The Fascist experience: Italian society and culture, 1922-1945 9781597404167

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction: The "Problem" of Fascism (page 1)
1 The Setting (To December, 1920) (page 7)
2 The Fascist Revolution (page 33)
3 The Life of the Party (page 59)
4 Economy and Labor (page 87)
5 Fascist Socialization and Conformity (page 117)
6 Education (page 149)
7 Catholics and Fascism (page 179)
8 Popular Culture and Propaganda (page 211)
9 Literary and Artistic Trends (page 249)
10 Intellectual and Cultural Life (page 277)
11 War and Resistance (page 303)
Conclusion: Legacies of Fascism and Anti-Fascism (page 331)
Appendix: A Note on Sources (page 341)
Index (page 347)

Citation preview

THE

FASCIST Experience

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ae yy a THE

FASGIST Pn

Experience Italian Society and Culture

1922-1945 Edward R. Tannenbaum

(© 1972 by Basic Books, Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-174813 SBN 465—06877-4

Manufactured in the United States of America DESIGNED BY THE INKWELL STUDIO

Preface The purpose of this book is to evoke and describe the Fascist experience,

not to pass moral judgments on the behavior of specific individuals or groups. My own feeling about Fascism is that it was a terrible thing, that just about any other kind of regime would have been preferable to it, and that those Italians who fought it, in exile or at home, were the true heroes

of the Mussolini years. Nevertheless, as an historian rather than a polem- , icist, I must try to put aside my personal bias and to reconstruct the past with as open a mind as possible—to be what the Italians call spregiudicato. Although the wide variety of evidence used in this study is described in the footnotes and in the Appendix, I should like to acknowledge my debts to those individuals and institutions without whose help my research could not have been completed. First, I want to thank Doctor Costanzo Casucci and his colleagues at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome, my most important source for unpublished documents. Also very helpful were the national libraries in Rome and Florence, the library of the Chamber of Deputies, the Gramsci Institute in Rome, and the municipal library of Florence. In addition to state archives and general libraries, I used a number of specialized libraries; in this category I wish to thank Professor Luigi Volpicelli and his staff at the Istituto di Pedagogia in Rome and Professor Giovanni Calo and his staff at the Centro Didattico Nazionale in Florence for much of my material on education. Doctor Nicola Baratucci, Director General of the Gioventu Italiana, gave me a number of insights and leads regarding that institution’s predecessor, the GIL. My chapter on popular culture would not have been possible without the resources made available to me by Doctor Valerio Marino and his staff at the Istituto L.U.C.E., Doctor Leonardo Fioravanti, Director of the Centro Sperimentale

Cinematografico, and the staff of the library of RAI (the Italian broadcasting system). I am also grateful to Padre Angelo Martini, S.J., for letting me see the archives of La Civilta Cattolica on the Azione Cattolica, as well as a large collection of pastoral letters. In the final stages of my writing,

the staff at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York was always ready to supply last-minute information on short notice. The American Philosophical Society and the Research Council of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University awarded me several financial grants. These grants helped to pay not only for travel and supplies but also for a first-rate research assistant, Doctor Paola Corti, in Rome. I chose most of the illustrations in this book from hundreds of others Vv

Preface

collected according to my instructions by the photographer Carmelo Catania and his staff in Rome. Finally, I want to thank all those colleagues and friends who gave me

1972 ,

encouragement and assistance during the six years it has taken me to produce this book. Most helpful of all were Professors Renzo De Felice, Rosario Romeo, and Alberto Aquarone. New York

vi

Contents Introduction: The “Problem” of Fascism T

1 The Setting (To December, 1920) 7

2 The Fascist Revolution 33

3 The Life of the Party 59 4 Economy and Labor 87 5 Fascist Socialization and Conformity 117

6 Education 149 7 Catholics and Fascism 179 8 Popular Culture and Propaganda 211

9 Literary and Artistic Trends 249 10 Intellectual and Cultural Life 277

11. War and Resistance 303 , Conclusion: Legacies of Fascism and

Anti-Fascism 331

Index 347 Appendix: A Note on Sources 341 A portfolio of photographs follows pages 85, 147, 210, 275

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Introduction The “‘Problem™ of

Fascism

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: HE word Fascism, with a capital “F,”

refers specifically to the political system of Italy from the early 1920s through the early 1940s and should not be a problem; the problem concerns the word fascism, with a small “f,’ which has been used by serious scholars to describe such diverse regimes as Hitler's Germany, Franco's Spain, Perén’s Argentina, and even France under Napoleon III, Japan in the 1930s, and the USA in the 1970s. As an epithet of ideological opprobrium, “fascist” has been second only to “communist” in popularity. Indeed, since the mid-196o0s some liberals and leftwing radicals have been calling

each other fascists. (In graffiti and the language of the street, “fascist” is often just another word with which to deprive one’s enemies of their human dignity, like “pig” or sexual deviant.) Leaving the level of epithets and mutual recriminations aside, we are still faced with the bewildering and sometimes contradictory ways in which the word “fascist” has been applied to different regimes and movements throughout the world.!

Part of the problem is the confusion between fascism as a model in the sense of a prototype and in the sense of an ideal-type or structural pattern. During the 1930s, José Antonio Primo de Rivera in Spain, Corneliu Zelia Codreanu in Rumania, and even Antonio de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal, borrowed some of the trappings of Mussolini’s Italy and were generally

labeled fascists. By the early 1940s most of the countries of East Central Europe were either ruled by Nazi sympathizers or had important Nazi movements, while several of the German-occupied countries of Western Europe had Nazi puppet regimes. Yet these imitations of the regimes in Italy and Germany usually lacked the mass base and revolutionary potential

of the two prototypes; in most cases, particularly Portugal and Spain, fascism was merely a fashionable mask for reaction. The situation becomes more confusing when one looks for an allembracing theory using fascism as an ideal-type. Here the most obvious danger is the reductionist fallacy: fascism is nothing but the last gasp of capitalism, a rationale for imperialism, an extreme form of nationalism, a stage in the process of modernization, a kind of “utopian antimodernism,”

a lower-middle-class reaction against the threat of proletarization, or a perverted form of the revolt of the masses. In fact, all of these elements were present in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and in theory they could

3

The FASCIST Experience

be present in any fascist system. But there is a subtler danger in making the ideal-type of fascism so loose that it includes any “directoral system of government, with populistic appeal and sub-structure, which served to establish, strengthen or maintain a substantially capitalist economy against the real or imagined threat of a socialist takeover, invasion or revolution.” This definition disregards the violent, mystical, antiestablishment outlook of most fascist movements and is actually a more complex way of saying that fascism is nothing but counterrevolution. Another part of the problem is the failure of some analyses to distinguish sufficiently between fascism as a movement seeking power under given conditions and fascism as a system of government. A particularly serious aspect of this failure is that, if the aforementioned definition includes the system of government in the USA today, as its proponents would

have it do, then we would be unable to identify as fascist a violent rightwing movement seeking to overthrow it; similar loose talk prevented the Communists from seeing where the real threat lay in Italy in 1922 and in Germany in 1933. On a more basic level, it should be clear that two necessary, though not sufficient, conditions for the success of any revolution are an extreme degree of social disorganization and a loss of faith, by everyone concerned, in the existing political leadership. What makes a revolution specifically fascist is its slogans and its appeal to certain kinds of people who see themselves as losers in modern, technological civilization: “peasants who opposed the urbanizing aspects of industrialism; small businessmen and: those engaged in the traditional crafts and trades that opposed mechanization or concentration; white-collar workers (at least as long as they felt the loss of economic independence); lower levels of the professions, especially the teaching profession, which opposed changing social values.”? Having once mobilized such people, a fascist movement that

gained power had to keep them in tow in nonpolitical organizations and with an overriding stress on nationalism. Thus, whereas fascist movements seeking power were usually contemptuous of the existing authorities and had an anarchic streak, once in power they made every effort to be totalitarian. An important subdivision of the preceding problem is the frequent difference between ideology and practice. When still seeking power, Mussolini and Hitler preached revolution against the existing establishment while making compromises with the army, the bureaucracy, the church, and sections of the wealthy bourgeoisie. Yet once in power their acts clearly

showed that they were more interested in displacing the old political leaders than they were in saving the other ruling circles from worse alternatives. Perhaps the most confusing aspect of fascist ideology, as opposed to fascist practice, was its glorification of rural, populist, antimodern values. Yet aside from those fascists who sincerely believed in this aspect of the ideology, the motive for using it was clearly as opportunistic as making compromises with parts of the establishment: the fascists needed a mass base of support, and independent farmers threatened by modernization or, as in Italy in 1920, by socialism, provided this base along with those sections of the lower middle class already mentioned. (No socioeconomic

4

The “Problem” of Fascism

class, age group, or sex is immune to demagoguery when it feels strongly enough about a specific injustice to itself.) Once in power, however, neither Hitler nor Mussolini did anything to improve the economic lot of these “marginal” people. Another divergence between talk and reality was fascism’s emphasis on youth; while the movement was seeking power, this emphasis certainly reflected the disenchantment of its young “militants” with the established order, but once it had achieved power its continuing talk about dynamism and youth became mere rhetoric. Only in its anticommunism and its ultranationalism was fascist practice fairly consistent with fascist ideology. In many ways Fascist Italy is a more satisfactory starting point for

a general conception of fascism than Nazi Germany. Not only was it chronologically first, but it also lasted longer, thus giving the observer a fuller picture of its possible varieties and tendencies. Also, neither Nazi extremes of racism nor the SS state of the concentration camps was typical of fascist regimes in a number of other countries. If the rise of fascism is related to the dislocations caused by modernization, then Italy was in a more typically transitional stage in this process than Germany. If fascism gains popularity because liberal regimes seem unable to maintain “law and order,” then the situation in Italy in the early 1920s was also more typical than that in Germany ten years later; not only did the threat of “anarchy” seem greater in Italy than in Germany, but liberalism there, though on the defensive, was not as thoroughly discredited as in Germany by 1933, and hence Mussolini had to preserve liberal forms several years longer than Hitler did. Finally, the “repressive tolerance” of the Fascist

regime was actually more insidious and corrupting than the overt inhumanity of the Nazis. The latter is not likely to reappear as a serious danger; the former might. Not only is fascism a problem for people now seeking a general conception of it, but it also raised problems of interpretation among Italians from the early 1920s onward.* Unfortunately, most of these interpretations were too closely associated with particular ideological positions to be of much use today, though Angelo Tasca’s Nascita e avvento del fascismo— first published in French in 1938 and revised in Italian in 1963—stands up rather well. Suffice it to say that Marxists had their interpretation, as did liberals, conservatives, and Catholics, not to mention the Fascists themselves. The main question asked was not, What was Fascism like? but,

power.

How did it happen in Italy? And, given the deterministic bias of the

earlier part of this century, the answer usually emphasized the history of the seven or eight years immediately preceding Mussolini’s seizure of

The purpose of this book is not to solve the “problem” of fascism,

either for Italy or for the rest of the world. Its purpose, rather, is to

describe and explain what life was like in certain respects under Fascist rule. Since the politics of the regime has been amply covered by others® and since it was not strictly speaking experienced by most ordinary Italians,

it will be touched on here only as part of the historical framework within which most Italians did experience Fascism as part of their daily lives. is)

| The FASCIST Experience NOTES 1. Recent comparative studies include Stuart J. Woolf, ed., The Nature of Fascism and European Fascism (both published in New York by the Vintage Press in 1969), A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism (New York: Free Press, 1969), Francis L. Carsten, The Rise of Fascism (London: Batsford, 1967), Ernst Nolte, Die faschistischen Bewegungen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1966) and Eugen Weber, The Varieties of Fascism (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand, 1964). 2. This is Stuart J. Woolf’s paraphrase of Heinz Lubasz’s point in a discussion reprinted in The Nature of Fascism, p. 56. 3. Wolfgang Sauer, “National Socialism: Totalitarianism or Fascism?”, American Historical Review, 73, no. 2 (December 1967): 417.

4. Two useful anthologies of these interpretations are Renzo De Felice, Le

interpretazioni del fascismo (Bari: Laterza, 1969), and Costanzo Casucci, Il fascismo. Antologia di scritti critict (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1961).

5. Works on specific aspects of Fascist politics will be mentioned in the appropriate places; the best analytical work on the political regime itself is Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario (Turin: Einaudi, 1965); the two major narrative political histories are Luigi Salvatorelli and Giovanni Mira, Storia

a@Italia nel periodo fascista, 4th ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), which is anti-Fascist; and Attilo Tamaro, Venti anni di storia 1922-1943, 3 vols. (Rome: Editrice Tiber, 1953),

which is pro-Fascist.

6

I

The Setting (Io December, 1920)

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»

» _—— ETWEEN October 30, 1922, when

Benito Mussolini became prime minister, and January 3, 1925, when he formally announced his dictatorship, the Fascist regime was established without any effective resistance in a country that had been ruled by par-

liamentary liberals since its unification in 1861. Before the March on Rome, which brought Mussolini to power, the various parties and factions were more concerned with fighting among themselves than with putting up any kind of united front against the Fascists. After the March on Rome the most significant protest was a partial boycott of the Chamber of Deputies, a noble but ineffective gesture. The king, the army, the police, the church, the majority of the politicians, indeed the ruling circles in general, were primarily responsible for giving the Fascist seizure of power an aura of legality. But in a real sense the great bulk of politically conscious Italians

—and not merely those who were anti-Communist—had only itself to blame for the Fascist victory. The Communists themselves refused to cooperate with any of the other anti-Fascist forces; the Catholics (Popolari) were split over how much support to give to Mussolini’s coalition government; the Socialists allowed themselves to be caught in the crossfire of the Communists and the Fascists. There are perfectly plausible reasons for the behavior of all the parties and factions concerned, but these do not shift the responsibility elsewhere. The point is that a liberal political system can only work when the majority of people with anything to say agree to make it work. This consensus simply did not exist in Italy. Thus, the first well-organized attack against the liberal regime succeeded in destroying it altogether. Fascism was no mere “parenthesis” in the history of Italian liberalism, as Benedetto Croce main-

tained both during and after his own collaboration with Mussolini. Nor was it the last-ditch stand of capitalism, against the proletariat, as the Marxists used to claim. The argument that Italy was too underdeveloped economically to sustain a liberal regime discounts the fact that the main attacks against this regime came from some of the most advanced areas of the north, not the poverty-ridden south. The most that can be said is that Italy’s liberal leaders did not adequately prepare the people for participation in the nation’s political life. Yet, in 1912 the extension of the suffrage and the improvement of elementary education were clearly supposed

9

The FASCIST Experience

to increase mass participation. And Giovanni Giolitti did at least as much as other prewar liberal leaders elsewhere in trying to integrate the urban workers into the national society. If on the eve of the First World War Italian “democracy” was at least “in the making,” what went wrong? It is easy to argue that the war itself was what went wrong, but this argument is too vague. Was it the military aspects of the war or the war as a divisive moral issue at home, the antiparliamentary way in which Italy entered the war or the allegedly inadequate spoils she gained from her victory? The war and its immediate aftermath aggravated existing tensions and created new ones in other victorious nations without seriously threatening their liberal parliamentary regimes. One must therefore assume that there was something different about the Italian setting, at least since unification. Strictly speaking the geographical setting for the rise of Fascism was

the northern half of the country, the half that most resembled the rest of Western Europe in its degree of modernization. In the southern half of the peninsula, in Sicily, and in Sardinia, some nationalistic veterans’ organizations had formed Fasci di combattimento during the immediate postwar years, but nowhere did these have a significant following or control a local government by the time of the March on Rome. The south was an economic drag on the rest of the country, and its Bourbon heritage of corruption, clientelism, and arbitrariness probably lowered the level of national politics, despite the fact that some of the leading figures in Italian cultural and political life came from there: Antonio Salandra and Francesco Saverio Nitti, Don Luigi Sturzo, Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, Luigi Pirandello, Gaetano Salvemini. Yet, insofar as Fascism was the price the liberal regime had to pay for its inability to solve the “social question,” the south was a major factor in its rise, for it was there that the poor, downtrodden masses were most resentful toward this regime, and it was southern leaders, particularly in Parliament, who were most eager for reactionary solutions to the problem of “law and order.”! The economy of the north had made notable progress during the two prewar decades without overcoming its basic weaknesses. Compared to what it had been previously, the standard of living of all classes had improved considerably, but compared to that of other Western European countries it remained modest. Agriculture, which still occupied the majority

of the working population, was not productive enough to give northern Italians as varied and nutritious a diet as the French or the Germans or, with certain specialized exceptions (silk, wines, cheeses), to bring in revenue from the international market. Though growing, industry was still underdeveloped, partly because of Italy’s lack of coal, iron, and other raw materials, and partly because of the limited market for its products. Commerce, banking, transportation, and the professions were certainly expanding, but the demand for their services was limited by the country’s

basic poverty. |

Along with Italy’s backward economy went a fairly rigid social structure. In the north, even more than in the south (whence many rural people

10

The Setting (To December, 1920)

emigrated in the prewar decades), peasants had virtually no way of improving their low status. The percentage of underemployed agricultural day-laborers was far higher than in France, where population growth had almost ceased, or in Germany, where jobs in the booming cities were plentiful. Italian urban workers also had little chance of bettering their social position, either as individuals or as a class, although the war was to improve their relative economic condition, as we shall see. In the early 1900s some lower-middle-class people tried to help their children move upward by giving them a secondary education, but the majority led a modest, fixed existence. Even the middle ranks of the bourgeoisie—mainly professional people and all but the biggest businessmen—lived more mod-

estly than their northern European counterparts and valued their stable status above all else. The upper ranks of the bourgeoisie, both urban and rural, mingled relatively freely with the nobility, especially in Piedmont, Lombardy, and Tuscany. Because of Italy’s disjointed history these two classes were not a truly national aristocracy, although the power of the nobility remained strong in the south. Italy’s “ruling class”—a term still dear to most Italian historians— was not coterminous with the nobility and upper bourgeoisie for several reasons. First of all, as in every society, only those people who control the levers of power are properly called the “ruling class”; by this criterion, a

bank president or a general is certainly part of the ruling class, but his wife and children are not, nor is his brother or son who becomes a priest or a playboy. Second, as in other western parliamentary regimes by the turn of the century, many of Italy’s political rulers came from the middle and occasionally the lower ranks of the bourgeoisie; this was true for both the men in the Chamber of Deputies and the cabinet ministers themselves. Third, the abstention of upper-class Catholics from public life after the pope’s non expedit in 1874 deprived the Italian state of their services in such traditional parts of the ruling establishment as the diplomatic corps, the army and navy, the upper bureaucracy, and the magistrature. Thus, despite its relatively inflexible social structure, united Italy had failed to produce a ruling class that drew upon all the top talent in the nation, that

had the respect of the masses either from tradition or for services rendered, and that was capable of guiding the country through the accelerated

social changes brought about by the First World War and its immediate aftermath.

Because of its relative backwardness, the economy of Italy had to make a proportionately greater effort than that of the other major powers in order to meet the demands of the war effort. The steel and machine industries expanded enormously, owing to heavy investments and wartime needs, but when the war was over these industries had to cut back production and lay off tens of thousands of workers; the peacetime economy simply could not provide enough orders. Furthermore, these industries, because they had been protected from competition and paid exorbitant prices by the state, had attracted speculators. who, in the immediate postwar years, were to be the objects of social hatred because, as war profiteers (pescicani), they had grown wealthy and ostentatious, while others had 11

: The FASCIST Experience sacrificed their lives. The second feature of the wartime economy which had explosive social effects was the government's policy of forced inflation as a means of paying for the war, a policy made necessary by the nation’s low national income and inadequate system of taxation. The middle classes suffered the most from this forced inflation, not only because it reduced

their savings and fixed incomes, but especially because the salaries of white-collar employees and professional people did not keep up with the rising cost of living. On the other hand, the income of the working class did keep up with inflation—the income of the agricultural workers because they were paid mainly in kind, and the income of the industrial workers because their wage increases were easily passed on by their employers in the form of higher prices to the state. Working-class family income was also augmented by an increase in working wives and children and by the spread of piece work and overtime. The resultant resentment by the middle classes was to be crucial to the rise of Fascism. Class antagonisms were compounded by regional and linguistic differences. In the 1840s and 1850s Giuseppe Mazzini and other intellectuals had postulated the resurgence—Risorgimento—of Italy as a cultural ideal, and in 1859-1860 the diplomatic skill of Count Camillo Benso di Cavour

and the military exploits of Giuseppe Garibaldi had created Italy as a political reality. But neither the ideal nor the reality meant much to the masses of people who were nominally Italians. On the morrow of political unification not more than 2 percent of the total population spoke official

Italian (the language of educated Tuscans) in preference to their native dialect. This percentage increased by the time of the First World War as compulsory elementary education and universal military training eventually exposed millions of youngsters to the national language, but the majority still considered it their second rather than their first language. Furthermore, each local dialect was more closely tied to local loyalties than in Germany, where, despite the nominally loose federal political structure,

the Protestant-Catholic division, and strong anti-Prussian feeling in the south, even people who habitually spoke dialect considered themselves Germans first and Landsmdnner second.

In Italy, regionalism hindered the growth of a national culture and a national civic spirit in several ways. The economic cleavage between the north and the south actually grew after unification, with the latter increasingly assuming the character of a semicolonial dependency. There were also customs duties on goods shipped from one region to another and even between neighboring towns. Unlike Germany, the formerly independent states had lost every vestige of political power; united Italy was as highly centralized as France. Yet pride in one’s city or village remained strong, particularly in the north, where such attachments dated back to the Middle Ages. The Florentines looked down on everybody else, but the citizens of other Tuscan cities—Siena, Pisa, Livorno—preferred not to be confused

with those from Florence. Many Venetians still lamented the vanished glories of their Most Serene Republic but felt no kinship with the neighboring cities it had once included. The Milanese (like the people of Barcelona) assumed that they kept the rest of the country going through their

12

The Setting (To December, 1920)

hard work and commercial skills, and they looked down on all Italians south of the Po as incorrigibly inefficient and lazy. By the outbreak of the First World War, Rome still could not compete with Florence and Naples as the national center of humanistic culture, and its local popular culture had little chance of imposing itself on the rest of the nation as that of Paris or Berlin was doing by then. At the time of the First World War, Italy’s national culture consisted of the values and expressive forms of the educated middle classes. By and large this culture reflected the humanistic secondary education that most

of these people had received, and this culture was therefore alien to the urban and rural masses, most of whom had not got beyond the third grade in elementary school. This lack of cultural integration was not unique to

Italy, but because of that country’s economic and social backwardness the | middle classes were neither large enough nor strong enough to make their way of life prevail over the rest of the population, as was usually the case in the more modern nations. In Italy the social cleavages reinforced the cultural cleavages, a phenomenon that the Fascists were to do their utmost to overcome.

Bourgeois culture—which to any self-respecting intellectual is bad by definition—had received its full share of criticism in Italy before the First World War, particularly in certain Florentine literary reviews. But it would be difficult to demonstrate any direct connection between La Voce, Leonardo, It Regno, or Lacerba, and the rise of Fascism. No leading Fascist had ever had anything to do with these reviews (converted nationalists like

Enrico Corradini, who had, were to have no real influence on Fascist

policy), and of their major editors, Giuseppe Prezzolini was to spend most of the Fascist period on the campus of Columbia University, while Giovanni Papini was to continue his purely aesthetic and “philosophical” pursuits

in Florence. The only indirect connection between these reviews and Fascism was that they intellectualized certain feelings that were rife in the early 1900s and that the Fascists were later to exploit. Italian Fascism was the postwar political expression of anti-intellectual

mass movements that began to appear at the end of the nineteenth century. These movements rejected both rationalistic liberalism and scientific Marxism, putting their faith in action—or at least an activistic rhetoric— rather than thought. They appeared in many parts of Europe and included anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists as well as extreme nationalists. Each of them had its intellectual spokesmen—Kropotkin and Sorel, Barrés and Corradini—but their significance lay more in their style, which would

be called “militant” today, than in their ideology. This is not to say that anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists wanted the same things as nationalists: certainly the former were revolutionaries whereas the latter were counterrevolutionaries. The point here is that both sides found the existing reality intolerable, and since the sponsors of that reality claimed that it was based on rational and scientific principles, its “militant” opponents (always excepting the Marxists) tended to attack it in the name of other values: feeling, “life,” the “liberating” quality of violence.

By the time the Fascists controlled the government, their counter13

The FASCIST Experience

revolutionary side had won out over their revolutionary side, but they were

to continue to stress both sides, which were part of their heritage from prewar radical movements. The argument over whether Mussolini himself was a revolutionary who turned to the right in 1920 still rages,? but even those who say “No,” allow that he was at least a “subversive.” And two of his closest associates at the time of the March on Rome—Edmondo Rossoni and Michele Bianchi—had organized revolutionary syndicalist strikes in the Po Valley in 1907-1913 and in the fall of 1914 had broken away from the anarchist-oriented Unione Sindacale Italiana, which remained pacifist, to form the Unione Italiana di Lavoro and to work for the interventionist cause. Mussolini’s anticapitalist populism, militarism, and imperialism can be traced to the prewar views of Alfredo Oriani, Giovanni Pascoli, and Enrico Corradini. The poet Pascoli, for example, in a famous speech in 1911 honoring the dead and wounded of the Libyan War, justified imperialistic conquests as a means of alleviating the misery of the masses. As early as 1905 the nationalist publicist Corradini had called war “the greatest instinctive act of the nation.” Like Corradini, Mussolini developed

a rhetorical and irrational view of war, in which concrete problems of preparation took second place to an indiscriminate will to expand. In addition to being a challenge to bourgeois smugness the glorification of war and imperialism was a form of overcompensation for an uncomfortable feeling of national inferiority, which the Fascists were also to exploit to the fullest. This feeling was based partly on centuries of foreign domination, partly on Italy’s dependence on foreign help in gaining independence and unity, and partly on continuing slights from foreigners thereafter. Despite the glaring regional and class differences among Italians, outsiders tended to see only the uncomplimentary national stereotype: emotional, untrustworthy, fickle, noisy, given to bragging, preoccupied with sex, and likely to burst into song without warning. This stereotype was almost all wrong for millions of ordinary Italians, let alone a Giolitti, a Croce, or any pope. Yet for the French all Italians were “macaronis,” while the Anglo-Saxons gave them far crueler nicknames. Millions of Italians experienced the contempt of foreigners firsthand, either from tourists in

Italy or in their own travels abroad (not as tourists but as immigrants). Mussolini himself had felt it as a drifter in Switzerland during the early 1900s, and Edmondo Rossoni, later the head of the Fascist unions, had become acutely conscious of it as a labor agitator in France and in North and South America. But even Milanese tycoons and Florentine literati séemed to believe that Italy was destined to lag behind the more advanced countries of Europe with little hope of catching up.

The most serious weakness of Italians as a people was not any inherent inferiority but rather a conditioned inability to work together in a spirit of trust and cooperation. They lacked what is called a civic culture. Unlike the French and the Americans, they had not acquired one by fighting together in a revolution; unlike the Germans, they had not acquired

one by having habits of discipline and obedience forced on them from above. From the time they were children they were taught to be suspicious

14

The Setting (To December, 1920)

of strangers and cynical about other people’s motives. The “amoral familism” of poor, helpless southerners was no more typical of Italy than that of the hillbillies of eastern Kentucky was in the United States. Nevertheless, on the eve of the First World War only the middle classes were beginning to acquire a civic culture within a truly national framework. Urban workers and northern peasants were beginning to develop a limited class-conscious-

ness, but even on this level they seemed to prefer spontaneous acts of protest to sustained efforts through disciplined organization.

It has already been suggested that the liberal regime died in the early

1920s because not enough people were committed to keeping it alive. Surely its apparent inability to cope with the postwar crises made even some of its friends turn against it, at least temporarily, but its basic weaknesses antedated the war. Some observers blame these weaknesses on the

constitution for allowing the executive to maneuver Italy into wars for which neither the public nor the economy was prepared; others blame the men who ruled Italy for not providing more effective leadership; still others

argue that the liberal regime never had a large enough popular base of support because of its authoritarian treatment of the masses. But another factor, Italy’s political culture—the standards and practices of its politicians—must also bear some of the blame, though it is not easy to separate it from the system and the men involved. One of the main standards of Italy’s political culture was that only those politicians who accepted the regime in its nineteenth-century form— monarchical, anticlerical, bourgeois-capitalist—should be allowed in the government, and the main practice used to meet this standard was called

trasformismo (“transformism”). The practice of trasformismo entailed what in today’s jargon would be called co-opting one’s nearest rivals in order to form a coalition against common enemies who refused to be co-opted. In the process, ideological and policy differences were “transformed”—a euphemism for sacrificed—in the interest of preserving the coalition and staying in power. By the 18gos the old distinction between the Destra (conservative liberals) and the Sinistra (progressive liberals ) had already become meaningless, and between 1901 and 1914 trasformismo reached its apex under the leadership of Giovanni Giolitti. _ Although some of the reforms of the Giolittian era resembled those of the “new liberalism” in other western countries, Italy’s political culture precluded any alternative to the ruling coalition. The reforms it passed— labor benefits, universal manhood suffrage, improvements in elementary education—were based not on a sincere desire to democratize Italian public life, but on the hope of pacifying the masses so that they would not turn against the regime in its present form. Within the ruling coalition there was no real division between conservatives and progressives along party lines; there were only individuals and cliques without a following. Thus the public never had the feeling that, at election time, it was taking power

away from one party and giving it to another—the feeling that made liberal democracy more acceptable, and even interesting, in other coun15

The FASCIST Experience

tries. Even in France, the ruling coalitions gave the appearance at least of being either right or left of center; in Italy they seemed to remain at

dead center. As in France, the majority of Italy’s politicians represented themselves

more than any party, class, region, or other real interest in the larger society. And, as in France, Italy had no strong conservative party to provide an alternative group of leaders. But in France, for better or for worse, the legislature was supreme, whereas in Italy it was virtually ignored on certain key issues, particularly in foreign policy. In the summer of IgI1 Giolitti maneuvered Italy into a war with Turkey over Libya while Parliament was in recess, not because he represented the “forces of imperialism” (indeed, he had opposed earlier efforts at colonization), but merely as a

political maneuver to steal the thunder of the nationalists at home and enhance his country’s prestige abroad while the rest of Europe was preoccupied with the Second Moroccan Crisis. In this respect Giolitti was being a good Cavourian. But that was the trouble; the constitution, the men, and the political culture of the liberal regime had not basically changed since Cavour’s time, whereas new political forces that did represent larger interests were clamoring to be heard. Although many “Cavourian”—that is, mid-nineteenth-century—liberals were to survive the First World War, in Italy and elsewhere (one has only to remember Paul Miliu-

kov, Miguel Azaha, Thomas Masaryk), the “revolt of the masses” was already impinging on their prerogatives in the early 1900s. In retrospect, the Giolittian system has seemed so much more palatable

than Fascism that it has perhaps been praised for having been more than it actually was; as part of the setting for the rise of Fascism, what is important is what people thought of it at the time. Aside from its opportunism, it was bitterly criticized for its nefarious electoral practices. Gaetano Sal-

vemini, an academic historian and parttime Radical politician, called Giolitti il ministro della mala vita (the minister of the underworld) for the way in which he used his control over the state administration—particularly the prefects—to “manage” elections in a way that insured the victory of government (liberal) candidates: The police enrolled the scum of the constituencies and the underworld of the neighboring districts. In the last weeks before the polls, the opponents were threatened, bludgeoned, besieged in their homes. Their leaders were debarred from addressing meetings, or even thrown into prison until election day was over.

Voters . . . favoring governmental candidates were given not only their own polling cards, but also those of opponents, emigrants, and deceased voters, and

were allowed to vote three, five, ten, twenty times. :

Although this description was accurate for certain extreme cases, it was exaggerated for the country as a whole. Still, it was the withdrawal of Radical support in February, 1914, that prompted Giolitti to resign as prime minister, even though he had a majority without the Radical votes. Meanwhile, in the 1913 elections—the first under universal manhood suffrage—the various socialist groups together got one fourth of the votes

16 ,

The Setting (To December, 1920)

(though less than one sixth of the seats in the Chamber because there was no proportional representation), and Catholic and nationalist candidates gained notable successes. Barred from participating in the government and critical of the regime in principle, these opposition groups became increasingly impatient for the downfall of both.

The “isolative character” of Italian politics? was reinforced by the Catholic challenge to the very legitimacy of the Italian state. This challenge was not exclusively reactionary. The reactionary view—called intransigent

then—had been initiated by Pope Pius IX at the time of unification and would settle for nothing less than a complete return to the situation before 1870, or even 1848, when clerical control of the Papal States had been complete. As long as the pope was a “prisoner in the Vatican,” Italy’s Catholic aristocracy refused to serve the Italian state in any way, thus depriving it

of their talents as well as their support. But by the end of the nineteenth century a leftwing intransigent group appeared, the Christian Democrats, headed at first by a young priest from the Marches, Don Romolo Murri. Their antagonism toward the liberal regime was inspired less by the Roman Question than by their desire to democratize the nation’s political, social, and economic life.* Still, the Christian Democrats as well as the reactionary Catholics obeyed the papal non expedit forbidding all Catholics to vote or hold office in the national government. Although the non expedit was not rescinded until after the First World

War, it was relaxed somewhat during the prewar years. In 1904 Pope Pius X suspended it in those electoral districts in which anticlerical candidates might have won if the Catholics had abstained from voting. Meanwhile, another new group, the Clerico-Moderates, sought a rapprochement with laic conservatives and even liberals against the laic (Socialist) and

clerical (Christian Democratic) left. This rapprochement became fullfledged cooperation in the 1913 general election, when Count Ottorino Gentiloni, president of the Catholic Unione Elettorale, made a pact with Giolitti,

whereby Catholics were permitted to vote for Giolittian candidates who agreed to safeguard the rights of the church. Although this so-called Gentiloni Pact did attract some reactionary intransigents, it failed to produce a strong conservative alliance; instead, it alienated the leftwing Christian Democrats, such as Giuseppe Donati, Guido Miglioi, and Giovanni Gronchi, who led the Catholic labor and peasant unions. The “separatism” of Italy’s public-spirited Catholics was greater in the field of social action than in political action. The Opera dei Congressi, one

of the most active and extensive organizations of Catholic laymen in the world, had been founded in 1874; it had 700 parish committees in 1879, 1,300 by 1884, and nearly 4,000 in 1897, mainly in the north. Inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891), the congress movement

sponsored hundreds of associations of Catholic workers, mutual-aid societies, youth groups, newspapers, and even banks in rural areas. These organizations and activities tried to be “separate” in two senses: from their secular counterparts and from the modern sector of the economy. Shunning the socialist emphasis on class conflict, they tried to revive the corporatist and cooperative habits of craftsmen and small farmers, people resentful of

17

The FASCIST Experience

modernization and with no political influence. (The lot of such people was

far different in France, where they had helped make the Revolution of 1789 and where they continued to have considerable political influence in the early twentieth century through the Radical Socialist party. ) At the turn of the century, Italian Social Catholicism, like its counterparts in other continental countries, found its aristocratic and paternalistic outlook challenged by Christian Democrats. It was this challenge within the Opera dei Congressi, plus the division over the issue of founding a mass party, that prompted Pope Pius X to dissolve that organization in 1904. The most influential Christian Democrat of the day, Romolo Murri, got himself defrocked and excommunicated for his (then) daring view that concerned Catholics, including priests, should help workers and peasants organize to defend their class interests against capitalist exploiters rather than merely

set them a good example. As in its war on theological modernism, so in social action, the Vatican was determined to control the ways in which Catholics accommodated themselves to the emerging industrial society. It replaced the Opera with a series of Unioni Cattoliche, which were more directly controlled by the bishops. One of the leaders of the Unioni movement—Giuseppe Toniolo, a Venetian-born economic historian at the University of Pisa—called for professional associations (whenever possible, the phrase “Catholic trade-unions” was avoided) for workers without abandoning the antimodern, corporatist outlook of his Social Catholic predecessors.

Ultimately the most important Catholic leader to emerge out of ferment of the early 1900s was Don Luigi Sturzo, the Sicilian priest who was to head the Partito Popolare in the years immediately after the First World War and to found a school of Catholic sociology upon his return from exile after the Second World War. Like Toniolo, Sturzo condemned the liberal order wholeheartedly, but he went further in viewing the workers’ professional associations as the agencies through which the working class partici-

pates in civil life and heightens its own collective moral and religious consciousness.® Like Murri, Sturzo wanted to form a mass party of Catholics, but unlike him, Sturzo did not want this party to have a formal alliance with the church. On this issue Sturzo was the more realistic politician, for neither the Roman Catholic Church nor any other part of the traditional establishment can permit itself to be identified with a particular “sect,” no matter how well-meaning that sect may seem at the time. Although clerico-moderates could sometimes ally themselves with laic conservatives against the extreme left, especially in the provinces, away from the parliamentary games in Rome, the basic hostility of most Catholics toward the liberal regime remained unchanged up to the First World

War. The unsolved Roman Question and the non expedit were the main stumbling blocks for the more politically conscious Catholics, whereas “atheistic capitalism” alienated the more socially conscious ones. The great mass of less-educated Catholics was not so much hostile as indifferent to the liberal regime and to “Italy” in general. This was particularly true in the south, where the clergy extended old patterns of clientelism and local influence in order to make cooperation with the state innocuous. Even in

18

The Setting (To December, 1920)

the north, where social activism led the younger generation of Catholics to

seek further involvement in public affairs, there were areas and whole provinces—as in Venetia—in which traditional clerical influences predominated over those of the laic state.

Whereas the extreme “separatism” of the Catholics was peculiar to _ Italy, the political isolation of much of the working class was typical of most continental countries in the early twentieth century, but the frictions within and between the Italian Socialist party and labor movement made both less effective than their counterparts elsewhere. At the 1900 Socialist party congress the division between reformists and revolutionaries was expressed in the minimum and maximum programs that were presented to it: the “minimum” program, while retaining longterm ideas of social rev-

olution, advocated tactical collaboration with other leftwing parties in parliament as well as a program of political and economic reforms most of which Giolitti himself was soon to accept; the “maximum” program of thoroughgoing revolution was based on the belief that the historical dialectic would bring success to the Socialists and that they should therefore shun ordinary social reforms and cooperation with liberals as hindrances

to their ultimate victory. In order not to split the party, its founder and titular head, Filippo Turati, persuaded the congress to approve both pro-

grams, the minimum one being a means to the maximum one. This rhetorical compromise failed to prevent future schisms and an increasing gap between doctrine and tactics. As in other European countries, the extreme wings of the Socialist party disagreed over ends as well as means, yet even the right wing hesitated to split the party by openly collaborating with the bourgeois government. The party was typically Italian in having too many theorists and tacticians and not enough organizers. In fact, its best organizers tended to be revolutionary syndicalists until 1908, when the failure of the agricultural strikes they led brought their expulsion from the official Socialist party. Between 1908 and 1912 the revolutionary remnant of the party came under the leadership of Costantino Lazzari and the young Benito Mussolini, while the leaders of the reformist majority tried to use the pages of the party newspaper Avanti!—first under Leonida Bissolati, then under Claudio Treves—to educate the workers to accept their gradual approach. But most party leaders were too much attached to dogmas of class war and revolution to accept this approach, and in the party congress of 1912 the “Maximalists” expelled Bissolati and his followers from the party and seized control of the party organization and funds. While the “Maximalists” dominated the Socialist party after 1912 the reformists retained control of the CGL (General Confederation of Labor), which had been formed in 1908. Rinaldo Rigola, its secretary-general, argued that the workers no longer had nothing to lose but their chains and that they were not anxious to risk their recent gains in revolutionary action. Most skilled industrial workers and state employees did indeed adopt this view, and it might have spread as economic growth reduced the number of unskilled workers, both urban and rural, who still had nothing to lose through revolutionary violence. But this growth did not come fast

19

The FASCIST Experience

enough before the First World War, and the anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists were able to retain much of their influence among the poorer workers. All the major strikes of the prewar years were their doing, culminating in the “red week” of June, 1914, in the Romagna. This insurrection showed how deep was the split between the reformist-controlled CGL and the Maximalist-controlled Socialist party as well as within the party

itself. “Red week” began on June 7, 1914, in Ancona as an antimilitarist demonstration during which the police were provoked into firing on the crowd.

Spurred on by the veteran anarchist Errico Malatesta, the workers of that city declared a general strike, which soon spread to other towns in the Romagna. On June 8 the leaders of the Socialist party proclaimed a general strike of protest for the rest of the country for the next day in accord with the executive committee of the CGL, calling the deaths at Ancona “premeditated assassination, assassination without attenuating circumstances.” But as the strike spread and took on the character of a revolt, the leadership of both the Socialist party and the CGL wavered. The CGL had never wanted the general strike to be anything more than a protest and, on June 10, it announced through the press the end of the strike for the following day. Without its support the strike movement faltered,’ and the incipient revolution ended even in the Romagna by June 14. Among the Socialists, Mussolini, the editor of Avanti! since November, 1912, won support for his “revolutionary” position, but many of the Socialist deputies and rank-and-file members opposed this position and the events of “red week” as irresponsible and self-defeating. Despite its failure and the divisions it exposed, “red week” demonstrated the degree to which the mass of Italian workers was hostile to the

liberal regime. The insurrectionists in the Romagna expressed this hostility by committing acts of sabotage against government buildings and installations and by declaring the towns they captured independent communes. This kind of radicalism, plus the fear it evoked in the partisans of law and order, was a preview of similar events in 1919-1920. But it really was foolhardy in 1914 to launch the revolutionary syndicalist version of the general strike, which was supposed to topple the regime, without preparation and without the support of the nation’s largest labor confederation.

Italy’s entry into the First World War in May, 1915, was to be the crowning blow to the liberal regime, for, in the face of the “separatism” of the Catholics and Socialists, the decision to intervene divided the ruling elite itself. It was already clear that this elite could survive only by expanding trasformismo to include one or more of the budding mass parties in a united front against the remaining antiparliamentary forces. Instead, the interventionist liberals, led by the prime minister, Antonio Salandra, and the foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, accepted the support of noisy interventionist minorities, while the neutralist liberals, led by Giolitti himself, abandoned their responsibilities for the duration of the war.

