Eja, Eja, Alalà

“Eja, Eja, Alalà” is a Fascist rallying cry whose clearest documented use sends a Milan crowd from a political meeting into the streets in tight formation. Across the surrounding narrative, the acclamation belongs to a politics that seeks to transform crowds into a disciplined, emotionally charged national body: its sound accompanies marches and celebrations, while its force comes from the rituals and promises of rebirth with which Fascism surrounds it.

The cry and its settings

The expression appears as the cry concluding a Fascist rally in Milan. The crowd is to proceed in tight formation along Via Morone and Via Manzoni, past Piazza della Scala and down Via Silvio Pellico, before dispersing without incident at the Fascist Electoral Committee headquarters. The route is not incidental scenery: the acclamation accompanies a planned movement through the city, turning the meeting’s ending into an organized public display. The account also notes that measures had been taken to ensure the rally would remain orderly and solemn.

A related form appears at the National Fascist Party’s founding congress. After Benito Mussolini has spoken for three hours, the assembly erupts in applause, singing, and cries of “eja, alalà”; the excitement then spills into the street as Fascists march in formation toward the Altar of the Fatherland. The phrase is thus heard not only as a rally’s closing signal but within a larger sequence linking speech, shared enthusiasm, and collective movement.

Against rival street politics

The cry’s significance becomes clearer against the competing sounds and formations of postwar Milan. At a large socialist demonstration on April 15, 1919, women at the head of the procession carry a portrait of Lenin and a red flag while singing songs of liberation. Their march is met by a smaller counter-procession of officers, Arditi, and Fascists; after the Carabinieri cordon opens, the confrontation becomes a brief exchange of stones and gunfire. The account distinguishes the groups not simply by their numbers but by their different experiences of death: the socialists arrive as marchers still expecting a parade, while the counter-demonstrators include men accustomed to wartime killing. The later Fascist acclamation belongs to this contested street world, where collective song and organized movement mark opposing political communities.

That conflict rests on a wider postwar crisis. The narrative describes a Europe emptied by mass death and facing five million returning soldiers, while the coming political order appears divided between those who belonged to the old world and those who would take their place. In the countryside, socialist leagues and labor organizations exert extensive control over work and hiring; in Emilia, their reach extends across municipalities and agricultural life. Against that background, the Fascist cry is part of a bid to gather people into a rival formation, not merely an isolated flourish at the end of a speech.

Rebirth, nation, and political ritual

The acclamation resonates with a recurrent promise that national decline can be overcome through youth, discipline, and a new beginning. In a speech to his legionnaires, Gabriele D’Annunzio presents Fiume as youthful, beautiful, and alive, in opposition to the exhausted world represented by the Versailles negotiations. This rhetoric places the dead behind the present generation and the unborn before it. The cry itself is not attributed to that speech, but its surrounding political culture similarly binds collective feeling to ideas of sacrifice, renewal, and a future made by action.

At the National Fascist Party congress, Mussolini gives that future a political program. He argues for absorbing liberalism, making Italians into a unified national people, pursuing imperial greatness, and treating the state as the vehicle of Fascist rule. The congress’s cries and formation march follow this expansive address. Five days earlier, the Unknown Soldier had been buried in a national ceremony that made one unidentifiable fallen soldier represent the war dead as a whole. The narrative places the founders’ later kneeling at that grave beside the congress’s fervor, observing that politics is becoming a religion. In this sequence, the acclamation belongs to a movement whose public ceremonies draw authority from both national unity and the memory of collective death.

From small bands to a multitude

The meaning of the cry shifts with the movement’s growth. Returning to Piazza Belgioioso, Mussolini recalls the earlier gathering there as a meeting of only a few hundred and contrasts it with the thousands now assembled. He describes the present force as a religious army of volunteers, a people becoming a nation and a nation becoming a state that seeks expansion in the world. The crowd answers his question about whether it would endure greater sacrifices with a resounding yes. The narrative therefore connects the movement’s acclamations and responses to a change in scale: a small band presents itself as a multitude prepared for further sacrifice.

The political use of collective cries is not confined to Fascism. At Giacomo Matteotti’s funeral in Fratta Polesine, mourners call for vengeance, justice, and liberty. That distinct set of demands belongs to a different public ritual and a different political moment; it helps show how, in the book’s Italy, crowds give competing meanings to grief, allegiance, and the future. “Eja, Eja, Alalà” is specifically associated with Fascist celebration and mobilization, where the chant helps carry the movement from assembly toward action.