The world of the twentieth century differed
sharply from that of the nineteenth. The twentieth
century was the age of the masses. Those who
governed had the opportunity for the first time to
communicate directly with those they governed.
The mass-circulation newspapers, the radio, the
cinema and, after the Second World War, television,
created entirely new conditions of government.
Contemporaries were not slow to recognise
this. Those who ruled could create images of
themselves, of their policies and objectives,
of society and the world around them and so seek
to lead and manipulate the masses. Mass persuasion
became an essential ingredient of government;
and the techniques of the art were seriously
studied and consciously applied by elected governments
and totalitarian regimes alike; the British
prime minister Stanley Baldwin used the radio
effectively during the General Strike of 1926 by
broadcasting to the nation; President Roosevelt
started his famous ‘fireside chats’; and the totalitarian
leaders, Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, put on
gigantic displays that could be ‘witnessed’ by millions
through the cinema. Mussolini’s and Hitler’s
raucous speeches became familiar to every Italian
and German; they were amplified by loudspeakers
erected in public places in case anyone turned off
their radio at home. Manipulation, today’s ‘spin’,
became the art of politics.
The privileged felt alarmed and threatened by
this new age that was dawning. In countries with
strong traditions of representative government and
democratically inspired institutions this new force
of the ‘masses’ was successfully integrated. This is
essentially what happened in Britain and the US in
the 1920s and 1930s and, less convincingly, in
France too. In the Soviet Union the mass of people
were brought into harmony with the rulers by propaganda,
appeals to communist idealism and,
where this did not suffice, by force and terror. The
revolution created a new class of privileged and
bound these to the regime. But those who had
possessed social, political and economic privilege in
pre-war Russia lost it. The spectre of revolution
haunted the majority of Western societies where
communist parties only gained the allegiance of a
determined minority. The danger from the
extreme left was generally exaggerated. The weaknesses
of existing representative forms of government
to deal with national problems, became
glaringly clear to everyone. The soldiers returning
from the hardships of a long war to the unsettled
conditions of post-war Europe, with its endemic
under-employment as economies readjusted from
war to peace, were disillusioned.
The victors did not experience the rewards of
victory. Neither territorial increases nor reparations
could compensate for the immense human
loss and material damage of the war. The defeated
in any case lacked the means to compensate the
victors adequately. Among the defeated powers
the sense of loss now suffered made the sacrifices
of war seem all the more unbearable. Unrequited
nationalism was a powerful destabilising force in
post-war Europe. It differed from the pre-1914
variety in that it was not just expansionist; it also
was fed by the fury felt at the injustices real and
imagined.
Among the victorious nations the Italians particularly
suffered from this malaise. They referred
to the ‘mutilated’ peace that had not given them
what they believed they deserved. The Ottoman
Empire had been defeated by the Allies, but the
Greeks, British and French were the intended
principal beneficiaries. The sorest point of all was
that Italy, despite its sacrifices in the war, had not
replaced the Habsburgs as the paramount Balkan
power. At the peace conference the flashpoint of
Italian resentment came when Italian claims to
the Italian-speaking port of Fiume, formerly in
the Habsburg Empire, were rejected by its allies.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, poet and professional
patriot, thereupon took the law into his own
hands and with government connivance and indications
of royal support in 1919 seized Fiume at
the head of an army of volunteers. The outburst
of super-patriotism, bravado and violence, the
dictatorial rabble-rousing techniques of balconyoratory
that D’Annunzio adopted made him the
duce on whom Mussolini modelled his own political
style.
Whenever representative institutions had no
established hold there was a tendency towards
authoritarian forms of government that promised
to meet the multiplicity of problems. The particular
movement which became known to the
world as fascism first reached power in post-war
Italy. It developed in response to problems and
opportunities facing the West in the twentieth
century and arose out of the Great War. But its
success, at the same time, has to be studied in
purely Italian terms. The form that fascism later
took varied so much from one country to another
as the movement spread in the 1930s to Austria,
Hungary, Romania, France, Portugal and Spain
that historians dispute the usefulness of applying
a common label.
