A Century of Fascism

On 31 October 1922 King Victor Emmanuel III charged Benito Mussolini to head a coalition government in Italy. Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF) had been founded less than a year earlier on 9 November 1921 and his arrival into office had been advanced by violence, through the activities of the armed ‘squads’ of the Fascist movement, the fasci di combattimento, a paramilitary organisation established by its Duce in Milan on 23 March 1919. Mussolini and Fascism were destined to govern for a generation, with the Duce proclaiming himself dictator in a speech on 3 January 1925. When they framed a history for themselves, Fascists maintained that their movement had gained power through a ‘revolution’, which they dated to 28 October 1922. Soon they also boasted that they had invented a ‘totalitarian state’, which in a novel manner would unite and discipline all the Italian people in every aspect of their lives and ready them for global greatness.

From their origins in Italy, the words fascism (most usefully spelled with a small ‘f’, leaving capital ‘F’ Fascism as exclusively Italian) and totalitarianism spread into every language. Wikipedia informs its readers that fascism was (and is) ‘a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and of the economy, which came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe’. Many add  genocidal racism, antisemitism and an obsession with war to this list. Fascists, most agree, perpetrated the horrors of Auschwitz, and so brought the world to the nadir of human civilisation. Naturally, an academic industry exists aiming for a more subtle or compelling definition, one that can cover every form of fascism in every place. Unsurprisingly, given the Second World War and the seemingly permanent triumph of liberal and neo-liberal democracy, most interpretations are sure that fascism was, above all, liberty’s foe.

Yet anachronism stalks the corridors of history. Was the meaning of fascism that emerged from the Second World War and Auschwitz recognisable from the origins of a fascist (or, rather, Fascist) movement in Italy? After all, during his rapid rise to power between 1919 and 1922 Mussolini frequently rejected suggestions that his movement had a set ideology and meaning. Always a capable and inventive journalist, he was given to urging that his movement was practical in its essence and so the reverse of its prime enemies, the Marxists, with their intellectualised delusions (and the splits and divisions between communism, ‘maximalist’ and reformist socialism). As he told his followers in September 1922, in a country where there was too much ideological purism and too many ‘programmes’, the aim of his movement was simpler: ‘We want to govern Italy.’ In an article published in October, revealingly released to the international press, he added that he badly wanted to improve the condition of the working class, but in a nation where citizens acknowledged that they had duties as well as rights. ‘Our policy therefore will basically be liberal’, he stated, but in a disciplined manner: thrifty with government expenditure and firm, but sensible, in foreign affairs. 

Once in office, there were many further, by no means consistent, efforts to typify the regime. One aphorism, repeated more than once in the 1920s, was that Fascism, Italian-style, was ‘not for export’. Perhaps, Mussolini stated in a speech on the third anniversary of the March on Rome, it had created a totalitarian society where ‘all was for the State, nothing was outside the state, nothing and nobody was against the state’. Yet, the clearest and simplest statement of the regime’s nature was made in June 1927 in the key fortnightly magazine Critica fascista: ‘Fascism is Mussolinism … Without Mussolini there would be no Fascism.’ In power, propagandists maintained, it had imposed on Italians – to their approval – authoritarian rule by an exalted person, Europe’s first and principal modern dictator.

The banality of fascism

It was only when Fascism was celebrating ten years in office in October 1932 that Mussolini, his pen guided by philosopher Giovanni Gentile, formally set out a ‘doctrine of Fascism’ in a 35-page article. It authoritatively reversed the insistence on Italy alone, from which Mussolini had started to distance himself in October 1930 with the claim that the ideology was ‘universal’ (like the Catholic Church). From 1932 the regime insisted that, globally, the Duce’s ideology had become ‘the characteristic doctrine of our time’. A few months later, as if proving that fascism was very much for export, Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. Thereafter, given Nazism’s role in causing the Second World War, the Nazi dictatorship took over the definition of ‘fascism’ and skewed attempts to explain the Italian version or to re-assert its primacy.

