“Fascism will lose all its strength as soon as it ceases to be violent”

The expression that fascism would lose its strength once it ceased to be violent condenses Luigi Fabbri’s analysis of the movement into a conditional warning: force is not merely one tactic among others, but a source of Fascism’s appeal and capacity to expand. The book places the claim amid scenes in which violence, political spectacle, and institutional weakness repeatedly meet, making it both an argument about Fascism and a test of the liberal state’s ability to contain it.

Fabbri’s Warning

In the passage identified with Fabbri’s La contro-rivoluzione preventiva, published in Bologna in 1921, the prediction is deliberately qualified. Fabbri argues that Fascism would lose its glamour and power if it abandoned violence, shrink back toward the small minority movement of early 1919, and carry the liabilities of its past violence into the future. Yet he also acknowledges that he might be wrong. The qualification matters: the statement is an analysis offered under pressure, not a certainty guaranteed by the narrative.

The expression’s logic is causal. If violence ends, Fascism loses a defining source of political energy; if that energy disappears, the movement risks losing its enlarged following and returning to marginality. Fabbri’s warning therefore treats violence as structural to Fascism’s strength rather than as a temporary response to particular conflicts. Its reference to the movement’s early-1919 minority status gives the prediction a historical point of comparison, while its caution about the future leaves the outcome unsettled.

Violence as Political Method

The surrounding narrative gives the claim a concrete setting. In Piazza Sant’Agostino, several Fascist squad members had raised truncheons against a captain of the royal guards; the guards then killed them. Benito Mussolini addressed the dead and the survivors in the language of national identity, presenting Italy as something larger than either the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. The passage places that public performance beside Fabbri’s warning: the movement’s capacity to turn violent conflict into political meaning is part of what sustains its force.

Fabbri’s formulation also stands in tension with the idea that violence might simply be put aside once Fascism became a conventional party. In his account of the crisis, the choice was between creating a party and creating an army, but the proposed solution was an organization disciplined enough to become an army when violence required it. That formulation makes institutional organization and coercion complementary rather than competing paths. The warning thus concerns not only street attacks, but the possibility that a party could preserve the movement’s capacity for force within a more durable structure.

A Movement Between Mass Politics and the State

Other episodes broaden the context without resolving Fabbri’s prediction. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini presented Fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, remaking national identity, and claiming the state as its own. He also described the movement’s relationship to the masses as a mixture of service, education, and discipline. This expansive political program contrasts with Fabbri’s forecast of a return to minority status if violence ends: the question is whether the new party can hold its power by means other than the coercive force that helped produce its rise.

The narrative further shows how the state’s attempts to restrict Fascist violence faltered. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi issued a circular treating truncheons as weapons requiring licenses and sought to classify Fascist paramilitary formations as illegal. Michele Bianchi, newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, responded by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable; that directive appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia. Bonomi’s later circular complained that public-order instructions had not been obeyed. These details sharpen the expression’s political stakes: violence was not only visible in street conflict but connected to the organization of the party, while the state struggled to enforce its own restrictions.

The Prediction and Its Uncertainty

The book’s account of the later crisis preserves the gap between formal authority and practical control. In October 1922, Luigi Facta transmitted orders for Rome’s defense, sent prefects instructions to arrest those responsible for sedition, and prepared the proclamation of a state of siege. The carefully timed measures show that the government still possessed legal and administrative instruments; the episode’s tension lies in whether those instruments could be made effective against the Fascist advance.

Fabbri’s expression consequently works as both diagnosis and open question. It identifies violence as central to Fascism’s strength, while the surrounding episodes show a movement trying to translate that strength into party organization, national rhetoric, and control of the state. The prediction that Fascism would weaken if it ceased to be violent is not presented as a settled historical law. Its force comes from the unresolved contradiction it names: a movement seeking political legitimacy while remaining bound, in its organization and ascent, to coercion.