Anna Kuliscioff on the Fascist marches

Anna Kuliscioff on the Fascist marches is presented chiefly through correspondence: she sends Filippo Turati a newspaper announcing the case for dictatorship, and later describes a Fascist parade in Milan. The letters place her within a political exchange attentive both to the public appeal of Fascist mobilization and to its threat to civil liberties. Rather than furnishing a continuous personal narrative, these fragments make her a witness and correspondent through whom the book sets spectacle against the prospect of conflict.

Letters and Political Context

On November 24, 1921, a letter from Anna Kuliscioff to Filippo Turati accompanies an issue of Il Popolo d’Italia containing an article by Benito Mussolini. The article calls for a dictatorship, or a dictator, as the means to save Italy. Kuliscioff’s act of sending the paper makes the political claim itself part of the correspondence: Turati receives not only a report about a danger but the newspaper in which that danger is being publicly advocated. The evidence does not supply her further comment on the article, so the significance lies in the documented transmission rather than in an inferred response.

The book places that letter in a moment when the liberal state’s ability to restrain Fascist violence was under severe pressure. A December circular from Ivanoe Bonomi sought to treat truncheons as weapons requiring permits and to classify Fascist paramilitary groups as illegal formations. Michele Bianchi answered by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable, and the directive appeared in Il Popolo d’Italia. The book’s account stresses the widening gap between formal government action and effective enforcement. This context sharpens the stakes of the newspaper Kuliscioff sends: the call for dictatorship appears alongside a struggle over whether the state can control armed political organizations.

Correspondence and the Prospect of Civil Conflict

The letters around the turn of 1922 establish an exchange between Kuliscioff and Turati, but the surviving passages do not give both sides equal space. A December 1921 letter from Turati to Kuliscioff warns that a government determined to suppress Fascist violence would have to be prepared to face civil war. He describes the situation as terrible and the country as moving closer to a precipice. This is Turati’s assessment, not a statement that can safely be attributed to Kuliscioff; its place in the correspondence shows the severity of the danger being discussed between them.

A letter from Kuliscioff to Turati is dated February 8, 1922, but the passage supplied here does not reproduce its contents. That distinction matters: the book establishes that the exchange continued, yet does not provide enough material to reconstruct her argument in that letter. Read together, the dated items document political communication at a time when Fascist power was expanding, while leaving the precise development of her views beyond the quoted evidence.

The Parade as Political Spectacle

A further letter, by Kuliscioff to Turati regarding the Fascist parade in Milan on March 26, 1922, records the impression made by the gathering. The estimate is deliberately uncertain: about 20,000 to 30,000 people took part, though the account questions who could count them. The young men, aged seventeen to twenty-five, appear vigorous and are arranged in military formation. The parade’s order and visible strength could produce a magnificent impression if its purposes were unknown; the passage immediately sets that attraction against the vile ends to which the participants’ actions are directed.

That contrast is central to the force of the description. The marching crowd is not reduced to disorder: its discipline and appearance are precisely what make the display politically potent. But the aesthetic impression cannot be separated from the violence the book associates with Fascism. Kuliscioff’s letter, as presented, registers both facts at once—the parade’s capacity to impress and the danger concealed by its orderly form. Its scale also gives a concrete measure of the movement’s reach, far removed from a small gathering of committed activists.

Witness, Evidence, and Narrative Role

Across these episodes, Kuliscioff’s role is that of a political correspondent whose presence is made legible through documents. The November letter transmits Mussolini’s argument for dictatorship; the February entry confirms continued correspondence without disclosing its substance; the March letter supplies a carefully qualified account of mass spectacle. The shifts in what the book preserves prevent her from becoming a fully narrated protagonist, but they also keep the limits of the record visible.

Her account of the Milan parade contributes a perspective distinct from the movement’s own language of national renewal and disciplined unity. The book elsewhere presents Fascist leaders describing mass mobilization as the rebirth of a people and the creation of a nation and state. Against such claims, the parade’s numbers, formation, and apparent beauty become evidence of how political power could present itself attractively even as violence remained its underlying purpose. Kuliscioff’s documentary role is therefore not simply to oppose one slogan with another; it is to preserve the tension between what the crowd looked like and what its actions served.

The correspondence also links public politics to the instability of institutions. The letters frame dictatorship and civil conflict as immediate possibilities, while the surrounding narrative shows government measures failing to establish control over Fascist squads. In this structure, Kuliscioff is not credited with a policy or a decisive intervention unsupported by the record. Her significance lies in the careful transmission of warning and observation: a newspaper advocating dictatorship, a correspondence shadowed by the prospect of civil war, and a parade whose disciplined appearance cannot be mistaken for political innocence.