectacle: a leader who is said to command the forces of disorder because he embodies their strength. That image offers a vivid solution to the crisis, but its emphasis on personal command also complicates the stated goal of building a disciplined organization that can stand on its own.

Mussolini’s return to the symbolic sites of the movement makes the transformation visible. In Piazza Belgioioso, where his first Fascist rally drew only a few hundred, he addresses a multitude assembled after a military review. He presents the growth from small groups to legions as a collective revival, and the crowd answers his question about future sacrifice with an emphatic affirmative. The scene makes expansion feel like a shared passage from marginality to national power. Its religious language and synchronized response reveal how political belonging is being staged as more than agreement with a program: it is performed as a promise of loyalty and endurance.

Yet the demand to control violence does not erase its consequences or its opponents. When Giacomo Matteotti’s remains are returned to Fratta Polesine in August 1924, tens of thousands of workers mourn him and call for vengeance, justice, and retribution. His wife, Velia, has insisted on burial in his home region rather than a political funeral in Rome. The funeral’s public grief stands against the spectacle of unity and discipline cultivated by Fascist politics. It shows that normalization cannot simply declare a settled national community into being; the violence on which the movement has built its authority continues to generate resistance, mourning, and rival claims to the meaning of liberty.