The peculiar diplomatic position of Italy in August, 1914, made it

20

The Setting (To December, 1920)

practically impossible for her to enter the war at that time, nor did the overwhelming majority of her citizens want her to do so. Her membership in the Triple Alliance did not oblige her to support Austria-Hungary in an aggressive war against Serbia, and she could hardly switch sides overnight. (In fact, a year later, after Italy had switched sides and declared war on

Austria-Hungary, her military leaders had still not devised a workable strategy for defending her northeastern frontier.) The Vatican was proAustrian, and the Nationalists were pro-German, but the pope refused to support the Italian government whatever it did, while the Nationalists began advocating a declaration of war against Italy’s recent allies as early as August 6. Although they differed on other issues, Gabriele D’Annunzio and the futurists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Umberto Boccioni shared the Nationalists’ belief that Italy had to enter the war in order to “revivify” and “purify” her national existence. The other partisans of intervention on the side of the Entente developed their positions more slowly. Mussolini’s volte face in November, 1914, put him on the side of a handful of revolutionary syndicalist interventionists® but got him expelled from the Socialist party, which alone among those

in Europe, was united in its opposition to the war. It is true that, like the Nationalists’ L’Idea Nazionale, Mussolini’s new daily, Il Popolo d'Italia, got financial support from certain interventionist industrial corporations, particularly Ansaldo, but most authorities now agree that the future Duce be-

came an interventionist not because he was “bought” by anyone but because he thought that the war could further his subversive goals at home. (Significantly, by late 1914, both the revolutionary syndicalists and

the rightwing nationalists believed that Italy’s participation in the war could be turned to their respective ends: revolution for the former, counterrevolution for the latter. Caught up in their own rhetoric of violence, both groups wanted the existing regime to be overthrown or at least profoundly transformed, and the disruptive effects of wartime seemed to be the only means of “softening it up” for this purpose.) On the other hand, the socalled democratic interventionists, led by Bissolati and Salvemini, far from being subversive, wanted to make certain that Italy's “democracy on the move” survived by preventing the reactionary, imperialistic Central Powers from imposing their rule on all of Europe. Finally, by early 1915, a more conservative kind of interventionism was nurtured by the respected and widely read Milanese daily, Corriere della Sera, whose position was closest to that of the government itself. Salandra and Sonnino brought Italy into the war on the Allied side because they saw themselves as the heirs of Cavour and the Risorgimento. By 1915 the myth of the Risorgimento combined the pre-Cavourian idea of Italy’s cultural preeminence (primato) with Cavour’s emphasis on power politics in the national interest. This myth made Italy’s rightwing liberals think that they had to establish their country’s cultural preeminence by making Italy a great power. It was difficult for these men to renounce this desire and to be “realistic” about their country’s industrial and military capabilities. Like Cavour in 1859, Salandra and Sonnino in 1915 got their

21

The FASCIST Experience

country into what they hoped would be a short, victorious war against Austria after having obtained from their western allies (France in 1859, France and Great Britain in 1915) secret promises of new Austrian territories in the Treaty of London. And like Cavour, they put national aggrandizement above parliamentary scruples. The manner in which Italy was brought into the First World War also

weakened the liberal regime by downgrading Parliament. During the

“radiant days of May” (1915) it seemed as if the Nationalists and

D’Annunzio, through their euphoric speeches and street demonstrations, were forcing the government to declare war. This was hardly the case, but the impression that it was cast doubts on the supremacy of Parliament. Another apparent link between the Nationalists and Salandra and Sonnino was their common belief that a successful war could destroy the possibility of revolution at home as well as enhance Italy’s power and prestige abroad. Most damaging to parliamentary rule was the high-handed means by which Salandra and Sonnino committed the nation and the king to declare war and then forced the Chamber to ratify this decision under the threat that Vittorio Emanuele III would otherwise feel honor-bound to abdicate,® thus

creating political chaos at home and disgracing the nation abroad. The Salandra cabinet agreed to resign and give the king the responsibility of either reconciling Giolitti or asking him to form a new government, which would surely have had a majority in the Chamber. But Giolitti would not

balk the king, and the king, on his own, chose a policy and a premier (Salandra again) against the wishes of Parliament. Constitutionally, he was within his rights, but the precedent was to be fatal in 1922. Many interventionists later argued that the war had completed the work of the Risorgimento by integrating the masses into the national society, but this had not been their motive for intervention nor was even an appearance of national unity achieved before late 1917. Again, the manner in which Italy entered the war was crucial; the masses had not been consulted on this decision, and they continued to view the war as an affair of

the governing classes. At the front, the cleavage between “rulers” and “ruled” could be seen in the different attitudes toward the war of the officers and the men, and in the social and cultural isolation of the two groups. Lack of contact between them in civilian life was reinforced by diversity of language, both literally (a middle-class officer knew the dialect of his own region but not that of his men from other regions) and figuratively (the goals of the officers were national, while those of the men were social and economic: a few hectares in his own paese meant more to the average soldier than Trieste or the Trentino). By 1917, defeatism was rife on both the home and battle fronts. But the rout at Caporetto, beginning

on October 24 of that year, was due, on the Italian side, mainly to bad generalship both in tactics and in insensitivity to the needs and feelings of the fighting men. Only this defeat, which opened northern Italy to a fullscale invasion, rallied both the people and their leaders to the common cause of national defense. During the final year of the war government propaganda raised the hopes of all sections of society for a better world: land for the peasants,

22

The Setting (To December, 1920)

social justice for the workers, moral and spiritual regeneration for the middle classes. Never in their history had the Italian people made so many sacrifices in a common cause, but in no other belligerent country were so many promises made to justify similar sacrifices. Neither Clemenceau nor even Lloyd George spoke of “making war for the proletariat,” which were the words of the Italian prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. Par-

ticularly important in the immediate postwar years were wartime promises of land reform and redistribution, for the peasants were to take these promises literally. On another level, nationalist extremists and the Fascists themselves were to pervert the wartime goal of moral regeneration to a demand for the revolt of “good Italy” against “bad Italy,” playing in a new key the prewar tune of the “real Italy” versus “official Italy’—that is, the honest, patient, hard-working “silent majority” against the establishment and the ruling class. Having been forced into the war against their will, the Italian masses had been promised more than any regime could deliver;

their resultant frustration and disillusionment with the liberal regime made many of them ripe for Fascism. Those groups that had never supported the war were also ready to renew. their attacks on the liberal regime as soon as the fighting was over. When Italy had entered the war the Socialist party, under Maximalist control, had adopted the slogan: “Neither join [the war effort] nor sabotage [it].” In July, 1917, even a reformist like Claudio Treves called for “nobody in the trenches any longer next winter.” A few weeks later Vatican opposition was vividly reaffirmed by Pope Benedict XV, who labeled the war a “useless slaughter.” In November the example of the Russian Revolution prompted the Maximalists to combine their demands for peace with calls for rebellion. From then on the Maximalists insisted on accepting Lenin’s revolutionary program in their rhetoric while refusing to adopt the tactic necessary for achieving it: jettisoning their reformist wing and making the revolution themselves. The alternative was to cooperate with other democratic forces to bring about basic reforms, but the Maximalists refused to do that either. Meanwhile, once the war was over the other “separatist” group in Italian society, the organized Catholics, made their bid to transform the liberal regime through mass political action; in January, 1919, they founded the Partito Popolare Italiano.

Soon after the armistice had been signed (November 4, 1918), the superficial national unity achieved as a result of Caporetto broke down, and the social and political conflicts that had divided the nation in 19141915 flared up with greater intensity than ever before. Each section of society presented its bill, so to speak, for its wartime sacrifices, but neither the Italian government, the Allies, nor anyone else could pay these bills. Not only factory workers, but school teachers and even judges, were striking for higher pay and better working conditions by the spring of 1919. The eight-hour day and other gains of the labor movement exacerbated the envy of middle-class Italians who had no effective way of preserving their position. In 1919 much of the social protest and resentment was displaced

from economic targets to political targets. The revolutionary rhetoric of

23

The FASCIST Experience , Socialist-led protest strikes prompted an anti-Bolshevik response. among the Nationalists and their wealthy backers, to be sure. But the polarization between revolution and counterrevolution was partially obfuscated by the issue of the “mutilated victory” and the ways in which it was exploited by two political mavericks: Benito Mussolini and Gabriele D’Annunzio. | Neither the Nationalists at the end of the war nor the Fascists later on had a monopoly over chauvinism or the “Call of Rome”; at the time of the Armistice the first reports of the desire of the people of Fiume to become a part of Italy elicited a flood of rhetoric which neither the government nor the major newspapers were able to resist and which expressed “a dangerous emotional fragility and a substantial political immaturity.”!° As for the victory itself, Prime Minister Orlando said on November 20 in an extravagant speech to the Chamber: “An altogether Roman breath of greatness pervades this latest epic; and certainly never as at this moment has Italy seemed a more worthy heir of Rome.”!! At the beginning of November, 1918, Fiume had been almost unknown to most Italians; by December,

| due to newspaper articles and speeches about the desire of its citizens to

join Italy, that Adriatic town was fast becoming a symbol for all of Italy’s territorial claims. By early 1919 many Italians began to feel that if they did not get Fiume they would have won the war in vain. There was no rational basis for such a belief; even the Treaty of London had not prom_ ised Fiume to Italy for her participation in the war. Nor was the demand for Fiume consistent with Italy’s professed friendliness for the nascent Yugoslav nation, the spirit of the “new diplomacy,” or Italy’s bargaining position at the Paris Peace Conference. Fiume was important as a symbol of Italian frustration at not having Italy’s great wartime achievement sufficiently acknowledged by the Anglo-

Saxons and the French: not getting Fiume was like being demoted in rank.” Actually, Italy had risen a good deal in rank as a result of the war: not only was she one of the Big Four at the Paris Peace Conference,

a but she was also the dominant power in south central Europe, replacing her now defunct hereditary enemy, Austria-Hungary. While France still

, faced an undivided Germany of 65 million people, Italy faced only an

Austria of 6 million and a Yugoslavia of 12 million. Nor did France get the

| Rhine frontier, which was far more important to her security than Fiume

_ was to that of Italy. Yet the “renunciation” of Fiume caused far more open

protest in Italy than the “renunciation” of the Rhine frontier caused in France. The reason was that the majority of the French people, no matter

| how much they differed on other issues, never doubted the necessity for

their sacrifices in the war; they had fought for national survival, not terri-

tory. In Italy the idea of national survival had superficially united the majority of the people for barely a year, from Caporetto to the disintegration of Austria-Hungary. Then nationalism took over as an attempt to convince these people that, unless, they got Fiume, their victory would be — “mutilated.”

As part of the setting for the rise of Fascism, Fiume (as distinct from its occupation by D’Annunzio’s legions) was to remain important as a sym-

24

The Setting (To December, 1920)

bol of the rightness of Italy’s participation in the war and of the doubtful patriotism of all those who questioned that participation. The issue of the war itself, more than the “mutilated victory,” served as a catalyst (though

hardly the cause) for the eruption of deep-seated group antagonisms. Italians seemed to need to keep reassuring themselves that the war, with

its heavy sacrifices, had been worth fighting. In a broader sense they seemed to be asking if they all had anything in common worth fighting for on the same side. Hence one of the appeals of Fascism was to be its glori-

fication of the war effort and its pledge to fulfill the hopes engendered by | that effort. But the Fascist movement was to make little headway until the end of 1920, when Mussolini was finally to abandon his effort to unite the interventionists of the left in order to concentrate on anti-Bolshevism. This change was to come about partly because D’Annunzio’s Fiume expedition siphoned off many of the left interventionists and partly because at home the people the Fascists found themselves attacking for being antipatriotic were Bolsheviks at heart if not in deed.

The founding of the Fasci di combattimento on March 23, 1919, in Milan involved an effort to combine the rhetoric of “the hopes of the war” with a nationalistic perversion of revolutionary syndicalism. Led by Mussolini, still only the editor of a newspaper, the two hundred people present

for the occasion were a heterogeneous lot. The nucleus consisted of a group of arditi (wartime daredevil shock troops) and futurists, who believed that politics should be felt “in terms of seizures, risks, dangers, adventures, not as something calculated but as boldness, as striving, as dissatisfaction with reality, as a celebration of the rite of action.”!3 (These two militant movements were the only base that Mussolini then had for making himself a leading figure in the larger world of war veterans, which in turn was the only mass following he could envision at the time.) The

other main group in attendance was an assortment of ex-revolutionary interventionists—renegade socialists, anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists; there were also a few republicans and younger war veterans with no particular political affiliation. The main speeches by Mussolini and Michele Bianchi were demagogic and subversive in tone but contained no substan-

tive program beyond “the defense of the victory” and the promotion of “national syndicalism.” The Fascist program in I919 was anticapitalist, antimonarchical, anticlerical, antisocialist, antiparliamentary, and, most

to them. | |

especially, antibourgeois. The men who propounded it were classic examples of revolutionary subversives beginning to turn counterrevolutionary while publicly denying that anything of the kind could possibly happen

It was the position of the Socialists on foreign policy, more than their demand for a political revolution at home, that most antagonized Mussolini and his followers. There is little evidence for the argument that, as in late

1914, Mussolini wanted to bring the Socialist party around to his interventionist position and then rejoin it. (This argument assumes that Mussolini was a renegade Marxist, whereas his prewar penchant for revolution, insofar as it had been based on any ideological faith, had been Sorelian.)

25

The FASCIST Experience

He had already committed himself to the myth of the war itself as the beginning of a revolution and therefore had to defend the war effort at all costs or else lose his credibility completely. Thus, as the Italian Socialist party reaffirmed its commitment to Lenin’s definition of the war as a conflict between imperialisms, incapable by its very nature of bearing any but reactionary fruits, Mussolini and his Fasci had no alternative but to oppose the Socialists at every turn.

Ironically, in 1919-1920, the Maximalist Socialists seemed to be doing what they had opposed in the perpetrators of “red week” in 1914— confusing revolutionary rhetoric and political strikes with a real revolution —only this time the counterrevolutionary forces outdid the would-be revo-

Jutionaries in violence. On April 15, 1919, the Socialist party and labor leaders of Milan launched a twenty-four-hour general strike in protest against the manner in which the police had broken up a Socialist rally two days earlier, leaving several people killed and wounded on both sides. A counterprotest, organized by army officers, Arditi, futurists, and Fascists, attacked the headquarters of Avanii!, destroying its presses and burning everything in sight. Thus was set the pattern of relatively peaceful strikes countered by massive physical violence. The next major episode occurred July 20-21, 1919, when the Socialist party leadership called another general strike, this time throughout the country, supposedly in coordination with similar strikes in Great Britain and France, to demonstrate international socialist solidarity against Allied military intervention in the revolutions in Russia and Hungary. But the British and French socialists did not act at all, and in Italy all the public services operated normally; even the mass rallies were somewhat apathetic. The failure of the strike marked the beginning of the decline of the “red wave” while reinforcing the deter-

mination of the counterrevolutionaries to fight. At the same time, the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti (who had replaced Orlando a month

earlier) gave a boost to these “subversives of the right” by temporarily offering to accept their help in case it might be needed to maintain law and order during the July 20-21 strike. Yet the habit of revolutionary rhetoric not backed up by deeds would not die; in December, 1919, the 156 newly elected Socialist deputies interrupted the king’s speech from the

throne with cries of “Long live the socialist republic’ and marched out singing the “Red Flag.” Growing disaffection with the ineffective leadership of men like the

rhetorical Orlando and the irresolute Nitti was obvious in the elections of November, 1919—the first in six years and the freest in Italy’s history so far—which had returned this massive contingent of Socialists to the

Chamber of Deputies. Together with the Popolari, the next biggest winners, they got 54.1 percent of the votes cast and 256 out of the 508 seats in the Chamber. Universal manhood suffrage, plus a newly installed system of

proportional representation, had shown conclusively that the mass of Italians preferred the two parties that were least likely to be “transformed” by shrewd liberal politicians and that had most consistently opposed Italy’s entry into the war. But since these two parties retained their “separatism” with regard to one another as well as the government parties, liberal and

26

The Setting (To December, 1920)

Radical politicians continued to head minority governments for almost two more years. These minority governments could do nothing to alleviate the frustrations and resentments of opposing sections of Italian society. The redistribution of income caused by inflation, higher wages, and speculation by war profiteers, brought increasing resentment among the middle classes, particularly those with fixed incomes. As one contemporary observer said: A professor in a liceo or a university usually becomes more indignant over the fact

that a good mechanic could have a wage not far from or even higher than his salary than when he hears that an illiterate but lucky boor earns ten times more than he by black market dealings in hogs or dairy products.

This kind of class envy became stronger than ever over such postwar gains

of the labor movement as the eight-hour day and representation in the factories through shop stewards. Another form of social frustration and resentment was expressed by demobilized soldiers who had no jobs to which they could return and who, because they found it discouragingly difficult to resume their high-school or university studies, were unable to get the academic degrees essential to most careers in Italy. Many of these spostati began to swell the ranks of the Fasci di combattimento in 1920 and 1921. When Giolitti returned to office as prime minister from June, 1920, to June, 1921, his former neutralism lowered his prestige in the eyes of the right, while the left continued to view him with suspicion. When he eventually tried to crack down on war profiteers, control inflation, and raise taxes, big business was to turn against him. Meanwhile, most urban and rural workers felt cheated in their demands for social justice and their militancy made property owners of all kinds feel threatened.

The most spectacular threat to private property was the “occupation

of the factories” in September, 1920. This episode began in Milan on August 28 when the workers in the Alfa Romeo plant, faced with a lockout in a dispute over wages and working conditions, occupied the building in

order to prevent the owners from bringing in scabs. Within a week the movement spread among metallurgical workers throughout the peninsula and was supported by the nation’s major labor federations. In themselves the occupations were indeed open infringements on the property rights of the owners, but the demands of the occupiers became more ominous when, on September 11, the national council of the CGL passed by a small margin what was actually the more moderate of two proposed resolutions. The more extreme resolution demanded that the Socialist party take over the responsibility and direction of the occupation movement and extend it to the whole country and the entire working class. The resolution that passed demanded the acknowledgment, on the part of the employers, of

the principle of union control in the factories as a prelude to collective management and socialization as the solution to the problem of production. In Turin, sovietlike factory councils elected by the workers were already in operation under the guidance of Antonio Gramsci, the future leader of

27

The FASCIST Experience

the Italian Communist party, and his colleagues on the newspaper L’Ordine

Nuovo (The New Order). It is also interesting to note that Mussolini and his associates on Il Popolo d'Italia, while decrying certain aspects of the occupations, took great care to support the principle of “workers’ control,” which they unconvincingly argued was a variation of their own “national syndicalism.”

Although the novelty of the occupation movement seemed to require novel countermeasures, Giolitti merely repeated what he had done during

the general strike of 1904: he waited until the movement lost its initial thrust and then stepped in as a neutral mediator. For a full month after the first occupations, Giolitti resisted the employers’ demands that he use troops to oust the workers from the factories. The red flag flew over most of these factories, and in some of them, notably in Turin, factory councils were maintaining production and discipline at almost normal levels. But the majority of the workers were unable to run the factories without the engineers and technicians, and, as Giolitti predicted it would, the movement gradually spent itself. Thus, when he finally persuaded the employers to grant most of the workers’ original demands, the reformist leaders of the CGL held a referendum in which the majority of the workers agreed to end their occupations. The whole episode left permanent scars, however, scars that helped the rise of Fascism: the employers never forgave Giolitti for his “softness”; the more extremist labor leaders never forgave the re-

formists for their failure to lead the workers in the most revolutionary situation in postwar Italy. In many ways the occupation of the factories was the swan song of the postwar revolutionary movement in Italy.“ First of all, it isolated the urban blue-collar workers from the intermediate strata of the population and from the working-class movement in the countryside. Second, it highlighted the divisions within the Socialist party and the CGL, and particularly

between the students and intellectuals of L’Ordine Nuovo group and the rest of the labor movement. Third, Giolitti’s handling of the whole episode deprived the militant workers and the Socialists of their victory, since they

owed what they did get to the government. Finally, the failure of the occupation movement loosened the hold of the Socialist party on the CGL and initiated a critical phase in their relations.

Even more than the occupation of the factories the class struggle in the countryside forced Mussolini and his urban Fascists to drop any lingering revolutionary pretensions and put themselves in the vanguard of the anti-Bolshevik movement. This struggle had begun in March, 1919, in the vineyards around Rome and had soon spread to much of the south and into the Po Valley. At first it was limited to groups of peasants, especially war veterans, occupying fields not being farmed at the moment, but it soon turned into armed attacks by Socialist leagues of farm workers against everyone and everything that stood in their way, not only in seizing land from small and large proprietors alike but also in running the economic and political life of whole provinces through their cooperatives and their control of municipal governments. By April, 1920, 27,000 hectares

28

The Setting (To December, 1920)

had already been seized from 191 proprietors. Helpless in the face of this rural class-war, the Nitti government gave retrospective sanction to most of these seizures. Many landowners who had counted on the government to restore order in the countryside were extremely indignant at Nitti’s gesture and, in August, 1920, they founded their own General Confederation of Agriculture for mutual defense.

Like the Socialist movement in the cities, the rural leagues were unwilling to become soviets as a prelude to seizing control of the central government. As Palmiro Togliatti observed: The heads of leaguism looked askance at all efforts to put their movement in the framework of that of the [urban] workers, and politically they limited themselves to being the electoral agents of the Socialist party. Thus, their action, instead of seeming, as it was, the beginning of the construction of a new society, finished by seeming a vain exercise in bullying.?®

In Bologna province this impression reached its peak in October, 1920, when after many violent incidents and the resultant loss of a significant portion of the year’s crop, the landowners were forced to give in to most of the league’s demands for control of all farming operations in the area. It was in Bologna province and others in the Po Valley soon afterward that the first squadristi appeared in late 1920. Many of these young rowdies were the sons of landowners, including small proprietors who had recently bought land from large landowners and who feared a Red takeover. While

the league leaders refused to cooperate even with their counterparts in neighboring provinces, these squads of rural Fascists set out to dislodge them from control of local governments and to destroy their movement altogether. The squadristi introduced a distinctly provincial and anarchic quality to Fascism, specializing in vicious “punitive raids” against socialist and Catholic labor unions and the headquarters of rival parties. Although many squadristi leaders were to accept subsidies from the big landowners and businessmen, they did not abandon their ultimate goal of making their own revolution. A number of the ex-revolutionary syndicalists in the origi-

nal Fascist movement were to play a major role in organizing counterunions of agricultural workers, but by the end of 1920 Mussolini began taking his cues from the squadristi. The squadristi, in turn, borrowed the daredevil, revolutionary stance—epitomized in the slogan Me ne frego (“I

don’t give a damn” )—of D’Annunzio’s Fiume legions. The whole D’Annunzian enterprise in Fiume was an essential part of the setting for the rise of Fascism in several ways. From September 12, 1919, when D’Annunzio and his legions marched from Ronchi (near Venice) to Fiume, until December 25, 1920, when they abandoned the city after the regular army arrived and fired a few shots (Natale di sangue), they had openly defied the Italian government, which was negotiating the fate of that Adriatic port through diplomacy, first with the Allies in Paris and finally—in November, 1920—with the Yugoslavs. This defiance weakened the public image of the government all the more because it received

29

The FASCIST Experience

the approval and even cooperation of some important military and naval officers. It also taught the radical right, and particularly Mussolini, that, despite its ultimate failure at Fiume, a well-orchestrated appeal to patriotism

could divide the Italian ruling class and force it to make crucial compromises.17 Finally, D’Annunzio’s retirement removed Mussolini's major rival as the would-be leader of Italy’s rebellious war veterans. But by the time this happened Mussolini wanted to lead these veterans toward the

right, whereas D’Annunzio had been led by them increasingly toward

the left. Recent studies'8 have tended to view D’Annunzio’s regime in Fiume

as the outstanding dramatization of the early twentieth-century spirit of revolt—a spirit that also gave rise to movements like expressionism, futurism, Bolshevism, and the first Fasci di combattimento. Whereas the poetcommander himself tended to remain the symbol of wounded nationalism and some of his followers were mere adventurers, an important element in his entourage saw his regime as a base from which to impose an alternative society and value-system on the hated establishment at home. In the end even D’Annunzio himself succumbed to ideas like conquering Rome and Italy and “annexing” them to Fiume and aiding “oppressed peoples” in other lands; he also promulgated a constitution, the Charter of Carnaro, which came closer to the dreams of the revolutionary syndicalists than any-

thing later Fascist corporatists were to devise. It was D’Annunzio, not Mussolini, who attracted the most support from those rebellious war veterans who espoused a confused mixture of patriotic anarcho-syndicalism and revolution for its own sake. Later on his Fiume adventure seemed like a mere comic-opera episode in the serious business of peacemaking, but at the time even Lenin took it seriously and had kind words for it. It was only

the slogans, symbols, and poses of D’Annunzio’s legionnaires that Mussolini’s squadristi borrowed. Most of the legionnaires themselves became anti-Fascists after the March on Rome, and soon thereafter D’Annunzio relinquished his role as politician and returned definitively to that of poet. In Italy by the end of 1920 the dangers from revolution and counterrevolution were far less serious than they were believed to be at the time. Neither the extreme left nor the extreme right had the physical power, the program, or the following sufficient to threaten seriously the existing regime. The occupation of the factories had failed, the occupations of rural lands had peaked, and the Socialist party was splitting up. The Nationalists,'? who were the closest thing to an organized party on the extreme right, were out of the limelight. Yet within less than two years the Fascists were to grow strong enough to seize control of the national government, partly because of their ability to play on fears of revolution from the left. One of the main reasons for the Fascists’ success was the continuing crisis within the liberal regime itself: more than anything else, loss of public confidence made it such an easy prey. The prestige of Parliament had already been badly damaged by the war. Now, in 1920, the Fiume expedition and the occupation of the factories had shown up the weakness of the executive branch of the government as well.

30

The Setting (To December, 1920)

NOTES 1. Roberto Vivarelli, “Italia liberale e fascismo. Considerazioni su di una recente storia d'Italia,” Rivista storica italiana, 82, no. 3 (September 1970): 679-680; see also Guido Dorso, La rivoluzione meridoniale, 2nd ed. (Turin: Einaudi, 1950), pp. 96-97.

2. Compare Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883-1920 (Turin: Kinaudi, 1965), passim, with Roberto Vivarelli, Il dopoguerra in Italia e lavvento del fascismo, 1918-1922 (Naples: Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, 1967), vol. 1, especially Chapter 3, where Vivarelli challenges De Felice’s description of Mussolini as a revolutionary.

3. See Joseph La Palombara, “Italy; Fragmentation, Isolation, Alienation,” in

Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Developmeni (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 301-302. 4. For the Christian Democratic program of 1899 see Giorgio Tupini, I demo-

cratici cristiani (Milan: Garzanti, 1954), pp. 326-328; and Michael P. Fogarty,

Christian Democracy in Western Europe, 1820-1953 (South Bend, Ind.: Notre Dame University Press, 1957), pp. 319-320. On Murri see Lorenzo Bedeschi, Romolo Murri e la Romagna (Rome: Guanda, 1967).

5. “Le unioni professionali e la questione sociale” (1903), in Luigi Sturzo, Sintesi sociale (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1961), p. 76. 6. Sturzo expressed his views on the relationship between politically organized Catholics and the church in his speech at Caltagirone (Sicily) in December, 1905. See

Gli Atti dei congressi del Partito Popolare Italiano, ed. Francesco Malgeri (Brescia:

Morcelliana, 1969), pp. 3-31. 7. For the text of an intercepted telephone conversation in which the Maximalist

leader Lazzari in Rome tried to persuade Rigola in Milan to revoke the order to end the strike, see De Felice, op. cit., pp. 677-678.

8. The first manifesto-appeal of their Fascio rivoluzionario d’azione inter-

nazionalista was issued on October 5 and included the signatures of Michele Bianchi, Filippo Corridoni, and Angelo Oliviero Olivetti (see ibid., pp. 679-681). g. See John Alden Thayer, Italy and the Great War (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), Chapters 10 and 11. 1o. Vivarelli, Il dopoguerra in Italia, p. 197. 11. Discorsi parlamentari di Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, 4 vols. (Rome: Tipografia della Camera dei deputati, 1965), 4, p. 1435. 12. In the fall of 1969, when the author was finishing his research in Italy, the

young men of the city of Caserta (near Naples) rioted for several days in protest against the demotion of their football team to a minor league. 13. Curzio Malaparte, quoted in Vivarelli, p. 284. 14. Giovanni Zibordi, Critica socialista del fascismo, in Guido Bergamo, Il fascismo visto da repubblicani e socialisti (Bologna: Cappelli, 1922), p. 21. 15. Paolo Spriano, L’occupazione delle fabbriche (settembre 1920) (Turin: Einaudi, 1964), p. 164ff. 16. In his “Rapporto sul fascismo per il IV Congresso dell’Internazionale (1922),” Rinascita, December 1, 1962. 17. Renzo De Felice, “D’Annunzio e la vita politica italiana dal 1918 al 1936,”

offprint from Quaderni Dannunziani, nos. 38-39 (1969): 6. 18. Particularly noteworthy are Nino Valeri, D’Annunzio davanti al fascismo (Florence: Le Monnier, 1963) and Ferdinando Cordova, Arditi e Legionari dannunziani (Padua: Marsilio Editori, 1969). 19. On the influence of the Nationalists on the rise of Fascism see Franco Gaeta, Nazionalismo italiano (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1965); Robert Paris, Les origines du fascisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1968), and Giuliano Procacci, “Appunti in tema di crisi dello Stato liberale e di origini del fascismo,” Studi storici, 6, no. 2 (1965).

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2 The

Fascist Revolution

F the end of 1920 onward the Fascist movement changed direction in ways that gained it the backing it needed for its eventual seizure of power. Mussolini now proved willing to make deals with Giolitti and even the Socialists in order to advance the interests of his party in the arena of parliamentary politics. He was limited, however, in some of these deals by the new agrarian Fasci, whose interests were predominantly local and openly reactionary. The main financial backing of the Fascist movement came from wealthy landowners and helped leading ras like Roberto Farinacci and Italo Balbo carry on their rural strike-

breaking activities. (The term ras, which is the same in the singular and plural, had been imported from Ethiopia in 1896 and means a strong local chieftain.) Other subsidies came from urban, particularly Milanese, bankers and industrialists. These wealthy bourgeois were determined to turn back

the “red wave,” dramatized by the occupation of the factories, and the Fascists offered them the armed force they needed for this purpose.

It seems fair to say that in the early 1920s the majority of Italians of all classes lost confidence in the liberal regime. The mass of urban and rural workers were hostile to it, and their militant leaders had been openly defying it on numerous occasions. The Nittian and especially Giolittian formulae of neutrality followed by compromise in labor disputes failed to win over the workers while antagonizing the employers. The conservative bourgeoisie wanted to rescind all the postwar gains of labor and to force

the government to abandon its Giolittian strategy, which had not only favored the cause of the workers but had also aided the Socialist party, whose reformist wing Giolitti now seemed to want to bring into his ruling coalition, along with the Popolari. The economic and social reforms that such a coalition might initiate were inimical to the landowners, much of big business, and lower-middle-class people who were already envious of the workers, whose economic status had risen in comparison with theirs, and who feared that any new “concessions” would further threaten their already precarious position in Italian society. Part of this response was mere

meanness, but part of it was also due to a feeling of bewilderment and helplessness in the face of rapid changes that they did not understand and that seemed to be passing them by. In the end it was people like this who gave the Fascists their mass base in their attacks on both the “reds” and the liberal regime.

35

The FASCIST Experience

Mussolini owed much of his success to his skill as a politician. In 1920 his political prospects were not very hopeful. On the one hand, D’Annunzio’s

Fiume expedition had upstaged his own efforts to be the leader of the nation’s rebellious patriotic veterans and had even lured a number of Fascists away from the fold. On the other hand, his attempt to preserve his “image” as a man Of the left had also failed, despite his program for drastic labor reforms in October, 1919,' and his qualified support for the occupation of the factories in September, 1920. He therefore concluded that only on the right could he and his movement achieve the “unity” he had sought on the left for seven years. The most important thing was not to be used and then discarded, like so many other anti-Bolshevik groups. It was in this struggle for survival that Mussolini demonstrated his real mastery. He also showed his awareness of the motives of those sections of the liberal and democratic bourgeoisie which wooed him, as is evident in the following sentence from a speech he gave on October 15, 1920, in Milan: The image may seem rather daring, but | have the impression that when these elements look for support in Fascism they do so with the same motives as people who take Spanish fly; they are people who feel exhausted after a long period of exertion and who want to use our youthful impulse to recuperate their strength and maintain their dominant role in the society.”

None of those political forces that tried to use Mussolini was his equal— neither Giolitti, who hoped to “transform” him into another element in his ruling coalition, nor the Nationalists and the extreme right, who thought they had found in him a pawn to carry out their program, nor the industrialists, who hoped to use him and his squadristi against the extreme left. Mussolini’s success was made possible in part by the fact that there was

no precedent for it. The combination of a demagogue who was also a skilled politician (which D’Annunzio was not) and paramilitary vigilante forces posing as champions of the little people was original in the early 1920s, The established order could probably have “managed” the leader or the squadristi separately; together they proved to be unbeatable. Beginning in 1921 and especially from 1922 onward it was Mussolini who used his allies more ruthlessly and more successfully than they used him. Mussolini the politician had begun to replace Mussolini the subversive — rabble rouser by the end of 1920. After having given qualified support to

the occupation of the factories, in the September 28 issue of II Popolo d Italia he had openly approved Giolitti’s refusal to oust the workers by force. In the issue of December 28 he gave the government only a mild reprimand

for the ouster of D’Annunzio’s legions from Fiume by the regular army. These moves were calculated to make Mussolini and his party acceptable to the aging Piedmontese statesman in his next electoral alliance, for only in

such an alliance could the Fascists hope to gain a significant number of seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Mussolini’s new image as a responsible politician also pleased the Milanese bankers and industrialists whose subsidies were needed by Il Popolo d'Italia and who balked at the brutality of the rural squadristi.

36

The Fascist Revolution

The response of Giolitti and his closest collaborators to the Fascist movement was self-defeating, to say the least. In many ways these old-style

liberals were still living in the nineteenth century and failed almost completely to understand the profound changes that the war and its immediate aftermath had wrought in all aspects of Italian life. Although the prosaic Giolitti may be excused for not seeing the violent and subversive character of Fascism, Croce (his minister of education for a while), who had preached

against this sort of activism for over two decades, should have known better. Yet Croce argued that Fascism was not dangerous because it had no program. Giolitti, on the other hand, convinced himself that a movement that expressed the feelings of the nation’s patriotic middle classes would never defy “law and order” by turning against the state; those individual Fascists who did so should be punished by the courts, of course, but the movement itself was a healthy, if overexuberant, force capable of being integrated into the liberal body politic. In his determination to be pragmatic, Giolitti saw Fascists but not Fascism. Hence, in preparation for the May, 1921, elections he brought the Fascists into a “national bloc” of candidates in the hope of reducing the power of the Socialists and Popolari in the Chamber and thus increasing his working majority. The results of the election were disastrous from Giolitti’s point of view. The Socialists lost 34 seats but still held 122; the Communists, who had split off in January, got 16 seats; the Popolari now had 107 instead of roo. The Fascists got 35

seats, not a spectacular showing but enough to give them national “visibility” and, eighteen months later, the right to be considered a possible government party. In the meantime, however, Mussolini repudiated his alliance with Giolitti, and the latter was voted out of office in July, 1921. Having bested Giolitti, Mussolini wanted to continue on the road to personal power through parliamentary politics, but this course, particularly his “pact of pacification” with the Socialists, caused a major split within the Fascist movement in late 1921. On the surface, this pact, which was signed on August 2, was a reciprocal renunciation of violence by the Fascists on one side and the Socialist party and the CGL on the other.® For Mussolini, however, it had the double purpose of making his will prevail over the more revolutionary elements in the Fascist movement—both syndicalists and squadristi—and of making the party the main instrument for bringing the movement to power. He may also have wished to put a bit of a scare into those wealthy landowners and businessmen who thought that they could turn the Fascists into “white guards” to be dismissed once their work was done.* In any case, the “pact of pacification” was so vigorously opposed by both the local ras and the party directorate that Mussolini tem-

porarily resigned; he did this to show that none of his main rivals— particularly Dino Grandi and Roberto Farinacci—could take his place effectively, and to leave himself a free hand in championing his own ideas for the party. At the party’s Rome congress, in early November, Mussolini's

views prevailed, and the “pact of pacification” was abandoned as the opportunistic gesture it had been from the start. In late 1921 and early 1922 Mussolini succeeded in moving toward the right again while at the same time mollifying the squadristi with the

37

The FASCIST Experience

hope of an eventual coup d'état. At the party congress in November, he made his first reference to solving the Roman Question as a conciliatory gesture toward the Vatican. He also began adopting an expressly laissezfaire, antisocialist economic line as a means of appealing to big business. Some business leaders loosened their purse-strings a bit, but they still wanted to use the Fascists to assure law and order and then drop them.® Mussolini kept assuring the squadristi that he would never allow this to happen—that they were true revolutionaries whose goal was to overthrow the existing regime in a “March on Rome” and seize power themselves. Squadrism was extremely useful to him in progressively weakening the authority of the state, in hemming in and destroying the strongholds of the “reds,” and, because of this, gaining favor with the larger public. It is now clear that he preferred the road of parliamentary politics to that of revolution in gaining power for himself,® but at the time he had to encourage the idea of revolution in order to get the best from the other Fascists. A crucial factor in helping the Fascists gain and keep power was their belief that they were making their own revolution’ and not merely preventing the “reds” from making theirs. This belief was a classic example of the self-fulfilling prophecy: it encouraged the Fascists when things went against them, and it gave them a justification for the brutal means they employed. After the March on Rome, it also began to convince a number of intellectual leaders without whose support the Fascists’ claim to be making a revolution of the spirit (once the political revolution had been achieved ) would not have been convincing. An obvious example was Giovanni Gentile, but there were many others, as we shall see later. What is important here is that the Fascists convinced themselves that they were revolutionaries. In 1921-1922 the one area where they worked hardest along. these lines was in organizing agricultural workers and sharecroppers into unions that would challenge the big landowners’ protective associations as well as destroy the red and white (Catholic) leagues.’ In mid-May, 1922, Italo Balbo had his squadristi and the Fascist union officials organize a four-day “occupation” of Ferrara by 60,000 unemployed farm-workers as a means of forcing the government, through the prefect, to provide jobs on public-works projects.® For Balbo, who thought of “the revolution” as essentially political, this action was pure demagogy. Other Fascist leaders, however, were more committed to winning the workers over by championing their interests. In August, 1922, for example, they put strong pressure on the employers in the port and shipping industry of Savona to respect previous labor gains. In practice, the efforts of the Fascists to “do something for the workers” were secondary to their ultimate goal of a coup détat, and in order to achieve this goal they had to destroy the hold of the Socialists and Communists on the labor movement and on local governments. Only after they

already controlled a number of important local governments, at least in the north, could they hope to challenge the central government itself. Hence, in 1921-1922, their “revolution” took the form of a series of local civil wars in which their victims were almost invariably the workers’ organizations,

both rural and urban.1! Some union and leftwing party leaders had been

38

The Fascist Revolution

trying to make their own revolution since 1919, but even on the local level they were divided and poorly organized. The occupation of the factories had frightened the propertied classes without advancing the cause of the workers; the ambition of certain Socialists, especially in Emilia, to “build

socialism in one province” had been equally unsuccessful; the internal quarrels within the Socialist party and the Communist secession from it at the Livorno Congress in January, 1921, demoralized the workers at the very moment when the Fascists and their counterrevolutionary backers were mobilizing their strength. Even during the Fascist party crisis of late 1921, the squadristi continued the work of destroying the agrarian leagues and ousting the Socialists and Communists from control of the municipal governments of Emilia and parts of the Po Valley. Fascist takeovers of local governments reached their climax in July,

1922. There is no better description of the situation than Mussolini's article, “L’imminente crollo delle ultime roccaforti del ‘pus, ” in the July 15 issue of Il Popolo d'Italia. It reads almost like a war bulletin: ltalian Fascism is currently committed to a number of decisive battles involving local purges. . . . According to the latest bulletins we have, at Rimini Fascism has succeeded, albeit with the inevitable sacrifice of blood, in moving in and imposing its will. Now the entire situation has been changed. With Rimini in our hands we now control the arm of pincers which had been lacking for us to squeeze Emilia and Romagna; at the same time Rimini in Fascist hands is the bridge for penetrating into the neighboring March. ... At Andria our troops have now achieved their victory. . . . Passing from Apulia to Latium, the news of the past few days shows incidents at Viterbo and a Fascist concentration in reaction to them. . . . Moving northward we find Fascist forces deeply involved in Liguria . . . . Sestri Ponente will no longer be retaken by the reds. Nor will the ignoble coalition of socialists-Freemasons and followers of [Guido] Miglioli [an extreme leftwing Catholic leader who advocated a kind of rural socialism] succeed in retaking Cremona. In Novara, too, the battle is moving toward a triumphant conclusion for us.

But these takeovers sometimes led to such barbarous excesses that they threatened to isolate the Fascists from many of their potential supporters. The ordinary tactics used by the squadristi against individual enemies were malicious practical jokes—shaving off half a man’s mustache

or beard or forcing an overdose of castor oil into him—and blows with a big club (affectionately called the santo manganello). They met organized

resistance with brass knuckles, revolvers, and hand grenades against people, and arson and dynamite against any buildings these people might hold. By the summer of 1922, however, the sheer volume of Fascist violence made it difficult for anyone to control its level in all cases, so excesses did occur: men were dragged from their beds and shot, people were tortured and mutilated. Atrocities had been committed by socialists and anarchists, to be sure, but in the summer of 1922 middle-class opinion began to fear

that the excesses of the Fascists would bring a counterreaction against them, leading perhaps to a government far more anti-Fascist than the

39

The FASCIST Experience

current one of Luigi Facta, a Giolitti stand-in. This fear was expressed in the July 15 issue of the conservative Giornale d'Italia, despite its acknowledgment of the Fascists’ “great and unforgettable merit of having saved

the country from the Bolshevik catastrophe.” On July 18, the liberal Corriere della Sera was much harsher toward the squadristi, calling their atrocities inexcusable, but oversimplifying the distinction between their “revolutionary” Fascism as opposed to Mussolini’s “political” Fascism. The fickleness of public opinion was beautifully demonstrated in Italy

at the beginning of August, 1922, during the so-called legalitarian strike called by a workers’ “alliance” in protest against the same Fascist excesses that had repelled the middle classes two weeks earlier. When the general work-stoppage was announced for August 1, the Fascists informed the government and the public that, if the authorities could not put a halt to it within forty-eight hours, they would “demand full freedom of action and substitute themselves for the State which once again will have demonstrated its impotence.”!? On the next day squadristiin many towns managed

to keep the mail flowing and the buses and trains running; their actions provoked some violent incidents with the striking workers but pleased the lower-middle-class and middle-class public. Even though the workers’ “alliance” itself called off the strike, the Fascists claimed victory not only over the “reds” but also over the ineffective government. Thus, after two and.one half years of indiscriminate use, the leftwing tactic of the protest strike was incapable of serving the purpose for which it was intended: all it could do was to reinforce the hostility of the state and society against which it was directed for tolerating Fascist violence. The failure of the “legalitarian strike” broke the will of the labor movement and put the Fascists on the road to Rome. The strike itself had backfired, not only because of lack of enthusiasm and cooperation among the workers, but also because of the vigor of the Fascists plus the hostility of the representatives of law and order and the middle classes. With the labor movement temporarily broken, many squadristi wanted to seize power

right away. In Genoa, Milan, Livorno, and Ancona they took over the

central districts and treated the government officials as equals. In Savona they tried to win support from the workers by persuading the employers, particularly in shipping, to respect previous labor gains.’® On August 3 the prefect of Milan, Alfredo Lusignoli, telegraphed the minister

of the interior in Rome that “public opinion is completely favorable to the Fascists, whereas among the Socialists one sees a deep despondency.

... In its present state of mind the citizenry would never tolerate strong government measures against the Fascists.”44 On August 3 even the Corriere della Sera, in every respect the most serious paper in Italy, expressed substantial approval of what the Fascists had done. Indeed, the eminent liberal economist Luigi Einaudi wrote in the August 8 issue that the Fascists had no need to impose a dictatorship on the national level: “They can get everything by means of discussions and through legal channels.” Since neither the Corriere della Sera nor the government was ready for a Fascist coup d’état, Mussolini soon persuaded the Milanese squadristi

to go home. Nevertheless, with the labor movement and the leftwing

40

The Fascist Revolution

parties beaten and torn by internal conflicts and recriminations, he was now free to concentrate on his political maneuverings against the liberal government itself.

In September and October the Fascists mustered their forces for a seizure of power: politics were handled by Mussolini, Bianchi, Cesare Rossi, and a few other members of the party directorate; organizational and military preparations were entrusted to Italo Balbo and several other squadristi leaders, plus two older military men, Cesare Maria De Vecchi and Emilio De Bono. This second group reorganized the Militia—as the squadristi as a whole were henceforth called—into a Fascist “army” in open defiance of the armed forces of the state. The fact that Prime Minister Facta allowed this to happen showed both his weakness and his opportunism

in not wanting to sever all links with Mussolini the budding minister. Mussolini himself made several public speeches calculated to dispel the doubts of the nation’s conservative forces about the revolutionary character

of the Fascist movement. His three main themes were a conciliatory attitude toward the monarchy, a laissez-faire economic policy, and an effort to present Fascist syndicalism as a harmless sop to the working classes. Most important to Mussolini’s bid for power were continued contacts with men like Giolitti, Facta, and Salandra—contacts designed to make them believe that the government crisis could be solved by giving Mussolini, and maybe a couple of other Fascists, cabinet posts in a new

Giolitti government. These negotiations deliberately obscured his real goal, which was the premiership for himself. In order to achieve this he supported his political bid for power with an insurrectional one. For him the forthcoming March on Rome was to serve as political blackmail of the establishment and as a symbol of revolution to the squadristi. For the squadristi, of course, their revolution was to be more than symbolic. Perhaps the most crucial factor the Fascists had to worry about was the attitude of the army and the police. In their local raids and punitive actions the squadristi had often had the tacit and sometimes the open support of these forces: partly because of the middle-class and lower-middleclass background of most police officials, party because most of them were war veterans, and partly because they approved of the Fascists’ emphasis on anti-Bolshevism and order. Except for the Carabinieri, Italy’s various police organizations, particularly the Royal Guard, left something to be desired from the point of view of quality and discipline and hence were easily encouraged in their Fascist sympathies by the example of the army itself. The open collaboration between army officers and Fascists in the provinces is well documented.'® But would the army tolerate a March on Rome? On this score General Emanuele Pugliese, in charge of the 28,000

troops in the Rome district, always maintained that, despite their pro- : Fascist sympathies, these troops would have obeyed any orders from the king and the government.'* But recent scholarship points to a different

attitude on the part of the army: “formal obedience to the constituted powers, but substantial support for Fascism, expressed in the pretext of staying neutral during the government crisis.” 41

The FASCIST Experience

Despite the risks, on October 12 Mussolini decided to go ahead with the March on Rome by the end of the month. The political groundwork had been laid, and any further delay might lead to a new Giolitti government. Also, on October 11, Mussolini had met D’Annunzio at the latter’s retreat

at Gardone and felt that he had mollified him sufficiently that he would not interfere with the Fascists’ plans.18 On October 21 the Quadrumvirate of Balbo, De Bono, De Vecchi, and Bianchi, took charge of organizing the March on Rome. Meanwhile, Mussolini and Bianchi were still leading Facta and Giolitti to believe that at the October 24 Fascist Congress in Naples

they would make their final decisions regarding their participation in a new government. (It is a tribute to the loyalty of the top Fascists and to the inefficiency of the police spies that the government had no inkling of this deceit.) In reality, for Mussolini and his collaborators the Naples meeting had the sole purpose of completing a kind of premobilization for

the March on Rome on October 28 after certain key localities in the provinces were occupied.!9 Mussolini used the threat of a Fascist insurrection in a masterly way

in his bid to obtain the premiership legally. On the night of October 27, while the squadristi were seizing communications centers in many parts of northern Italy and the prefecture in Perugia, Mussolini attended the theater in Milan with his wife and daughter. On October 28 and 29 he convinced the leaders of the Confindustria (the Italian National Associa-

tion of Manufacturers) and Senator Luigi Albertini, publisher of the Corriere della Sera, to use their influence to get him appointed premier.”° Mussolini also maintained his contacts with Giolitti and Salandra until the last minute, in case something prevented him from becoming prime minister himself. The crucial factor, however, was the attitude of King Vittorio Emanuele III. On the night of October 27, when Facta and his cabinet wanted to resign in the face of an imminent Fascist insurrection, the king refused to accept their resignations and went to bed. Early the next morning the Facta government pulled itself together and prepared a proclamation for a state of siege and even notified all the prefects to count on it. But the king refused to sign the decree, and nothing now stood in Mussolini's way.

