Mussolini and Fascist Italy

Martin Blinkhorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134505715
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In Mussolini and Fascist Italy Martin Blinkhorn explains the significance of the man, the movement and the regime which dominated Italian life between 1922 and the closing stages of the Second World War. He examines:

• those aspects of post-Risorgimento Italy which provided the longterm context vital to an understanding of Fascism
• the social and political convulsions wrought by economic change after 1890 and by Italy's intervention in the First World War
• the Fascist movement's rapid rise from obscurity to power and the subsequent establishment of Mussolini's dictatorship
• the history of the Fascist regime until its demise during the Second World War
• the ways in which Italian Fascism has been understood by contemporary analysts and by historians.

The third edition of this best-selling Lancaster Pamphlet provides an expanded and fully updated analysis. New features include additional material on Fascist totalitarianism and a completely revised consideration of the ways in which Fascism has been interpreted.

1 Introduction

The present-day visitor to Rome is surrounded by architectural reminders of past centuries and dead regimes: most notably, those of Republican and Imperial Rome and of the medieval and Renaissance papacy. Here and there may also be observed traces of another bygone regime, one that can seem somehow more distant and elusive than any of these. One of the approaches to Italy’s Olympic stadium, for example, is along an avenue decorated with defaced stone columns and crumbling mosaics, obviously inspired yet not produced by classical Rome, commemorating epoch-making military victories, and praising a now-dead leader or Duce. The Duce was Benito Mussolini and the regime responsible for thus inscribing his achievements in stone was the Fascist regime he headed. Another face of Fascism awaits the visitor who ventures out to the south-western suburb of EUR, where an array of architecturally innovative, modernistic buildings reminds Romans of a ‘Universal Exhibition’, planned for 1942 but never actually held.

Mussolini and Fascism dominate the history of Italy between 1922 and 1945. From October 1922 until January 1925 Mussolini, backed by his Fascist Party, was Italy’s constitutional prime minister. From 1925 until his dismissal by King Vittorio Emanuele in late July 1943, Mussolini was Italy’s dictator and the Fascist Party its state party. Finally, from his initial deposition until his death in late April 1945, Mussolini served as head of Hitler’s puppet Fascist state, the Italian Social Republic. Italian Fascism aroused violent disagreement among its European contemporaries. Its many admirers, most but by no means all of them on the right of the political spectrum, tended to view it as a spontaneous eruption of patriotic energy which, once in power, replaced the fumblings of parliamentary liberalism and the threat of left-wing revolution with order, efficiency and national pride. To its detractors these gains appeared superficial or downright non-existent. For most of those on the left, Fascism was a product of capitalist crisis and its role was to serve the interests of big business and rural landlords. Liberal critics struggled to find a coherent explanation for Fascism, but were viscerally repelled by what they saw as its essential characteristics: hooliganism and thuggery in opposition, and systematic repression in power. In the eyes of liberals and left-wingers alike, Fascism meant the suppression of free speech, discussion and assembly, and the elimination of political parties and trade unions: all this by a corrupt, brutal regime and a megalomaniac leader increasingly obsessed with dreams of imperial conquest. Contemporary debate over Italian Fascism became part of wider debates over what came to be regarded as a general, Europe-wide ‘fascism’ of which German National Socialism was the most important variant.

Nowadays, although in the English-speaking world discussion of Italian Fascism’s origins, character, achievements and responsibilities may be confined largely to academic circles, in Italy itself the Fascist years are still sufficiently recent for academic debate to spill over into the mass media and engage a wider audience. That audience already exists, thanks to Italians’ consciousness of and sensitivity to the legacy of Fascism. In the early twenty-first century the Mussolini family retains a high public profile, one of its members as a prominent rightwing politician. A political party, the National Alliance, with a recent neo-Fascist pedigree, occupies posts in the right-of-centre Berlusconi government of 2001–6. And even as this introduction was being written (in winter 2005–6) a well-known Italian footballer won notoriety in some quarters, congratulation in others, for his unapologetic, celebratory use of the straight-armed fascist salute and his open admission of admiration for Fascism.

