“Either they will give us the government or we will seize it, descending on Rome”

“Either they will give us the government or we will seize it, descending on Rome” is Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Fascist supporters in Naples, delivered as the movement’s public confidence sharpened into a demand for power. The sentence holds a deliberate tension: the demonstration, he insists, must not become a battle, yet the alternative he announces is a seizure of government by force. It makes the march both a spectacle of mass support and a threat directed at the existing political order.

The address in Naples

After Italo Balbo left the platform and gave the order, the crowd’s chant of “Roma! Roma!” swelled through the alleyways. The squadristi kept time to it as the afternoon advanced. Mussolini then addressed the Blackshirts, claiming that they had captured the soul of Naples and of southern Italy without striking a blow. He called the demonstration an end in itself and warned against turning it into a battle, but immediately followed that restraint with the ultimatum: either the government would be given to the Fascists or they would descend on Rome to seize it. He added that the decision was a matter of days, perhaps hours.

The speech ended not with an order to attack but with an invitation to acclaim the army beneath the military command’s windows. The crowd answered with cheers for Fascism, the army, Italy, and the king. That sequence gives the expression its political shape: a show of disciplined, national loyalty frames a threat against the government, while the stated possibility of force lends urgency to the demand. The language presents seizure as the alternative to concession, not as a remote contingency.

A postwar claim to the future

The ultimatum belongs to a wider argument in the book about a Europe remade by war. The postwar landscape is described as a stage emptied of its old political actors and crowded instead by five million returning veterans. In this account, the forecast remains bleak and conflict still lies ahead; society is dividing between those who belonged to the old order and those who will shape what follows. Mussolini’s appeal to the Blackshirts draws authority from that perceived rupture, presenting organized action as the answer to a discredited political generation.

A related contrast appears in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s New Year address to his legionnaires. He casts 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations: Fiume signifies youth, life, and a future carried forward by the dead and by generations not yet born, while Versailles stands for a fearful and faltering Europe. Yet the account also notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio, and that his stature had already diminished. The contrast helps place Mussolini’s ultimatum within a broader language of renewal and national destiny without making the two men’s positions identical.

From ultimatum to program

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini’s three-hour, improvised address set out a program whose reach extended beyond taking office. He presented Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism after violence had buried earlier methods. Within Italy, he proposed replacing regional identities with a single Italian national identity; beyond its borders, he invoked empire as necessary to national greatness. His account also brought the Roman Church into that imperial vision, asserted that the Fascists were the state, and described a role for the masses in which they would be served and educated but also disciplined when judged to be wrong.

This program gives the Naples sentence a wider horizon. The demand for government is not presented merely as a bid to replace officeholders: it sits within a claim to remake the nation, define its relationship to the masses, and expand its place in the world. The address’s promise of action and the later programmatic vision share a political logic in which power is both an immediate prize and an instrument of national transformation.

The image of the new ruler

The book later frames Mussolini’s rise through the image of the “new man,” set against the supposedly exhausted politicians of old Italy. Crowds gather to see him pass, press close, and seek personal contact. The narration depicts him as an arbiter of disorder who promises to restore safety by mastering the violence that has divided society. In that portrayal, the Naples ultimatum anticipates a central paradox of his public image: force is invoked as the means by which conflict will supposedly be brought to an end.

A later commemoration at Piazza Belgioioso turns political growth into a staged return to origins. Mussolini recalls a time when only a few faithful gathered there; now, he says, small groups have become legions and a multitude. He describes the volunteers as an army with something mysterious and religious about it, and casts the movement’s advance as a people becoming a nation and then a state. Read alongside the Naples address, that retrospective makes the ultimatum more than a dramatic threat: it is an early, compact expression of a movement that claimed both the right to seize power and the historic mission to create a new political order.