His Holiness the Mass

“His Holiness the Mass” is Benito Mussolini’s polemical name for the democratic masses, imagined not as citizens capable of political judgment but as a collective of ungoverned impulses to be disciplined. The expression exposes a central tension in the narrative: fascism scorns the authority of the crowd even as it depends on crowds for spectacle, political force, and the performance of national unity.

A challenge to democratic sovereignty

In Mussolini’s account, individuals left to themselves merge into an incoherent mass, while democracy gives that mass political standing. Fascism offers a different model: military hierarchy and discipline, with party members treated first as soldiers. The party card becomes comparable to the identification recovered from a fallen soldier, turning political belonging into a form of enlistment. “His Holiness the Mass” therefore reverses the language of reverence: the collective that democracy places at the center of political life is, for Mussolini, an authority to be overthrown and reshaped.

The phrase also sharpens a gendered conflict visible in the earlier demonstrations. Forty thousand striking workers had marched in Milan, and the presence of women and children at the head of the socialist parade particularly unsettled authoritarian, patriarchal observers. Their anti-militarist protest suggested a future in which the men who had willed the war might no longer set the terms of public life. The shopkeepers and hoteliers who shut windows and barred doors responded to that prospect by retreating into the present rather than accepting the crowd as a legitimate political voice.

Crowds as spectacle and threat

The narrative repeatedly presents the crowd as a force that can exceed the intentions of those who gather within it. On April 15, 1919, thousands assembled at the Milan arena; in the early afternoon, several thousand broke from the main procession and moved toward the Duomo without a prearranged plan. At Piazza del Duomo, women again led the socialist column, carrying Lenin’s portrait and a red flag and singing for a better life for their children. Across the cordon, the opposing procession was smaller and composed of men accustomed to wartime killing. When the cordon opened, stones and clubs came from the socialist side and gunfire from the officers, Arditi, and Futurists; the brief clash silenced the marchers’ song. The crowd could appear as joyful collective possibility, but also as a gathering that the armed political factions interpreted as a coming catastrophe.

A different, openly hostile reading appears in Albino Volpi’s view of a socialist procession celebrating an electoral victory. Watching from the Bridge of the Sirenette with two Thévenot bombs and a dagger, he saw the marchers’ red flags, carnations, singing, and disorder as evidence that they were a mob rather than a people. His perception reduces political difference to a contrast between disciplined national belonging and an allegedly foreign, shapeless mass. The scene makes the expression’s political work legible: the crowd is not merely criticized for its conduct; its claim to represent the nation is denied.

From mass politics to discipline

The expression’s importance lies in the way fascism sought to replace popular authority with organized command without giving up the political usefulness of mass mobilization. After the failed effort to return to the movement’s origins, Mussolini argued that governing required a party capable of restricting squad violence and bringing unlike doctrines under a single political body. The proposed National Fascist Party was thus presented as a way to harness disorder, even while the movement’s black-shirted formations posed the more immediate threat to that project.

The effort to impose discipline also took an institutional form. The proposed Voluntary Militia for National Security would dissolve the local squads and recruit from fascist military formations, placing members under an oath to Italy and, above all, to Benito Mussolini. Its design aimed both to rein in provincial leaders and to preserve armed pressure on parliament and the monarchy. When Mussolini warned his fellow leaders that Italy could tolerate only one Mussolini, the rebuke gave personal form to the hierarchy the militia was meant to establish. The mass was not to rule; it was to be organized, commanded, and made politically usable.

Ritual, belonging, and the limits of the phrase

The narrative’s account of the burial of Italy’s Unknown Soldier reveals another route by which a crowd could be gathered into a political community. On November 4, an unidentified fallen soldier, chosen by lot to represent the dead, was buried after being carried across the country by special train amid cheering crowds. The marble coffin became the focus of a public ritual in which people could approach the grave as if before an altar. Five days later, the founders of the National Fascist Party, with Mussolini at their head, knelt for more than half an hour beside it. The scene presents politics becoming religious in form: collective grief and reverence lend emotional force to a national identity.

The funeral of Giacomo Matteotti shows that mass feeling could also gather around a demand that resisted fascist appropriation. At Velia’s insistence, Matteotti was buried in Fratta Polesine rather than given a political burial in Rome. Peasants, laborers, and railway workers knelt along the tracks as his coffin departed Monterotondo; in Fratta, tens of thousands mourned and called for vengeance, justice, retribution, and liberty. These scenes do not erase Mussolini’s contempt for democratic mass authority. Instead, they show why the phrase matters: the crowd remains a contested source of political meaning, alternately denounced as disorder, assembled as a spectacle, disciplined as a force, and drawn together in mourning.