But what was Fascism? How and why did it emerge and win power in Italy? How and with what consequences was that power exercised? These are the principal questions that this short book seeks to explore and, where possible, answer. Fascism, it will become clear, cannot be explained entirely in terms of Mussolini himself, important as his contribution undoubtedly was. Nor can it be dismissed, as in some circles it used to be, as a mere capitalist conspiracy or an irrational outburst of peculiarly ‘Latin’ violence. A product of the post-war crisis of 1918–22 it may in part have been, yet there is also more to it than this. Fascism, in order to prosper, required a distinctive socio-economic environment, just as in order to challenge for power it needed a political vacuum into which to move and a unique set of circumstances to provide opportunities that otherwise might not have arisen. Having attained power, Fascism faced chronic domestic problems to which it offered its own (sometimes but not always novel) solutions, and pursued foreign policies for which it eventually became notorious. In order to understand these and many other aspects of Italian Fascism we must first examine the setting within which it appeared and from which it was never wholly to escape: the ‘liberal’ Italy born in 1861.

2
The setting: liberal Italy, 1861–1915

Politics and society in liberal Italy

The modern Italian state came into being during the course of little more than a decade. Between 1859 and 1870 the interaction of nationalist sentiment among limited sections of the population, the influence and involvement of foreign powers, and the ambitions of one Italian state, Piedmont, created a united Italian kingdom. The Risorgimento (‘resurgence’ or ‘revival’), as the movement for and achievement of Italian nationhood is commonly known, bequeathed to Italy a complex legacy, of which two threads mainly concern us here: it aroused among politically conscious Italians exaggerated expectations concerning Italy’s immediate prospects of power and prosperity; and in forging a new nation without involving or satisfying the mass of the population it threw up a socio-political system riddled with potential weaknesses.

The new state was endowed with a limited monarchy (that of Piedmont elevated to the new national stage),a liberal-parliamentary constitution and political system, and a highly centralized administration. From the start it was widely considered in Italy’s other regions to be–and accordingly resented as–an agent of ‘Piedmontization’. This was particularly the case in central and southern Italy. Levels of national consciousness were uneven and, throughout much of rural, provincial Italy, extremely low; loyalties to suddenly fallen dynasties and rulers–notably the Bourbons in Naples and Sicily and the papacy in its former central Italian territories–and to the regional traditions they embodied persisted. For millions of peasants the only reality was the locality, any outside authority being regarded as an intruder and potential exploiter. Economic and cultural differences aggravated regionalism and localism: much of southern Italy was barren, impoverished and isolated from progressive developments. The Austrian statesman Metternich had once called Italy a mere ‘geographical expression’; now it resembled a mere political expression. As the Piedmontese statesman D’Azeglio remarked, ‘We have made Italy–now we must make Italians.’

The gulf between the new Italian state and so many of its people was reflected in, and widened by, the workings of liberal politics.

The electoral base of late nineteenth-century liberalism was narrow at its outset and widened only slowly. From around half a million male Italians out of a population of approximately 32 million in 1870, the electorate expanded to some 2 million following the electoral reform of 1881, and stood at 3 million on the eve of a long overdue major electoral reform in 1912. (For the sake of comparison it is worth noting that Spain, another large, Latin, ‘Mediterranean’ country which, nevertheless, few Italians would have cared to regard as more advanced, introduced universal male suffrage in 1890.) For three decades after 1870 political office in Italy was monopolized by the limited layer of mainly upper-middle-class Italians who had risen to prominence and power during the Risorgimento. Increasingly referred to by the revealing term ‘political class’, these privileged men, divided not by fundamental differences of belief or class so much as by regional loyalties and personal rivalries, treated Italy to a system of parliamentary politics which lacked clear party boundaries. Instead, through the practice known as trasformismo (‘transformism’), premiers and their parliamentary managers fashioned constantly shifting majorities by extending favours to deputies and their constituencies. Elections, as much after the 1881 reform as before, were characterized by the bribery, manipulation, intimidation and outright coercion of voters by local power-cliques and political ‘bosses’. Parliament in consequence represented the political class itself and those bound to its members by family, local and economic ties in networks nowadays known as ‘clienteles’.

