Week 74

 

Here we come.

On March 23^rd 1919 Benito Mussolini, with a few others that we'll mention again later on, officially formed the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento - thus marking the beginning of the fascist movement in Italy, and broadly speaking of fascism. It took us seventy three weeks of introduction, almost three million characters, and endless detours I take full responsibility for; so that now I feel compelled to remind you we shouldn't make too big of a deal out of it – there's already enough people around who put a circle on their calendars.

Of course, the date is relevant, and it's easy to see how it could be seen as a turning point, a "fateful" day, to echo one of the most overused attributes of all things fascist. It was one of the three official “party-national festivities” (with October 28^th and April 21^st – the “Roman Nativity”) established in 1927, when the “regime's calendar” took its definitive form. It's also the date chosen by Mussolini to end his own recollection of the weeks he spent in search for his way – as recorded by his contemporary biographer Y. De Begnac, in October 1939

We were lost, looking for a path ahead of us. Could my own Popolo d'Italia lead the way? I dared not say so myself. But the shop was open and in need of someone running it. The public had whirled around in a kaleidoscope of new trends and then returned to the […] negative ideas of before the War. [As for us,] we were like revenants whose tongue had been forgotten among the people of the rear and we had, therefore, to free our vocabulary from all archaisms […] Our spiritual guides had fallen behind a thousand years, in comparison to us who had suffered the long experience of service in the trenches. […]

It was that real perspective, which always comes after a flood, to open my eyes. Milan was by then a scene without characters. The intervention had burned out Turati, Treves and many others […] The War had killed Corridoni and the revolutionary syndicalists. D'Annunzio, to exist and survive, had to make up the Fiume affaire. I felt the public for their pulse and understood how, amidst general disorientation, there was an audience for me. It was a matter of finding a way to let them see themselves in my newspaper. With wars, intermediate social classes are gradually pushed towards financial equality with the poor: with wars, great financial concentrations triumph above the graveyard of institutions; with wars, quotas of the lower strata, speculating on the dead and the living, turn themselves into strong militants for a new system of conservation. The defeated of victory were the low rank officers, non commissioned officers who had been given no guarantee of returning to their pre war workplace. The defeated had been, due to the devaluation of currency, the holders of fixed income, owners of small savings, those who had fronted the state the means to wage war, that is the subscribers of public debt. A right to life had been betrayed. Someone had failed their sworn promises. My way found its right direction by itself. It was March 23^rd 1919.

But even in Mussolini's own (revised) words, spoken more than twenty years later, there is little sense of predestination in the recollection of those weeks after the Great War, when the future Duce of Fascism found his path, tentatively and often ambiguously, as the whole complex of international and financial affairs seemed on the verge of coming down crushing over the Italian nation, and he was left – like many others – looking around for a way out, a way forward, and a place to be, and to become.

R. De Felice has given the following description of Mussolini's political action during the preparatory motions and during the first year of life of the Fasci.

[…] during the two years between the end of the war and his deal with Giolitti, Mussolini moved along a substantially univocal direction, but, also substantially, [one that was] set day by day: the result not of a plan or of a precise consciousness, but – on the contrary – determined by a progressive adaptation and adjustment to the state of things. […] When he gave life to the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini didn't have even the faintest of ideas of where they were going to take him. In reality, the Fasci di Combattimento were born like many other movements, many other organizations during the years of the war and of the immediate post-war, destined to a meager existence and to a more or less rapid exhaustion. The Fasci di Combattimento fell perfectly in line with the first of these two rules for around one year and a half. [...]

We'll cover in time how fascism came to escape the fate of the many other similar, and less fortunate, groups and organizations, to become itself often a center of coalescence for the disperse particulate of the galaxy of national radicalism. Before we move onto that, it's worth trying to establish the collocation – broadly speaking, since even larger political formations (and the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento were intentionally conceived – and operated by and large – in the form of a movement, if not as an “anti-party” altogether) went through a rather fluid process of evolution and adaptation during the post war months, constrained as they were by an antithesis between interventionist and neutralist which was no longer viable in the long run – of the new movement within this galaxy and the general political and social trends of post war Italy.

And in doing so – a bit of a pet peeve of mine, I admit, but I suspect this can be a source of legitimate confusion, especially among non Italian speakers – it's probably worth addressing first the “fatal” word itself, destined to establish such a lasting legacy and to outlive largely not only the movement which came to be defined with it but its original political usage as well: fascismo, or “fascism” as you like. Now, the word fascio (or better the plural form fasci) finds an immediate correspondence into English – that is “fasces” - as defined by Merriam-Webster online dictionary:

a bundle of rods and among them an ax with projecting blade borne before ancient Roman magistrates as a badge of authority

Nowadays, within Italian language, the use of the word fascio has often fallen in line with XX Century events (exception made for a few technical terms, in anatomy and mathematics for example, and a few frozen idiomatic expressions, the most notable being fare di tutta l'erba un fascio, more or less analogous to “tar the whole bunch with the same brush”) so that the relation with the fascist movement has become an objective one – while the various related terms, fascia, fascina, fasciare, fascicolo, etc survive free from the association with fascism and its symbology. With that in mind (and considering the vast amount of related terms, which have no equivalent relations in English for the voice “fasces”), it's easy to see how, as of early XX Century, fascio wouldn't really work (except for the most literary oriented) as a reference to the symbol of authority of the Roman magistrates. And even taking into account the symbolic use of the fasci made during the republican period after the French Revolution, there is no substantial evidence of a semantic unity between the fascio, the republican symbol and the ancient roman signs of magistrate authority. The vastly attested main use of the word was just what the first part of the definition gives us, a more or less exact analogue of "bundle": "a group of things fastened together for convenient handling ".

In fact, of the many possible meanings given to the word, the "first" Italian dictionary – curated by N. Tommaseo and which begun publishing in 1861, in Turin by G. Pomba – the Roman "bundle of rods with ax" is listed as the eighteenth, being noted as “plural only” (that would be fasci) and marked as "ancient historical". The first one is just:

Qualunque cosa accolta insieme o legata, di peso tale che uomo possa portarla.

Whatever thing, collected together or bound, of such a weight that a man can carry it.

This was the same first acception included in the 1806 edition of the Dictionary of the Accademia della Crusca - dedicated to the viceroy of Italy, Eugenio Beauharnais. That of things fastened together (in this fashion it was used for instance by V. Alfieri, presi a fascio, “taken collectively” in 1803), but also, in an extension of meaning, to signify a collection, a group, a sizable amount.