“Our dead are not mourned, they are avenged”

“Our dead are not mourned, they are avenged” is Piero Brandimarte’s slogan during the Turin violence of December 1922. The phrase replaces mourning with retaliation: after two Fascists are killed in a street clash, it becomes the justification for a much wider assault. Its force in the narrative lies in the gap between the promise of vengeance and the state’s subsequent effort to absorb the violence it claims to condemn.

A slogan of retaliation

The words establish a stark opposition between mourning and revenge. The dead are not to be remembered through grief but answered through action. In Turin, that formulation follows the killing of two Fascists near the Barriera Di Nizza tram station during the night of December 17–18. The account says the clash appears to have begun as a personal matter involving a woman; Brandimarte, the local squad leader, then gathers 3,000 Blackshirts from across the region. The scale of the mobilization makes the slogan more than a private expression of loss: it becomes a public authorization for collective reprisal.

Turin and the consequences of the words

From 1 p.m. on December 18 until the afternoon of December 20, Brandimarte’s squads carry out raids, seizures, arson, destruction, and killings. The account describes two days and two nights of uncontrolled violence, including mistaken identities and innocent victims. The Chamber of Labor is set on fire for the third time. Against this sequence, the slogan’s simple division—grief forbidden, vengeance demanded—helps explain how the killing of two Fascists is made the pretext for a campaign that reaches far beyond those responsible for their deaths.

Violence and the state

Benito Mussolini publicly repudiates the massacre, calling it “a discredit to the human race” and threatening punishment. Yet three days after the violence ends, he proclaims a general amnesty for politically motivated blood crimes committed for national ends. On December 28, he puts forward the first decree for creating the Voluntary Militia for National Security. The sequence complicates the apparent repudiation: the government condemns the violence, pardons political bloodshed under a national rationale, and moves to incorporate the squads into a state institution. The slogan’s logic of vengeance thus sits beside a political effort to discipline, rather than simply abolish, the force that enacted it.

The wider politics of sacrifice and renewal

Elsewhere in the narrative, the language surrounding postwar Italy repeatedly binds death to political renewal. The returning veterans are presented as a force that will overrun the old political order; Gabriele D’Annunzio contrasts the exhausted world represented by Versailles with the youthful promise of Fiume; and Mussolini’s later vision of Fascism joins national unity, empire, and the use of violence. In a commemorative speech, the Blackshirts’ growth from a small group into legions is described as a springtime resurrection of the nation. These contexts do not repeat Brandimarte’s slogan, but they illuminate its place in the book’s larger pattern: sacrifice is made politically useful by turning the dead into a mandate for action. The Turin episode shows the cost of that transformation, as a call to avenge two deaths helps usher in violence against a city and a state response that converts the armed movement into an official force.