October 24, 1917

October 24, 1917, is the date the book returns to as a marker of Italy’s military defeat at Caporetto and the end of an old political world. Recalled after the war by Benito Mussolini, it joins battlefield loss to the upheaval that followed: millions of veterans returning to a country whose politics increasingly turned on mass mobilization, violence, and competing promises of national renewal.

The Date as a Rupture

In Mussolini’s retrospective account, October 24, 1917, stands behind him as Caporetto: the death throes of an era and, in his formulation, the greatest military defeat of all time. He describes an army of a million soldiers destroyed over a weekend. The date functions less as a passing calendar reference than as a dividing line: the old order has suffered a defeat so great that its political language and familiar leaders seem unable to command what comes next.

That sense of rupture expands beyond the battlefield. The postwar landscape is presented as a Europe emptied of its established political figures and crowded instead by survivors. Five million returning veterans press toward the borders, while the prospect of further hardship and conflict remains. In this account, the defeated do not simply return to civilian life; they become the human substance of a new mass politics. The scale of the return gives the date a continuing presence in the narrative, even as the story moves into later years.

Defeat and the Politics of the Survivors

The remembered battlefield is part of a larger landscape of loss. The narrative evokes the dead of the Carso and the Isonzo, and presents the postwar audience as a public of former soldiers and survivors. Its members speak in short, forceful bursts, then fall silent; they are portrayed as people who have come back from the war but do not fit readily into ordinary political life. Mussolini identifies himself as their protector and as a man suited to what comes after the old era.

That claim is also a political calculation. The veterans are described not as a uniform constituency with a settled program, but as a heterogeneous gathering that includes the disaffected, the dispossessed, and men drawn to the myth of combat as well as to combat itself. Mussolini’s account holds attraction and contempt together: he wants this following, while also looking down on it. The date’s meaning therefore lies partly in the tension between the scale of the sacrifice and the uncertain ideas of those who survived it.

The wider postwar crisis sharpens that tension. The book describes the spread of revolutionary expectations, the collapse of three empires and dynasties, and the Spanish flu’s infection of tens of millions. In Italy, strikes and political conflict make the expectation of a new rupture tangible. The returning soldiers are thus situated amid a society where neither victory nor peace has settled the question of who will shape the future.

From Rupture to Renewal

Later political language repeatedly turns defeat and exhaustion into a promise of rebirth. In January 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio contrasts Fiume with the negotiations at Versailles: one is associated with youth, life, and a future still to be made; the other with a Europe weakened by suspicion and uncertainty. The contrast does not erase the war’s losses. It recasts the postwar moment as a contest between decline and a new beginning, a structure of meaning that echoes the earlier portrayal of Caporetto as the end of an era.

When the National Fascist Party is founded, Mussolini presents fascism as a project of national consolidation and imperial ambition. He says that divisions among regional identities should give way to Italians united within one nation, and that the state is to be understood as an instrument of fascist power. His vision of the future makes the masses central but also assigns them an interpreter and disciplinarian. The postwar population is not merely to be represented; it is to be organized and remade.

The same regenerative frame reappears in Mussolini’s later celebration of fascist growth. At Piazza Belgioioso, he contrasts the few who gathered there four years earlier with the multitude assembled in the present, describing the transformation as a people becoming a nation and a nation becoming a state. This later spectacle gives political form to the earlier claim that the old era has ended and a new one has begun. October 24, 1917, is not presented as the direct cause of every subsequent development; it serves as a remembered rupture that helps make such claims of rebirth intelligible.

The Afterlife of the Date

The book’s later crises also expose the gap between the promise of order and the conditions through which fascist power advances. The liberal state authorizes fascist cooperation in maintaining public order against revolutionary threats, and Benito Mussolini assures the prefect of Milan that the Fascists will resist the Bolsheviks by whatever means necessary. In October 1922, as a coup is anticipated, the government orders preparations for armed resistance and a state of siege; the king does not sign the decree, and it is revoked. These later episodes belong to a different political moment from Caporetto, but they show the continuing struggle over who may claim to restore order after the old world has been declared exhausted.

The date’s narrative significance is therefore retrospective as well as historical. Caporetto supplies a stark point of reference for defeat, while the postwar account builds from that rupture a story of survivors, political instability, and promised renewal. The same language that turns the end of an era into an opening for a new one also helps explain how a movement can present its rise as both a response to disorder and a means of remaking the nation.