The king’s responsibility was enormous, and the reasons for his decision, insofar as they can be pieced together, illuminate the crisis of the liberal regime. One reason was that the king had little confidence in Facta and his fellow ministers after seeing their obvious desire to resign. He also hated Giolitti (particularly for his wartime neutralism), but until later in the day of October 28 the Fascists encouraged him to believe that a Salandra government was still possible. A second reason (to which some observers attribute more importance than others) was the king’s concern about the attitude of his cousin, the Duke of Aosta, who openly supported the Fascists and who might be their choice for king if Vittorio Emanuele openly opposed them. A third reason was that when the king consulted the highest military authorities in the land, they advised him not to put the army to the test. A corollary was the king’s alleged fear of a bloody civil war, also involving the Communists, if the army failed to put down

, 42

The Fascist Revolution

the Fascist insurrection speedily. Finally, some of the king’s closest advisers

at court urged him not to sign the decree for a state of siege. The fact that the king gave in to these influences indicated his own lukewarm attitude toward the liberal regime; the fact that he could refuse to sign the decree highlighted a basic defect in the constitution.

The king’s refusal marked the end of both Facta and the liberal regime in Italy. Having renounced armed resistance, Vittorio Emanuele had to ask Mussolini to be premier or risk a real, rather than symbolic, March

on Rome. On October 29 tens of thousands of squadristi were camping in the rain outside the capital waiting for the order to move in. Under this pressure the king sent Mussolini, then in Milan, a telegram asking him to

form a new government. Mussolini then took the night train to Rome, arriving in the midmorning of October 30. By the end of the day he presented his coalition government to the king; it contained three other Fascists, two Popolari, four assorted democrats and liberals, one nationalist (Luigi Federzoni in the ministry of colonies), one independent (Giovanni Gentile in the ministry of public instruction), General Armando Diaz, and

Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel. Mussolini then invited the squadristi to march in a gigantic victory parade, which he reviewed flanked by the king and the leaders of Italy’s political and military establishment. Such was the “March on Rome” that was soon to become a Fascist legend.

Most people who accepted Mussolini at first were interested in the restoration of law and order, not in squadrism, syndicalism, or demagogic nationalism, and Mussolini himself was interested in personal power, not in making a revolution, Fascist or otherwise. By 1926 he was to create a regime based on much of the authoritarian program of the prewar Italian Nationalist Association, with which the Fascist party merged in March, 1923. Although each of these two movements already had its own internal divisions, their fusion engendered the most acrid arguments over ideology between the half-educated former squadristi leaders who had made the “Revolution” of 1919-1922 and the nationalist intellectuals who tried to use it for their own ends thereafter. There was also a conflict of generations

here: aside from Mussolini himself, most Fascist ras were still in their

twenties when he gained power, and they resented the apparently preponderant influence of the older nationalists, particularly Luigi Federzoni and Alfredo Rocco, soon thereafter. The Fascist syndicalists wanted a new,

autonomous labor movement, not the absorption of the workers into corporations dominated by the employers and controlled by the state. The squadristi wanted the triumph of rebellious youth over the existing order and the older generation in all the other parties, not a bureaucratic Fascist party machine stripped of its political power. For many of them Fascism continued to mean beating people with the santo manganello and performing daredevil feats of courage. The squadrism that brought Mussolini to power on October 30, 1922, did not disappear after the Black Shirts went home peacefully two days later. While Mussolini seemed content to be prime minister of a coalition government and to leave the existing order intact, Farinacci, Balbo, and

43

The FASCIST Experience

even Michele Bianchi, the national party secretary, viewed the March on Rome as only the beginning of their conquest.?! On the other hand, half of the 60,000 party members as of August, 1922, resigned within a year, especially those rank-and-file squadristi from the rural areas of the Po

Valley, many of whom were the sons of landowners, including small proprietors who had recently bought land from large landowners who feared a Red take-over.?? These people left the party because they believed the Bolshevik danger to be over; others did so because they disapproved of the directives of the central party hierarchy after the March on Rome.

(These defections were, however, more than equaled by late joiners; by December, 1922, there were 300,000 party members.) One of these directives ordered all squadristi to become members of the newly created Fascist Militia (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale ).

But the Militia did not solve the problem of unbridled squadrism. Throughout 1923 many ras kept their squads aloof from it, and Mussolini had to struggle hard to make them conform.”* Before the fusion with the Nationalists, the squadristi had violent brawls with their Blue Legions, particularly in the south. In 1924 rival gangs of squadristi were fighting each other—in Bergamo, Novara, Milan, Bari, Naples, Messina, Livorno, Genoa, and Bologna.** These incidents of organized violence for its own

sake created a serious crisis for Mussolinis new government, a crisis that was to be aggravated by the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti. Unlike the situation in October, 1922, when Mussolini himself

had decided that the squadristi should march on Rome, by the end of December, 1924, it was they who were to force him to “complete the revolution” by setting up a dictatorship in place of the liberal regime, as we shall see presently. The methods of many leading ras were as brutal as those of Al Capone,

but these men were not ordinary gangsters. They wanted their gangs to take over the whole country, punish all those citizens whom they considered

subversive, and indoctrinate the rest with a superpatriotic military spirit. They wanted to base the new Fascist order on their mode of organized violence and on an omnipotent but decentralized party oligarchy, with themselves as dictators in their own provinces. Their revolution, however, was to be political; the old ruling groups were to be displaced by a new rough-and-ready elite, but the economic and social structures were not to be altered. The leading exponent of squadrism was Roberto Farinacci, the ras of Cremona. Writing in Il Popolo d'Italia on October 20, 1925, when he was the national party secretary, he said that the goals of squadrism were “the legalization of Fascist illegality . . . exceptional laws for the defense of our revolution .. . reforms for the great Fascist reconstruction.”?5

Although the squadristi could not have realized their youthful ideal of regenerating Italy’s “sick society” either with or without Mussolini, they did give Fascism its heroic, revolutionary, D’Annunzian stance. Mussolini himself openly assumed this posture in early August, 1924, when he said

that all true Fascists should be proud to reach their goal unadorned by titles and honorific trappings (arrivare nudi alla meta) and that their motto should be: Live dangerously (Vivere pericolosamente). The

44

The Fascist Revolution

squadristi marching song, “Giovinezza, Giovinezza,” which became the second national anthem, along with the “Marcia Reale,” vaunted grenadethrowing and dagger-wielding as well as youth as the springtime of beauty. Many squadristi thought of themselves as the successors of Garibaldi’s Thousand, of the Arditi (who had used daggers and grenades during the war), and of D’Annunzio’s legionnaires. Their self-styled revolutionary activism gave them a mystique that the Fascist regime preserved—albeit as mere rhetoric—long after they themselves were either tamed or purged. As early as mid—1923 Mussolini had decided to use the authority of the state increasingly to curb dissidence among the squadristi and to impose

discipline on the Fascist party. This modus operandi not only served his own purpose of reinforcing his personal power but also convinced many liberal leaders that his government might even make the existing regime more workable. Actually Mussolini had no program of reform in mind; he simply “played it by ear,” using everything and everybody, even his enemies, then discarding them in order to take advantage of a new set of conditions requiring different tactics and different allies.2* A consummate actor, he could be suave or crude to suit the needs of the moment. Later on,

his cynicism and his lack of faith even in his own nation were to become clearer. But during his first two years in office he played the patriotic restorer of law and order, complete with top hat and tails. In their own way each of the other political parties helped Mussolini to consolidate his control over the state within the constitutional framework

of the existing regime. Less than one month after he took office the Chamber of Deputies voted to give him decree powers for one year by a vote of 215 for and 80 against. This decision gave him a virtually free hand in administrative and fiscal reforms. Salandra himself led the major-

ity, which also included Giolitti and the other Liberals as well as the Popolari. Not even all the Socialists, now badly split, voted against decree powers. The position of the liberal establishment was best summarized by

Croce, who viewed Mussolini’s coalition government as a bridge to

_ orderly, constitutional rule. Croce argued that the king would never allow the dismantling of Italy’s liberal institutions and that he held the upper

hand as head of the armed forces. In October, 1923, in a famous interview,?’ Croce said that the question was not one of Fascism or liberalism but one of the political forces that could replace Mussolini without risking

a return to the disorders of 1921-1922. Unfortunately, these forces no longer existed. In fact, in July, 1923, the Chamber had approved—by a vote of 223 against 123—-a new electoral law, named after Giacomo Acerbo, which said that any party that got a majority of at least 25 percent of the popular vote would get 65 percent of the seats in the new Chamber. By the time of the parliamentary elections in April, 1924, the major

opposition parties were already weakened by internal divisions; these divisions, plus the violence and intimidation used by the Fascists during the electoral campaign, gave the Fascists an even greater victory than they had hoped for. In 1921 the Socialist party (Partito Socialista Italiano ) had received 25.7 percent of the votes cast; in 1924 the Maximalist rump received only 4.9 percent, while the Reformist wing, now separate and

45

The FASCIST Experience

called the PSU (Partito Socialista Unitario), got 5.9 percent. The Popolari,

who in 1921 had received 21.2 percent of the votes cast, received only 9.1 percent in 1924; by then the right wing of the party had already deserted to Mussolini, and the rest of the party was split into at least three factions and was already out of favor with the Vatican (see pp. 184-186). Only the

Communists and the small Republican party increased their vote slightly in 1924: the former to 3.8 percent, the latter to 1.6 percent. Aside from

3 percent more for two leftwing democratic parties, all the rest of the votes went to the parties that supported the government: 66.3 percent for the Fascists and their liberal, conservative, and Catholic allies®® plus 2.8 percent for Giolitti’s “parallel” list of Liberals. Despite the violence

that had punctuated the electoral campaign, even the stanchest antiFascists had to admit that Mussolini's majority was incontestable. The Acerbo electoral law did not even have to be invoked, since the Fascist coalition list had already won 374 out of the 535 seats in the Chamber. The assassination on June 10, 1924, of Giacomo Matteotti, the outspoken secretary of the PSU, sparked the most serious political crisis of the Fascist period. Until then, some members of his own party and some reformist leaders of the CGL had shown a limited willingness to collaborate with the Mussolini government.2® But in his last speech in the Chamber, Matteotti had expressed strong opposition not only to Fascism but also to these would-be collaborators from his own camp. His subsequent murder

by Fascist thugs ruled out any further thoughts of collaboration for the moment and set the whole Fascist movement back in many ways. Many of Mussolini’s liberal supporters, including Senators Orlando and Albertini,

deserted him. Most of the opposition deputies absented themselves from the Chamber in protest; after the fashion of the plebs in ancient Rome, they began meeting on the Aventine hill. Members of the bureaucracy and the police took a more aloof attitude toward the Fascist government, so as not to be too compromised in case it should fall. Even within the Fascist camp itself, many moderates and late joiners wanted to detach themselves from the squadristi element, which now found itself isolated because of the Matteotti murder and the wave of shocked indignation it produced in the whole country.

During the rest of 1924 and into the early months of 1925, many Italian leaders believed that Mussolini could be turned out of office without any difficulty. Most big businessmen adopted a cautious wait-andsee policy, but one group, led by Senator Ettore Conti, eager to persuade the king to oust him, though once again Vittorio Emanuele bowed to counter-

pressures that told him not to risk a return to the “anarchy” of the immediate postwar years. Conti was particularly critical of the deputies of the “Aventine Secession” for deserting their posts instead of working with Mussolini's former allies for a vote of no confidence.2° Even the astute Filippo Turati believed that the Matteotti murder had finished

Mussolini by exposing him as a bandit chieftain, and that for the

Socialists the question was henceforth merely whether to give the crisis a final resolute push against the wall or to let the gangrene dissolve itself.*! The way in which Mussolini finally extricated himself from the Mat-

46

The Fascist Revolution

teotti crisis was the supreme example of his tactic of seizing opportunities

and at the same time seeming to let himself be influenced by others to do something that was to his own ultimate advantage. At first he had seemed

uncertain about how to stay in power in the face of public protests and possible dismissal by the king. By mid-December he even proposed restoring

the pre-1923 electoral law as a means of placating some of his opponents

in both houses of Parliament. Such acts of “normalization” prompted several high-ranking leaders of the Militia, followers of Farinacci,®* and

other squadristi extremists to intimidate Mussolini into making a coup détat. Under pressure from these people he set up a dictatorial regime in his speech to the Chamber on January 3, 1925, and made Farinacci the national party secretary a month later. The squadristi precipitated a new outburst of violence that lasted until early 1926. But this “second wave” was their swan song, for the very dictatorship they had forced Mussolini to establish gave him the power, through the prefects, to tame them and disperse most of their leaders.

Whereas the squadristi idea of the Fascist revolution was the conversion of Italy to a demagogic, gangsterlike form of militarism, the goal

of the militant Fascist trade-union leaders was a heretical version of revolutionary syndicalism.®? Fascist syndicalism paid lip-service to the ideal of cooperation among classes while retaining its faith in an auton-

omous labor movement as the main force capable of completing the

political revolution with a social revolution. Edmondo Rossoni, the relatively moderate head of the Fascist trade unions, said in a speech in Naples in December, 1922: “Between Italians and Italians there should be neither masters nor servants, but loyal collaborators for the common interest and for the overriding ends of the Fatherland.”*4 He then added that “against the ‘bosses’ in the old sense of the word we shall fight ruthlessly.” Three years later, when the Fascist unions were being given a legal monopoly in representing labor, Agostino Lanzillo, a leading Fascist spokesman in the Chamber of Deputies, said that these “unitary” unions were “a new reality alongside the family, the city, the commune, the State.”*> Lanzillo went on to say that the regime should not fear their revolutionary function in realizing the complete program of syndicalism: their development into

a structure parallel to the state and, ultimately, their assuming certain responsibilities of the state in the collective administration of society. But the hope of making the syndicalist version of the Fascist revolu-

tion prevail had already been vitiated by the actual means the Fascists used to gain power. From late 1920 until the March on Rome, Fascist syndicalist leaders had to concentrate on the immediate task of administering the Fascist unions of small farmers that the leading ras in the Po Valley sponsored in order to compete with the older landowners’ associa-

tions in destroying the leagues of agricultural laborers. In Cremona, Farinacci forced some small farmers to join, but he opposed real workingclass syndicalism.** In Ferrara, Balbo helped to found the first Fascist unions and persuaded Rossoni to come from Rome to help him; in January, 1922, Rossoni established the first confederation of all Fascist unions at

47

The FASCIST Experience

Bologna, where Mario Rachelli, another ex-revolutionary interventionist,

was setting up the national headquarters of the farmers’ unions.?’ In

; Bologna, the squadristi leader Leandro Arpinati denied that the farmers’ unions in his province represented a bourgeois reaction, but the leading Fascist history of the rural unions describe the two founders of the Bologna federation as sons of big landowners?’ and Rachelli as an ex-legionnaire at Fiume who, “after having vainly tried with . . . others to reconstitute alongside the Fascist movement the ranks of revolutionary syndicalism inspired by the Charter of Carnaro,” threw himself into his new job of organizing the farmers.®® The Fascist syndicalists opposed squadristi violence against the Socialist and Catholic leagues of agricultural workers,*° but it was the destruction of these unions and the attacks against the urban labor move-

ment that gave the Fascists their mass following among the middle and lower-middle classes as well as tacit support from the police and the army.

After the March on Rome both the squadristi and the syndicalists tried to pursue their own goals in opposition to each other and often to Mussolini himself. From the beginning, however, the syndicalists were

handicapped by the determination of the ras to keep them under their own control. Thus, the Fascist unions had to fight an uphill battle against

individual ras who, as federal secretaries of the party, wanted to have their own headquarters run all the local mass organizations, including the

unions. The conflict with the ras and with the regime itself reached its peak in December, 1924, when both the militant syndicalists and the extremist squadristi leaders were each trying to force Mussolini to fulfill their differing versions of the “revolution.” Although squadristi pressure was undoubtedly more crucial in making Mussolini set up a dictatorship in his speech of January 3, 1925, syndicalist pressure also had some effect in showing him how isolated he was from the militant forces in the Fascist movement.

Rossoni summed up the views of the leading syndicalists in a report to Mussolini at the end of 1924.4! On the question of Mussolini’s failure to see syndicalism as the motive force of the Fascist revolution and to fulfill this revolution, Rossoni mentioned an interview of his colleague Arnaldo Fioretti in the December 3, 1924, issue of Nuovo Paese. According to Fioretti, Fascism should carry out in the political field the goals of the Fascist union movement just as socialism had done for the CGL. Fioretti’s torment over the “arrested revolution” led him to consider making the unions autonomous from the party, even to the point of abandoning the label “Fascist.” Other syndicalist leaders, including Rachelli, shared this view, but Rossoni, while reporting it, asserted that he wanted to remain loyal to Mussolini and the party.42 Rossoni agreed with his colleagues, however, in their opposition to control of the provincial union federations by the ras.48

The main enemy of Fascist syndicalism was not the ras but the Confindustria. Already on December 19, 1923, in the so-called Palazzo Chigi Pact, Rossoni had had to renounce his “integral syndicalism”— which the Confindustria feared would undermine the independence of management—in return for preferential treatment in collective bargaining

48

The Fascist Revolution

for his unions. But Mussolini was not averse to using the Fascist unions and the idea of “mixed corporations” of workers and employers as a counter-

force to big business, once his own position was stronger. At the January 23, 1925, meeting of the Fascist Grand Council, that body, under his leadership, issued a strong statement favoring Fascist syndicalism and criticizing the selfishness of the employers.*4 Then, in March, Augusto Turati, the ras of Brescia, instigated a strike among the metalworkers in his province; this strike soon spread throughout Lombardy. This kind of militancy was obviously designed to show that Fascist unions were not the instruments

of management and hence, to regain members who had deserted these

unions as a result of the Matteotti murder. In the end, however, the

Confindustria won out over labor. On October 2, 1925, in the Palazzo Vidoni Pact, its representatives and those of the Fascist unions agreed to recognize

the monopoly of their respective organizations. This pact in effect destroyed the position of the CGL and the Catholic unions, but it was a Pyrrhic victory for the Fascist unions, because it also abolished the workers’

factory commissions and virtually eliminated the right to strike. More than anything else, the labor policies of the Fascist regime made its claims to being revolutionary a mockery. These policies, spelled out on April 3, 1926, in the Rocco Law on the Juridical Regulation of Labor Relations, and a year later in the Charter of Labor,*¢ destroyed Italy’s free labor movement which, despite a certain lack of discipline and cooperation, had shown a degree of autonomy equal to that found in more advanced countries.*” After the CGL leadership dissolved itself on January 4, 1927, saying that Fascist restrictions made its functioning impossible, the Communists launched their own CGL underground, while a group of exiles in Paris, led by Bruno Buozzi, set up a rump CGL there.** But their activities had little impact for two reasons: the Fascist Federation gained official recognition by the International Labor Organization in

Geneva, and a number of leaders of the reformist wing of the CGL agreed to work within the Fascist framework. The Fascist syndicalists hoped that this collaboration would make the regime more responsive

to the needs of labor,*® but it was to do so only on its own terms, without reference to them. It supported the Confindustria position of noninterference with the employers’ activities until the end, in November, 1928, when it broke up Rossoni’s confederation and forced him out of the labor move_ment. Henceforth the Fascist unions were to be run mainly by bureaucrats

the workers. ]

in the interest of the state rather than by labor leaders in the interest of In 1925, before the squadristi and syndicalists had been quelled, Mussolini’s regime began to institute its own version of “totalitarianism” in a manner which in Nazi Germany eight years later was called Gleichschaltung. As in the Third Reich, this process involved the elimination of the

opposition political parties and independent labor unions and the “coordination” of the press, the schools, and all rival social organizations. These three categories will be discussed at length in later chapters. It should be noted here, however, that the “coordination” of the schools came

49

The FASCIST Experience

considerably later than that of the other two. Press censorship was given definitive legal sanction in the law of December 31, 1925,5° and in the following year the venerable Federation of the Italian Press was absorbed into the National Fascist Union of Journalists. On November 26, 1925,°! another law strictly regulated the activities of all nonpublic associations

and forbade state employees at all levels to belong to any association “operating even in part in an undercover or secret manner or whose members are in some way bound by secret vows.” The Freemasons were the principal target here, but other kinds of organizations were harassed in other ways. Most worth noting here in view of the origins of Fascism are the principal organizations of war veterans: Associazione Nazionale Combattenti, Associazione Nazionale fra Mutilati e Invalidi di Guerra, and Federazione Nazionale Arditi di Guerra. In the province of Genoa, for example, the members of the second of these organizations resisted the

efforts of local Fascists to take control throughout 1925, and the first and third of them were not finally “coordinated” until the early 1930s, when the prefects had to step in directly.*2

Unlike its counterpart in Nazi Germany, Fascist “totalitarianism” included the subordination to the state of the party itself and the organizations it sponsored: Militia, Balilla, Dopolavoro, and so forth. Mussolini

strengthened the faltering state administration he inherited, especially the ministry of the interior; in Germany, friction between Nazi party organizations and the traditionally strong state administration weakened the latter.5* Martin Bormann had far more discretionary powers than any Fascist party secretary; Robert Ley’s Labor Front was able to challenge the Reichsbank, the Ministry of Economics, and the party hierarchy itself, whereas the Fascist unions and corporations could put no real pressure on anyone except the workers. Yet despite the Fascists’ subordination of other agencies to the state, their attempt to create a totalitarian regime had less success than that of the Nazis. One reason was that Mussolini never completely eliminated the influence of the king and the pope; another reason was that, unlike Hitler, he delegated the task of his Gleichschaltung

to men whose outlook was quite different from his: Luigi Federzoni (minister of the interior, 1924~—1926), Alfredo Rocco (minister of justice,

1925-1932), and Arturo Bocchini (chief of police, 1926-1940). One of the main tasks of Federzoni was to make state Fascism prevail over revolutionary Fascism. The squadristi leaders who had made the “Revolution of 1919-1922” had wanted the party to take over the state, not vice versa. Their revolutionary Fascism was one form of political expression

of “dropouts” from the established order. These “dropouts” were not proletarian either in origin or in consciousness. But neither were they petit-bourgeois, because they rejected the values and norms of this class. Whatever their social origins—usually plebeian—they denounced the existing social order as having no acceptable place for them. Like the Nazi storm troopers, they enjoyed bullying the people who had formerly looked down on them in their home towns, and they themselves looked down on people from other camps—particularly Federzoni—who had joined their revolution in order to turn it to their own ends. But in Italy

30

The Fascist Revolution

there was nothing comparable to the “night of the long knives,” in which Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s archrival, and his leading henchmen were slaughtered. Mussolini’s archrival, Farinacci, was made national party secretary from January, 1925, to March, 1926, and then allowed to return to his bailiwick in Cremona for the rest of the Fascist period. Nevertheless, he was bested by Federzoni, whose control over the prefects and the police gave him the decisive advantage in limiting the activities of the party, and especially the ex-squadristi, to those that the government approved. By the late 1920s all the ex-squadristi leaders were either tamed or purged. Mussolini had tried to tame Balbo early in 1923 by making him

one of the top commanders of the Militia, but the rivalry between the two men appeared even then when, in the meeting of the Fascist Grand Council of January 12, Balbo openly asked Mussolini if “the revolution has been made for you alone or for all of us.”54 He served as air minister

in the late 1920s, but his spectacular transatlantic flights in 1930 and 1933 made him so popular that Mussolini got rid of him by sending him off to govern Libya. Of the other ex-squadristi revolutionaries, Augusto

Turati (Brescia) served as a pliant party secretary from 1926 to 1930 and died in 1932 under a cloud of accusations; Leandro Arpinati (Bologna )

became a good bureaucrat as undersecretary of the interior until his disgrace and expulsion from the party in 1933 at the instigation of the then

party secretary Achille Starace, another former revolutionary turned conformist. But more ex-squadristi were purged than tamed. A typical example was Gino Baroncini, a young accountant and one of Balbo’s leading lieutenants until 1923. In 1924 and 1925 he was disowned by Balbo and became the leader of the dissident Fascists in Bologna, where he and his comrades fought with late joiners, stored up grenades and bombs

(their slogan was: “One bomb is worth a hundred lectures”), and called themselves the true Fascists, until their expulsion from the party. A good case study of a typical squadristi leader turned typical Fascist hierarch was Renato Ricci, from the Tuscan town of Carrara. Born in 1896, this “son of the people”** went to night school to study accounting and later used the title ragioniere. In 1915 he volunteered for the army and became a lieutenant by the end of the war. He participated in D’Annunzio’s Fiume expedition and returned to Carrara in the spring of 1921 to form the first group of squadristi there. During the “legalitarian strike” in August, 1922, his Fascist gangs participated in the “conquest” of Genoa,

having already destroyed the trade unions in his home town as well as overthrown its republican mayor and dispersed the Socialist and Communist parties there. In May, 1923, when his main rival was expelled from the party as a dissident, Ricci became the leading ras in his section of Tuscany. A year later he was made a high official in the Militia, and, in 1926, the head of the Opera Nazionale Balilla until its transfer to party control in late 1937. (Thereafter he was undersecretary (1938) and then

minister of corporations (1939-1943), and the head of the Republican National Guard (1943-1945) in Mussolini’s Repubblica Sociale Italiana.)

In Carrara, Ricci was hated by the workers for having destroyed their unions; the small quarry owners also resented him for forming a con51

" The FASCIST Experience sortium with the big owners in order to control the production of the

area’s famous marble. Later on, however, he ordered marble for the construction of ONB building and pocketed part of the money that was sup-

posed to pay for it. Ricci was no more brutal or corrupt than many Fascist hierarchs; but it was ironical that he should have been the head of the nation’s youth organization, with its Boy Scout—like pretensions, for eleven years. Although the ministry of the interior successfully asserted the authority

of the state over the party, its apparent inability to prevent assassination attempts against Mussolini in 1925 and 1926 brought a change of leadership in the national police force and a permanent crackdown on all antiFascist activities. The first assassination attempt—really only a conspiracy

—was that of Tito Zaniboni in November, 1925. It served as an excuse for the immediate dissolution of the Socialist party, to which Zaniboni belonged, and of all other opposition parties shortly thereafter. The Zani-

boni plot also gave many Italians an excuse to turn from aloofness or opposition to support of the regime on “patriotic” grounds. Mussolini's participation as one of the Big Four at Locarno a month later, dissipated fears of an adventurist foreign policy, thus improving the regime’s respect-

ability. In 1926 there were three real attempts to assassinate the Duce: one by Violet Gibson, an aging and slightly crazy Irishwoman, in April;

| one by Gino Lucetti, a young anarchist, in September; and one in October, attributed to a teenage anarchist named Anteo Zamboni. Between the last two attempts Mussolini fired his old police chief and replaced him with Arturo Bocchini, who was to devote the next fifteen years of his life to protecting the life of the Duce and rooting out subversives. In November, a draconian internal security law was instituted, with the Special Tribunal —outside the regular judicial system—to enforce it. Meanwhile, by dramatizing the “law-and-order” issue, the assassination attempts of 1926 rallied many Italians to the policies of the regime, including its repression of all opposition.

The monarchy and the army also reinforced the legitimacy of the regime. In November, 1926, Vittorio Emanuele III once again failed to meet his responsibilities. Marshal Enrico Caviglia, hardly an antimonarchist, later said of the king: “He permitted violations of the Constitution; he allowed the civil liberties guaranteed by the Statuto to be tampered with; he proscribed many citizens for extra-constitutional reasons amounting to persecution.”*’ The modus vivendi between the regime and the army dated back to the winter of 1923-1924, when Mussolini had first assured the generals full control of the army without interference or criticism, as well as providing a climate of patriotism and militarism. The army in turn

assured the regime of its support in any civil strife and guaranteed the policy of prestige pursued by Mussolini, thus “allowing the regime to don a warlike mask and to seek an international role beyond the country’s capabilities.”>8

Of the three men who consolidated Mussolini’s regime after 1925, Rocco became known as its “official theorist.” Whereas Federzoni was a traditional authoritarian nationalist and Bocchini an efficient and largely

52

The Fascist Revolution ©

apolitical police chief, Rocco was an eminent professor of law and an original thinker. By 1914 he had made his reactionary elitist ideas prevail in the Italian Nationalist Association. He had two basic goals: to substitute an authoritarian state for the liberal state and to replace the unsupervised conflict of social and economic forces with a hierarchical class structure and with corporations for each sector of the economy, which would run their own affairs, but would have to submit to the authority of the state.

ideology. ,

Rocco incorporated these goals into a full-blown, logically consistent

Because Mussolini gave Rocco the power to make this ideology the constitutional basis of the Fascist regime, a number of observers argued that the Fascists, having no ideology of their own, took over the Nationalist program. This argument overlooks both the difference between the facade and the praxis of the regime and the divergence of Mussolini’s goals from those of other Fascists. Mussolini wanted a personal dictatorship based on mass support for his charismatic leadership (“Mussolini is always right”) and reinforced by a strong police state; most other Fascists wanted something more, although this was all that materialized. Nevertheless, in 1926, having accepted Rocco’s program of reform, Mussolini launched the famous slogan: “Everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.” Mussolini was mainly concerned with the second goal—eliminating the enemies of his regime and neutralizing those forces, especially the

monarchy and the church, that he could not eliminate. Rocco’s ideal

society was to be run by the grands commis de l'état and the progressive captains of industry, with Auguste Comte’s primacy of the social organism

as the new principle of legitimacy.5® Thus, despite Mussolini slogan, Rocco’s conception of the state was reactionary rather than totalitarian, authoritarian rather than demagogic. As we shall see in succeeding chapters, Rocco’s economic goal of a corporate state merely continued the practices established in the 1926 laws disciplining labor without controlling management; it was his political goal that made him the “official theorist” of Mussolini’s variety of Fascism. The exceptional laws devised by Rocco in 1926 reinforced the Duce’s dictatorial powers by allowing him to legislate by decree, by outlawing all other political

parties, by eliminating the possibility of subversion, by “demoting” the Fascist party from an autonomous “private” organization to a propaganda agency of the government, and by making the Fascist Grand Council Mus-

solini’s “general staff.” Even the government itself was reduced to the status of a merely consultative and executive organ without joint responsibility for decisions taken by its head. The law of December 9, 1928, defined the organization and powers of the Grand Council and made it the highest deliberative organ of the regime. Not only was its approval neces-

sary for all further constitutional changes; it also prepared the lists of deputies to be elected and union leaders to be appointed and was even empowered to rule on the succession to the throne and to choose Mussolini’s eventual successor.

As the regime entrenched itself, a number of anti-Fascist politicians and intellectuals went into exile—the celebrated fuorusciti. Francesco

53

The FASCIST Experience

Saverio Nitti set the pattern by going first to Switzerland in June, 1924, and then settling in Paris at the end of 1925. During this period two outstanding leaders of the Popolari also emigrated, Don Luigi Sturzo to London and Giuseppe Donati to Paris. The historian Gaetano Salvemini, harassed by the police and some of his own students at the University of Florence,

went to Paris in 1925 and later to Harvard. Piero Gobetti, the brilliant young publisher of the suppressed Rivoluzione Liberale, in Turin, died a few weeks after his arrival in Paris in early 1926. The biggest wave of emi-

‘gration came in late 1926, in the wake of the exceptional laws. The most spectacular escape was that of Filippo Turati, who, though ailing, twice eluded the police network designed to catch him. Turati was soon followed to Paris by Pietro Nenni and other Socialist and leftwing political and labor leaders. Aside from these well-known figures, over ten thousand ordinary Italians emigrated during the 1920s because of their anti-Fascism. Some anti-Fascists who did not emigrate went underground beginning

in late 1926. As with the fuorusciti, these people included Communists (Palmiro Togliatti had moved to Paris before settling permanently in Moscow ), Socialists, Catholics, and leftwing liberals. The Communists alone maintained an active underground organization, led by Antonio Gramsci until his imprisonment in June, 1928. They continued to denounce all other anti-Fascists, particularly the Socialists, and to cultivate the impression, confirmed by the government, the police, and the press, that they were the only anti-Fascists left in Italy. This impression was mistaken; the total number of non-Communist anti-Fascists exceeded that of the Communists. Yet all of them together comprised a small minority of the total population.

The Fascist revolution began as an alternative to a Bolshevik revolution and ended as a counterrevolution. From 1919 to 1925 the majority of the black shirts were alienated young men, a self-styled “lost generation,”

determined to overthrow the liberal establishment by violent means and restore a “sick society” to health. In their struggle to destroy the liberal political regime, Mussolini and the Fascists had made the reactionaries their main allies and the Reds their main rivals. But in making this alliance

Mussolini wittingly, and many other Fascists unwittingly, had brought about the counterrevolution desired by the big landowners and businessmen,

along with the monarchy, the military, and some of the higher civil servants; the church also preferred Mussolini to the liberal politicians, as we shall see in Chapter 7. The main purpose of this counterrevolution was to “demobilize” the urban and rural workers, many of whom were being “mobilized” for the first time in modern forms of political, social, and eco-

nomic participation after having been mobilized in the more traditional sense as part of the armed forces during the war. Thus, the basic raison détre of the new regime was to consolidate a state of affairs considered capable of enforcing indefinitely both lower-class “demobilization” and a moratorium on all those aspects of modernization that might threaten the interests of the alliance, “even at the cost of prolonged economic and social stagnation.’©° In order to placate the middle classes who also opposed the

34

The Fascist Revolution

“mobilization” of the lower classes but not other aspects of modernization, substitute satisfactions were provided in the form of stability and national prestige. In 1926 the majority of Italians accepted the Fascist regime as legitimate, and its air of legitimacy convinced a number of its former opponents to work with it. Some liberal intellectuals salved their own consciences by arguing that the king would have acted illegally if he had dismissed Mussolini after the Matteotti murder, while the king salved his by invoking the

conservative bogey of anarchy as the only alternative. Once Mussolini reasserted his power in January, 1925, both the army and the police became his loyal servants, as did the civil service and the courts. The Fascist party itself was relieved of most of its would-be revolutionary elements and incor-

porated into the constitutional structure of the regime; the Fascist labor unions still retained a modicum of militancy, but they were fighting a losing battle against the combined opposition of the government and the Confindustria. Slowly but surely Mussolini the Fascist was becoming Mussolini the Duce, a national rather than a party chief. This change also added to the regime’s air of legitimacy. Talk of a Fascist revolution was restricted

to party periodicals and handbooks; those aspects of the regime which people accepted as legitimate were frankly counterrevolutionary.

NOTES 1. At the first Congress of the Fasci, held on October 10, 1919, at Florence, Mussolini advocated: a) an eight-hour day, b) a minimum wage, c) participation by workers’ representatives in the technical functioning of industry, d) entrusting to the proletariat’s own organizations the running of enterprises unable to run themselves, e) reorganization of the transport industry and its workers, f) improvements in sickness and old-age insurance, g) the obligation of landowners to cultivate their fields, h) uncultivated fields should be turned over to peasants’ cooperatives, with special consideration for those composed of veterans of the trenches. Cited in Edoardo Malusardi, Elementi di storia del sindacalismo fascista, 3rd ed. (Lanciano: Carabba, 1938), pp. 25-26.

2. In Opera Omnia, ed. Edoardo and Dulio Susmel, 35 vols. (Florence: La

Fenice, 1951-1963 ), 15, 261.

3. One particularly murderous example of such violence occurred at Sarzana (just south of La Spezia) on July 21; contrary to the usual outcome, in this case the raid by five or six hundred squadristi was turned back by a force of local workers and arditi del popolo, leaving 18 Fascists dead. 4. Giacomo Acerbo, one of the leading Fascist deputies in parliament, indicated this possibility in an interview published in Il Giornale d'Italia on August 29 and reprinted in Il Popolo d'Italia on August 30.

5. The degree to which big business supported the Fascists in I92I-—1922 is still a matter of controversy. See Roland Sarti, “Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy before the March on Rome,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 21, no. 3

(April, 1968); Piero Melograni, “Confindustria e fascismo tra il 1919 e il 1925,” Nuovo osservatore, nos. 44—45 (November—December 1965); Renzo De Felice, “Primi

elementi sul finanziamento del fascismo dalle origini al 1924,” Rivista storica del socialismo, 7 (May—August 1964); Ernesto Rossi, I padroni del vapore (Bari: Laterza,

35

The FASCIST Experience 1966); Felice Guarnieri, Battaglie economiche tra le due grandi guerre, 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1953); Angelo Tasca, Nascita e avvento del fascismo. L’Italia dal 1918 al 1922 (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1963). 6. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, I, La conquista del potere, 192I~1925 (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), p. 170. 7. For the flavor of the “Fascist Revolution” see Pietro Gorgolini, Il fascismo nella vita italiana (Turin: Silvestrelli e Cappelletto, 1921), which expresses the militantly antibourgeois stance of early Fascism; Giuseppe Bastianini, Rivoluzione (Rome: B. Berlutti, 1923), which takes a more conservative line; Alceste De Ambris, “L’évolution du fascisme,” Mercure de France, 162, no. 2 (15 February 1923), by a disillusioned revolutionary syndicalist supporter of the early Fascists; and Pietro Nenni, Storia di quattro anni (Rome: Einaudi, 1946) and idem, Pagine di diario (Milan: Garzanti, 1947), by a revolutionary socialist.

8. See Massimo Rocca (Libero Tancredi), Come il fascismo divenne una dittatura (Milan: Edizione Librerie Italiane, 1952), pp. 88-89, who says that the party directorate (Mussolini, Roberto Farinacci, Michele Bianchi, and himself) refused the request of the agricultural employers’ association that the Fascists limit them-

selves to organizing the workers and not interfere with the employers; see also

Giovanni Pesce, La marcia dei rurali. Storia dell’organizzazione sindacale fascista degli agricoltori (Rome: Casa Editrice Pinciana, 1929), pp. 156-157, who says that the purpose of the Fascist farm workers’ union was to counter and destroy the old Confederazione Generale dell’Agricoltura, which was too conservative and passive. g. Italo Balbo, Diario, 1922 (Milan: Mondadori, 1932), p. Goff. to. Arrigo Cervetto, “Dopoguerra rosso e avvento del fascismo a Savona,” Rivista storica del socialismo, I (1958), 519-520.

11. This generalization is borne out by the reports of the prefects and by a growing number of local and regional studies. In addition to ibid., see Luigi Abrizzani, “L’avvento del fascismo nel Bolognese,” Movimento operaio e socialista, 10 (April— June, July-December 1964), 83-102, 253-276; Antonio Bernieri, “Il fascismo a Carrara tra il 1919 e il 1931,” ibid., (January—March, April—~June 1964), 39-55, 105-19; Secondo Ramella, L’azione sindacale nell’agro novarese dal 1918 al 1925: Socialisti e fascisti a confronto (Novara: Tip. P. Riva, 1962); Mario Vaini, Le origini del fascismo a Mantova, 1914-1922 (Rome: Riuniti, 1961); Gino Bianco, “L’avvento del fascimo a

Sestri Ponente (I92I—1922),” Movimento operaio e socialista, 8 (1962): 189-203. Claudio Silvestri, Storia del fascio di Trieste dalle origini alla conquista del potere and Mario Fabbro, Le origini del fascismo in Friuli (both published by the Libreria Internazionale “Italo Svevo” di Trieste, 1969). In the south and in Sicily and Sardinia there were fewer Fascists than in the north, and their main rivals were often the Nationalists; see Luigi Nieddu, Origini del fascismo in Sardegna (Cagliari: Fossataro, 1964); Salvatore Sechi, Dopoguerra e fascismo in Sardegna. Il movimento autonomistico nella crisi dello Stato liberale 1918-1926 (Turin: Einaudi, 1970); Simona Colarizi, Dopoguerra e fascismo in Puglia (1919-1925) (Bari: Laterza, 1971). The situation in Naples, however, tended to resemble that of the northern industrial cities; see Raffaele Colapietra, Napoli tra dopoguerra e fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1962). 12. Il Popolo d'Italia, August 1, 1922. 13. Arrigo Cervetto, loc. cit., 561.

14. See Lusignoli to Taddei, 3 August 1922, no. 6613, Ministero dell’Interno, Gabinetto, ufficio cifra, telegrammi in arrivo (1922), Archivio Centrale dello Stato. All the government and party documents cited hereafter are in this archivio. 15. See, for example, the report of May 27, 1921 from Camillo Corradini, undersecretary of state for the ministry of the interior, to Giulio Rodino, the minister of war,

on the attitude of the army toward the Fascists in Tuscany; cited in De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, I, 733-735.

16. In addition to the general’s own memoirs—lIo difendo Vesercito (Naples: Rispoli, 1946)—see M. Michaelis, “Il generale Pugliese e la difesa di Roma,” La Rassegna di Israele, June—July 1962, p. 271. There is also a record of the plan for stopping Fascist moves toward the capital: “Zone di sbarramento per impedire incursioni di fascisti,’’ Ministero dell’Interno, Direzione generale, Pubblica Sicurezza (1914-1926),

56

The Fascist Revolution Divisione affari generali e riservati [hereafter called simply P.S. (1914—1926)], busta 61, “Fasci Combattimento—Affari generali.”

17. Giorgio Rochat, L’esercito italiano da Vittorio Veneto a Mussolini, 1919—1925 (Bari: Laterza, 1967), p. 407. 18. The various organizations of D’Annunzio’s ex-legionnaires and their rivalries with the Fascists are discussed in Cordova, op. cit. 19. De Felice, op. cit., p. 345. The most detailed account of the March on Rome is Antonino Repaci, La marcia su Roma. Mito e realta, 2 vols. (Rome: Canesi, 1963). 20. Melograni, loc. cit., 844-45. 21. Rocca, op. cit., p. 127. 22. Ibid., p. 161-62.

23. Alberto Aquarone, “La Milizia volontaria nello Stato fascista,” La Cultura, 2,no. 3 (May 1964): 266. 24. See P.S. (1914-1926), busta 86, “Fascisti dissidenti,” for telegrams from the prefects of all these provinces describing these events. 25. The speeches and declarations made by Farinacci when he was party secretary have been published in Roberto Farinacci, Un periodo aureo del Partito Nazionale Fascista. Raccolta di discorsi e dichiarazioni, ed. Renzo Bacchetta (Foligno: Franco Campitelli, 1927). See also Harry Fornari, Mussolini’s Gadfly: Roberto Farinacci (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971). 26. De Felice, op. cit., p. 457.

27. Reprinted in Benedetto Croce, Pagine sparse, 1st ed. (Naples: Ricciardi, 1943), 2, pp. 371ff.

28. These allies included Orlando and Salandra, Stefano Cavazzoni from the rightwing Catholic camp, and representatives of big business like Antonio Stefano Benni (president of Confindustria), Gino Olivetti (secretary general of Confindustria), and Giacinto Motta (a high official in the Edison Corporation). 29. Particularly noteworthy in this connection is the record of the CGL national

convention on August 23-25, 1923 at Milan (cited in Melograni, loc. cit., 850), in which Ludovico D’Aragona welcomed such collaboration, as long as the CGL representatives in the government “did not forget their own past and continued their work in defense of the proletariat.” 30. Ettore Conti, Dal taccuino di un borghese (Milan: Garzanti, 1946), p. 322. 31. Filippo Turati-Anna Kuliscioff, Carteggio, ed., Alessandro Schiavi, vol. 6, I! delitto Matteotti e ’Aventino, 1923-1925 (Turin: Einaudi, 1959), pp. 219ff. 32. There is no evidence that Farinacci himself was involved in the movement

led by the militia consuls, but a number of his followers knew of it and tried to exploit it. See Adrian Lyttleton, “Fascism in Italy: The Second Wave,” Journal of

Contemporary History, 1, no. I 1966: 95. 33. Some observers see this aspect of Fascism, especially in the beginning, rather as a Marxist heresy. See Giovan Battista Chiesa, “Il ‘patto col diavolo’ di Alfredo Rocco,” Rivista trimestrale, 4 (March—-June 1965): 178-200; and Augusto Del Noce, “Idee per l’interpretazione del fascismo,” in Costanzo Casucci, Il fascismo: Antologia di scritti critici, pp. 370-383.

