The Third National Congress of the Fasci and Founding of the National Fascist Party took place in Rome from November 7 to 9, 1921. Its decisive achievement was not simply the creation of a party: Benito Mussolini used a dispute over peace with the socialists to reconcile rival Fascist leaders, redirect the assembly toward organization and program, and convert a movement sustained by squad violence into a national political force. The reconciliation depended on an agreement made before the delegates knew it had been reached, while the violence that had helped bring the movement to prominence remained close at hand.

Background: a movement built on conflict

The congress met amid unresolved postwar upheaval. The book’s account presents veterans returning in their millions to a political world whose old leaders seemed exhausted, while the prospect of renewed conflict continued to shape public expectations. It also sets the movement’s appeal against the dead and disillusionment of the war: earlier, Benito Mussolini had described the returning soldiers as a population of survivors for whom the established political generation had lost its authority. The promise of a new political beginning therefore drew on a real rupture, but also framed that rupture as a demand for discipline and collective action.

The tensions were material as well as rhetorical. In Bologna, labor organizations and socialist institutions exerted strong influence over civic and rural life; in Emilia, peasant leagues organized work, hiring, and agricultural production. A government circular had meanwhile urged Fascist collaboration in maintaining public order against revolutionary attempts, subject to official command. After deaths in a rural clash, the Bolognese Association of Social Defense formed and appealed to Prime Minister Nitti, arguing that the state had failed to contain socialist violence. Such developments helped make Fascism appear to some landowners and middle-class groups as a force of defense, even as its independent armed squads challenged the state’s claim to control political violence.

The congress’s immediate internal conflict concerned the pacification pact with the socialists. Some delegates wanted discussion of the agreement shelved; others opposed any accommodation. Dino Grandi, leader of the dissidents, received a stronger ovation than Mussolini when the assembly opened. The divided response showed that the movement’s leaders could not assume their authority would settle the dispute by itself.

The bargain behind the reconciliation

Before the public confrontation, Mussolini and Grandi had met secretly. Their understanding exchanged the pacification pact for the establishment of a Fascist Party. The delegates who spent the congress arguing over the pact were therefore, without knowing it, contending over an issue already set aside by the two leaders. The apparent open contest concealed a prior political bargain: the question was no longer whether the congress would preserve the pact, but how the new party would be constituted.

Mussolini entered the assembly after Grandi’s dissident faction had been warmly received. His public position appeared flexible: he would not insist on a vote about the pact, but would fight on all fronts if the congress chose to vote. He returned the decision to the delegates and shifted attention toward what he described as more pressing questions, especially the movement’s program and the creation of a party. This maneuver removed the pact as the immediate test of loyalty without requiring the assembly to resolve the deeper disagreement over violence and political compromise.

The change in emphasis worked. Once the pact had effectively been sacrificed, the disagreement that had divided the hall lost its power to hold the delegates apart. Grandi called for a solid Fascist bloc and left the stage; the crowd rose in a prolonged ovation. He then embraced Mussolini at the presidential table. Delegates followed, forming a chain of embraces around Mussolini, who was lifted onto the table. The physical reconciliation turned a private agreement into a public spectacle of unity, while the crowd’s excitement displaced the unresolved social conflict outward, toward the movement’s opponents.

Founding the party and defining its program

The scene of reconciliation also exposed the connection between party-building and squad violence. The man who lifted Mussolini onto the table was Italo Capanni, identified in the account as the killer of Spartaco Lavagnini. The National Fascist Party was born amid an embrace between factional leaders and the presence of a participant in political murder. The new organization did not mark a clean break from the movement’s violent methods; it gave the divided movement a shared political form.

The following day, Mussolini spoke for three hours, setting out a program that presented Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing and superseding rival political traditions. He argued that violence had buried older methods and that the movement would complete the nationalization of Italians: regional identities were to give way to a single Italian identity. Beyond national unity lay an imperial ambition, which he linked to the idea of national greatness. He also abandoned the movement’s earlier anticlerical posture, placing the Roman Church within this imperial vision.

His account of state and society was similarly expansive. Mussolini declared that Fascists were the state, while describing the economy in terms of classical liberalism. On the question of the masses, he rejected both the idea that political history belonged only to individual heroes and the claim that the masses could act without an interpreter. Fascism, he said, would serve and educate the masses, but discipline them when it judged them to be wrong. He further made the health of the national bloodline a political concern. Taken together, these positions joined national uniformity, imperial power, mass mobilization, state authority, and population management in a single program.

Mussolini also presented himself as willing to disappear within the new organization so that the movement could assume responsibility collectively. That declaration sat uneasily beside the congress’s personal devotion to him and the program’s reliance on a leader who claimed the role of interpreter for the masses. The party was to be depersonalized in principle, yet its birth was staged around Mussolini’s control of the agenda and the crowd’s embrace of his leadership.

A new political spectacle

The congress culminated in a public performance of unity. After Mussolini’s programmatic address, delegates shouted, sang, and applauded; the excitement spilled into the streets as Fascists marched toward the Altar of the Fatherland. The theater itself reinforced the event’s historical staging: the Auditorium Augusteo stood where the mausoleum of Augustus had once been, and the account casts Mussolini’s performance as an encounter with the changing balance of power. The movement’s political consolidation was made visible through architecture, applause, embraces, and procession.

The congress thus resolved one crisis by changing the terms of the dispute. Rather than settle whether Fascists should make peace with socialists, its leaders moved the assembly toward a party capable of organizing the movement nationally. The new program promised rebirth after decline and unity after division, while treating coercion as a foundation of the political order it proposed. The result was a more durable organization, but not the end of factional tension or violence: those forces had been incorporated into the party’s founding spectacle rather than left behind.