Nitti Government Confidential Circular on Fascist Assistance in Maintaining Public Order

The Nitti Government Confidential Circular on Fascist Assistance in Maintaining Public Order was a confidential instruction issued by Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti to prefects on July 14, 1919. It invited Fascist and combatant associations to assist the authorities in maintaining public order and repressing revolutionary attempts, even violently, provided they volunteered and accepted the authorities’ command. The circular’s significance lies in this conditional arrangement: the state sought help from an armed political movement while insisting that its intervention remain subordinate to official direction.

Purpose and Conditions

The circular addressed prefects at a moment when the government judged that public authorities could not rely solely on state resources and the police. In cities where Fascist groups and associations of combatants were present, they could make themselves available to the authorities for public-order work. Their participation was framed as voluntary and patriotic, and was explicitly conditional on their accepting the authorities’ direction as the sole command. The instruction therefore did not simply endorse independent Fascist action: it set out a state-directed form of cooperation.

The language of the policy joined repression to administrative control. Fascist groups were to help confront revolutionary attempts, including through violence, but were not, in the circular’s stated design, to choose their own targets or operate as an autonomous public force. This distinction mattered because the proposed helpers were not ordinary police units. They belonged to a political movement that opposed the left and had its own organization, leadership, and objectives. The circular attempted to make that movement useful to the state without openly surrendering the state’s claim to command.

Milan Implementation

The correspondence from Milan shows how the policy was put into practice locally. Benito Mussolini instructed Michele Bianchi, the managing editor of Il Popolo d’Italia, to reach an agreement with Milan’s prefect, making the local Fasci available for maintaining public order. A prefectural telegram sent to the Head of Public Security on July 15 reported that Bianchi’s agreement with the prefect was complete. The telegram credited Mattina’s intervention and concluded that the local Fasci would be available in the event of an emergency.

That report records an arrangement and an expectation of availability, rather than describing a particular operation carried out by the Fasci under official orders. Its administrative route is nevertheless revealing: the agreement was relayed from the prefecture to the Head of Public Security, while the movement’s representative was Bianchi and Mussolini was in Rome. The account thus presents cooperation as a connection between the local state apparatus and Fascist organizers, not simply as an informal understanding between street-level groups.

The Strike and Political Stakes

The arrangement acquired immediate importance in the confrontation surrounding the proposed general strike of July 20, known as the scioperissimo. Mussolini was trying to steer between his former socialist comrades and potential new allies, but at the July 17 conference of Fasci from Central and Northern Italy he took a resolute position against the strike. The meeting represented only a small portion of the registered movement, yet it marked a turn toward a hard line against left-wing agitation. The government’s invitation to cooperate with the prefects placed the Fascists, under official direction in principle, on the side of efforts to restrain revolutionary action.

At the same time, Mussolini pursued a separate political opening. On the eve of the strike, he addressed left-wing interventionists and former socialists gathered at the Liceo Beccaria in Milan, proposing a social and economic reorganization centered on workers’ welfare but free of Bolshevik influence. The possibility of joining forces in the November elections briefly appeared viable. These parallel initiatives show the movement operating on more than one front: it could seek electoral cooperation with parts of the patriotic left while presenting its forces to the state as an instrument against revolutionary disorder. The circular belongs to that shifting political situation, rather than to a settled alliance between government and Fascism.

Reach and Limits

The evidence establishes that Nitti’s instruction called for cooperation, and that Milan’s prefect and Bianchi reached an agreement. It does not establish that the circular created a permanent legal force, transferred policing powers, or placed every Fascist organization under effective state control. The requirement of official command was part of the policy’s stated terms; whether that command could be maintained over armed political groups remained a practical and political question.

Events in Bologna illustrate the wider stakes without proving that the circular directed those events. After a clash in which carabinieri fired on unarmed peasants, killing eight and injuring about thirty, the Chamber of Labor called a three-day general strike. Local business and professional groups then organized the Bolognese Association of Social Defense, whose delegation told Nitti that it was prepared to replace the state in self-defense. This sequence exposed pressure on the liberal authorities from opposing directions: workers used withdrawal of labor to protest state violence, while sections of the bourgeoisie organized independently when they judged the state inadequate. The circular’s proposed use of Fascist collaborators was one response to that broader crisis of public authority.

Political Significance

The circular made cooperation between the liberal state and Fascist organizations administratively imaginable at a moment of acute conflict. Its terms preserved a formal hierarchy, with the authorities directing any participation, but the arrangement also offered the movement recognition and a possible public role in suppressing its political opponents. The prefectural report from Milan shows how quickly a general instruction could become a local agreement to make Fascist groups available for an emergency.

The episode also clarifies the tension between institutional authorization and political autonomy. The government sought disciplined assistance; the Fascists could gain access to public-order work while retaining their identity as a movement mobilized against the left. The circular should therefore be understood neither as a simple transfer of state power nor as a neutral administrative measure. It was a conditional collaboration shaped by the government’s fear of revolutionary action and by the Fascists’ growing capacity to present themselves as useful defenders of order.