Collapse of the Italian liberal state

The Collapse of the Italian liberal state was not a single constitutional act but a process in which formal institutions remained visible while their ability to control political violence and defend their authority steadily diminished. The crisis culminated in Benito Mussolini’s accession to government in 1922: the state’s failure to stop the Fascist mobilization became both the justification for a new authority and the means by which it was established.

A postwar crisis of authority

The political order faced a society transformed by war and mass demobilization. The postwar account imagines Europe as a stage emptied of its old political actors, while five million returning soldiers press back into national life. Veterans appear not simply as a constituency but as a force that established leaders must reckon with. The passage’s division between those who had belonged to the old world and those who would shape what came next captures a crisis of legitimacy: the liberal politicians’ familiar appeals to moderation and delay no longer seemed capable of containing the consequences of war.

The state’s weakening was visible in conflicts over public order well before the final transfer of power. After a massacre of unarmed peasants, a three-day general strike halted public and private services across the province. Local business and property interests responded by organizing the Bolognese Association of Social Defense, whose delegation told Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti that the state had abdicated in the face of socialist violence and offered to act in the name of self-defense. The episode reveals a damaging reversal: rather than appearing as the reliable guarantor of order, the state was accused of having left groups to provide security for themselves.

At the same time, officials increasingly treated Fascist formations as potential instruments of public order. In 1919, Michele Bianchi, acting on Mussolini’s instructions, reached an agreement with Milan’s prefect to make the Fasci available for policing. A confidential government circular urged Fascist collaboration against revolutionary attempts, even by violent means, provided the groups accepted command by the authorities. That qualification did not erase the political significance of the arrangement. In trying to contain the revolutionary left, the liberal state gave an organized movement outside its ordinary structures a role in enforcing order—and thereby helped normalize its use of force.

Parliamentary entry and the armed party

Fascism’s entry into parliamentary politics did not restore the state’s authority over the movement. In the April–May 1921 election period, Senator Luigi Albertini’s acceptance of the alliance between liberals and Fascists marked a decisive change: Fascists had crossed from the violence of the trenches and streets into the parliamentary arena. The national blocs were intended to strengthen Giovanni Giolitti’s position against Bolshevism, but the alliance also made it harder for liberal politicians to maintain a clear boundary between parliamentary politics and a movement that openly celebrated violence.

The contradiction sharpened under Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi. On December 15, Bonomi issued a prefectural circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and including Fascist paramilitary groups among formations considered illegal. Within forty-eight hours, Michele Bianchi, newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, answered with a directive declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable. It was published in Il Popolo d’Italia. The government’s attempt to regulate the weapons and status of the squads was thus met not by compliance but by a public assertion that the party and its armed organization formed a single unit.

The state did not respond with arrests. Bonomi instead sent prefects another circular on December 21, complaining that many public-order instructions remained unenforced, including a prohibition on civilians routinely carrying spiked clubs and maces during Sunday promenades. The gap between issuing orders and making them effective had become a defining feature of the crisis. The government could still publish rules; it could no longer reliably compel obedience to them.

The calculated crisis and the failed defense

Mussolini’s strategy exploited that weakness. In secret negotiations he presented himself as the one person able to stop the squad violence, promising to disband the squads once he entered government. Yet he also sought to bring the political crisis to a point at which no alternative government could be formed, timing the pressure so that the threat of insurrection would appear decisive without exposing the movement’s military bluff too early. The same leader who offered to end the violence depended on its threat to make his own appointment seem necessary. This was not simply a contest between state and insurgents: the crisis was being used to make the state’s alternatives appear impossible.

On the night before the decisive confrontation, Efrem Ferraris kept watch at the Ministry of the Interior. He recorded occupied prefectures, invaded telegraph offices, military garrisons that had aligned themselves with the Fascists, and trains requisitioned to carry weapons toward the capital. The sequence, visible through the ministry’s communications, showed the state disintegrating across its administrative and military networks. The spectacle was not confined to the streets of Rome: the authorities were receiving reports of their own institutions being occupied or compromised elsewhere.

The government nevertheless attempted a lawful defense. On the morning of October 28, 1922, Luigi Facta transmitted written orders for Rome’s defense to General Emanuele Pugliese. A telegram ordering the arrest of those responsible for sedition went to the prefects; a notice initiating a state of siege was drafted; and the proclamation was posted in Rome at 8:30 a.m. The sequence shows that constitutional and administrative procedures still existed and could be set in motion. Their force, however, depended on the king’s decision and on the capacity of the state to carry them through. The proposed emergency measure did not stop the Fascists from reaching power.

Power transferred, authority unsettled

After the Fascist insurrection, the public record could describe events as peaceful while still registering the scale of the political defeat. Luigi Albertini wrote that Italians had become accustomed to seeing violence as a route to advancement or a solution, and that the population had watched with acquiescent indifference as state authority collapsed and its powers were humiliated. The absence of a large-scale confrontation therefore did not mean that the state had successfully defended itself. It marked how thoroughly the threat of violence had altered the conditions under which political power could be claimed.

Fifteen days after the March on Rome, Mussolini entered the Chamber of Deputies before a packed and celebratory audience. Most deputies stood to applaud; the left did not. The chamber’s continued activity and the government’s presentation to parliament could suggest institutional continuity, but the reception also staged a new political settlement. The March was already being described as a bloodless revolution even though Rome had seen nineteen people killed and twenty seriously injured during the same fifteen days. Public spectacle and parliamentary ceremony helped obscure the violence through which the transfer had been secured.

Mussolini later acknowledged that a government determined to defend itself could have done so, but insisted that the Italian state no longer existed. That retrospective claim was politically useful, yet the evidence gives it a concrete basis in the government’s unheeded orders, compromised garrisons, occupied administrative offices, and inability to control the squads. The collapse was therefore both real and instrumental: Fascist leaders invoked state failure to justify taking power, while their own organized pressure helped make that failure decisive.

The state’s diminished political meaning

The new regime offered not merely a change of ministers but a claim to embody the state itself. At the Fascist congress, Mussolini presented Fascism as capable of absorbing liberalism, making Italians into a single national people, and extending national power through an imperial project. He described the state as something the Fascists themselves constituted. The claim answered the perceived disunity of the liberal order with a promise of national unification, but it also displaced the idea that public authority should stand above a party and its armed formations.

This politics drew force from a narrative of decline and rebirth. Fascist rhetoric opposed the exhausted politicians of the old order to youth, vigor, and national resurrection, presenting a mass movement as the means by which a people could become a nation and a nation a state. The promise was inseparable from the history of violence and institutional accommodation that preceded it. In that sense, the collapse of the liberal state was not only a failure to enforce particular laws or defeat a single insurrection. It was the loss of the state’s practical monopoly over political authority, accompanied by the rise of a party that claimed to restore order while treating its own armed power as part of the state to come.