“We have built our fortunes on catafalques”

“We have built our fortunes on catafalques” is a phrase Benito Mussolini whispered to Cesare Rossi on the night of July 21, 1921, after news of the Sarzana massacre reached Rome. Its image makes the dead the foundation of fascist political success; its warning, spoken beside it, turns that success into something precarious. The phrase matters not as an expression of remorse, but as a compressed account of the movement’s reliance on violence and Mussolini’s fear that violence could ultimately destroy its gains.

The phrase and its occasion

Mussolini spoke to Rossi before entering the hall where he had convened the national council. He followed the observation about fortunes built on catafalques with a caution that this good fortune must not pass to the adversaries of fascism. The juxtaposition is decisive: the deaths are acknowledged as having helped the movement, while their political consequences are treated as something to manage. The catafalque, a bier for the dead, becomes a figure for the price and the platform of power.

The account emphasizes that Mussolini was less appalled by the reports of death than troubled by what he took as an ominous sign of another, more uncertain and terrible death. Before addressing the assembly, he declared that fascism could not die. In this setting, the phrase registers anxiety about the movement’s survival rather than a break with the violence that had helped build it.

From bloodshed to pacification

The immediate political consequence was Mussolini’s proposal to make peace with the socialists through a “pacification pact.” The provincial squadristi had been boycotting him since the beginning of July. On July 12, the fascist national council, led by Roberto Farinacci and Dino Grandi, had voted against any possibility of pacification. Meanwhile, 1,500 squadristi occupied Treviso and set fire to the headquarters of Catholics, populists, and republicans. The phrase therefore stands at a moment when violence was both a source of fascist strength and a force threatening to escape its leader’s control.

The calculation behind the proposed pact was also a calculation about political isolation. Giovanni Giolitti had fallen and Ivanoe Bonomi succeeded him. Bonomi brought the Catholics of the Populist Party into his government, and Mussolini feared that an alliance extending to moderate socialists would create a united front against the fascists. He saw pacification as a way to break that isolation and prevent the movement’s violence from furnishing its opponents with the means to defeat it. The warning about fortunes passing to adversaries gives the phrase its strategic edge: the issue was not whether deaths had underwritten fascist success, but whether continuing the same course would reverse the advantage.

Death, defeat, and political renewal

The phrase belongs to a wider account of postwar politics in which mass death and the return of soldiers unsettle the old order. The narrative describes eleven million corpses and five million returning veterans, presenting Europe as a stage emptied of its former political actors and filled by a new mass. Against this background, the catafalques do not stand alone: death is repeatedly made part of the language through which political movements claim to represent the future.

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of 1919 supplies a pointed contrast. He presented Fiume as a year of passion, youth, light, and life, set against the decrepitude and fearful bargaining associated with Versailles; he also evoked the dead behind the legionnaires and the unborn ahead of them. Yet the narrative notes that Italians did not follow him and that his standing had already waned. The contrast shows how the dead could be invoked not only as evidence of political cost but as a source of authority for a promised future.

Mussolini’s later program gives that promise a more comprehensive political form. He described fascism as capable of absorbing liberalism, unifying regional identities into a single Italian nation, pursuing an imperial ideal, and treating the state as its own. He also connected the movement’s claim to serve and educate the masses with the policing of the nation’s health and ethnic future. In this context, the catafalque phrase exposes the tension within the rhetoric of renewal: the future is presented as national rebirth, but the movement’s fortunes are already bound to the dead.

From a small following to a multitude

The book returns to that transformation in its account of Mussolini speaking at Piazza Belgioioso. Four years after his first fascist rally there, attended by a few hundred, he returned before thousands. He described the movement’s growth from small groups to legions and presented its volunteer army as a religious revival: a people becoming a nation, then a state, and seeking expansion in the world. The scene turns political growth into a spectacle of collective resurrection.

Read beside that later image of swelling ranks, the 1921 phrase marks the danger concealed within triumph. Fascist fortunes had been built on deaths, but their continued dependence on violence could bring about the very political defeat Mussolini feared. The catafalques are thus both the movement’s foundation and the warning embedded in its success.