XXVII Legislature of the Kingdom of Italy

The XXVII Legislature of the Kingdom of Italy represents the passage from the parliamentary decline identified in the preceding legislature to an assembly expected to be the first fascist one. Its significance lies not simply in a change of political personnel: the path toward it joined electoral success to violence in the streets, while the institutions that remained in operation increasingly struggled to restrain armed political power. The account’s key contrast is between parliament as a functioning arena and parliament as the setting for a transformed political order.

The crisis inherited from the previous legislature

The transition was framed against a postwar landscape of mass death and return. The narrative describes five million veterans coming back to Italy and a political order in which the old liberal figures appeared unable to answer the pressures gathering around them. In this picture, the war had not ended as a political force: former soldiers, organized movements, and unresolved social conflict pressed into public life, while the rhetoric of national renewal promised a new beginning.

That upheaval had a strong rural dimension. In Emilia, socialist organizations controlled 223 of 280 municipalities, and agricultural leagues exerted influence over hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. Their system answered farmworkers’ seasonal insecurity, but also imposed rules that could punish landowners and workers who broke the collective arrangements. These competing claims over labor and land formed part of the social conflict against which the fascists organized.

The liberal state’s difficulty in containing political force was already visible before the new legislature. After Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi attempted to restrict fascist paramilitary activity, Michele Bianchi directed that party sections and combat squads be treated as an inseparable unit. The directive publicly challenged the government’s effort to distinguish legal party activity from armed organization. The state’s inability to enforce its orders made the boundary between parliamentary politics and organized coercion increasingly fragile.

Electoral entry and parliamentary legitimacy

The 1921 election gave Benito Mussolini a major personal victory: he headed the lists in Milan and Bologna, receiving 197,000 and 173,000 votes respectively, and placed third among the ten most-voted candidates nationally. Yet the campaign’s conclusion was marked by deadly clashes. On election day, violence in nine named cities left 29 people dead and 104 wounded. The narrative emphasizes the disturbing conjunction: fascist electoral support grew amid violence, rather than in a political climate separated from it.

The fascists’ entry into parliament had been enabled by an alliance with established anti-Bolshevik forces. Luigi Albertini, after opposing fascist inclusion in the national blocs, eventually urged readers of the Corriere della Sera, the government-critical daily, to accept the alliance. The account treats this change as evidence of how far the movement had travelled from the trenches into parliamentary politics. Its opponents’ moral objections remained, but resistance to its political inclusion had narrowed.

The result did not resolve the crisis that had drawn fascists into the parliamentary system. The election instead produced a divided assembly, with parties and factions at odds. The XXVI Legislature of the Kingdom of Italy was described as the last legislature of decline; the XXVII was anticipated as the first fascist legislature. That formulation gives the later legislature a threshold quality: it is not merely the next chamber in sequence, but the promised institutional stage of a changed political era.

A new party’s claim to the state

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini set out a program that joined national unity to state authority and imperial ambition. He argued for making Italians into a single national people, subordinating regional identities to a common Italian identity, while presenting expansion abroad as necessary to national greatness. He also made a striking claim about political authority: the fascists were the state. In his account of the masses, they would serve and educate them, while reserving the right to discipline them when they were judged to be wrong.

This program helps explain the significance attached to the XXVII Legislature. Parliamentary participation did not, in the account, mean that fascism had simply accepted the older system’s limits. The movement presented itself as capable of absorbing liberalism after violence had displaced previous methods, and of remaking national life from within the state. The legislature thus stood at the intersection of electoral legitimacy and a political project that claimed authority beyond ordinary parliamentary competition.

The march, the chamber, and the appearance of consent

The chamber scene following the March on Rome belongs to the preceding parliamentary moment, not to the XXVII Legislature. On November 16, 1922, the Chamber of Deputies was crowded with visitors, dignitaries, and spectators. Benito Mussolini entered accompanied by General Armando Diaz and his ministers; all deputies except those on the left rose to applaud, and the galleries joined them. The occasion appeared festive, even triumphant.

That spectacle stood beside a less celebratory record. Only fifteen days had passed since the march, and in Rome alone 19 people had been killed and 20 seriously injured during that period. Public descriptions of a bloodless or joyful revolution threatened to obscure those deaths. The scene therefore anticipates the political conditions the next legislature would inherit: parliamentary ritual and public acclaim could coexist with the coercion that had helped bring the new government to power.

The XXVII Legislature as threshold and arena

The new legislature’s designation as the first fascist legislature captures a transition rather than a complete account of what occurred inside it. The evidence places a decisive challenge to its political order at the opening of Giacomo Matteotti’s parliamentary intervention on May 30, 1924. When the chamber president, Alfredo Rocco, gave him the floor, murmuring and hostility preceded his first words. Matteotti had delivered 106 long, meticulous speeches during his four years in office, but was regarded by many, including members of his own party, as tiresome and obsessive. His isolated position made the moment a concentrated image of parliamentary opposition under pressure.

The legislature therefore carries two meanings in the narrative. It is the institutional destination of fascist electoral advance and the arena in which opposition still attempts to speak. The distinction between those meanings matters: parliament remains present, but its procedures operate amid political violence, weakened state restraints, and an increasingly forceful claim that the ruling movement embodies the nation and the state. The XXVII Legislature marks that unstable passage into fascist rule.