Mass Politics

Mass Politics is the struggle to organize and claim the participation of large populations, rather than leaving political life to established leaders and parliamentary figures. In the postwar account, returning soldiers, workers, peasants, nationalist crowds, and Fascist formations become competing political forces. Their numbers matter, but so do the networks that assemble them, the material interests that bind them, and the stories through which leaders give collective action meaning.

From War to a New Public

The war supplies both a constituency and a political language. Millions of veterans return to a country still marked by military defeat, mass death, and uncertainty. In the early Fascist gathering, the audience numbers fewer than a hundred, yet Benito Mussolini imagines the old political generation being overtaken by five million returning soldiers. The small room and the vast prospective public stand in sharp contrast: mass politics has begun, but no single movement can assume that it already speaks for the masses.

The socialist movement makes that scale visible in another way. In July 1919, red flags gather in Milan as workers prepare for a general strike in solidarity with workers abroad. Leaders including Claudio Treves and Giacinto Menotti Serrati address the crowd before Nicola Bombacci explains the strike’s purpose. He presents it as a demonstration that may prepare the way for a revolutionary strike, not as the revolution itself. The workers are invited to imagine a new social order, but also told that its arrival depends on historical and economic conditions still unfolding. The gap between expectation and immediate action is part of the scene: the crowd’s hope is real, while the strike’s stated limits remain explicit.

Competing Crowds and Political Spectacle

Public space becomes a stage on which rival movements try to define who belongs to the people. On April 15, 1919, a large socialist procession in Milan sends several thousand demonstrators toward the Duomo. A smaller counter-procession gathers around Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with officers, students, Arditi, and Fascists among its participants. Marinetti urges neutral bystanders to join rather than watch. The confrontation that follows is brief, but its arrangement is telling: the socialist column, led by women carrying a portrait of Lenin and a red flag, faces a much smaller group whose members have lived with war and killing. Stones and clubs come from the socialist side; gunfire from the opposing side brings the marchers’ singing to a halt. The scene makes mass politics more than a question of head counts: opposing groups bring different experiences, symbols, and expectations into the same streets.

Nationalist mobilization also turns collective humiliation into a source of political belonging. After the Italian delegation’s walkout from the Paris peace negotiations, crowds in piazzas across Italy rally around demands for Fiume and Dalmatia. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s image of a mutilated victory gives young veterans a language for feeling deprived despite the country’s battlefield victory. Their gathering in Rome in May 1919 shows how a political metaphor can make a large, physically intact crowd experience itself as injured and wronged. The return of the delegates to Paris, after the Allies continued negotiating without them, deepens the disappointment that had made the appeal of national grievance so powerful.

Organization, Livelihood, and Leverage

The account repeatedly shows that crowds do not mobilize through rhetoric alone. In Bologna, socialist institutions and workplace organizations shape political life, while the city’s employers and middle classes face pressure over union membership, access to bread, and the threat of strikes. In the surrounding countryside, leagues, cooperatives, and local socialist networks extend that influence into villages. Their reach is not merely electoral: the organizations seek control over hiring and working conditions, and their demands reflect the precarious lives of farmworkers who can find work for only part of the year.

In Emilia, the leagues’ power is measurable as well as local. Socialists control 223 of the region’s 280 municipalities, and Ferrara’s leagues register 81,000 members. Their placement offices regulate hiring; they also influence work shifts, threshing, seed supplies, and crop planting. This organizational capacity gives rural workers leverage over landowners, while fines, social exclusion, and pressure against those who breach the agreements enforce collective rules. The account presents these methods as both a response to insecure livelihoods and a system capable of imposing severe discipline. Mass politics here is rooted in the organization of labor and access to resources, not simply in the spectacle of rallies.

Fascist organizers build a rival capacity for coordinated action. A Ferrara punitive expedition in January 1921 is planned on military lines, with armed groups, trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association, and simultaneous targets in several rural communities. Later, Italo Balbo’s mobilization draws thousands of impoverished farmworkers toward Ferrara from the countryside by foot, bicycle, wagons, and barges. The city wakes to an occupying column of 50,000 people; telephone lines are cut, schools are requisitioned for lodging, and shops and businesses are closed. These details show how an appeal to mass participation can be converted into logistics, territorial presence, and pressure on local authorities. They also expose the movement’s entanglement with organized agrarian interests even when its mobilized participants are poor laborers.

From Mobilization to Rule

Mass action can challenge the state, but it can also be used to claim the state. During the 1922 legalitarian general strike, workers’ and peasants’ organizations attempt to act as a united front in defense of political and union liberties. The strike’s advance disclosure disrupts its plans. Fascist leaders then set a deadline for the state to demonstrate its authority and threaten that Fascism will act in its place. The episode links a labor mobilization to an explicit contest over who has the right to exercise power: collective organization on one side, a movement claiming authority because the government appears unable to secure it on the other.

At the founding of the National Fascist Party, Benito Mussolini describes Fascism as a synthesis that will absorb liberalism, complete the nationalization of Italians, and bring the masses into political life through an interpreter who will also discipline them. The program connects participation to national unity and state power, while leaving little room for autonomous regional or class identities. A later commemorative speech returns to the contrast between the first small Fascist gathering in Milan and the much larger formations that followed: a few hundred have become thousands, and the movement imagines itself as a people becoming a nation and a nation becoming a state. The expansion is represented not only as growth in numbers but as a sequence of public gatherings, allegiance, and institutional consolidation.

Significance and Tensions

The account does not treat the masses as a single, unified political actor. Workers at a strike, peasants organized through leagues, veterans drawn to nationalist appeals, and farm laborers mobilized by Fascist leaders have different aims and means. Their shared importance lies in the fact that political authority increasingly depends on reaching them, organizing them, and claiming to speak in their name. Their numbers alone do not determine the outcome: organization, access to material resources, alliances, and the response of state institutions all shape what collective action can accomplish.

Mass Politics therefore carries a double significance. It opens political life to people previously described as spectators or subjects, and it gives organized workers and peasants practical means to press demands. At the same time, the same mass scale supports disciplined mobilization, armed coercion, and the Fascist claim that a movement can replace a state that fails to assert its authority. The movement’s promise of national renewal culminates in an image of the crowd becoming the nation and the nation becoming the state; the history traced here shows that this transformation is neither neutral nor consensual, but contested through organization, spectacle, and force.