1920

1920 was a year in which Italy’s postwar crisis took shape as a struggle over who could organize the country: socialist leagues and workers, the liberal state, or the rising Fascist movement. Rural labor agreements and factory occupations demonstrated the reach of collective action, but the revolution anticipated by many workers did not occur. At the same time, Benito Mussolini turned away from electoral participation and toward a politics of organized force, while Gabriele D’Annunzio’s continuing venture in Fiume offered a rival image of national renewal.

Postwar expectations and political realignment

The year opened under the shadow of the war and its returning soldiers. The narrative presents a Europe in which established political figures seemed exhausted and five million Italian veterans were returning to the country. For Benito Mussolini, this unsettled mass was not simply a social consequence of demobilization: it was the audience for a new political order, even as he recognized that the immediate future remained troubled and conflict seemed likely to continue.

In January, Gabriele D’Annunzio described 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations. He cast Fiume as youthful and vital in contrast to a weakened, fearful Europe, and chose to remain there despite the wishes of the Fiume Italians. Benito Mussolini praised the poet but also registered the political limit of his appeal: Italians were not following D’Annunzio, and his association with youth seemed increasingly at odds with his age. By the end of the year, the contrast had practical force. Mussolini continued publicly to promise support for Fiume, but privately had no wish to be drawn into a confrontation he regarded as a dead end. The approaching struggle, in his view, lay elsewhere.

The countryside and the expansion of labor power

In the spring, Angelo Tasca was among the most influential young Italian socialists. A former student at an elite Turin school who had embraced the proletarian cause, he had joined the leadership of the city’s Labor Board. The previous year, he had helped found L’Ordine Nuovo with Antonio Gramsci, Palmiro Togliatti, and Umberto Terracini. The paper had become a center of laborist thought and the movement for workers’ councils. When Tasca encountered Benito Mussolini in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, he saw a striking change from the gaunt revolutionary he had known in 1912: Mussolini now appeared physically robust and prosperous. The encounter made his political and personal transformation visible to an observer from the socialist movement.

In Emilia, socialist strength rested on a dense network of organizations. Bologna’s Fascio, founded by republicans including Pietro Nenni, had lost those founders by 1920; only six Fascists remained, without money even to rent an office. Leandro Arpinati nevertheless received Benito Mussolini’s backing to manage the group and organize in eastern Emilia. The proposal was to build civic-defense militias in response to strikes. This organizing took place amid sharp conflict: in Bologna, competing labor bodies and socialist agitation alarmed the middle classes and employers, while in the countryside socialist leagues, cooperatives, and local organizations held extensive influence.

Ferrara showed how that influence worked materially. Seasonal farmworkers and sharecroppers struck over the collective farm agreement, interrupting the sowing of hemp and sugar beet. The landowners accepted wage increases, worker-managed hiring centers, and a compulsory hiring quota: five workers for every thirty hectares during the winter months when agricultural employment was scarce. By mid-May, the leagues of proletarian unity counted 81,000 members. Across Emilia, socialists controlled 223 of 280 municipalities, and the leagues shaped not only hiring and wages but work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crop choices. With farmhands able to find work for an average of only 120 days a year, these arrangements addressed the risk of hunger during idle months. Their reach also imposed penalties on landowners who broke the agreements and social costs on workers who accepted lower wages.

Industrial occupation and the deferred revolution

On September 1, workers occupied the Alfa Romeo Portello plant in Milan, where the company was preparing to produce the RL sports car. Production passed into workers’ hands without bank financing, raw-material supplies, or the guidance of engineers and technicians. For thirty days, the workers maintained production through their own organization. They prohibited alcohol during shifts, set up watches against theft, and guarded the machinery and materials. The occupation made workers’ practical ability to run a factory part of the political argument over who could control production.

Yet the factory struggle did not become a wider revolution. Labor leaders in Turin feared that moving the conflict from the factories into the streets would leave them isolated and outmatched. Although workers had weapons, their supply was judged inadequate for more than ten minutes of fighting. The General Confederation of Labour referred the decision to the Socialist Party leadership, which did not act and continued to postpone the confrontation. Giovanni Giolitti’s political opportunity opened in that hesitation. Appointed prime minister after Francesco Saverio Nitti’s government fell, he returned to office for a fifth time as the bourgeoisie sought a mediator amid revolutionary pressure and hunger. The occupations demonstrated workers’ capacity, but the decision to defer a decisive struggle left the government space to reassert itself.

Organized opposition and a new Fascist strategy

The rural confrontation also prompted landowners to organize nationally. On August 17, landowners meeting in Bologna founded the General Confederation of Agriculture. The account describes mounting hostility and discreet understandings with prefects and police chiefs. This development coincided with Leandro Arpinati’s unexplained absence from the Milan Fascist committee, even as Mussolini’s movement sought to strengthen its organization in Emilia.

By October, Mussolini was steering the Fascists away from the ballot box. At a meeting on October 10, he persuaded the national council of the Fascist groups not to take part in local elections. He argued that the movement should assert itself through shootings, fires, and destruction rather than join the established parties in an electoral bloc. The political distinction he drew was between an assembly of politicians and an order of fighters. On October 16, he assured Milan prefect Alfredo Lusignoli that the Fascists would resist what they regarded as Italy’s ruin by whatever means necessary; Lusignoli relayed the assurance to Giolitti.

The shift unfolded amid confrontations between socialists, Fascists, and other armed groups. On October 14, demonstrations supporting Soviet Russia were met by Fascist action in Trieste, where Fascists set fire to the offices of Il lavoratore while militarized police did not intervene. Violence in other cities further marked the period’s instability. By the year’s end, the Fascist movement was presenting force as its means of political advancement, while the liberal state and socialist organizations remained caught between competing claims to authority. The year’s unresolved struggles—in the fields, factories, and streets—formed the immediate setting for the Fascist punitive expeditions that began in 1921.