Fascist Revolution “Second Phase” Policy

The Fascist Revolution “Second Phase” Policy was Benito Mussolini and Margherita Sarfatti’s program for consolidating fascist power after the movement’s initial period of violent upheaval. Published in Gerarchia, the official fascist journal, on January 31, 1923, it joined gradual institutional change to the threat of continued repression: the state’s administrative machinery would be retained, but parliament would be humiliated and political opposition treated as incompatible with fascist rule.

From upheaval to consolidation

The policy declared the first phase of the revolution complete and irreversible. The next task was normalization: for the time being, institutions and procedures could remain in place while fascism reconciled elements of the old order with the new and advanced through successive compromises. That gradualism was not a retreat from revolutionary ambition. It described a method for extending control without dismantling the complex administration of a modern state all at once.

The argument belonged to a postwar political world portrayed as exhausted and unstable. The returning mass of veterans threatened to overwhelm the old political class, while the forecast offered no prospect of an immediate end to conflict. In this account, the division was between those who belonged to the past and those who would shape what came next. The policy’s language of a new phase thus converted crisis into a claim that fascism alone could direct the country’s future.

The state and its opponents

The article’s gradual institutional approach was paired with an uncompromising account of political membership. The fascist state was presented as representing Italy, not as one party among others competing within a parliamentary system. Parliament, accordingly, could not remain an independent limit on fascist authority; it was to be publicly and repeatedly subordinated. Those outside the fascist project were framed not as legitimate rivals but as enemies, with the text threatening their destruction rather than accepting their continued opposition.

This combination made normalization a form of domination rather than reconciliation between equal political forces. Compromise described the pace and means of institutional change, not a willingness to preserve political pluralism. The promise to leave things unchanged for the moment sat beside the insistence that the state would not tolerate its enemies. Continuity of administration and the elimination of meaningful opposition were presented as compatible parts of the same program.

The political conditions behind the program

The article’s language of consolidation followed years in which political conflict had moved between rural workplaces, city streets, parliament, and armed organization. In Ferrara, socialist leagues controlled hiring and other parts of provincial economic life; their reach made control of labor and land a direct political stake. Fascist squads, in turn, developed organized methods for attacking the leagues, including a January 1921 punitive expedition planned to strike several rural targets simultaneously with the support of trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association.

Mass mobilization offered another demonstration of how fascist power could operate beyond parliamentary debate. In May 1921, thousands of impoverished farm laborers marched from the countryside into Ferrara, and the city awoke occupied by an immense column. Telephone lines were cut, buildings requisitioned for lodging, and businesses closed. In 1922, the Labor Alliance’s legalitarian general strike sought to defend political and union liberties as a united national front; the fascists used the confrontation to issue an ultimatum challenging the state’s ability to maintain authority. These episodes illuminate the context for the second phase: normalization followed not the disappearance of organized conflict, but the accumulation of coercive capacity and pressure on the institutions meant to contain it.

Gradual change and the new political order

The policy’s emphasis on preserving administration answered a practical problem as well as an ideological one. A state could not simply be replaced in a single stroke without disrupting its governing machinery. The proposed solution was incremental transformation: remove people, procedures, and doctrines over time, while keeping the administrative structure functioning. Its claim to moderation in method therefore accompanied an expansive ambition to remake the state.

The wider fascist presentation of this project relied on a contrast between national decline and rebirth. Benito Mussolini was cast as a new man who would impose order on chaos, while mass gatherings were described through the imagery of a devoted army, a people becoming a nation, and a nation becoming a state. In that frame, the second phase promised to turn the movement’s revolutionary spectacle into durable government. Its central tension remained unresolved: fascism described its advance as normalization and compromise, even as it denied its opponents a secure place in political life.