Believe, Obey, Fight

Political Socialization of Youth in Fascist Italy, 1922-1943

Tracy H. Koon

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780807865569, 9780807816523
• eBook ISBN: 9781469610146
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia italiana

The Fascist regime under Mussolini regarded its youth as its best hope for the future. Young people were courted more assiduously than any other group in the society and their political socialization became a central concern of the government. Believe, Obey, Fight discusses the various tools used by the Fascist regime from 1922 to 1943 to shape the political values and environment of the young. Tracy Koon focuses on the secondary agents of socialization, including the party, the educational establishment, youth groups, and the media of political communication. She shows that the response to this socialization ranged from apparent consent to dissent and finally to open opposition.

The regime employed several methods to produce consensus among the young. Koon's analysis begins with a discussion of the rhetorical style of Mussolini's message and the key political myths manipulated by his propaganda machine: fascism as continuing revolution and social justice, the glories of ancient Rome, the hygienic function of war and violence, the religious spirit of the new creed, and the omniscience of the leader. She then describes the pre-Fascist educational system, the "most Fascist" Gentile reforms of 1923, and the later revision of those reforms by zealous party men engaged in the Fascist regimentation of teachers and students and the militarization and politicization of curricula and textbooks.

Equally important agents of socialization were the Fascist groups organized for young people from their earliest years through the university level, including the annual national competitions and forums in which members could express their ideas on a range of issues. The regime provided physical, military, sports, and political training to strengthen the new Fascist society.

Fascist socialization did for a time create a superficial consensus by appealing to both the love of conformity that marks the very young and the economic fears that caused students to conform in the hope of jobs. But Koon argues that the regime's attempt to exert totalitarian control over the young deprived them of personal identity. As time passed, the contradictions of the regime became clearer, the chasm between Fascist rhetoric and reality more obvious. In the end, the majority of young people came to believe that the regime had given them nothing to believe in, no one to obey, and nothing for which to fight.

Originally published in 1985.

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CHAPTER ONE

“The Kingdom of the Word”

In mass societies, myth takes the place of history.

—William Bosenbrook

Italian fascism was heir to a variegated political and cultural legacy, an intellectual product of the crisis of the 1890s. In its revolt against positivism, fascism echoed Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson. It emphasized spirit over matter, faith against reason, action over thought. Like the Futurists, the Fascists praised the purifying effects of war and dynamism and condemned pacifism and neutralism. For the Fascists, as for F. T. Marinetti and the Futurists, the future of Italy lay with the “young, the strong, and the living.”¹ Like Gabriele D’Annunzio, Benito Mussolini had a vision of politics that glorified adventure and struggle, the sexual imagery of domination and virility, the religious rhetoric of sacrifice and duty, and, above all, the role of the man of action who could control the mass and mold it to his own design. Fascism replaced economic man with heroic man, decried the decadence and corruption of liberal and parliamentary systems, and exalted the cult of the elite, of force, and of youth. Against the fragmentation and anomie of modern mass society, it placed the harmony, belonging, and identity of the national community. Rejecting the rotting and defeatist Italietta of the past, it promised a glorious Italy in the future.

Fascism did have roots deep in the intellectual developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But it was less a coherent ideology than a cry of pain—or a war cry. It did not have an oracle like Marx, Lenin, or Mao, nor did it possess a body of sacred, written truths against which ideas and behavior could definitively be measured as orthodox or heretical. The titular theorists of the regime, Giovanni Gentile and Alfredo Rocco, both tried to provide such an ideological base ex post facto. But the theories of the ethical state or corporativism, though much in evidence in the regime’s official propaganda, were never really the guides of political action in Fascist Italy.

