Squadrist violence

Squadrist violence was not a series of isolated street clashes but a persistent method of political action: it could be organized on a military model, turned against opponents inside and outside the movement, and defended as part of Fascism’s national project. Across the narrative, the promise of renewal and disciplined unity stands beside attacks on labor organizations, political dissenters, and elected deputies; the widening record of violence becomes both a means of coercion and evidence of the liberal state’s declining capacity to restrain it.

Social Conflict and Organized Force

The violence takes shape amid conflicts over work, property, and political authority. In Bologna, competing labor organizations and escalating revolutionary rhetoric leave employers and the middle classes feeling trapped. The socialist mayor Zanardi, described as moderate in his own disposition, tries to keep pace with the agitation by encouraging tenants to claim ownership of elegant homes. Union membership becomes a condition for receiving bread, while some employers consider selling their businesses rather than continuing under what they see as intolerable pressure. The account presents a city in which everyday necessities and control of property have become part of an intensifying political struggle.

In the countryside, the confrontation is organized around control of agricultural labor. In Emilia, socialists govern 223 of 280 municipalities, while peasant leagues increasingly regulate hiring, work shifts, threshing machines, seed supplies, and crops. Farmhands average only 120 days of work a year, making wages a question of survival during idle periods; for landowners, by contrast, the conflict concerns profits and control. The narrative thus gives the rural struggle a material basis: the leagues’ authority over the organization of work helps explain why landowners and their allies seek to dismantle them by force.

The Ferrara expedition of January 23 is presented as a consequential change in method. Dozens of armed men set out for the surrounding countryside, with trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. Their planned targets include the peasant leagues in San Martino, Aguscello, Cona, Fossanova San Biagio, Denore, and Fossanova San Marco. The operation is designed to strike several places at once, relying on surprise and premeditated violence rather than an improvised confrontation. Its military organization makes squad violence a means of attacking the leagues’ local infrastructure and authority.

The campaign also depends on mobilization beyond the city. At midnight on May 11, thousands of impoverished men begin moving from remote Ferrarese farmhouses toward the city, organized by local Fascist leaders. They travel on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges pulled along the Po of Goro and the Po of Volano. The range of transport and the nighttime coordination give the movement a mass, logistical dimension: squadrist action is connected not only to armed groups but also to an organized network capable of drawing people from across the countryside.

Violence as Political Organization

The narrative repeatedly places Fascist violence in tension with the institutions meant to regulate it. Prime Minister Bonomi’s attempts to harness the squads prove ineffective. The Carabinieri are described as converting to Fascism, a Disciplinary Council absolves them, and the judiciary is unable to act effectively. On December 15, Bonomi issues a prefectural circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and including Fascist paramilitary groups among formations considered illegal. Within forty-eight hours, Michele Bianchi, newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, counters with a directive declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable. Its publication in Il Popolo d’Italia makes the conflict public: the party asserts organizational unity where the government is trying to impose legal separation and restraint.

The movement’s own claims about discipline also reveal a central contradiction. Fascist doctrine rejects the democratic ideal of a mass acting through ordinary political participation, describing individuals gathered together as an incoherent, instinct-driven collective. It instead demands rigid military hierarchy and discipline, treating party membership as comparable to a soldier’s identification. Yet the narrative records feuds, rivalries, and struggles for local control within Fascism itself. The language of order therefore accompanies practices that are neither politically moderate nor free of factional conflict; discipline is an asserted ideal and a method of command, not proof that violence has disappeared.

This friction is visible in Ferrara, where Balbo’s response to an internal revolt involves sending Dino Grandi as commissioner and arranging for six trusted members of the Perugia militia to be dispatched to the city. Their task is to suppress Fascist dissidents and restore Tommaso Beltrami to command. The operation reaches even places that Fascists had traditionally treated as refuges from political pursuit. By the end of June, dissent has been driven away and Beltrami restored. The episode shows squad violence turning inward: force that helps establish local power also serves to eliminate challenges to its command structure.

Targets Beyond the Streets

Alfredo Misuri’s case connects public dissent in Parliament to organized intimidation outside it. On May 29, deputies and spectators fill the chamber to hear a Fascist expected to criticize the movement from within. That same day’s Cremona Nuova carries an article by Cremona’s Farinacci calling for a new campaign of squad violence to complete the revolution and crush dissent. The article, titled “Second Wave,” gives a political rationale to renewed coercion just as Misuri’s anticipated speech makes dissent visible inside the parliamentary arena.

