Liberty

Liberty in the book is not a settled inheritance but a point of political struggle. As the liberal state weakens after the war, Benito Mussolini recasts freedom as subordinate to order and force; Giacomo Matteotti, by contrast, insists that citizens must demand their rights and resist the dictatorship’s abuses. The conflict exposes the gap between parliamentary forms that remain in place and the freedom required to make them meaningful.

A postwar ideal under pressure

The account sets the dispute against a landscape of mass death and disillusionment. The returning veterans are a force that will overrun the political world of the old liberals, while war remains on the agenda and society is imagined as dividing between those who belonged to the past and those who will shape what comes next. In this setting, liberty is already vulnerable: it belongs to a political order described as exhausted, while the language of collective discipline and renewal gathers force.

The contrast appears in the competing meanings attached to 1919. In his address to the legionnaires at Fiume, Gabriele D’Annunzio presents the city as youth, life, faith, and a future carried by the dead and the unborn; Versailles, by contrast, signifies a fearful and declining Europe. The narrative then notes that Italians did not follow him and that his authority as a figure of youth had waned. The episode places liberty within a wider struggle over what freedom might serve: a new political life, or a promise of national renewal that can eclipse the claims of existing institutions.

Freedom made conditional

Mussolini’s political language turns liberty from an end into a means subject to control. In the March 1923 issue of Gerarchia, he argues that force and consensus are joined, that liberty must be controlled, and that force is required to control it. His accompanying rejection of liberty as an idol is sharpened by a replacement vocabulary: order, hierarchy, and discipline. The change is more than rhetorical. Freedom is acknowledged as a political term, but denied the standing of a principle that can limit the state or its leader.

That logic connects to Mussolini’s broader account of the state and the nation. At the Fascist National Party’s founding congress, he declares that the state is the Fascists, imagines a national identity that would erase regional distinctions, and links national greatness to empire. He also describes the masses as needing an interpreter who can educate them and discipline them when they are wrong. In this program, collective unity and political authority take precedence over the independent claims of individuals and groups.

The tension is visible in Mussolini’s parliamentary performance. He tells the Chamber that Fascism is not against elections or Parliament, and invites the opposition to consider cooperation; he also declares that liberty has never existed. His appeal to reconciliation therefore coexists with a claim that drains liberty of substantive force. Parliamentary participation remains on display, but the concept that might give participation its protective purpose is treated as an abstraction rather than a binding limit on power.

Institutions and the narrowing of liberty

The weakening of liberty is also shown through the inability of government institutions to restrain Fascist force. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi’s attempt to regulate truncheons as weapons and to classify Fascist paramilitary groups as illegal is countered within forty-eight hours by Michele Bianchi, who declares party sections and combat squads inseparable. The directive is published in Il Popolo d’Italia. Although the account observes that a functioning state would have arrested those claiming to maintain an armed militia, Bonomi instead issues another circular complaining that his public-order orders have not been obeyed.

A later crisis makes the institutional stakes concrete. In October 1922, Luigi Facta’s government prepares a state of siege, including orders for Rome’s defense and telegrams directing the arrest of those responsible for sedition. The measure would suspend constitutional guarantees and place powers in military hands, but it is intended to stop the Fascist march rather than enable it. The sequence shows a liberal state reaching for emergency authority as ordinary protections fail; the planned decree is posted in Rome, but its appearance does not itself settle who will control the state or preserve liberty.

The same divide between formal politics and coercive power persists after Mussolini enters government. The Chamber of Deputies is packed for his November 1922 appearance, and most deputies rise to applaud. Yet the narrative notes that, in Rome alone, the fifteen days since the March on Rome have left nineteen dead and twenty seriously injured. The spectacle of parliamentary welcome and the casualties attributed to the march occupy the same brief interval: the public rituals of political legitimacy do not erase the violence surrounding the transfer of power.

Liberty as resistance

Giacomo Matteotti gives liberty a practical meaning opposed to Mussolini’s conditional version. In a letter to Filippo Turati on the eve of the April 1924 election, he argues that resistance to dictatorship must become more active, that no position should be abandoned without resolute protest, and that citizens must demand their rights. He rejects the expectation that Fascism will voluntarily disarm and restore legality and liberty, arguing instead that each success encourages further abuses. Liberty here is neither a philosophical abstraction nor a gift to be awaited: it requires organized insistence against a regime whose power expands through the surrender of ground.

The book’s account of Matteotti’s parliamentary role reinforces the cost of that insistence without reducing his position to a single speech. By May 1924 he has delivered 106 long, meticulous speeches in four years, often on financial and budgetary matters, and is widely regarded as irritating and obsessive. On May 30, he is given the floor in a hostile Chamber, where he stands as an isolated figure on the left. The scenes place his defense of civic rights within institutions that still convene and grant him a formal right to speak, even as the surrounding political climate makes opposition increasingly precarious.

Liberty thus marks the boundary between two political projects. Mussolini’s rhetoric preserves the word while subordinating it to discipline, state power, and controlled participation; Matteotti’s insists that legality and citizens’ rights cannot survive without resistance. The repeated contrast between parliamentary procedure and the force operating around it makes liberty a measure of the liberal state’s deterioration—and of the opposition’s refusal to treat that deterioration as inevitable.