May 10, 1915

May 10, 1915, is presented as the date when Italy was dragged into the First World War, and Benito Mussolini later treats that intervention as the revolution that had already happened. The date therefore works as a political point of origin in the book: it links wartime mobilization to the postwar Fascist claim that struggle, rather than parliamentary debate, would determine Italy’s future.

The date as a political beginning

In the account of the gathering at Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan on March 23, 1919, Mussolini looks back on the interventionist decision as a revolution that had already occurred. While workers outside call for revolution, the new movement’s argument is that Italy’s decisive rupture came when the country was brought into the war. The date turns a past act of national mobilization into a continuing political claim: the war is not treated as a closed episode but as an identity and a promise of future power.

That claim is set against the gathering’s small scale. Fewer than a hundred men are present, while the narration measures the room against the millions killed in the war. The contrast gives May 10, 1915, a double meaning in the later scene: it is invoked as a moment of national action, but its legacy is inseparable from mass death. The date’s significance is thus retrospective and contested, not simply celebratory.

From wartime rupture to postwar organization

The book places this memory beside the formation of the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919 and the movement’s struggle to find political footing. In July, Mussolini opposed a general strike and moved simultaneously on two fronts: he pursued an alliance among left-wing interventionists, while Michele Bianchi, acting on his order, arranged for the Fascists to assist Milan’s prefect in maintaining public order. A confidential government circular encouraged Fascist cooperation against revolutionary attempts, subject to state command. The wartime interventionist identity had become useful both as a political appeal and as a basis for collaboration with the liberal state against the socialist left.

The subsequent rural conflict reveals how far postwar politics extended beyond speeches and party organization. In Ferrara, the peasant leagues controlled hiring, work arrangements, and other parts of agricultural life; during the 1920 harvest, their power and the landowners’ resistance were bound up with the practical conditions of work and subsistence. In January 1921, a Fascist punitive expedition from Ferrara was organized to strike several rural leagues at once, using trucks supplied by the Agrarian Association. The narrative’s movement from the interventionist date to these organized clashes shows political struggle taking an increasingly coercive, local form.

Mobilization and the state’s weakening authority

In May 1921, thousands of farmworkers from the Ferrarese countryside converged on Ferrara. By morning, the city was occupied by a column of some fifty thousand laborers; telephone lines had been cut, schools requisitioned for lodging, and shops and businesses ordered closed. The episode demonstrates the scale of mass mobilization that had become possible in the postwar countryside, while also showing Fascist leaders directing and controlling a movement of impoverished workers.

The crisis deepened in the summer of 1922. After the Labor Alliance announced a nationwide strike to defend political and union liberties, Michele Bianchi issued an ultimatum declaring that Fascism would act in place of a state that failed to assert its authority. Mussolini celebrated the prospect of unrestricted action. In the book’s chronology, the claim that the war had been the real revolution now accompanies an explicit challenge to the state’s capacity to govern.

The long aftermath of the wartime claim

By October 1922, the contest had become a race over whether the government could stop a Fascist insurrection. After Gabriele D’Annunzio’s abdication was reported to the Ministry of the Interior, officials learned that Fascists were preparing a coup attempt. Luigi Facta’s government drafted orders for Rome’s defense, arrest warrants for those responsible for sedition, and a state-of-siege proclamation. The measures were prepared and announced, but King Vittorio Emanuele III refused to sign the decree, and the state of siege was revoked.

The book does not offer May 10, 1915, as a self-contained scene whose consequences follow automatically. Instead, it makes the date a retrospective hinge: Mussolini’s account of intervention as revolution persists through the movement’s formation, its alliances with state authorities, the escalation of rural and urban conflict, and the government’s failure to carry out its emergency response. The date’s narrative force lies in that transformation—from a claimed national decision to a lasting political justification for action.