Many of these features of Italian parliamentary politics were broadly comparable with those present at the time in other southern European countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. Parliamentary unrepresentativeness in Italy, however, was exacerbated by a factor unique to the country: the official non-participation of Catholics. This was the result of the emergent Italian kingdom’s absorption of papal territories during the climactic phase of the Risorgimento in 1860–1, and its final occupation of Rome in 1870. The affronted papacy reacted with hostility to what it considered the Italian state’s aggression, effectively forbidding Catholics to take any active part, voting included, in Italian politics. In a country around 98 per cent of whose population were baptized Catholics this might seem to have been a death sentence against the entire political system. However, since a great many Italians were actually apathetic or downright hostile towards the Church, while others contrived to combine regular religious observance with disobedience to the papacy’s instruction, the reality stopped well short of that. Even so, most of the more devout among Italian Catholics fell dutifully into line. A constitutional gulf was opened up between Church and state. Anticlericalism became entrenched within the ethos of Italian liberalism, and the possible development of a conservative party based on Catholicism was inhibited–with arguably ominous consequences.

The important anomaly of Catholic isolationism apart, later nineteenth-century liberal politics reflected not inaccurately an overwhelmingly rural society distinguished by traditional patterns of agriculture, high illiteracy and low political consciousness. As long as this scene changed only slowly, liberalism was able to function smoothly, if ingloriously. Its test was to come when its gentlemen’s-club world was challenged by rapid change and new socio-political forces.

Italy and the wider world, 1861–96

In the rapidly changing world of the mid-nineteenth century it had been easy for Italian patriots and foreign sympathizers to convince themselves that a united Italy would quickly establish itself as a great power. Such expectations were soon dashed. Thoughtful Italians recognized and sometimes resented the important contribution made by other states, especially France and Prussia, to their nation’s creation; from this stemmed the acute sensitivity displayed for decades by both politicians and intellectuals concerning Italy’s standing as what has been termed ‘the least of the great powers’. The country’s deficient natural resources, its low agricultural productivity and its consequent economic backwardness compared not only with established powers like Britain and France but also with another new nation, Germany, were enough to ensure that for a generation at least Italy would remain at best a second-rank power. These difficulties were intensified by the sheer demands of nation-building, given Italy’s faster than anticipated achievement of a unity that failed to conceal the aforementioned deep regional divisions and uneven levels of Italianità (‘Italianness’). While it might have been better had Italy’s political and cultural leaders settled for second-class status and concentrated on domestic issues, the mood and expectations generated by the Risorgimento and the climate of intensifying international competitiveness after 1870 ensured that they would instead seek the great power status that Germany instantly acquired.

Italian foreign policy during – and beyond – the liberal era was strongly influenced by two notions, sometimes competing and sometimes combining, of territorial expansion: irredentism and imperialism. Many patriotic Italians considered the Risorgimento as incomplete while large numbers of Italian-speakers remained subject to Austrian rule in the regions of Trent and Trieste. The acquisition of these terre irredente (‘unredeemed lands’) was the dream of Italian ‘irredentists’ down to 1918. Successive liberal governments were none the less prevented from pursuing irredentist claims by a discouraging international climate and by the implications of Italian ambitions farther afield in Africa. The presence of large Italian communities in, for example, Tunis and Alexandria, the activities earlier in the century of Italian traders and missionaries, and a pride in the expansionist histories of Rome, Genoa and Venice, helped to convince men like the Sicilian-born Francesco Crispi, prime minister from 1887 to 1891 and from 1893 to 1896, that in an age of European imperialism Italy too must play an imperial role. The economic case for empire was flimsy. Italy’s lack of financial or industrial wealth requiring overseas outlets reduced imperialists to arguing that colonies would generate wealth for Italy’s own enrichment, end her supposed geopolitical ‘confinement’ in the central Mediterranean, and offer millions of Italian emigrants an ‘Italian’ alternative to South America and the United States. The danger, which they preferred to ignore, was that colonies would be difficult and expensive to conquer, defend, control, administer and develop, and that as a result they would run at a loss.