What can it be said to have had in common
before the Second World War? Fascism was a
movement designed to secure the support of the
masses for a leader without the intermediary of a
democratically elected parliament. It was a substitute
for democracy, giving the masses the illusion
of power without the reality. Thus, though violently
anti-communist, fascism appeared to support
the existing social and economic hierarchy of
society and so appealed to the right. Fascism made
a virtue of destroying the powers of parties and
divisions in the state. It stood for ‘strength
through unity’ at the expense of civil liberties. The
cult of the leader was fostered, above all, by the
leader and his principal lieutenants. Fascism was a
chauvinist male-oriented movement assigning
women to the role of child-bearing and raising a
family. It was stridently nationalist. The leader,
with virtually unlimited powers, stood at the apex
of a party, a private army and a bureaucracy.
Violence against opponents cowed possible opposition.
The fascist army and bureaucracy, of
course, ensured that tens of thousands would have
a vested interest in preserving the fascist state.
Here loyalty to the movement, not social standing,
provided an avenue of advancement to the
unscrupulous and the ambitious.
In Italy, as elsewhere, fascism derived its
strength as much from what it was against as from
what it was for. In detail this varied according to
the tactical need of the movement to attain and
then retain power. It was a totalitarian response
to new social forces and to change and to discontents
real and imagined, both personal and
national. Parliamentary government had functioned
very imperfectly already before the war.
The conduct of the war did not enhance parliament’s
prestige. The disaster of the battle of
Caporetto was blamed on civilian mismanagement.
The mass of impoverished Italians in the
south, and the agricultural and the urban workers
in the north, half a century after unification still
did not identify themselves with the parliamentary
state set up by Piedmont, depending as it did on
local favours and corruption.
Government was by personalities rather than
by leaders of parties. Manhood suffrage, introduced
in 1912, and proportional representation
in 1919, undermined the way in which parliament
and government had previously been managed.
The two biggest parties, which emerged from the
elections of 1919 with more than half the seats
between them, the Catholic Popular Party (100
seats) and the Socialists (156), were both incapable
of providing the basis of a stable coalition
with the Liberal and Nationalist parties to the left
of centre or the right of centre. The Socialists
were divided between the communists and the
more moderate socialists in 1921. Since 1919
neither wing wished to collaborate with government
and both spoke the language of revolution.
The Catholic Popular Party had been formed with
the tacit support of the Pope to fight socialism.
But it was not a class party. The majority were
genuinely reformist, advocating the distribution
of the landed estates to the peasantry. It was a
mass party relying on the support of the agricultural
labourer in the south, just as the Socialist
strength lay in the industrial towns of the north.
But the Popular Party also included conservative
and extreme-right supporters. Their support of
government policies was accordingly unpredictable.
The five governments between 1918 and
1922 were consequently faced with parliamentary
paralysis and no sound base on which to build a
majority. Giovanni Giolitti dominated the last
years of Italian parliamentary life.
Against the Catholics and Socialists, Giolitti
enlisted the help of Mussolini’s Fascists who, in
the elections of May 1921, with his electoral
support, gained thirty-five deputies out of more
than 500. It was a modest parliamentary beginning
for the Fascists. But, without Giolitti,
Mussolini and his party would have remained a
negligible constitutional force. In the streets,
however, the Fascists had already made their violence
felt. They flourished on the seed-bed of
industrial and agricultural discontent. There was
large-scale post-war unemployment. On the land
the peasantry took possession of uncultivated
parts of the large landed estates. In the towns militant
unionism demanded higher wages and in
some instances in 1920 occupied factories. It was
not the beginning of revolution.
Higher wages were conceded, the standard of
living of the urban worker rose appreciably
despite higher prices. Real wages were between a
quarter and a third higher in 1922 than in 1919,
and by the autumn of 1922 unrest subsided. It
was at this point that Mussolini came to power,
claiming to have saved the country from the
imaginary threat of Bolshevism and offering
fascism as an alternative.
Mussolini succeeded in attracting attention to
himself in his pose as statesman and duce. He
made Italy seem more important in international
affairs than its weak industrial resources and military
strength warranted. It was an image built up
with skill to mislead a gullible world. The success
of fascism lay largely in creating such myths
which, after 1925, became identified with the
public personality Mussolini created of himself.
