Militarization of Political Life

Militarization of Political Life is the book’s account of how the practices and meanings of war migrated into postwar politics. Weapons, veterans’ organizations, military formations, wartime imagery, and habits of discipline made political conflict appear increasingly like a continuation of combat. The process was not confined to armed clashes: rallies became staged mobilizations, workers and peasants organized collective economic power, and even electoral and commemorative politics drew on the authority of war.

From demonstration to confrontation

The pattern is visible in Milan on April 15, 1919. A demonstration of tens of thousands, gathered at the arena, sends an avant-garde of several thousand toward the city center without a prior plan. At Piazza del Duomo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urges bystanders to join a counter-demonstration, rejecting the possibility of remaining neutral. The opposing columns take shape across a cordon of Carabinieri: socialist women carry Lenin’s portrait and a red flag, while a smaller group of officers, Arditi, and Futurists brings the experience and bearing of wartime combat into the street. The brief clash that follows makes the gulf between the groups visible not only as political disagreement but as sharply different relationships to violence and death.

The later fascist rally at Piazza Belgioioso turns that relationship into deliberate political staging. Armed men stand in ranks around a troop-transport truck used as a platform, near Casa del Manzoni. In the darkness, a Very rocket arcs over Milan. Its role is not merely practical illumination: the flare makes a civilian square resemble a wartime zone and serves as the starting signal for the meeting. Ferruccio Vecchi speaks in the language of battle and sacrifice; afterward, Marinetti watches a disciplined column move through the city’s elegant streets with flags, clubs, and torches. The sequence joins rhetoric, military equipment, lighting, formation, and movement into a public spectacle in which organized force offers direction and belonging.

Weapons and the authority of combat experience

The account of the socialist procession on Via San Damiano shows how military expertise could be recast as political authority. Albino Volpi watches the procession from the Bridge of the Sirenette, carrying two Thévenot bombs and a dagger. He judges the crowd through a veteran’s understanding of how people respond under fire, treating their reactions as a test of courage and fitness. The narrative connects his experience of war directly to his decision to attack the march; the weapons and the practiced assessment of a crowd have become instruments of street politics.

A related logic appears in Lodi on the eve of the elections. About sixty Fascists arrive from Milan in military trucks, including officers, Arditi, Futurists, and party members. They confront a much larger crowd guarding the Teatro Gaffurio, where a Fascist meeting had previously been prevented. When objects are thrown from the balcony, the Arditi draw revolvers. The episode shows how the effort to hold a political meeting could be treated as an operation to secure contested ground, with armed escort and readiness to escalate shaping the terms of participation.

Organization beyond the battlefield

Militarization also depends on the capacity to organize people, resources, and action at scale. In Bologna, Leandro Arpinati is assigned responsibility for the local Fascist organization and for eastern Emilia, despite the movement’s weakness: only six Fascists remain, and they cannot afford an office. Against this fragile organization, the narrative sets the reach of socialist institutions in city and countryside. Labor bodies, cooperatives, and leagues organize collective pressure; in Ferrara, peasant leagues influence hiring, wages, crop choices, and the use of agricultural machinery. These rival organizational networks make political power concrete in everyday control over work and supplies.

In January 1921, Ferrara’s Fascists mount a punitive expedition using military methods. Dozens of armed men, trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association, simultaneous targets, surprise, and coordinated action are assembled against peasant leagues in several villages. The operation is not a spontaneous street fight but a planned campaign whose organization makes force more effective across the countryside. Its military form reflects the growing use of squad action as a means to break the institutions and collective power built by rural workers.

The same capacity for mobilization appears in May, when thousands of impoverished farm laborers set out from remote farmhouses toward Ferrara. They travel on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges. By morning, fifty thousand have entered the city. Telephone lines are cut, school buildings requisitioned, businesses closed, and the march proceeds under Fascist control. The occupation demonstrates a striking reversal: rural deprivation is converted into a coordinated mass presence that paralyzes the city and places the prefect under pressure. Here, military organization provides the means to gather people and seize public space, even as the participants’ purpose and circumstances differ from those of soldiers at war.

Mass action, institutions, and the state

The factory occupations of 1920 present another form of collective discipline. Workers establish armed command centers and guard posts, but the account also stresses their management of production: during thirty memorable days, they supervise machinery and materials, organize shifts, and prohibit alcohol during working hours. Their ability to keep factories functioning without bank finance, raw materials, or the usual direction of technicians gives the occupation a practical demonstration of workers’ capacity for self-organization. The struggle nevertheless stops short of revolution when labor leaders and Socialist Party leaders defer a move from the factories into the streets, fearing the workers would be overwhelmed. Military readiness and disciplined collective action therefore do not determine outcomes by themselves; political decisions and the balance of force matter too.

In July 1922, the Labor Alliance calls a legalitarian general strike to defend political and trade-union liberties. The strike is conceived as a last, unified act of resistance, but its announcement becomes public prematurely and the political situation shifts. Fascist leaders answer with an ultimatum threatening to replace a state they describe as powerless. The episode makes the contest over public authority explicit: a mass stoppage, Fascist mobilization, and a challenge to the state’s control of force unfold together.

The state’s difficulty in asserting that control is clearest in the conflict over Fascist armed formations. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi issues a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and including Fascist paramilitary groups among illegal formations. Michele Bianchi, as secretary general of the National Fascist Party, responds by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable; the directive is published in Il Popolo d’Italia. Bonomi’s subsequent complaint that his public-order orders have not been obeyed underscores the difference between formal authority and effective command. In October 1922, as Rome faces the Fascist march, Luigi Facta sends written defense orders to General Pugliese, transmits arrest instructions to prefects, and drafts the state-of-siege telegram before a manifesto is posted. The sequence shows the liberal state attempting to mobilize its own legal and military machinery against a movement whose armed organization has already challenged its authority.

War memory as political ritual

The military presence in politics also operates through commemoration. Five days before the Fascist gathering in Rome in November 1921, the Unknown Soldier is buried in a ceremony that gives one unidentifiable fallen soldier the symbolic place of all the dead. The new National Fascist Party’s founders later kneel for more than half an hour at the Altare della Patria and Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Rome), even as squadristi from the North fight in popular districts. The contrast joins disorder in the streets to solemn ritual at the national monument. The war is not simply remembered as a past conflict; its dead, ceremonies, and symbols are used to give political action a sacred register.

The same conjunction of mourning and political mobilization appears at Giacomo Matteotti’s second burial, in Fratta Polesine, on August 21, 1924. His wife Velia refuses a political burial in Rome and chooses his home region. Peasants, laborers, and railway workers line the route and gather in the tens of thousands, demanding vengeance, justice, and retribution. The funeral is a civilian act of grief, but its crowds, public order, and political meanings remain inseparable from the conflicts that have militarized public life. Across these episodes, the book presents militarization not as a matter of weapons alone, but as a transformation of political organization, public space, memory, and the state’s ability to command obedience.