Although most of Italy’s early leaders were sceptical regarding its imperial destiny, by the 1880s the tide was flowing against them. During 1881–2, nevertheless, Italian ambitions in North Africa suffered setbacks when France occupied Tunis and Britain established de facto control over Egypt. Only the seemingly less succulent prospect of Libya remained to tease the appetites of Italian ‘Africanists’ for another thirty years.

Italy’s loss of face in North Africa had important consequences. First, annoyance at France’s Tunisian coup helped to push Italy into the 1882 Triple Alliance with Germany and the old Austrian enemy, in the new (since 1867) form of Austria-Hungary. Second, imperialist eyes now turned towards East Africa. The small territory of Eritrea was annexed in 1885, followed in 1889 by part of Somaliland. The goal of imperialists such as Crispi, however, was the establishment of an Italian ‘protectorate’ over all or part of the still just about independent empire of Ethiopia. Their dreams were dashed in 1896 when Italian arms suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of Ethiopian forces at Adowa, where 5000 Italians were killed and 2000 taken prisoner. In the eyes of many Italians, it was not the imperial idea that was discredited by the humiliation of Adowa, but the liberal system for failing to make it a reality; for them and for another generation of Italian nationalists the dream of an East African empire lived on. Forty years after Adowa, Fascism was to make it come true.

Liberals and the challenge of change

To be a liberal in late nineteenth-century Italy was not to be a democrat. For most members of Italy’s political class, liberalism meant a limited (though not powerless) monarchy, a parliament elected by and for a privileged minority of male Italians, the separation of Church and state, the free movement of property, and a state that actively defended the socio-economic status quo. It did not mean universal male (let alone adult, i.e. male and female) suffrage, governments answerable to a mass electorate, or a state that in socio-economic conflicts was either neutral or active on behalf of the weak. And as long as economic, social and cultural change remained slow, Italian liberalism faced little serious pressure to change.

In the 1890s, however, Italy–or at any rate substantial areas of Italy–began to undergo a belated but far-reaching transformation. In agriculture, the backwardness of which had contributed so much to Italy’s general economic retardation, the introduction of capitalist methods and modern machinery created in the fertile Po Valley of northern Italy a new breed of wealthy and enterprising agrari (‘agrarians’), a numerous class of landless rural labourers, and a significant intermediate layer of estate managers and technicians; in other regions such as Tuscany, where landlords customarily divided their estates among tenant farmers and mezzadri or ‘sharecroppers’ (peasants who were contractually obliged to surrender to the landlord a proportion, often half, of their crop or their earnings), many such peasants found their lives and conditions changing very much for the worse. In the northwestern region bounded by Milan, Turin and Genoa, the transformation was more profound still. Here, rapid industrialization at last occurred with the development of heavy industry and its offshoots: iron and steel, metallurgy and engineering, shipbuilding, armaments and automobiles, electricity and chemicals. By 1914 there had emerged in the north a powerful class of bankers and industrialists, closely bound to each other and to a protective state. As well as the new, albeit still localized, modern working class produced by industrialization, another ‘new’ urban class was starting to emerge: increased educational provision in Italy’s fast-growing cities and towns was producing a lower middle class eager to fill managerial, bureaucratic and whitecollar positions and to keep its distance from the proletariat. The effect of these developments was to alter radically relationships within northern and central Italian society, generating demands and conflicts which in their turn were to contribute massively to the rise of Fascism.

