LITMIR.BIZ

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Italo Balbo and Roberto Farinacci, who did not hesitate to accuse him of being excessively accommodating. Faced with what amounted to an internal revolt he had threatened to resign, thereby resolving the crisis.²³ The opposition he had faced showed that his control was not yet absolute, but the incident played into his hands because it confirmed that, unlike his acolytes, he was a shrewd politician able to play on several registers at once.

      With their man now Prime Minister, the foot–soldiers of fascism went home triumphantly, confident that this was the first stage of a revolution that would sweep throughout Italy, transforming the country. Many of their comrades, however, were quickly seduced by the charms of the political establishment they had sought to destroy. They began to experience the pleasures of wielding power, of being feared and envied, and of basking in the respect of those they had hitherto viewed with awe.

      The old elites, of course, despised Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and a schoolmistress. They were alarmed by his plebeian tones and his rough and populist language, yet they recognised him as someone prepared to do the dirty work they themselves were not able or willing to do. Some intellectuals openly admired him, or were not prepared to criticise him. The distinguished historian Gioacchino Volpe praised Mussolini well before the March on Rome.²⁴ Benedetto Croce, the most revered philosopher in Italy, sent his good wishes to the new Prime Minister, while keeping his distance. Writing in 1944 of his contacts with Mussolini, Croce, in what were essentially self–justificatory notes, while barely able to disguise his pleasure at being esteemed by the Duce, explained that he had refrained from ever meeting him because they just did not belong to the same social circles: ‘There were differences between us to do with differences of social milieu, family and culture; and I have always held the view that men get on together if they have had a similar education rather than if they share the same abstract ideas.’²⁵

      Mussolini too made sure that everyone knew he did not belong to the same class as Croce. In 1931, wildly overemphasising his antecedents as a ‘man of the people’, he wrote with some pride that he belonged to the class of those who shared a bedroom that doubled up as a kitchen, and whose evening meal was a simple vegetable soup.²⁶ It is true that life in his native Predappio, a small town near Forli, was hard, but in reality his parents were not poor: they both worked – his father as a blacksmith, his mother as a teacher – and his father owned a bit of land which he rented out.²⁷ Mussolini was baptised in the local church and received a religious education. Yet his father was a socialist, who had named his son Benito after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez, and given him the middle names Amilcare and Andrea after two Italian socialist leaders, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.

      Locally, Mussolini’s parents were people of some importance, not quite the dispossessed peasants described in later hagiographies; yet compared to the politicians who had ruled Italy since its unification, Mussolini was certainly a ‘man of the people’. The twenty–five Prime Ministers who preceded him may have been very different from each other, but they all belonged to Italy’s elites. Some, such as Cavour, De Rudini, Menabrea, Ricasoli, Sonnino and Lamarmora, were aristocrats; the majority were grands bourgeois – lawyers, academics, doctors and army officers. All had university degrees or had been to the military academy. Mussolini had left school at eighteen to be a primary school teacher. For a man of such humble origins to have become Prime Minister was a remarkable feat.

      What are handicaps in some circumstances occasionally turn into advantages. During the First World War Mussolini had shared the lot of the ordinary soldier, the boredom as well as the fear. He could speak about life in the army with some authority, unlike the overwhelming majority of politicians. His war diary has the ring of truth. It avoided the absurd rhetoric of D’Annunzio (who had fought with considerable valour): ‘After two months I am beginning to know my comrades … Do they love war, these men? No. Do they hate it? No. They accept it as a duty that cannot be questioned. Those from the south have a song that goes like this: “And the war must be made, ‘cos that’s what the King wants.” ’²⁸

      A humble start in life may have prepared Mussolini to be more in tune with what ordinary people thought, and may have helped him to perform in the public sphere, embellishing his rhetoric with a language more vivid and more readily understandable than that deployed by his socially more polished rivals. But it would be a mistake to assume that rabble–rousing populism was a major factor in Mussolini’s advent to power. Electorally speaking, fascism had not been a great success. The first election the fascists fought, that of 1919, turned out to be disastrous. It is true that the party, or rather the movement – since they refused to call themselves a party until 1921 – had just been founded, but so had the Catholic PPI (the Partito popolare italiano) – and this immediately won a major victory in the 1919 election. If anyone could be deemed to represent the ‘new’ Italy it was, in 1919, not Mussolini but the PPI, which was the de facto representative of the Catholic masses, or perhaps the Partito socialista italiano (PSI), still the main party of the urban workers and the new intelligentsia. The fascists did a little better in the election of May 1921, but only because they were part of Giolitti’s blocco nazionale, along with liberals and right–wing nationalists. Giolitti had hoped to neutralise the fascists, and Mussolini had been ready to compromise to achieve parliamentary gains, though as soon as they were elected the fascist deputies sat at the far right of the Chamber, in opposition to Giolitti. Even so, they had not been able to muster more than thirty–five MPs out of 535. One cannot say that Mussolini had been swept to power by a wave of electoral support.

      Votes, of course, are not everything, not even in a democracy. The real strength of the Fascist Party, as measured by the size of its membership, had been growing steadily throughout 1921. In March of that year the fascists numbered 80,000. By June the party had 204,000 members (62 per cent of them in the north). By May 1922 there were 322,000 members, and the Fascist Party had become the strongest in Italy.²⁹ The tipping point had been their inclusion in Giolitti’s national bloc at the May election. This somewhat legitimised them in the eyes of many, for in the course of the electoral campaign they recruited substantially, and at a faster rate than ever before, more than doubling their numbers from March to reach 187,000 at the end of May 1921. This surge was overwhelmingly concentrated in some regions of the north and the centre, so that their activities appeared far more important and greater than if their support had been spread throughout the peninsula.³⁰

      The liberal establishment was scared of the fascists, but even more scared of the left and the trade unions. This explains why the violence of the squadristi remained unchecked; and the more unchecked it was, the more it grew. The fascists, while allowed to use violence, were never sufficiently strong to be able to topple the existing political order, yet not so weak as to be ineffectual. Besides, political violence was far more prevalent in the years following the First World War than it is now. When a left–wing revolt threatened the Weimar republic in 1919 even a social democrat such as Friedrich Ebert, then Chancellor, was prepared to use the Freikorps (a right–wing militia of veterans) to crush it, murdering in the process Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

      After the fascists came to power, in just over five years, at a speed dictated by events rather than by any carefully–worked–out strategic plan, what was still, technically, a constitutional government turned into a dictatorship. The existing system of proportional representation – the cause of parliamentary fragmentation – was abolished in 1923, and a new electoral system was devised aimed at guaranteeing an overwhelming majority to the victorious coalition. Then, by a combination of brutality and questionable legal proceedings, the opponents of fascism – socialists, communists, trade unionists, democratic liberals and the few conservatives who had repented of their early support for fascism – were eliminated, stripped of power, beaten in the streets by fascist squads, forced into exile, or jailed. New laws and new institutions finished off the old liberal state: a Special

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