Benito Mussolini was born to ‘proletarian’
parents on 29 July 1883 in the small town of
Predappio in the poor east-central region of Italy,
the Romagna. His father was a blacksmith and
named his son Benito after the Mexican revolutionary
leader Juarez. From youth onwards,
Mussolini admired rebellious violence against the
‘establishment’ of schoolmasters; and as he
became older he rebelled against the better off
and privileged. He experienced poverty, and his
hatred of privilege turned him into an ardent
socialist. He left Italy and spent some time in
Switzerland under socialist tutelage. He then
accepted both the internationalist and pacifist
outlook of the socialists. Yet in 1904 he returned
to Italy to serve his obligatory time in the army
and clearly enjoyed army life and discipline. It was
the first and not the only inconsistency in his
development. For a time he took a post as a
teacher. But above all Mussolini saw himself as a
socialist political agitator. He rose to prominence
in the pre-war Italian Socialist Party, belonging
to the most extreme revolutionary wing. He
denounced nationalism as a capitalist manifestation
and was briefly imprisoned for his activities
in seeking to hinder the war effort during Italy’s
Libyan war with Turkey, 1911–12. His imprisonment
brought him into favour with the revolutionary
socialists who controlled the Socialist
Party in 1912. They appointed Mussolini to the
editorship of Avanti, the socialist newspaper.
Consistency and loyalty to friends and principles
was not a strong trait in Mussolini. War, that
is international violence, later attracted him.
Mussolini was no pacifist by nature. All went well
with his efforts as a socialist editor until shortly
after the outbreak of the Great War. Then, to the
anger of the Socialists who condemned the
capitalist war and demanded non-intervention,
Mussolini switched and started banging the drum
of nationalism and patriotism in Avanti. The
Socialists thereupon ousted him from the editorship.
Mussolini then founded his own paper in
November 1914, the Popolo d’Italia, and campaigned
for intervention. Without political connections
his influence, however, was negligible.
He served in the army from 1915 to 1917, was
wounded and, on release from the army, returned
to patriotic journalism.
Mussolini observed the impotence and weakness
of parliamentary government after the war
and saw it as an opportunity for him to form and
lead an authoritarian movement; with its help he
might then play an important role in the state,
something he had so far failed to do.
A meeting in Milan, addressed by Mussolini,
of some 200 of his followers in March 1919
marks the formal beginning of the Fascist movement.
The movement in the beginning expressed
its hostility to property and to capitalist industry
and followed the line of French syndicalism in
advocating worker control of industry – ‘economic
democracy’ – and so tried to win the urban
workers’ support. Yet in its early years the money
flowing in to support it, and to fund Mussolini’s
own newspaper, came from Milan industrialists.
The landowners too intended to use his bands of
ruffians – the squadristi – against peasants.
Mussolini’s personal inclinations were probably
socialist still in 1919, but in his bid for power he
was ready to trim his sails and operate in the
interests of property to secure the support of
industrialists and landowners. He had become a
pure opportunist and adventurer.
Fascism was the main beneficiary of the ineffectual
trade union activities, the occupation of
the factories in the summer of 1920 and the
Socialists’ appeals to workers to engage in a
general strike. During the winter of 1920 and the
following spring, bands of Fascists in their black
shirts, both in the towns and in the countryside,
attacked all forms of labour organisations, socialist
councils, socialist newspapers, even cultural
societies. Opponents were beaten and tortured.
The ‘red shirts’ offered resistance and street
battles ensued. Liberal Italy and the Church,
while condemning all violence, connived at the
destruction of socialist organisations by the
Fascists. Since the government appeared powerless
to restore law and order, the Fascists came to
be regarded as the protectors of property by the
middle classes and not as the principal disturbers
of the peace, which they were.
The rapid growth of violent bands of Fascists,
swelled by the followers of D’Annunzio, whose
escapade in Fiume had collapsed, could no longer
be effectively controlled by Mussolini and at this
stage, in 1921, was unwelcome to him. Mussolini
had entered parliament as the leader of a small
party and sought power in alliance with either one
of the two large parties, the Catholic Popular
Party or the Socialists. He chose the Socialists
temporarily to capture the mass votes of the urban
workers. But the leaders of the Fascist bands were
outraged at this ‘betrayal’. Mussolini even lost the
leadership of the party for a short time. The
Fascists continued their violence in the cities and
the countryside. Mussolini also nourished the
belief of the parliamentary Liberals that he would
cooperate with them against the socialist left.
