The Holy Sepulchre Program

The San Sepolcro program was the first substantial platform of the Fasci di Combattimento, but its importance lies as much in the gap between its detailed reform proposals and the movement’s refusal to be bound by a consistent doctrine as in the demands themselves. It brought together interventionist nationalism, labor and welfare measures, radical financial proposals, and the call for an armed nation. Yet, in the account of its political role, the program was ultimately subordinate to combat: it could attract former socialists and give the movement a public platform without determining what fascists would do next.

Origins and publication

At a March 1919 gathering in Milan, interventionist groups discussed forming regional fasci. Benito Mussolini outlined a set of guiding principles: validate the war and its combatants; defend an Italian imperialism said to be shared by other peoples; oppose foreign imperialism when it harmed Italy; reject Italian imperialism directed against other nations; and contest elections against parties and candidates hostile to the war. The meeting approved his proposals, and representatives came from several Italian cities. This initial framework joined commemoration of wartime service to a nationalist electoral appeal, while presenting opposition to foreign domination and opposition to Italian expansion against other nations as compatible positions.

The more extensive platform appeared later. Published in Il Popolo d’Italia on June 6, 1919, nearly three months after the Piazza San Sepolcro meeting, it followed thousands of discussions and modifications. Its prominent, full-page presentation made the program difficult to mistake for a marginal statement. The delay and revision also matter: this was not simply a transcript of the founding meeting, but a public platform shaped after sustained debate within the movement.

Political, social, and economic demands

On political questions, the program called for a foreign policy that would not submit to other powers, reform of electoral law, and abolition of the Senate. These demands proposed changes both to Italy’s position abroad and to its institutions at home. The platform thus offered more than a declaration of loyalty to the interventionist cause: it challenged established political arrangements, though it did not specify a single settled constitutional design to replace them.

Its social proposals included an eight-hour working day, minimum wages, union representatives on company boards, workers’ management of industry, disability insurance, and pensions. It also called for uncultivated land to be distributed to farmers, bureaucratic reform, and secular schools funded by the state. Taken together, these measures addressed workplace authority, social protection, land, administration, and education. The program’s language and reach could appeal to workers and peasants as well as to former comrades of the movement’s socialist founders. The narrative characterizes the proposals as unusually radical in comparison with reformist socialism, while stressing that their presence on the platform did not guarantee that the fasci would make them the basis of policy.

The financial demands were similarly sweeping: a progressive special tax on capital, partial expropriation of wealth, seizure of 85 percent of war profits, and confiscation of the assets of religious congregations. Their specificity gave the program a sharply redistributive edge. Alongside its labor proposals, this financial agenda could make the new movement appear to offer a route to profound social change rather than a conventional defense of existing property relations.

The military proposal was brief but consequential: the program called for an armed nation. In the context of its founding appeal, this connected the political standing of the war’s veterans with a vision of national life organized around readiness and force. The platform’s other demands were more detailed, but this concise formula made clear that political and social transformation would not be separated from the movement’s conception of military preparedness.

A platform without binding doctrine

The breadth of the proposals produced a central tension. The platform could be read as an ambitious program of institutional and economic transformation, and its social measures placed it well to the left of reformist socialism. But Benito Mussolini treated the search for a stable identity as a possible encumbrance. The fasci could describe themselves as an anti-party, opposing established political habits without accepting the discipline of a settled body of principles. In that understanding, the San Sepolcro program was a preamble rather than a binding plan: its demands could be invoked, set aside, or revised according to circumstance.

Cesare Rossi recognized that the movement had no clear idea of its future direction. He doubted that workers and peasants could be separated from their socialist leaders merely by appealing to class grievances. The narrative presents that lack of definition not simply as a weakness but as a source of flexibility. The movement could exploit competing resentments and present itself as revolutionary or reactionary without resolving the contradiction between those positions. The platform’s radical language therefore coexisted with a politics that withheld a firm promise about how, or whether, its proposals would be carried out.

Gabriele D’Annunzio offered a contrasting emphasis: action mattered more than programs. That preference helps explain the platform’s unstable authority in the narrative. Rather than treating the document as a complete doctrine, the movement could make action its practical test and leave the political direction open. The result was a program capable of signaling multiple allegiances, but also of being displaced by immediate mobilization.

The gap between proposals and practice

Later episodes show why the distinction between platform and practice matters. In Bologna, labor organizations could exert power over access to work and bread, while employers and middle-class residents felt caught between political forces. In the Po Valley, the peasant leagues controlled hiring and other aspects of rural production; their struggle over wages and employment was bound up with the material conditions of seasonal farmworkers. Such conflicts give concrete meaning to the platform’s calls for labor reform and land distribution, but the evidence does not show those demands being implemented through a consistent program of government.

By 1921, Ferrara’s fascists organized a punitive expedition against peasant leagues using trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. Later, Italo Balbo proposed occupying Ferrara to pressure the government to provide public works for unemployed farm laborers. The mobilization brought tens of thousands of impoverished workers into the city, under fascist organization, to demand work. These episodes reveal the distance between the program’s promise of worker management and land reform and a movement whose actions could be organized through alliances with agrarian interests, coercive expeditions, and mass pressure on the state. They do not erase the platform’s demands; they show why the document cannot be treated as a reliable summary of fascist conduct.

The San Sepolcro program thus functioned as both an early statement of reform and a deliberately insufficient definition of the movement. Its lists of political, social, financial, and military objectives made the fasci legible to a broad audience, including former socialists. Its limited authority, however, left action free to outrun doctrine. That contrast—between a paper promising extensive change and a movement that preserved the freedom to change direction—became central to the program’s significance.