34. Edmondo Rossoni, Le idee della ricostruzione: Discorsi sul sindacalismo

fascista (Florence: Bemporad, 1923), p. 31. 35. Meeting of December 5, 1925, Atti del Parlamento italiano, Camera, Legislatura XXVII, Sessione 1924-25, Discussioni, 5, 4849-51. 36. Rocca, op. cit., p. 144. 37. Malusardi, op. cit., p. 45. 38. Pesce, op. cit., p. 115. 39. Ibid., p. 157. 40. Rocca, op. cit., p. 84. 41. Rossoni, résumé of the meeting of the directorate of the Confederazione delle Corporazioni Fascisti, December 30-31, 1924, Partito Nazionale Fascista, Segretario Particolare del Duce, Carteggio Riservato (hereafter referred to as Seg. Part. del Duce), W/R, sottofascicolo 3. 42. See also Rossoni’s lead editorial in La Stirpe, 3 (January 1925), where he too

57

The FASCIST Experience

insisted that syndicalism was an integral part of the Fascist revolution and essential

for the realization of that revolution. 43. Rossoni’s position at this time was confirmed to me by Riccardo Del Giudice in a personal interview on November 10, 1967. Del Giudice was active in the Fascist labor movement throughout its history and was the head of the national Confederation of Commercial Employees from 1933 to 1939. He remained on friendly terms with Ros-

soni until the latter’s death in 1965 and is a professor of labor law at the University of Rome. According to him, until 1926 Rossoni believed in a rather nebulous syndicalist corporatism in which unions of workers and unions of employers working together would give Italy a new spirit. Rossoni wanted the labor movement to be autonomous from the party at the local level, with himself as the link between the two at the national] level. 44. Cited in Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia XXI, 250-251. 45. See excerpts from the April 25, 1925, resolution of the Fascist Grand Council

(cited in Malusardi, pp. 90-94) and from the meeting of the National Council of the Confederation of Fascist Syndicalist Corporations of April 27 (ibid., pp. 94-96). 46. These two documents may be found in Alberto Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario pp. 442-451, 477-481, and in S. William Halperin, Mussolini and Italian Fascism (Princeton, N.J.: Van Nostrand-Anvil, 1964), pp. 117-121 and 129-133. In essence these laws brought all aspects of the labor movement under strict state control, set forth a number of workers’ rights—such as paid vacations, terminal leave payments, and various kinds of insurance—but specifically prohibited the right to strike. 47. Gino Giugni, “Esperienze corporative e post-corporative nei rapporti collettivi

di lavoro in Italia,’ Il Mulino, 5, nos. 1-2 (January-February 1956): 5.

48. See Gino Castagno, Bruno Buozzi (Milan-Rome: Edizioni Avanti, 1955). 49. See the article by Agostino Lanzillo, “La lettera degli organizzatori. Sintomi.” La Provincia di Como, 6 February, 1927 (in Seg. Part. del Duce, W/R Lanzillo Agostino ).

50. Cited in Aquarone, op. cit., pp. 418-420. 51. Cited in ibid., pp. 393-394.

52. Letters from the prefect of Genoa, 25 February, 6 April, and 5 November, 1925; 4 February and 5 March, 1931; and 4 May, 1933; P.S. (1910-1934), Serie Cl, Associazioni, busta 21, Genova.

53. See Hans Mommsen, Beamtentum im Dritten Reich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags—Anstalt, 1966).

54. Cited in Rocca, op. cit., p. 122. 55. Telegram from Prefect Arturo Bocchini, May 21, 1925, P.S. (1914-1926) busta 86, Fascisti dissidenti, fascicolo Bologna. This was the Bocchini who was soon to become the national chief of police.

56. This brief biography of Ricci is culled from police reports dated January

1929, 4 February, 1935, and 16 March, 1938—all in Seg. Part. del Duce, 242/R, Renato Ricci, sottofasc. 3. Additional information on his activities during the 1920’s may be found in Antonio Bernieri, “Il fascismo a Carrara tra il 1919 e il 1931,” Movimento

operaio e socialista, 10, nos. 1 (January-March 1964) and 2 (April-June 1964): 39-55, IO5-I1g. 57. Enrico Caviglia, Diario (Rome: G. Casini, 1952), p. 18. 58. Rochat, op. cit., pp. 408-409. On Mussolini’s foreign policy in the 1920’s see Alan Cassels, Mussolini’s Early Diplomacy (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton University Press, 1970) and Giorgio Rumi, Alle origini della politica estera fascista, 1918-1923 (Bari: Laterza, 1968). 59. Paolo Ungari, Alfredo Rocco e Videologia giuridica del fascismo (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1963), p. 32. 60. Gino Germani, “Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Regimes: Italy and Spain,” revised text of a paper delivered at the Symposium on Single-party Systems, Jenner, California, 5-7 April, 1968, p. 3.

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3 The Life of the Party

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, EGINNING in the late 1920s the

Fascist party became a servant of the state rather than its ruler; as this happened, it changed both its character and its composition. The more that

membership in the party came to be a badge of acceptability, the less it entailed any commitment to change Italian society. This was particularly true among the state’s highest administrative and judicial officials, many of whom tended to view Fascism as merely an ideological fagade for the preservation of the old order, now freed from meddlesome politicians. On the other hand, the gerarchi—party officials at the national and local levels —became increasingly preoccupied with rhetoric and ritual as the possibility of their seizing the main levers of power receded. Achille Starace, the

national party secretary during most of the 1930s, tried to impose the Fascist style of behavior on the whole country; in doing so, he became a caricature of what Max Weber once called the “routinization of charisma.” The Duce himself remained outside of the vast party bureaucracy and its

internecine conflicts; he used it to implement many of his policies but ignored it in deciding what these policies should be. Yet the party had a life of its own, the most direct and intense manifestation of the Fascist

experience. ,

Within a few months after his dismissal as party secretary on March 30, 1926, Roberto Farinacci accused his successor, Augusto Turati, of turning the party into “an athletic and leisure-time organization” and of depriving it of “any revolutionary dynamism.” He was right: according to Mussolini, “the trouble is, the revolution having been made, the revolution-

aries remain.” The Duce wanted Turati to eliminate all “personal” and “provincial” positions and give the party a centralized, authoritarian organization; to incorporate the party into the regime as its instrument; and to serve as a reservoir of loyal Fascists for service in the state.t In addition

to forming a new ruling class, Turati wanted the party to integrate the working classes into the regime, both through the Fascist unions and the

Dopolavoro. :

Turati’s personal loyalty to Mussolini did not prevent him from interpreting the slogan “all power to Fascism” in the old squadristi sense of putting dedicated black shirts into top positions of power in the nation, but 61

The FASCIST Experience

this kind of Fascistization never took place for several reasons.” First of all, unlike the Bolsheviks, the Fascists had come to power not by making a real revolution but through a compromise with the leaders of the existing establishment. Although they held the premiership and a number of cabinet posts, they could not displace most of the leaders of the army, the civil service, and the courts—not to mention the monarchy and the church. Secondly, the fact that many high administrative and judicial officials joined the party made it more difficult than ever to dislodge them. Thirdly, even

in those places where the Fascists could have put their own men the Old Guard had not only been deprived of some of its best elements through purging or taming, but its remaining members also lacked the technical competence to compete with new converts from the old order. Finally, even though it proclaimed itself revolutionary and substantially altered the old

governmental and legal structures, the Fascist regime was never able to ignore completely the privileges of certain categories of people—e.g., university professors until 1931, the clergy and the military at all times. All the evidence leads us to believe that Mussolini himself wanted the Fascist party depoliticized and all power concentrated in his hands as the Duce of the Italian people. One obvious sign was the fact that, in addition to holding the premiership, he headed eight ministries, including foreign affairs, colonies, the three armed forces, and corporations until September, 1929, and again sporadically in the early and mid 1930s; he was also the nominal minister of the interior during much of the dictatorship. Another sign was his insistence on making all major policy decisions—such as the “Conciliation” with the Vatican, the Ethiopian War, and Italy's entry into

the Second World War—without consulting the Fascist Grand Council, despite its supposed status as the highest deliberative body in the land. More specifically, the party constitution of December 14, 1929, spoke of the “conscious and definitive subordination of the Party to the State, both at the center and at the periphery” and decreed that all the national party officials and provincial secretaries be appointed by the head of the government, thus eliminating all remnants of democratic control within the party.

The fact that this new party constitution itself had to be approved by a royal decree initiated by the premier made it clear that the party was now an institution of the state rather than an independent political force. And increasingly the state came to mean Mussolini’s regime. Indeed, his unwill-

ingness to provide for his succession not only confirmed his own lack of confidence in any other man or group of men but it also made many leading Fascists doubt the durability of the regime without Mussolini as Duce. During the late 1920s Mussolini removed the remaining “revolutionary” elements from both his party and his regime. The breaking up of Rossoni’s National Confederation of Fascist Unions and the replacement of most top union leaders with bureaucrats effectively silenced the syndicalists. In a letter to Mussolini on January 1, 1930, even Turati complained that the minister of corporations and his growing bureaucracy were stifling the unions and recommended restoring the authority of the local party secretaries in union matters.’ (We have seen how, in that role, he had led a strike by Fascist unions in March, 1925.) But it was the powers of these

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The Life of the Party

secretaries, particularly those who still behaved like ras, that Mussolini insisted on curbing.

Ironically, it was the secretary in Milan, the birthplace of Fascism, that gave Mussolini the most trouble. There the ex-squadrista Mario Giampaoli continued to run the party as if the “Revolution” of 1922 were still going on. In October, 1927, Mussolini told the prefect to call Giampaoli on the carpet and ask him about an incident in the neighboring province of Bergamo, where several Milanese Fascists had allegedly mistreated a hotel-

keeper and sung rowdy songs while in the party uniform. Giampaoli ignored all efforts to discipline him, and in December, 1928, he was replaced by Achille Starace, a longtime vice-secretary of the national party, who fired a number of local leaders, seized stocks of weapons, and brought

Milanese Fascism temporarily back into line.5 But the new secretary, Franco Cottini, proved to be just as unregenerate a squadrista as Giampaoli and inept as well. For example, when Mussolini visited Milan in 1930, Cot-

tini charged that the police could not provide adequate security and insisted that the local black shirts protect him. Because of their prominence and their earlier services to the party, Giampaoli and Cottini were treated rather well after their expulsion: on Mussolini’s recommendation Giampaoli was made the representative of the Shell Oil Company in the south, and Cottini was given an administrative post in the Ernesto Breda works (manufacturers of heavy machinery) in Milan.® Other ex-squadristi were less fortunate. Many of them held low-level

jobs during the 1930s and occasionally protested their lot publicly. Those who did so too flagrantly, like praising early squadrism in graffiti or jeering the gerarchi, were given short jail sentences by the civil courts.’ But they were never “liquidated” the way the old Nazis and old Bolsheviks were in Germany and the Soviet Union. Not only the leadership but also the membership of the party became more respectable and conformist during the late 1920s. In fact, the social composition of the rank-and-file changed a good deal more than that of the gerarchi. As we have seen, the typical Fascist during the early 1920s was someone who had either not yet made a place for himself—a student or a young war-veteran—or whose socioeconomic status was on the borderline between the lower-middle and upper-lower class. By 1927, with further recruitment temporarily halted, perhaps 75 percent of the members were middle-class or lower-middle-class, particularly white-collar employees,® and

the average age was over thirty. Naturally those members of the Old Guard who remained resented these opportunistic late joiners, and even Mussolini himself felt that the less desirable ones should eventually be booted out. Nevertheless, he welcomed the broader base the new membership gave to his regime as well as the less militant tone it gave to the party itself. The more it was depoliticized, the more visible and (one is tempted to add) “audible” the party became; it was this visibility and “audibility” that made most Italians and foreigners think of it as all-powerful, whereas its main functions were extrapolitical. The most obvious of these functions was propaganda: as early as 1926-1927 all party organs, including the Popolo

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The FASCIST Experience

d'Italia, now run by the dictator’s brother, Arnaldo, were championing Mussolini’s economic policies such as the revaluation of the lira (see Chap-

ter 4), the necessity for wage reductions, and the Charter of Labor. The party also ran the regime’s nongovernmental agencies, particularly the Dopolavoro and the youth organizations; the Balilla, under Ricci, was an adjunct of the state, not the party, until November, 1937, but, in 1931, the. party was given its own youth group for eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds, the Fasci Giovanili di Combattimento, from which to recruit future members and leaders. All these changes in the Fascist party fitted in with Mussolini’s conception of his personal dictatorship.® There was to be no opposition of any kind, of course, and the ministry of the interior would see to that through its control of the prefects and the police; in late 1927, under the guiding hand of Bocchini, not only was a new political police force, the OVRA, created, but the whole national police organization was reinforced, modernized, and made to operate with calculated efficiency, without unnecessary brutality or personal vindictiveness. On the more positive side, the authority and the public image of the Duce would embody the highest potential of the Italian people and lead them to new heights. The function of the party

was to nurture this conception of the Duce and his regime, particularly among the younger generations, which when properly indoctrinated would provide continuing support for him and it. Finally, Mussolini wanted his regime to rest on as broad a consensus of the entire population as possible. In 1929, in addition to having created political and economic stability and given his party a mass base, Mussolini broadened his consensus with the Lateran Accords on February 11 and a “plebiscite” on March 24. The Lateran Accords and their longterm effects on Catholic life in Italy will be discussed in Chapter 7; here we are concerned only with their immediate effects on the regime. In return for sovereignty over Vatican City, a financial settlement, and increased influence in public life—particularly the schools—the church gave its blessing to the Fascist regime. Not only were all Italian Catholics now free to support it openly, but the signing of the Lateran Accords also reinforced the “national”—that is, moderate and tradi-

tional—aspect of the regime. Soon thereafter the entire electorate was called out for its support. Technically the Italian voters went to the polls on March 24 to “elect” a one-party slate to the Chamber of Deputies, but

it was a true plebiscite in the sense that it was a vote of approval for Mussolini’s policies, Fascism, and the regime itself. The fact that almost go percent of the electorate voted merely indicated that few people were willing to reveal themselves as anti-Fascists by openly abstaining. What is crucial is the fact that 8,519,559 voted “Si” and only 135,761 voted “No,” in a period of calm and without any massive forms of coercion. Between October 8, 1930, and December 7, 1931, the new party secretary, Giovanni Giurati, completed the purge of opportunists and extremists, thus giving the impression that the party had become completely bureaucratized. Bottai’s influential fortnightly review Critica Fascista entitled its

lead editorial for September 15, 1931, “The Party is Not Outmoded.”!° The very title reflected a real fear that the actual disbanding of the party

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The Life of the Party

was being seriously considered. In its December 15, 1931, issue Critica Fascista greeted the appointment of Starace as Giurati’s replacement with a plea for the party to challenge the nation’s youth and to reach the common people. Throughout 1932 the review periodically stressed the necessity for the party to create a competent, up-to-date elite. But this possibility receded rapidly as party membership, previously restricted, was now opened indiscriminately to almost anyone who wanted it. Meanwhile, Starace be-

came the symbol of the depoliticization of the party and the reduction of its role to primarily that of “choreographer” of the regime, with himself as the “high priest of the cult of the Duce.”!! Almost all observers agree’? that the year 1932 was the turning point

away from any basic reform and toward bureaucratization of the Fascist regime. The “changing of the guard” in the national party leadership was followed by a similar change in the government in July, 1932, when most of Mussolini's ablest collaborators were dismissed, including Rocco as minister of justice, Grandi as minister of foreign affairs, Balbino Giuliano as minister of education, and Bottai as minister of corporations. Thereafter the leading government ministers were mainly party hacks, although Bottai returned to office as minister of education in 1936. In 1932 the “Fascist Revolution” was merely history and was enshrined in a public exhibition (Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista) on the Via Nazionale in Rome. This exhibition depicted the events of 1919-1922, stressing the activities leading up to the March on Rome and thus making it perfectly clear that the revolution had been purely political.!® The squadristi heroes of this revolution were canonized as the Old Guard (Vecchia Guardia), again em-

phasizing their place in the past rather than in the present. (Alessandro Blasetti’s film Vecchia Guardia, released in 1934, was the best artistic effort to glorify squadrism as a historical phenomenon. See p. 232.) Anyone looking for evidence of Fascism as a “continuing revolution” did not find it in the 1932 exhibition or in any other feature of Italian public life.

From 1932 on, the cult of the Duce—always printed in block letters

as DUCE—became the overriding feature of Italian Fascism, surpassing | even the cult of Fihrer in Nazi Germany in its importance to the regime. Here was the charismatic leader par excellence, now portrayed in profile in a steel helmet, in order to emphasize his manly jaw and his warlike demeanor and to hide his baldness. Far more than any European dictator of his time, Mussolini was also a sex symbol to millions of women of all ages; it was probably to enhance this image, rather than his military or athletic prowess, that he was so often photographed on horseback. He saw to it that he personally was given credit for any and every benefit attributable to his regime—from (yes!) making the trains run on time to ridding a farming region of snakes, as well, of course, as raising Italy’s international prestige. The most blatant and definitive expression of his charisma—in the original Greek meaning of “magic power”—was the slogan, emblazoned on public buildings throughout the land: “Mussolini is always right.” In a sense, to paraphrase Keats, that was all Italians knew or needed to know. For all his charisma, however, Mussolini was not a great leader of men. This defect could be blamed on the fact that, coming from a small-town,

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The FASCIST Experience

petty-bourgeois background—especially in Italy—he lacked confidence in other people’s loyalty and willingness to follow his orders, that such confidence is restricted to self-conscious elites and proletariats. But Hitler came

from a similar backround, albeit Austrian, and he had an uncanny skill and self-assurance in dealing with people of all classes as well as a greater willingness to delegate authority to competent subalterns. Perhaps Italians are simply more cynical than Germans. Perhaps Mussolini was taken in by the myth of his own infallibility; he certainly trusted his own “animal instinct” above all else.!* Yet he could not reconcile his mania for making

all political decisions himself with his growing indulgence toward the proliferation of rival administrative structures. The party, however, was never able, in Weberian langauge, to bureaucratize the charisma of the Duce. One of his most astute colleagues compared him to “an electric power

station that illuminated one small lamp bulb .. . an energy that dispersed itself and evaporated for want of collecting centers, of links that might

articulate it.”

On the local level the influence of the party and the quality of its leadership varied considerably from region to region. In the south there was virtually none of the revolutionary fervor of the syndicalists and squadristi elsewhere.'* Aside from Starace himself, who

left his native Apulia soon after the March on Rome, the outstanding Fascist “revolutionary” in the south was Aurelio Padovani in Naples.'” Mussolini got rid of him in May, 1923, in order to placate the city’s leading businessmen, but the Fascist party in Naples never produced another leader of comparable force. In the provinces of Apulia, Basilicata, and Calabria, the local Fascist leaders tended to be the lieutenants and “ward heelers” of the former political leaders and deputies—unemployed lawyers, semiliterate farmers, and lordlings of the town squares.!® Unlike certain parts

of the north—particularly Tuscany and Milan—in the south neither the noblemen nor the middle classes were much interested in Fascism. In Sicily and Sardinia, which were economically, socially, and culturally extensions of the south, the Fascist party and its auxiliary organizations had very little influence outside of the larger cities. Sicilians working in Rome during the 1930s smiled when the government announced that the Mafia had been destroyed and that the habitual delinquency of many parts of their island was about to disappear;'® one did not give such people a civic culture in one or two decades.

In general it may be said that on the strictly local level the Fascist party gained the most influence in those places where the municipal civic

culture was weakest. The outstanding exception was the city of Rome itself, whose forceful communal administration was replaced by a governor in October, 1925. In a series of decree-laws?° between February, 1926, and October, 1927, Mussolini's government replaced the elected mayors and communal councils in all towns with a podesta and municipal committee appointed by the prefect. Often the podesta himself was appointed from outside the commune as a way of superseding old divisions among local

parties and families*! and assuring control by dedicated Fascists. This

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The Life of the Party

procedure was less necessary in the south than in those northern and central towns with a strong municipal tradition. In Turin, even with the municipal administration in Fascist hands, the local party was weak and ineffective in promoting the national policies of the regime in this least Fascist of Italy’s major cities.2? Furthermore, in the largest cities it was not possible to replace the whole municipal bureaucracy, which, like the lower echelons of the national bureaucracy, retained much of its pre-Fascist out-

look. This was particularly the case in Milan,?* where the party, on the other hand, was strong. The municipal reform was more effective in weakening pre-Fascist forces than in spreading Fascist influence, which was the job of the party anyway. In keeping with the ideals of the corporative state, representation on the new municipal committees was to be by economic category rather than by head, so that in the larger industrial towns the employers had

one third of the seats, professional men one third, and workers one third. Thus, not only were the old political leaders eliminated, but the

workers lost most of their former influence on the old communal councils,

where they had often held a majority of the seats through democratic elections. Even more than in the party, the appointed municipal governments in the north were composed primarily of middle-class and upperclass people, and in the south they were primarily lower-middle-class.

Whereas in the smaller communes, particularly in the south, there was often close cooperation between party and government officials, in ~ each of Italy’s ninety-four provinces the federale (provincial party secre-

tary) had to demur to the prefect in any open struggle for power. Mussolini had decreed in his January 5, 1927, circular to the prefects that: The prefect . . . is the highest authority of the State in the province. He is the direct representative of the central executive power. All citizens, and first of all those who have the great privilege and highest honor of being militant Fascists, owe respect and obedience to the highest political representative of the Fascist regime and must collaborate with him in a subordinate way in order to help him fulfill his duties as easily as possible.**

Nowhere was the subordination of the party to the state made clearer than in this all-important document, and nowhere was the difference clearer than between party leaders and high government officials who were nominally party members.

Throughout the 1930s individual federali tried unsuccessfully to reassert their power in the face of the prefects. In 1931 the federale of the province of Milan complained bitterly to his own lieutenants about the

national police for believing the reports of informers about him, but he gradually had to bow to the authority of the prefect.2* One area where the two leaders sometimes clashed during the early 1930s was aid to the unemployed and the needy. In early 1932 the federale of the province of Piacenza openly flouted the prefect’s order not to take certain measures in this regard and was eventually removed from his post, but by the end of the year his successor, urged on by other party leaders, was campaigning

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The FASCIST Experience

to have the prefect transferred.2* More often the conflict between the federale and the prefect was over strictly political decisions regarding personnel or policies, with each leader being backed by a particular faction within the Fascist party itself, as in Matera and Siracusa.?’ In Nuoro in 1937, the excessive zeal of the federale in humiliating a number of suspected anti-Fascists backfired, and several hundred citizens of the town demonstrated in favor of the prefect, who had opposed this action.”® Back in Piacenza in 1938, the federale openly challenged the authority of the prefect and accused him of publicly making “pessimistic statements”

about Fascism.2® At Taranto the federale was angry at the prefect because of his close association with the colonel in charge of the local Carabinieri (the two friends were probably both northerners commiserating

over their “exile” in this Godforsaken southern town) and accused him of being too much under their influence.®° In all parts of Italy the typical gerarca, from the federale on down, was

a man who had suffered the frustrations of powerlessness under the liberal regime. The squadristi “Revolution” had transformed him from a petty bully over other powerless people into a person of authority and prestige; even the riding boots he wore symbolized both his exaggerated masculinity and his aspirations toward aristocracy, the class that tradi-

tionally went about on horseback. In most towns and even in many neighborhoods of large cities the local gerarchi continued to be viewed as bullying upstarts (the Italian word prepotente—overbearing, bullying—

was used with greater frequency than ever before during the Fascist period) by their acquaintances who had known them before their rise to power. Understanding that this was how many people viewed them, many gerarchi flaunted their contempt for the values of the former local bigwigs—traditional learning, the social graces, family snobbery—in order to emphasize the new dispensation under which they now “rode high in the saddle.” In a country where “lording it over” one’s inferiors was almost a national vice, it is easy to understand the kind of meanness that crept into the manner of so many gerarchi now that they had a license to push other people around. Although the increase in total membership in the Fascist party from

slightly more than 1 million in October, 1932, to over 2.6 million in October, 1939, might seem to indicate its growing popularity among the masses, other factors add up to a different impression. First of all, the 1 million in October, 1932, was abnormally low owing to the restrictions on new members in preceding years. Secondly, the bulk of the increase came in 1934 and 1935 as a result of recent laws requiring all civil servants, including school teachers, to be party members. Thirdly, hardly any peasants—who constituted half of the total population—belonged to the party, and the percentage of urban workers who did was very small, so that the party was “popular” mainly with the middle and lower-middle classes. One reason for this social imbalance was the fact that membership

in the party and all of its subsidiary organizations required a fee, which many people found too high and which some simply could not pay at all. Indeed, in 1933 Mussolini personally ordered the ministry of the interior

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The Life of the Party

to tell Starace to stop the Genoa branch of the party from charging an additional fee for the application for membership, a practice that the Duce said was keeping some workers away.*! Finally, there was a considerable variation in the party’s size and strength from one region to

another. The party’s youth organizations, women’s groups, and the Dopolavoro will be discussed in Chapter 5; here we are concerned only with adult party

members (who, as in Nazi Germany, but unlike the Soviet Union, were all men) in certain typical provinces. In 1932 the national average for membership in what were still called Fasci di Combattimento was 2.4 percent (1 million out of 42 million); in 1940 it was 6 percent (2.6 million out of 44 million). In the province of Trent the figure for 1932 was 3.2 percent; for 1940, 7.5 percent.®2 In the province of Naples the corresponding figures were 2 percent and 4.1 percent; the further south one went from Naples, the lower the figures were.*? Whereas the figure for most cities in the north varied between 7 and 8 percent, even in 1940 it was less than 4.5 percent in recalcitrant Turin. With the exception of Turin one can say that party membership was highest in the richest and

most urbanized provinces and lowest in the poorest and most rural provinces. It was highest of all in the province of Rome—over 15 percent*4 —mainly because of the large number of government workers there. The growth in party membership during the 1930s did not bring new

blood into the leadership. Except for a minority of young men who rose from the Fasci Giovanili, control of the party at the local and national levels usually remained in the hands of gerarchi who had taken part in the “Revolution” and were now beginning to fight off middle age. Since there were few such people in the south, many of the gerarchi there had been sent down from Emilia or Tuscany and were viewed—like all northerners, no matter how well-meaning—as foreigners by the local party members. Even in the north the party leaders tended to become increasingly a class

apart from the rank-and-file, which included, in each district, a small segment of the Old Guard—ex-arditi, ex-squadristi, wounded and decorated

war veterans, all of whom remained aloof from the host of late joiners and retained a kind of arrogant “sour grapes” attitude toward the party hierarchy that honored them but at the same time ignored them. During the Starace era the local gerarchi tended to become carbon copies of the

apparently irreplaceable national secretary in their outward behavior; they could not all jump through flaming hoops or over automobiles on horseback, but they all could and did pay punctilious attention to rank and ritual. For ordinary Italians the most disturbing official at the local party headquarters was the fiduciario, who combined the roles of drill sergeant, deacon, and police inspector. Even most ordinary party members entered this headquarters, “as a Christian enters a mosque,”®> with wonder and trepidation toward a world they barely understood. At least once a year, however, every member had to see the fiduciario, if only to renew his party

, 69

card. After he had filled out the necessary forms he had to listen to the fiduciario rebuke him for his absences from party rallies and to swear to

The FASCIST Experience

serve the Duce with renewed zeal in the coming year. Even non—party members had to visit the fiduciario, sometimes merely to have their dossiers

brought up to date, sometimes to be disciplined for not supporting some current government campaign or merely for lack of patriotism. As with the police, the party meted out punishment appropriate to the social class of the accused: a brusque verbal warning for a bourgeois, a slap or a kick for a worker or peasant. The myth that sustained the professional Fascists during the 1930s was that of a “second Revolution,” of a “smoldering fire in the ashes” of the current atmosphere of tranquility and softness. (There was nothing comparable in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union; in the mid-1960s the “great proletarian cultural revolution” in China was launched ostensibly against the party bureaucracy, but Mussolini was no Mao Tse-tung.) The so-called Reform of Custom after 1937—abolition of the formal Lei in favor of voi, substitution of the Roman salute for the traditional handshake—was partly a tactic to “co-opt” the demands of young firebrands who took the myth too literally. As relayed to ordinary party members the myth entailed the possibility that the Duce might at any time call on all black shirts to march again and shed their blood for the cause. Meanwhile, the gerarchi expressed their “revolutionary” zeal in a group of slogans reflecting the outlook of the arditi, futurists, and Fiume legionnaires: Vivere non é€ necessario, ma € necessario navigare®® (“It is not necessary

to live, but it is necessary to plot a course and stick to it”); Ardisco non ordisco (“I dare, I don’t just arrange”); La guerra sta altuomo come la maternita alla donna (“War is to a man what childbearing is to a woman” ).

According to the myth, Fascism was a continuing revolt of idealistic young men who did not give a “damn” against a conventional and cowardly bourgeois establishment. As often occurs in such cases, the Freudian mechanism of projection

was at work in the party’ hostility toward anything bourgeois. One slogan announced that Fascists hated paperwork, yet in every party headquarters everyone was busy coping with a mountain of bureaucratic red tape. In the mid-1930s the party review Gerarchia published the following item: Those dandies in starched collars who get up at noon and flit from one café to another into the night have become rarer. . . . Italians under Fascism have an altogether different style: to rise at seven, to exert one’s self for hours on end skiing, to return home at sunset and, after having eaten, to retire into a corner and sing a simple refrain, with a good pipe in one’s mouth.®”

This grotesquely ironical attempt at populism (skiing was hardly a plebeian pastime ) not only showed a remarkable ignorance of how most middle-class

and upper-middle-class people spent their time (Mussolini himself was said to have shared this misconception ), but it also overlooked the frequent portrayal of society playboys in the movies—often by Vittorio De Sica—to say nothing of the elaborate wedding of Mussolini’s daughter to Galeazzo

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The Life of the Party

Ciano. Even as late as 1941 a party critic in Critica Fascista lamented the slowness with which the bourgeois life-style was giving way to Fascist

norms,®® yet the advertisements in this review pictured quite elegant bourgeois Italians sipping brandy and tasting fancy chocolates.

As the party become increasingly bureaucratized and preoccupied with ritual, the federali sent Starace elaborate monthly reports on all the activities they sponsored. They sometimes complained about sparse attendance at rallies of the Fascist Women and the Fascisti Giovanili,°° but they could always list impressive numbers for cultural events—mainly lectures on “political culture.*° Another favorite activity was “reaching

the workers,” through patriotic rallies! and even through lectures by university students.*? During the early 1930s the federali in Milan province

tried to win over the workers by holding large meetings to honor “oldtimers” and other “worthy” employees with diplomas and five-hundredlire prizes.*2 In Palermo the federali also took an interest in the mistreat-

ment of several thousand workers who were dislocated by an urban renewal project between 1934 and 1938.** In 1939, Starace in turn issued

an order to the federali to distribute one-thousand-lire prizes to party members who had taken part in the “Revolution,” saying that the ones that he and the other gerarchi were entitled to should be distributed to “squadristi burdened with large families.”4* Some ex-squadristi who were

no longer in the party protested so loudly in some places that it was forced to give some prizes to them as well.*

The activity that gave the party the most popularity at the local level was relief for the poor and unemployed during the depression years. Although the federali had to compete with various state officials in this realm, they were often successful in winning the allegiance of the poor people they helped. When this kind of relief was launched on a large scale

at the beginning of 1932 it was given much fanfare, and the federali everywhere stressed the fact that it came from the party itself. (It is also worth noting that the principal lay Catholic organization, Azione Cattolica, was much distressed over this “competition” in welfare work, considering it another blow to its activities. )4” Indeed, the distribution of flour, pasta, soup, and other foodstuffs was sometimes labeled “Gift of the Duce.”4® Supplementary rations and clothes for the children were

distributed at Christmas and Epiphany. In some places as much as Io per cent of the total population was reached at least a few times a year, and the school-lunch program for children was perhaps the largest and steadiest item of relief. In its relief work the party was partial to children and war veterans

and their families. The party not only considered these people more deserving than ordinary “needy” folk, but it could also expect them to be

more appreciative. It was particularly sympathetic to veterans with permanent disabilities, to the families of men killed in the war, and to veterans who had been Fascists of the first hour. Its main help to children, aside from the school lunches, was the highly publicized summer “colonies” —really camps—at the seashore and in the mountains. By 1935 as much

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The FASCIST Experience

as 10 percent of the total number of children of the eligible age were being sent to these “colonies” for two weeks or more each summer.*? The

party fanfare that accompanied their departure from the city plus the programmed combination of good times and inspirational talks at camp were bound to have made a strong impression on these indigent youngsters, most of whom had never been outside the slums of their home town.

So important did the party consider these summer colonies that it spent almost exactly half of its own funds for public assistance on them.°? Actually, 90-95 percent of the funds spent by the federale in the name of the party’s public-assistance agency—Ente Opere Assistenziali (EOA)—

came from the ministries of the interior and of corporations and from a number of government agencies. For this reason, although the EOA was under the jurisdiction of the federale, its accounting was controlled from the prefect’s office.5! The party itself spent 8,843,777 lire of its own funds

through the EOA in 1935-1936, but in Ferrara alone, an average size province, 3,000,000 lire a year were*? spent. Although the bulk of these funds were obviously coming from outside the party, it got the credit for all the money spent. It also instituted a grain levy on the local farmers— 750 grams out of each quintal (100,000 grams) for poor relief. Yet for all the money spent by the EOA the relief was sporadic and temporary, aside from the school-lunch programs and the summer “colonies.” Charity was — no substitute for a real welfare system, and the party, which was mainly interested in earning brownie points, was hardly equipped to administer such a system. One specific, almost Boy Scout—like, function acquired by the party in

October, 1935, was that of watchdog over rising prices caused by the Ethiopian War and restrictions on imports. The main work was done by provincial trade-union committees presided over by the federale. These committees not only kept a close watch for illegal price increases but also established fines and jail sentences for transgressors and defended the purchasing power of the poorer classes. They took their work seriously, and

many small merchants were unhappy about the kind of spot-checks this work entailed.*4 In the early spring of 1937, faced with complaints that price controls were not being enforced, one quick-witted federale countered

by saying that the real reason for the high cost of living was that wages had not risen as fast as prices.5> Needless to say, such candor was not welcomed in Rome, either at party headquarters or by the government.

Punishing the local grocer was a far cry from running the state; indeed, throughout the 1930s the party had even less influence on the national government than on local affairs. Bottai, Ciano, and the other leading Fascists still active in Mussolini’s government in the late 1930s, had little or nothing to do with the party or its activities. The ministry of the interior, the empire, and even foreign affairs, continued to be run by older “establishment” types who were party members in name only. Although the courts had to enforce the rather harsh Fascist conception of law and order and most judges joined the party, they managed to preserve a good deal of their professional integrity;** only the special tribunal for

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. gubversives was outside their purview, but even here it was the OVRA rather than the party that took charge. Bocchini also refused to appoint Fascist zealots to the important post of chief constable (questore) in large towns.°*” In fact, the OVRA and other branches of the national police were not averse to keeping high party officials under surveillance; Farinacci complained that this happened to him in 1932, and Adelchi Serena, vicesecretary of the party, made a similar complaint in 1936.°° The party itself had no power over the armed forces, and Mussolini himself was less suc-

cessful in intimidating them than Hitler, who was able to get rid of a number of his leading generals by 1938. In September, 1934, Mussolini could not even get General Pietro Badoglio to applaud his speech to a group of divisional commanders.5?

Although the party had no control over the regular armed forces, a certain number of younger officers brought Fascist attitudes into the army

from the Militia and the Fasci giovanili. Most observers agree that the man most responsible for promoting such officers was General Federico Baistrocchi, undersecretary of war during the 1930s.® The Militia itself remained in an ambiguous position because of Mussolini’s unwillingness,

on the one hand, to allow it to become in any way an instrument of the ) party independent of the state and, on the other hand, to allow it to become completely absorbed by the army, thus eliminating a tangible and living

sisn of the permanence of the Fascist Revolution, with its militaristic overtones. In fact, on February 1, 1938, he inaugurated the Roman “goosestep” to give the “legionnaires” of the Militia added distinction. But it was

certainly not this new parade-step that could ever transform this motley national guard—“whose militaristic and administrative-bureaucratic elements met on the common level of supplying the choreography for the regime”’—into a new elite.61 The regular army officers looked down their

noses at an organization that could transform a ragtag group of family men into an assault battalion by a simple bureaucratic directive.’ The | head of the Militia, on the other hand, argued that the real rivalries were not so much between it and the regular army as between rival army officers in the two organizations.®

Beginning with the Ethiopian War, the Militia became a kind of auxiliary volunteer force of the regular army. As is well known, Mussolini began planning the conquest of Ethiopia at the time of the Ualual border

incident in early December, 1934. His main goal was undoubtedly to replace the “social” card of corporativism €which had withered in his _ hand, so to speak) with a “historical” justification for his dictatorship; a revival of “Roman” imperialism, as a way of stimulating national enthusiasm and unity. But an important secondary purpose of the war was to put some of the nation’s unemployed men into uniform. Already in March,

1935, the class of 1911 was being called into the regular army, and a number of these men were simply transferred to the Militia as “volunteers.”64 In May, 1936, with Ethiopia conquered and the empire proclaimed,

these and more authentic volunteers were dismissed and given bonuses. Then, later in that year, Mussolini began sending 50,000 “volunteers” to Spain to fight on the side of Franco. Although most of the volunteers in

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the Militia, particularly from the southern countryside, joined because they were unemployed and needed the money, a significant number of them became Fascist enthusiasts after their experience as black shirts. And during the Second World War university graduates, including teachers and journalists, were to fight enthusiastically in the Militia.®

From the beginning, however, a number of leading figures of the regime, though nominally Fascists and “purged” for this reason in 1945, were poles apart from Starace and most party gerarchi. Luigi Federzoni, for example, was one of Mussolini’s closest collaborators throughout the 1920s; after retiring from his post as minister of the interior in November, 1926, he became minister of colonies and, in August, 1928, governor of Rome. From 1929 to 1939 he was president of the Senate; from 1931 on the editor of the Nuova Antologia, and in 1938 the president of the Italian Academy. Federzoni’s appointment to the Senate and his wife's appointment, in May, 1931, as a leader of the Fascist women’s group

(Fasci feminili) in the province of Rome, disturbed Starace and other “Fascists of the first hour.” They were right to be disturbed, for Federzoni,

himself a prewar nationalist and loyal monarchist, was their enemy not only in his role as minister of the interior but also in his basic conservatism and his intellectual and social snobbery.

Another, perhaps more typical, member of the conservative upperbourgeoisie who served the Fascist regime throughout its existence was the Neapolitan Amadeo Giannini (1886—1960).°7 He had strong ties with the church, was a diplomat, jurist, and professor of law at the University of Rome, and sat on numerous state and international commissions. Before 1922 he admired Sidney Sonnino, but he had a stronger nationalist bent. A conformist, he accepted and served the Fascist regime without question.

Although he had little personal contact with the party or Mussolini, he corresponded with many of the leading figures of the Fascist period: Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi, Luigi Federzoni, Roberto Forges Davanzati, General Pietro Badoglio, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri, Giovanni Gentile, and many others. Even operating behind the scenes, Giannini had more influence on national policy than a pompous loud mouth like Starace. For this reason,

he and other men like him must be held just as much responsible as the party gerarchi for what happened under Fascism, however “pure” their motives may have been. Although the party’s leadership could do little about men like Feder-

zoni and Giannini, it vented its wrath on those from its own ranks who, in the jargon of more recent times, became co-opted by the establishment; the outstanding example was Leandro Arpinati. As we have seen, Arpinati,

a prewar anarchist, had been the ras of Bologna in the early 1920s but had gone over to the idea of the supremacy of the state after being appointed undersecretary of the interior and the actual head of that ministry under Mussolini. During the early 1930s Starace had a running feud with him, accusing him of trying to undermine the party secretary's position and of not having a true Fascist spirit.°* After forcing Arpinati’s dismissal from his post in May, 1933, his expulsion from the party, and his actual arrest and incarceration a little over a year later, Starace still complained

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The Life of the Party

that he helped his disciples retain high administrative posts in the ministry

of the interior.6° Starace also complained that the ministry of press and propaganda authorized the readmission into the journalists’ union of several journalists expelled from the party, thus demoralizing old-line Fascist militants.”° As a kind of sop to Starace, in early 1937 Mussolini made the office of party secretary include the title minister-secretary of state and in September gave Starace, in this capacity, precedence immediately after the minister of the interior. Still, Starace was not accepted in fact as one of the Duce’s inner circle.

Infighting among Fascist bigwigs was easily as frequent and acrimonious as among the top Nazis. We have seen how Renato Ricci, the ruthless former ras of Massa and Carrara, had become the head of the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the regime’s organization for children up to age eighteen. In 1931 he came into conflict with Carlo Scorza, the former ras of Lucca, whom he accused of trying to enroll fourteen-to-eighteen-year-old

students in his newly created Fasci Giovanili, thus robbing the Balilla of them.”! Scorza, who was to be the last national party secretary before the fall of the regime in July, 1943, had recently participated in the campaign of a group of ex-squadristi and futurists to rid the Duce of “bad advisers” like the “conservative” Arpinati.”? Even though both Ricci and Scorza were

Joyal to Mussolini until the end, they were bitter enemies during most of the 1930s over the issue of which one would control the nation’s youth. Another feud was the one between Gaetano Polverelli and Cornelio Di Marzio over mastery of the nation’s journalists, each man trying to absorb the organizations controlled by the other.”? Next to Galeazzo Ciano, who was protected as Mussolini’s son-in-law, the Fascist minister most hated by the party gerarchi was Giuseppe Bottai, minister of education from 1936 to 1943. Starace was frequently at odds with him, and he was constantly being denounced by anonymous informers as insensitive and incompetent,’ mainly because he favored the schools over the Balilla and the party in molding the young. Before turning to some of the ideological efforts to revive the spirit of the “Fascist Revolution” within the framework of the bureaucratized regime during the 1930s, we must mention Giovanni Gentile’s conception of the “ethical state.” This conception was important mainly because Mussolini himself followed it almost literally in his famous article on “Fascism”

in the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia italiana. The controversy over whether or not Gentile ghost-wrote this article is irrelevant here. Certainly the first part, “Dottrina-idee fondamentali,” is borrowed completely from Gentile’s 1925 essay Che cosa é il fascismo. The second part, “Dottrina politica e sociale,” diverges from Gentile in its emphasis on militarism, in its conception of the state as an entity independent of its citizens, and in its identification of the Fascist state with the Roman tradition. Gentile, of course, was the editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia, but it is unlikely that he edited Mussolini.

The first part of Mussolini’s article assumes the basic premise of Gentile’s “actual idealism”: the identity of thought and action (see Chap-

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ter 10). From this premise Mussolini postulates the idea of an authentic community that Fascism is trying to make actual by fusing the individual and the nation. Only in such a community can the individual realize his true potentialities, which are spiritual rather than material, social rather than individual. The means for making this ideal a reality is the totalitarian state. Fascism reaffirms the state as the true reality of the individual. . . . For the Fascist

everything is in the state, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the state. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist state, which is the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops, and brings out the full potential of the total life of the people.

Thus the Fascist state is an ethical state because it alone makes possible the realization of true human values. “The nation as state is an ethical reality that exists and lives as long as it develops.” Mussolini liked Gentile’s idea that the Fascist regime was the means |

of creating a new type of Italian and a new civilization. According to Gentile, the spiritual essence of Fascism, its “religious, totalitarian view of

life,” must inform the consciousness of all citizens and permeate every sphere of daily life.”> The neoidealist philosopher maintained that “politics

and history are made not only by promulgating new laws, creating new institutions, or winning battles, but also (and properly so) by developing new states of. mind, and ideas, in forming new men and a new spirit.””° ' Fascism for him was neither a philosophy nor a dogma; it was, rather, a “continuing revolution” of the immanent spirit of the nation. It was bound _ by no irrevocable policies: “The true resolutions of the Duce are those _ that are both formulated and put into actual effect.”