Mussolini played the anti-Bolshevik card for all
he was worth. The call by the Socialists in July
1922 for a general strike in a bid to stop the
increasing lawlessness and drift to the right provided
a semblance of justification for Mussolini’s
claims. The strike call was a failure but increased
the desire for tough measures against the workers.
The support the Fascists were given was particularly
strong from those groups – artisans, whitecollar
workers and shopkeepers, the lower-middle
class – who saw their status threatened and
usurped by the demands of the workers. The
army despised the parliamentary regime, which
was obliged to reduce their swollen wartime
strength. Mussolini’s strident nationalism naturally
appealed to them. Prefects and civil servants
in the provinces, too, connived at Fascist violence
and were hedging their bets in case the Fascists
should one day come to power. Giolitti’s policy
of non-interference in disputes which he believed
would blow themselves out was a clever tactic as
far as weakening the strength of the trade unions
and socialists was concerned. Strikes diminished.
Any danger the left had posed was rapidly vanishing.
But the low government profile also
created a power vacuum which the Fascists filled
until they themselves openly defied law and order
and even threatened the state itself. Without government
weakness, without the parliamentary
paralysis which prevented the liberal centre from
forming a stable coalition, the Fascists could
never have gained power. While the politicians
connived and jockeyed for power, divided
as much by ambition as policy, administration
throughout the country was becoming anarchic.
The Fascists chose the month of October 1922
to seize power from the unstable Liberal administrations.
Their plan was first to stage uprisings
in the provinces which would capture prefectures
and post offices and cut off Rome from the surrounding
countryside thus paralysing government,
and then to march on Rome with armies
of ‘blackshirts’ and throw out the government by
force if intimidation did not suffice. Conveniently
for Mussolini, his one rival duce, D’Annunzio,
who might have claimed the leadership, fell on his
head from a balcony after quarrelling with his
mistress. It was rumoured that the poet’s fall had
been assisted. A touch of opera was never entirely
absent from the dramatic moments of Italian
history.
Yet a Fascist victory was far from certain. It was
a great gamble, as Mussolini knew while he
waited in Milan, a Fascist stronghold not too far
from the Swiss frontier, in case of failure. The
king, Victor Emmanuel III, held the key to the
situation. Loyalty to the dynasty was strong and
it seems most probable that the army, though
infiltrated by Fascists from the highest-ranking
officers to the most junior, would have responded
to his lead and command. But there was nothing
heroic about Victor Emmanuel. He did not put
army loyalty to the test. Although a constitutional
monarch, he must increasingly have lost confidence
in the jockeying politicians and in the
corruption of the electoral system. When his ministers
finally found the courage to resist the
threats of the Fascists, the king refused them
his backing and, in doing so, handed Italy over
to Mussolini.
The government in Rome, after receiving news
of the Fascist uprising, of the seizure of government
buildings in the provinces, was at first undecided
how to act. It had already resigned in the
process of another reshuffle but in the interim
remained in charge. After a night of alarm, Luigi
Facta, the temporary prime minister, having
secured assurances of the loyalty of the army garrison
in Rome, decided with the support of his
ministers on a firm stand. The army was ordered
to stop the Fascist attempt to seize Rome. Early
on the morning of 28 October 1922 an emergency
decree was published that amounted to a
proclamation of martial law. The king refused his
assent to this decree and so it was revoked. The
way was now open to Mussolini to state his terms.
He demanded that he be asked to head the new
government. The king’s action had left the state
without power at this critical moment. The government
was discredited and so was the Crown
when Mussolini, arriving comfortably in Rome in
a railway sleeping-car on the morning of 30
October, accepted from the king the commission
to form a new government. Thus, the march on
Rome occurred after and not before Mussolini’s
assumption of the premiership. There was never,
in fact, a ‘seizure’ of power – though Fascist historiography
embroidered and glorified the event
– only a threat to seize power. The Fascists also
did not march on Rome but were conveyed in
special trains to the capital and there reviewed by
the king and the duce before being quickly
packed off home on 31 October. Yet without the
threat of seizing power Mussolini would not have
achieved his ends. The threat was real, though
whether he would have succeeded if he had
attempted to seize control of Rome is another,
much more debatable, question.
