Roaring Twenties

The Roaring Twenties in the book is not simply an age of novelty and prosperity. It is a contested new era: consumer technologies and expanding public life promise modernity, while memories of mass death and political upheaval give force to competing calls for order, national unity, and rebirth. The period’s energy becomes a setting in which Fascism presents itself as the movement capable of directing the modern mass society emerging from the war.

Modernity and the New Century

The book’s portrait of the decade gathers speed through its material changes. In America, automobiles, radios, and phonographs accompany expanding commerce and industrial production; gramophones bring music within reach of wider audiences, while cinema helps create new public myths. Millions discover leisure, hobbies, and pleasures once associated with a small elite. Women enter public life with greater visibility, challenging convention and demanding the vote. The images range from jazz-age dancing to Sunday bathers and Rudolph Valentino’s worldwide appeal, making modernity feel at once technological, commercial, and cultural.

That transformation is not confined to America. In Lombardy, a new road connecting Milan with the tourist districts around Lake Como and Lake Varese is designed for fast motor traffic rather than horse-drawn wagons. Some regard it as the world’s first motorway. The detail links the decade’s larger cult of speed to a concrete change in the Italian landscape. The book also presents the possibility that American industry, rather than patriotism alone, might help restore Europe by turning it into a vast market for new products. Modernity arrives as both a promise of participation and an economic force reshaping how people travel, consume, and imagine the future.

The War’s Unfinished Aftermath

Against this expanding world stands the scale of the recent war. The narrator evokes eleven million dead and five million returning soldiers, describing Europe as a stage emptied of its old political actors. The survivors are not treated as a settled remnant: veterans press back across national borders, and the political future is imagined as a division between those who belonged to the old order and those who will inherit what follows. In this account, the decade’s excitement does not erase devastation. It grows alongside the expectation that conflict remains possible and that the old political language has lost authority.

Gabriele D’Annunzio gives that break a sharply contrasting meaning. Speaking to his legionnaires at the beginning of 1920, he presents 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations. Versailles stands in his account for an exhausted, fearful Europe bargaining over the remains of war; Fiume signifies youth, life, faith, heroic action, and a future populated by generations yet unborn. His choice to remain there, despite the wishes of the Fiumani, makes the city a symbol of freedom in his rhetoric. The narrative immediately qualifies the grandeur of this claim: Italians have not followed him, and the narrator suggests that his appeal as the prince of youth is already fading. The decade’s language of renewal is therefore powerful but contested, not proof that its messianic figures command lasting allegiance.

Fascism’s Promise of National Rebirth

The emerging Fascist vision turns the language of a new age into a program of political transformation. Benito Mussolini presents Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism after violence has displaced earlier methods. Its ambition is to make Italians into a unified people, overriding regional identities, while projecting national greatness outward through an imperial idea. The program also accommodates the Roman Church and rejects what Mussolini calls foolish anticlericalism. In this account, the modern state is not merely an instrument of government: Mussolini declares that the Fascists are the state, and describes the masses as requiring interpreters who will serve, educate, and discipline them.

This political project is bound to an ideal of regeneration. Mussolini’s public image is framed as that of a new man set against the old political generation: youth against antiquity, vigor against decline, and a decisive ruler against parliamentary formulas. The image of a man who creates a desert and calls it peace gathers the contradiction into one figure. The order promised by the new age is presented as emerging from violence, even as that violence is claimed to end disorder. The book’s language makes the spectacle of personal authority central to Fascism’s answer to a society transformed by war and mass politics.

From Masses to Nation and State

The decade’s political transformation is also staged as a passage from small beginnings to immense collective scale. At a later commemoration in Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini recalls the earlier gathering there, when only a few hundred had assembled, and contrasts it with the thousands now present. He describes the movement as having grown from small maniples into legions and casts its volunteers as an army ready for sacrifice. The speech’s sequence—people becoming a nation, then a nation becoming a state—turns numerical expansion into a story of collective resurrection and future power.

That sequence clarifies the book’s central tension in its treatment of the Roaring Twenties. Modern mass society offers new forms of access, mobility, and leisure, but political movements also seek to organize the masses into disciplined instruments of national purpose. The decade’s promise of a fresh beginning is thus inseparable from the unresolved war, the rhetoric of rebirth, and Fascism’s attempt to claim authority over the future it says it is creating.