Donald Sassoon - Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

War anger united disparate veterans around the vision of a different Italy, where those who had paid a high price would see their suffering recognised by a grateful motherland. Most, of course, saw the war as an inevitable evil over which they had little control. Used to obey and to be subservient, they accepted the war as one accepts a natural catastrophe. Giuseppe Capacci, a soldier in 1915–16, kept a diary written with uncommon literary skill (in civilian life he was a Tuscan sharecropper who had had only three years of schooling), in which there is hardly a word of hatred towards the enemy or a whiff of patriotism. The main theme is a resigned acceptance of his fate: ‘We wanted to know where we would be taken,’ he wrote, ‘but it was useless: a soldier knows nothing until he has arrived. Some thought we were going to Albania, others to the Isonzo …’ 31 In October 1916 he got lucky: he was wounded in the arm and taken to the relative safety of a military hospital, where the presence of nurses from the Red Cross reminded him of the comfort of feminine company, of mothers and sisters: ‘Those who have not experienced the war do not know how pleasurable it is to return to a semblance of civilian life.’ 32 The only social criticism he expressed was when, on the train taking him home, he was ejected from the second–class carriage to the third–class to make room for some signori (ladies and gentlemen), though he was visibly wounded: ‘This is the love, the care that these gentlemen have for us soldiers; I shall say no more about this, though I could write much.’ 33

A collectivist spirit developed among many of these soldiers who until recently had been peasants. The war was a transforming experience. Removed from their normal situation, affections and interests, soldiers became absorbed in the task at hand. Their rural passivity turned quickly into humble devotion to their officers and love for their fellow soldiers. 34

The war was seen as a test of comradeship, youth, discipline and courage. It was celebrated by those who had fought and survived it, and who had been, to some extent, brutalised by it and by the demonisation of the enemy. 35 Regardless of the reality of war camaraderie, about which we have only unreliable evidence constructed after the events, what united many veterans of the war was a common narrative. While the soldiers suffered, the ‘others’, the rich, the protected and those with well–placed friends and relations, had managed to avoid – or so it was thought – the pain and suffering of the war, and became richer. War enthusiasts and neutralists alike blamed the politicians who bickered in Rome, far from the trenches. The traditional anti–political attitude of many Italians grew in the trenches.

That the war had been a watershed is not in question, but so was the Second World War; yet, as George Mosse showed in an illuminating essay, the Second World War never generated a myth of shared experience and pooled memories in the way the First did. 36 The profusion of war memorials which dotted the countryside and small towns in France, Great Britain and Italy after 1918 was not replicated after 1945.

It was agreed, even at the time, that the conflict of 1914–18 had changed Italy completely. When it was over the then Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, called it ‘the greatest political and social revolution in our history’. 37 Salandra, who had taken the country into the war, admitted that it would be impossible to return to the spirit of the pre–war age. 38

The new spirit was embodied in the returning soldiers. These veterans would provide the terrain for the proliferation of violent right–wing paramilitary associations from which the fascists recruited their most fervent supporters. Much of the symbolism of the far right was acquired during the war. The black shirts they wore were inspired by the uniform of the elite crack troops – the Arditi – created in the summer of 1917 by General Luigi Capello. The hymn of the Arditi, ‘Giovinezza’ (Youth), became the official anthem of the Fascist Party. The word fascio (bundle or bunch) itself had been somewhat in vogue well before Mussolini appropriated it. It originated during the Risorgimento, and was later used by left–wing protest movements of peasants and workers based mainly in western Sicily – the fasci siciliani crushed in the early 1890s by the Prime Minister Francesco Crispi. In October 1914 some left–wing trade unionists who wanted to join the war founded the Fascio rivoluzionario d’azione internazionalista. Then, in February 1917, a group of eighty pro–war MPs formed the Fascio nazionale di azione, which included not only conservatives but also socialist reformists such as Bissolati and liberal interventionists like Luigi Albertini, the editor of the Corriere della sera. Finally, in December 1917 a large group of nationalist MPs (over 150 deputies and ninety senators) including Salandra formed the Fascio parlamentare di difesa nazionale. They were hailed by Mussolini as ‘the 152 fascist deputies’. 39

Thus many of the elements of fascism – symbols, potential recruits, attitudes and ideological elements – were already extant when Mussolini was still barely known and had few followers. Had the fascists been more of a threat they might have been crushed by the ruling political establishment, but it was far more concerned with the danger represented by the left than with what was still an inchoate and ill–defined movement on the nationalist right.

A negotiated end to the war – as urged by the American President Woodrow Wilson in 1916 – would have favoured Giolitti and that section of the old liberal establishment which would have preferred to stay out of it. But the war ended only in 1918. Since Italy had been on the side of the victors, the interventionists appeared to have been vindicated. Before the war Italy was ‘the least of the Great Powers’, or perhaps not even a Great Power at all. Italian nationalism wallowed in a feeling of inferiority.

After the war, the situation was favourable for a complete realignment of the system of international relations in Europe. It is true that the real victors had been the United States – the new Great Power – without whose intervention the war might have gone on for longer, and on whose financial resources many in Europe relied for reviving their economies. It was equally true that, though weakened, Italy’s main imperial rivals, France and Great Britain, had emerged with their colonial empires intact. But all the other Great Powers had been humiliated. From the point of view of Italian diplomacy, the situation for a major improvement in Italy’s international prospects could not have been better. Its main enemy, the Austro–Hungarian Empire, had not only been defeated but was about to be dismembered. Germany had lost the war. Russia, having withdrawn from the war after the Revolution, was in the midst of civil war and, having become a pariah state, was faced with foreign intervention. The impending demise of the Ottoman Empire also offered rich colonial pickings to the victorious coalition. It was therefore perfectly rational for Italian nationalists – such as the Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino – to assume that the higher status they had aspired to for so long could be achieved. After all, Italy had paid a high price in terms of lives lost.

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