Benedetto Croce

Benedetto Croce, a senator and former minister of public education, appears as the pre-eminent liberal intellectual of his time—and as one of the figures whose approval helped make fascism seem acceptable to people who might otherwise have opposed it. The narrative’s central tension is not that Croce fails to recognize force, but that he sees it and still chooses accommodation: applause, political calculation, and repeated arguments for preserving what he regards as fascism’s useful achievements.

Identity and public standing

Croce is introduced as a fifty-four-year-old philosopher, a leading authority in the country and a representative of liberal thought. He had served as minister of public education in Giovanni Giolitti’s last government and was already an established senator. His standing matters because his gestures are not those of an obscure spectator. When he applauds Benito Mussolini, the act carries the weight of an intellectual whose judgment could shape how others understood the new movement.

The book’s concise assessment of Croce is sharply divided: he is a supreme intellectual authority and the leader of liberal thought, yet he regards fascist violence with a mixture of arrogance, myopia, and disdain. That formulation frames his later choices. Croce is neither depicted as unaware of fascism’s methods nor as a simple convert to its political doctrine. Instead, the narrative follows the gap between his liberal identity and his willingness to treat the regime as a force that might serve the country.

Applause in Naples

At a crowded gathering in Naples, Mussolini tells the city’s bourgeois audience that fascism is an armed party, organized around discipline and force, and that it intends to become the state. He dismisses parliament as a political plaything while presenting the nation’s greatness as fascism’s higher aim. The audience of seven thousand responds with loud approval. Croce, seated in a box, applauds too, although the speech openly challenges the liberal tradition he represents.

The contrast becomes explicit in Croce’s exchange with Giustino Fortunato, who is troubled by the amount of violence he hears in fascist politics. Croce answers by invoking the idea that violence can propel historical change. His response does not deny the violence; it gives it a place in a theory of political development. When Luigi Russo later asks why Croce applauded a speaker he considered histrionic, Croce explains that politics operates through theatrical performance and that Mussolini performs effectively. The scene binds together judgment and accommodation: Croce can recognize the spectacle as spectacle and still applaud its political force.

Liberal hopes after the March on Rome

In the aftermath of the March on Rome, Croce is among the liberals who see a promise of peace in Mussolini. The narrative places his continued applause alongside the hopes of other political figures that the new leader might rescue Italy from a failing parliamentary order. Mussolini’s government includes not only fascists but also populists, nationalists, democrats, and liberals; Croce’s response belongs to a broader pattern of support that crosses ideological boundaries.

This welcome is presented against the violence already suffered in Rome: nineteen people have died and twenty have been seriously injured in the fifteen days since the march. Yet public attention has narrowed to the leader, and many Italians hope he will restore order. Croce’s place in this scene is significant because his liberal authority helps frame that hope as a defensible political choice. He is not described as endorsing every fascist act. Rather, his support contributes to the expectation that a movement born in violence might nevertheless cure the disorder surrounding it.

Support through 1923 and 1924

Croce’s accommodation persists beyond the initial transfer of power. At the Palio in Siena, he is praised for his approval of Giovanni Gentile’s education reform, a policy Benito Mussolini presents as a major achievement. Croce’s regard for the reform places him within the cultural and political network that gives the government’s program respectability, even as Giacomo Matteotti’s presence among the crowd marks a sharper opposition to fascist normalization.

By the first anniversary of Mussolini’s rule, Croce is still publicly defending a conciliatory position. In a newspaper interview, he urges his followers to acknowledge good wherever it appears and to prepare for the future. The phrasing treats the regime’s record as something to assess selectively, rather than as a reason to reject it outright. His intervention comes amid expanding government control, including measures against the free press and the tightening of authority inside the National Fascist Party. The juxtaposition makes his optimism consequential: it helps sustain confidence in the government while its restrictions deepen.

The same pattern reappears during the crisis following Matteotti’s murder. After the Senate gives Mussolini’s government a vote of confidence by 225 votes to 21, with six abstentions, Croce explains his own support in an interview. He acknowledges criticism and regret, but maintains that fascism has met serious needs and accomplished good that should not be allowed to disappear into the ineffectual politics that came before. He identifies love of the Italian homeland and devotion to its salvation as the movement’s central value. In the same moment, the regime moves to defend Amerigo Dùmini, Matteotti’s killer. Croce’s case for preserving fascism thus stands beside a concrete sign that the government is protecting those implicated in political murder.

Narrative role and contradiction

Croce’s arc is one of sustained judgment without decisive opposition. He repeatedly encounters evidence that fascism depends on force: in Mussolini’s speech, in the post-march violence, and finally in the government’s defense of Matteotti’s killer. Yet he continues to distinguish the regime’s claimed national purpose and practical accomplishments from its illiberal means, and his public support helps keep that distinction politically available.

The narrative does not reduce Croce to a naïve observer. His remarks about political theater show that he understands the performative nature of Mussolini’s appeal; his invocation of violence as an engine of history shows that he can place coercion within an intellectual framework. The contradiction lies in what that understanding permits: the liberal philosopher recognizes the threat and continues to lend it authority. His significance is therefore not only personal. Croce’s repeated approval illustrates how fascist power could draw legitimacy from figures who did not simply share its origins, but who judged its promise of order and national renewal worth supporting even as its violence became harder to separate from its rule.