But what was the situation during Mussolini’s rise to power? Before 1919 the word fascio had surfaced often in Italy, meaning little more than a somehow united group. In a country already obsessed by its Roman past, it sounded good to imply that the association of the members of one body or another evoked a Latin fasces, the bundle of rods tied together and armed with an axe that, in classical times, had symbolised magistrates’ power. The Italians were not original in such historical evocation. Throughout the 19th century new societies had readily added fasces to their shields or other icons. In the US, fasces appear on either side of the flag behind the podium of the House of Representatives and in many other places. Statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are ornamented with them, as are the escutcheons of a number of states and Harvard University. Ecuador, Cameroon and Cuba include them on their national coat of arms. After 1789, revolutionary France was given to affirming an inheritance from the Roman Republic and the fasces reflected in the country’s great seal.

After the Italian Risorgimento, the most evident use of the word had been by a radical group of Sicilian peasants, the fascio italiano dei lavoratori. During the early 1890s they campaigned for social justice against the nationalist and imperialist prime minister Francesco Crispi, destined after 1922 to be painted as a Fascist precursor by the regime’s historians. But the banality of the word is better displayed in the pre-1914 Fascio Medico Parlamentare, which routinely convened doctors who had won parliamentary seats.

Italy’s First World War gave a new thrust to fascism’s meaning. From 1917 pro-war deputies joined together as a Fascio parlamentare di difesa nazionale (parliamentary union for national defence). The liberal journalist Luigi Albertini argued that such fascisti ‘from now on must take over from the old parties’. With rather different hopes, syndicalist and other radical intellectuals – Mussolini among them – had late in 1914 already set up a Fascio d’azione rivoluzionaria (union for revolutionary action), favouring political and social revolution and intervention in the war. They thereby separated themselves from orthodox Italian socialists who were trying to follow a line of ‘neither support nor sabotage’, weakly hostile to the Liberal government’s war of aggression with its huge sacrifice of ordinary Italians’ lives. Nonetheless, in 1919 Mussolini was anything but alone when he adopted the word fascio as the name for his own new movement. Anarchists founded a Fascio socialista comunista and school children a Fascio degli studenti delle scuole medie. No one owned the meaning of fascism.

Fascists of the first hour

Between 1919 and 1922 Mussolini became the pre-eminent Fascist and the PNF its political expression. The movement’s novelty lay in its unapologetic employment of violence against its opponents, with a boasted revival of the wartime slogan of me ne frego (‘I don’t give a damn’) and the wearing of black military shirts. As their anthem, Fascists took up the song Giovinezza (‘Youth’), composed in 1909 and deployed by the crack Alpini regiments during the war. From 1924 they added an obligatory worshipful reference to Mussolini.

These ‘Fascists of the first hour’, as they were to be honoured under the dictatorship, had two special zones of operation. One was in the Po Valley, Umbria and Tuscany, where, in 1921-22, the squads viciously overthrew the power of freshly unionised ‘Marxist’ peasants to the applause, and with the financial and material support, of landowners and, more covertly, the authorities of the state. The second was in the borderlands, territories that Italy annexed as a result of its victory in the First World War. There, its chief enemies were non-Italian speakers. In July 1920 local squads attacked and burned the Hotel Balkan, the key urban redoubt of Triestine Slovenes. By spring 1921 Trieste was the city where membership of the fasci was highest. 

Three qualifications need to be made about ‘squadrism’ as typifying the Fascist movement. The first is that ‘Liberal Italy’ was hardly a state that controlled social violence effectively. Institutions like the Mafia in Sicily, the ’Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Camorra in Naples did not behave with kid gloves. In 1900 Italy had six times the murder rate of France and nine times that of Britain. Detailed study of a desperately poor region like Puglia has demonstrated that, before 1914, landowners were ready to arm and employ local toughs against peasants who endeavoured to associate politically. Through the decades before the war, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso, from a Northern Italian rabbinical family, acquired an international reputation from his argument that criminals exhibited their racial inheritance. Certain that race degenerated the further south you went in Italy, Lombroso highlighted southern crime (though Fascism spread more quickly in the north). 

Another comparison demands attention. During the years of the Fascist rise to power in Italy some 3,000 men and women died as a result of political violence. But Italy was not alone in this. From Ireland in the west and especially through what Timothy Snyder has vividly called the ‘bloodlands’ of Central and Eastern Europe, following the formal end of the First World War, mini-civil wars raged, often fostered by ethnic difference and insecure borders. When, in March 1921, the Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci made one of his various efforts to understand what was going on in Italy, he maintained that the best parallel was postwar Spain, a country which had not fought in the war but where, he stated, ‘the organisation of petty and middle bourgeoisie into armed groups occurred before it did in Italy’. King Alfonso XIII of Spain called the dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera ‘my Mussolini’ when he curbed the powers of parliament in September 1923.

