Fascist squads

Fascist squads were armed local groups that carried the Italian Fascist movement from political agitation into organized coercion. They grew amid strikes, rural labor conflict, and the collapse of confidence in liberal authority; by late 1920, their actions were spreading across provinces, and in 1921 they were conducting planned expeditions against peasant leagues. Their declared defense of order became a mechanism for breaking socialist organization and establishing fascist power on the ground.

Origins and Political Setting

The squads emerged in a country shaped by wartime loss and the return of millions of soldiers. The book sets their rise against the expectation of further conflict: veterans and other survivors formed a politically unsettled mass, while established liberal politicians appeared unable to contain the postwar crisis. This atmosphere helped make military discipline, force, and national rebirth compelling political themes, even as competing socialist organizations commanded support in cities and the countryside.

The struggle was not confined to street demonstrations. In Bologna, socialist influence extended through labor organizations, cooperatives, and rural leagues. The leagues could regulate hiring and working conditions, while employers and landowners faced fines and pressure when they resisted. In Ferrara, the leagues’ strength had produced a compulsory labor quota requiring landowners to hire five workers for every thirty hectares during the winter months. These arrangements gave the conflict immediate material stakes: work, wages, land, and control of local institutions.

From Armed Readiness to Expansion

The turning point in the account is the Bologna massacre. In its aftermath, fascists continued to assemble and march, and recruitment rose sharply over only a few days. Leandro Arpinati declared that the Bologna group would remain armed until violence in the countryside stopped and state agencies regained control. Benito Mussolini sent Cesare Rossi and Celso Morisi from Milan to coordinate squad formation. Local mobilization, rather than a single centrally directed force, was thus joined to intervention by leaders of the national movement.

The squads’ advance quickly exceeded Bologna. They burned a red flag in the city, attacked labor institutions and socialist opponents, and carried out raids in surrounding towns. The book describes a chain of actions extending through the Po Valley and beyond: squads drove farm laborers from an estate near Adria, attacked municipal council members in Modena and the Chamber of Labor in Carpi, and pursued opponents into local government offices in Bra. Landowners supported some of these operations. The result was an avalanche of violence that moved from claims of self-defense to counterattack and spread from province to province.

Organization and Methods

By January 1921, the Ferrara squads were undertaking expeditions planned according to military methods. On January 23, armed groups set out from Ferrara to strike several peasant leagues at once, including those in San Martino, Aguscello, Cona, and Denore. Their plan relied on surprise, multiple targets, and trucks supplied by the Ferrara Agrarian Association. The collaboration reveals the practical alliance between squad violence and agrarian interests: vehicles and local knowledge made coordinated raids possible, while the targets were organizations that had challenged landowners’ control over labor.

The participants were socially varied. Among those assembling were former Arditi, a Latin professor attracted to legionary style, and Barbato Gattelli, a landowning family’s son and veteran who had established an automotive business. Yet not every early fascist joined this campaign. Olao Gaggioli, founder of the Ferrara organization and a veteran of the occupation of Fiume, had resigned in protest against Mussolini’s break with Gabriele D’Annunzio and what he saw as agrarian interference. His departure exposed a division within the movement over whether its local organizations should serve the landowners’ interests.

Giacomo Matteotti’s account of raids in the Polesine describes a recurring method: armed groups arrived at night with local Agrarian Association leaders, surrounded a labor organizer’s home, and used threats or abduction to force him out. Resistance could bring fatal consequences. In this description, the squads’ effectiveness depended not only on weapons but on cooperation, intimidation, and knowledge of isolated rural settlements. The violence aimed to disable the people who organized labor and to make the surrounding community understand the cost of resistance.

Mass Mobilization and Political Consequences

In 1922, Italo Balbo demonstrated that squad organization could mobilize far larger forces for political pressure. Beginning at midnight on May 11, thousands of poor farm laborers moved toward Ferrara on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges. By the next morning, about fifty thousand had entered the city. Balbo’s forces cut telephone lines, requisitioned schools for accommodation, and ordered shops and businesses closed. The city was occupied and paralyzed; the prefect, confronted by the crowd, asked to speak with the commander. The episode showed how rural networks and logistical coordination could turn numbers into an instrument for controlling an urban center.

The conflict with organized labor also shaped the squads’ confrontation with the state. After Balbo’s punitive actions, the Labor Alliance called what it termed a legalitarian general strike, beginning at midnight on July 31. Fascist leaders treated the strike as an opportunity to challenge the government: Michele Bianchi issued an ultimatum giving the state forty-eight hours to demonstrate its authority and warning that fascism would act in its place. The episode connected squad violence to an explicit claim of political substitution, in which the movement presented its own coercive power as the answer to state weakness.

Political Meaning and Legacy

The squads were both instruments of violence and builders of a mass movement. Their actions helped break socialist control in localities, weakened labor organizations, and made the Fascist movement appear capable of imposing order where the liberal state seemed ineffective. The rise in recruitment after Bologna and the spread of operations through the provinces show how victories against opponents could generate further mobilization.

The movement’s language framed this process as national renewal. At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini presented fascism as a force that would nationalize Italians, subordinate political life to the state, and conquer and discipline the masses. The squads supplied that project with a local, physical means of enforcement. Their significance lies in the connection between political spectacle and coercion: marches and mass gatherings could display collective strength, while raids and armed threats narrowed the space in which opponents could organize. What began under the banner of restoring order became a method for transferring power from existing institutions to the Fascist movement.