XXVI Legislature of the Kingdom of Italy

The XXVI Legislature of the Kingdom of Italy opened its parliamentary life after the 1921 election, bringing Fascism into the Chamber amid widespread political violence. In the book’s account, it was the last legislature of liberal decline: the institutions remained in session, but their authority and the prospects for open political competition were being steadily weakened. Its course runs from Fascist entry into electoral politics through the government crisis of 1922 and the triumphant reception of Benito Mussolini in the Chamber, to the opposition speeches of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924.

Election and Entry into Parliament

The legislature’s beginning is framed by the return of five million soldiers to a country whose political order had been shaken by war. The narrator describes the old political class as losing its hold on public life while a mass of veterans pressed into the postwar landscape. Against that background, the 1921 election carried Fascism from the violence of the streets into the parliamentary arena. The new Fascist Party was small beside the established political forces, but its entry marked a consequential change in where and how it could pursue power.

Benito Mussolini’s election results made that transition personal as well as institutional. He headed the lists in Milan, with 197,000 votes, and in Bologna, with 173,000, and ranked third among the ten leading candidates elected nationally. The campaign had ended amid deadly clashes and fires: on election day, the book records 29 dead and 104 wounded across several cities. It also describes new supporters drawn to Fascism by its violence and by the appeal of small landowners prepared to defend their position. Electoral participation therefore did not displace coercion; the two advanced together.

The alliance with the traditional anti-Bolshevik parties further demonstrated how far Fascism had entered the political system. Luigi Albertini, the liberal publisher who had previously opposed Fascist inclusion in Giovanni Giolitti’s national bloc, eventually urged readers to accept the alliance despite its moral cost. The narrator treats this reversal as a threshold: Fascism had crossed from the bloody ground of the trenches and the streets into the parliamentary chamber. Yet acceptance by liberal allies did not mean that liberal opposition had vanished. La Stampa continued to argue that liberals could not morally join with a movement that exalted violence, though the account presents that objection as politically isolated.

A Legislature under Pressure

The book’s judgment on the legislature is stark: it calls the crisis of democracy acute and parliamentary decline irreversible. The XXVI Legislature is described as the final chamber of that decline, with the next legislature anticipated as the first Fascist one. This is not simply a forecast about which party would hold power. The election had produced a parliament divided among incompatible groups and internally contending factions, while the continuing violence had helped create the conditions in which Fascist influence could grow.

The struggle over armed Fascist organization exposed the gap between parliamentary presence and effective state control. In December, Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi tried to restrict the squads through a prefectural circular that treated truncheons as weapons requiring a licence and included Fascist paramilitary formations among organizations considered illegal. Michele Bianchi, newly elected secretary-general of the National Fascist Party, answered by declaring the party sections and combat squads inseparable. The directive was published in Il Popolo d’Italia. The account emphasizes that this was an open assertion of an armed party structure by a movement with deputies in parliament, while the government’s response remained limited: Bonomi issued another circular complaining that prefects had failed to carry out earlier public-order instructions.

The Chamber’s continued existence thus coexisted with an erosion of the state’s ability to enforce its own rules. The episode does not depict parliamentary procedures as already abolished; rather, it shows their weakness when faced with a political organization able to combine elected representation with paramilitary force. That contrast gives the legislature its central historical tension in the narrative: formal politics continued, but the balance of power was shifting outside the chamber as well as within it.

The 1922 Crisis and Mussolini’s Arrival

During the crisis surrounding the March on Rome, the government prepared extraordinary measures to defend the capital. Luigi Facta transmitted written defense orders to General Emanuele Pugliese, and orders for the arrest of those responsible for sedition were sent to prefects. A state-of-siege telegram was drafted, and a manifesto was posted in the streets of Rome. These details show the administrative and military machinery being put in motion at a moment when the government still sought to meet the Fascist challenge through the state’s formal authority.

By November, the atmosphere in parliament had changed dramatically. When Mussolini entered the Chamber on November 16, 1922, the hall was packed with deputies, senators, diplomats, former deputies, and members of the public. Most deputies rose to applaud him; the representatives of the left did not. The ovation followed the March on Rome by only fifteen days. The book juxtaposes the press’s descriptions of that march as a bloodless or theatrical revolution with its account that 19 people had been killed and 20 seriously injured in Rome during those same fifteen days. The spectacle of parliamentary welcome therefore rested beside a recent record of violence, even as the march itself was already being recast as a triumphant political turning point.

The crowd’s reception of Mussolini, and the ceremony surrounding his entrance, gave the new government an appearance of popular legitimacy. The Chamber was not merely the setting for a change of administration: it became a stage on which the movement’s leader could be presented as the embodiment of national renewal and restored order. The legislature’s procedures survived, but their public meaning was being reshaped by the Fascist leadership and the crowds gathered to acclaim it.

Opposition within the Chamber

The legislature also remained a venue for opposition. On May 30, 1924, Alfredo Rocco, the new president of the Chamber, gave Giacomo Matteotti the floor. The account introduces the speech through the chamber’s reaction: murmuring began before Matteotti had spoken, and the socialist deputy rose amid annoyance and hostility. His isolation was striking against the scale of his parliamentary work. In four years in office, he had delivered 106 long, closely detailed speeches, often on financial and budgetary questions that few colleagues followed closely.

Matteotti’s appearance in the Chamber makes visible both the persistence and the precariousness of parliamentary scrutiny. He could still rise, be recognized by the presiding officer, and address the assembly; the hostile response surrounding him suggests how little procedural access alone guaranteed a hearing. The XXVI Legislature therefore closes its political arc not with a simple disappearance of parliament, but with a chamber in which opposition could still speak while the forces constraining it had grown more powerful.

Historical Significance

The XXVI Legislature is presented as a hinge between electoral inclusion and Fascist domination. The 1921 election gave Fascism a parliamentary foothold, but violence accompanied the campaign and continued to shape the political environment. The government’s circulars and crisis measures revealed attempts to assert authority, while the Fascist party’s integration of its sections and squads showed a rival structure of power operating alongside elected representation. In November 1922, the Chamber’s ovation for Mussolini helped turn that movement’s advance into a public parliamentary spectacle.

The book’s framing of the XXVI Legislature as the last of decline gives its chronology a pointed irony: the institution that admitted Fascist deputies remained in place as the conditions for meaningful competition deteriorated. By the time Matteotti rose in 1924, parliamentary speech persisted, but it did so in a chamber marked by hostility and political isolation. The legislature’s significance lies in that uneven transition: not an immediate replacement of representative forms, but their survival amid the growing force that would transform their purpose and limits.