December 1, 1919

December 1, 1919, was the opening day of the new Parliament of the Kingdom of Italy, but its defining image was not the king’s address. It was a row of Socialist deputies in red carnations refusing to greet him, then leaving the chamber behind Nicola Bombacci. The walkout made parliamentary ceremony a stage for repudiating the monarchy; the exhilaration outside the building, however, quickly gave way to confusion and violence.

The new Parliament assembles

The day began in Montecitorio beneath Aristide Sartorio’s vast frieze, a painted panorama of Italy’s history and virtues. Fifty canvases, stretching for more than a hundred yards and filled with more than two hundred human and animal figures, seemed to surge above the semicircular chamber. The newly elected Socialist deputies admired the work as they gathered in the first three sections on the left, wearing red carnations in their buttonholes. The visual order of the hall—its allegorical account of a nation awakening—stood over a gathering in which the meaning of national representation was already being contested.

The king’s speech was scheduled for 10:30, but representatives had begun taking their places from 9:00. The Socialists’ occupation of the left-hand sections displaced returning deputies who had sat there before. Giovanni Giolitti, after three decades as a dominant figure in parliamentary life, had to give up his customary seat in the third section. Vittorio Emanuele Orlando arrived shortly after 10:00 and sat in the fourth section; Leonida Bissolati later crossed the chamber to the committees’ bench. The left was full early, while the benches on the right filled more slowly. These details made the changing balance of parliamentary life visible before the ceremony formally began.

The refusal and the walkout

At 10:28, a royal valet opened the small door on the right. About five hundred representatives were present. Senators and deputies stood and cheered the king, but the Socialist bloc remained seated. The contrast was striking, though at first the applause was so loud that the refusal went unnoticed. Vittorio Emanuele III bowed several times, visibly touched, and took his place on the throne. Francesco Saverio Nitti then invited the assembly to sit.

That invitation changed the meaning of the Socialists’ stillness. They rose, and, after a moment of silence and confusion, began to leave. The book presents their departure as a refusal to meet the king and a public disavowal of him. Nicola Bombacci, disheveled and scruffily bearded, led the dissidents. As he passed the throne, he called for a socialist republic. His following in the Bologna district was enormous, and newspapers had dubbed him the king of preferential votes. The account gives the gesture a reach beyond the deputies themselves: Bombacci’s departure, together with that of the other Socialist representatives, was described as carrying more than one hundred thousand Italians out of Montecitorio in political allegiance. The king was left to deliver the crown speech to a half-empty chamber.

Euphoria and reprisal

Outside in the piazza, the departing deputies congratulated and embraced one another. Their laughter and jubilation lasted only briefly. The ceremony had supplied a powerful gesture of rejection, but the Socialists soon recognized that they had no plan for what should follow. The narrative frames this gap between symbolic victory and practical direction as decisive: they had challenged the existing order in public, yet did not know how to use the moment they had created.

That same afternoon, nationalist gangs began attacking Socialists in Rome. Men were seized by their republican bow ties and forced to proclaim loyalty to the king. Toward evening, the newly formed Royal Guard, a force charged with maintaining public order, joined the repression. Giacinto Menotti Serrati, the Socialist leader, was taken to security headquarters and beaten. The contrast with the walkout was stark: the deputies had left the chamber together, but outside Parliament their political defiance met organized coercion.

The following day and the date’s significance

The Socialist response was, as usual, to call a general strike. The first victim was recorded the next day in Piazza Esedra: Tiberio Zampa, a twenty-three-year-old worker in Avanti!’s print shop. Factories stopped again, and Milan remained on alert, with weapons at hand in expectation of revolution. Claudio Treves described an atmosphere of acrid fury and terrorism. From his seat in Parliament, Bombacci declared that revolution was a historical necessity, that Parliament belonged to the past, and that he had a duty to strike its final blows.

The date therefore joins a theatrical parliamentary rupture to an immediate deterioration in public order. Red carnations, the king’s entrance, the seated refusal, and the procession out gave the challenge a compact, memorable form. Yet the walkout did not itself settle what power would replace the monarchy or how that change would be achieved. Its emotional high point—the deputies’ brief celebration in the winter sunlight—was followed by uncertainty, attacks, and a strike. December 1 stands in the narrative as a day when a performance of popular repudiation briefly looked like a new beginning, while the consequences exposed how far gesture remained from control.