March 23, 1919

March 23, 1919, the founding date of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, is presented as a hinge between the mass death of the First World War and a new form of political mobilization. At Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan, a sparse gathering of men became the starting point for an organization whose early program sought to validate the war and its fighters, while its later growth gave institutional form to a larger promise of national rebirth.

The founding scene

The account places the meeting in a nearly empty room, with scarcely a hundred people present. Its dramatized speaker faces the audience as if the gathering were taking place atop the dead of the war: the fallen of the Carso, Ortigara, and the Isonzo fill the scene’s imagination, while five million returning veterans loom beyond it as a force the old political order cannot absorb. The founding moment is therefore framed less as a confident beginning than as an attempt to find a constituency among survivors and demobilized men.

That uncertainty appears in the speaker’s stated inability to address the room, even as he recognizes the men before him as his people. The image of a small, unburied remnant contrasts with the expectation that the veterans will overwhelm the established political class. The passage makes the date’s significance depend on this tension: an organization begins with few adherents, but speaks as though it already represents a much larger postwar mass.

An initial political program

A contemporary report of a meeting to form regional fasci among interventionist groups records a more programmatic account of the movement’s beginnings. Benito Mussolini outlined principles centered on affirming the war and honoring those who had fought it; presenting Italian imperialism as a national aspiration shared by other peoples, while opposing foreign imperialism harmful to Italy; rejecting Italian imperialism directed against other nations; and contesting elections on the question of the war against parties and candidates opposed to it. Speakers included commander Ferruccio Vecchi of the Arditi, and the proposals were approved after discussion by representatives of several Italian cities.

The program joined claims that sat uneasily together. It defended an imperial ambition while also declaring opposition to imperialism against other nations, and it paired the vindication of wartime intervention with participation in electoral politics. The date thus marks not a fully settled doctrine but an effort to turn the experience and political commitments of interventionists into an organized movement.

War, crisis, and the language of renewal

The book sets this beginning against a Europe described as emptied of its old political actors and faced with the return of millions of soldiers. Its account treats the aftermath of war not as a return to ordinary life but as an unsettled interval in which further conflict remains imaginable. The veterans’ sense of shared exposure to death supplies a basis for political belonging, while the established liberals and politicians are depicted as unable to meet the moment.

That pattern of decline and promised regeneration recurs in later representations of fascism. In a 1921 address, Mussolini contrasts the movement’s earlier small groups with its later multitude, portraying their expansion as a springtime revival in which a people becomes a nation and a nation becomes a state. At the National Fascist Party’s founding congress, he likewise presents fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, completing the nationalization of Italians, pursuing imperial greatness, and reshaping the state and the masses. These later claims enlarge the founding date’s meaning: the appeal to wartime sacrifice becomes part of a program for remaking national identity and political authority.

From a small gathering to organized force

The later chronology shows how much political organization depended on conditions beyond a founding declaration. In Bologna, the fascio was reduced to six members after republicans withdrew; it lacked money even to rent an office. Mussolini nevertheless pressed Leandro Arpinati to take charge and encouraged the organization of civic defense militias amid strikes. In the countryside, socialist leagues held extensive influence, and in Ferrara their control of hiring, work conditions, and agricultural production shaped a conflict that landowners and farmworkers experienced in sharply different terms.

By 1921, fascist action in Ferrara could take the form of a planned punitive expedition. On January 23, armed groups set out by truck, using vehicles supplied by the Agrarian Association and coordinating attacks on several rural leagues. In May, Italo Balbo organized a very different display of mobilization: from midnight on May 11, thousands of impoverished farmworkers travelled into Ferrara, and the city awoke to an occupying column of fifty thousand. These episodes do not make the 1919 gathering a simple, inevitable blueprint for later actions; they show the movement developing through local alliances, resources, and confrontations.

The July 1922 legalitarian strike offers another measure of the changed political landscape. The Labor Alliance called workers and peasants to defend political and union liberties, while fascist leaders used the strike as an occasion to challenge the state’s authority. Read beside the modest gathering at Piazza San Sepolcro, the episode marks a striking shift in scale: a movement that began by seeking an electoral foothold among interventionists had become a power claiming the right to replace a state it called impotent.

Significance of the date

March 23 is both a specific founding date and a retrospective point of origin. The book’s scenes repeatedly set the movement’s small beginnings against its later multitudes, turning the contrast between a few followers and mass political spectacle into part of fascism’s account of itself. The date’s importance lies not in a single settled manifesto, but in the way it gathers together the postwar veteran constituency, an interventionist political program, and a promise of national transformation—elements that would be developed, contested, and organized through the years that followed.