I have put a lot of youtube videos here; you can ignore them of course but I felt that I could not explain my point without showing something. They are OK obviously; but, before watching, you may want to log out, unless you want “how the Nazis could have won” to pop up as your next suggested video! Source: I did not log out.

 

That's a few questions rolled into one.

First though I must begin by challenging the assumption that there was something that made the Italians more susceptible to Mussolini's style. In fact it is certainly true that Mussolini's speeches were quite distinctive, to the point where imitations were at risk of crossing into parody, and that he enjoyed a large, if fluctuating, amount of consensus up until the late 1942.

But that one thing had a causation function on the other is another thing entirely.

Mussolini's public speeches – and Hitler's too – were certainly a part of that privileged channel between the leader and the people that has been discussed in the most diverse fields of study: the charismatic leader, head of a totalitarian state, etc.

Nonetheless a question remains: were the leaders popular because of their oratorical skills or were the speeches successful because of the leaders' popularity? And were in fact the speeches successful at all?

In the last months of the Third Reich, when Hitler avoided speaking to the people, Goebbels noted that one of his speeches would have a reinvigorating effect on the Nation but Hitler appeared afraid that a speech of defeat and misfortune by a sickly old man would have had the opposite effect; that instead of rekindling the fire of the leader cult, it would have smothered it for good... Perhaps the connection was worth more than the leader himself.

The fact is that it is difficult to prove how successful a public speech was. Things like opinion polls were at the time – at least in Italy – essentially non existent; and they would have been pointless in the years of the Regime. Therefore what we have is countless police reports: the Fascist Regime was actively listening to the possible manifestations of dissent, complaints, lack of enthusiasm – I discuss this point here talking about dissent but the reasoning is the same. Keeping track of the people's dissatisfaction was a crucial part of the surveillance activity; it allowed the Regime to keep a minimum of content that prevented a coalescence of opposition or a public display of dissent. In these various reports, we see that what dominated the mood of the Italian Nation were the material conditions of living: prices, wages, unemployment, subsidies; and later during the war, victory, defeat, new enemies, hope and fear.

In this context the reaction to Mussolini's speeches was generally positive; but why? Very little or nothing at all is said about his style: what matters is the general idea that Mussolini addressing an issue would mean a better chance of the State taking care of it. Mussolini spoke of the unemployed in the Savona docks: that means that new jobs were coming. Mussolini traveled to Catania: public works are coming. And Mussolini made every attempt to make sure that a positive reaction was a given: knowing beforehand the people's complaints, arranging for large sums of money to be given as charity during his travels, timing the solution of occupational issues, the beginning of public works, etc. so that it was clear that the solution was a consequence of his taking a direct interest into the matter. Mussolini also gave out large sums of money – well a large number of relatively small sums – to petitioners of any kind; those that wrote to him directly.

The connection between the Duce – here I must add that the Mussolini style OP is referencing really is the style of his 1930s speeches; it changed a bit from before (here in 1923 – skip to after 28.00, when we don't have the sort of media coverage that was developed later; more (here and here for some cuts of Mussolini hanging out with friends and Mussolini in frac) – and his people was fostered in any possible way, even damaging that of the Party by comparison; and if Mussolini's popularity lasted for over twenty years, that of the various gerarchi was far less substantial, with peaks of open contempt – ahem, Starace.

 

But a remarkable difference of style exist between Mussolini and other less idiosyncratic speakers (as this guy proves). And it is worth addressing some of the possible reasons.

The various moments of building consensus trough a speech have been discussed in various forms since the beginnings of mankind. Unfortunately, of that I know little to nothing except for translating bits of De oratore, therefore I'll limit myself to a minimum.

The first moment, that often may not be the most important, I'll call “open petitioning”, which is to say that part of the speech where you address the audience by presenting logical arguments to support your point and ask them to either agree or disagree on the basis of those arguments. Such moment was absent in Mussolini's speeches: there was no open petitioning for consensus as open consensus was a given – the fact that the Regime maneuvered to make it so did not chance the fact that open dissent was unfeasible, that there was no proper way to disagree.

In a Roosevelt speech – and I know very little of him as well – even as President, he is still talking to men who may agree with his views and to men who may disagree with him. All the elements of the speech are required. Ultimately he is addressing his equals.

Mussolini wasn't: the people and the leader weren't equals. Mussolini's audience was listening to the Duce telling them how things were going to be fixed. And in fact Mussolini's speeches to selected audiences toned it down significantly: here one briefly introduced by Minister Starace – don't miss 1.08. When he speaks to a crowd, from up, on the top of everyone else, dressed to impress, he becomes a showman, playing with the crowd, leading it .

