Fascism

Fascism is presented as a movement that turns political uncertainty into a claim to national rebirth. It rejects a settled doctrine in favor of action and adaptation, while making organized violence both a practical instrument and a public sign of its power. Its trajectory—from a program with socialist echoes to an armed movement seeking to absorb other parties and become the state—reveals a central tension: it celebrates insurgent energy even as it builds institutions meant to discipline and preserve that energy.

Identity and political program

The movement begins by addressing a country imagined as exhausted by its old political class and transformed by mass participation. In the aftermath of war, the returning veterans are described as a force that will overwhelm the established order. The future is divided between those who belong to the past and those who will shape what comes next. This language makes generational replacement a political promise: Fascism presents itself not as one more parliamentary tendency, but as the force capable of ending an era of delay and beginning another.

The platform of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia on June 6, nearly three months after the founding meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro and after extensive discussion and revision. Despite the movement’s later anti-socialist direction, the published program retained marked similarities to revolutionary socialism and stood to the left of reformism on several points. It had been shaped in part by socialist exiles seeking to attract former comrades. The gap between this platform and the movement’s subsequent development is not treated as a simple repudiation of principle: the movement’s leaders instead make the absence of binding principles part of its identity.

Benito Mussolini describes Fascism as an anti-party and a form of anti-politics. The label supplies a boundary without fixing a comprehensive doctrine. Consistency, dogma, and settled principles are treated as burdens that could paralyze action. The founding program is accordingly dismissed as less decisive than combat itself. Fascism can present itself as revolutionary in one circumstance and reactionary in another, promising no particular outcome beyond its commitment to act. Its flexibility is therefore not a temporary adjustment at the margins; it is a method for keeping political options open and attracting constituencies that do not share a single ideology.

At the Teatro Olimpia, Mussolini gives this method a vocabulary of modernity. He characterizes the movement as dynamic and practical, drawing on the language of Futurism: speed, synthesis, and the present. Rather than define itself by conventional political categories, it claims to combine affirmations and negations. Its stated doctrine is action. At the same time, the movement refuses to serve automatically as a protective force for wealthy interests, particularly the newly rich. That posture helped distinguish its public self-image from a straightforward defense of the bourgeoisie, even as later alliances would draw it toward conservative and agrarian supporters.

Social conflict and expansion

The book places Fascism’s rise amid conflicts that were not reducible to the return of soldiers or to the experience of war alone. In Bologna, Leandro Arpinati, an anarchist railway worker from a working-class background who had not served at the front, became a leader whom others followed into action. The account stresses the contradiction between his origins and the agrarian and industrial interests served by the movement he helped organize. His attraction to confrontation could bridge that contradiction in practice without resolving it politically.

The pressure behind this shift is shown through the reach of the peasant leagues and labor organizations. In Emilia, Socialists controlled 223 of 280 municipalities. Farmhands averaged only 120 days of work a year, making adequate wages essential to survival during the idle months. The leagues gained control over hiring through their placement offices and extended their authority over work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crops. For landowners, the dispute concerned profits; for farmworkers, it concerned whether they could live through periods without work. Fascism expanded in a landscape where organized labor had acquired substantial influence over rural and municipal life.

The book also describes a broader political breakdown in Bologna: rival labor organizations competed in revolutionary rhetoric, while the socialist mayor tried to respond to demands for housing and workers’ control. Some employers preferred to sell their businesses rather than continue amid the uncertainty. This turmoil helps explain why the middle classes could appear trapped between competing forces. It does not, however, make Fascism merely a spontaneous reaction to disorder. The narrative suggests that the people drawn into its expanding crowds had not simply been created by the war; war had released or redirected dispositions already present in peacetime.

Violence accelerated the movement’s growth. After the Bologna massacre, Fascists assembled in the streets while the dead and wounded were still present, and membership rose by thousands within days. Arpinati declared that the local Fascio would keep its weapons ready until violence in the countryside ended and state agencies had regained control. That condition allowed continued armament to be presented as a response to disorder, even as the movement’s own capacity for force helped determine what counted as order.