This kind of language obviously flattered Mussolini, but he had no intention of making Gentile his Plato. First of all, he could not accept

Gentile’s idea that the state exists in so far as the citizens cause it to exist; for Mussolini and for all other leading Fascists, the state was autonomous. Furthermore, the “continuing revolution” was obviously over by the time of the Lateran Accords. By then Gentile, who had been Mussolini’s first minister of education (see Chapter 6) and had headed an important constitutional commission, was relegated to purely academic posts and had no further influence on government policy. The hostility of the Vatican’ also made it necessary to downgrade him in Fascist circles. He was, in addi-

| tion, attacked by many party officials for harboring anti-Fascist professors on the editorial board of his encyclopedia. Consequently, by the time Mus-

_ solini’s article appeared in 1932, the man and the philosophy that had in_ gpired it were already out of fashion. ‘- But neither Mussolini, nor Starace, nor the old and new ideologues were content with the bureaucratized “corporate state.” Mussolini soon

turned to imperialism, and Starace wanted his version of the party’s “Roman” style of behavior to become the national norm. By 1937, in a three-volume work called Sistema di dottrina del fascismo, Antonio Canepa

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The Life of the Party

blamed the mediocrity of Fascist thought. on the doctrine itself and the rigidity with which it had to be interpreted and the atmosphere of exaltation in which Fascist writers had to operate.’? Those older ideologues who

wrote for Critica Fascista, kept calling for the creation of an elite competent to deal with the problems of an industrial society. Bottai, who con-

tinued as its editor, also wanted to give Fascism a new cultural base through his Carta della Scuola (1939), which tried to democratize the public schools and to bring life and work experience into the educational process (see Chapter 6), and through his efforts to patronize Italy’s most talented artists and writers, regardless of their political views.®° But Critica

Fascista had many enemies, both on the left and the right, and it was never the official spokesman for the regime. The most militant of the younger ideologues were divided into two opposite extremes: the neomystics (exponents of mistica fascista) and the “integral corporatists.” Despairing of all efforts to give Fascism a philosophical base, the

neomystics rejected rationality in all its forms in favor of faith in the genius of Mussolini. Nicolo Giani, the director of the Istituto di Mistica Fascista, with headquarters in Milan, said: “We are mystics because we are mad... factious .. . and even absurd. Yes, absurd . . . [for] History has always been and will always be an absurdity—that is, mystical—the absurdity of the spirit and the will which bends and conquers the merely material.”8! Gianni Guizzardi said that “man is happy to abdicate his reason in order to believe in Him who leads... ,” and he preached a “return to that most beautiful Myth, born in the bloodbath of the world war, which gave the first blow to modernity.”®? By “modernity” Guizzardi meant

the rational, modernizing leadership of the liberal regime. In its place the neomystics substituted unquestioning faith in whatever Mussolini said or ordered them to do. Credere, obbedire, combattere (“Believe, obey, fight”) was a perfect slogan for their irrationalism, which was a vulgarized version of the “destruction of reason” proposed by certain philosophers and poets at the turn of the century; this slogan also had echoes of the menefreghismo of the original squadristi.

At the opposite extreme from these reactionary mystics a smaller number of radical students and older syndicalists were attracted to the seemingly ultramodern “integral corporatism” of the political philosopher Ugo Spirito.8* The whole subject of the corporative state, including Spirito’s

extremist position, regarding it, will be discussed in Chapter 4. Here all we need to note is that during the late 1930s a self-styled “new left” among the university students tried to use Spirito’s ideas as a means of reviving the 1919 Fascist program’s promise of radical social change.

The government permitted the expression of all sorts of heterodox ideas as long as these ideas did not challenge the regime itself, but it ignored them completely in formulating its own policies, especially imperialism. Indeed, these polemics served as an ideal safety-valve for powerless Fascist intellectuals and idealistic Fascist students. Although the conquest of Ethiopia rallied the Italian people behind the regime as no other Fascist policy did, it was not a uniquely Fascist goal. Mussolini's war with Ethiopia

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The FASCIST Experience

was popular, not because it transformed Italy into a new Roman Empire, but because it united the Italians against the opposition of the League of Nations and especially against the English. The Duce’s words and manner expressed the strong emotional need of millions of Italians to overcompensate for the patronizing and often contemptuous attitude of AngloSaxons, Frenchmen, and other Europeans, toward them. The victory over Ethiopia®* seemed to fulfill this need until Mussolini spoiled the illusion that Italy could create its own “place in the sun” by making the country a junior partner of Germany. The strengthening of the Rome-Berlin Axis in 1938 brought a seemingly new ingredient into Fascist ideology and practice: racism. Before

then there had been individual anti-Semites and anti-Africans among Fascist and non-Fascist Italians (particularly among traditional clericals and reactionaries), but there was no ideological tradition of biological racism comparable to the one in Central Europe. At first, when Fascist theoreticians or even Mussolini himself spoke of the Italian race, they were referring to a politically defined population within the borders of a particu-

lar nation, just as other people spoke of the French race or the English race. Nevertheless, the Fascist regime eventually did push its exaggerated nationalism toward ethnic racism in its effort to integrate the highly diverse regional, cultural, and physical types that made up the Italian population, as well as to assert that Italians were “as good as” northern Europeans.

As the idea of the nation no longer seemed to have the power to fulfill these two crucial functions, and with no other unifying slogans available, ethnic racism became the main ideological component of Fascism from 1938 until the end of the Second World War. The alliance with Nazi Ger-

many prompted some (though not all) Fascist theorists to try to graft biological racism onto their ethnic racism, but so did the “problem” of keeping Italian soldiers from mating with Ethiopian women. Thus it is not true

that Fascism had no racial doctrine and that it simply imitated the Nazis “out of a clear blue sky,” so to speak.® It is a mistake to insist that a person or a group cannot sincerely sup-

port today an attitude that he or it opposed yesterday; this is particularly true of racism. Undoubtedly Mussolini and the majority of Italians were not temperamentally anti-Semites, whereas Hitler and a large number of Germans were. Yet, once the Manifesto of Fascist Racism was issued on July 15, 1938,** its contents were gradually accepted by millions of Italians. The example of Critica Fascista shows how quickly attitudes changed. Until 1938 Bottai’s review had opposed racism of any kind. Then, immediately

after the issuance of the manifesto, it stressed the “spiritual” rather than the biological idea of race.*7 A month later, although still playing up the “spiritual” side of racism, it went along with denying Jews influence in government or education because they had a different spirit.®® In early 1940, in a widely publicized lecture,8° Giacomo Acerbo, distinguished professor of economics and sometimes Fascist minister, alluded to the looseness of the term “Aryan” but said that it had to be used in order to isolate the Jewish minority from the “national organism.” By then Fascist periodicals, including those with intellectual pretensions, were publishing cartoons

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The Life of the Party

ridiculing Jews and articles accusing them of being against whatever the author happened to be for—modern art or traditional art, the rich or the poor, etc.°° While the theoreticians struggled to balance psychic against physical traits in order to justify laws against “miscegenation” between “Aryan” and Jew, Italians of all classes became “sincere” anti-Semites, partly out of conformity and partly out of conviction,®! only to abandon this new attitude after 1943, when the Nazis themselves imposed their anti-Semitic practices on Italy’s 45,000 Jews. Part of the ambiguity about Fascist “totalitarianism” stems from the fact that the Fascist party as such never destroyed the old power structure, like the Russian Communists, and never succeeded in dominating it, the way the Nazis did in Germany. Even on such a crucial ideological issue as racial policy it was the state, not the party, that took the initiative in Italy, whereas Hitler and the Nazi party imposed this policy on the German state. Hitler shrewdly left the presidency “vacant” after the death of Hindenburg, thus altering the state power structure in a way that was impossible for Mussolini, for whom the monarchy remained a stumbling block until the very end. Nor were the Fascists able to gain as much control over the army as their counterparts in Germany; many of Italy's army officers kept their first loyalty for the king, whereas in 1934 Hitler made all German officers swear allegiance to him personally, and in 1938 his creation of the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht broke the power of the old general staff. The difference between the two countries was to widen during the Second World War, when the SS, originally an elite organization of the party and with no Italian counterpart, gained increasing power and independence, while in Italy the party was deprived of much of its remaining influence even in the Dopolavoro and the olympic training committee.®? In the end, the rift between the party and the leader was to forestall any resistance to Mussolini’s overthrow. (Even in April, 1945, when Germany’s military situation was far worse than Italy’s had been in July, 1943, there was no party revolt against the Fihrer. ) As we have seen, the Fascist Party was legally deprived of its potential role as a ruling elite by the end of the 1920s, to the regret not only of the

Farinaccians but also of Fascist intellectuals who wanted the party to create an aristocracy of thought and action. One of these intellectuals, Gherardo Casini, protested the subordination of the party to the state as early as 1928,°3 and in the early 1930s, along with Bottai, he periodically warned that this subordination was ruining the party’s ability to produce the required elite.** But the political downgrading of the party and of the Fascist Grand Council was only part of the reason; at least as important was the poor quality of the party’s leadership from the beginning. At no time was this leadership socially cohesive, competent on a technical or administrative level, or endowed with the high moral caliber of a true ruling elite—like, for example, the Communist party of the Soviet Union. One need not go as far as the conservative Catholic Stefano Jacini, who said that the regime had to rely mainly on small cliques and influential men who often represented the worst rather than the best elements of their

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The FASCIST Experience

respective sections of Italian society.* It is nonetheless true that the leaders

of the Fascist party lacked not only the intelligence but also the selfdiscipline and self-sacrifice needed to make a revolution of any kind. The revolution that most Fascist intellectuals wanted was the transformation of Italy into a modern industrial state. There is a growing litera-

ture on Fascism as a modernizing ideology, but it must be remembered that this ideology was set forth by only one of several pressure groups and never by the party itself after the mid-1920s. (Neither Farinacci, Turati, Giurati, Starace, nor Starace’s successors were modernizers in any sense of the word.) Only at the very beginning, when Mussolini was still seeking power, did he encourage the formation of teams of experts (gruppi di competenza) to function in an advisory capacity within the party and form the cadre of a new ruling class.®’ These teams were also to serve as a means

of attracting non-Fascists with technical and administrative know-how. But by 1925 they had ceased to exist outside of public administration and education, both of which were overhauled to some extent, though hardly “modernized” (see Chapter 6 on the Gentile educational reform). Thereafter men like Alfredo Rocco and Ugo Spirito urged the creation of new in-

stitutions to facilitate Italy’s industrial progress, but the state soon lost interest in these, and the party was simply not involved. The sociologist Camillo Pellizi said the most that could be said for the Fascist effort at modernization by calling it another of Italy’s “missed revolutions.” From the early 1930s onward the review Critica Fascista was the main

champion of modernization and of the need for a new elite to push this process forward. Its main whipping-boy was the Italian bourgeoisie, which, unlike that of Germany, the United States, and Japan, did not provide the needed modernizing leadership. This accusation was not true of the Agnellis

(Fiat), Olivettis, or Pirellis, though many other leaders in big business were still somewhat backward in their managerial techniques by American or German standards, though less so, during the interwar years, by British or French standards. In an article written in late 1940, Mimmo Steppa attacked the basic Italian ways of doing things: getting favors and jobs through recommendations; getting the job for the man, rather than the man for the job; lack of professionalism and expertise in most jobs. Steppa went on to criticize even the hierarchy of the party for its amateurism and for giving jobs to men without concern for their qualifications.°® He concluded by saying that the strongest nations are the best organized ones, which, in December, 1940, obviously meant Nazi Germany. But since Germany had been strong and modernized before the Nazis had taken over, even this grudging admiration for their achievements was mis-

placed. : Although it failed to produce a new ruling elite, the Fascist regime had brought about a political revolution whose effects were immediate, ob-

vious, and enduring. Parliamentary democracy, such as it was, was destroyed, and most of the old political class went into retirement or exile. Mussolini gave the impression of being all-powerful, but he could not rule alone, and the Fascist party as such was little help to him in running the country. The civil service, the courts, the armed forces, and the police re-

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mained in the hands of career officials whose commitment to Fascism was usually nominal. Chief of Police Bocchini had far more real power than Party Secretary Starace. Indeed, the party and the Militia tended increasingly to become ceremonial leftovers from the days of the “revolution’— much like the soviets in the USSR. The bigger and more ostentations they became, the less they had to do with the way in which Italy was ruled.

NOTES . 1. See especially Mussolini’s suggestions for Turati to use in his speech to the party directorate in March, 1927, cited in De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, 2: 178. 2. The analysis in this paragraph comes largely from ibid., pp. 343-44. 3. Seg. Part. del Duce, fasc. 242/R. Gran Consiglio, sottofasc. 8, inserto A. 4. Telegram of October 17, 1927, busta 31, fasc. 242/R, ibid., Giampaoli, Comm. Mario. It should be noted that Giampaoli was segretario politico of the city of Milan; . &@man named Maggi was the segretario federale of the province of Milan. As we shall see presently, during the 1930s the main conflicts were between the segretarii federali

and the prefects, whereas until then, at least in the north, these two officials were

usually on the same side against the segretario politico.

5. Telegrams from Starace to Turati and from the prefect to the ministry of the interior, from December 12, 1928 through February 1, 1929, plus a congratulatory telegram from Mussolini to Starace on May 21, 1929, ibid., busta 24, fasc. 242/R, Missione dell’on Starace (Milano-Fascismo ). 6. See the police dossiers on these two men in ibid., busta 31, fasc. 242/R, Giampaoli, Comm. Mario and busta 26, fasc. 242/R, Luigi Franco Cottini. 7. Anonymous reports of 18 July and 26 October, 1931, PNF, Situazione Politica delle Provincie, Siracusa (hereafter called PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov. ). 8. This estimate comes from Secondo Tranquilli (pseud., Ignazio Silone), “Elementi per uno studio del PNF,” Lo Stato Operaio, October 1927, 875ff., and “Borghesia, piccola borgesia e fascimo,” ibid., April 1928, 151ff. 9. Opinions on this subject run the gamut from De Felice, who says that Mus-

solini’s conception of the “true” Fascist Italy was simply “to endure and to use its power to.mold the new generations of Italians according to its ideals” (Mussolini il fascista, 2: 360), to A. James Gregor, who sees it as a full-blown, consistent ideology of totalitarianism capped by Gentile’s notion of the. ethical state. (The Ideology of Fascism: The Rationale of Totalitarianism, New York: The Free Press, 1969, passim, but particularly pp. 194-95. Io. 9, no. 18. Bottai’s co-editor until 1936 was Gherardo Casini. The other staff writers who wrote editorials most frequently were Agostino Nasti, Mario Rivoire, Sergio Panunzio, F. M. Pacces, and Emilio Canevari. iz. Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario, pp. 182-183. 12. E.g., PNF, Sit. Pol. delle Provincie, Roma; report of 30 December 1931 on a

secret meeting attended by the ex-futurists F. T. Marinetti, Emilio Settimelli, and

Mario Carli, as well as former Minister of Finance Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, Minister

of Corporations Giuseppe Bottai, and Prof. Arturo Rocco, brother of the minister of justice. According to this report, this group believed that “the leaders of the dictatorship have understood that all the revolutionary objectives of Fascism have failed and so they now pursue a purely day-to-day kind of policy.” Camillo Pellizzi, a noted sociologist and sometime contributor to Critica Fascista, told me the same thing about the year 1932 in an interview on July 28, 1966, in Rome.

13. The main exhibits were on the ground floor; the first five rooms dealt with events from the outbreak of the First World War to the founding of the Fasci Italiani

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The FASCIST Experience

di Combattimento on March 23, 1919; the next ten rooms depicted the events from that date to the March on Rome, the last, and largest, hall being the “Shrine of the Martyrs” (squadristi killed during the “Revolution” ). Only in five small rooms upstairs were there exhibits suggesting the accomplishments of the regime, and even here the emphasis was on things already done rather than things yet to be done. (See the 258page illustrated catalogue of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Rome: Partito

Nazionale Fascista, 1933].)

14. In his Memorie (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), p. 333, Alessandro Lessona, min-

ister of colonies in the late 1930s, quotes Mussolini as saying that “il mio fiuto d’animale non m’inganna mai.” 15. Giuseppe Bottai, Vent’anni e un giorno (Milan: Garzanti, 1949), p. 31.

16. Report to the party directorate, dated 12 August 1923, PNF, Mostra della Rivoluzione, parte 1, busta 69, fasc. “Ufficio Propaganda del PNF, Anno 1924.” 17. On Padovani see Guido Dorso, La rivoluzione meridonale, pp. 133-139 and 148; and Raffaele Colapietra, Napoli tra dopoguerra e fascismo, p. 236. 18. Tommaso Fiore, Un popolo di formiche. Lettere pugliesi a Piero Gobetti (2nd

ed. Bari: Laterza, 1952), pp. 132-134; and Carlo Levi, Crisio si é fermato a Eboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), passim.

19. Report of 26 June 1932, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma. .

20. Reproduced in Aquarone, op. cit., pp. 412-418. 21. Report from the segretario federale, Umberto Guglielmotti, to the prefect of

Rome, 30 October 1928, regarding communes outside of the capital itself, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma.

22. Report to Mussolini, Ministero della Cultura Popolare (hereafter called Minculpop), Agenzia Stefani—Manlio Morgagni, busta 1, fasc. 1, 1931. See also PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma, anonymous report of 17 June 1932, in which one finds one of many references to the fact that Turin was somewhat isolated from Fascism, despite “years and years of propaganda and speeches.” For a later view see Armando Gavagnin, Vent’anni di resistanza al fascismo. Ricordi e testimonianze (Turin: Einaudi, 1957). 23. Report to Mussolini, Minculpop, Agenzia Stefani—Manlio Morgagni, busta 1, fasc. I, 1931. 24. Opera omnia, 22, p. 467.

25. Anonymous report of March 28, 1931 and a report to Mussolini by Dino

Alfieri on October 14, 1931, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Milan. 26. Anonymous reports of February, September, and December, 1932, ibid., Piacenza, 27. Anonymous report of December, 1932, Siracusa; anonymous report of February 22, 1935, ibid., Matera. 28. Anonymous report of April 27, 1937 and reports of the federale, June 21 and 30, 1937, ibid., Nuoro.

29. Report of the federale, January 8, 1938; confirmed by an anonymous report of May 7, ibid., Piacenza. 30. Report of the ispettore di zona of the Ministero dell’ Interno, May 14, 1938, ibid., Taranto. 31. Telegram from Mussolini dated July 29, 1933, Seg. Part. del Duce, busta 34, fasc. 242/R, Starace, Achille. The party got over 10 per cent of its funds from regular

fees, aside from these “extras.” At nearby Imperia some people accused the local gerarchi of pocketing these extra fees as graft; anonymous report of Feb. 28, 1933, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov. Imperia.

32. Reports of the federale for December, 1932 and 1940, PNF., Sit. Pol. delle Provincie, Trento.

33. Reports of the federale for December, 1932 and 1940 ibid., Napoli; also similar reports for Taranto and Palermo. 34. For figures on these cities see report of the federale for October 1940, ibid., Torino, as well as similar reports from Milan, Trieste, Genoa, Savona, Mantua, Parma, Piacenza, Modena, and Ferrara; and report of the federale for Nov. 1940, ibid., Roma. 35. Emilio Radius, Usi e costumi dell’uomo fascista (Milan: Rizzoli, 1964), p. 297.

82

The Life of the Party 36. This is a variation on the closing lives of D’Annunzio’s play, Laus Vitae

(1903): “Ché necessario é navigare/vivere non é necessario.” 37. D. Calcagno, “Cronaca del Partito,” Gerarchia, 15 (1935), 172. 38. Domenico Vanelli, “Rivoluzione totalitaria,” Critica Fascista, 19 (1 March, I94I ): 135-136. 39. E.g., anonymous report, 15 November, 1933, PNF, Sit. Pol. delle Provincie, Trento.

40. Report of the federale of Trento, 24 January, 1934; also, reports of the federali of Rieti, 16 March, 1935, ibid; of Pisa, 4 May, 1935; and of Pistoia, 8 May, 1935.

41. Anonymous report of 11 September 1935, ibid., Milano, saying that several thousand workers attended such a rally but without enthusiasm, and the report of the federale on 11 November 1935, saying that the response was impressive considering that the district had recently been a “fortress of subversion.” 42. Report of the federale, November 1934, ibid., Napoli. 43. Anonymous reports, November 17, 1930; July 22, November 20, December 15,

I931; November 23, 1932; January 21, 1933; and periodic reports of the same kind for two more years, ibid., Milano.

44. Report of the federale, July 6, 1934, ibid., followed up by an anonymous report, July 20, 1938, describing the poor housing conditions of the displaced workers. 45. Order No. 1285 (Mar. 12, 1939), in Bollettino del Comando Generale della G.ILL., 13, no. 11 (1 April 1939), 174.

46. In July, 1967, the Italian scholar Domenico Zucaro told me of several examples of modest employees in Turin protesting in this way with this result. 47. Anonymous report, February 23, 1932, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma. On the other “blows” to the Azione Cattolica in 1931 see Chapter 7. 48. My information on the kinds and amounts of poor relief doled out by the party comes from reports of the federali in the early and mid 1930s from the following provinces: Mantova, Matera, Milano, Napoli, Perugia, Pesaro, Pescara, Piacenza, Pisa, Pistoia, Potenza, Reggio Emilia, Roma, Savona, Siena, Terni, Torino, Trento. 49. Ibid., Milano, Modena, Napoli, Roma, Terni. 50. “Consistenza patrimoniale del PNF in base ai bilanci dell’anno XIV” (QOctober 1935—October 1936), cited in Aquarone, op. cit., pp. Goo—G6o1. All information on

national party funds for public assistance come from this source. 51. Article 27 of the 1932 Party Statute, cited in ibid., p. 528. 52. Ibid., pp. 6oo—6o01; 2,500,000 out of 4,431,235 lire spent on the colonies came

from the ministry of corporations; of the other party funds for the EOA, 1,500,000 came from contributions from semipublic and private institutions and 1,633,264 from contributions for a Monument to the Empire, which were transferred to the EOA. 53. Report of the prefect, September 11, 1936, PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Ferrara, and Nuoro, report of the prefect, May 4, 1938; the rest of the infomation in this paragraph is based on these two reports.

54. Report of the federale, March 6, 1937, ibid., Reggio Emilia, and Milano,

anonymous report, March 20, 1937.

55. Anonymous report of March 16, 1937, ibid., Terni, and the answer of the federale, April 31, 1937. . 56. Among the many memoirs that support this observation see Domenico Ric-

cardo Peretti Griva, Experienze di un magistrato (Turin: Einaudi, 1956), p. 17. See also Antonio Raimondi, Mezzo secolo di magistratura. Trent’anni di vita giudiziaria milanese (Bergamo: SESA, 1951), and Mario Berutti, Un magistrato indipendente e altri racconti di vita e costumi giudiziari contemporanei (Milan-Rome: Gastaldi, 1950). 57. See Guido Leto, OVRA. Fascismo-Antifascismo (Bologna: Cappelli, r951);

Leto, a high official under Bocchini, says that his boss allowed only three Fascist zealots to become gquestori during his fourteen years as chief of police (p. 132). 58. Letter to Mussolini, December 2, 1932, Seg. Part. del Duce, busta 242/R, Farinacci, Roberto, sottofasc. 6, inserto B.; also, ibid., busta 34, Starace, Achille, undated report (some time in 1936) from Serena to Starace. 59. Letter from Starace to Mussolini, Sept. 14, 1934, ibid. 60. Aquarone, Op. Cit., Pp. 253.

83

The FASCIST Experience 61. Ibid., p. 255. 62. Quirino Armellini, La crisi dell’esercito (Rome: Editrice “Priscilla,” Edizioni delle Catacombe, 1945), p. 102. 63. Enzo Galbiati, Il 25 luglio e la MVSN (Milan: Editrice Bernabo, 1950), p. 24. 64. Armellini, op. cit., p. 103. 65. See, for example, Giuseppe Berto, Guerra in camicia nera, new ed., (Milan: Garzanti, 1967). 66. Seg. Part. del Duce, fasc. 82/R, Federzoni, Luigi. The correspondence in this file bears this point out beyond any doubt. 67. See Gabriele De Rosa, I Conservatori nazionali: Biografia di Carlo Santucci

(Brescia: Morcelliana, 1962), passim. |

68. Letter on May 3, 1933 to Mussolini, Seg. Part. del Duce, busta 34, fasc. 242/R, Starace, Achille. For a recent apologia for Arpinati see Giancarla Cantamessa Arpinati, Arpinati mio padre (Rome: “Il Sagittario,” 1968). 69. Letter of January 27, 1937, ibid. 70. Memos to all cabinet ministers, February 15 and September 10, 1937, ibid. 71. Ricci letter to Mussolini, May 30, 1931, ibid., 242/R, Riunioni del Direttorio del Partito Nazionale Fascista, sottofasc. I.

72. See the May 30, 1930, issue of the review La Quarta Roma, in which its director, Guglielmo Danzi, praises Scorza for participating in this campaign, along

with Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli. 73. Copy of a memo from the Pubblica Sicurezza to Mussolini, May 10, 1937, re-

garding a conflict between Polverelli and Di Marzio over the control of the Instituto di Previdenza dei Giornalisti “Arnaldo Mussolini,” Seg. Part. del Duce, busta, 62, fasc. W/R, Polverelli, Gaetano.

74. Anonymous reports of February 19 and June 19, 1940, ibid., busta 64/R, Bottai, Giuseppe.

75. Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa é il fascismo: Discorsi e polemiche (Florence:

Vallecchi, 1925), p. 38.

76. Id., “La legge del Gran Consiglio,’ Educazione Fascista, VI (September 1928 ), 514.

77. Id., “Origini e dottrine del fascismo” (1927), cited in Casucci, Il Fascismo, Pp. 37.

78. In March 1930 Gentile had publicly attacked the pope as a doctrinaire Thomist and cryptomaterialist. (See Police report, March 15, 1930, Seg. Part. del Duce, 7R, Senatore Professore Giovanni Gentile, sottofasc. 1.) 79. (Rome, Formiggini, 1937), 2: 207-208.

80. Bottai had come to Fascism via futurism, and he maintained his contacts with Italy’s avant-garde writers and artists throughout the duration of the regime. In the late 1930s he gave academic posts to the poets Giuseppe Ungaretti, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Alfonso Gatto; the novelist Vasco Pratolini; and the painters Ottone Rosai and Giorgio Morandi. Gatto, who was a crypto-Communist then and has been an outspoken Communist since the days of the resistance, told me (personal interview,

November 28, 1967, in Rome) that Bottai did not patronize these artists and writers as a means of corrupting them into supporting the regime and that he remained personally loyal even to those who were anti-Fascist. This view was also expressed to me by Piero Bargellini, a conservative Catholic literary critic, writer of textbooks for the Fascist elementary schools, and mayor of Florence in 1967-1968, in a personal interview on July 9, 1967 in Florence. 81. Nicold Giani, “Perché siamo dei mistici,’ Gerarchia, 19 (February 1940): 113. 82. Gianni Guizzardi, “Dalla ragione alla fede,” ibid., 198.

83. See Ruggero Zangrandi, Il lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1964), pp. 442-445. 84. See A. J. Barker, The Civilizing Mission: A History of the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935-1936 (New York: Dial Press, 1968), for an up-to-date account of the military history of this war. 85. A. James Gregor, The Ideology of Fascism, p. 282; although it stresses only

the theoretical aspects of Fascism, this work is particularly good as a corrective to

84

The Life of the Party conventional oversimplifications about Fascist racism. The standard work on Fascist anti-Semitism is Renzo De Felice, Storia degli ebrei sotto il fascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), 86. Cited in ibid., pp. 383-386. 87. Editorial, 16, no. 19 (1 August 1938). 88. Ibid., no. 21 (1 September 1938).

89. “Il fondamento della dottrina fascista della razza:” a summary appeared in Razza e civilta, 1, no. 1 (1 March 1940): 99-104, and the reference cited is on p. 102. 90. E.g., Il Bargello, the weekly newspaper of the Fascist Federation of Florence, whose third page (see Ch. 10) contained some of the liveliest cultural criticism in the Fascist press. Its November 20, 1938, issue featured on page one an article by Gino Ersochi in which he criticized the Jews for opposing modern art, and on page three a cartoon of a neanderthal-like figure, with a huge nose, telling an official: “I have a cousin who lives near the Piazza San Sepolcro. Do you think that this could work in my favor?” Articles and cartoons like these appeared regularly in Il Bargello until its demise in 1943.

gi. All the reports of police and party officials do not portray this phenomenon nearly as vividly as Giorgio Bassani’s novel, Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (Turin: Einaudi, 1962); the English version is called The Garden of the Finzi-Contini (New York: Atheneum, 1965); Vittorio De Sica adapted it into a film in 1971. 92. Guido Cavallucci, “Il Partito e la classe dirigente,” Critica Fascista, 19, no. 4

(15 December 1940); the author tries unconvincingly to argue that the decentralization of these organizations will allow the party to concentrate on its role of “spiritual” and “moral” leadership. 93. “Il Partito e la Rivoluzione,” Il Popolo d’Italia, 12 February 1928. 94. “Quando il popolo ascolta,” Critica Fascista, 10, no. 13 (1 July 1932).

95. Stefano Jacini, Il regime fascista (Milan: Garzanti, 1947), pp. 57ff. 96. In addition to Gregor, op. cit., see Alberto Aquarone, “Aspirazioni tecnocratiche del primo fascismo,” Nord e Sud. 11, n.s., no. 52 (April 1965) and Roland Sarti, “Fascist Modernization in Italy: Traditional or Revolutionary?” American Historical Review, 75, no. 4 (April 1970), 1029-1045. The principal Fascist treatments on the subject in retrospect are Camillo Pelizzi, Una rivoluzione mancata (Milan: Longanesi, 1949) and Massimo Rocca, Come il fascismo divenne dittatura, cited earlier. 97. Il Popolo d'Italia, October 8, 1921; the groups were not actually formed for over a year and then slowly.

98. Critica Fascista, 19, no. 3 (1 December 1940); see also Cesare Zavoli,

“Spirito della modernita fascista,” ibid. (1 January 1941).

85

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ae Fgnce ees moSe enes peefondo ee ee tee eae a gears See = ee a Sa SPSS RRS eeewae peeetruoeeen, Meet Bee RES os ae is eeEnea aePehace ae oe gee Se ees eo i =ae spesss ee see eg eee ee OE. CeSeren gn eee fiegSomes ne otaRee bd3cg rea noe ae eae anepee wens See Seine ees Oa eC OEce RR naa

:r Re Pe ee ©Seetn ig eeBes Pe ‘ee oo.oawr 2 86 - : 2 ok pee ee eee ee ; sey wee eeeeeeeee — gt. ge: Soe 2 a va ie 2 In one of his last public speeches he said that, in contrast to the medieval corporation, the Fascist corporation achieves a high level of discipline in the productive process not only in the interests of the producers but above all in the general interest, under the effective tutelage of the State... as an organ of the State. . . . Utilizing its technical competence and the stimulus of the individual interests of the producers it operates above all to make the produc-

tion and hence the wealth of the Nation more perfect, more profitable, more considerable.®

In other words, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Rocco never saw his neomercantilist dream realized, partly because

of the resistance of big business to state interference, partly because the depression delayed the kind of juridical reforms he wanted, and partly because his economic and social goals interested neither Mussolini nor

most other Fascists. The so-called corporative state that was finally achieved on paper in 1934 changed nothing; it merely continued the practices established in the 1926 laws disciplining labor without controlling management. The corporations themselves were dominated by the em-

ployers insofar as they functioned at all. Furthermore, the name “corporativism” was used loosely to describe all the government’s economic policies during the 1930s, thus confusing the juridical structure with dayto-day adjustments to the world economic crisis. As we shall see presently, restrictions on imports to protect native production were labeled “autarchy” and were neomercantilist in their own way. But they did little “to make

the production and hence the wealth of the Nation more perfect, more profitable, more considerable.”

Because the whole issue of corporativism was divorced from reality, the regime allowed a lively and articulate polemic to go on about it, particularly concerning the seemingly ultramodern “integral corporativism” of the political philosopher Ugo Spirito.’ In early May, 1932, at a congress for corporative studies at Ferrara, Spirito sparked this polemic with his unorthodox ideas. His basic premise was that Fascist corporativism had dealt “a mortal blow to the liberal conception of property” and that the result could only be the gradual fusion of capital and labor in all large enterprises. In this way the ownership of these enterprises would pass from the stockholders to the “producers,” who would own and operate them according to their technical competence, thus eliminating the class struggle. Spirito himself later called this idea “communist,”® although it was actually closer to the tradition of Proudhon, the anarchosyndicalists, and the abortive factory committees set up in Russia immediately after the 1917 revoltuion, than to the state socialism of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. In any case Spirito believed that his conception of the corporazione proprietaria (a corporation owned in common by all who worked in it)

| 91

The FASCIST Experience

expressed “the whole political, moral, and religious meaning of the Fascist

Revolution.” It is needless to say that the party gerarchi at the Ferrara Congress rejected Spirito’s “Bolshevik” position, but a few of those present, including Mario Rachelli, then secretary of the Confederation of Commer-

cial Workers, accepted it. And, as we saw in Chapter 3, during the late 1930s a self-styled “new left” among the university students tried to use Spirito’s ideas as a means of reviving the 1919 Fascist program’s promise of radical social change. The polemic over corporativism was not restricted to doctrinaire intellectuals and students; it generated more interest in more circles than any single issue during the Fascist period. Speaking for the industrialists Alberto Pirelli said: They know that initiative and private property, that indispensable mainspring of human and civilized progress and of collective well-being, demands as a condition and a consequence that management be granted—as the Fascists indeed grant to it—adequate powers for running each productive organism; at the same time they know how indispensable the State’s disciplinary intervention is in the productive process.”

This attitude, which was the one that predominated, was of course at the

: opposite pole from that of Ugo Spirito. Even within the Fascist party,

however, there was basic disagreement over corporativism. Carlo Costamagna, one of the regime’s respected theoreticians on social policy, wanted

to diminish the importance of the corporations in the Fascist totalitarian state and to upgrade the functions and importance of the party.!° On the other hand, in the pages of Bottai’s Critica Fascista, Gherardo Casini defended the corporations!! against Costamagna’s charge that they would inevitably degenerate into the pre-Fascist form of trade-unionism and accent the class struggle. As ludicrous and unreal as such fears seem today, the argument was carried on in earnest during the 1930s. Meanwhile the corporations themselves were literally stillborn. According to Felice Guarneri, one of the main Fascist policy makers: The corporations, structurally ponderous, hamstrung by complicated procedures, and surrounded by the suspicions of the producers and of the state agencies themselves, began their lives as institutions operating in a void, without any hold on the State organization, of which they were organs, or on those of production of which they were supposed to become instruments of discipline and coordination.??

The meetings of the corporations had an academic, theoretical character, especially since most of the matters with which they dealt had already been decided by other agencies. The conclusions of their labors rarely went beyond a motion to notify the interested agencies of the problems discussed.

Big businessmen made their own decisions, which were unaffected by anything the corporations did, even though these were dominated by representatives of big business. The ruling economic class did not consider

92

Economy and Labor

the corporations as innovating forces but rather as decorative legal props for existing capitalist arrangements. By the late 1930s it was clear that the corporate state was nothing but

a facade, and that even as such it was not convincing. On the National Council of Corporations, for example, a philosopher represented the corporation of grain growers, a notary that of the artists, a professor of con-

stitutional law that of textiles, a literary writer that of the olive oil

producers.'® By January, 1937, this National Council no longer even met, and Critica Fascista made a valiant effort to gloss over its uselessness in an editorial saying that “the problem of the National Council of Corporations in the constitutional and administrative order cannot be said to be definitively resolved.”!4 This same editorial went on to say that the cor-

porations themselves were merely appendages of the old bureaucracy, rebaptized “ministry of corporations.” By 1939 it was obvious that this ministry was itself without effect on the Italian economy; otherwise it could never have been entrusted to an ignoramus like Renato Ricci. Not all Fascist economic policies pleased big business, but the regimé allowed it to increase its overall power in the economy, particularly during the world depression. One means for bringing about this increase was the

cartel (consorzio), over which the state had little control. These cartels first appeared in 1929 and 1930 as voluntary associations of producers in steel and other industries who were anxious to limit production and fix prices in a shrinking market. Soon, however, the state made some of the

“consortiums” compulsory and—in June, 1932—it passed a law sanctioning their functions. By 1937, in the absence of official statistics, the Confindus-

tria estimated that there were 279 cartels; these were particularly numerous in the machine industries, metallurgy, chemicals, and certain food products.'* In addition to the trade associations of the individual industries the organs of the Confindustria were important in the activities of the cartels. As in cartels everywhere the biggest firms and the most powerful

individuals dominated the other members. } Though sanctioned and nominally supervised by the government, the

cartels did not discipline private enterprise in the public interest. They had to give annual statements of their activities to the ministry of corporations, but the staff of the ministry was too small to handle the mass of reports, and the investigating boards of the corporations themselves could never get enough information to come to meaningful decisions. Thus, the cartels became the real regulators of production. After 1935 the policy

of autarchy, which will be discussed presently, created more intersecting bureaucratic channels and overlapping jurisdictions, which made it easier for the cartels and other agencies of organized business to retain control

of production for their own interests. There is little evidence that the cartels promoted productivity to any significant degree; indeed, by favoring established firms in assigning raw materials and production and market quotas, they excluded newcomers from the market and may have acted as a brake on the entire economy.'@

93

The FASCIST Experience

There were many complaints against the cartels and against economic concentration in general. In 1931 at Messina the contractors and workers in the construction business protested that most of them would be out of jobs because of the activities of a new cartel whose leaders seem to have had government funds for their own projects.!” During the winter of 1934— 1935 at Aosta there was a good deal of tension over the absorption of the Cogne Steel Company by the Cornigliano combine; the inspector general

of the national police and the prefect both warned the government that unemployment in the town would go up by one third.!® In March, 1935, at La Spezia the naval shipyard of the Cerpelli Company was forced to close down, laying off four hundred workers, because the Ansaldo and Tosi companies wanted to eliminate it as a rival; the party’s federal secretary urged that the company be saved.'*® The situation became just as seri-

ous in agriculture; the small farmers, underrepresented already in the agricultural corporations, were ignored altogether by the ministry of agriculture, which—beginning in June, 1938—handled most of the former functions of the ministry of corporations, and which favored the farming cartels.2° Even in the realm of city planning, where a so-called totalitarian regime supposedly had a free hand, open space and parks were sacrificed to blocks of massive flats, particularly in Rome itself, where much of the land was owned by consortiums and by aristocratic families like the Chigis and the Torlonias.”!

There is no question that, as in Nazi Germany, the Italian Fascists favored big capitalists over small ones after having come to power with promises to protect the latter. But in Germany at least this favoritism was justified by the government in the name of higher productivity, whereas in Italy it was imposed on the government by private enterprise for purely selfish reasons. For all its paper controls the Fascist government had less influence on and received proportionately less of the product of the Italian economy than the Nazi government vis-a-vis the German economy with considerably less formal interference. Recent research has shown that in both countries “totalitarianism” did not cover the economy and that neither Hitler nor Mussolini cared much about economic matters. They and their propagandists continued to praise the small farmer and the small businessman, but ironically, Mussolini—who was verbally more anti-big business than Hitler—gave it a freer rein than his German counterpart. From October, 1922, to July, 1925, Mussolini’s minister of finance was Alberto De Stefani, whose laissez-faire guidelines served the dual pur-

pose of placating the big-business interests and balancing the state’s budget. The reduction of taxes affecting business was especially appreciated among the industrialists, bankers, and big landowners who had helped the Fascists in their rise to power. Middle-class opinion was not disturbed by the fact that certain categories of “privileged” workers now .

had to pay additional taxes?2 and that certain poor farmers had their squatters’ rights on uncultivated land rescinded. Its main concern was the general financial situation and particularly the state’s budget. In order to

balance this budget with reduced revenue coming in, De Stefani made sweeping cuts in government expenditure, including the military. He elim-

94

Economy and Labor

inated over 65,000 people from the government payroll, of whom 46,000 were railroad workers. The fact that Mussolini’s government could do this and also make the trains run on time was due primarily to the elimination of strikes, but the favorable impression the achievement engendered became one of the favorite clichés of the regime. It would be quite wrong, however, to conclude that De Stefani’s liberalism was for Mussolini anything more than an expedient to gain support where he could get it while he was consolidating his dictatorship. The first and also the most typical Fascist economic policy was the so-called Battle of Grain, which was begun in 1925 and declared a success eight years later. Its purpose was to raise Italian wheat production to the point where the country would no longer have to spend large amounts of its limited foreign currency for imported wheat. This goal was achieved partly by bringing marginal land under cultivation and partly by persuading farmers to switch from other crops. An intensive propaganda campaign supported the Battle of Grain, including huge photographs showing a barechested Mussolini working in the fields. At one point a crisis arose when the Montecatini chemical works refused to lower the price of fertilizer in accordance with the demands of the leaders of the agricultural union. Mussolini effected a compromise by lowering freight rates for the transport of fertilizer and tractors, thereby putting the railroads in the red. The Battle of Grain was typically Fascist not only in its name (battles for safe streets and against air pollution became clichés in other countries only since the Second World War), but also in the ballyhoo that accompanied it, in its effort to mobilize millions of people in a common undertaking, and in its emphasis on national prestige at the expense of sound economics.

For the Battle of Grain was uneconomical. Much of the savings it brought in purchases of foreign wheat were offset by a decline in foreign sales of some Italian agricultural products. The encouragement given to wheat production—which required the least brains and the least capital— kept millions of marginal farmers and agricultural workers underemployed in the countryside rather than on the streets of the cities, but it discouraged others from engaging in more productive and lucrative forms of agricul-

ture, such as horticulture or truck-and-dairy farming in the north, and animal husbandry in the south. In the south the Battle of Grain reinforced a fundamentally mistaken system of agriculture which was badly in need of transformation.?? The climate of the south favors grazing land much more

than wheat fields, whose product is less remunerative and less certain. Furthermore, animal husbandry, with its by-product of free, natural fertilizer, would have enriched the soil so that some of it could have been cultivated more intensively as orchards or truck farms. The south especially

needed more intensive forms of agriculture to provide work for an ever-

increasing population cut off from its prewar outlets for emigration. But. catering to this need would have produced slow and inconspicuous results in contrast to the Battle of Grain. Chronologically, the next major Fascist economic policy was another “battle,” this time to revalue the lira at 90 to the pound sterling—the quota novanta. Italy’s postwar inflation was not nearly as serious as that of France

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or Germany, but by July, 1926, the lira had declined to 153.68 to the pound, which, it must be added, had just been revalued at an artificially high rate a year earlier. Mussolini’s motives were political more than economic.** He wanted Italy to have a strong, stable currency, and he wanted to show

that he had the power to create such a currency.”> Furthermore, as the “savior of the lira” in November, 1926, he was in a better position to enforce his exceptional laws than he had been six months earlier.”® Finally, Mussolini remained adamant on the quota novanta in order to demonstrate his power as the Duce and the power of the state over the business community. But there is also evidence that the leaders of heavy industry actually favored Mussolini’s deflationary monetary policy “as a means of consolidating ownership and management and as the best way of perpetuating the existing balance of forces between rival industrial interest groups.’ Certain exporting light industries, particularly cotton textiles, opposed the quota novanta, which threatened to ruin them by raising the price of Italian goods in the world market. But Antonio Benni, the head of the Confindus-

tria, gave his full support to the revaluation, telling his associates that it would be offset not only by the elimination of some of their competitors and a lowering of taxes and transportation costs but also by wage reductions

ranging from Io to 20 percent.28 Although the cotton manufacturers were important victims of the Battle of the Lira, the ordinary working man suffered the most from it, partly because his wages were lowered to a greater extent than prices fell, and partly because many factories reduced the work week to three or four days in the face of declining orders.”° The outcome of the Battle of the Lira illustrated once again the kind of modus vivendi that had evolved between the leadership of the Confindustria and the Fascist regime. As we saw in Chapter 2, the two negotiated the Palazzo Chigi Pact in 1923 and the Palazzo Vidoni Pact in 1925 behind the scenes at the expense of the still-free labor movement. The Rocco labor laws of 1926 destroyed that movement, thus guaranteeing that big business would have no more labor “troubles.” When Rossoni’s Fascist unions tried

to weaken the Confindustria in early 1926 by urging the Fascist Grand Council to set up mixed corporations in which workers and technicians would participate in the operation of large firms, Benni, the Confindustria representative on the Grand Council, opposed this idea.®° His view concerning noninterference with the employers’ activities prevailed throughout the Fascist period. At the same time, he and his organization carefully avoided

compromising themselves as a group by remaining aloof from political issues until the leadership of the regime had made its decision. Then, like the army, the civil service, and to some extent even the church, big business responded favorably to decisions already taken in return for special concessions and safeguards for its own interests.

One of the most highly publicized Fascist economic “reforms” was land reclamation (bonifica integrale ) through the draining of marshes and swamplands, irrigation, and reforestation. Actually this was a continuation of pre-Fascist policy within a new framework of public and private cooperation through consortiums sponsored by a series of laws from 1929 onward. The most famous example, the draining of the Pontine marshes near Rome,

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was strictly a public-works project. Once the land was reclaimed, settlers were brought in from the northeast, and new towns, like Latina and Sab-

audia, were built to serve the surrounding farmland and to house new urban settlers. These showplaces were conveniently near the capital for foreign visitors to admire, but they were not duplicated in other parts of the country. Furthermore, the government’s program was designed primarily to stimulate private enterprise, and here the record was very disappointing:

in the years 1928-1938 only 76,000-80,000 hectares were reclaimed, mostly in Venetia and Emilia.3!

