Legalitarian strike

The Legalitarian strike was a nationwide stoppage proclaimed by the Labor Alliance in 1922 as a last attempt to defend political and trade-union liberties. Its defeat became a turning point: the Fascist squads continued their campaign even after the strike was called off, destroying organizations across the country and leaving the socialists unable to mount an effective response. The episode also exposed the gap between the government’s formal authority and its ability to enforce it, while the Fascists used the crisis to claim that they could act in the state’s place.

Conditions and Stakes

The confrontation took shape against a background of growing Fascist control in the countryside and increasingly frail state authority. In Ferrara, where agricultural workers had faced seasonal unemployment and hunger, Italo Balbo proposed a mass mobilization to press the government for public works. The plan was designed to demonstrate that Fascism could provide for its followers without threatening the interests of the landowners who financed the local movement. Benito Mussolini authorized the proposal, while making Balbo responsible if it failed.

The mobilization brought tens of thousands of impoverished farm laborers from the surrounding countryside into Ferrara. Organized from remote farmhouses, they traveled on foot, by bicycle, in wagons, and on barges. The city was paralyzed: Balbo had telephone lines cut, school buildings requisitioned for lodging, and shops and businesses closed. The prefect was confronted with the demand that police return to barracks and that public works be guaranteed before the peasants demobilized. This earlier display of coordinated mass pressure formed part of the immediate political setting in which the later strike and Fascist response unfolded.

The state’s weakness had also been visible in its efforts to control the squads. Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi had attempted to regulate their weapons and paramilitary organization through prefectural orders. Michele Bianchi, newly elected secretary general of the National Fascist Party, countered by declaring party sections and combat squads inseparable. The directive was published in Il Popolo d’Italia. Rather than arresting the party’s leaders for asserting the existence of an armed militia, Bonomi issued another circular complaining that his public-order orders were not being obeyed. The state could issue directives; it increasingly struggled to make them effective.

Calling the Strike

After the Labor Alliance announced the strike, its leaders recast it as a legalitarian action: workers’ and peasants’ organizations would act together in defense of political liberties and union rights. The timing was intended to make the stoppage a decisive test of resistance. But the announcement was prematurely disclosed by a newspaper employee in Genoa, disrupting the plans. The episode also reached the king while he was negotiating socialist support for a government of the left. He summoned Luigi Facta and urged him to form a cabinet without the socialists; by late afternoon, Facta had assembled a ministry much like its predecessor.

On 1 August, Bianchi issued an ultimatum giving the state forty-eight hours to prove its authority over its employees and those said to threaten the nation. If the deadline passed, he declared, the Fascists would claim freedom to act and replace a state they considered impotent. Benito Mussolini, writing in his newspaper, presented the movement as seeking freedom to fight and triumph. The ultimatum turned the strike into more than a labor dispute: it challenged the government to demonstrate that public authority still rested with the state.

Fascist Counteraction

As squadristi occupied the mayor’s offices in Milan, Cesare Rossi welcomed the strike as an opportunity to justify the movement’s violence. In conversation with his bodyguard, he treated the contrast between striking workers and Fascist attackers as a political reversal: those acting in the name of legality could now be denounced as outlaws, while the squads’ violence could be framed as a response to revolutionary danger. Fear of a Bolshevik uprising, in his account, supplied the justification for action.

When the ultimatum expired, armed Fascist operations began across Italy. In Milan, Aldo Finzi drove a tram out of its depot on Via Leoncavallo while squadristi aboard aimed firearms at the strikers. Rossi and Finzi also sought to attach Gabriele D’Annunzio’s name to the campaign. D’Annunzio was in the city for negotiations with his publisher, not to participate in the strike’s suppression. His companion asked the Fascist messengers not to involve the poet in violence he opposed. Rossi nevertheless ordered his men to spread word that D’Annunzio was about to arrive at Palazzo Marino, illustrating how the movement tried to make public authority out of rumor as well as force.

D’Annunzio later appealed for compassion and brotherhood among workers. That appeal coincided with a further attack on the Avanti! premises on Via San Damiano, where squadristi associated with Forni and Cremona’s Farinacci set the building alight. The contrast between the poet’s public language and the attack nearby marked the limits of appeals for reconciliation: the campaign of retaliation was already widening beyond the immediate strike.

Defeat and Consequences

The Labor Alliance called off the strike on 4 August, but the Fascist campaign did not stop. For days, squads continued attacking socialist organizations. Hundreds of cooperatives, associations, and chambers of labor were destroyed across the country, and socialist administrations resigned. When Benito Mussolini flew over Italy on 12 August, smoke from fires remained visible in Tuscany, Emilia, and the lower Po Valley. The strike’s end therefore did not end the confrontation; it preceded an intensified assault on the institutions through which socialist political and economic life had been organized.

Filippo Turati’s account in La Giustizia acknowledged the defeat. He described the strike as the socialists’ equivalent of Caporetto, recognized that the movement had committed its last major resources to Milan and Genoa, and conceded that Fascist force had devastated resistance in the principal centers. Benito Mussolini read the report before taking the controls of his plane. The book presents Turati’s judgment as accurate but too pessimistic: the socialists had been shattered, yet a further contest remained between the Fascists and the liberal state.

That distinction gives the episode its broader significance. The strike’s failure did not simply reveal the organizational vulnerability of the socialist movement. The response demonstrated how a mass stoppage, announced in the name of legality, could be recast as evidence of revolutionary threat; how the government’s inability to enforce its own orders could strengthen a rival claim to authority; and how the squads’ violence continued after the stated occasion for it had passed. In the account’s sequence, the legalitarian strike ends as a workers’ action but becomes the opening for a sustained Fascist offensive against the organizations that had made collective resistance possible.