Mussolini’s real uniqueness lay not in the depth of his political analysis nor in the originality of his thought but in his conception of the political process as the art of political communication. No matter which side one takes in the hoary debate about fascism as ideology or how one traces its intellectual debts, fascism did have a doctrine, an essentially action-related set of ideas that were used to elicit a certain response from the masses, to pull certain emotional and intellectual strings. Mussolini’s greatest talent—perhaps his only genuine talent—was his ability to manufacture and communicate myths and slogans that captured the Fight popular imagination. Fascism made widespread use of the media and the educational system to push a whole series of myths that were, by virtue of repetition and familiarity, more real to many Italians than the philosophical musings of Gentile or Rocco or even the universally quoted, quasi-inspired articles on fascism by Mussolini himself. In these myths is the essence of fascism as it was presented to the Italian people: they tell us what the regime’s leaders wanted the Italians to believe and what they wanted them to become. Fascism promised that it would transform Italy; many took that promise seriously. In order to understand how Italians (and in this context young Italians) saw fascism, we must pay more attention to its rhetorical elements, for rhetoric was an absolutely crucial part of what fascism was and why it was successful—at least for a time. Rhetoric, said Franco Venturi, “is the reduction to the absurd of all the ideological currents that had given rise to fascism. . . . The . . . regime was the kingdom of the word. Or better . . . of the loudspeaker.”²

The Political Myth, Elites, and the Leader

Benito Mussolini’s views on human nature and man in society show an intellectual kinship with the ideas of two French thinkers, Gustave Le Bon and Georges Sorel, and with contemporary studies of political elites by Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels. All were interested in the historic function of the determined minority and in the relationship between belief systems and the political process.³

Mussolini readily acknowledged his intellectual debt to Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931), author of an influential study on the psychology of the crowd, Psychologie des foules, first published in 1895.⁴ According to Le Bon, the art of politics had to be based on the irrationalism and conservative nature of mass man. Any successful political leader had to know how to harness and control the instinctual side of human nature. Le Bon emphasized the fundamental role played by belief in history. That faith might be an illusion, but its force in history was for Le Bon undeniable: “All great historical facts are the . . . direct or indirect consequences of strong impressions produced on the crowd.”⁵

Le Bon suggested ways to turn the irrationalism of the mass into a positive social force and to counter the chaos it produced. The crowd could be tamed by the use of “magic”: the creation of a myth that would have such powerful appeal that it could produce the national consensus the leaders—“les grands meneurs des foules,” as Le Bon called them—were seeking. Their role was to create faith by striking the imagination of the crowd repeatedly with images, words, and slogans to produce feelings and beliefs that bolstered the position of the leader and his movement. To these “creators of illusions” the crowd, “a servile flock incapable of doing without a master,” erected temples and altars. Gathered in a crowd they lost all force of will and turned instinctively to the man possessing those qualities of decision and charisma they themselves lacked. For Le Bon the mainspring of all authority was the personal prestige of the leader, which allowed him to exert a “magnetic fascination” on all those around him.⁶

In his talks with the German journalist Emil Ludwig, Mussolini elaborated on his notions of social psychology and political mythmaking in terms that were very reminiscent of Le Bon. “The mass,” he said, “is a flock of sheep until it is organized. . . . The mass loves a strong man. The mass is a woman!”⁷

Like Le Bon, Georges Sorel (1847-1922) was interested in questions of social psychology: How do men in groups behave? What is the relationship between the individual and the collective consciousness? Sorel’s ties to Italy went back to 1895, when he first began publishing in Italian journals.⁸ Reflections on Violence appeared in Italy in 1906, and Sorel’s work was much discussed and debated, especially among Italian Socialists, who often took exception to his heterodox views on Marxism. Mussolini did not know Sorel personally, but he was familiar with his work and referred to it in several articles. Though Sorel’s influence in Italy had declined by the immediate postwar period, Mussolini did acknowledge his debt to Sorel in his 1932 article on fascism in the Enciclopedia Italiana, at least in part to give his own movement intellectual respectability.