A final point needs to be made. The years between 1919 and 1922 saw Mussolini moderate or fudge the ideological radicalism of the early fasci, while erratically and partially disavowing its violence. From demanding a republic, the PNF became monarchist. From anti-clerical, it began to cosy up to the Church. Soon its framing of Fascist unions or syndicates into a ‘corporate state’ indicated that, in office, Fascist administration was to direct more assistance to big business than to workers, whose socialist, communist (and Catholic) unions were rigorously suppressed. 

Given to superlatives

If the great majority of respectable Italians convinced themselves that nothing untoward had happened when the young Mussolini (he was still only 39, 20 years younger than the average first appointment to his office) became prime minister, liberal and conservative foreigners were also tolerant. Take the United Kingdom, for example. On 11 November 1922, the fourth anniversary of Allied victory, readers of the Spectator could ponder a letter to the editor offering expert evaluation of recent events in Italy. The writer James Rennell Rodd was a commentator of distinction, at Oxford in his youth where he was an associate of Oscar Wilde, later as a young diplomat critical of the stridently Germanophobic elements in the Foreign Office and, from 1908 to 1919, as a long-serving British ambassador in Rome. In regard to the word ‘Fascism’, Rodd explained that he wished to correct a widespread ‘misleading impression’. In its Italian form, ‘Fascismo’ did not mean reaction or violent tyranny but union. In essence, Fascists stood for ‘patriotism, sound and healthy national life, efficiency, economy’ and deflating bureaucracy. The impotence of liberalism and the ‘Red’ threat demanded drastic action. Fascist ideals were no different ‘from ours’, he concluded, although Italians were more given to ‘superlatives’ than were Britons. There was no need to worry about foreign policy issues. Fascism did not mean war, merely national pride. Mussolini had donned a frock coat on assuming office. He must be a gentleman, a reader could conclude.

This eminent commentator, therefore, was certain that ‘Liberal’ Italy had not matched the standards of Liberal Britain where, as W.S. Gilbert had put it, ‘every boy and every gal, who is born into the world alive, is either a little liberal or else a little conservative’. Italy may have been governed by a parliament, but its Chamber of Deputies was not made up of modern mass parties equipped with detailed political programmes. It had been an ally, but not an equal, in the First World War. It needed to repel Bolshevism and to reform the ‘corruption’ of its inferior version of liberalism. Rodd would not have used the word ‘democracy’ as a touchstone of virtue and certainly did not deploy it to describe Italy. Nonetheless, he thought of himself as a liberal who endorsed parliamentarism, legal process, capitalism and ‘freedom’, responsibly defined. In his mind, Mussolinian Fascism offered no threat to these ideals. 

He was not unusual in this judgement. In the conservative and liberal press, there was some wariness about Fascist violence. The Daily Telegraph on 30 October, with first reports of the March on Rome coming in, noted that ‘even a sympathetic critic must censure their [Fascist] methods’. A few days earlier the Observer had worried that Fascism was rousing ‘national feeling to white heat’, some of it anti-British. Yet the Telegraph was soon comforting its readers with the news that the ‘Fascist army, which has occupied Rome’ proved itself ‘most orderly and marvellously disciplined’. It had presided over a ‘revolution with little bloodshed’. The Observer underlined that Mussolini’s movement was ‘essentially a reaction to Bolshevism’ and published an interview with ex-prime minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a Liberal, whom, it was emphasised, was fully confident about ‘the beneficial effects of Fascism’.

The Daily Mail was less cautious in charting Mussolini’s promotion. ‘Fascisti’, as it called the squads, were ‘ardent Nationalists and patriots’. They were ‘young men’ who had ‘out-terrorised the [Bolshevik] terrorists’. Mussolini’s appointment had been greeted in Rome with ‘indescribable enthusiasm’. As a special correspondent put it a few months later, ‘Fascism has fought a holy war. A nation has suddenly risen from its lethargy’. An editorial agreed that the Fascisti had triumphed because ‘they were young and brave and earnest’.