Later, Misuri is followed through the streets around Montecitorio by men in a Lancia K found in a courtyard of the Palazzo del Viminale. They wait near Via Due Macelli. When Misuri leaves a public urinal, Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi approaches with a club, carrying it without concealment or apparent hesitation. The account’s sequence—from a prominent dissenter’s departure from Parliament, to surveillance, to an assault—shows how political opposition is met not only with argument or party discipline but with pursuit beyond the chamber.

The attack on Cesare Forni similarly emerges from a movement divided by rivalries and contested ideals. On April 25, Francesco Giunta and Forni fight a saber duel outside Porta del Popolo in Rome. Their conflict mixes personal rivalry, women, territorial control, and betrayed ideals. Forni resigns as commander of the militia’s first zone, which covers the industrial triangle, in protest against what he sees as corruption among Rome’s Fascists. The episode does not present squad violence as a unified force moving smoothly toward a common purpose: personal ambitions and factional disputes repeatedly unsettle the movement’s claims to unity.

At Milan Central Station, an assault on Forni is prepared with a different kind of coordination. Club-wielders wait at the foot of the stairs, near the turnstiles, while crowds emerge beneath the station canopy after three trains arrive at almost the same time. When Forni appears, the attackers strike him from behind and the surrounding crowd disperses. The public station becomes an exposed political space: the crowd’s presence offers no protection, and the attackers’ organization turns an ordinary arrival into a planned assault.

Parliament, Records, and Escalation

Giacomo Matteotti’s efforts to document Fascist violence give the phenomenon a cumulative measure. For months, he works methodically on a book intended for publication at the end of the year, Un anno di dominazione fascista (A Year of Fascist Domination). His record lists 42 killings, 1,112 clubbings, beatings, and injuries, 184 destructions of buildings and homes, and 24 newspaper fires. Each new entry enlarges the documented pattern but also deepens Matteotti’s isolation, even within his own party. Filippo Turati urges him to abandon the project, accusing him of “preconceived hostility” toward more moderate colleagues. The numbers give the violence a political scale, while the response to the book shows how its documentation itself becomes contested.

In Parliament, Matteotti continues to return to the presence of an armed militia during the election. As interruptions and protests mount, he insists that the government had an armed force available to coerce voters, emphasizing that the militia was composed of citizens of one party that should have abstained but instead appeared in force. The scene contrasts the formal setting of parliamentary debate with the pressure exerted by a partisan armed organization. His argument identifies coercion not as an accidental excess at the edge of politics but as a condition affecting political competition.

The threat extends to other opposition figures. On June 3, Cremona’s Farinacci tells Giovanni Amendola and other opposition leaders that Fascists had been wrong not to have them shot. Hours later, a display of Fascist solidarity ordered by Benito Mussolini and organized by Cesare Rossi culminates in a manhunt: hundreds of squadristi track socialist deputies through the narrow streets around Montecitorio. The episode links threatening speech in the chamber to coordinated action outside it, making the boundary between parliamentary politics and street violence increasingly fragile.

The narrative also places the return of the proposed “Second Wave” beside a larger rhetoric of national rebirth. The ideal Fascist “new man” is cast as youthful, vigorous, and capable of inaugurating a new era, while older liberal politicians are represented as remnants of decline. In Gabriele D’Annunzio’s address to his legionnaires, 1919 becomes the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations: Versailles signifies an exhausted and fearful Europe, while Fiume signifies youth, life, faith, and a future carried forward by the dead and by generations not yet born. Such contrasts frame violence within a story of national renewal, but the narrative’s documented assaults and factional conflicts expose the coercive practice beneath that promise.

Political Meaning and Limits

The account’s scenes range from control over agricultural hiring to intimidation at a railway station and threats against elected deputies. Their recurrence gives squadrist violence its defining political character: it attacks the organizations through which opponents exercise influence, pressures individuals who challenge Fascist authority, and helps make the public exercise of political rights increasingly dangerous. At the same time, the attacks do not establish a stable, unified order. Rivalries among Fascists, government efforts to restrict paramilitary activity, and the growing record compiled by Matteotti reveal a struggle over who can command force and whether any institution can hold it to account.

The contrast between military discipline as an ideal and coercion as political practice is central to the subject. Fascism presents the nation as a body to be unified, disciplined, and renewed; in practice, squads impose that claimed unity through organized violence against labor movements, dissenters, and parliamentary opponents. The result is not simply a succession of assaults but a pressure on the conditions of political life itself: organizations are attacked, dissent is made costly, and formal institutions persist while their capacity to protect opposition is visibly weakened.