Sorel criticized the determinism of the Marxist view and called for a moral and psychological reinterpretation of Marxism, which he saw not as a science but as “social poetry.”⁹ For Sorel, social change was not the automatic consequence of economic or material factors but involved questions of psychology: what moves men to social action? Emphasizing the role of heroic violence in the class struggle, Sorel claimed that the proletarian revolution would be led by an elite minority and based on an absolute moral rejection of any compromise or concession with the bourgeois order. Galvanized by the political myth—for Sorel the general strike—the masses would be shaken out of their inertia and moved to action. The political myth, then, aimed at arousing sentiments and not analysis.¹⁰ The manipulation of the revolutionary myth led believers to see themselves as an army fighting for their apocalyptic vision of the future. Social action was thus the visible expression of the psychological reality of the myth, an image capable of fostering feeling and social cohesion. A political philosophy based on such a myth was not a logical or rational program but an incitement, a spur to action and loyalty.

Sorel was contemptuous of the corrupting influence of parliamentary democracy and fascinated with the role of syndicates and representation by economic category. He also came to see the power of the national myth. By 1910 Italian nationalists such as Enrico Corradini were speaking of national syndicalism: a reconciliation of economic syndicalism and political nationalism. Corradini translated the Socialist rhetoric of class struggle from a horizontal proletarian solidarity across national boundaries to a vertical solidarity among classes of the same nation. Public enthusiasm for the Libyan war of 1911-12 testified to the political value of the national myth. Many Socialists, including Mussolini, remained opposed to the Italian involvement in the Libyan war, but the currents of revolutionary syndicalism and nationalism forged a new, and potent, political combination in Italy. Mussolini’s realization of the political potential of the mass-mobilizing national myth helps to explain his “conversion” of 1914.¹¹

A trio of social scientists—Pareto, Mosca, and Michels—also influenced Mussolini’s notion of the political process. All three of these thinkers helped to foster a general antidemocratic outlook by emphasizing the minority over the majority, the few over the many. All criticized what they saw as the reductionist fallacy of historical materialism and emphasized the role of belief systems in the social sciences while downplaying the causal relationship between economic factors and all other social phenomena. For Pareto, individual or group decisions were governed by “derivations” or “residues”; Mosca insisted on the importance of “political formulae”; Michels termed them “fictions.”

In his Les systèmes socialistes, published in 1902, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) called the Socialist apocalypse a mirage. The Marxist view of class struggle, he said, would produce not a true people’s democracy but the rule of another “political class,” an elite behind the proletariat ready to reap the benefits of working-class actions for their own individual or class interests. In this and other works—most notably his Trattato di sociologia generale (1915), translated as The Mind and Society: A Treatise on General Sociology—Pareto argued that there was no scientific foundation for the sovereign rights of the majority and struck at the roots of both socialism and democracy by proclaiming that government “by the people” was always a facade for the control of the state by an oligarchy, mere rhetoric masking domination of the disorganized majority by the organized minority. These elites vindicated their power through an appeal to the masses based on emotion: “Human actions,” according to Pareto, “have their origin not in logical reasoning but in sentiments.”¹²

This notion was also advanced by Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) in The Ruling Class (Elementi di scienza politica), published in 1896. Mosca maintained that the organized minority always held and justified power by the use of “political formulae,” energizing myths that were functional—they produced consensus—and not rational. Robert Michels (1876-1936), much influenced by Max Weber’s notion of charismatic power and by Mosca, argued in Political Parties (1911) what he termed the “iron law of oligarchy” and emphasized the sociopsychological aspects of political behavior: the susceptibility of the mass to the appeal of a charismatic leader, the innate conservatism of the masses, and their resistance to social change.

For all of them, myths served to legitimize the claims of the political class or the elite that was the real center of social control over the majority. As legitimizing fictions, the myths organized human emotions for social action; they mobilized the mass on the side of the elite in its struggle for power and justified its hold on power. Myths allowed a dynamic minority to lead and control a passive majority by playing on the suggestibility of the mass and its general psychological predisposition to arrange itself in hierarchical order and to conform.

