The state's monopoly on legitimate violence

The state's monopoly on legitimate violence is the contested principle that organized force should belong to the state rather than to rival political groups. In the book, it is not a settled condition but a prize and a governing problem: Benito Mussolini tries to absorb the Fascist squads into a state militia, making their violence official while redirecting it toward his own authority. The proposed settlement promises order, yet it also preserves coercion as a political resource and binds the new armed institution closely to the prime minister.

A crisis of authority

The argument for state control of force emerges from a postwar landscape filled with armed experience, political mobilization, and anxiety about what might follow. The returning veterans are described as a mass of five million men pressing toward Italy’s borders, while the old political class appears exhausted and unable to defer the coming conflict indefinitely. In this account, political authority is already under pressure from the scale of wartime mobilization and the expectation that force will remain part of public life.

The conflict is not limited to organized political leaders. Socialist demonstrations bring large crowds into the streets, including women and children at the front of a procession. To the nationalist and patriotic observers described in the book, this participation signals a future that may exclude their authority. The reaction illustrates a broader struggle over who can speak and act in public, although the passage does not present street protest and state force as equivalent forms of power.

Factory occupations supply another measure of the unsettled order. For thirty days, workers operate production without bank financing, raw materials, or the guidance of technicians and engineers. They establish work discipline, monitor machinery and supplies, and organize surveillance against theft. The episode shows collective organization functioning beyond the ordinary direction of owners and managers; the anticipated revolution nevertheless does not follow, as labor and socialist leaders defer a confrontation they fear they cannot win. The state’s authority thus appears in a field where control over production, political organization, and armed force are all disputed.

From squad violence to state institution

After the Fascist rise to government, independent squad violence becomes an immediate problem for Mussolini. The Turin massacres expose the contradiction starkly. He publicly repudiates the killings and threatens punishment, but three days after the violence ends he proclaims a general amnesty for politically motivated blood crimes committed for national ends. On December 28, 1922, his government advances the creation of the Voluntary Militia for National Security. The sequence turns repudiation into incorporation: rather than simply separating the state from Fascist violence, the government proposes to give selected Fascist forces an official institutional form.

The account presents the militia as a response to the dangers created by the squads themselves. Their local leaders refuse to disarm, and Mussolini fears that forces which helped bring him to power could also be used against him. Incorporating them into a national body would remove them from provincial control and regiment them under a central command. At the same time, their continued presence would help keep parliament and the monarchy under pressure. The project is therefore double-edged: it seeks to restrain independent action while retaining the threat of organized force.

The militia and the claim to legitimate force

The proposed militia would defend the Fascist revolution and maintain public order, duties then assigned to the army and the Royal Guard of Italy. The royal guard was to be disbanded, while Fascist squads were to be dissolved. Recruitment would be formally voluntary but restricted to members of Fascist military formations; senior officers would come from the army, alongside some Fascist consuls promoted to colonel. These arrangements combine state military structure with membership drawn from the movement whose armed formations the new institution is meant to replace.

Its oath makes the arrangement especially revealing. Members would swear allegiance to Italy and, above all, to Benito Mussolini as prime minister, with obedience defined as absolute. The militia is thus not portrayed as an impartial force standing above political factions. It would be incorporated into the military, but its loyalty would be directed particularly toward the head of government. The state’s claim to control legitimate violence and the leader’s effort to secure personal command become intertwined.

Order, normalization, and unresolved force

Mussolini’s plan aims to normalize Fascist violence by legalizing it and to demobilize the provincial squads by transferring their members into the militia. The distinction between uncontrolled violence and official force is consequently central: the initiative promises to end local autonomy, but does not amount to a rejection of coercion. Instead, it changes who organizes it, under what institutional name, and toward whose command it is directed.

The book emphasizes that the maneuver must serve two purposes at once. Mussolini needs to prevent local Fascist leaders from controlling armed men who could challenge him, yet he also needs the squads’ threat to maintain leverage over parliament and the monarchy. The prospect of civil conflict remains a guarantee of his power even as he seeks to present the militia as a means of ending disorder. The proposed monopoly is therefore neither a neutral administrative reform nor a completed transfer of force to an independent state: it is an attempt to centralize violence within a political system that the Fascist leader identifies with his own authority.

That tension gives the concept its significance in the narrative. Public order is promised after massacres and years of conflict, but the route to calm runs through amnesty, the absorption of squad members, and the creation of a partisan armed institution. The state’s monopoly on legitimate violence appears not as an abstract rule already in force, but as a political claim Mussolini tries to make effective by bringing force under his command without surrendering its threat.