The fascist “second wave”

The fascist “second wave” is the threatened return of large-scale squad violence during the crisis following Giacomo Matteotti’s murder. In the book, the phrase names both a practical danger—militants demanding freedom to act—and the culmination of a political creed that presented violence as a route from national decline to rebirth. Its anticipated eruption is repeatedly checked by a widening rejection of Fascism, leaving the regime besieged rather than renewed.

A politics formed around mobilization

The prospect of another violent surge belongs to a postwar political world described as still organized by war. The returning veterans are a mass force, while the old liberal leadership appears exhausted and unable to meet the crisis. This account makes the appeal of disciplined action legible without presenting it as an inevitable consequence: Fascist leaders sought to draw the discontented into a new alignment, while the struggle over Italy’s future remained open.

The movement’s language supplied a regenerative promise for that mobilization. At Fiume, Gabriele D’Annunzio opposed the image of a weakened Europe to one of youth, life, and a future shaped by the living and the not yet born. Benito Mussolini’s later party program likewise joined national unity to an imperial ambition and asserted that Fascism was the state. The vision of a new man and a revived nation gave force a forward-looking justification: coercion was represented not simply as destruction, but as the means by which disorder would be mastered and a new political community made.

That promise had a material and organizational counterpart in the countryside. In Emilia, socialist leagues controlled 223 of 280 municipalities and organized hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. In Ferrara, the leagues’ membership reached 81,000 by mid-May 1920. Against this extensive organization, Fascists developed their own capacity for coordinated action. A January 1921 punitive expedition from Ferrara was planned to strike several rural targets at once, using armed men, surprise, and trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. These episodes establish the competing networks and methods behind the later threat; they do not make the second wave merely a spontaneous outburst.

From local forces to mass spectacle

The mobilization associated with Italo Balbo shows how local organization could be enlarged into a display of collective power. At midnight on May 11, 1922, groups from the Ferrarese countryside set out for the city by foot, bicycle, wagon, and canal barge. Ferrara awoke to an occupation by about 50,000 farm laborers. Telephone lines were cut, schools requisitioned for accommodation, and shops and businesses closed. The operation demonstrated the movement’s ability to coordinate a mass action that paralyzed a city as well as to assemble armed squads.

This capacity existed alongside a transition into parliamentary politics, not in place of it. In 1921, the insistence that the Fascist party ticket was not open to discussion accompanied the movement’s entry into an alliance with liberals. Later, the National Fascist Party’s program proclaimed a state-centered political order. The contrast matters to the idea of a second wave: force could be mobilized through local commanders and street action even as the movement claimed a national political role and sought to define itself as the state.

By December 1922, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi had tried to curb paramilitary groups through a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring a license and declaring Fascist formations illegal. Michele Bianchi, the newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, answered by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable; the directive appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia. The government did not arrest those openly claiming an armed militia. Bonomi issued another circular complaining that his public-order directives had gone unheeded. The scene anticipates a central condition of the later crisis: a government order could be issued, yet enforcement was undermined by the party’s armed organization and the state’s inability to make its authority effective.

The threat of a second wave

In the summer of 1924, Mussolini’s counteroffensive included orders for prefects to organize Fascist rallies. Clubs reappeared in the piazzas, and the militia’s Iron Legion marched through central Rome in formation. In Emilia, Leandro Arpinati organized thousands of squadristi despite being bedridden after a car accident; three days later, 50,000 blackshirts from across the region marched in the streets. These displays made the prospect of renewed violence concrete: the movement could still summon bodies, weapons, and disciplined public demonstrations while the government was under pressure.

The danger sharpened after the Labor Alliance announced a general strike beginning at midnight on July 31. It framed the action as a defense of political and union liberties, but the announcement leaked in advance and disrupted its plans. On August 1, Bianchi gave the state forty-eight hours to prove its authority, warning that Fascism would claim freedom to act and replace a state that again demonstrated its impotence. The ultimatum turned the question of violence into an explicit contest over sovereignty: the party did not merely threaten disorder, but claimed a right to act where state power failed.

The feared escalation appeared imminent again in September. On September 5, squadristi attacked Piero Gobetti in Turin, inflicting serious internal injuries. Demonstrations and destruction resumed elsewhere, and on September 12 a worker killed Fascist unionist Armando Casalini on a Rome tram in front of his daughter. From Cremona, Roberto Farinacci called for the use of machine guns against the opposition if other measures failed. Fascist militants appealed to Mussolini to untie their hands. The narrative presents these episodes as the rising pressure behind the second wave, while making clear that violence came from more than one side and that the Fascist demand was specifically for permission to intensify its own action.

A besieged movement and a failed purge

The anticipated surge did not unfold as an uncontested renewal. On September 14, industrialists who had supported Fascism presented Mussolini with a petition equivalent to an ultimatum. Liberals also distanced themselves, and Corriere della Sera openly attacked the regime. The judicial investigation into Matteotti’s murder advanced as well: after a deposition implicated Cesare Rossi and Giovanni Marinelli, Amerigo Dùmini admitted on October 20 that he had worked for the Fascist Cheka and followed orders from his principals. The disclosure weakened the strategy of denial and made the violence harder to detach from the movement’s leadership.

The crisis was visible even in ceremonies intended to demonstrate Fascist strength. On October 28, the second anniversary of the March on Rome was marked by celebrations in deserted piazzas; even war-wounded veterans stayed away. Gabriele D’Annunzio denounced Italy as a ruin made culpable by Matteotti’s murder, while plots to kill Mussolini circulated behind the scenes. The party, in the book’s image, had shut itself inside like a besieged fortress, with its opponents waiting for an order to storm it.

The regime’s last attempt to purify itself combined personnel changes, exile, political accommodation, and the appropriation of national ritual. Emilio De Bono was removed from militia command, which passed to Italo Balbo; Luigi Sturzo was exiled to London; and Luigi Pirandello acquired a party card. On November 4, Mussolini knelt at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier as Fascists attacked a nationalist procession in another part of Rome. The effort to claim the nation’s commemorative symbols did not restore consensus: clashes with former combatants spread, and Mario Ponzio tore up his party card. When Parliament reopened, Luigi Repossi publicly objected to Fascists commemorating Matteotti, and no Fascist silenced him. The episode closes the concept’s arc in the evidence: the second wave remains a credible threat, but the movement’s bid to renew itself through force and patriotic spectacle meets a growing refusal to accept its authority.