“The new man”

“The new man” is a political ideal of rebirth after decline: youthful, vigorous, and able to impose order on a society portrayed as exhausted. In the book, the figure is embodied above all by Benito Mussolini, whose appeal joins the promise of national renewal to personal charisma and force. Its recurring contrast is with the old political world; its deeper tension is that the new order is imagined in a landscape still shaped by war and conflict.

Postwar exhaustion and the promise of renewal

The ideal answers a Europe described as a stage emptied by war. The dead fill the trenches, while five million returning soldiers press toward national borders. In this account, the old political class appears spent: its cautious leaders and familiar formulas have failed, and a new division is coming between those who belong to the past and those who will shape what follows. The “new man” is thus more than a youthful individual. He represents a proposed break with a discredited order and the possibility of directing the mass of veterans toward a new future.

The contrast also appears in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of 1919. He sets Fiume, associated with youth, beauty, life, and the future, against the decrepitude and uncertainty symbolized by the Versailles negotiations. His language makes rebirth a national and generational claim: the living are to move forward with the dead behind them and the unborn ahead. Yet the book also notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio as he wished. The rhetoric of a new era therefore carries an uncertainty from the outset: the promise of renewal does not guarantee popular allegiance.

Mussolini as the figure of the new age

In Rome, Mussolini’s public presence is presented as a physical encounter between leader and crowd. Recognized in Piazza Colonna, he is surrounded by people eager to approach and touch him. The scene contrasts his direct contact with the public against the concealed maneuvers of older politicians. His origins as a blacksmith’s son reinforce the image of an outsider who has come from the streets rather than from established political circles.

The text then enlarges this popular image into a drama of historical succession. Mussolini stands for youth after decline, vigor against degeneration, and a new beginning after a prolonged crisis. The old politicians are reduced to relics of a supposedly exhausted age; he is cast as the person who can arbitrate chaos and initiate a new one. This representation makes political authority personal: the future is embodied in a leader whose presence appears to offer an answer to national uncertainty.

That image depends not on strength alone but on a paradoxical claim: the man of force is presented as the one who can end the conditions that make force seem necessary. The narrative compares him to a lion tamer who commands dangerous beasts, and to a ruler who creates a desert and calls it peace. The metaphor exposes the cost concealed by the promise. Order is pictured as the end of visible conflict, but the image of the desert leaves open what has been cleared away to produce it.

From personal image to political program

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini’s proposed future extends beyond the figure of a single leader. His program promises to make Italians into one nation, replacing regional identities with a unified national identity, and connects national greatness to an imperial ambition. It also brings the Roman Church within this vision, setting aside earlier anticlerical positions. The ideal of the new age is therefore both integrative within Italy’s borders and expansive beyond them.

The program assigns the state a commanding place and describes the economy in terms of classical liberalism. It also frames the relationship between leader and masses as a mediation: the masses are to be served and educated, but a political interpreter is needed to guide them. The proposed national renewal includes a concern with the population’s health and ethnicity, treating the nation’s people as material from which history is to be made. The “new man” consequently belongs to a broader project of organizing society, not simply to a portrait of personal vigor.

Yet Mussolini also presents himself as someone who must not remain indispensable. After acknowledging his own mistakes, he says that the new organization should learn to stand on its own. The claim complicates the image of the leader as the sole embodiment of the future: he presents personal authority as both the instrument of transformation and something the movement should outgrow. The book places this declaration alongside the spectacle of his followers embracing him and carrying him to the presidency table, making the tension between institutional independence and leader-centered devotion visible.

Collective ritual and the limits of the ideal

The book repeatedly links national renewal to collective display. In 1922, Mussolini returns to Piazza Belgioioso, where a few hundred had gathered for an early rally and thousands now assemble. He describes the movement’s growth from small groups into legions and presents its volunteers as a religiously charged force, ready for sacrifice. The gathering’s applause and his call for the blackshirts to accept greater sacrifices turn the promise of rebirth into a shared pledge of discipline and expansion.

That ritual language exists beside the memory of anonymous death. At the burial of the Unknown Soldier, an unidentifiable fallen man is chosen to represent all the dead. The ceremony makes the war’s impersonal losses into a national object of reverence, while the book emphasizes the contrast between collective mourning and killing as a mechanical process. The new order’s religious imagery therefore does not leave the war behind: it draws authority from the same mass death that the rhetoric of renewal claims to overcome.

A later scene offers a counterpoint to the promise of unified national purpose. When Giacomo Matteotti’s remains are returned to Fratta Polesine for burial on August 21, 1924, tens of thousands of workers mourn and call for vengeance, justice, and liberty. The procession does not resolve the conflict between the nation imagined as a single disciplined body and the people still demanding justice. In the book’s wider pattern, “The new man” remains an ideal of rebirth and command, but one continually shadowed by the war’s dead and by political divisions that have not disappeared.