“the great proletarian”

“The great proletarian” is a name for Italy that turns poverty into a claim to historical importance. Attributed to Pascoli and invoked by Nicola Bombacci, the expression links a nation of poor people to the revolutionary legitimacy of Soviet Russia. Across the narrative, its meaning resonates with rival visions of popular power: socialist revolution, Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Fiume, and fascist national rebirth.

A Nation Cast as Proletarian

In Nicola Bombacci’s appeal for Italy to recognize Soviet Russia, the phrase describes a country of poor, decent people who should recognize the legitimacy of a state founded by Russian workers. The argument makes national identity a basis for international solidarity: Italy’s poverty is not presented as a reason for political inferiority, but as a bond with the proletariat. Bombacci’s interest goes beyond reopening diplomatic relations or arranging trade. He hopes contact with Russia will lead toward revolution in Italy, and wants to discuss that prospect directly with the revolutionaries who have already taken power.

The phrase therefore carries an unresolved double meaning. It places Italy among the poor and working people whose political emancipation Bombacci advocates, but it also speaks of Italy itself as a collective actor with a national destiny. That ambiguity lets a language of class solidarity serve a project centered on the nation.

Revolutionary Promise and Political Division

Bombacci’s use of the expression belongs to a moment when Italian socialism had grown rapidly but remained divided over what that strength should accomplish. At the Socialist Party’s national council in Florence, he pressed for soviets modeled on Russia’s councils; his proposal received 401 of 440 votes. Palmiro Togliatti nevertheless regarded the plan as premature and theoretically incomplete, dismissing any Italian soviets as an imitation of Russian ones. The episode shows the distance between Bombacci’s desire to turn mass strength into revolutionary action and the reservations of party leaders.

The phrase also illuminates the limits of Bombacci’s effort to gather allies. He considered an alliance with Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose project at Fiume offered a different language of collective renewal. D’Annunzio described 1919 as a year of passion and set Fiume’s youth, life, and future against the weariness and failed negotiations associated with Versailles. Yet the socialist leadership avoided an alliance with him. The shared appeal to a renewed people did not resolve the political differences between socialist revolution and D’Annunzio’s national spectacle.

From Popular Mass to National State

The expression’s national emphasis finds an altered political echo in Benito Mussolini’s later account of fascism. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini presented fascism as a synthesis capable of absorbing liberalism, declared that the state was fascist, and called for Italians from distinct regions to be made into Italians alone. He also connected national greatness to an imperial idea. This program takes the language of popular and national transformation away from Bombacci’s proposed revolution and places it within a project of state power and empire.

A later fascist ceremony gives that transformation a mass image: the movement, once small, is represented as having grown into legions, while the people become a nation and the nation a state pursuing expansion. The movement’s rhetoric of renewal thus echoes the promise that the poor nation can become historically consequential, but redirects it toward national unity and expansion.

The Expression’s Central Tension

Across these uses, “the great proletarian” is not simply a synonym for the working class. It makes a claim about Italy as a whole, while drawing force from the political experiences and expectations of its poor. Bombacci uses that connection to argue for solidarity with Soviet Russia and a revolution at home; fascist rhetoric recasts collective renewal as nationalization and imperial ambition. The expression’s significance lies in this unstable passage between class and nation: the same image of a people seeking a future can support radically different accounts of who should act, what should change, and what power should follow.