Now that Mussolini was in power he had no programme
to place before parliament. He had concerned
himself solely with the problem of how to
attain power. Should he complete the ‘revolution’
now, as the Fascist militants expected, or should he
manipulate the parliamentary system and seek to
govern at least pseudo-constitutionally? Should the
Fascist Party replace the state or should it be subordinated
to the state? These important questions,
often asked, are in fact somewhat unreal. What
mattered to Mussolini now that he had attained
power was to retain as much of it personally in his
hands for as long as possible. He had no principles
or methods and despite talk of a new corporative
state, all relationships with existing institutions and
organisations possessing some power in the state
were subordinated to his will. His own Fascist
backers in this sense posed as much of an obstacle
to him as political opponents, the monarchy, the
papacy, the army and the bureaucracy. ‘Policy’ was
what Mussolini felt best served his interests in
dealing with every group.
Did Mussolini establish a ‘totalitarian’ regime?
The monarchy was preserved, and the Church and
the armed forces enjoyed some independence,
while the independence of parliament was virtually
destroyed. But Mussolini avoided a sudden revolutionary
break; he allowed some degree of independence,
believing this to serve his interests. He
lacked in any case the iron will, utter ruthlessness
and total inhumanity of Hitler. Rather than make
the Fascist Party supreme, Mussolini preferred to
leave some delegated power in the hands of rival
interest groups so that his task of domination
would be made easier. Mussolini understood in
his early years, before self-delusion blinded him,
that some voluntary limits on his exercise of
power would make him more acceptable and so
strengthen his hold over government. The duce
was a complex character whose undoubted arrogance
and insensitivity was complemented by
intelligence and unusual political skill.
In October 1922 Mussolini made himself the
head of a government which looked not so different
to previous government coalitions based on
personal bargaining. Included were the Catholics
and Conservatives. Mussolini, in addition to
holding the premiership, was also minister of the
interior and his own foreign minister. He won an
overwhelming vote of confidence in parliament
for this government. His objective of breaking the
political power of other parties by inveigling the
majority to cooperate with him in national tasks
was attained slowly but surely. When he felt sufficiently
strong and secure, he backed a Fascist bill
for parliamentary ‘reform’, the Acerbo Bill. In
place of proportional representation this bill
established that the party gaining most votes (as
long as these amounted to at least 25 per cent of
the total) should automatically secure two-thirds
of all the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Since
the Fascists were infiltrating and taking over the
provincial administrations, they would be able to
ensure in any case that more than a quarter of the
votes were cast for the list of government candidates.
The bill passed in November 1923 made
certain that Mussolini would have at his disposal
a permanent majority of deputies ready to do his
will. The morale of any intending opposition
parties was consequently undermined. Intimidation
played its part in persuading the deputies
lamely to consent to Mussolini’s retention of
power by legal and constitutional means. He
always hinted he could act differently, especially
as he now had a private army, the former Fascist
bands, which had been transformed into a voluntary
militia of national security paid for by the
state and swearing allegiance to the duce, not
the king.
The elections of April 1924 were a triumph for
Mussolini. Intimidation and corruption to a
degree not practised before secured for his
candidates two-thirds of all the votes cast. The
year 1924 was the last, nevertheless, in which
Mussolini could have been driven from power.
There was a feeling of revulsion in the country
when a socialist deputy, Giacomo Matteotti, was
murdered by a Fascist gang after he had attacked
the corrupt elections in parliament. Mussolini was
taken aback by the sense of outrage; he was
accused in parliament in June 1924 of being an
accomplice to murder, and a group of opposition
deputies withdrew in protest. But the king did
nothing. Mussolini rode out this, his first and last
serious storm before his fall in 1943. In 1926 his
regime became more openly totalitarian with the
suppression of the free press.
