People's Combat Squads

The People's Combat Squads are identified in the account through their leader, Argo Secondari, and their confrontation with Fascist squads in Rome. Their presence in working-class districts marks them as an organized force resisting Fascist incursions, though the narrative provides little detail about their membership or internal structure.

Identity and Setting

The People's Combat Squads enter the story amid the postwar struggle over who would control Italy's streets and political future. The account describes five million returning veterans pressing into a Europe emptied by war, and presents the conflict as a division between those who belonged to the old order and those who would shape what came next. Against this unstable background, political movements competed not only in public debate but through organized force.

The broader crisis included state cooperation with Fascists against revolutionary activity. A confidential government circular urged Fascist collaboration in maintaining public order, including violent repression, so long as the forces involved accepted official command. In this setting, the People's Combat Squads are encountered on the opposing side of the street conflict: their leader was identified with resistance in working-class neighborhoods that Fascists had previously failed to hold.

Confrontation in Rome

During the Fascist occupation of Rome, some squads disobeyed orders and carried out attacks and assaults. Other armed Fascists entered working-class districts including Borgo Pio, San Lorenzo, Prenestina, and Nomentana, areas from which they had been driven the year before. They were driven out again. The episode gives the People's Combat Squads a concrete, if narrowly drawn, place in the account: resistance was not simply parliamentary or rhetorical, but involved contest over access to urban neighborhoods.

Argo Secondari, identified as the leader of the People's Combat Squads, was among those attacked. Fascists struck him during the disorder, leaving him with a grave head injury. The account does not describe the organization’s response or subsequent activity, but the episode links its leadership directly to the street-level opposition that the Fascists encountered in the capital.

Political Context and Significance

The organization’s brief appearance contrasts with the expanding scale of Fascist mobilization. Benito Mussolini’s movement presented itself as an army of volunteers advancing from a handful of early followers to a mass force, and Mussolini described its national project in terms of forging Italians into a single people and state. The People's Combat Squads appear instead at the point where that mass movement met armed resistance in districts it had not been able to dominate.

That resistance also stands against a political climate in which violence was becoming an instrument of public authority as well as party action. The liberal state’s willingness to enlist Fascists against revolutionary attempts, and the Fascist leadership’s insistence on controlling its own forces while clearing Rome, frame the narrow account of the People's Combat Squads. Their significance here lies in this unresolved contest: Fascist expansion could claim the language of national unity and order, but it still had to confront opponents capable of denying it the streets.