In a way there was in that a portion of deliberate choice, as Mussolini was familiar with Le Bon's Psychologie des Foules - even if with him we are never sure how much of it he really understood and how much he believed to – and had taken to heart the idea that large groups of people were more easily moved by irrational arguments, than by rational ones. But we shouldn't fall into the trap of imagining a Mussolini master of propaganda, precursor of modern sociology and so on. As I noted before his functional role within the Regime put him in the perfect position to hold effective speeches, a position that would have made a less competent speaker still somehow successful. Nor we should forget that Mussolini was in fact – and was believed so by his contemporaries – an extremely effective speech writer and some of his speeches of the early 1920s clearly display that he was perfectly able to address an audience in a traditional manner – see for example the Udine speech for the economical program of the Party or his inaugural speech to chamber, or even his 1925 reopening speech.

You might consider these differences not so much a matter of national styles, but as a question of medium. In his “fireside chats,” Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed an audience listening in their living rooms through radio sets – and his voice was consequently that of a soft-spoken uncle gently explaining policy questions to a national family. By contrast, Adolf Hitler’s most famous speeches were made to large assembled audiences and projected through loudspeakers through city centres. An avuncular tone would not have made sense in this context; instead, he adopted call-and-response style theatrics.

Carolyn Birdsall, in Nazi Soundscapes (2012), has emphasized the extent to which the Nazis used sound as medium to both claim urban spaces and also to form a national community that embodied the notion of Volksgemeinschaft. She notes that from 1919 to the election of 1933, the experience of the SA (and their predecessors, the Freikorps) was marked by streetfighting against communists, focused on a struggle to control urban spaces. Socialists were encouraged to “Hit a fascist”, and the SA responded in kind – while both sides used songs and brass bands as a way of projecting their presence. Birdsall refers to this as a kind of “sonic brawling.”

By 1932, though, as the Nazis increasingly turned toward an electoral strategy, they placed less emphasis on fighting and more on sound. A key element of this strategy was the use of vans equipped with loudspeakers, which would drive through towns and cities blaring Nazi slogans. As Birdsall puts it:

This represents an expansion of the principle of acoustic presence and resonance, since it enabled a significant intensification of sounds in support of the party. These loudspeaker vans opened up the possibility for penetrating public and private spaces with amplified sounds. Loudspeaker vans also intensified urban forms of “acoustic conflict,” since the vans provided the party with the opportunity to achieve a mediated acoustic dominance in the city, with the potential to drown out the sounds of political opponents.

The Nazis also were adept at using loudspeakers in public rallies, saturating urban landscapes with amplified sound. This strategy allowed them to drown out all opposition voices, while also creating an aesthetic effect in which the voice of the Führer – affirmed by chants of “Heil Hitler!” – would have added force.

Hitler was self-consciously aware of this. In Chapter 6 of Mein Kampf, he noted that the Nazis “relied principally on the spoken word. And, in fact, this is the only means capable of producing really great revolutions, which can be explained on general psychological grounds.”

Returning to one of the central themes of his book – the necessity for stronger wills to triumph over the weak – he emphasized that public speaking could bring about a revolution, and that it was necessary to establish circumstances in which individual listeners would lose their ability to think critically and independently:

If one goes to a theatre to see a matinée performance and then attends an evening performance of the same play one is astounded at the difference in the impressions created. A sensitive person recognizes for himself the fact that these two states of mind caused by the matinee and the evening performance respectively are quite different in themselves. The same is true of cinema productions. This latter point is important; for one may say of the theatre that perhaps in the afternoon the actor does not make the same effort as in the evening. But surely it cannot be said that the cinema is different in the afternoon from what it is at nine o'clock in the evening. No, here the time exercises a distinct influence, just as a room exercises a distinct influence on a person. There are rooms which leave one cold, for reasons which are difficult to explain. There are rooms which refuse steadfastly to allow any favourable atmosphere to be created in them. Moreover, certain memories and traditions which are present as pictures in the human mind may have a determining influence on the impression produced. Thus, a representation of Parsifal at Bayreuth will have an effect quite different from that which the same opera produces in any other part of the world. The mysterious charm of the House on the 'Festival Heights' in the old city of The Margrave cannot be equalled or substituted anywhere else.

In all these cases one deals with the problem of influencing the freedom of the human will. And that is true especially of meetings where there are men whose wills are opposed to the speaker and who must be brought around to a new way of thinking. In the morning and during the day it seems that the power of the human will rebels with its strongest energy against any attempt to impose upon it the will or opinion of another. On the other hand, in the evening it easily succumbs to the domination of a stronger will. Because really in such assemblies there is a contest between two opposite forces. The superior oratorical art of a man who has the compelling character of an apostle will succeed better in bringing around to a new way of thinking those who have naturally been subjected to a weakening of their forces of resistance rather than in converting those who are in full possession of their volitional and intellectual energies.

So Hitler here was not tapping into a national style of speaking, so much that he was developing a philosophy of oratory that fit with – and served as medium to establish – his political principles.

I would like to further ask how the history of orators have looked like in Germany and Italy. Hitler and Mussolini dominates so much that one has little to no idea of other great orators of the time. For example was Mussolini's style an "Italian" style or simply a personal one that we in modern times overexplain as Italian.