Alfredo Rocco explained that fascism rejected the theory of popular sovereignty, proclaiming that the “great mass of citizens is not a suitable advocate of social interests,” because the capacity to subordinate private interests to the good of the whole “is a very rare gift and the privilege of a chosen few.”¹³ The “people” were replaced by the “few elect,” quantity by quality, democracy by aristocracy. In Fascist theory, therefore, each individual was an integral part of the whole; there was no real distinction between public and private spheres, for the organic view of society synthesized the interests of the individual, society, and the state. The ruling class existed to remind the individual of his or her relationship to this organic community, because only the party leaders had a true consciousness of the destiny of the nation. Hence the rise of the single party as a pedagogical and ethical imperative: the needs of the society and those of the party were one and the same. Fascism thus rejected the principle of equality as a “soft” Judaeo-Christian ideal out of keeping with the new virile spirit of creative inequality. Society was divided into superiors and inferiors: believers and nonbelievers, leaders and led, men and women. The extreme form of Fascist elitism was the emphasis on the role of the leader, the one man who incarnated the aspirations and desires of the community. The many became the few; the few became the one.

Language and Myth: The Mussolinian Model

When Mussolini was asked in 1922 to write a collection of essays on the war, he declined. “Today in Italy,” he said, “is not the time for history. Nothing is yet concluded. It is the time for myths. Everything is yet to be done. Only the myth can give strength and energy to a people about to hammer out its own destiny.”¹⁴ Communicated as they were in a variety of forms and a vast array of propaganda, these myths were one of the principal instruments used by the regime to create, organize, and maintain consensus. To understand the appeal of the regime, we must understand how fascism presented itself to the young, what images of fascism were presented in the regime’s educational system and textbooks, youth organizations, and youth-directed media. The political myths were the appearance rather than the substance of fascism, what the regime said it was rather than what it was in reality. Without understanding how the regime spoke to the young, we cannot really understand that the development of dissent or antifascism among them was not merely a change of political views but for many a deep internal struggle for liberation from an illusion once accepted as real. “Inculcated from infancy and insistently repeated,” these myths were “offered as an answer to youthful aspirations and hopes . . . to their desire for progress and liberty.”¹⁵

Mussolini found his myth in a form of nationalism heavily overlaid with Socialist rhetorical flourishes. He had inherited an anarchistic/ Blanquist brand of socialism from his father, and often spoke in Marxist idiom after his final break with organized socialism. But his Marxist culture was superficial and secondhand and his ideas of revolution indeterminate and indefinite, based less on an objective analysis of the structure of society than on an instinctive recognition of the political value of action and violence and the emotional appeal of Socialist rhetoric.

World War I dramatized for Mussolini the power of the national myth and the weakness of working-class solidarity; if the notion of class unity would not inspire sacrifice in the multitude, men would fight and die for king and country. After Mussolini’s break with socialism, his new orientation was symbolized in the name of his newspaper: Lotta di classe became Il Popolo d’Italia. In November 1914, in his first editorial for the new paper, Mussolini wrote, “It is certain that the nation represents a stage in human progress that has not yet been transcended. . . . The sentiment of nationality exists, it cannot be denied!”¹⁶

Fascist rhetoric was a mélange of socialism and nationalism: socialism stripped of its antinational, international, and pacifist overtones and inspired instead with love of country and militarism. In October 1922, ju...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE “The Kingdom of the Word”
• CHAPTER TWO “The Most Fascist Reform”
• CHAPTER THREE The New Spirit in the Schools
• CHAPTER FOUR The Regime’s “Breeding Ground”
• CHAPTER FIVE The Battle for Custody of the Child
• CHAPTER SIX The “New Imperial Climate”
• CHAPTER SEVEN Formation of the Fascist Ruling Class
• CHAPTER EIGHT “The Long Voyage”
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index