In 1935 Arrigo Serpieri, the undersecretary of agriculture in charge of the program, claimed that 800,000 hectares were all ready “more or less

launched” on some form of land reclamation,?2 but three years later, Giuseppe Tassinari, another leading figure in the bonifica movement, made the following telling criticism: It is undeniable that in many areas the hoped for synthesis between public and private activities, through the consortium, has not yet been realized. . . . For many reasons, not all the fault of private interests, the consortiums have either limited themselves to supervising the implementation of public works assigned to them by

the State, without activating any transformation of the land, or they have not known how to adapt their equipment and programs to the means available.®4

The argument over how much land was reclaimed went on after the Second World War, but the consensus has favored the lowest estimates, particularly those of Mario Bandini. According to him, out of 2,600,000 hectares in which some kind or reclamation was begun, only Io percent, or 220,000—250,000 hectares, showed a significant increase in productivity and in the number of people the land could support.34 (On another 100,000 hectares, completed irrigation systems increased production without creat-

ing new farms.) Out of these 220,000—-250,000 hectares, 100,000 were improved by the National Veterans’ Association on lands expropriated during the immediate prewar years, 30,000 by large private organizations, and 30,000 by the peasants themselves; as has already been mentioned, less

their consortiums. |

than 80,000 hectares were reclaimed by individual property owners through

The main weakness in the land-reclamation program was that the government allowed the consortiums an exaggerated extension of undertakings with insufficient control and funds. Although on paper these undertakings were at various stages of completion, in reality most of them were not even begun by the outbreak of the Second World War. But the war itself cannot be blamed, since the slowdown began by 1938. The idea of large-scale land-reclamation through a joint effort by public and private enterprise was certainly a good one. But the Fascist regime failed to stimulate sufficient cooperation among rural property owners, and it lacked the capital to do the job itself. Fascist efforts to intervene directly in banking and industry were more massive than in agriculture and were sparked by the world economic crisis. From beginning to end this intervention took place outside the ap-

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paratus and procedures of corporativism.®* Its principal vehicle was IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale), which was created in January, 1933, to give legal sanction to the state’s action a year earlier in buying stocks held by the Banco di Roma, the Banca Commerciale, and the Credito Italiano, in order to give these banks enough liquid capital to continue operating effectively. These stocks turned out to be in industries badly hit by the depression, so that IRI had to implement technical and organizational

changes in the concerns involved in order to recover at least part of its investment by making the stocks resalable on the open market at some future time. Created on a temporary basis to deal with banking and financial problems, IRI soon became permanently involved in industrial problems.** But

under Fascism it never tried to substitute public for private initiative in particular sectors of the economy; rather, it tried to eliminate their deficiencies so that they could compete successfully on their own. And it did this not as a public entity in the service of the national economy but as a stockholder, among others, in specific companies. In other words, it supported the policies that the companies themselves wanted in order to get back on their feet, rather than pushing for reduced costs, organizational consolidation, and adaptations to new economic conditions. This caution was largely attributable to the men who ran IRI—Donato Menichella and Alberto Beneduce—technical experts from the business establishment, determined to keep any government, Fascist or otherwise, from usurping private initiative in industry. As with other aspects of Fascist economic policy, there is much disagreement about the significance of IRI. On the one hand, Fascist “liberals” like Maffeo Pantaleoni and Alberto De Stefani have argued that it simply used the taxpayers’ money to salvage ailing banks and weak and inefficient industries. On the other hand, Pasquale Saraceno has maintained that IRI brought about a small but important modification in the property structure of the Italian economy by using public funds for investment purposes.?’

More recently the young American historian Roland Sarti has tried to prove that Beneduce used the powers of IRI to “revamp the entire system of production.”*® According to Sarti, Beneduce believed in doing this through financial inducements rather than by having the state assume direct respon-

sibility for the regulation of production. His chief victory in this respect came in early 1936, when the government reformed the banking system by limiting banks to shortterm commercial loans, thus forcing the industrialists to rely almost entirely on the government for medium and longterm credit. Although it would be an exaggeration to call IRI a new form of state capitalism, it did indeed create a public industrial sector with the same legal structure and operating procedures as the private sector. Thus, like Fiat, Montecatini, and Edison, IRI was able to “control” firms in which it held far less than 51 percent of the stocks, particularly in industries related to rearmament, such as shipbuilding, iron and steel, and engineering. After IRI was transformed in 1937 into a permanent industrial holding-company to aid the government’s programs of autarchy and rearmament, it continued

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to limit its operations to industries and services in which private enterprise was unwilling to invest sufficient funds. But those industries, protected by high tariffs and subsidized by war contracts, showed little improvement in productivity. In addition, the Banking Act of 1936 transferred IRI’s function of providing industrial credit to IMI (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano), and IM?s virtual monopoly in the field may have helped to distort and retard the development for Italian industry thereafter.°® This was ironical in view

of the charge that in 1935 Mussolini deliberately adopted an aggressive foreign policy and its attendant rearmament program mainly to help industry out of the depression.* The continuing inability of Italian banking and industry to provide enough capital forced IRI to assume an enduring role in a mixed economy that was emerging even before the banking reform of 1936. Once its _ original lending activities and subsidizing operations were transferred to IMI, IRI, under Beneduce’s guidance, became a permanent branch of the public administration until the late 1930s, with the purpose of encouraging the reorganization and rationalization of the industries under its control: steel, machinery, shipping, electricity, and telephones. Mussolini’s aggressive foreign policy prevented the kind of changes Beneduce wanted, but

in the long run IRI was to give the government more control over the economy than in any other capitalist country. Already by 1940 the government, through IRI, had a controlling interest in business corporations whose assets amounted to almost 18 percent of the total capital assets in Italy.*! To complicate matters, however, IRI and its affiliates issued their own stock, which could be purchased by private investors; in this way IRI had an additional source of investment capital aside from the government, and private investors in IRI acquired an interest in preserving public enterprise. The one area of the economy in which the Fascist government interfered the most was foreign trade, where it imposed a policy of autarchy. Yet in his memoirs Giacomo Acerbo, one of Fascism’s leading economists, says that Italy’s “so-called autarchical policies” came later and were less extensive than in other major countries, especially the United States.” It is true that Italy did not adopt policies like high tariffs, import quotas, and absolute embargos until 1935, largely as a defensive response to the League

of Nations’ sanctions during the Ethiopian War. But it is also true that such policies had a greater impact on Italy’s economy of limited resources than on the economy of the United States. Economic nationalism was one thing; the attempt to make the economy of a country like Italy self-sufficient was something else, and there were

numerous criticisms of it. Industrialists complained that restrictions on imported raw materials made it difficult for them to maintain production.* Workers blamed the higher prices imposed on their products for the home market (as opposed to the foreign market, where dumping occurred) for the fact that they were being laid off their jobs.** And economists lamented

the fact that the Italian consumer bore the entire cost for autarchy in the form of higher prices.* Overall the policy of autarchy did not cause a substantial deviation in the direction of Italian industrial development from

that of the past. It did, however, exercise a certain influence in certain

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branches of industry where changes in plant and work techniques were required in order to utilize national products as substitutes for formerly imported ones. In this process of adaptation certain sectors, especially textiles and construction, were sacrificed. On the other hand, a select group of thirty of the largest firms was granted special fixed quotas assuring them a steady supply of iron and steel; these privileged firms included Ansaldo,

Ilva, Terni, Snia Viscosa, Fiat, and Montecatini. Thus, even under the

restrictions imposed by autarchy, big business fared better than any other sector of the economy. During the entire Fascist period Italian economic growth was modest; during the depression years, 1929-1938, the rate of growth in industrial income in Italy was less than in almost every other European country. According to figures compiled by Confindustria (which were less “doctored” than those of the government), there was uninterrupted industrial growth

from 1922 to 1929 of 100 to 204; from 1929 to 1934 there was a sharp decline; beginning in 1935 a very slow recovery, so that by 1938 the index was 208. In 1939 there was a marked increase to 216.5, but the war years wiped this out. As in other countries with relatively stagnant economies during the 1930s—e.g. France and Great Britain—lower industrial income reduced the amount of savings available for investment in new growth. But in these countries at least per capita consumption increased somewhat, whereas in Italy it was slightly lower during the 1930s than it had been during the 1920s.** Furthermore, the autarchic policies of the government in the mid-1930s reinforced the state’s traditional reliance on indirect taxes

on consumer goods which in effect raised their price and reduced the demand for them. (In 1935 taxes on consumer goods accounted for half of all tax receipts.*’) It is difficult to say which of the three variables involved was most to blame: the basic backwardness of the economy, the depression itself, or Fascist policies. The economists argued that the deflationist policy of the late 1920s made it especially difficult for Italy to confront the problems of the depression. They also tended to blame the policy of autarchy for cutting down foreign trade and hence retarding economic growth at home. Autarchy, according to them, fostered the development of industries with low income and of primary products whose high cost brought higher prices for manufactured goods; for example, the high cost of home-produced iron

and coal pushed up steel prices, which in turn pushed up the prices of machinery of all kinds. In any case, the basic backwardness of the Italian economy made matters worse by limiting demand for all consumer goods, thus slowing the recovery from the depression. The two most telling indicators of Italy’s poverty were the fact that almost half of the economically active population was engaged in agriculture and that Italians as a whole spent almost 50 percent of their total income on food alone.* On the eve of the Second World War, out of a total active population

(age ten and up—a classification that was both realistic and revealing about Italian attitudes toward child labor) of 18,347,231, 8,756,064 were engaged in agriculture, 5,375,152 in industry, and 4,216,015 in services,

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commerce, and construction.*? The proportion of people employed in each of these major sectors of the economy had changed little under Fascism.

What had changed was the proportion of the total national income from each sector. In 1938, 36.4 percent of the total national income came from agriculture, 33.8 percent from industry, 8.7 percent from commerce, 5.7 percent from construction, and 15.4 percent from professional and other personal services and activities®° The figure for agriculture had declined since 1929 mainly because agricultural prices did not rise as fast as industrial prices but also because, low as it was, productivity in industry was higher than in agriculture. This was particularly so in the south, where agriculture was the nominal activity of the overwhelming majority of the population. In 1939 the geographical distribution of workers in industry was as follows: 65.3 percent in the north, 16.3 percent in the center, 12.4 percent in the south, six percent in the islands. Hence the economic gulf between the developing north and the backward south widened steadily under Fascism. Some older Italians look back to the late 1930s as a time when they lived better on less money than ever before, but the statistics on consumption and income belie their faulty memories. At 1938 prices, annual per Capita income was 2,948 lire from 1926 to 1930; 2,902 lire from 1931 to 1935; and 3,191 lire from 1936 to 1940.5! Again at 1938 prices, private consumption per capita was 2,545 lire from 1926 to 1930; 2,479 lire from 1931 to 1935; 2,522 lire from 1936 to 1940; public expenditures per capita were respectively 179, 250, and 369 lire>?—-the increases being attributable mainly to the bailing-out of the banks and to military expenditures. Clearly,

private consumption was lower during the late 1930s than it had been a decade earlier, thus indicating that the depression had not yet been overcome. Furthermore, per capita consumption of such items as meat, fruits and vegetables, fats, tobacco, and coffee also declined between the two decades.*3 The policy of autarchy was directly involved here and most specifically in the declining quality of the bread because precious white flour was limited and darker flour was used instead. It is easy to forget such

things after over thirty years, but at the time the complaints were numerous.** The one indication of a slight improvement was the fact that the average expenditure on food declined from 49.5 percent (1925-1930) to 45.5 percent (1936-1940), but, as in most countries, this decline was due primarily to falling agricultural prices rather than to higher per capita

income.

The following table of nominal and real income of workers in industry®® needs little explanation. The declines in 1935 were due to the institution of the forty-hour week as an emergency measure to spread the available amount of work among some of the unemployed. The large increase in hourly and monthly wages from 1937 on was due primarily to increased employment in the high-paying machine industries. But taking the rising cost of living into account, the real income of the average industrial worker was about the same in 1939 as it had been in 1928; increased deductions for social-security benefits and taxes may actually have made the average take-home paycheck slightly less.5¢

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TABLE 4-1 Numerical Indexes of Nominal and Real Wages of Industrial Workers (base, 1928=100)

HOURLY MONTHLY COST OF REAL WAGES

YEAR WAGES WAGES LIVING HOURLY MONTHLY

1929 99.5 100.6 101.6100.2 97.9 97-4 99.0 1930 98.6 95.8 98.4 1931 91.0 92.9 84.9 87.784.9 88.9107.1 104.5100.0 98.7 1932 1933 88.6 85.6 81.4 —III.O 108.8106.1 105.1 1934 85.7 81.9 77.2 1935 84.3 74.5 78.3 107.6 95.1 1936 89.5 78.1 84.2 106.3 92.7 1937 100.5 91.0 92.2 109.0 98.7 1938 107.6 95.1 99.3 108.3 95.8 1939 117.8 104.6 103.7 113.4 100.8 During the Fascist period a number of substitutes for wages and salary were instituted. These:‘included family allowances, end-of-the-year bonuses,

and increases in severance pay. All of these, but particularly the practice of giving bonuses in the form of an extra month’s paycheck (often two or three months in the case of higher-ranking office employees), have given Italy since 1945 a complicated system of paying its workers and employees

in indirect and delayed ways not indicated in the figures for hourly or monthly income. The system of family allowances was developed in late 1934 in order to compensate workers with at least two children for the reduction in their wages brought about by the reduction of the work week to forty hours, but

it was continued thereafter as a substitute for wage increases. Within a year an increment in income was given for the first as well as the second child, and the system was extended to white-collar employees as well. In 1939 the value of each increment was increased by 50 percent, and an additional one was given for the wife; further increases were granted in 1941. Italy’s system of family allowances was one of the most comprehensive in the world at the time. The explanation probably lies in its secondary goal of favoring large families in accordance with Mussolini’s political goals. But, as we shall see, the slight increase in the birthrate from 1938 to 1940 was due more to the increase in the number of young adults born in the immediate postwar years than to any policy of the government. It

should also be noted that the proportion of women in the job market declined in the late 1930s, thus depriving some families of income from working wives and mothers, a deprivation scarcely made up by the small family allowance to the husband. Aside from the family allowances, the Fascist regime did not go very

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far in creating a welfare state. Sickness insurance was included in most labor contracts after 1928, but it was incorporated into government legislation only in 1943; until 1939 it covered only the worker himself and only 50 percent of his wage, with no compensation for medical expenses. No improvements were made in the nation’s modest system of unemployment

insurance, despite the great demands made on it during the depression years. And only in 1939 were minor improvements made in the system of retirement insurance. Thus, under Fascism, social security benefits were modest and fragmented among several agencies and were less advanced than in Scandinavia or New Zealand, not to mention the Soviet Union. Despite everything the regime did to hide the facts, the 1930s was a decade of depression and widespread unemployment in Italy, hardly less severe than in Great Britain. Official unemployment figures were collected

by two separate agencies: the National Social Insurance Fund (Cassa Nazionale per le Assicurazioni Sociali) between 1924 and 1933, and the main centers of the Employment Offices from 1933 onward. Not only were there discrepancies in the standards used, but, what was more important, unemployed urban artisans and many agricultural workers were simply not included. Officially there were 1.2 million unemployed Italians by December, 1932; if one adds the urban artisans and uncounted agricultural workers, the figure would be closer to 2 million,’ the approximate figure for the same date in Great Britain, which had only a slightly larger population and a considerably larger proportion of industrial and service workers. After the beginning of 1935°° the government no longer published unemployment

figures, though they can now be pieced together from contemporary unofficial estimates and reports from the provinces in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato. As in many countries hit by the depression, the prevailing eco-

nomic attitude in Italy was one of keeping what one had rather than growth. Private industry had little incentive to reduce its costs and its labor force by investing in technical improvements, and many public projects

specifically forbade the use of new machinery in order to leave more manual jobs.*®

Local and regional reports from party and police officials and the prefects indicate that unemployment was considerably higher than national Statistics would indicate throughout the 1930s and the war years.® In addition, government restrictions on internal migration—particularly through

the “job passport” (Libretto di lavoro) required of all employees—held down visible unemployment by tying peasants to the land and checking the burgeoning growth of cities. One should therefore add approximately 75 percent to any national figure to get a more realistic total for any year; thus, the official figure of 960,000 for December, 1934, should really be 1,700,000, the official figure of 740,000 for 1935, 1,300,000, etc. For 1936 the official figure was 700,000, for 1937-1938, 700,000—720,000; only in

1939 did the figure go below 700,000. Actually, unemployment figures should have been even lower for the years 1935-1938 because of the smaller number of young people (those born during the First World War) entering the labor market, and for 1935-1936, because of partial mobilization for the Ethiopian War. The main reason that these figures were not

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lower was the closing off of the possibility of emigration and the actual return of some emigrants, particularly from France and the United States. _ From 1939 on, the larger numbers of young adults born during the immediate postwar years were being absorbed partly by industry (now recovering) but mainly by the armed forces. The policy of autarchy caused some unemployment in industries and

agricultural enterprises cut off from foreign trade, but the most basic cause of unemployment, which the depression aggravated, was the indisputable fact that economic growth was barely staying ahead of population growth. In general, unemployment was lower in heavy industry than in other sectors of the economy, but it is difficult to say to what extent the policy of keeping a superabundant supply of industrial workers employed at low wages was simply accepted by private enterprise out of inertia and

to what extent it was directly fostered by the state through IRI. On the other hand, unemployment was highest in the overpopulated, backward south, where, in contrast to the rest of the country, it went up in 1939. Unemployment figures for industrial workers give a distorted picture of the economy as a whole, for almost half of the active population was engaged in agriculture, and it was here that the depression hit the hardest, both in terms of unemployment and increased poverty. After the “victory” in the Battle of Grain in 1934, the regime tended to ignore the agricultural population increasingly, except for the ostentatious transfer of a few thousand poor farmers to land reclaimed from the Pontine marshes. The situation was especially bad in the south (including Sicily and Sardinia), where the growing surplus of young men was almost completely cut off from its normal avenues of emigration.*! Out of desperation a handful of these young men volunteered to fight in the Italian legions in the Spanish Civil War, but the majority had to stay home and work at odd jobs for a few hours a

week a few months out of the year. Southern Italy’s rural ghettos have been vividly described in Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli, Elio Vittorini’s

In Sicily, and Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine, but these works were unknown to the Italian reading public under Fascism. Not only was the poverty of Italy’s rural masses ignored by the middle classes, but rural life

in all its forms was beyond their ken. The Fascist regime did less than many “liberal-parliamentary” regimes to counteract the effects of the depression and unemployment. Most of the temporary relief measures were organized by local party and union officials,

and a large proportion of the public-works projects were sponsored and funded by municipal governments. The only major innovations of the national government were the lowering of wages until 1934 and the introduction of the forty-hour week and family allowances thereafter. Other-

wise the most it could think of was to move small numbers of people away from areas where unemployment was particularly bad. (On the party’s activities in public assistance, see pp. 71—72.) In the early 1930s some federali thought it would be a good idea to give unemployed eighteento-twenty-year-olds jobs in the party Militia—a policy that would keep them off the streets and give them “spiritual training and discipline”—but most of these youths were unwilling to join the Militia, and some were ready

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to leave the party altogether rather than do so.®? Thus, neither the state nor the party created a significant number of new jobs within their own ranks or through large-scale public works.

The basic fact to keep in mind regarding the responses of Italian workers to the Fascist experience is that strikes, protest demonstrations, and even verbal criticism of government policies were illegal. Hence, the number of actual strikes and protests was small, and even these were not publicized, so that the impression the general public got from the mass media was one of labor discipline and contentment. Compared to the situation in the immediate postwar years this impression was not inaccurate. There was little “subversive activity,” even by Fascist definitions; most labor

disturbances were sparked by unemployment and poverty, although there was also much hostility toward employers who cheated on their contracts. One of the commonest causes of working-class agitation during the early 1930S was wage cuts. Each time the government sanctioned such cuts there were spontaneous work stoppages, sometimes accompanied by unfavorable comments about the regime, followed by the arrest of the instigators

and a return to a normal situation.*¢ These disturbances rarely lasted longer than a day or two and never involved more than a few hundred workers in a particular factory. They were caused by a natural reaction to keep what one had in the depths of the depression. Economic hardship drove women as well as men into the streets and piazzas in protest. In Bologna province they demonstrated against having

to pay for injections and against the closing of the soup kitchens.® In Potenza province they protested against unemployment and certain municipal taxes.*° In the slums of Trieste the women complained loudly every day in early 1933 about having to eat the pigeons their children killed with

stones in the street; the police hesitated to interfere for fear of creating

more incidents.*’ In a small town near Forli a women’s street demonstration caused eight arrests and prompted Mussolini to have ten thousand lire distributed among the poor—a meager substitute for their demand for jobs on public-works projects for their husbands.®

Other grievances also sparked protest demonstrations in the mid1930s. Hard-pressed municipal governments got behind in their payments to public employees; in the town of Ragusa, for example, fifty street cleaners refused to work until they were paid five months’ back wages, and work

gangs demanded payment for their labor two years earlier on townsponsored public works.®? In Vicenza in August, 1936, there was a series of demonstrations over nonpayment of relief subsidies for seven thousand workers laid off by the local woolen mills because of the freeze on wool imports;” in all reports of such disturbances the police naturally looked for the influence of “outside agitators,” whereas in most cases the disturbances were spontaneous. Another frequent cause for protest was unwar-

ranted reductions in the work week by small employers when the first across-the-board wage raises were initiated in September, 1936; for the small employers this was the only way they could absorb the required wage increases without raising their costs.

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Whereas public disturbances like those just mentioned were isolated and rare, there were frequent complaints by workers against nonfulfillment of contracts and other abuses by their employers. In Trieste province the owners of a stone quarry held back payment to their workers, despite the

intervention of their union and the protests of the federale.”? In Siena province two thousand workers complained about the nonfulfillment of their contract by their employers, who, according to an anonymous report, had

bought off the federale and forced the transfer of the overzealous union secretary.”2 Other employers simply ignored the law about collective contracts and made their own arrangements with their workers.’4 But the commonest complaint was against employers who accepted a specific contract on wages and then paid their workers at a lower rate.”* One abuse arising from the wage raises of the late 1930s was the practice of some employers of firing workers whose seniority entitled them to the maximum wage and

rehiring at the minimum wage. Another abuse was the closing down of many big companies “for inventory” during the first week in January in order to recuperate the required bonus payment for a fifty-third week at the end of the preceding year beginning in 1939.”° Paternalism remained the rule in labor-management relations throughout the Fascist period, in both large and small enterprises. The employers and their representatives treated the workers like children, addressing them in the familiar form and scolding them with little regard for their feelings. In some towns one company dominated the entire economy; the outstanding example was Turin, increasingly controlled by Fiat, which employed 44,000 workers in 1935 and 70,000 in 1940. Fiat, Ansaldo,’”? Montecatini,’® and other big companies settled grievances in an arbitrary way, firing those workers who protested too vigorously. Without the right to strike and with-

out strong unions of their own, Italian workers had to put up with the arbitrariness and bullying of plant supervisors and foremen who, as everywhere, were often harsher than their superiors toward the workers. Thus Fascism did nothing to alleviate traditional class antagonisms; it merely drove them underground, like the Mafia. But the Fascist unions were not without their effect on the workers, as the steady increase in membership alone would indicate. Unlike membership in the party, union membership was never a requirement for keep-

ing one’s job, so that motive did not come into play very much. For the first few years after the dissolution of the free unions many workers were resentful of the Fascist unions and found it difficult to think of them as their own.”® During the 1930s, however, membership in the Fascist unions skyrocketed. In Milan province, for example, the number of members in the industrial unions was 176,000 in 1933 and 560,041 in 1940; in Rovigo the figure for 1931 was 5,085, for 1940, 22,000.81 Such figures were repeated

in the agricultural and white-collar unions as well. During the early 1930s both the party and the unions made considerable headway among industrial workers in the larger companies, and the party's activities in giving relief aid were popular among the unemployed. Working-class disillusionment with both the party and the unions became

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Economy and Labor

widespread only in 1937 and 1938, with the high cost of living and an increasing number of instances of employers not honoring their contracts. This change was well illustrated among the workers in the Ansaldo shipyards in Genoa, who were unusually sophisticated and who had a strong socialist tradition: a party report of July 16, 1933, said that thousands of them attended a Fascist rally and cheered the Duce and the union leaders;®2 a similar report of March 22, 1937, said that even those workers who had recently joined the party saw no improvement in their economic con-

dition as a result of new contracts negotiated by their unions or of the conquest of Ethiopia.*? The extent to which this kind of discontent was exploited by the nascent Communist underground labor forces is problematic, but these forces were there by the late 1930s, whereas until then the Fascists had no competition in their efforts to regiment the workers. Although after 1928 most Fascist union leaders were time-serving bureaucrats, a few zealous syndicalists still exerted some influence: Pietro Capoferri was a good example. In March, 1930, when Mussolini transferred him from Bergamo to head the industrial unions of the province of Milan, the Duce admitted to him that there was “after seven years of the regime

a clear gap between the party and the masses,” and Capoferri himself stated that only 15 percent of the industrial workers in the province belonged to the Fascist unions.®5 Most workers remained skeptical about them,

making unfavorable comparisons with the defunct socialist unions.** But by early 1932, under Capoferri’s leadership, the Fascist unions negotiated quite favorable contracts for the workers—and this in the depths of the depression—and even brought equality of wages for workers in Milan and other parts of the province. Not only were the workers pleased by these contracts,®’ but they also came in large numbers to hear Capoferri expound the virtues of the corporative state at a number of party rallies.°* Capoferri never lost his hostility to the old Confindustria and, in 1939, he became one of the principal champions of the reinstatement of shop stewards. But Capoferri’s concern as a top union official could not counteract all abuses and resultant complaints. This was particularly the case regarding small industries that took advantage of the unemployment and misery of the early 1930s to pay lower wages; with or without justification, many workers viewed the inaction of their unions as a sign of connivance with the employers.®® In 1937 one informer reported workers’ conversations in a bar in Sesto San Giovanni, in which the general line was that the Duce’s

statement that capital and labor should be one thing was impossible to realize and that the unions did not provide sufficient leadership and protection from overbearing employers.® In Ferrara province the leaders of the Fascist unions took on the role of contractors in certain private and public enterprises, thus depriving the workers of true union leadership.” The list of such dissatisfaction of the workers with their union leader- . ship could be extended almost endlessly; the main point is that the govern-

ment and the party usually did not give strong backing to the unions. In Vicenza, for example, both the prefect and the commander of the Militia

urged the transfer of the regional union secretary, a certain Secondo

107

The FASCIST Experience

Amadio, because of his overzealous syndicalist stand vis-a-vis the employers.°2 At Matera the regional secretary of the farm workers’ union speci-

fically charged the local authorities with failing to enforce contracts negotiated by the unions.®? As might be expected, the situation was particularly bad in Sicily, where the reactionary land and mine owners tried to stifle all union activity; in 1934 the federale of Siracusa claimed to have

stepped in where the union officials had feared to tread and taken the side of the workers,°* but such gestures were altogether exceptional, particularly in the south. At Taranto, where the arsenal and the F. Tosi ship-

yards employed several thousand skilled workers, another exceptional situation arose when the local workers were able to compare notes with workers brought in from La Spezia; they learned that their union leaders had neglected to inform them that their new contract, though it gave them the same hourly wage as workers in the north, gave them a lower rate for piecework.®

Perhaps the most discouraging aspect of the Fascist unions was that their leaders were appointed by the government and considered themselves government servants. As late as April, 1941, Critica Fascista published an editorial implying that working-class people were still barred from adminis-

trative and leadership roles in the country and even in their own unions and that, for this reason, the regime had no strong hold on the workers’ loyalty.°%° This was becoming increasingly true by 1938 among the young-

est workers, apprentices, and young veterans, who were more outspoken at union meetings than their older colleagues. For this reason the regime forbade the enrollment of anyone under age eighteen in the unions. On the other hand, many apprentices were fired at age eighteen, when they were entitled to full pay.®’ Even the labor exchanges employed bureaucrats unqualified for the work of classifying workers and getting them jobs once

these exchanges came under the control of the unions. Despite all these specific complaints about the inadequacies of the Fascist unions, these unions did help to break down the workers’ feeling of social and cultural isolation and to give them a sense of belonging to the

national community. The unions performed many functions, as in Nazi Germany and the USSR; they handled social-security benefits, they served —through the labor exchanges—as employment agencies, they handled claims for severance pay, and they sometimes did negotiate contracts that

were fairly advantageous to the workers. In addition, along with the Dopolavoro, they brought the workers into the mainstream of Italy's emerging mass society. Even Eugenio Curiel, an underground Communist agent, recognized the importance of the Fascist unions in the workers’ lives in a

report written in January, 1939.°° He pointed out that the workers often went to large meetings where they were able to discuss their immediate grievances with their colleagues and with petty functionaries. Curiel said that, in 1939, there was no possibility of creating a rival union-movement to the Fascist one and that therefore the Communists should try to “bore from within.” The extent to which they were able to do so is uncertain, but the fact that they saw the Fascist unions as a meaningful mass organization is most significant.

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Economy and Labor

In contrast to its various contacts with the urban workers, the Fascist regime had few ways of reaching most peasants. Except for some communal

radio-sets in the late 1930s, the mass media, particularly the press and films, passed them by. (See Chapter 8.) The unions of farmers and of agricultural workers were run by bureaucrats and commanded little respect. The youth organizations (Balilla and GIL) and the Dopolavoro were weak

in most rural areas, and in any case their activities were not adapted to peasant needs and interests. Nor did the schools have much effect, for most rural children did not attend beyond the third grade and soon forgot what little they had learned. Interestingly enough, the period of military service required of each Italian youth was not used to instill Fascist propaganda, so that peasant lads were not reached by the regime to any great extent even in the army. There was an almost ludicrous irony in the contrast between the attitudes of most peasants toward the regime and the glorification of rural life by certain Fascist propagandists. It seems fairly clear that the Fascist regime was no more successful than any other in making Italian peasants believe that it was not their enemy and that it was actually working in their interests. Some of the more prosperous farm-owners recognized certain

economic benefits, as did the few thousand landless peasants who were resettled in the drained Pontine marshes. But the mass of sharecroppers, tenants, and agricultural laborers, saw little improvement in their lives, and those in the south were probably worse off than before because of the virtual end of emigration abroad. Yet Arrigo Serpieri, an eminent professor of agricultural economics and a high official in the ministry of agriculture, said that it was essential to “ruralize” Italy because in the first place a high degree of rural life assures demographic development and at the same time contributes to the health and physical and moral strength of the race, whereas urbanism and industrialism lower fertility and spread dangerous germs and decadent habits. In the second place, rural life checks the passions better than urban life ... and favors the virtues of work and thrift in the interest of improving the land that is to be passed on to the children. In the third place, agriculture furnishes the means of subsistence.!

Admittedly this idyllic picture of rural life was one of the commonplaces of

the depression years in many western countries, but it was particularly wrong-headed for the actual situation in most of rural Italy.

First of all, as has already been mentioned, Italian agriculture was lopsided and inefficient, so that it did not even furnish the means of subsistence for the country’s growing population. During the 1920s, as in industry, the total production of many items rose significantly, particularly grain, beet sugar, and tobacco; the increasing use of chemical fertilizers was also a sign of slow progress. But the world depression hit Italian agriculture particularly hard because it was so weak to start with. In the more advanced countries of northern Europe farmers switched increasingly to producing dairy products and meat, which brought a higher income than cereals, which were a glut on the market. But in agriculture, even more

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The FASCIST Experience

than in industry, Italy had the typical characteristics of a poor country; without capital and know-how, all that her farmers could do was to keep producing grain in the same old inefficient way. Also, during the 1930s, the production, and hence consumption, of meat actually declined.1”

In the second place, the Fascist goal of filling the countryside with small landowners was never achieved; in fact the structure of rural Italy remained basically unchanged.’ Even the official Fascist figures showed a drop in the number of farm proprietors from 2,292,308 in 1921 to 2,073,240 in 1936, which was almost exactly proportional to the 10 percent drop

| in the total population actively engaged in agriculture. What changed was the Fascist system of counting and classifying people. In 1926, for example,

Mussolini arbitrarily transferred over 1,000,000 sharecroppers from the farm laborers’ union to the farm proprietors’ union, despite considerable violent protest by the sharecroppers in a number of provinces.!% In taking this step the Duce said that it was not final but that his ultimate goal was

that the sharecroppers, by saving, should become small landowners. He also said that the agricultural day-laborers should disappear as a class by being absorbed into public-works projects and specialized forms of agriculture.!°% But since these outlets did not materialize in any significant way,

there is no plausible explanation for the big drop in the number of male agricultural day laborers (one must add 25 percent to the total to include

females as well) in the Fascist statistics for 1921 (3,170,589) to 1936 (1,791,946 )—a drop from 44.7 percent to 28.4 percent of the total number of males active in agriculture.1% The bulk of the land transfers—6 percent of Italy’s total farmland— that could have increased the number of small proprietors had taken place

during the immediate postwar years, before the Fascists came to power. 125,000 new proprietors had been created with 250,000 hectares (an average of 2.5 hectares per farm), and 750,000 hectares had been added to existing farms.1° Most small landowners (those with less than 5 hectares ) still held their land in separate plots and continued to live in squalor in villages, rather than on consolidated farms of their own, though there were some exceptions in the Po Valley. In the south, returning emigrants used their savings to buy land or to send their children into the professions, re-

fusing to abandon the hovels they had originally left when they had emigrated, hovels in which a whole family slept in the same room with the animals. During the depression much of the newly acquired land was sold back to its old owners at 20 to 30 percent less than its original price. But the depression merely aggravated a basically unsound situation in which a family without funds or training tried to subsist on 2 or 3 hectares. Many small proprietors came to envy the tenant farmers and sharecroppers, who had no taxes to pay and whom the landowners would help in a pinch. As in all countries, Italy’s agricultural day-laborers were the nation’s

poorest, most underprivileged class—a true proletariat. The majority of them were migrant workers on big farms under shortterm contracts. Under

the best conditions they worked 200-250 days a year; in 1936, in the province of Modena, generally known for high farm-wages, the average was 8o days, with a total yearly income of 1,000 lire.1% The situation was

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Economy and Labor

particularly bad in Emilia (where Modena is located), Lombardy, Venetia, Campania, Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. In Ferrara province (also in Emilia), over 50,000 braccianti, mostly women, were out of work in the winter of 1934—1935.'°% Furthermore, despite the decline in the cost of living and increased payments in kind, the real income of farm workers went down between 1927 and 1931.!° And even the official spokesmen of

the regime recognized the lack of uniformity in the contracts of farm laborers: “We must acknowledge that there are innumerable standards, so that in provinces with identical work conditions and for the same types of

workers, there are large differences in wages which are in no way justified.”1!° The Fascist ideal of eliminating migrant workers was made im-

possible by its own policies, such as the concentration on grain, which hindered the settlement of day laborers in one place.

In general, rural Italians gained little from the Fascist experience. Like all earlier governments, the Fascists raised taxes, thus sparking the usual protests.!!1 Other complaints arose over government price-fixing and local tariffs. In late 1938 the regime launched its biggest reform, the aboli-

tion of the latifundia in parts of Sicily, thus alienating the landowners there.1 But unfortunately the Second World War interrupted the implementation of this reform, so that when the regime finally fell it had accomplished little indeed in improving the quality of rural life in Italy. Economically Fascism was a failure. The most serious ideological and constitutional innovation of the regime, the corporative state, did nothing to reduce class antagonisms or improve economic conditions; in fact, it never really functioned at all except on paper. Those few Fascist officials who knew something about economic theory, like Alberto De Stefani and Giacomo Acerbo, were unable to bring about any significant changes in economic practice. Italy became almost self-sufficient in wheat production at the expense of the rest of her agriculture. IRI, which has been used since 1945 to stimulate economic growth, was not designed for this purpose; under Fascism IRI served mainly to perform a salvage operation similar to the Reconstruction Finance Corporation in the United States. It is true that during the 1930s the main economic concerns almost everywhere were conservation and recovery rather than growth, but on both scores Italy’s

performance was worse than that of any major country, even stagnant France. The main reason for this bad performance was.that Italy was poorer to start with, but the fact remains that the Fascist regime did more to hinder than to aid economic growth and modernization. Critica Fascista and other

champions of modernization deplored this fact but could not change it. Even before the disastrous losses of the Second World War, growth in national income was retarded by restrictive cartels, discouragement of urban growth, the Battle of Grain, the spread of autarchy, and promotion of war industry.'!°

Fascist efforts to serve the needs of all classes had mixed success. Autarchy allowed less social mobility and economic expansion than less regimented economies, but it did guarantee every established producer a fixed share of the market. Certainly the abolition of the independent trade

11

The FASCIST Experience

unions favored the employers over the wage earners, but the Fascist unions, while they did little to help the workers economically, did give them some sense of belonging to the larger Italian community. The system of family

allowances was based on humanitarian as well as nationalistic motives, even though it was a poor substitute for real wage increases and was not tied to a broader program of social security. For ordinary workers the most

frustrating experience was to be unable to cope effectively with the bad faith of employers who did not fulfill their contracts. But the hardships of the depression also brought out the worst in some workers as well. In Rome in 1936, several hundred unemployed hotel and restaurant employees demonstrated against the Employment Office, claiming that it was giving some of their relief money to workers in other occupations.1!4 This kind of meanness was less typical of blue-collar workers and farm laborers, but it

could occur even among these classes. For example, in Albanese, near Grosseto, in April, 1931, the local farm workers resented the government's settlement of six hundred workers from Venetia on land reclaimed by the Opera Nazionale Combattenti, fearing that they would lose their own jobs because of it.115 Neither Balbo’s transatlantic flights nor the creation of the African Empire could compensate Italy’s working masses for their basic poverty and insecurity.

NOTES I. There is no satisfactory general history of the Italian economy under Fascism. Books and articles on specific aspects of this topic will be cited throughout this chapter. A good summary can be found in Shepard B. Clough, The Economic History of Modern Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), Chapter 7. 2. Mussolini made this point in a speech to the Consiglio Nazionale delle Corporazioni on November 14, 1933; for the rationale behind corporativism see the discussions of this council from November 8 to November 14, 1933, in Sindacato e Corporazione. Bollettino del lavoro e della previdenza sociale. Informazioni corporativi, 9g (July-December 1933): 647ff. For the traditional liberal view see Luigi Einaudi, “Trincee economiche e corporativismo,” La Riforma sociale, 44, no. 6 (November—December 1933): 633-656. 3. E.g., a radio broadcast of November 12, 1934, by Roberto Forges Davanzati, in Cronache del Regime, 3 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1936-37), 1, 29-32. 4. Alfredo Rocco, “Il momento economico e sociale” (1919), in Scritti e dis-__

corsi politici, II, 586. .

5. Id., speech of December 10, 1925, ibid., III, 991. 6. Id., “Costituzione e funzioni delle Corporazioni,” speech to the Chamber of

Deputies, 16 January 1934, ibid., 1012.

7. See Ruggero Zangrandi, Il lungo viaggio attraverso il fascismo, pp. 442-443. 8. Ugo Spirito, Critica della democrazia (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), p. 33. For a full statement of Spirito’s position in 1932, see his “Individuo e Stato nella concezione corporativa,” Nuovi studi di diritto, economia e politica, V, no. 2 (1932); for the evo-

lution of Spirito’s thought, see Antimo Negri, Dal corporativismo all’umanesimo scientifico: itinerario teoretico di Ugo Spirito (Manduria, Lacaita, 1964). For the full proceedings of the Ferrara convention see Ministero delle Corporazioni, Atti del secondo

112

Economy and Labor convegno di studi sindacali e corporativi, Ferrara 5-8 maggio 1932, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1932).

9. “Gli industriali e le corporazioni,” in Luigi Lojacono, Le corporazioni

fasciste (Milan: Hoepli, 1935), p. 139. 10. “Il principio corporativo dello Stato fascista,” in ibid., 8off.

rz. “Un pericolo corporativo,” Critica Fascista, 13, no. 7 (1 February 1935),

125-136.

p. 285.

12. Battaglie economiche tra le due guerre, 2 vols. (Milan: Garzanti, 1953), I,

13. Ignazio Brunelli, Un dittatore fallito ed i suoi complici (Bologna: Tipografia compositore, 1952), p. 156; for the actual names of these and other such unrepresentative representatives, see Zangrandi, op. cit., pp. 446-449. 14. 15, no. 6 (15 January 1937): 83. 15. Giulio Scagnetti, Gli enti di privilegio nell’ economia corporativa italiana (Padova: CEDAM, 1942), p. 161f.

16. Roland Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership in Italy, 1919-1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 102. 17. Anonymous report from Messina dated October 20, 1931, PNF, Sit. Pol.

Prov., Matera. 18. Reports of November 14, 1934 and February 13, 1935, P.S. (1903-1949), Cl, busta 1, Aosta. Ig. Report of March 3, 1935, PNF, Sit., Pol. Prov., La Spezia.

20. See the editorial, “Cosa manca alle corporazioni?” in Il Lavoro, 27 December 1941.

21. Italo Insolera, Roma moderna (Turin: Einaudi, 1962), pp. 125, 149.

22. See for example the article by Luigi Einaudi, Italy’s outstanding liberal economist, in the Corriere della Sera of November 8, 1922; the title of the article, “La scelta dei chiodi su cui battere” (“The choice of nails that need to be hit’), indicates the need to tax the heretofore “undertaxed” workers. 23. Friedrich Voechting, “La politica agraria,” in Gerhard Dobbert, ed., L’economia fascista (Florence: Sansoni, 1935), passim.

24. See Shepard B. Clough, op. cit., pp. 228-230, and Renzo De Felice, “I lineamenti politici della ‘quota novanta’ attraverso i documenti di Mussolini e di . Volpi,” Il Nuovo osservatore, 7, no. 50 (May 1966): 370—395. 25. Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il fascista, 2, 254. 26. Ibid., p. 236. 27. Roland Sarti, “The Battle of the Lira 1925-1927,” Past and Present, no. 47 (May 1970): 98. 28. Ibid., pp. 110-111. 29. Report of Chief of Police Bocchini, 24 October 1927, P.S. (1927), busta 109, fasc. “Statistica mensile delle agitazioni e astensioni del lavoro,”

30. Memo, Benni to Mussolini, March 30, 1926, Seg. Part. del Duce, Gran Consiglio, 242/R, fasc. 20, sottofasc. 4 (1926), inserto C. 31. Mario Bandini, “Sulla bonifica,” Rivista di politica agraria, 1, no. 1 (March 1954): I9.

32. Arrigo Serpieri, Le legge sulla bonifica integrale nel quinto anno di applicazione (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1935), p. IoI. 33. Giuseppe Tassinari, La bonifica integrale nel decennale della legge Mussolini (Rome: Editrice Arti Grafiche “Aldina,” 1938), p. 262.

34. Mario Bandini, Cento anni di storia agraria italiana, 2nd ed. (Rome: 5

Lune, 1963), p. 161. 35. Sabino Cassese, “Corporazioni ed intervento pubblico nell’economia,”’ Quaderni storici delle Marche, 9 (1968): 402; also, Alberto De Stefani, Baraonda bancaria (Milan: Longanesi, 1960), pp. 516-519.

36. On IRI, see Gualberto Gualerni, La politica industriale fascista (Milan:

Istituto Sociale Ambrosiano, 1956) and Michael V. Posner and Stuart J. Woolf, Italian Public Enterprise (London: Duckworth, 1967.) 37. Ministero dell’Industria e del Commercio. L’Istituto per la Ricostruzione

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The FASCIST Experience

Italiano—IRI, vol. 3, Origini, ordini e attivita svolte (Rapporto del Prof. Pasquale Saraceno) (Turin, 1956), esp. pp. 19-59. 38. Sarti, Fascism and the Industrial Leadership, p. 121. 39. Posner and Woolf, op. cit., p. 23. 40. The most recent restatement of this charge is in Franco Catalano, L’economia italiana di guerra (Florence: La Nuova Italia, for the Istituto Nazionale per la Storia del Movimento di Liberazione, 1970).

41. Rosario Romeo, Breve storia della grande industria in Italia (Bologna: Cappelli, 1963), pp. 169-170.

42. Giacomo Acerbo, Fra due plotoni di esecuzione: Avvenimenti e problemi del’epoca fascista (Bologna: Cappelli, 1968), p. 328. 43. E.g., report of the federale, Mar. 12, 1935, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Trieste. 44. E.g., anonymous report of April 9, 1937, ibid., Napoli. 45. E.g., Luigi Federici, “Il costo dell’autarchia e le sue relazioni con il commercio con l’estero,” Giornale degli economisti e rivista di statistica, 58 (August, 1938), 610.