The change in scale was rapid. Membership cards sold in October and November amounted to 1,065; in December the figure reached 10,860. By then the movement had 88 sections and 20,000 members across Italy. In Bologna, membership rose from a few dozen at the beginning of November to 2,500. Groups of municipal and provincial employees, customs officials, professors, police, teachers, and charity workers left the General Confederation of Labour for Fascist membership. The movement’s growth thus involved more than street militants: it drew people from public employment and local institutions as well as from the squads. The burning of a red flag could serve as a rallying spectacle around which further adherents gathered.

Violence, spectacle, and political identity

The movement’s public identity depended on distinguishing its violence from violence it attributed to its opponents. Mussolini’s account in Il Popolo d’Italia acknowledges that Fascists beat, shoot, and burn, while denying that they place bombs in theaters. Fascists are represented as combatants engaged in open conflict with Socialists, whereas terrorist violence is assigned to anarchists and Communists. This distinction does political work: violence is not denied, but classified as legitimate, disciplined, and national, while opposing violence is described as indiscriminate and criminal.

A flare used during the war to illuminate no-man’s-land arcs above Milan and makes the city appear, briefly, like a war zone. The flare serves as a starting signal. The scene condenses the movement’s fusion of political action with military memory and spectacle: a device associated with the front returns to urban politics, and a crowd watches its passage before action begins. In another street confrontation, a cordon of Carabinieri separates two processions. At the head of the Socialist column, women carry Lenin’s portrait and a red flag and sing for a better life for their children. Opposite them, the smaller Fascist procession is made up of men accustomed to living alongside daily killing during the war. The contrast is not simply between two political programs; it is between groups with different relationships to death and political action.

Fascist leaders repeatedly cast the movement as a force of renewal. The ideal new man is young, vigorous, and opposed to the supposedly exhausted politicians of the old order. This imagery makes the movement’s political violence appear as part of a larger rebirth after decline. The same structure recurs in the description of its growth from small units into legions: volunteer mobilization becomes a vision of a people transformed into a nation and then a state, with expansion beyond Italy’s borders as its horizon.

That promise also had an exclusionary edge. The projected national community would dissolve regional identities into a single Italian identity, while the imperial ideal would extend national greatness beyond the country’s borders. The movement’s imagined future thus joins internal unification to external power. Its language of youth and collective rebirth does not erase the coercive means on which that vision rests; rather, it presents force as a way to overcome fragmentation and inaugurate a new political age.

Compromise and the effort to govern

As Fascism sought electoral influence, its leaders faced a choice between the movement’s militant identity and the practical work of political alliance. In Bologna, Mussolini had to press local Fascists to moderate violence and cooperate electorally with Giovanni Giolitti, despite the local militants’ admiration for Gabriele D’Annunzio and hostility to the established political order. The proposed alliance required them to work with a figure associated with the bombardment of D’Annunzio’s position, and to curb their attacks on Communists. The book presents this as a difficult demand: the movement’s rhetoric of purity had to make room for cooperation with the very political world it condemned.

The central committee of the Fasci voted on April 7 to join Giolitti’s electoral blocs, and the Milan Fascio confirmed the decision the following evening. The argument for compromise was that political life required contacts and transitions; it was presented as a form of practical wisdom rather than shame. This was not merely an electoral maneuver. It demonstrated how the movement could retain its anti-party posture while entering alliances when they offered access to power.

That tension became sharper as Mussolini was proclaimed irreplaceable and the movement’s provincial leaders acquired greater importance. The old contempt for conventional parties could not, by itself, govern a country. The proposed solution was a party of anti-parties: a political organization broad enough to contain rival doctrines, but disciplined enough to restrict autonomous squad violence. The founding of the National Fascist Party therefore marked an attempt to harness the movement’s disorder without relinquishing its claim to represent a revolutionary force.

The movement’s national vision developed alongside this organizational change. Fascism promised to absorb liberals and liberalism after using violence to bury the older political methods. It called for Italians to be made into a single nation rather than a collection of regional peoples, and connected national greatness to an imperial future. It also abandoned indiscriminate anticlericalism, bringing the Roman Church within its account of national and imperial authority. The program was expansive, but its practical shape was increasingly defined by incorporation: rival groups and traditions could be admitted so long as they served the national project.

