Fascism is not a religion, it is a training ground

Fascism is not a religion, it is a training ground names a central tension in the book’s portrayal of fascism: it rejects the image of a settled faith or finished doctrine while organizing people through discipline, shared passion, and repeated political performance. Paired with the claims that fascism is a movement rather than a party and a passion rather than a program, the expression presents political formation as an ongoing practice. Its apparent flexibility is consequential: the movement can claim to transcend old institutions while gathering force through them, and can make violence appear not as an exception but as part of its political method.

The Formula and Its Immediate Context

The expression appears in Benito Mussolini’s effort to define fascism after a bombing has altered the political atmosphere. He casts fascism as a force that acts openly against its opponents while denying responsibility for the bombing and assigning that violence to anarchists and communists. The distinction is strategic: the movement’s violence is presented as a visible struggle on an open political battlefield, while the bombing is placed beyond the bounds of legitimate political action. The formula therefore does more than reject religion or a formal program. It describes a movement that claims the right to train, mobilize, and act, even as it draws a boundary between its own force and violence it disavows.

That distinction sits beside the book’s account of fascism as a young movement with a contested past. Mussolini’s newspaper had described the fascists as having no history, while the narrative counters that they may have too much. The bombing becomes a turning point: Mussolini watches the aftermath without joining the retaliatory action, and the text presents the disaster as marking an end to one political era and a beginning to another. His argument that fascism is a training ground belongs to this attempt to convert crisis into a claim of political renewal.

A Postwar Audience for Formation

The formula answers a society portrayed as exhausted by the First World War and uncertain about what would follow. The imagined political stage is emptied of its established speakers, while five million returning veterans press toward Italy’s borders. Against the older politicians and liberal moderates, the narrative places survivors and former soldiers who speak briefly, forcefully, and then fall silent. The movement’s appeal is therefore not simply a set of propositions offered to an undifferentiated public. It addresses people shaped by war, dislocation, and the sense that another confrontation may still lie ahead.

The crowded demonstration in Milan on April 15, 1919, makes that divide visible. A group of several thousand breaks from a vast socialist procession and heads toward the Duomo, where Filippo Tommaso Marinetti urges bystanders to join the counter-demonstration. Across a cordon of Carabinieri, women at the head of the socialist column carry a portrait of Lenin and a red flag, singing for a better life for their children. Opposite them stand a smaller group of officers, Arditi, and Futurists, men the narrative associates with years of daily proximity to killing. When the cordon opens, the confrontation quickly becomes a brief exchange of stones and gunfire. The episode gives concrete form to the expression’s idea of a training ground: political identity is produced through organized bodies, opposing marches, and the experience of confrontation, not only through a written platform.

The contrast with the rural socialist leagues sharpens the point. In Bologna, revolutionary organizations exert influence through labor institutions and local networks; in Emilia, socialist control extends across municipalities and into hiring, work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and planting. In the account of Ferrara, farmhands may work only an average of 120 days a year, while the leagues’ control of hiring and working conditions is tied to the difference between subsistence and hunger. These organizations also form and discipline their own constituencies. The fascist formula does not mean that fascist mobilization is the only organized politics in the book; rather, it asserts a rival kind of formation amid competing mass movements and an increasingly violent struggle over who will command public life.

Passion, Program, and the State

The same vocabulary recurs in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s account of 1919 as a year of passion rather than peace. He contrasts Fiume with the negotiations at Versailles: Fiume signifies youth, life, faith, and a future imagined through the dead and the unborn, while Versailles represents a Europe exhausted by suspicion and bargaining. The language resonates with fascism’s claim to be passion rather than program, but the episode also shows that the rhetoric of renewal was not exclusive to Mussolini. D’Annunzio chose to remain in Fiume despite the wishes of its inhabitants, and the narrative observes that Italians did not follow him. The promise of a new political age could inspire, but it could also fail to secure consent.

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Mussolini’s three-hour speech turns the movement’s expansiveness into a governing vision. He proposes absorbing liberalism after violence has buried previous methods; making Italians into a unified national people; pursuing imperial greatness; accommodating the Roman Church; and treating the state as the central political authority. He also addresses the relationship between individuals and the masses, presenting the leader as their interpreter, and connects national greatness to the health of the population. The breadth of this program complicates any simple reading of fascism as having no program at all. The formula instead distinguishes the movement’s self-image from an ordinary party platform: it claims to be a force capable of encompassing nation, state, empire, and mass politics, while remaining organized around action and passion.

Mussolini’s stated wish to disappear from the new organization and let fascists recover from his mistakes sits uneasily beside the speech’s concentration of political interpretation in a leader. The contradiction matters. The training ground is presented as a place where followers should learn to stand on their own, yet the movement’s sweeping vision depends on a figure who claims to interpret the masses and define the state. The formula’s promise of formation and its concentration of authority coexist rather than resolve one another.

Ritual, Rebirth, and the Limits of the Promise

The movement’s language of training is reinforced by scenes of collective ritual. In Milan, an illuminated Very rocket arcs over the crowd in Piazza Belgioioso before Ferruccio Vecchi addresses it. The flare, once associated with the battlefield, serves as the signal for a rally whose imagery draws on war, dispossession, and vengeance. Later, at the burial of the Unknown Soldier, the anonymous body becomes a focus for a national ceremony: people pray at the tomb as if before an altar, and the fascist founders kneel there in the center of Rome. The narrative explicitly links the scene to politics becoming a religion, a pointed counterpoint to the formula’s denial that fascism is one. It rejects religion as a description of the movement even as its ceremonies assume religious forms.

A later speech in Piazza Belgioioso makes the movement’s scale change into a story of national rebirth. Mussolini contrasts the few who gathered there four years earlier with the legions assembled now, describing volunteers who ask for nothing and are ready for anything. Their collective passion is narrated as the resurrection of a people into a nation and then a state. The crowd’s response turns the speech into an exchange: Mussolini asks whether they will accept greater sacrifices, and a unified yes answers him. In this scene, training means more than preparation for a future act; it is the repeated making of a disciplined political community through ceremony, response, and commitment.

The promise of unity and renewal remains shadowed by the costs and exclusions visible elsewhere in the narrative. Mussolini’s image as a new man, arbiter of chaos, and restorer of order depends on a contrast with supposedly exhausted politicians and a claim that violence can end violence by leaving only one front. Yet the political conflicts that precede this rhetoric include organized socialist communities, mass demonstrations, and competing demands over work and land. In August 1924, Giacomo Matteotti’s coffin is returned to Fratta Polesine, where tens of thousands of workers call for vengeance, justice, and liberty. The mourning procession reveals a political community and a demand for accountability that the language of national unity cannot absorb. The expression thus holds together the movement’s self-presentation as a school of action and its larger promise of rebirth, while the book’s recurring scenes of conflict and mourning expose how far that promise remains from a shared, peaceful political order.