46. Giovanni Demaria, “Il problema industriale italiano,” ibid., n.s., 3 (September—October 1941): 533.

47. Francesco Repaci, La finanza pubblica italiana nel secolo 1861-1960 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1962), pp. 203-215.

48. Ministero per la Costituente, Atti della commissione per lo studio dei

problemi del lavoro, III. Memorie su argomenti economici, Bruno Ragazzi, “Redditi e consumi della populazione italiana negli anni ’44—’46 a confronto col periodo prebellico,” (Rome: Stabilimento Tipografico U.E.S.1S.A., 1946), 385-408. 49. Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Compendio statistico italiano, vol. 14 (Rome:

Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1940), p. 41. “ 50. Ministero per la Costituente, loc. cit.

51. Annali di Statistica, 86th year, series 8, vol. 9, Indagine statistica sullo slivuppo del reddito nazionale dell’Italia dal 1861 al 1956 (Rome: Istituto Centrale di Statistica, 1957), p. 252. 52. Ibid., p. 263. 53. Giovanni Demaria, loc. cit., 533. See also Stefano Somogyi, Cento anni di bilanci familiari in Italia (1857-1956) in Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Annali, II (1959), 121-263.

54. E.g., report of the General Inspector of the Pubblica Sicurezza, 12 May 1938, P.S. (1903-1949), busta 3, Bari; also, reports of the federali of Roma, 24 March and 31 December, 1937, and of Genova, 30 March 1937, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov. 55. From Cesare Vannutelli, “Le condizioni di vita dei lavoratori italiani nel decennio 1929-39,” Rassegna di statistiche del lavoro, Io, no. 3 (May-June 1958): 107.

56. In June 1938, in Genoa, office employees of the middle rank at the Gas and Water Works earned 1,500 lire per month, of which 1,100 was take-home pay; the lowest ranks earned 700, of which 500 was take-home pay. Many manual laborers got only 12 lire per day. See anonymous report of 5 June 1938, PNF., Sit. Pol. Prov., Genova, busta I. 57. This figure is given for 1931 in Piero Capoferri, Venti anni col fascismo e con i sindacati (Milan: Gastaldi, 1957), p. 69. Capoferri was the head of the Fascist unions in the province of Milan during the 1930s and the president of the National Confederation of Industrial Workers after September, 1939. 58. In his radio broadcast of January 17, 1935, Roberto Forges Davanzati said that unemployment had declined from 1,132,257 in December, 1933, to 961,705 in December, 1934, largely owing to the introduction of the forty-hour week in November, 1934. (Cronache del regime, I, 129.) The fact that the figure was still this high probably convinced the regime that it would be better not to continue giving such figures. 59. Cesare Vannutelli, loc. cit., 107.

6o. The estimates given here are based on reports from the following provinces in the P.S. (1903-1949) and the PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov.: Ancona, Aosta, Aquila, Frosi-

114

Economy and Labor none, Genova, Gorizia, Grosseto, Imperia, Lecce, La Spezia, Lucania, Lucca, Macerata, Mantova, Matera, Milano, Modena, Napoli, Novara, Nuoro, Palermo, Parma, Pescara, Pisa, Pola, Potenza, Ragusa, Reggio Emilia, Reggio Calabria, Rieti, Rovigo, Sassari, Savona, Siena, Siracusa, Sondrio, Taranto, Teramo, Terni, Torino, Trento, Trieste. 61. In 1938 and 1939, a few thousand agricultural workers from the Po Valley

were sent to work in Germany (See reports of the federale for June 8 and July 6, : 1938 and March 5, 1939, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Reggio Emilia), but unemployed young men in the south had no such outlets. 62. The favorite areas of immigration were the drained Pontine Marshes, France, and East Africa; see P.S. (1903-1949), Brescia, report of the regional inspector, dated April 2, 1935; ibid., Belluno, anonymous report dated July 1935; report of the federale, March 4, 1935, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Reggio Emilia. 63. Anonymous report of November 2, 1931, PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma; ibid.,

Pescara, the federale (Gian Luigi Mercuri) suggested this to Starace in his report of September 5, 1933, but an anonymous report two days later said that the youths did not want to join the Militia. 64. E.g., anonymous report, Oct. 1930, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Milano and report of the federale of Reggio Calabria, March 9, 1931, ibid., Reggio Calabria; also, report of the prefect, December 6, 1930, P.S. (1927-1933), section II, busta 48, Savona; telegrams from the prefect, March 19, 20, 21, 27, 1931, ibid., busta 54, Milano, and reports from the prefect, May 9, June 4, July 23, 1931, ibid., busta 51, Cagliari. 65. Ibid., busta 50, Bologna, reports from the questore and the prefect, June 15, 1930; from the Chief of the Militia, June 19, 1930 and June 27, 1931; report from the prefect, March 21, 1931. 66. Report from the federale, February 28, 1932, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov. 67. Ibid., anonymous report of February 8, 1933.

68. P.S. (1903-1949), busta 1, Forli, report of the prefect, June 10, 1935, and

of the Militia Command, June 12, 1935. 69. Report of the federale, August 13, 1935. PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Ragusa. 70. Reports of the prefect, August 21 and 28, of the Militia Consul, August 28, and of the General Inspector of the Pubblica Sicurezza, August 30, P.S. (1903-1949),

busta 2 Vicenza. | 7x. Anonymous report of September, 1936, PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Milan. 72. Report of the federale, January 1, 1934, ibid., Trieste. 73. Anonymous report, September, 1931, ibid., Siena. 74. E.g., report of the federale, November 4, 1933, ibid., Palermo.

75. E.g., anonymous report, March 27, 1934, ibid., La Spezia; ibid., Grosseto, report of the federale, July 2, 1934. 76. Anonymous report from Sesto San Giovanni, January 24, 1940, ibid., Genova, busta 3. 77. See anonymous report, August 18, 1936, P.S. (1903-1949), busta 6, Genova. 78. Anonymous report, January 27, 1941, PNF, Sit Pol. Prov., Grosseto.

79. An interesting discussion of this state of mind can be found in the correspondence between Rinaldo Rigola and Torquato Nanni, two ex-Socialist union leaders who founded the review, Problemi di lavoro in 1928 in the hope of making the corporative state a “bridge of passage” to the “workers’ state.” This correspondence is reproduced in Stefano Merli, “Corporativismo fascista e illusioni riformistiche nei primi anni del regime. L’attivita dell’ A.N.S. [Associazione Nazionale Studi—Problemi di lavoro] nelle carte di Rinaldo Rigola,” Rivista storica del socialismo, 2, no. § (January—March 1959): 120-137.

80. Reports of the federale, 1933 and November 27, 1940, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Milano. 81. Reports of the federale, June 1931 and October 18, 1940, ibid., Rovigo.

82. Ibid., Genova, busta I. 83. Ibid., busta 2. 84. Capoferri, op. cit., p. 49. 85. Ibid., p. 54. 86. Anonymous report of April 25, 1931, PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Milano.

115

The FASCIST Experience 87. Anonymous report of January 25, 1932, ibid. 88. Anonymous reports of February 19 and March 14, 1932, ibid. 89. Anonymous report of April 27, 1933, ibid. go. Anonymous report of January 7, 1937, ibid. 91. Report of the prefect, January, 1935, P.S. (1903-1949), busta 1, Ferrara. 92. Reports from both officials, August 26, 28, 30, 1936, ibid., busta 2, Vicenza. 93. Report from the regional union secretary, June 8, 1932, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov.

94. Anonymous report of June 7, 1931 and reports of the federale, July 3, July 17, and August, 1934, ibid., Siracusa.

95. Anonymous reports of January 14 and 29, 1939 and busta g, report of the prefect, December 27, 1939, P.S. (1903-1949) busta 6, Taranto. 96. I9, no. 11 (April 1, 1941): 163.

97. Letter from the secretary of the federale to Starace, February 16, 1938,

PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Trieste, busta 4.

98. Report to the minister of corporations, March 20, 1936, P.S. (1903-1949), busta 2, Roma.

99. “Lotte operaie e sindacato fascista,” reprinted in Stefano Merli, ed., La ricostruzione del movimento socialista in Italia e la lotta contro il fascismo dal 1934 alla seconda guerra mondiale. In Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Annali, Anno V (1962), pp. 541-846 (pp. 813-823 for the Curiel article). roo. Arrigo Serpieri, Fra politica ed economia rurale (Florence: Barbera, 1937), pp. 380-381. 1o1. Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, I, Agricultura, II, Appendice, Mario

Bandini, “Consequenze e problemi della politica doganale per l’agricultura italiana,” 402.

102. This is the considered judgment even of Giacomo Acerbo, who was minister of agriculture and forests from 1929 to 1935 (op. cit., p. 338). 103. Seg. Part. del Duce, Gran Consiglio, 242/R, fasc. 20, sottofasc. 4 (1926),

Inserto C. Report to session of June 24, 1926, “Situazione delle Federazioni al 23 giugno 1926.”

104. See Francesco Meriano, “La Mezzadria,” Il Resto di Carlino, June 25, 1926; Meriano supported Mussolini’s goal but said that it would be a long time coming. 105. Ministero per la Costituente, Rapporto, I, Agricultura, I, Relazione, 303-304. 106. All information in this paragraph comes from Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria, Inchiesta sulla piccola proprieta coltivatrice formatasi nel dopoguerra, XV; Giovanni Lorenzoni, “Relazione finale: L’ascesa del contadino italiano del dopoguerra” (Rome, 1938); and Alessandro Molinari, La struttura della popolazione rurale italiana e le nuove figure agricole rilevate nel VIII censimento (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1937). 107. Report of the federale, January 27, 1937, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Modena. 108. Reports of December 4, 1934, January 5, and February 4, 1935, P.S. (1930— 1949 ), busta 1, Ferrara.

1og. “I braccianti agricoli in Italia ed il sindacalismo fascista,” Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertad, no. 5 (December 1932), Photocopy, Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1959, 99. 110. See Il Lavoro agricolo fascista, November 2, 1930.

111. E.g., reports of the federali of Pescara, May 5, 1934, and Grosseto, July 2, 1934, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov.; also, from Foggia, reports from the podestd, the prefect, and

the general inspector of the Pubblica Sicurezza, June 21, 22, 27, 1936, P.S. (19031949), busta 6, Foggia.

112. Ibid., March 14, 1939 and busta g, Caltanisetta and Catania, reports of the prefects, July 20 and 21, 1939.

113. George H. Hildebrand, Growth and Structure in the Economy of Modern Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965), p. 355.

114. Report of the questore of Rome, February 21, 1936, P.S. (1903-1949), busta 2, Roma. 115. Anonymous report of April, 1931, PNF. Sit. Pol. Prov., Grosseto.

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O of the most novel, yet typical, features of Italian Fascism was its effort to regiment large segments of society, particularly youth and labor, into mass organizations. By the mid-1930s Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were equally totalitarian in

this respect, but the Italian effort was the first and was all the more remarkable for having had practically nothing to build on from the nation’s liberal past. The ONB and its successor the GIL had millions of active members and were surprisingly effective in socializing! Italian youth according to Fascist norms and ideals. The Dopolavoro was the principal organization through which the regime influenced the social and leisure-time activities

of the urban masses. But regimentation did not alter the nation’s class structure in the least; instead it reinforced existing behavior patterns thus creating a pervasive conformity in the whole society. Despite the calisthenics, rhythm dancing, and vacation colonies, the social attitudes of the regime were profoundly reactionary. Above all, woman’s place was in the home—divided between the kitchen and the bedroom. The regime’s premiums to newlyweds and mothers of large families are well known, but they were. not motivated solely by an alleged need for more future soldiers; the tax on bachelors in 1934 indicated the regime’s wish to have every male adult married so that women would indeed stay home.

The structure and jurisdiction of the various Fascist youth organizations varied over the years. Only the GUF (Gioventu Universitaria Fascista), comprising male and female university students from eighteen to twentyeight, remained under strict control of the party and independent from all the other organizations from the early 1920s until the end: even military

education in the universities was carried out by a separate agency, the University Militia. In contrast to the small and privileged GUF, the ONB (Opera Nazionale Balilla) included children of all classes, both in and out of school, from six to eighteen. Founded in April, 1926, with Renato Ricci as its head, it was taken away from the jurisdiction of the party in September, 1929, and made a semiautonomous agency of the state; its offices were

in the same building as the ministry of education, but it had its own budget, and Ricci was undersecretary of state for. physical and youth edu-

cation with only informal ties with that ministry.2 By the early 1930s,

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membership in the ONB was required of all schoolchildren, but since the majority did not go to school beyond age eleven (see Chapter 6), the percentage of the total number of children beyond that age who were members was very small. Although membership was required after late 1931

in the Catholic schools as well, this requirement was not enforced for several years in either the state or private secondary schools. As a result, Carlo Scorza, the head of the GUF, began recruiting fourteen-to-eighteen-

year-olds from the secondary schools in early 1931. In October of the preceding year a third organization, the Fasci Giovanili di Combattimento, was instituted for young men between eighteen and twenty-one who were no longer in school; its function was “to constitute—through a selective

process based on moral, spiritual, and militaristic education—an ample reservoir for the ranks and leadership” of the party and the Militia.? The Fasci Giovanili, then, like the Young Communists’ League in the USSR, was the party’s youth organization par excellence. Until October 27, 1937, when the GIL (Gioventu Italiana del Littorio)

absorbed the ONB and the Fasci Giovanili into one larger organization under party control, there was intense rivalry among the regime’s youth organizations. In 1931 Scorza argued that it was necessary for the GUF to counteract the influence of anti-Fascist and non-Fascist professors in the high schools as it was already doing in the universities and as the ONB was incapable of doing because of its close ties with the school system.* Ricci complained that Scorza’s efforts to recruit high-school students for the GUF were undermining the whole structure of the ONB and threatend to increase the gap between middle-class students and working-class

teenagers, which his organization had preserved; he also argued that it was a good thing to involve teachers in the work of the ONB, rather than make them suspect to high-school students, as Scorza seemed to want.® There was also rivalry between the Fasci Giovanili and the GUF, headed by Scorza and administered by Giovanni Poli; the latter insisted in early 1934 that GUF members must not be enrolled in the Fasci Giovanili and must not be required to attend its rallies or other activities.® But the main rivalry was between Starace and the organizations of the party on the one hand, and the ONB and the ministry of education on the other. In March, 1935, Starace answered a memorandum from Mussolini urging closer cooperation between the two “sides” with a strong letter criticizing the continuing separation of the two and protesting Mussolini's

implication that the GUF allow the ministry to coordinate the 1935 Littorial Games.’ (See below.) Although he praised Ricci and avoided criticizing the new minister personally (after all, he was Cesare Maria De Vecchi, one of the four triumvirs of the March on Rome), Starace lambasted the “unregenerate, lazy, bureaucratic bourgeoisie” of the ministry and argued that school teachers, particularly women, were unsuited to forging “a warlike and revolutionary” outlook in young boys. In September, 1937,° Starace

told Mussolini that the continued separation of the ONB from the party made it difficult to recruit the most promising elements for the Fasci Giovanili; he also complained of having been uncomfortable at the annual ONB exercises at the Campo DUX because of their lack of the true Fascist

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spirit and vowed never to go again unless ordered to do so directly by the Duce.

As we have seen, Mussolini finally gave in and transferred the ONB to party control through the GIL. Starace then wrote that all the old problems were now solved.? The GIL also incorporated the Fasci Giovanili, leaving only the GUF a separate existence, with 98,834 members in June, 1939.!° The membership figures for the GIL at that time were as follows:

Figli della lupa (boys and girls, 6-7) 1,355,575

Balilla (boys,(girls, 8-13) 1,576,925 Piccole italiane 8-13) 1,501,834 Avanguardisti (boys, 14-17) 756,236 Giovani italiane (girls, 14-17) Giovani fascisti (boys, 18-21 ) 387,321 745,608

Giovani fasciste (girls, 18-21 ) 378,140 The sum total of 6,701,639 for June, 1939, was not typical for the school year 1938-1939 because by then many children had either dropped out of school or simply not paid their dues. At the beginning of the 1939-1940 school year the total membership in the GIL was 7,891,547, an increase of 314,966 over November, 1938.1! Since this increase was less than the net increase in the total population (around 460,000 per year) and only about one third of the number of live births for a given year between 1931 and 1941 (well over 900,000 per year), it may be assumed that from at least 1937 onward the percentage of young people in the regime’s youth organizations remained unchanged. As in the party, membership in the GIL was highest in the north and lowest in the south.” In that half of Italy's 94 provinces with the higher memberships only 2, Bari and Salerno, were in the south. (In fact, of the top 39 provinces, only 3, Grosseto, Bari, and Rome, were south of Florence.) In the bottom half, only half a dozen were in the north, and 3 of them, Udine, Venezia, and Lucca, were particularly low in the 14-21 age categories because of strong competition from the youth groups of the Azione Cattolica (see Chapter 7). Interestingly, Turin, which, as we have seen, had a low percentage of party members for the north, was near the top for the GIL, along with Genoa and Milan, with close to 70 percent of the total population between 6 and 21. Hence, even more than the party, the GIL had more members, and presumably more influence, in those provinces with the higher per-capita income and the larger proportion of

children in school; except for Bari and Salerno, no province south of Naples had more than 36 percent of its total population between 6 and 21 in the GIL, and most of these members were in the larger towns. These

comparative percentages are more significant than the national average of around 50 percent. But even that figure was considerably higher than the one for Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the degree of actual participation in the activities of the youth organizations was probably lower in Italy than in Germany. The core of the activities of the GIL was the required assembly every Saturday afternoon from 3:30 to 6:00 throughout the school year—the 121

The FASCIST Experience

so-called sabato fascista.'* All those attending had to wear their uniforms: the girls wore white blouses and black pleated skirts, while the uniforms of the boys resembled those of the Boy Scouts, except that their shirts and

socks were black and that they wore fezzes. The program began with a roll call and some marching. Then all the children were drilled in calisthenics and other forms of group exercise. In addition, the boys were given military drill. In the larger towns these activities took place on or near the grounds of the school attended by the children during the week, and the regular GIL instructors also taught physical education in the same school. The majority of the parttime instructors and the children

seem to have gone through the required motions as a formality. The arrangement of neighborhood schools, coinciding in effect with neighborhood branches of the ,GIL, tended to keep the middle and lower classes apart; only in smaller communities did children from different social classes mingle more freely. It should also be noted that, in the largest cities, many teenagers used the opportunity of getting out of the house on Saturday afternoon to meet members of the opposite sex, especially at the movies, where they went in uniform, instead of to the GIL assembly. Only excessive absences brought punishment, though in the last years of the regime, truant officers looked in the movie houses for children in

uniform.

During the regular school year some branches of the ONB and the GIL had additional activities. In Trieste, for example, the boys were given educational and propaganda lectures as well as instructions on the use of gas masks on Sunday, while the girls could register (at five lire a month) for courses on Thursday afternoons after school; contrary to what might be expected, the courses in home economics and sewing were far less popular than those in rhythm dancing and choral singing.'* Other branches

offered a variety of special activities such as skiing, horseback riding, basketball, and water sports, as well as handicrafts of all kinds. There were also local and national competitions in these activities in mid-May in Rome—the Ludi Juveniles; in 1939 the 7,000 participants could not compare to the tens of thousands of Balilla and Avanguardisti who spent a week in tents in Rome each year in the Campo DUX, or the more than 700,000 children who spent a couple of weeks in summer camps in the mountains and especially at the seashore. (Under Fascism middle-class and particularly lower-middle-class Italians discovered the seashore and seemed delighted to see their children running around in bathing suits and shorts, soaking up the water and sunshine. ) The ONB and the GIL performed their task of Fascist socialization mainly in indirect ways. Five or six times a year, on Fascist holidays, some official gave a ten-minute speech, but overt political indoctrination was not the main function of the youth groups. More important was the very

experience of being part of a mass organization and submerging one’s individuality in it for a few hours each week, as well as on special outings during the summer. In addition, the so-called “reform of custom” in the late 1930s quickly found its way into the informal conversations between

group leaders and children. For example, the girls were told that they

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must learn to say ponte for bridge when referring to the card game because

Fascism had no need for foreign words. (It kept the word “sport,” however. )

Despite its strong Fascist overtones, the pervasive spirit of the ONB and the GIL was like that of the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. To be sure, all members had to take the following oath: “In the name of God and of Italy I swear to carry out the orders of the DUCE and to serve with all my strength and, if necessary, with my blood, the Cause of the Fascist Revolution.” But in the context of the 1930s and early 1940s this oath seemed about as harmless as the American pledge of allegiance to the flag. The member of the ONB or the GIL was expected to respect rank and authority to a far greater extent than children in western youth organizations, but most of the rules of conduct were the same—be courteous, help the weak and the infirm, don’t gamble, smoke, or drink, keep clean, tell the truth, etc. Rule Number 12 was perhaps the most novel—and the most notorious in the west; “When one finds one’s self in the presence of people, even

adults, who cast doubt on the fundamental political principles of the Regime, or who express lack of faith in its Leaders, and when there is no other older person there, one [i.e., the Balilla member] must intervene to correct, and, if necessary, scold and silence, anyone who holds an offensive attitude toward the Regime.” No Boy Scout was ever asked to go that far, and it is unlikely that many Balilla did either.16

Like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, the ONB and the GIL were basically middle-class in their outlook. Rule Number 25, for example, told the Balilla to be kind to all their fellow countrymen, “even when it comes to poor, uneducated people who work for a living.” However much this rule was meant to improve on existing standards of conduct, it reeked of bourgeois condescension. Also, in all the illustrated publications of the ONB and the GIL the physical types shown were bigger, healthier, and

blonder than the average even in the north. It almost seemed as if the

north Italian bourgeoisie was projecting its ideal image of itself on the , rest of the nation—an image which, after the racial laws of 1938, was increasingly “Aryan.” (As if one could will oneself to be bigger and blonder any more easily than Italy could will itself to be a first-rate power by con-

stantly referring to “eight million bayonets.”) Even the pervasive patriotism of the ONB and the GIL was essentially that of the prewar bourgeoisie, as is evident in the “Hymn of the Balilla”: The rock whizzes by, blaring forth the name Of the boy from Portoria. And the fearless Balilla Stands gigantic in history. . . That mortar was bronze, Which sank into the mud, But the boy was like steel, And freed his mother [Genoa]. Proud of eye, quick of step, Clear the cry of valor:

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The FASCIST Experience To our enemies a rock in the face, To our friends all our heart! Up little wolves and eagles Like the Sardinian drummers Like the Sicilian lads, Tanned Garibaldian heroes! Let your spirit throb in your breast Avid with virtue; Rustle the pennant, oh Italy, And You are there in the rustlings! Proud of eye, quick of step

We are clouds of seeds, We are flames of courage: For us sings the spring; For us May shines and laughs; But if one day battle Sets mountains and seas aflame, We will be the grape-shot Of holy Liberty! Proud of eye, quick of step

Ostensibly the feeling of community generated by the youth groups was opposed to traditional bourgeois values; in some ways it was a calculated substitute for the values of family and privacy. For the most part, young Italians enjoyed getting together in their uniforms, shouting slogans, _ and sharing the prescribed patriotic ritual. The ONB and the GIL trained

them to respond to the new, popular, culture, as opposed to the older bourgeois culture. In effect, however, Fascist Italy was merely catching up with the more modernized countries, particularly the USA, in using its youth organizations and activities to foster feelings of togetherness and enthusiasm—similar to pre-Second World War American rallies and organized heckling in connection with “the big game”—in which verbal assaults were made on the outward manifestations of traditional bourgeois values without endangering their content. The most obviously Fascist, as opposed to bourgeois, aspect of the regime's efforts to socialize the youth of Italy was militarization. As in the

past, most young men entered their period of military service at age twenty-one (twenty for specialists), but beginning in early 1935 obligatory

premilitary orientation programs were introduced simultaneously in the ONB, the Fasci Giovanili, and the schools (see Chapter 6). One of the most familiar images of Fascist Italy in the West was that of uniformed six-year-old boys doing “guard duty” with make-believe rifles; actually, the main emphasis in the premilitary programs of the ONB was on discipline and moral training. It was in the Fasci Giovanili that premilitary training

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as such was most intense and most self-consciously Fascist in tone. In fact, in the spring of 1935 Mussolini seemed afraid that Starace was turning his Young Fascist platoons into some kind of youth gangs, like the defunct squadristi, and Starace had to try to justify them.!7 He said that these paramilitary youth sections were approved by both the ministry of war and the Militia, that they included many eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds who already wanted to volunteer for military service in East Africa, and that they were completely loyal to the Duce. All these statements were true, yet Mussolini’s fear of gangs of young rowdies, born in the early 1920s, made him ambivalent about the kind of training that alone could create the nation of warriors he so often demanded. As a result of his ambivalence

and of a lack of professional cadres, the militarization programs of the Fascist youth organizations fell far short of their announced goals. Equally important in weakening the effectiveness of these programs was the fact that most Italian youths simply did not like them. Everybody agrees about this fact. Premilitary training can be tiresome in any society, but it seemed especially unpopular among Italians, with their weak military tradition and strong dislike for routine discipline of any kind. This is not

to say that the regular armed forces could not or did not make perfectly competent fighting men out of twenty-one-year-old recruits and volunteers. But most eighteen to twenty-year-old Italian males still preferred, in the words of the old cliché, to view themselves as lovers rather than fighters.

They accepted their period of compulsory military service as the end of their carefree youth but resisted the few hours a week of premilitary training as an unwarranted intrusion into their free time. University students could not even be tempted to volunteer for glamorous activities like glider exercises sponsored by ministry of aviation, because these smacked too much of premilitary training.1* Starace himself constantly complained about poor attendance in premilitary courses, and the reports of party informers pointed up an increasing decline in attendance in late 1939.’° _ Whereas the Fascist regime did not make most Italian youths more militaristic than its predecessor, it did make many of them more sports-

minded. From the beginning the regime tried to promote sports and to control

all the organizations involved in them. In 1923 the Ente Nazionale per UEducazione Fisica was set up under the ministry of public instruction with General Francesco Saverio Grazioli, recently retired, as its president. This organization concerned itself mainly with the extension of physical education in the secondary schools, but lack of funds and lack of a training college for instructors limited its activities.2° When, in late 1927, the ONB took over the task, the ENEF disappeared. By the early 1930s not only physical training, but competitive sports as well, were taking up an increasing amount of the time of a number of high-school students and eliciting the predictable complaints from their teachers.2! Under Ricci the ONB concentrated on physical fitness, whereas those students over eighteen

who wanted training in individual competitive sports got them in the GUF or joined the Comitato Olimpionico Nazionale Italiano—CONI—and those interested in team sports got these in the Fasci Giovanili.

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The FASCIST Experience

This separation of functions became less strict after the departure of Ricci with the creation of the GIL in 1937, but it? pointed up the divergent views of different Fascist leaders regarding the role of sports under Fascism. Apparently Ricci and Mussolini himself frowned on com-

petitive track and field events—what the Italians call campionismo. In any case the Duce did not want the Fasci Giovanili to sponsor them, and Scorza dutifully agreed to stress team and mass sports instead, saying that “the Regime has more need of fine, tireless hikers, agile mountain climbers, and courageous sailors, than of perfect athletes.”*? On the other hand, producing Olympic champions came to be viewed as essential to the nation’s prestige, or, to put it in a more typically Italian way, to making a good impression (fare la bella figura). At the 1936 Olympic Games in

Berlin, for example, the Italian team did very well in many events and did not enter those in which CONI thought it would make a poor showing.”

In addition, the fact that Primo Carnera was the world’s heavyweight boxing champion in 1933 and that the Italian soccer team won the world championship in both 1937 and 1938 made campionismo irresistible to millions of Italians, always eager to be first in all things.” Yet in a fumbling way the Fascist regime was trying to use sports for totalitarian, and not merely patriotic, purposes. As is well known, until the mid-nineteenth century, sport was primarily a pastime of the English aristocracy (hunting was the main aristocratic sport on the continent); _ the point was to play well, and winning was not important. From the midnineteenth century on, and especially since the early twentieth, both active and spectator sports became popular with the middle classes; winning and breaking records were very important, and there was an increasing trend toward professionalization. Since the 1930s spectator sports, particularly soccer in Italy, have become a pastime of the masses, who, as fans (tifosi) identify themselves passionately with their favorite teams and champions. During the 1930s Marxists used to say that this kind of sport was another “opiate” to distract the masses from the reality of their exploitation, but since the Communist countries began boasting that they could fabricate champions in societies that had never heard the word sport, Marxist and non-Marxist observers alike have come to view sport as an essential factor in the creation of the mass man and a disciplinary factor as well. Thus, would-be totalitarian states “understand and exploit fully the efficiency of

technicized sport in making their citizens into conformists and mass men.”26 According to this view, sport is one of the most effective means of

socializing young people for the technical laws and customs they will encounter in offices and factories as well as providing relief and distraction to workers without deviating from the use of mechanical techniques. The

Nazi Strength Through Joy movement did this sort of thing more selfconsciously than the Fascist youth organizations and Dopolavoro. Nonetheless, the will to do so was there. The ambivalence of many Fascist leaders toward sports was related to their ambivalence toward industrial society as a whole, which, in turn,

reflected a similar ambivalence among millions of urban Italians. Their desire for the form—like sleek ocean-liners and modernistic architecture

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—without the substance—mechanization, bureaucratization, materialism —of modern industrial society will be discussed further in Chapter 8, on

popular culture. Here a highly publicized sports-item makes the same point.*’ In 1935 the Italian racing-car ace Tazio Nuvolari competed in an Alfa Romeo at a Grand Prix in Germany and in the last lap won out over cars from two of that country’s biggest auto manufacturers—Mercedes and

Auto-Union. All the mass media played up the fact that not only had a little Italian daredevil shown up the allegedly superior Germans, but also that he could do so with a practically hand-made car—in other words, without having to accept mechanization and its consequences. (At the risk of being flippant, one could update Karl Mannheim’s notion of a “hand-cart mind” to an “Alfa Romeo mind” in an IBM civilization. )

In the GIL routine calisthenics and marching exercises seemed to become increasingly ends in themselves rather than means of socializing children and adolescents as functioning members of a totalitarian industrial society. This development was probably an inevitable result of the immense size and the growing bureaucratization of the GIL under party control. Nevertheless, it showed that the party was failing to perform one

of the few functions left to it—the socialization of the young, which is what the Italian word educazione was supposed to mean under Fascism. Starace’s dismissal on November 1, 1939, may well have been linked to

this failure and (though the evidence is scanty) to the ascendancy of

Bottai in the councils of the Duce. Bottai’s role as minister of education will be discussed in Chapter 6, but it should be noted here that he had been a constant critic of the impersonal atmosphere of the GIL and that

he wanted its local groups broken up into units of thirty or forty boys under the permanent guidance of energetic group leaders who were school-

teachers instead of party functionaries.28 Although Bottai preferred academically oriented teachers to physical education instructors for this task, the latter were actually performing it better than the former or the party functionaries by the late 1930s. The closest the regime came to having a corps of leaders committed to socializing the nation’s youth along Fascist lines was the physical education instructors of the GIL. Before their incorporation into this organization in October, 1937, the ONB and the Fasci Giovanili had already begun to produce the kind of dedicated youth leaders one finds in any modern society, among their fulltime professional organizers and especially among their unpaid squad leaders. In the smaller towns and in rural areas the younger elementary-school teachers also served as the physical education instructors of the ONB, thus, in effect, becoming. a part of the corps of Fascist youth leaders. After 1937, however, the male physical education instructors of the GIL were mostly graduates of the Fascist Academy of Physical Training at the Farnesina palace and grounds in Rome; there was a similar academy for girls in Orvieto. Unlike the teacher-training colleges (Istituti magistrali)—and unlike the colleges offering physicaleducation majors in the United States, for that matter—these institutes injected ideology into every course in the curriculum and made little pretense of developing their students’ intellectual or aesthetic potential. Many

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of their graduates came to view athletics not only as a means of physical and moral development for the young but as a new life-style particularly suited to the militaristic Fascist spirit. The influence of these instructors

on Italian boys and girls varied considerably from place to place and among different classes, but their own dedication and zeal marked them as the most enthusiastic Fascists in the country. Bottai the “liberal” Fascist had always been concerned about bringing

younger people and their ideas into the party, both as a means of reinvigorating the party and of socializing the elite of Italy’s youth. Interestingly, the liberal ideas of co-opting potential young leaders and bridging the generation gap were openly challenged by some of the very youths for whom they were designed. In the February 2, 1930, issue of Il Bargello, Alessandro Pavolini, the federale of Florence (and minister of popular culture ten years later) said that only by putting young men in their early twenties in high places could “the Revolution” avoid committing suicide, that “a mediocre revolutionary” was better than a superior “fence-sitter.” In April, 1933, Romano Bilenchi wrote in Critica Fascista that he and other twenty-to-twenty-four-year-olds “didn’t give a damn” about the pros and cons of “co-optation” as expressed by established party leaders.?® Bilenchi went on to say that too many young people thought only of becoming timeservers in the party instead of making a life of faith and feeling and carrying forward the great Fascist revolution. Other sources warned that many university students were loyal to Mussolini while criticizing the other leaders of the regime for being interested only in money.®° The ridicule heaped on Starace by such students in the late 1930s was symptomatic of a “generation gap” between them and the gerarchi, most of whom were no longer

young. The rhetoric of the party emphasized youth, but young people were given very little opportunity to participate actively at any level of the “power structure.” Even their right to engage in written polemics in party organs was frowned on not only by the gerarchi but also by the novelist Vasco Pratolini, (b. 1913) who in 1938 critized the very same kinds of polemics against the bourgeoisie which he himself had engaged in only a few years earlier. Pratolini already seemed to be losing his Fascist as well as his youthful enthusiasm at the age of twenty-five.

The majority of the university students of the 1930s were at least nominal members of the GUF, and a sizable minority participated in its varied activities, which included propaganda lectures, patriotic rallies, sports, and the Littoriali—annual competitions in the arts and crafts and on political themes. Many branches of the GUF also had their own little periodicals and, by the late 1930s, their own experimental film groups. The official organ of the GUF, published by its national secretariat, was called Libro e Moschetto (“Book and Rifle”), from the organization’s slogan: Libro e moschetto, fascista perfetto. As we have seen, however, most

university students were cool toward anything military and were much more interested in sports, which were still a novelty in the Italian academic

world and which were actually fun. Another, more traditional, activity was political demonstrations—now officially sanctioned—protesting anti-

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Tunisia.

Fascist remarks by foreigners, celebrating victories during the Ethiopian War, and, in early 1939, demanding the “return” of Corsica, Nice, and

It was through the “cultural” activities of the GUF more than in any other way that the regime tried not merely to socialize the nation’s future

leaders but also to mobilize their energy and enthusiasm into an active political consciousness. In order to do this successfully, the regime allowed

considerable scope for youthful spontaneity and creativity at the risk of having to deal with deviation, heresy, and possible rebellion.22 Nowhere was it more opportunistic in manipulating potential supporters than in its appeals to university students. To the Catholics it put on the face of reaction, to the nationalists that of patriotism; to the students it presented itself as a “continuing revolution” toward social justice and new kinds of freedom in art and thought. Thousands of idealistic young Italians took this revolutionary rhetoric literally in their little reviews and in their participation at the Littoriali. For example, Antonio Bernieri, in the Corriere del Tirreno of October 13, 1936, said: “Fascism above all is not reactionary but revolutionary: indeed, Fascism is revolution par excellence, continuous revolution. It confronted the same political, economic, and social problems as Communism and resolved them in another way, as its historical spirit required.”*? Even in the Libro e Moschetto Ruggiero Zangrandi was able

to write on May 6, 1937: “Revolutions, when they are authentic, do not turn against themselves but continue and complete themselves according to a single directing force, which is that of human progress. Consequently, Fascism for us is the ideal continuation of the other revolutions, and its doctrine does not neglect the truth that the other doctrines have brought to light.” In June, 1936, Vittorio Mussolini, the Duce’s oldest son, became the honorary president of an Istituto per la Propaganda dell Universalita del Fascismo, founded by some of his leftwing friends as a free discussion society within the GUF. In September, however, he had to inform his friends that his father found their initiative “inopportune.”*4 The most popular activity of the GUF through which the regime tried to mobilize the energy and enthusiasm of young people was the Littoriali, held each April from 1934 through 1940 in a different city. These Littoriali were contests involving written and artistic presentations and oral debates in all disciplines. They were preceded by Pre-Littoriali in the GUF chapters in the twenty-six Italian university towns, so that there was a much larger

number of participants in these semifinals than in the national finals. The very notion of local and national competitions of this kind was new and exhilarating to the students, and even the most critical observers of the older generation of Fascists agreed that they were the most successful means of mobilizing traditionally self-centered and unorganizable Italian students.35 For most of the participants the prizes, the camaraderie, and the trip itself were the main rewards. (It should be added that the judges were outstanding figures in their fields but that they participated more out of conformity than enthusiasm.) The oral debates, however, were the freest forum in Fascist Italy, the only place where serious criticism of any aspect of the regime was possible.

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Both at the time and in retrospect, these Littoriali, particularly the oral debates, were viewed by the participants as the most exciting aspect of the Fascist experience. Part of the excitement, of course, was based simply on youthful high spirits and good fellowship in a contest situation. There were also the opportunities for self-expression, especially in the arts®® and in debates on political topics. In addition, however, the experience of the Littoriali stimulated among some students a degree of nonconformity bordering on anti-Fascism, not so much in the formal debates as in the informal contacts behind the scenes. Ruggiero Zangrandi and others? argued later that not only nonconformists but true anti-Fascists used the debates for making their own propaganda. At first they did this mainly in the Pre-Littoriali,38 but they soon preferred to soft-pedal their polemics at that point in order to survive until the national contests. Two impressions of participants in the 1937 Littoriali are interesting for their views on the debate on the theme, “Possibilities offered by Fascist Society to the Individual Personality in Collective Organization.”®® Giancarlo Bal-

larati said that, in theory, the individual personality achieved its true freedom in the bosom of the party—an orthodox Hegelian-Gentilian view —but expressed some reservations about the party as “a live and active center of the political conscience.” Vincenzo Buonassisi, along with Ballarati, criticized the format of the sessions of the Littoriali, which by 1937 involved constant interruptions from members of the jury, thus becoming abstract debates with much emphasis on technicalities. These two young

men wanted to allow the students to present papers on more concrete topics and to follow through a particular line of thought without interruption. During the late 1930s there was growing dissidence within the “gen-

eration of the Littoriali” toward various aspects of the regime. Starace himself was a constant subject of ridicule because of his pomposity and his mania for rules and regulations—two qualities that few students anywhere find endearing. A handful of Italian university students began to have doubts about their country’s African imperialism* and intervention in the Spanish Civil War; more were critical of the alliance with Nazi Germany and with their own regime’s racial laws. But only a minority of these dissidents actually became subversives before Mussolini’s fall in July, 1943. Their story will be told in Chapter 11, but the celebrated example of Eugenio Curiel is worth noting here. In the summer of 1936, after contacting the headquarters of the Italian Communist party in Paris, he set up a Communist underground in Italy. Thereafter he followed the tactic of the “double track”—outward conformity combined with secret subversion. Indeed, in the August 20, 1938, issue of Il Bo, the GUF review of the University of Padua, he began to bring his subversion into the open:

although on page 3 he denounced the Jewish professors about to be deprived of their teaching positions, on page 4 he published his last article

(he was arrested and imprisoned in 1939), with the provocative title, “The Syndicalist Reprisal.”

It is impossible to estimate the proportion of young men whom the Littoriali helped to mobilize for Fascism as opposed to those for whom

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they served as a stimulus for anti-Fascism. Even Zangrandi describes cases like that of Teresio Olivelli, who retained his Fascist enthusiasm until the armistice in September 1943 (see Chapter 11), as well as that of Gianni Guizzardi, whom we have seen (See Chapter 3) as an exponent of mistica fascista as late as 1940, but who Zangrandi claims belonged to his own “underground” as early as the spring of 1938.4! Zangrandi’s characterization of the “generation of the Littoriali’ has been challenged by his contemporary Gastone Silvano Spinetti, now a well-known sociologist. According

to him, the members of that generation “were neither rebels nor conformists. .. . We did not fight Fascism but. struggled openly for its transformation into a regime that could provide well being and freedom for everyone.”#2 Spinetti compares the attitude of that generation with that of young people in Poland, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia in the Ig950s and 1960s who were trying to adapt Communism to their own outlook rather than repudiating it. Costanzo Casucci, now an administrator at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, argues that he and many of his contemporaries became such avid anti-Fascists in the 1940s because they had taken Fascism so seriously until then.* Different kinds of people have different reasons for remembering their behavior in the 1930s in different ways. Since many of Italy’s leading politicians today, both Christian Democrat and Communist, participated in the Littoriali and even in the mistica fascista, they must naturally argue that they were already secretly in some kind of “underground” as well. But outside of politics there are thousands of prominent middle-aged men who, as students, simply believed all the patriotic propaganda of the late 1930s and had no interest in political matters.44 The most that can be said is

that, although the majority of university students in Italy (as in most countries during those innocent interwar years) were more interested in sports and girls than in politics, the Littoriali provided a unique forum for the sizable minority that was politically minded. They also provided new forms of contests and fellowship for the majority, thus completing

their socialization as functioning members of a society dominated by Fascist slogans if not by Fascist ideals. When one looks at members of the GUF in general, rather than the “generation of the Littoriali,” one sees them as among the most enthusiastic

supporters of Mussolini’s regime. This enthusiasm undoubtedly reached its peak during the Ethiopian War; it was the enthusiasm of twenty-yearolds wanting to assert their manhood to themselves and to the world. In addition, they wanted to liberate themselves from all those feelings of inferiority which at various times in the past had induced Italians to view the French, Germans, and English as pacesetters. Mussolini’s defiance of the League of Nations’ sanctions seemed to them to symbolize this “lib-

eration.” Because of their youth and their bourgeois background they especially saw chauvinism and cheap victories as the best way to vaunt their heretofore unrecognized superiority. Even many female students were caught up in this nationalist excitement and waxed enthusiastic over the public image of the Duce, that “marvelous” man and “great” Italian. The main thing to remember in trying to estimate the impact of all

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the Fascist youth organizations, particularly in the 1930s, is that they had no competitors. The youth groups of Azione Cattolica, which will be discussed in Chapter 7, were the only exception, and they were forbidden

to duplicate the activities of the GIL, particularly sports. In the largest cities—Milan, Naples, Rome, Turin, Bari, Palermo, Genoa, Florence— many teenagers found more desirable things to do on a Saturday afternoon

than attend the sabato fascista, but most of the younger boys and girls seemed to enjoy their uniforms, their exercises and games, and the simple fact of belonging to an active organization. Indeed, today many adults of all political persuasions say that, as children in the 1930s and early 1940s, they felt deprived if their parents, out of anti-Fascism, refused to let them participate in its activities; as everywhere, Italian children wanted to do what their peers were doing. One writer and teacher who was a poor teenager in the Abruzzi during the 1930s says that the GIL provided him and his companions with an unparalleled release from humdrum school activi-

ties and catered to their desire for sports, fellowship, and contact with girls.46 He adds, however, that by the time he was sixteen or seventeen he began to make a distinction between party activities and uniforms and those having to do exclusively with sports. As a socializing force the Fascist youth movement was probably most effective in reinforcing the political and cultural attitudes that middle-class and lower-middle-class children learned in school and through the mass media. Its influence was undoubtedly greatest among those in middle-sized and small towns. Among secondary-school and university students it seems

to have been greatest among those in the vocational, engineering, and medical fields, and least among those in the liberal arts and the law.**® On

the other hand, the ONB and the GIL had the least influence among the lowest classes everywhere; in so far as most peasant children got any Fascist socialization at all, it came from the schools rather than from the GIL, and in the larger towns the working classes belonged to different branches of the GIL from those of the middle classes. There was a good deal less mixing of social classes in Fascist youth groups than in those of Nazi Germany.*

Not only was the Fascist youth movement less successful in integrat-

ing all sections of Italian society than its leaders wished, but, like the Dopolavoro and older institutions like the schools and the army, it helped

to reinforce the existing class structure and traditional social attitudes. Although individual university students were occasionally officials in the GIL, the GUF and the GIL remained completely separate, with the former including many students over eighteen from the classical high schools as well as those in the universities. Hence, these students had no contact with their working-class contemporaries, not even in their premilitary training squads, which also tended to be separate from one another.** Sporadic

attempts by eager GUF students to “go to the people” and give them lectures in their factories and shops had about as much effect as similar efforts anywhere else. It should also be noted that the untold numbers of teenage boys in Italy’s streets and piazzas completely escaped the influence

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of the GIL, which was mandatory only for those who were still in school. As late as September, 1941, the leaders of the GIL complained that they were unable to do anything to control these youths.* In Italy social cleavages have been aggravated by the desire of prac-

tically every citizen with the remotest pretense to any but the lowest status to “ride a high horse.” Professional people of all kinds insist on being addressed by their titles, which range from general and doctor to sergeant (even retired) and land surveyor; anyone who teaches anything

outside of grades one through five is called a professor. (Even Mussolini himself used this title in the 1921 elections, before switching to cavaliere.)