State power and the limits of opposition

The claim that the existing state had ceased to function became an argument for Fascist seizure of power. Mussolini asserted that an armed organization with officers and regulations could not be legitimate in a functioning state; he then used the claim that Italy’s state no longer existed to argue that Fascists had to take power. In this reasoning, the movement’s armed status is both evidence of the crisis and its proposed remedy. The march on Rome is described not as a distant metaphor but as an action already underway in history, with the liberal state portrayed as a mask and the coming clash as unavoidable.

Once in government, Fascism faced the problem of controlling the violence that had helped bring it there. The proposed Voluntary Militia for National Security would incorporate armed volunteers through regular military recruitment while binding them by oath to the prime minister. Mussolini’s plan aimed both to legalize Fascist violence and to regiment the provincial squads into a personal force. This would place coercive power under a central command, but it would also create an armed body parallel to the national army. The militia thus exposes a defining contradiction: Fascism invoked the state’s weakness to justify an independent armed movement, then sought to make that movement’s force an instrument of state power and personal authority.

This effort at consolidation coexisted with a strategy of electoral absorption. Fascism proposed to avoid alliances with parties while accepting candidates from any party, or from none, if they were considered useful to the nation. The goal was to draw people out of other political organizations and into the Fascist list. Its leaders also promised to curb unauthorized squad violence and pursued what they called a legal route to victory. The promise did not make the movement nonviolent; it placed violence, elections, and institutional expansion within a single strategy.

The 1924 election showed how far that strategy had advanced. The Fascist national list received 64.9 percent of the affirmative votes, exceeding the threshold needed for the majority bonus under the Acerbo Law. All 356 candidates on the list were elected, along with 19 representatives from a second national list, giving Mussolini’s government 374 seats. The law supplied a majoritarian advantage, but the list’s vote share was far above the 25 percent threshold. Electoral victory therefore furnished a parliamentary majority on a scale that the movement’s earlier rejection of party politics had not anticipated as its public form.

The opposition’s withdrawal from parliament in the Aventine Secession placed its hopes in moral condemnation and public outrage. Giovanni Amendola and the other secessionists rejected accommodation and sought to oppose Fascism’s violence through a unified moral stand. The narrative emphasizes the weakness of relying on outrage alone against a bloc supported by obedience to Mussolini and the power of government. Meanwhile, after a brief period of renewed activity, Mussolini allowed conflict between revisionists and intransigents within the party to reopen. Curzio Malaparte argued for the provincial and peasant character of Fascism against the Roman political establishment and urged renewed squad action against Matteotti’s mourners.

By late summer, Fascism had again entered a phase of open intimidation. Mussolini warned that if Socialists moved from words to deeds, they would face the blackshirts, and dismissed the Aventine abstainers as mistaken. In parliament, he then assumed political, moral, and historical responsibility for what had happened, including the violence associated with the movement. The declaration did not resolve the conflict over responsibility; it made the relationship between the leader and Fascist violence explicit at the moment when the opposition was testing whether parliamentary and moral pressure could contain his power.

Significance

The book’s account makes Fascism’s adaptability inseparable from its capacity for coercion. Its shifting program, alliances, electoral tactics, and institutional plans are not presented as separate phases that replace one another. Rather, they work together: anti-party language preserves room to maneuver; the promise of national rebirth gives that maneuvering a historical purpose; and violence helps the movement expand, pressure opponents, and claim authority.

Yet Fascism’s pursuit of state power also changes the meaning of its original militancy. A movement that treats combat as its essential program must decide who commands the combatants, whether local squads can act independently, and how their power can be made compatible with centralized rule. The proposed militia and the National Fascist Party answer these problems by attempting to discipline and incorporate the forces that produced the movement’s ascent. The result is not a clean transition from revolutionary violence to stable government. It is an effort to make violence governable while preserving it as the source of Fascism’s political identity.