Just as Mussolini did not wish to be dependent
on a genuine representative assembly, so he
did not intend to be at the mercy of Fascist followers
more revolutionary than he. In December
1922 he created a Grand Council of Fascism over
which he presided and which he dominated. In
October 1926 it was the turn of the independence
of the Fascist Party to be undermined; all
elections within the party were henceforth ended;
the party was organised from above with Mussolini
as its supreme head. Within two years the
party was bureaucratised and its violent activities
outside the law curbed.
The Pope and the Catholic Church were
another powerful and independent focus of power
in the state. With remarkable skill, Mussolini, an
avowed atheist, succeeded in reducing the political
influence of the Church. It had not been as
hostile to fascism as might have been expected,
since it saw in fascism a bulwark against atheistic
communism and socialism. The threat of socialism
had already brought the Church back into the
politics of the Italian state before the war.
Mussolini built on this reconciliation of state and
Church. The outcome of long negotiations from
1926 to 1929 was the Lateran Accords; by recognising
papal sovereignty over the Vatican City, the
state returned to the papacy a token temporal
dominion in Italy; furthermore, Catholicism was
recognised as the sole religion of the state, and
much of the anti-clerical legislation was repealed.
The treaty won for the Church a position in Italy
it had not enjoyed since unification. Judged as
Realpolitik, Vatican diplomacy was successful. But
what of the moral standing of the Church? This
was to be compromised even more when the
Vatican attempted to preserve Catholic interests
in Germany by concluding a concordat with
Hitler in 1933. Temporary advantages led to
long-term damage. The Church was inhibited
from taking a clear moral stand and from condemning
outright the crimes against humanity
which the dictators in the end committed. Official
Catholic protest tended to be muted (more so
under Pius XII after 1939 than under Pius XI)
though individual priests, including the Pope,
sought to protect persecuted individuals.
The positive contribution of fascism was supposed
to be the introduction of the ‘corporate
state’. This was based on the idea that, instead of
being fought out, conflicts of interest were to be
negotiated under the guidance of the state in
bodies known as corporations. Thus, in 1925 the
employers’ federation and the fascist trade unions
recognised each other as equal partners, and corporations
to settle differences in many different
branches of industry, agriculture and education
were envisaged. A huge bureaucratic structure
was built up under a Ministry of Corporations.
The industrialists, nevertheless, largely preserved
their autonomy from the state. Not so the representatives
of labour – labour was now represented
in the corporations by fascist bureaucrats. The
workers were exploited and even their basic
right to move from one job to another without
official permission was taken away. Real wages
fell sharply, and fascism, despite some spectacular
schemes such as the expansion of wheat-growing
in the 1930s, and drainage of marsh land, could
not propel the underdeveloped economy forward.
Economically, Italy remained backward
and labour ceased to make social advances. The
increasing fascist bureaucracy, moreover, was
a heavy burden to bear. Massive propaganda
showing happy Italians and the duce stripped to
the waist in the fields might fool foreigners but
could not better the lot of the poor.
The cult of the duce was substituted for
genuine progress. He posed as world leader, as
the greatest military genius and economic sage, as
the man who had transformed the civilised Italian
people into conquering Romans. His conquests
in the 1920s were meagre, however. In Libya and
Somalia his troops fought savagely to reduce
poorly armed tribesmen. After ten years of fighting
they were subjected. In no way was this a glorious
military episode. In the Balkans and the
Middle East there was little he could do without
British and French acquiescence. He tried in
1923, defying the League of Nations by seizing
the island of Corfu from the Greeks, using as a
pretext the murder of an Italian in Greece. But
Britain and France intervened and, after finding a
face-saving formula, Mussolini had to withdraw.
He did, however, secure Fiume for Italy in the
following year. All in all it was not very heroic.
For the rest, Mussolini unsuccessfully tried to
exploit Balkan differences and sought the limelight
by signing many treaties. So, abroad, he
was mistakenly judged as a sensible statesman.
Conservatives even admired the superficial order
he had imposed on Italy’s rich and varied life. The
1930s were to reveal to the world what his opponents
in Italy and the colonies had already learnt
to their cost – the less benevolent aspects of
Mussolini’s rule.
World History
