ТОП просматриваемых книг сайта:
Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism. Donald Sassoon
Читать онлайн.Название Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780007404216
Автор произведения Donald Sassoon
Издательство HarperCollins
The resulting political system was one envisaged neither by the radical wing of fascism nor by the conservatives. The former thought they would get rid of the monarchy, of the old ruling classes, of clericalism, of a timorous bourgeoisie which had sold Italy to foreigners. The new fascist society, so they dreamed, would demarcate itself sharply from the pathetic liberal Italy which had achieved so little in its sixty years or so of existence. The March on Rome became their foundation myth. In truth it had been – as we have seen – little more than a paltry gathering of useful idiots, but in the telling and the retelling of it, the March was transformed into a revolutionary movement, the vanguard of patriotic Italians of all classes, concerned and dismayed by the corruption and decadence of the old liberal state. According to this narrative, they had rallied around a new leader, Mussolini, and his new party, the unsullied and uncorrupted Partito nazionale fascista, that had denounced the inability of the old governing classes to stand up to the Great Powers and to make Italy great again. In so doing these patriots had also definitively repulsed the menace of Bolshevism and socialism, and the strikes and subversion which had threatened hard–working citizens and led the country to the verge of the abyss. Responding to the call of destiny, the Duce had led thousands, perhaps tens of thousands – even, in some hyperbolic accounts, 300,000 – to Rome (the Corriere della sera estimated the number of demonstrators to be between 45,000 and 50,00032). With the country at his feet, Mussolini could have, as he declared later, transformed Parliament into a bivouac for his legions. Instead he demonstrated his love of country and his sense of responsibility and accepted the offer to become the King’s Prime Minister.
Power, however, is seldom found in a single place, a handy central control room whose keys, once acquired, provide one with complete mastery. Even in a dictatorship, especially one in which the conventions are always changing, power is the result of a constant and extenuating negotiating process. The real losers are the outsiders. Isolated from the power structure, they do not see the compromises, the bargaining, the positioning, the back–stabbing, the fear of losing, the joy of winning, and the ephemeral nature of what appears permanent. From the outside a dictatorship looks like a formidable ‘totalitarian’ machine, in control and unassailable. When it crumbles (one thinks of Portugal in 1974–75, Spain in 1975–77, Iran in 1979, the Soviet Union in 1989–91, and South Africa in 1990–94), almost everyone is taken by surprise, except perhaps the more alert among those who led the old regime.
The key question to be addressed here is not how the dictatorship was consolidated, or why Mussolini succeeded in transforming a constitutional government into an undemocratic regime, or even why he was able to maintain himself in office so effectively for twenty years, and lost power only because he dragged his country into a devastating war. The key question is why Mussolini obtained office in the first place; that is, why, given the circumstances described, the leader of an electorally unpopular party, with no nationwide support and no control over the military, became Prime Minister.
Events developed in the way they did because of a unique conjuncture in which each participant, unlike a chess grandmaster, could not plan his next move in advance, with the knowledge that commonly agreed rules bind the players, that each must wait his turn, that only certain moves are allowed. Like all political grand games, the Italian crisis of 1922 brought to the fore a multiplicity of actors, with no fixed rules, with no clear boundary between friend and foe, and no obvious resolution. Only later, when the dust had settled, could each side count its losses and its gains, curse the wrong moves made or congratulate itself on its mettle and luck.
Mussolini realised – partly from experience, partly by instinct – that in order to be accepted by all as the supreme leader, he had to please those who had not been entirely convinced by his performance so far, and inevitably to disappoint some of his supporters. The views of the country began to matter to him more than those of the party. By 1923 he was warning his supporters that ‘The country can tolerate one Mussolini at most, not several dozen.’33
What were the circumstances which made reasonable and rational people hold the view that the country had become ungovernable, or at least that it could not be governed in the old way? In 1920 Lenin, who knew a thing or two about revolutions, explained to some of his excessively enthusiastic followers that one cannot make a revolution at will, but that it can only occur when two conditions are fulfilled: ‘It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).’34
In Italy in 1922, the first condition was no longer extant. The ‘lower’ classes, the workers and peasants to whom Lenin had successfully appealed in Russia in 1917 and in the immediately succeeding years, had been soundly defeated. The trade union unrest which had manifested itself in the ‘red years’ of 1918–20 had been quelled. As for the agricultural workers of central and northern Italy, they had been brutally put down by sheer fascist violence, violence which was often justified in terms of re–establishing order. The rural workers of the south had remained silent, barely aware of the momentous political game being played elsewhere. The second condition (‘the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’) applied to a limited extent. The ‘upper classes’, if one can use this terminology to designate interlocking elites seldom able to present a monolithic face, realised that they could no longer go on in the old way, but they were not sure what the new way might be. They looked for an option whereby, to paraphrase Tancredi’s famous remark in Tommaso de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, ‘Everything must change so that everything remains the same.’ As the uncertainty of the elites grew, their unity, never their strongest card, faltered. Mussolini was one of several options they considered. They hoped that he would clear the ground from under the socialist and communist rabble, wipe out those trade unions before which they had trembled, and would then settle down, content with the trappings of power, cutting ribbons, strutting around, visiting schools, ennobling friends and relatives. Mussolini’s assigned role was to cleanse the country of the red menace and then turn himself into a figurehead. The old establishment would rule in the shadows, as it had always done.
Mussolini’s capture of power was seen by many of his contemporaries, at home and abroad, as the result of his exceptional qualities of leadership. He was the true ‘man of destiny’, the embodiment of die Weltseele (the World Spirit), to use Hegel’s description of Napoleon when he saw the Emperor riding through the city of Jena on 13 October 1806, the eve of the battle.35 Mussolini was one of the first modern leaders to achieve power in exceptional circumstances, outside the normal rules of politics. He had not been anointed by divine right, as under the ancien régime, nor – as in most democracies – gone through the legitimate process of succession as the leader of a major established political party. In the course of the twentieth century such men of destiny appeared with alarming regularity, and they continue to do so in the twenty–first. But Mussolini’s predecessors were rare. Only in Latin America had dictators or caudillos come to the fore in the course of the nineteenth century, men