Postwar Period

The Postwar Period in Italy is depicted as an unsettled interval in which the end of the war did not end the conditions of conflict. Millions of returning soldiers entered a society marked by grief, economic strain, mass strikes, and fear of revolution. Veterans’ resentment and the growing capacity of organized political groups shaped a contest over who could claim to represent the nation. In this account, fascism’s appeal grew not from a single crisis but from its ability to turn postwar frustration into a promise of renewal, while making violence appear both necessary and politically useful.

Peace without demobilized passions

The war’s human cost defines the period’s opening atmosphere. The dead are imagined as a mass that has submerged the old political stage, while five million returning veterans press toward the country’s borders. The old liberal figures and established political voices seem unable to answer the scale of the change. The returnees are not simply a population coming home: they are survivors whose experience has left them with a terse, forceful way of speaking and a recurring pull toward silence. The postwar future remains uncertain, and war continues to shape expectations even after the fighting has ended.

That rupture is especially visible among the Arditi, whose wartime identity rests on assault and whose postwar circumstances offer little comparable purpose. They gather in two rooms on Via Cerva, where they drink, sleep on the floor, smoke, and speak of earlier battles and those still to come. Their stories enlarge the assault units’ role in victory, presenting them as the war’s decisive fighters. At the same time, their present is marked by idleness and social estrangement: civilians are unsettled by their open uniforms and visible daggers, while the former soldiers struggle to find a place in peacetime life.

The anger is also material. Discharged veterans complain that they were demobilized without ceremony, at night, after months of postwar discipline imposed by the generals. They believe that politicians dismissed them to avoid provoking socialists, defeatists, and others whom they blame for undermining the war effort. Their return is contrasted with the public honors given to veterans elsewhere: in Italy, they feel sent back quietly, without parades, flags, or compensation. The contrast between the national sacrifice they believe they made and their insecure civilian existence becomes one of the period’s potent grievances.

Mass politics and revolutionary expectation

In 1919, political gatherings and strikes gave the fear of upheaval a daily rhythm. At a Milan rally on April 15, tens of thousands of workers heard inflammatory speeches and anticipated a coming cataclysm. Later, several thousand demonstrators broke away from the procession and moved toward the city center. The account places this action within a broader European climate of revolutions and attempted Soviet governments, intensifying the sense that Italy, too, stood close to a decisive rupture.

The postwar strike wave soon extended far beyond a single rally. Postal, telegraph, and telephone workers walked out; railway workers followed, and agitation spread among porters, clerks, bakers, tram operators, gas workers, and others. In Milan, transport and ordinary services were disrupted, while wholesale prices rose fivefold. At Fiat in Turin, a dispute over the extension of daylight-saving time became the occasion for a ten-day general strike involving 120,000 workers in the city and province; 60,000 occupied factories. The account treats the dispute not as a technical quarrel over clocks but as a struggle over authority and the possibility of revolution.

The confrontations carried a heavy human cost. The end of a later general strike was accompanied by about ten deaths in Turin, Milan, Adria, and Modena, adding to 110 deaths already attributed to clashes between socialists and law enforcement during 1919. Such figures make the transition to peace a continuation of public violence rather than a clean break from wartime loss. Meanwhile, Mussolini’s movement remained small and precarious: the Fasci had only a few hundred adherents scattered across Italy, and the newspaper that sustained its political work struggled with declining circulation and the cost of newsprint.

Rural organization and the struggle over work

The countryside became another decisive arena. In Bologna, socialist organizations and labor bodies were strong enough to influence urban life, while rural districts were described as dominated by socialist leagues, cooperatives, and local institutions. In Ferrara, seasonal farmworkers and their allies struck over the collective farm agreement, suspending the sowing of hemp and sugar beet. The settlement included wage increases, worker-managed hiring centers, and a compulsory quota requiring landowners to hire five workers for every thirty hectares during months when farm work was scarce.

By 1920, the leagues’ influence reached further into the organization of agricultural production. In Emilia, socialists controlled 223 of 280 municipalities. Farmworkers averaged only 120 working days a year, making the terms of seasonal employment a matter of survival. The leagues regulated hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crop planting. Ferrara’s leagues recorded 81,000 members by mid-May, including agricultural workers, tenants, sharecroppers, and small landowners. Their gains alarmed landowners and made the countryside a central battleground in the struggle over property, employment, and local authority.

The account also shows how these conflicts could mobilize resources on both sides. A Ferrara punitive expedition in January 1921 was organized to strike several rural targets at once, using surprise, armed squads, and trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. The operation’s military planning marks a change in the organization of political violence: local action was being coordinated as a campaign rather than left to spontaneous confrontation. In this struggle, rural networks, transport, weapons, and connections to landowners mattered alongside ideological claims.

The state, fascist mobilization, and violence

The liberal state’s response helped alter the political balance. In 1919, Mussolini’s associate Michele Bianchi reached an agreement with Milan’s prefect to make the Fasci available for public-order duties. A confidential government circular urged fascist cooperation in repressing revolutionary attempts, including through violence, provided the groups accepted official command. The arrangement gave fascists a role in defending the state against the left even as their movement presented itself as hostile to established politics.

By October 1920, Mussolini had assured Milan’s prefect that the Fasci would oppose Italy’s ruin by whatever means necessary. The account places this assurance amid a wave of clashes, arson, arrests, deaths, and injuries across the country. Fascists increasingly positioned themselves against socialist mobilization while claiming to defend the liberal state from revolution. This was not simply a contest between state authority and its enemies: the state’s willingness to enlist fascists gave organized political violence a measure of official accommodation.

That combination of organization and force reached a striking scale in Ferrara in May 1922. Thousands of impoverished farmworkers marched toward the city from the countryside by foot, bicycle, wagon, and barge. The next morning, about 50,000 laborers occupied and paralyzed Ferrara. Telephone lines were cut, schools requisitioned for lodging, and businesses closed. The occupation demonstrated that fascist leaders could coordinate a mass mobilization using rural networks and strict orders, while also exposing the desperation of the people who formed its ranks. Soon afterward, the Labor Alliance proclaimed a nationwide legalitarian strike to defend political and union liberties. Fascist leaders treated the strike as an opening to challenge the state’s authority and threaten to replace it if it failed to act.

Competing futures and the myth of renewal

The period’s political language made the crisis more than a dispute over wages or government. In Fiume, Gabriele D’Annunzio presented 1919 as a year of passion and possibility, contrasting the city’s youth, life, and heroic future with the exhaustion he associated with the postwar settlement. His rhetoric turned the city into an alternative political spectacle, even as economic hardship and scarcity worsened there. The account links this vision to the broader belief that the liberal order was vulnerable and that the postwar crisis could not be confined to questions of borders and commerce.

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini offered a different but related promise of national transformation. He described fascism as capable of absorbing liberalism after burying earlier political methods through violence, unifying regional identities into a single Italian nation, and pursuing imperial greatness. The state, in this conception, was not an impartial referee standing above the conflict; fascists claimed to be the state and to educate the masses, while retaining the right to discipline them. These declarations converted the disorder of the postwar years into a program of nationalization, hierarchy, and power.

The promise endured through political ritual. Four years after his first fascist rally in Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini returned to address a much larger gathering, describing the movement’s growth from a small group to a multitude and presenting its volunteers as a people becoming a nation and then a state. The transformation was staged as a resurrection and a collective rebirth. That image gathered together the period’s central tensions: the memory of mass death, the failures of civilian reintegration, the growth of organized labor, and the rise of a movement that claimed it could impose order by mobilizing the very violence the postwar years had failed to leave behind.