Economic development affected southern Italy much less than the north and centre. The ‘southern problem’, shirked by early liberal governments, became if anything more intractable as industrialization and agricultural modernization widened the gap between north and south. For the vast, under-employed rural population of the south an escape was offered by emigration to the Americas–chiefly the United States, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil–or North Africa; by 1914, when Italy’s population was 35 million, between 5 and 6 million native Italians were living abroad. Emigration may have been symptomatic of southern problems and may even have relieved them slightly, but it was no cure. Much of the south remained economically and culturally impoverished, socially stagnant and politically inert, its enfranchised minorities little more than ballot-fodder for the election-rigging which kept liberal politicians in office.

In those regions where rapid change did occur, however, novel political developments naturally followed. Electoral reform in 1881 enfranchised mainly middle-class Italians in urban settings where election-rigging was soon to become more difficult than liberal politicians had anticipated. The result was the election of a significant cluster of radical and republican deputies; openly critical of liberal inertia, these groups pressed for further suffrage reform and for government to be more responsible to parliament. In 1892 another form of political opposition, potentially more threatening to Italy’s liberal oligarchy, appeared with the foundation of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). Very soon, despite the limitations of the franchise and being banned during the mid-1890s, the PSI expanded into a significant political force. After the turn of the century socialist (and in some districts anarchist) trade unions attracted increasing support from industrial workers and agricultural labourers, chiefly in northern Italy but also now in parts of southern regions such as Sicily and Apulia. This growth occurred against a background, during the 1890s, of widespread and in places bitter social and labour unrest, to which the authorities, especially during the premierships of Crispi and Di Rudinì, responded–as liberal employers expected them to do–with a policy of repression. Largely in response to the emerging challenge of a materialistic and ‘godless’ socialism, Italian Catholics from the turn of the century began to abandon their isolation, participating increasingly in politics and setting up their own trade unions. Although at the century’s turn a Catholic political party was still almost two decades away, the tectonic plates of Italian politics were starting to move.

From liberalism to democracy?

For parliamentarism and some–obviously changed–form of liberalism to survive, it was vital that Italy’s political system and its leading political figures adapt to these changes. While radical liberals showed a willingness to do so, conservatives on the right of the liberal spectrum were unwilling to accept increasing parliamentary assertiveness or to seek to understand the roots of social distress and disturbances. On the contrary: during the 1890s, and particularly between 1898 and 1900, political and military conservatives sought to bring about a return to a more authoritarian system of government. They failed, thanks partly to their own incompetence and loss of nerve but also to the resolute resistance of more genuinely liberal and democratic elements–but the reluctance of conservative so-called liberals to countenance genuine parliamentary democracy remained evident and ominous.

The rallying of what might be termed more authentically liberal and democratic forces to overcome the apparent threat of authoritarianism was nevertheless an encouraging development. The new century, indeed, brought a real, albeit still controversial, attempt to open the liberal system to new currents. Its chief architect was the dominant liberal statesman of the century’s first two decades, Giovanni Giolitti. During three pre-First World War terms as prime minister (November 1903–March 1905, May 1906–December 1909 and March 1911–March 1914), and by exercising powerful influence when out of office, Giolitti sought to draw the emergent popular forces of socialism and Catholicism into the parliamentary framework through, respectively, an impartial attitude towards labour disputes and a cooling of traditional liberal anticlericalism. Contemporary critics charged, and many later historians have argued, that Giolitti lacked a true democratizing vision or strategy. At best–the argument runs–he sought, by conceding just enough but no more to new forces, to preserve the essential features of traditional liberalism; at worst, he was concerned mainly to bolster his own position. However much validity there may be in these charges, Giolitti’s strategy at least offered so...