Royal Army

The Royal Army is present chiefly through the biographies of men whose later roles carried military experience into postwar political violence and Fascist power. The book offers little account of the Army as an institution; instead, it shows how service, military distinction, and the authority associated with an officer’s career reappear in the lives of individual Fascist figures.

Service and postwar recruitment

Amerigo Dumini, the son of emigrants and a United States citizen, renounced his citizenship to enlist in the Royal Army. He served in Major Baseggio’s “Death Squad,” was wounded and left with a limp, and received decorations for valor. The account makes military service part of the background to his later political activity, but does not describe the Army as directing that activity.

After the war, Dumini joined the City Defense Alliance as an anti-Bolshevik and helped found the Fascio in Florence. His path thus leads from enlistment and decorated service into an explicitly anti-Bolshevik postwar organization and then into Fascist organizing. The evidence establishes that sequence in his biography; it does not establish that the Royal Army as an institution sponsored his later affiliations.

Military careers in Fascist politics

During the Matteotti crisis, a police commissioner who was also one of the quadrumvirs of the March on Rome is identified as an old general of the Royal Army. Calling Benito Mussolini on a private line from the Ministry of the Interior, he warns that responsibility is being placed on the prime minister. The episode presents a former army general acting within a police and Fascist political setting, not the Royal Army intervening as an organization.

Taken together, these appearances place the Royal Army at the edge of the book’s account of Fascist ascendancy: as a source of service and military credentials in one man’s biography, and as part of the former career of a senior political figure. The distinction matters. The Army is not given a collective policy or a sustained institutional role here; the narrative traces how individual military histories could persist inside the changing structures of postwar authority.