Italo Balbo (ff67bada)

Italo Balbo rose from decorated war volunteer to commander of a mass Fascist militia and one of the organizers of the 1922 insurrection. Courageous, charismatic, and ruthless, he could mobilize men quickly and press for decisive action; after Fascism entered government, he was also charged with disciplining the same squads whose street violence had built his authority. His career turns on that tension. The movement needed him as an organizer, but the habits and rivalries he had fostered made it difficult to turn its armed followers into a regular force—or to separate its leaders from their violence.

Background and Rise

Balbo was the son of two elementary-school teachers from the urban petite bourgeoisie. He volunteered for the war, served as a lieutenant in the Alpini and the Arditi, and received decorations for valor. After the war he joined the Fascist squads in Ferrara, which received funding from agrarian interests, and soon became their leader. The combination of military experience, personal daring, and a capacity to command armed men made him a prominent figure in the expanding movement.

His authority was not simply national or formal. It rested on local networks, personal loyalty, and the ability to direct squadristi in the provinces. That foundation later became both an asset and a liability: Balbo could call on men who knew and followed him, but those men were not automatically soldiers, and their loyalty to local leaders could compete with discipline imposed from above.

The Insurrection and March on Rome

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini summoned Balbo to Milan as preparations for an armed seizure of power intensified. Balbo reported that the squads were being militarized promptly and that provincial forces were ready for action. The assessment proved more optimistic than the evidence warranted. Pietro Badoglio was said to have warned that Fascism would collapse at the first shot from the regular army; at a meeting on October 16, the generals present recognized the danger. The squads had only a few thousand rifles in the Padua area, and their members lacked training in their use.

At the meeting in the Fascio headquarters on Via San Marco, Balbo nevertheless argued for immediate action. He feared that parliamentary maneuvers and an electoral arrangement among liberals and socialists would trap or weaken Fascism if it waited until spring. His position was political as well as military: delay risked losing the moment, while the movement’s opponents might regain room to act. Michele Bianchi supported the argument for urgency, while several of the generals favored postponement because the forces were not adequately prepared.

The operational plan subsequently discussed by Mussolini assigned authority to a quadrumvirate and divided the country into twelve zones, each with an inspector general. Fascist forces were to occupy key provincial centers, while squadristi gathered near Rome for the march. Balbo’s presence among the decision-makers reflects his standing as a field organizer, though he was not one of the quadrumvirs who were to direct the operation from Perugia.

The campaign did not unfold as a controlled military advance. When Tuscan squads and followers of Roberto Farinacci in Cremona acted ahead of the plan, Florence’s prefecture came under pressure during a banquet honoring General Armando Diaz. Balbo recognized the danger that an attack involving Diaz might alienate the army and turn the confrontation into a catastrophe. He left for Florence through rain and mud, while ordering the squadristi guarding his hotel to laugh at the royal guards outside the prefecture at regular intervals. The episode shows him attempting to contain an impulsive escalation without abandoning the movement’s show of force.

At a later Fascist demonstration in Naples, Balbo stepped down from the platform and led his Emilian comrades in a chant demanding a march on Rome. The gesture helped turn a peaceful parade into a public demonstration of resolve. Mussolini then told the assembled blackshirts that the government must either be handed over or seized by marching on Rome, and that the decision was close. Balbo’s intervention gave the spectacle its mobilizing refrain: political pressure was presented as a mass movement already in motion.

Commanding the Militia

After the seizure of power, Balbo became commander general of the Voluntary Militia for National Security and traveled through the provinces to organize squads that were reluctant or unruly. He wore a uniform of his own design: a black shirt, military trousers, an Ardito-style jacket with black flames, and a fez. Supporters and opponents alike called him the generalissimo. At twenty-seven, he received a monthly salary of 3,000 lire, equivalent to that of an army corps general, and commanded a force said to number 150,000 men.

The impressive number concealed institutional weakness. The militia had no standard uniform, barracks, or transport, and lacked even muskets in adequate supply. Much of the 30 million lire allocated for extraordinary expenses had gone on uniforms. Balbo urged Fascists to stop arguing about direction and to act, but the injunction exposed the contradiction of his new assignment: the man who had taught squadristi to prize rebellion and gang warfare was now expected to impose hierarchy and discipline. The militia might carry military ranks and regulations without becoming a trained army.

