Week 75

 

The first meeting – the adunata - of the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan, on March 23^rd 1919, was regarded by contemporaries as one of the many initiatives occurring within the lesser spheres of the Italian political world, the motion of which was regulated and directed from a much higher plan by the greater events of the time: the Russian Revolution with its aftermath, the threat of Bolshevism spreading through Europe, the massive, growing movement for workers organization, the fall of the “autocratic regimes” and dissolution of Austria-Hungary with its corollary of new insidious nationalism, the peace conference in Paris, with its repercussions on the Italian aspirations over Fiume and Dalmatia as well as on the stability of the Orlando-Sonnino government, the debate over the new electoral law and the much needed renovation of local administrations.

Those contemporaries who were able to notice it in the first place, that is.

Even Mussolini's own Popolo d'Italia had to somewhat restrain its coverage of the event, to account for the bigger and momentous events of national and international politics – the Popolo d'Italia was a newspaper, after all, and Mussolini had a business to run. Which is not to say that he didn't have political ambitions, or aspirations – and some were far from modest either – during the months between the end of the Great War and his affirmation as a proper political leader; but rather that these were complementary to his activity as a publicist, in so far as Mussolini understood that his personal stature and relevance, now that he had opened a shop of his own, no longer with the socialist franchise (to update one of his metaphors a bit), was tied to his ability to maintain a “voice”, a channel to appeal directly to his public. And this action – as Mussolini himself described and understood it – was a complex mixture of leading and following, or rather of leading those already on the move and leading them where they wanted to go.

On March 18^th Mussolini justified the absence of a vast coverage on the program of the upcoming Fasci assembly – someone might compare this lackluster introduction to the far wider and vocal debates he had promoted on the Avanti! - (“March 23^rd ” - it's the title of the piece, published on the 18^th )

I had resolved to develop and expose the general lines of what our program of tomorrow may be, in a series of articles during this week before our meeting. I have given up on this exposition because, this one being the decisive week for the resolution of the fundamental problems of peace, foreign politics absorbs time and space and focus, and furthermore because the vast coverage of the previous months has already “settled in” the readers of the Popolo.

For these reasons Mussolini contented himself with a few generic arguments – keeping the exposition of the “program to be” for the meeting of the 23^rd (in fact no real program was exposed on the 23^rd since no program was ready at the time – the famous “San Sepolcro program” was published on June 6^th even if certain outlines of it had been circulated before, as showcased by the inclusion of them in the famous “Gasti informative relation” of June 4^th – not that those ideas were even remotely unprecedented or difficult to come by). While Mussolini's summary was far from groundbreaking, it actually works as a convenient summary, since it's almost a blueprint for his short intervention of the 23^rd and a reiteration of the themes of “trencherism”, “productivism”, “anti-official socialism”, “national renovation”, which had inspired the political debate of the interventionist area during the previous months.

[…] Those who follow the political life of the nation can see how deeply and pervasively restless it has grown under the complex of those institutions and men who represent all past anachronisms and [how deeply imbued] it has become with a desire for renovation. Besides the traditional parties two new ones have risen in these last times: the Partito Popolare Italiano and the “Liberal Reformer Party” [no list with this denomination took part to the 1919 elections; by mid February the aforementioned group had been formed with a contribution of the agrarian and liberal-conservative forces leaving the Fascio Parlamentare, which had by then more or less ceased to exist – but there were many others with a variety of almost interchangeable names, such as “liberal”, “liberal nationalist”, “liberal constitutional”, “liberal independent”, “constitutional”, “constitutional and combatants” etc.]. Above those parties there are forces which may tomorrow play a decisive role: the associations of combatants which originate in every city and town of Italy, and which may very well join together in a nearby future in one single powerful organisms, with unitary purpose and methods. It might be that “trencherism” weeds out sooner or later everything else. If we examine the programs of the other parties, both old and new, we can see that they look very much alike. […] What sets one party apart from another one is not its program: it's the beginning and the end. […] Our starting point is the nation, the war, the victory. In another word, interventionism.

This fact sets us irremediably apart not only from official socialism, but also from all those grouplets and individuals who, perhaps in vain, overtly or covertly, seek a way back into the “party of all” [partitone in the original – a stand in for the “old political world”]. By holding fast on the ground of interventionism – nor could it be any different, since interventionism has been the dominant fact in the history of our nation – we reclaim our right and duty to transform, if it can't be avoided also by revolutionary means, the Italian life. Those who insist on painting us as conservatives or reactionaries just because we are no longer holding onto the cards of one of the many churches [of socialism] or we don't resign ourselves to the idea of throwing the one hundred thousand Italians of Dalmatia into the Adriatic Sea – those are almighty morons.

As for the self-proclaimed revolutionary forces,

It's us, the interventionists, the only ones in Italy who have the right to speak of revolution. […] We don't have to wait for the revolution like the flock with the section card […] because we have already made the revolution. In May 1915. […] That was the first moment of the revolution. It was the beginning. Revolution went on for forty months under the name of War. IT'S NOT OVER. […] IT KEEPS GOING. Without the revolution we made in 1915, by now the Kaiser would have planted a Prussian Prince in Paris […] To prevent the triumph of the forces of the reaction was eminently revolutionary.

All those, and first among them the Italian socialists, who have, more or less, directly or indirectly, worked in favor of the German victory are counter-revolutionaries, reactionaries, the hangmen of liberty.

As for the end, the arrival point of this revolutionary path, Mussolini remained rather vague.

We want the material and spiritual uplifting of the Italian citizens (not of the proletarians alone) and the greatness of our people within the world. As for the means, we hold onto no prejudicial conceits: we accept those which will be necessary, the legal ones and the so called illegal ones. A new historical period begins, that one may define of the “politics” of the masses, or of democratic hypertrophy. We can't stand in the way of this movement. We must steer it towards political democracy and economical democracy; the first one can lead the masses back to the State, the second one can reconcile capital and labor on the ground of the maximum of production.