Fascist Nationalism

Fascist Nationalism answers postwar exhaustion with a promise of national rebirth. In the book, it gathers together the returning veterans, hostility toward the old political class, the ideal of a unified Italian people, and the prospect of imperial expansion. Its language makes a new national community seem capable of ending division and restoring historical greatness; its political practice, however, depends on force and unfolds amid sharp conflicts over land, labor, and the authority of the state.

Defeat, exhaustion, and the promise of renewal

The nationalism takes shape against the wreckage left by war. The narrator imagines Europe as a stage emptied of its former political actors and points to five million returning veterans pressing toward the territorial borders. In this account, the old generation’s moderation and parliamentary habits have failed, while the future belongs to a mass politics organized around those who fought and survived. The proposed answer is not a return to the prewar order but a new alignment and a demand to move in step.

That diagnosis makes national renewal both a political program and a response to collective loss. The veterans are described as the speaker’s own people: survivors whose brief, forceful speech gives way to silence, and who have been left behind by those who did not fight. Their experience supplies an audience for a politics that promises belonging and direction. Yet the text does not present the promise as proof that the nation has already been remade. It stresses the gap between the movement’s certainty about its future and the uncertainty of the postwar moment.

Fiume and rival images of the future

Gabriele D’Annunzio gives this contrast a particularly vivid form in his New Year address to his legionnaires. He casts 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations. Versailles, in his account, stands for a fearful, exhausted Europe; Fiume stands for youth, beauty, life, faith, and a future that reaches beyond the dead to those not yet born. The political force of the contrast lies in its competing visions of time: diplomacy appears to divide up the remains of an old world, while the occupation of Fiume is presented as the beginning of a new one.

The narrative immediately complicates that triumphant image. Gabriele D’Annunzio remains in Fiume against the wishes of its inhabitants, while Italians do not follow him as his rhetoric might suggest. His claim to embody youth is therefore vulnerable to political reality: the text portrays him as an aging figure whose elevated language has not secured the national following it promises. Fiume serves as a model of national passion, but it also exposes the limits of a nationalism proclaimed from above.

From Italians to a nation and an empire

Mussolini’s later program turns national rebirth into an explicit project of cultural and political homogenization. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, he declares that Fascism will complete the nationalization of Italians: regional identities such as Venetian, Romagnan, Tuscan, Sicilian, and Sardinian are to yield to Italians alone. Beyond the borders, the movement looks to an imperial myth, on the grounds that national greatness requires an idea of empire. The Roman Church, once a target of anticlerical hostility, is also recast as an institution whose universal reach can serve that imperial vision.

This national unity is not framed as an equal partnership among social groups. Mussolini says that the movement wants to serve and educate the masses, but also to discipline them when they are judged to be wrong; the masses, in his formulation, require an interpreter. He presents the state in similarly absolute terms: “we are the state.” The claim makes the nation more than a shared identity. It becomes a political authority embodied by the movement, with little room in the formulation for independent institutions or dissenting conceptions of the public good.

The book places that rhetoric against social conditions that resist easy absorption into a single national story. In Bologna, socialist organization and labor conflict shape both city and countryside; in Ferrara, peasant leagues regulate hiring, wages, and other parts of agricultural life. The leagues’ power is supported by material pressures: farmhands work an average of 120 days a year and need wages that can sustain them through idle months. The account records 223 socialist-controlled municipalities out of 280 in Emilia and, in Ferrara, 81,000 members of the Leagues of Proletarian Unity by mid-May. Such details reveal the scale and organization of the conflicts that national rhetoric seeks to supersede, even as the movement’s own appeal grows through opposition to them.

Nationalism enacted through force and spectacle

The narrative repeatedly shows that the promise of national order is coupled with organized coercion. On January 23, 1921, a Ferrara punitive expedition is planned on military principles: armed men assemble, trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association carry them toward multiple targets, and the operation relies on surprise and a coordinated force. This is not merely a verbal rejection of socialism. It is a deliberate method for imposing a different political order in the countryside, where the movement contests the influence of the peasant leagues.

The mass mobilization in Ferrara later makes the movement’s organizational reach visible on a larger scale. Beginning at midnight on May 11, thousands of impoverished farmworkers travel toward the city on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges. The next morning, fifty thousand arrive in a procession along the Corso della Giovecca. The city is paralyzed: telephone lines are cut, schools requisitioned for billets, and businesses closed. National community is staged as a mass presence, but its public display is backed by command, control of space, and the threat implicit in an occupying force.

A similar combination appears in Mussolini’s speeches. In his first parliamentary address, he attacks Giovanni Giolitti’s foreign policy for failing to protect Italian presence on the eastern borders and for sacrificing Montenegro’s independence. He then addresses communists, socialists, and Catholic representatives with a shifting mixture of mockery, promises, and threats. On the question of socialism, he offers support for an eight-hour working-day bill while warning that continued conflict will be met on its own terrain. Nationalism thus reaches into parliament without surrendering the methods of street politics; persuasion and intimidation appear side by side.

Rebirth as political ritual

The promise of renewal is also built through repeated performances of collective belonging. Returning to Piazza Belgioioso, where a few hundred supporters once gathered, Mussolini addresses thousands from a balcony. He contrasts the movement’s former small groups with its present legions and describes an army of volunteers, a people becoming a nation, and a nation becoming a state. The piazza’s remembered scale gives the scene its argument: expansion is presented not only as numerical growth but as a resurrection and transformation of the national community.

The book’s account of Fascist Nationalism keeps that spectacle in tension with what it conceals. The language of rebirth promises to overcome regional difference, class conflict, and political paralysis; the events associated with it show a movement confronting organized opponents through coercion while claiming to speak for the whole nation. Its central political achievement in the narrative is therefore not simply to proclaim a renewed Italy, but to make that claim seem at once a historical destiny, a mass experience, and a justification for concentrating authority.