Pietro Nenni

Pietro Nenni’s trajectory in the book crosses an unsettled political boundary: he helped found Bologna’s Fascio in 1919, then left as its republican founders withdrew, while later appearing as a perceptive critic of both Benito Mussolini’s appeal and the failures of the socialist movement. These episodes make him less a continuous protagonist than a recurring political observer, present where alliances form, collapse, and are reconsidered.

Identity and Early Role

Nenni is introduced as a republican and as one of the founders of the Bologna Fascio in April 1919. The detail is striking because the organization’s later identity as a Fascist formation can obscure the unsettled coalition from which it emerged. At its beginning, the Bologna group included republicans associated with Nenni; its origins did not yet make its subsequent political direction inevitable.

The book also places Nenni in the public agitation of the postwar period. During the 1919 election campaign, his republican rally at Meldola in Romagna was interrupted by gunfire. The episode establishes the danger surrounding interventionist speakers and meetings: political opponents were not simply debating competing positions in public squares, but confronting one another in an atmosphere of hostility and threat. Nenni appears here as a speaker exposed to the same disorder that shaped the wider campaign.

Founding and Disintegration in Bologna

The Bologna organization soon proved fragile. In April 1920, Leandro Arpinati sought assistance from the movement’s secretary, warning that the local Fascio was coming apart. The warning was borne out as Nenni and the other republicans who had founded it left one after another. A report from Bologna concluded that, once the republicans had broken away, the Fascio was effectively dead. Only six members remained, and they lacked even the money to rent an office.

Nenni’s departure is therefore presented through its organizational consequence, not through an account of his private reasons or the precise circumstances of his exit. His founding role had helped give the Bologna Fascio its initial shape; the republicans’ withdrawal removed that basis. Arpinati was left to try to rebuild the organization, with Benito Mussolini insisting that he take charge and encouraging the formation of civic-defense militias against strikes. The episode marks a local political realignment: as the original republican coalition dissolved, the remaining Fascists sought a different constituency and a more confrontational role.

That change took place amid a broader struggle over control of Bologna and the surrounding countryside. The account describes competing labor organizations, Socialist influence in rural communities, and conflict over the conditions imposed on landowners and farmworkers. It does not identify Nenni as an actor in those later local confrontations. Instead, his significance in this part of the narrative lies in the contrast between the Fascio’s republican founding circle and the organization’s attempted reconstruction after that circle had dispersed.

A Reading of Mussolini

Nenni also appears as a source of judgment on Mussolini. In February 1920, the industrial magnate Ettore Conti recorded that Nenni, then traveling with him, had known Mussolini before the two men stood on opposing sides of the barricades. Conti relays Nenni’s assessment of Mussolini as an obscurely compelling, forceful figure driven to be first, whether as an opponent of the bourgeoisie or as a ruler. The assessment was neither simple praise nor a dismissal: it recognized the capacity for political consequence while leaving open whether that consequence would be beneficial or harmful.

The observation gains force from the change in political position it describes. Nenni had known Mussolini when their political paths were closer; by the time Conti recorded his view, they had become opponents. The book does not develop this into a detailed account of their personal relationship. Instead, Nenni’s earlier familiarity gives weight to his reading of Mussolini’s ambition and public magnetism, while Conti’s diary preserves the judgment as an observation made during a journey from which Mussolini himself was absent.

Socialist Division and Political Isolation

By the summer of 1922, Nenni’s attention turns to the divisions weakening the socialist movement. The parliamentary group had voted for the Zirardini agenda, which called for an agreement with the government to restore public liberties and the rule of law. The maximalist leadership rejected it, accusing reformists of collusion with the bourgeoisie. At the same time, left administrations were falling across the province of Novara, leaving workers increasingly without political protection.

Nenni’s diagnosis, as the book reports it, is that socialist leaders were absorbed in doctrinal disputes while their political world was collapsing around them. The image is of a leadership arguing over interpretation as the institutions and local support it might have defended were being lost. The criticism does not reduce the crisis to disagreement alone: it connects factional hostility to a practical failure to protect the working class.

The following events deepen that sense of isolation. Filippo Turati’s meeting with the king was treated by much of the radical left as betrayal, while communists mocked him. Soon afterward, the general strike failed, and workers who had answered repeated calls to strike were forced back to work under threat. The book describes Nenni as having already recognized the perilous separation between socialist leadership and the people left to face repression without assistance. His commentary gives the political collapse an organizational and human measure: leaders’ disputes mattered because they left their supporters exposed.

Nenni’s Account of the Fascist Takeover

In November 1922, Nenni’s commentary in Avanti! reconsiders the language of revolution used to describe the Fascist seizure of power. He judged the proclamation grander than the events themselves, arguing that the state had already relinquished so much authority that the Fascists needed only to take hold of what their efforts had made available. In this account, their advance was not mere bluff, but bluff played a substantial part in it; an effective response by the state, particularly the use of its machine guns, might have weakened the Blackshirts’ confidence.

The argument connects Nenni’s earlier concerns to the outcome of the political crisis. His 1922 analysis does not portray the Fascist victory as proof that the movement possessed irresistible strength. It emphasizes instead the state’s prior abdication and the political theater that magnified the threat. That interpretation also fits the book’s wider contrast between the appearance of a decisive revolution and the institutional failure that allowed it to succeed.

Across these episodes, Nenni occupies several distinct positions: republican founder of a local Fascio, public speaker in a violent election campaign, former political acquaintance of Mussolini, and critic of socialist paralysis and liberal-state weakness. The account does not make him the central organizer of the later confrontations. His importance lies in the changes he witnesses and in the clarity of the judgments attributed to him: the fragile coalition at Bologna, Mussolini’s capacity to command attention, and the consequences of political divisions when state power is left undefended.