Italian Carabinieri

The Italian Carabinieri are presented amid the weakening of the liberal state, where the effort to preserve public order increasingly overlaps with the rise of Fascist power. Their place in the narrative shifts from part of the state’s coercive apparatus to evidence of how that apparatus could be drawn into, or rendered ineffective by, the political violence it was meant to contain.

Public Order and the State’s Retreat

In Milan, Benito Mussolini arranged for the Fascist squads to be made available to the prefect for maintaining public order. The government’s confidential circular went further: it urged Fascist collaboration in suppressing revolutionary attempts, including by force, on the condition that the squads accept the authorities’ command. The arrangement exposed a contradiction at the heart of the state’s response. It sought to curb revolutionary action by relying on a movement that was itself building an armed political force.

By December 1921, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi’s efforts to impose discipline had made little headway. A circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring a license and placing Fascist paramilitary groups among illegal formations was effectively countered within forty-eight hours by Michele Bianchi, who declared that party sections and combat squads formed an inseparable unit. The narrative describes the Carabinieri as converting to Fascism and notes that a Disciplinary Council absolved them, while the government’s subsequent complaints to prefects showed that its public-order instructions were not being carried out. State authority remained on paper, but its capacity to command its forces and enforce its rules was visibly failing.

Encounters with Fascist Violence

A later episode shows the corps confronting political violence without securing control of the scene. When Fascist deputy Alfredo Misuri was attacked, Carabinieri arrived as Amerigo Dumini moved away from the immediate confrontation and Arconovaldo Bonaccorsi asserted that his militia rank placed him above arrest. Misuri remained injured on the ground. The account does not describe an arrest; instead, the exchange makes the competing claims to authority plain, with a Fascist militia member openly challenging the state officers who had arrived.

The abduction of Giacomo Matteotti sharpens this pattern through a telling detail of placement. As the Lancia Lambda carrying the abductors passed Matteotti walking beside the river, a Carabiniere stood nearby in the shade of a plane tree, among other people in the area. The narrative establishes the officer’s proximity but does not say that he witnessed or understood the abduction. That distinction matters: the corps appears within the scene, yet the account leaves its capacity to recognize and prevent the crime unresolved.

Intervention and Its Limits

At the Siena Palio, Fascists attacked Giacomo and Velia Matteotti amid the crowd. Police made their way through the confusion and escorted the couple to the station, after which they were expelled from the city. The account identifies the rescuers as police, not specifically as Carabinieri; it therefore offers a contrast to scenes in which state authority is unable to control Fascist violence, without establishing that this corps intervened. Matteotti later recorded the attack tersely in his book, noting that the police had looked on helplessly. The juxtaposition leaves the public authorities’ role unsettled: present in the episode, they ultimately removed the couple from danger, but their intervention also ended in the couple’s expulsion rather than in any described restraint of the attackers.

The Rural Massacre and Its Political Aftermath

In a confrontation with unarmed peasants, the Italian Carabinieri fired roughly fifty shots, killing eight people and injuring about thirty. The deaths triggered a three-day general strike across the province, suspending public and private services. On April 8, farmers, manufacturers, merchants, professionals, public employees, and homeowners formed the Bolognese Association of Social Defense; a week later, its delegation told Francesco Saverio Nitti that the state had abdicated in the face of socialist violence and declared itself ready to act in the name of self-defense. The sequence places the corps within a wider collapse of confidence in public authority: its use of force did not restore order, but became part of the crisis that drove civilians to organize beyond the state.