Squadrismo

Squadrismo was the organized political violence carried out by Fascist squads, a method that transformed local conflicts into a campaign against socialist and other opposing organizations. It relied on armed raids, intimidation, destruction, and the occupation of public space; its impact grew where squad organization converged with agrarian resources and the failures or cooperation of state institutions. The book presents it not as an incidental excess but as a central instrument of Fascist expansion: increasingly disciplined in its operations, it helped break organized socialism while creating a violent power that Benito Mussolini sought to use, redirect, and contain.

Origins in Local Conflict

In the postwar years, the roots of squad violence lay in a country sharply divided over labor, land, and political authority. In Bologna, revolutionary organizations and labor institutions had gained influence, while in the countryside of the Po Valley socialist leagues exercised substantial control over hiring and working conditions. In Ferrara, seasonal farmworkers and their allies had forced landowners to accept wage increases, union-managed hiring, and compulsory employment quotas. These gains shaped the agrarian conflict in which Fascist violence took hold. For landowners, the leagues’ rules threatened control over property and labor; for farmworkers, seasonal employment and long periods without work made wages and hiring arrangements matters of survival.

The city and countryside presented different but connected pressures. In Bologna, political agitation and disputes between labor organizations unsettled employers and middle-class residents. Across rural districts, socialist leagues, cooperatives, and local associations formed a dense network that governed employment and other aspects of economic life. The resulting confrontation was not simply a clash of ideas: it concerned who could set labor conditions, enforce collective decisions, and claim authority in everyday life. Squadrist violence offered a counterforce capable of attacking the organizations through which the leagues exercised that authority.

Organization and Methods

A major change came when raids were planned as coordinated expeditions rather than improvised street confrontations. On January 23, 1921, a force departing Ferrara targeted peasant leagues in several surrounding communities. The operation was arranged to strike multiple sites at once, using surprise, armed men, and trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. Participants came from different backgrounds, including former soldiers and men drawn to the aesthetic and political culture of the legionaries. The planning joined local knowledge and agrarian resources to a deliberate use of force.

A contemporary public-security report described a broader pattern of armed Fascists traveling in trucks to attack associations, leagues, and cooperatives; seize individuals; intimidate opponents; and target opposition leaders. The report also noted retaliatory violence and clashes that often left people dead or injured. This account situates local expeditions within a widening cycle of political conflict across Emilia and neighboring regions, rather than treating each raid as an isolated disturbance.

The tactics acquired a distinctly military character. In the countryside, squad actions increasingly depended on concentrated force, movement, and planned timing. The text emphasizes that this method reduced the chance that outcomes would turn on individual courage or luck. The campaign advanced through successive attacks on local institutions. In Ferrara, actions in April included the destruction of labor offices and associations, the occupation of a town after a squad member’s death, and the dismantling of peasant leagues. Within a few months, nine labor chambers, a cooperative, and nineteen peasant leagues in the province had been destroyed; the Rovigo Chamber of Labor eventually ceased to exist.

State Power and Political Use

The relationship between the squads and the state was neither simple opposition nor a stable division of authority. During the fighting in Florence, Fascists benefited from the protection afforded by police and army operations against their opponents. The Army Corps supplied them with 120 muskets and three crates of SIPE grenades. Such support gave the movement access to resources and room to act that went beyond clandestine or purely local violence. It also blurred the boundary between state enforcement and partisan force.

Benito Mussolini pursued a parallel political strategy. He sought to enter constitutional politics while retaining the ability to unleash squad violence and then present himself as the figure able to restore order. This required reconciling participation in parliamentary alliances with the squads’ anti-parliamentary outlook. Their presence in parliament, in this logic, did not mean acceptance of parliamentary rule; it could be used as a platform from which to attack it. The tension exposed the difference between the movement’s national leadership and local militants whose power came from direct action.

The movement also attempted to give its forces a more formal military structure. A plan commissioned by the new national party leadership divided the militia into formations modeled on Roman legions, with units organized by size and named ranks. Yet the plan preserved considerable regional autonomy and elective leadership. The political leader and military commander were to be the same person locally, while discipline and hierarchy were presented as guiding principles. The arrangement captured an unresolved transformation: Fascism was still a heterogeneous movement of militants, even as its leaders sought to organize it as a disciplined force.

Expansion and Consequences

The squads’ reach became especially clear during the 1922 general strike. After the Labor Alliance proclaimed a legalitarian strike in defense of political and trade-union liberties, Fascist leaders used the confrontation to challenge the state’s authority and claim a right to act in its place. Once the strike was called off on August 4, squad violence did not stop. It continued against the defeated organizations, destroying cooperatives, associations, and labor chambers and contributing to the resignation of socialist administrations. Smoke from fires remained visible across Tuscany, Emilia, and the lower Po Valley during Benito Mussolini’s flight over the country on August 12. In the book’s account, the strike’s defeat marked a decisive blow to organized socialism.

This success carried a political cost as well as a strategic benefit. The violence that helped establish Fascist power also made the movement difficult to control and tied its authority to continuing coercion. After the abduction of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, the Fascist leadership faced public outrage and internal panic. Defensive memoranda, concealment of evidence, and deliberate false reports accompanied the effort to deflect responsibility. At the same time, Benito Mussolini ordered rallies in support of his government, and Leandro Arpinati helped assemble large numbers of squadristi in Emilia. The squads remained available as a resource for political mobilization even amid the crisis.

After the funeral of Giacomo Matteotti, Fascism again faced condemnation and renewed pressure from its own violent wing. Benito Mussolini threatened opponents with further violence; attacks and killings followed, and provincial squadristi urged him to release them from restraint. The anticipated second wave of violence did not unfold as an uncomplicated consolidation. Industrialists, liberals, and newspapers distanced themselves from the regime, while the judicial investigation advanced. The ending thus stresses both sides of Squadrismo’s significance: organized force had helped demolish its opponents’ institutions, but the threat and practice of further violence could deepen a political crisis rather than settle it.