The project also met resistance from within the movement. At a party meeting on nationalizing the militia, Balbo oversaw the force alongside Emilio De Bono and Cesare Maria De Vecchi, but the proposal renewed disputes over whether Fascism should be controlled by the party leadership or retain its revolutionary squads. Roberto Farinacci argued that the squads were more effective than the militia at keeping the country obedient, while other leaders defended the revolutionary spirit. Balbo challenged Mussolini over whether the revolution had been made for the leader alone or for all its participants. The exchange captures his independence, but also the fragility of the discipline he was meant to enforce.

That fragility extended to the movement’s leaders. In April 1923, Francesco Giunta and Cesare Forni fought a duel amid disputes involving personal rivalries, women, territorial control, and what each regarded as betrayed ideals. Forni, a celebrated squad leader, resigned from command of the militia’s first zone, which covered the industrial triangle. The episode was part of a broader pattern of factional conflict: with communist leaders arrested, Fascists were increasingly divided against one another. Balbo’s authority could organize the movement, but could not erase the appetites and rivalries that animated it.

Ferrara and the Minzoni Affair

Balbo’s power in Ferrara rested on an alliance with the agrarians and influence over local administration. After the march on Rome, the socialists did not contest the December administrative elections, and Fascists won throughout the province. Balbo strengthened the agrarian alliance through municipal tax changes and placed friends, relatives, and even dissidents in important administrative and party positions. The arrangement appeared stable until seasonal unemployment returned in spring and farmworkers faced hunger. Discontent among peasants fed dissent within Fascism itself. Local leaders resigned in protest at agrarian influence and the treatment of the peasants, while expectations of revolt spread through the city.

Balbo responded to this internal challenge without appearing to take direct charge. He sent Dino Grandi as commissioner of the city Fascio and arranged for six trusted members of the Perugia militia to go to Ferrara. They tracked down dissident Fascists, and by the end of June the opposition had dispersed; Tommaso Beltrami was restored to command. The episode makes clear that Balbo’s effort to discipline the movement could rely on coercion against its own members as well as against political opponents.

When Don Giovanni Minzoni, an antifascist priest, was killed in August, Beltrami reported the event to Balbo, who had rushed from Rome. Balbo dictated a press statement condemning the killers as men who had no true connection to the Fascists and expressing hope that they would face justice. Beltrami then disclosed that Raoul Forti, a militia consul and Balbo’s personal friend, was involved, and that Beltrami himself had helped the two men escape from their hiding place. Balbo’s response was to hush the matter up. The attempted public disavowal thus sits beside private knowledge of the perpetrators’ connections to the movement and its leadership.

The consequences reached Balbo in November, when he sued a newspaper for libel over its account of his role in the killing. During the trial, Beltrami produced a letter in which Balbo guaranteed the perpetrators impunity. Benito Mussolini demanded Balbo’s resignation, and the squadristi’s idol fell from his position. The affair exposed the weakness of a distinction between responsible Fascist authority and supposedly rogue violence when the evidence pointed to protection from within.

Crisis and Narrative Significance

When Giacomo Matteotti was abducted, the Fascist leadership turned against itself. Defensive memoranda were prepared, evidence was concealed, and false accounts circulated to suggest that Matteotti had fled or disappeared for private reasons. Balbo rushed to Palazzo Chigi to demand the immediate shooting of Amerigo Dùmini. This demand appears amid the broader scramble to contain the crisis; it does not erase the regime’s concealment campaign, but shows Balbo advocating a drastic response to the men at its center.

By November, parliament and the political establishment were increasingly repudiating Fascism. During the proceedings over the killing of Don Giovanni Minzoni, Beltrami’s letter connected Balbo to the perpetrators’ impunity, and Mussolini required him to resign. The subsequent political crisis following Matteotti’s abduction further weakened the government, as support ebbed and Fascist authority came under mounting challenge.

Balbo’s narrative role is that of both builder and attempted regulator of Fascist violence. The same qualities that made him useful in the rise of the movement—speed, personal command, and an appetite for action—could not supply the training, institutional loyalty, or accountability required to make its militia a disciplined state force. His career repeatedly stages the collision between spectacle and organization: the large force without the equipment of an army, the leader who preaches action while trying to contain premature violence, and the public condemnation of a crime followed by an effort to suppress knowledge of the perpetrators. His fall does not mark a clean separation between Fascism and squad violence; it reveals how difficult that separation was to sustain.