The Times was less convinced. On 30 October it commented that ‘there are very wholesome and very evil elements in Fascismo; it still has to be seen which will triumph’. Yet, it, too, was sure that ‘the “revolution” had been surprisingly rapid and surprisingly bloodless’. There could not be much regret over Italian Liberalism, it added. In the Chamber of Deputies, ‘the old parties are effete, and for years past, they have not had any real grip on the nation’. 

Fellow travellers

In so far as respectable British opinion was concerned, Mussolini might yet behave in an unpredictably foreign manner. But, almost by accident and with little damage, he had revised the meaning of Italian Liberalism and perhaps might give it a chance to equal British virtue. And his real foes, those whom he had worthily defeated, were the Marxists, the Bolsheviks, those who, in imitation of the Russians, wanted to wreck ‘civilisation’. In Britain, sure that its own country was governed by virtuous liberal democracy, Italian Fascism was not yet seen as a foe, nor did it seem equipped with an ideology destined to become a menacing global force. 

When it came to that interpretation, it was Mussolini’s Marxist antagonists and victims who sought to find universal danger and evil in fascism. After all, Marxists were dedicated internationalists, certain that class behaviour ran across national borders. The Soviet Union went on to fight its Great Patriotic War against fascism not, as might seem more logical, against Nazism. From 1922 to 1940 and beyond, the diplomatic relationship between the Fascist and communist dictatorships was usually normal. From time to time Italy helpfully exported technologically advanced arms to Moscow, even if one leading Italian observer was certain that the Soviets were ‘staunchly uninterested in Italian issues’. 

While Fascism was rising and installing itself in power, Italian communists were splitting in January 1921 from the main body of the Socialist party to establish the Partito comunista d’Italia (PDd’I). All socialists, even communists, were given to debate and personal rivalries. But members of the PCd’I necessarily had to report to the Comintern in Moscow and accept guidance from the home of the proletarian revolution. Gramsci, its leader from 1924, died in 1937 following a decade of Fascist imprisonment. He was to be manufactured into a saint and seer after 1945. By then he was especially applauded for his gradual and often hesitant realisation that Mussolini’s regime had succeeded in creating what Marxists called a ‘genuine popular base’, one that could be unpicked in class terms.

Like all his comrades, Gramsci was certain that an Italian Fascist dictatorship worked in the interests of the bourgeoisie, those who owned the means of production, whether in the city or countryside. In September 1924 he was still stressing that Fascism had no proper ‘essence’ and was backed by its sometime liberal bourgeois fellow travellers ‘in the way that the rope supports the hanged man’. For him, ‘democracy’ (he did use the word) and fascism constituted different tactics exploited by the bourgeoisie at different times for the same purpose: the repression of the proletariat. The leading Liberal Democrat anti-Fascist, Giovanni Amendola, was therefore in Gramsci’s understanding a ‘semi-fascist’, almost as much an enemy of workers and peasants as was Mussolini.

For export

Yet Gramsci did maintain that Mussolini had ‘for the first time in history … successfully organised the petit bourgeoisie’ and had won over to his cause quite a few other sectors of Italian society. At the Lyon Congress in 1926 he argued that Mussolini’s Fascism must be viewed as a ‘social movement’. Now he implied that communists should examine its national origins in the Italy forged in the Risorgimento in a fashion that was not the same as other European nations. Such subtlety soon seemed out of place as Stalinism spread and Italian communists, led by the crafty Palmiro Togliatti after Gramsci was jailed, accepted that fascism was for export well before Mussolini got around to expressing that view. Comintern policies against fascism twisted and turned through the next decade. It could even embrace the idea that ordinary Fascists, if not party chiefs, could be ‘brothers in black shirts’ (fratelli in camicie nere) to communists, since each hoped to make genuine revolution. But the assumption that the Italian regime was not unique in its behaviour and ideology remained firm among communists and other leftists, whether in Italy or abroad. Ironically, therefore, more quickly than the Fascists themselves, anti-Fascists led the way to a global definition of fascism. But the Marxists among them scarcely shared the view that Mussolini’s rule aimed first and foremost to destroy liberal democracy. They knew that its prime purpose was to check and divert the working class.

R.J.B. Bosworth is the author of Politics, Murder and Love in an Italian Family: The Amendolas in the Age of Totalitarianisms (Cambridge University Press, 2022).