The use of such titles continued unabated during the Fascist period. So did the habit of small shopkeepers and white-collar employees of “lording it over” service personnel, particularly in restaurants. Even the lowest ranks of the Carabinieri patronized the older street-people—hawkers, shoeshine men, etc.—like lords of the manor, and many Fascist gerarchi aped

this kind of behavior. Peasants, particularly day laborers, continued to be looked down on by everyone else, although this was not surprising in view of the lack of real change in rural Italy. But urban workers resented being treated like “boys” by their employers;®° the failure of corporativism to reduce class antagonisms was complete. The preservation of the existing class-structure and traditional social attitudes was particularly evident in Fascist policies regarding women. In

essence, these policies involved regimenting young girls in the public schools and the youth movement and then training them to stay at home and be more effective housekeepers and more prolific mothers. Along with its ineffectiveness in promoting economic growth and its failure to transform a society still dominated by preindustrial bourgeois values, its oldfashioned attitude toward women disqualified Fascism as a modernizing ideology. One could argue that this attitude was peculiarly “Latin,” if it had not also prevailed in Nazi Germany. The social conservatism of both Fascism and National Socialism seems to indicate that neither type of “totalitarianism” was much interested in modernization, in marked contrast to totalitarian regimes run by Communists. If modernization means anything, it means getting rid of traditional institutions and norms that hinder the full utilization of a society’s resources—material and human—in fostering higher levels of material well-being, individual freedom, and social justice for everyone. The degree of priority assigned to these three goals may vary from one regime to another, but no truly modern society can neglect any one of them.

As is well known, many of the social attitudes of the traditional

European bourgeoisie, particularly in the Latin countries, were conscious imitations of aristocratic attitudes. This was obvious in the patronizing ways in which middle-class people treated their servants and employees and in the rationale (noblesse oblige) for their “good works” among other “less fortunate” people. It was also apparent in their “manners” toward people of their own class regarding hospitality, courtship, marriage, and even such minutiae as table settings and when and in what form one left one’s calling card (the bourgeois’s coat of arms). The especially strong

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Italian preoccupation with status and titles has already been mentioned.

With regard to women, this preoccupation meant that, in order to be called and treated like a lady—a signora—one had to look and act like one. Looking like a lady required enough money and time to cultivate the proper kinds of dress and grooming; acting like a lady still seemed to mean being delicate, chaste, helpless, and a constant reminder to gentlemen—signori—of their superiority, for which they returned elaborate forms of solicitude and flattery. A lady did not work with her hands— except for embroidery and needlepoint; a lady did not work with her mind,

either—except possibly as a schoolteacher, a role viewed as a kind of extension of that of child rearing. By these standards the vast majority of Italian women were not signore but simply donne; they had always done much of the menial work, and continued to do it under Fascism.

This idea that the only women who counted were ladies and that ladies behaved in certain ways was one of several factors that modified the policies of the Fascist regime regarding women. In the northern and central parts of the country it was easier to get middle-class and uppermiddle-class women to join the Fasci femminili (Sometimes called Donne Fasciste) than to persuade wives of farmers—a much larger group—to join the Massaie Rurali.5! But in the south, particularly in Sicily, it was impossible to bring either middle-class ladies or peasant housewives into any Fascist organizations because of the traditional taboo against women appearing in public at all.°? Working-class women fared reasonably well in the northern cities; in Milan, for example, the Fascist unions in dyeing plants, bookkeeping, and printing and related occupations, managed at

one point to negotiate contracts giving women equal pay for the same jobs held by men.*? But female day-laborers in the northern rice fields got

little help from their unions or the government; the main assistance the party gave them was to place their small children in shelters during the depression years.°* In addition to regional factors, the church modified some of the policies of the regime toward women; for example, it opposed public exhibitions of rhythm dancing by girls in the Fascist youth movement so vigorously that Starace himself had to stop these at the beginning of 1939.5 Probably the most important nonideological factor that influenced Fascist policy toward women was the economic depression of the 1930s. As in all countries affected, Italy was faced with a growing number of high-school and university graduates looking for “suitable” positions in a stagnant economy with a high rate of unemployment. The unstated desire of relieving the frustrations of the men in this situation was undoubtedly as strong a motive as the official purpose of strengthening the family in instigating the decree of September 1, 1938; limiting to 10 percent the number of posts henceforth open to women in public and private managerial and professional ranks. This decree was particularly effective in favoring male as opposed to female graduates of teacher-training institutes for new jobs, though it did not affect those female teachers who already held jobs. Even the otherwise modern-minded Critica Fascista accepted the government's line that women’s place was in the home and criticized

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those women who wanted something more than manual or domestic work, which was all for which they were allegedly suited.5* The implication, however, was that women should only do those kinds of manual and domestic

work that men considered beneath them and not take the bread out of

the mouths of married men’s children. Unlike the girls’ sections of the GIL, the Fascist organizations for adult women got little support from the party. In 1936, for example, the total expenditures of the Fasci femminili for all of Italy were only 178,680 lire (about 6,000 1936 US dollars), as opposed to 2,648,355 lire for the GUF,*” which had only a fraction of the total membership of the Fasci

femminili. In the smaller cities and rural areas of central and southern

Italy these ladies engaged in various kinds of charitable activities: giving

help to the unemployed and to orphans in the mid-1930s and sending packages to men in the armed forces during the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. In the north they also tried to teach the younger peasant women how to cook, sew, and take care of babies;** one suspects

that they were motivated as much as anything else by the desire to ensure a steady supply of trained servants. Indeed, there was nothing Fascist except the name in these women’s organizations. And the party gerarchi treated the mildly feminist president of the Italian Professional Women (Donne professioniste italiane), Maria Castellani, more as a nuisance than a leader.

There is no evidence that the regime changed the ways in which _. Italian women thought or behaved qua women. The mass of peasant women and housewives in all classes continued to stay at home. On the other hand, there was only a small, temporary decline in the proportion of working women at all levels (by 1940 the mobilization of several million

men in the armed forces removed whatever effects the aforementioned quota of September 1, 1938, had) and no decline in the percentage of female university students. There were a few highly publicized mass meetings of women’s organizations during the late 1930s, but little other activity. Mussolini particularly hated society ladies who pampered their pet dogs instead of having babies, and he prohibited all newspapers from publishing photographs of women with dogs. But he could not alter the

life-style of these ladies one iota. And for all the regime’s efforts to glorify the housewife and encourage her to have more and healthier

children, as we shall now see, there was no increase in the birthrate. Beginning in 1936, the Fascist regime intensified its so-called demographic campaign for more and healthier children. As in many western countries, the decline in the birthrate in Italy during the mid-1930s was due partly to the smaller number of young people born during the First World War and partly to the reluctance of some of them to marry and have children during an economic depression. The national government

tried to stimulate more of these young people to do both by giving 2,000-lire

bonuses to all Ethiopian war veterans who wed in 1936 and 1937. In 1938 the provincial administrations, working with the Istituto Fascista della Previdenza Sociale (Fascist Institute of Social Security), gave 47,409 loans averaging 1,660 lire to newly married couples under age twenty-six,

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while employees of the state, and agencies affiliated with it, received 9,790 marriage bonuses and 43,538 bonuses averaging 1,230 lire for each baby.®®

Just before Christmas in 1938 Mussolini received 95 couples, all agricultural laborers and tenant farmers, with large families, and gave each one a gift of 5,000 lire and 1,000 lire in insurance on their youngest child. On other occasions mothers of numerous children received medals and prizes, all highly publicized. In addition, high-school girls and young married women were encouraged to improve the health of all Italian children by working with agencies in charge of public hygiene. All these efforts produced only temporary and very modest gains. The

number of marriages in 1936 was 306,514, in 1937, 381,326, in 1938, 319,759; the number of births in the same years was 962,676, 992,587, 1,031,193; the number of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants in 1936 was 7.4, in 1937, 8.9, in 1938, 7.3; the number of births per 1,000 inhabitants for the same years was 22.4, 23.2, and 23.6.6! But in 1939 the number of births was less than 23.5 per 1,000 inhabitants, and the number of marriages per 1,000 inhabitants was slightly below the figure of 7.3 for the preceding year, in comparison with 11.8 for Germany, 8.6 for the United Kingdom and Hungary, and 6.5 for France, with the lowest birthrate in Europe next to Ireland. The increase in the number of births in 1937 seems to have been prompted by the bonuses for war veterans’ who married in 1936, but the higher numbers in 1938 and 1939 were due mainly to the physical maturing of the large number of young people born in the immediate postwar years.® The total population increased from 43,059,889 on April 21, 1936, to 44,990,925 (estimated) on October 31, 1940. This was a considerably smaller increase than the one in Germany (allowing for her larger total population and the annexations of Austria and the Sudetenland) and is largely explainable by the fact that, unlike Italy, Germany had eliminated its unemployment problem by 1937, rather than by any greater effort by the Nazis to stimulate marriages and births. Although the Fascist regime was never able to provide enough jobs for all Italian workers, it did offer them a wide range of leisure-time activities through the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro. This most popular of all Fascist institutions was originally created to offset all the cooperatives, mutual-aid societies, and People’s Clubhouses (Case del Popolo) within the free labor movement, which had mushroomed in the immediate postwar period and which were having a revival in the wake of the Matteotti murder during the second half of 1924. As early as 1922-1923 the squadristi had seized

the facilities of some of these organizations, but the big takeover began after the official institution of the OND as a national movement in 1925.© In January, 1926, in Genoa, the provincial heads of the party and the Fas-

cist unions took over the stevedores cooperative and substituted Fascist officials for the existing ones on the trumped-up charge that they were anarchists wanting to kill the king and Mussolini.®* Thereafter the facilities of many similar organizations throughout that province were confiscated— like the mutual-aid society Amici di Calvari in the town of Davagna, and

the Associazione fra Pensionati e Pensionandi Ferrovieri of Savona. In

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March, 1929, the Casa del Popolo of Bolzano; like the ones in Rome and Ravenna, were dissolved and turned over to the Dopolavoro.® Although the initial facilities of the Dopolavoro had been confiscated by local party leaders and turned over to communal authorities (Dopolavoro Comunali), many new buildings and sports fields were built by these au-

thorities and by the two smaller divisions of the Dopolavoro: those

developed and financed by private concerns (Dopolavoro Aziendali) and those run by individual ministries for state employees (Dopolavoro Statale),

including railroad workers, postal and telegraph workers, and workers in state-controlled industries (mainly utilities and urban transport). After 1931, when membership charges were reduced by 50 percent, the Dopolavoro became increasingly a subsidized institution. More novel than the state subsidies were the required financial contributions of the large private companies to the creation and operation of their own branches of the Dopolavoro. By the late 1930s every town and village, even in much of the south, had a Dopolavoro clubhouse with at least a refreshment counter, an athletic

field, a small library, and a radio; many of these centers had elaborate athletic equipment, auditoriums for plays, films, and songfests, and, most popular of all, miniature travel agencies that arranged daily outings, tours

to other cities, and vacations at resort “colonies” on the Adriatic, all at

reduced rates.

Like the facilities themselves, these reduced rates were orginially designed to compete with non-Fascist organizations offering similar attractions, rather than to give the workers special privileges as a class. This was specifically the case regarding the granting of a reduction of 50 percentin — railroad fares to members of the Dopolavoro in late 1925. Mussolini agreed to this reduction in answer to a report from Minister of Communications Costanzo Ciano,® which argued that workers preferred other sporting and excursion groups because they got such reductions in them. Ciano noted that these groups also included middle-class people and that it was unwise

for a uniquely Fascist organization not to take the steps required to lure workers away from them. The implication seems to have been that workers should have “separate but equal” recreational facilities. Equal or not, the facilities were certainly separate, on the trains themselves, in the vacation “colonies,” and on steamship cruises. The Dopolavaro was by far the regime’s largest and most active organization for adults. Its membership rose from 280,584 in 1926 to 1,772,085

in 1931 to 2,809,985 in 1936 to 3,831,331 in 1939.® Of the 1939 total, 1,581,313 were in industry, 559,048 in banking and commerce, 879,389 in agriculture, 308,223 in transport, and 503,538 in miscellaneous occupations (mainly state employees). But the figure for industry is misleading, since it included office workers in large industrial firms like Fiat, Ansaldo, and Breda. The national figure for agriculture included twice as many farm proprietors as farm workers.”° Hence, there were probably as many mem-

bers who considered themselves lower-middle-class as those who were

clearly blue-collar workers. Although these two classes sometimes preferred different kinds of activities, they both “got their money’s worth” in special

excursion trains (over 4 million individual trips a year in the late 1930s),

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amateur theater productions, band concerts, and choral groups, and a wide variety of sports.”! There was less emphasis on uplift and self-improvement in the Dopo-

lavoro than in the Nazi Strength Through Joy or the Soviet leisure-time organizations. Even its national leaders paid only lip-service to the ideal that it improve the life-style of the workers “by socializing [educando] them

and bringing their functions and their tasks into line with the principles of the Corporative Fascist State.”?2 The spirit of the Dopolavoro was frankly hedonistic and plebeian. For this reason it was looked down on by bourgeois Italians, who traveled first-class and had their own summer-houses, and by

Fascist intellectuals, who wanted their countrymen to adopt more serious and austere norms for behavior. The adjective dopolavoristico became a

synonym for vulgar, but this vulgarity was more petty-bourgeois than working-class in its style and taste. What could be more petty-bourgeois than a guided tour of another town on a Sunday outing? Or two weeks in a third-rate hotel at Riccione (Italy’s Atlantic City)? Or ballroom dancing on a cruise ship? Or an amateur theater production directed by a local schoolteacher?

The Dopolavoro did sponsor concerts and theatrical performances, particularly by the Carro di Tespi. Troupes of this traveling theater brought plays and grand opera to small communities throughout the country during the fall of each year; they also performed in the large cities on Saturdays during the winter and spring. In January, 1938, the Carro di Tespi in Rome performed seven plays and one opera before audiences varying in size from 1,000 to 2,000.73 Of the plays, two were by Pirandello (Ma non é una cosa seria and Pensaci Giacomino!), two were farces in dialect, two were

lightweight contemporary comedies (Una ragazza per bene and Mani in alto!), and one was a series of skits. Not only did the Carro di Tespi provide

work for theater personnel in a period when the theater was languishing, but it also brought a fairly high level of offerings to people who would not ordinarily go to the theater at all. A typical audience of 1,500 consisted of 500 blue-collar workers (only one fifth of whom belonged to the Dopolavoro), 350 white-collar employees, 350 petty officials, 150 members of the armed forces (at reduced rates), and 150 people on welfare (admitted free). At the opera performances the proportion of blue-collar workers rose to half. Still, most dopolavoristi preferred traditional farces to Pirandello and bocce (a kind of bowling game with wooden balls aimed at a fixed pin) to skiing. The leaders of the OND also justified billiard-playing, even though

it did not correspond to the movement's ideals, because “it responds to a specific recreational desire on the part of workers” wherever “this class of people” gathers.” The mediocre quality of Dopolavoro activities and the lack of opportunities for self-improvement were due as much to the organization’s leadership as to the wishes and tastes of its members. Until May 24, 1937, when it was placed under the direct dependence of Mussolini, the Dopolavoro was run by party gerarchi, few of whom had any expertise in the fields of recreation and popular education. They did little to encourage individual

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members to take books out of their libraries, and in some large industrial and commercial centers they provided no courses to help workers improve their professional qualifications.» Even after 1937 the leaders of the publicly run Dopolavoro tended to be self-educated local dilettantes, overzealous schoolteachers, former lecturers from the defunct popular universities, out-

of-work actors, and neighborhood or village know-it-alls and good-timeCharlies.

In general it may be said that the branches of the Dopolavoro run by the communes and the state ministries were popular without being very Fascist. They engaged in no direct political indoctrination; even their house

newspapers (fogli di communicazioni) dealt mainly with leisure-time activities and avoided politics. Only in a kind of negative censorship on books and films available at their centers did they exert any control over what their members thought. Yet the Dopolavoro introduced the great mass of urban workers, particularly those in white-collar jobs and public services, to the small pleasures of mass leisure—from roller-skating to ballroom dancing, from community singing to tourism. Without the Dopolavoro, the mass

media, particularly motion pictures, would have had for less effect, for it allowed people to do on a small scale what would otherwise have been just images in a magazine or on a screen (see pp. 233-234 for the example of the film Signor Max).

One of the most modern examples of social mobilization in Fascist Italy was the Dopolavoro organizations of large industrial concerns like Ansaldo.”¢ In the greater Genoa area there were twenty-four sections of the Dopolavoro Ansaldo, with at least 50,000 members in the company’s ship-

building, armaments, steel, railroad-locomotive construction, and other heavy industrial plants. The large number of company people involved in administering its programs gave management an unprecedented influence over the leisure-time activities of its employees. Like similar American companies, Ansaldo sponsored bowling matches and other competitive sporting events in which the players wore uniforms advertising its name. Unlike workers in American concerns, Ansaldo workers went on excursions and tours together, thus strengthening their esprit de corps and their identification with the company. During the depression the Dopolavoro Ansaldo

also distributed an average of 30 kilos of food and 60 kilos of fuel per family to 12,000 workers in 1931, 21,600 in 1935, and 30,042 in 1937, thereby creating a misleading image of the company as good-hearted (misleading because much of the money for this food and fuel came from membership dues rather than company funds). It was companies like Ansaldo

and Fiat, more than the Fascist regime itself, that helped to integrate Italian workers into the national society through its leisure-time activities and to give them the beginnings of a feeling of identification with a modern institution outside their family or home town. The one leisure-time institution with educational pretensions was the Istituto Nazionale di Cultura Fascista, headed by Piero Rancicci until 1939 and by Camillo Pellizzi after that. It had branches in all major towns and close to 200,000 members in 1941, but half of these were teachers of one sort or another.”? With only 10,000 industrial workers in the INCF from all

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The FASCIST Experience

of Italy, it was hardly a substitute for the old popular universities and their counterparts in other modern countries. Indeed, according to Pellizzi himself,”® the main activity of the institute—despite all its clubs, libraries, foundations, and study grants—was to keep in contact with university and high-school teachers, many of whom were either retired or isolated in the provinces, by holding periodic gatherings with lectures on general themes like “What is Europe?” The very idea of an institute of “Fascist Culture” was enough to make most established professors have “other plans” whenever its directors tried to persuade them to speak at such gatherings.

Despite the misgivings of certain intellectuals, students, and workers, most of them, along with almost everyone else, viewed the Fascist regime as “normal” and did what it required of them more often out of conformity than fear. For many Italians, joining the party or at least the “corporation” of their particular profession, seemed like a routine bureaucratic requirement. Thus, many lawyers and medical doctors joined the Corporation of the Professions and the Arts in order to be able to practice but remained aloof from the party.”? University professors had to swear allegiance to the

regime in a loyalty oath in October, 1931, in order to keep their chairs (see Chapter 6) and were sometimes pressured into attending public cere-

monies sponsored by the party.8° Workers in any enterprise remotely connected with the government—a riveter in an aircraft factory, a photographer at the Istituto L.U.C.E. (which produced newsreels and documentary films—see Chapter 8) a porter at the University of Rome—joined the party, even when they could not afford the fee, out of fear of being fired.®! The widespread unemployment among white-collar service-personnel during the 1930s made it seem almost as foolish for them not to do so as for a worker not to join a union in a closed shop. Even non-Fascist parents urged their children to conform in order not to jeopardize their future careers. It was

equally important not to get expelled from the party for, according to Regulation Number 20 of the 1932 Party Statute, expellees were excluded from all aspects of public life. Conformity out of opportunism was more common than conformity out of fear or out of enthusiasm for the accomplishments of the regime. A good illustration is the following recollection by a man who was born and reared in Potenza, the sleepy capital of the poor southern province of Basilicata: Notwithstanding all the big talk about “faith” in Fascist Italy, in the imperial destiny of the nation, and in the “Duce,” what | saw every day was the wretched spectacle of a bunch of humble people who liked the quiet life adapting themselves to living from day to day without “making waves.” They did this by donning the Fascist boots and uniform with no other preoccupation than keeping their position or acquiring some privilege that would allow them to live in a less sordid way and to be able to “lord it over” people worse off than they were.®”

At the other end of the social scale, most members of the nobility also found it opportune to pay lip-service to the regime, particularly since the royal family was given a respectable ceremonial role in it. Even most of

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Fascist Socialization and Conformity

the Roman nobles “rallied” to the government of the Kingdom of Italy after

the Lateran Accords of 1929 and, like the rest of the middle and upper classes, continued to make sarcastic remarks about it in private. One noteworthy exception was Prince Filippo Doria Pamphili; he expressed his antiFascism openly on November 18, 1935, by refusing to display the flag from the Palazzo Doria, which is adjacent to the Piazza Venezia, where the big processions expressing “faith” in the regime were converging.® The overwhelming majority of cases of nonconformity treated as “subversion” were less dramatic than Prince Doria Pamphili’s gesture and involved the poorest and most ignorant sections of the population, who did not know enough not to let off steam in public.*+ Almost all the cases reported involved only verbal insults—against Mussolini, the party, or government policies—by poor workers or peasants, often while drunk or out of work or both together. There were hardly any police reports on mature intellectuals as subversives, but some university students were kept under surveillance. Most of the subversives were not affiliated with any organization. During the late 1930s perhaps Io to 15 percent of them were middleaged repatriates from the Americas and France, though in some parts of the industrial north there were workers in their twenties who favored the Communist party and the Spanish Loyalists. They sometimes distributed leaflets or scribbled anti-Fascist slogans on walls in public places. The following police report for late 1937 concerning a small town in northcentral Italy probably describes a typical situation: At Jesi up until now Fascist penetration has been relatively ineffectual. On the other hand, we have only 13 subversives on file, and they are constantly under surveillance. A few copies of anti-Fascist newspapers have come in (sent by unknown persons to the podestd or to a handful of private individuals of impeccable conduct). In September of last year some anti-Fascist leaflets were found in the office of the match factory.®°

The real subversives were handled by the OVRA and the special tribunal rather than by the regular police and courts. Compared to Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union under Stalin their number was remarkably small and their treatment relatively humane. Between 1926 and 1943 only 25 were condemned to death, and this figure included several spies and Slav extremists.86 Around 10,000 were placed under controlled residence in

remote parts of the south and on small islands, without a formal trial and for indeterminate periods of time. (It was under such conditions, for ex-

ample, that Carlo Levi wrote Christ Stopped At Eboli). Of the 5,000 defendants who came before the Special Tribunal, most but not all were accused of political crimes. Even more significant is the fact that many of these defendants were let off with a reprimand or a simple warning.®’ Thus,

political terror—the threat of persecution—was used as effectively as in-

carceration. Some of the best people, including Antonio Gramsci and Alcide De Gasperi, were indeed political prisoners for a number of years,

but they would never have denied that they were real subversives. The Special Tribunal was severe but not completely arbitrary; it did not, for 141

The FASCIST Experience

example, condemn people merely for associating with known anti-

Fascists.°°

There seems to be little doubt that the national police functioned more effectively under the leadership of Arturo Bocchini®® than ever before, but

the degree to which its effectiveness, along with that of the Carabinieri, deterred people from committing crimes of all kinds is more questionable. We have already seen that fear of losing one’s party card and hence one’s job was probably a greater deterrent to petty subversion than fear of the police: and “hard-core” subversives were not deterred by anything except getting caught. In the realm of “ordinary” crime the most spectacular feat of the police was the work of Cesare Mori in “freezing” the activities of the Mafia in western Sicily in the late 1920s.9° Among the several extraordinary measures used to accomplish this feat was the decree-law of July 15, 1926, which permitted the authorities to put people with questionable pasts under preventive detention. But the (then) less-publicized banditry and vendettas in Sardinia appear to have gone their merry way with little abatement’! at the one time when there was a significant—and highly publicized—decline in the national crime-rate, namely the years 1933-1935.” Although Mussolini had gained his initial mass support as a proponent of “law and order,” there is little evidence that the rate of crime fell significantly during his dictatorship (1925-1943). The main reason that people thought—and still think—it fell is that the press was simply prohibited from reporting most crime news; as early as 1926 Ugo Ojetti, then director of the Corriere della Sera, said: “When the mirror [i.e., the daily newspaper as mirror of events] is hidden, people think that crime and criminals have

disappeared.”*? (See also Chapter 8.) In addition, the situation under Fascism obviously compared favorably with the abnormal conditions during the years immediately following the two world wars. Even those observers who have seen the official statistics have sometimes failed to note that the number of homicides per 100,000 inhabitants dropped to less than half the 1930 figure in 1931 because the classification “infanticides to preserve the family honor’ (unwed mothers killing their babies) was no longer included, owing to changes in the penal code. Even the decline in personal assaults during the early 1930s** is accountable in part by the “freezing” of Mafia

activities in Sicily by that time. While the number of violent crimes undoubtedly fell somewhat during the 1930s, the number of thefts of all kinds increased steadily, reaching an alltime high in 1937. In fact, in that year the total number of crimes prosecuted (623,240) was the highest during the entire Fascist period; even the number per 100,000 (1,436) had only been surpassed in 1926 (1,488) and 1927 (1,447). What declined, then, was mainly the visibility of crimes, both the kinds committed and the number reported by the mass media. Fascist efforts to regiment Italian society had varying degrees of success among different classes and in different places. They seem to have been most effective in small towns, where the podestd, party chief, school principal, physical-education instructor—and probably the notary, phar-

macist, and doctor as well—were enthusiastic Fascists. In general the

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Fascist Socialization and Conformity

small-town piccola borghesia, which was the most conformist anyway, was the most conformist under Fascism. In some of the larger towns the middle

ranks of the borghesia were the pace setters in boosting Fascism, and in many parts of Tuscany the local nobility took the lead. (Almost all the Tuscan podestad were nobles.) On the other hand, we must remember that a large proportion of Italians of all ages were simply unable to grasp such abstract notions as the nation, the state, Fascism, .and the empire. This group would include the majority of the country’s women (practically all farm women and a large percentage of urban women), the majority of the rural population as a whole, including particularly large numbers of uneducated southerners and a sizable proportion of young male peasants in the north. Since Fascism, unlike present-day Arab nationalism, was not, so to

speak, a “gut” issue nurtured by fanaticism, it could only reach those people who were culturally able and willing to accept its outlook. The Ethiopian war united these people temporarily, but after it was over Italian society remained as hierarchical and divided as before.

NOTES 1. The term socialization is used here in its broadest sense of the total formation and upbringing of young people according to the beliefs and norms for behavior of the dominant group in a given society. In other words, socialization is the process by which individuals are made into functioning members of their society. 2. This information was given to me in a personal interview by Dottore Nicola Barattucci, Direttore Generale della Gioventu Italiana, in Rome in July 1967. Barattucci, who was in charge of personnel at the ONB in the 1930s, insists that the ONB was not “dependent” on the ministry of education. 3. From the party’s Foglio d’ordini no. 90, February 16, 1932; cited in Aquarone, L’organizzazione dello Stato totalitario, p. 180.

4. Report for 1931, PNF, Segretaria Amministrativa delle Federazioni Pro-

vinciali, 2) GUF, busta 967, fasc. 27.

5. Letters from Renato Ricci to Mussolini, May 30 and July 11, 1931, Seg. Part. del Duce, fasc. 242/R, Riunioni del Direttorio del Partito Nazionale Fascista, sottofasc. I.

6. Letter from Poli, 2 February 1934, to the head of the GUF branch in Lecce, PNF, 2) GUF, busta 964.

7. Letter of 19 March 1935, Seg. Part. del Duce, busta 34, fasc. 242/R,

Starace, Achille.

8. Letter of 7 September 1937, ibid. Starace said that in May 1937 the ONB should have “graduated” 205,095 youths into the Fasci giovanili. Instead, only 29,115 (plus 19,560 in 1936) joined, along with 47,673 eighteen-year-olds not from the ONB. 9. Letter of 24 October 1937, ibid. 10. PNF, Bollettino del Comando Generale della G.I.L., 13, no. 18, July 15, 1939. The figures for the GIL are also from this source. 11. Ibid., 14, no. 1, 1 November 1939. 12. All figures used in this paragraph come from ibid., 13, no. 18, July 15, 1939.

13. The description of these activities is based on about fifty personal interviews as well as the official periodicals of the GIL. 14. Report of the federale to Starace, July 11, 1935, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Trieste,

busta 3; also the booklet, Casa della giovane italiana di Trieste, published by the

ONB in 1934. 15. Bollettino del Comando Generale della GIL, 13, no. 15, June I, 1939.

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The FASCIST Experience 16. The descriptions in this paragraph come from personal interviews and from the following ONB publications: Il capo-squadra Balilla (Rome, 1935), La caposquadro piccola italiana (Rome, 1936), and Il capo centuria (Rome, 1937). Some designs and compositions by elementary school girls in the Renato Ricci file of the PNF were also suggestive. It should be noted that the hierarchical table of organization of the GIL paralleled that of the Militia with its military-sounding ranks.

In the more than a thousand police reports I have seen for the 1930s, only two described denunciations of “subversives” by Balilla. In his report of July 17, 1934,

the prefect of Piacenza mentioned two eleven-year-old Balilla denouncing a thirtyeight-year-old peddler for making remarks against the Duce while drunk (P.S. 1903-—

1949, C2, busta 37, Piacenza); in his report of March 8, 1937 the prefect of Pesaro said that the signed affidavits of four boys, aged nine to eleven, were used to arrest a forty-one-year-old small-town bully for subversive utterances (ibid., Pesaro). 17. Letter to Mussolini, May 1, 1935, Seg. Part. del Duce, busta 34, fasc, 242/R:

Starace, Achille. : busta 965, Sport. .

18. Telegrams dated June 6, 1935, from GUF secretaries at Agrigento, Cuneo, Enna, and Matera, PNF, Seg. Administrativa delle Federazioni Provinciali, 2) GUF, 19. See Starace’s report on the activities of the GIL in the Bollettino del Comando

Generale della GIL, 13, no. 11, April 1, 1939, and PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Napoli, anonymous report for November 1939.

20. Letter to Mussolini, Sept. 12, 1927, Seg. Part. del Duce, 91/R, Grazioli

Francesco Saverio, sottofasc. 1. 21. E.g., anonymous report, Jan. 27, 1933, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Milano.

22. Personal interview with Dottore Giovanni Oddo, July 1967, in Rome. Dottore Oddo was one of the top administrators of the sports program of the GIL. According to him, Ricci constructed swimming pools ten centimeters short of the olympic standard so that they could not be used for training purposes or contests. 23. Report on youth organizations by Carlo Scorza, July 11, 1931, Seg. Part. del Duce. Riunione del Direttorio del PNF, sottofasc. 2, inserto A. For the next five years all the reports of the federali highlighted team sports in the Fasci Giovanili. 24. Oddo interview; Dottore Oddo said that the Italian broad-jump team had no one who could jump more than fifteen and a half meters and that when CONI

saw in the trials that one Japanese jumped sixteen meters, it withdrew its own

jumpers from the event. 25. A radio program on June 30, 1938, gave forth the following item: “June 29 was for Fascist Italy, in aviation and in winning sports activities, a day of continuing firsts [primati], a celebration of athletic value which could be defined as the ‘potential’ value of a continuous workout, the intrinsic value of an entire race.” Cited in Radiocorriere, 14, no. 27 (July 3-9, 1938): 3. 26. Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 384.

27. This anecdote is taken from A. M. Fabbri (Luigi Preti), Giovinezza, Giovinezza (Milan: Mondadori, 1964), p. 17. 28. E.g., “Compiti della G.I.L.,” Critica Fascista, 13, no. 4 (December 15, 1939): 50-51. 29. Critica Fascista, 11, no. 8 (April 15, 1933): 144-145. 30. Anonymous report of January 2, 1934, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma.

31. Critica Fascista, 16, no. 18 (July 15, 1938): 280; one month later a twentyyear-old named Giuseppe Bianchini replied by saying that polemics were “necessary to the life of the Revolution” (ibid., no. 20, 320). 32. Germani, loc. cit., p. 8. 33. The citations in this paragraph are from Zangrandi, Il lungo viaggio, p. 94.

34. Ibid., p. 72.

35. Enzo Capaldo, “Gruppi Universitari Fascisti e Gioventu Italiana del Littorio,” Critica Fascista, 17, no. 1 (November 1, 1938): 8. 36. The main examples I have seen of the kinds of materials presented at the Littoriali are in a comprehensive commemorative book on the Naples gathering in 1936 (PNF-GUF, I Littoriali della cultura e dell’arte dell’anno XIV [Naples, 1936]). Many of the essays were of the type, “Italy’s contributions to the world” in science, music,

144

Fascist Socialization and Conformity etc. The papers for presentation at the oral debates were more original. Among the entries of short experimental films the shots shown plus the description and comments of the producer-directors indicate considerable talent, resourcefulness, and independence in thought and action. 37. Ibid., pp. 1o1—-116. See also Autobiografie di giovani del tempo fascista

(Brescia: Morcelliana, 1947); La generazione degli anni difficili, eds., Ettore A. Albertoni, Ezio Antonini, Renato Palmieri (Bari: Laterza, 1962); Eugenio Curiel,

Classi e generazioni del nuovo risorgimento (Rome: Edizioni di Cultura Sociale, 1955): and Luigi Preti, op. cit. 38. Report of the federale, Mar. 16, 1935, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Rieti; see also, Corriere Padano, March 14, 1935. 39. These impressions appeared in Critica Fascista, 15, no. 13 (May 1, 1937): 229-232. 40. Report of Ezio Maria Gray—chairman of the session on colonialism at the 1937 Littoriali in Naples—to Starace, April 1937, in Seg. Part. del Duce Cart. Ord., fasc. 177, 899, “Littoriali dell Cultura e dell’Arte.” See Zangrandi, op. cit., p. 89 for Curiel’s article. 41. Ibid., pp. 108-109, 187-188.

42. Gastone Silvano Spinetti, Vent’anni dopo: Ricominciare da zero (Rome: Edizioni di “Solidarismo,” 1964), p. 147. Spinetti was a minor official in the press office and the ministry of popular culture between 1934 and 1940; during those years he also wrote books like Mistica fascista nel pensiero di Arnaldo Mussolini, Spirito della Rivoluzione Fascista, and Fascismo e libertad. The work cited here is one of several in which Spinetti has defended his generation for having tried to transform Fascism into a more libertarian and communistic regime. 43. Costanzo Casucci, “La Generazione del Littorio,” Lo Spettatore italiano, 9, no. 1 (January 1956), 37; this was a review of Giuseppe Berto’s Guerra in camicia nera.

44. This is my impression from my own reading in the autobiographical literature and from personal interviews; see also the testimony of Francesco Compagna, an eminent historian and editor, in La generazione degli anni difficili, p. 95. 45. Ibid., p. 207, testimony of Mario Pomilio. 46. Letter from Carlo Scorza to Mussolini, July 11, 1931, Seg. Part. del Duce, fasc. 242/R, Riunioni del Direttorio del PNF., sottofasc. 2. 47. See David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution (New York: DoubledayAnchor, 1966), p. 5o0ff.

48. Gianni Guizzardi, “Universitari e propaganda operaia,” Critica Fascista, 18, no. 4 (December 15, 1939): 62-63. 49. Fernando Feliciani, in Gioventn del Littorio. Bollettino del Comando Generale, 15, no. 21 (September 1, 1941): 681. 50. Anonymous report, Aug. 18, 1936, P.S. (1903-1949), C2. busta 6 (1936), fasc. Genova. This report also says that the local metallurgical workers were dissatisfied with their own bureaucratic union leaders. The report was confirmed in part by that of the prefect of Genoa on September 13, 1936. 51. In Rome province there were 45,461 Donne Fasciste and 30,099 Massaie Rurali in 1940 (report of the federale, November 2, 1940, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Roma);

in Genoa, another highly urban province, there were 31,051 Donne Fasciste and 25,813 Massaie Rurali (report of the federale, October 1940, ibid., Genova); in Mantua, with a fair-sized city and about an equal proportion of the population in rural areas, the figures were 13,605 and 35,000 respectively (report of the federale, October 19, 1940, ibid., Mantova); in provinces where the rural population was approximately twice that of the urban population the proportion of Donne Fasciste to Massaie Rurali averaged one to three (e.g., reports for October 1940 from Macerata, Trento, Pescara,

Modena, and Piacenza, all in ibid.)—despite the much narrower class base of the former.

52. Reports of the federale, December 27, 1934 and March 1, 1935, ibid., Siracusa. 53. Anonymous report, January 25, 1932, ibid., Milano.

54. Report of the federale, May 11, 1934, ibid., Pavia; in his report of July 5,

145

The FASCIST Experience 1935 the federale of Reggio Emilia (ibid., Reggio Emilia) said that the party helped place over one thousand infants of these working mothers in public or private shelterhomes in cooperation with the Opera Nazionale Maternita e Infanzia. 55. Bollettino del Comando Generale della GIL, 13, no. 6 (January 15, 1939). 56. 16, no. 23 (October 1, 1938): 359-360; 17, no. 8 (February 15, 1939).

57. Consistenza patrimoniale del partito nazionale fascista in base ai bilanci

delVanno XIV e dell’anno XIX; cited in Aquarone, op. cit., p. 605.

58. E.g., report of the federale, May 11, 1934, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Pavia and report of the federale, of Pisa, January 18, 1935, ibid., Pisa. 59. L’economia italiana nel 1938, extract from the Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali, 10, no. 3 (May, 1939): 29. 60. U. Pierantoni and G. Zirpolo, Elementi di igiene e puericultura per le alunne delle scuole medie (Milan: Societa Anonima Editrice Dante Alighieri, 1938), pp. 8—10. 61. L’economia italiana nel 1938, p. 17. 62. Istituto Centrale di Statistica, Compendio Statistico Italiano, 14 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1940): 49-50, 52. 63. Cesare Vannutelli, “Le condizioni di vita dei lavoratori italiani nel decennio 1929-39,” loc. cit., p. 102. 64. Compendio Statistico Italiano, 14 (1940): 23. 65. ACS. Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, gab. 1939—1943, fasc 3,3.6,3200,

unsigned report of April, 1925, no. D/56. 66. Telegrams from the prefect of Genoa to Federzoni, January 19, March 4, and April 9, 1926 P.S. (1910-1934), G.I, busta 21, Genova; the next two examples mentioned are described in similar reports dated September 19, 1929 and November 30, 1926.

67. Letter from Augusto Turati (who as party secretary was also head of the Dopolavoro) to the ministry of the interior, March 12, 1929 ibid., fasc. 7, Bolzano. 68. Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, Bag. 1939-1943, f. 3,3.6,3200, sottofasc. 7, report of Costanzo Ciano to Mussolini on October 30, 1925. Mussolini expressed his approval in the margin. 69. Compendio Statistico Italiano, vol. 14 (1940), pp. 252-253. The figures in the next sentence are from this same source. 70. Luigi Maffei, I dopolavoro agricoli in provincia di Varese, 1930-1937 (PNFOND, Dopolavoro Provinciale di Varese, 1938), p. 18, which says that seven out of

eleven thousand rural members were landowners; if this was the proportion in Varese, one of the most advanced parts of Italy, it was undoubtedly greater in the

rest of the country where the vast majority of day laborers could barely afford food, let alone membership in a recreational organization. 71. The membership figures and the numbers participating in various activities were regularly reported by the federale; I have seen such reports for the following provinces between 1931 and 1940: Genova, Macerata, Milano, Modena, Napoli, Pescara, Piacenza, Pisa, Pistoia, Roma, Rovigo, Taranto, Terni, Torino, Trento. 72. Corrado Puccetti, who succeeded Enrico Beretta as General Director of the OND in June, 1937, said this in his preface to Ugo Cuesta’s Il libro del dopolavoro (Rome: “Pinciana,” 1937), p. 8. 73. Reports of the questore for January-May and December 1938, P.S., 19031949, busta 3 Roma; other information confirming the averages and generalizations in this paragraph come from the reports of the prefect of Naples (in the same busta)

23, 1938.

for February—April, 1938.

74. Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri, 1939-1943, fasc. 3,3.6,3200, sottfasc. 8, copy of a memorandum from OND headquarters to Bolaffi, minister of finance, May

75. Report, sometime in 1936, “Un problema del regime: Il Dopolavoro,” Seg. Part. del Duce. Carteggio Ordinario, busta 49, fasc. 509. 016, sottofasc. 1. This report was prepared by Ottavio Dinale, an old ex-revolutionary syndicalist who remained one of Mussolini’s closest friends until the dictator’s downfall in 1943.

#76. All the information in this paragraph comes from a 48-page pamphlet. Relazione del Direttorio sull’attivita svolta nel 1937—-XV°, published by the Dopolavoro Ansaldo.

146

, Fascist Socialization and Conformity 77. Annual report of Pellizzi, May 16, 1942, Ministero della Cultura Popolare (hereafter called Minculpop) Atti, busta 84, fasc. 3, “Ist. Naz. Cul. Fasc., sottofasc.

“Varie.”

78. Personal interview, July 28, 1966, in Rome. 79. Anonymous report, April 5, 1933, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Trieste, busta 4. 80. Napoli. Anonymous report, October 11, 1932, ibid.

81. The aforementioned report from Trieste, ibid.; also Roma, anonymous reports, October 5, 1936 and January 30, 1939. 82. Michele Abbate, in La generazione degli anni difficili, p. 29.

83. Insolera, Roma moderna, pp. 175,6n. The Fascists got their revenge by changing the name of the nearby street from Vicolo Doria to Vicolo della Fede.

Needless to say, the old name was restored in 1945.

84. This generalization is based on a study of one fourth of the total of reports for 1936 and 1937 for all of Italy in the Cx and C2 files of the Pubblicca Sicurezza, 1903-1949.

85. Report of the questore, October 14, 1937, P.S. (1903-1949) Cx. busta, 3,

Ancona.

86. The figures given here come from Ernesto Rossi, La pupilla del Duce. POVRA (Parma: Guanda, 1956, pp. 131 and 133), who in turn took them from Adriano Dal Pone, Alfonso Leonetti, Pasquale Maiello, and Lino Zocchi, Aula IV. Tutti i processi del tribunale speciale fascista (Rome, 1961). This publication describes the trials at the Special Tribunal; since its authors represent the victims

themselves (Associazione Nazionale per Perseguitati Politici Italiani Antifascisti), it is unlikely that they have minimized the numbers involved. 87. At Savona, for example, the questore reported on January 29, 1938, that 10 defendants were awaiting trial by the Special Tribunal, 19 had been put in prison, 31 dismissed with a reprimand, and 10 dismissed with a warning. (P.S. 1903—1949, C1,

busta 3, Savona) It is difficult to say how typical these figures were, but they certainly indicate that not all defendants were imprisoned for years at a stretch. 88. Report of the federale of Naples, Nov. 6, 1938, (PNF, Sit. Pol. delle Prov., Napoli), in which he complains because a lawyer named De Ambrozio was acquitted even though everybody knew that he was in contact with a man named Alpi, who was living in controlled residence at Ponza. 89. There is no biography of Bocchini. Much of what we know of him comes from the memoirs of his successor, Carmine Senise, Quando ero capo della polizia, 1940-1943 (Rome: Ruffolo Editore, 1946). There is also a file of newspaper articles

about him—the Ministero dell’Interno, Dir. Gen. P.S., Seg. Part. del Capo della

Polizia, Parte 1, Segretario di S.E. Bocchini, Miscellanea atti riservatissimi, Materie,

busta 12, fasc. 21, “Pubblicazioni di giornali esteri e nazionali sulle attivita dell Ecc. B.”

90. See Michele Pantaleone, Mafia e politica (Turin: Einaudi, 1962—English translation, The Mafia and Politics (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966), and Danilo Dolci, Spreco: documenti e inchieste su alcuni aspetti dello spreco nella Sicilia occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1960)—English translation, Waste (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964). g1. E.g., reports of the federale, September 1932 and October 14, 1933, PNF, Sit. Pol. Prov., Sassari.

g2. This decline is evident in the reports of the inspector general of the Pubblica Sicurezza for January 1935 (P.S. 1903-1949, C1, busta 1, Affari per provincie, 1935); in his radio broadcast of January 11, 1935, Roberto Forges Davanzati boasted that while Fascism had reduced the crime rate in Italy, it was rising in the United States (Cronache, I, pp. 194-195). 93. Ugo Ojetti, I taccuini (Florence: Sansoni, 1954), p. 222. 94. The national figures given in this paragraph come from Trattato elementare di statistica, vol. 6, Statistiche sociali, Alfredo, Spallanzani, Statistiche giudiziarie (Milan: Giuffré, 1934), p. 31; and Compendio Siatistico Italiano, vol. 13, 1939, p. 261. These figures are confirmed by reports of the police and the federali from most of the provinces I have investigated. 95. Tamaro, op. cit., III, 219.

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