Week 121

 

It's typical of many narratives of the growth and affirmation of Fascism in Italy to refer, as a central motive in Mussolini's ascension to power, to the weakness of the last liberal governments, those headed respectively by Nitti, Giolitti, Bonomi and Facta. Far less common is to encounter a satisfactory explanation of what a “weak” government really is – more so if we consider that contemporaries, while largely agreeing on the government being somewhat inadequate, held vastly divergent views on what a “stronger” government was supposed to do. Fascists themselves had made criticism of the liberal state's “weakness” (especially in so far as the tolerance displayed towards the socialist movement) into a central theme of their political action, and therefore loudly and openly advocated for a political transformation which would consolidate the power and authority of the State.

By adopting the opposite point of view, one might simply interpret “weakness” as the matter of fact inability of the state to prevent the Fascist rise and to suppress and restrict the use of public violence by a political formation the action of which, while purportedly ancillary to the true institutions of the State, was certainly in defiance of public order and in exception to the law of the State. That therefore a State would either be able to maintain its monopoly on the use of public force, or implicitly surrender its legitimacy to any other group able to make a more effective use of organized violence.

But, even adopting Weber's perspective in full, one must observe that, if we want to interpret the weakness of the liberal Governments as a precondition for the rise of Fascism, it's not possible to limit such “weakness” to the relations between the State and the Fascist movement, as the State had to be weak before Fascism came to be, or at least weak enough for the Fascist challenge to its monopoly to stand a chance of success.

Operating under this assumption, one is pushed to look further in the past, across and before the Great War and into the decades during which the Italian unitary State was called to consolidate its structures and absolve its fundamental functions in leading Italy into the modern world of XX Century. There many different issues are bound to surface: from the long drawn agrarian question, to the difficult amalgamation of North and South, from the slow and uncertain development of a practical social legislation, always hampered by recurrent periods of financial uncertainty, to the ambiguous ideological legacy of the Risorgimento.

Different observers have chosen to highlight some of these aspects and to stress their importance over others, but it's certainly reasonable to assume that all of these elements (and probably just as reasonable to reject the exclusive prominence of one over the others) could play a role in undermining the liberal State, its authority and its institutions – both in abstract and practical terms – and therefore in producing the conditions for the affirmation of Fascism. Yet, at the same time, elements, close and present, or distant and remote, of historical and political interpretation are often unable to impact the real existence of a collective of people in their mere theoretical formulation. Which is to say that the ambiguous definition of a national identity during the early post unitary decades with its impact on the ideological formation of a generation of public servants of middle class extraction – to cite one example – is unlikely to result in some form of mass mobilization, political orientation, identity definition, unless the abstract seeds of social, political and cultural ideas are provided with an opportunity to coalesce into a concrete manifestation, almost a material thing, with direct and indirect effects of its own. A symbol, where the abstract forms and ideas could consolidate around a material core of some sort, transforming and transcending the original in its limited, contingent, significance.

Thus price riots, inflation, political price of grains – paraphrasing Einaudi's words – came to be invested with a symbolic value, revealing to the masses the deep, unsettling financial instability of the Italian State straight out of the Great War, thus producing effects even more negative than the objective causes had been. And thus, if one has to seek a first, original symbol for the weakness of the Italian State, they might very well look at the events of Fiume. Not because D'Annunzio's “raid” and subsequent occupation should be taken as a first objective cause in the Government's weakness, but because its loud, manifest and open defiance of the Government's will – ineffective as it was on objective grounds – offered a magnificent stage for parading around the inadequacies of the liberal State and an almost material evidence that there was no need to seek any other reason for the nation's ailments but the self-explanatory fact that the State was weak.

Our hope that at first had appeared to shine over Fiume – wrote Giovanni Giuriati in his memoirs, remembering his frustration and disillusionment at the news that the Italian Chamber had renewed its confidence to Nitti on September 27^th – to see the Country rise up at the news of the endeavor of Ronchi, or at least to find within the Chamber such a support as to uproot the Government's plan and to force Nitti to resign, vanished immediately. […]

By leading the troops to disobedience, our implicit intent was to demolish the Government; rather, the latter came out of Montecitorio empowered and with greater freedom of action, with a decree of dissolution in its pocket, and therefore with the chance of forming a new one in its image and likeness. […]

Giuriati, of course, was writing after the elections of November 1919. Which means that he knew already how unfavorable these would be to the “national-interventionist” forces and how distant from the campaign for the annexation of Fiume the orientation of the masses would be, rewarding for the most part those forces, socialists and catholics, which were perceived as both anti-war and external to the liberal establishment. That the new Chamber was formed in Nitti's image and likeness – or even to Nitti's liking for what matters – is something that makes little sense even if we accept the view of the “anti-national” Nitti, busy in all sorts of “high finance” and “Bolshevik” intrigues, that a significant portion of the annexationist groups attempted to promote during the months of D'Annunzio's occupation and to reiterate during the subsequent years of relative popularity of their action.

Indeed, to remain on topic, the new elections were certainly such as to “weaken” the liberal State even more and to strike another blow on Nitti's composite majority and on his perspective of pacification and democratization of the Italian State.

Moving from the opposite point of view to that of Giuriati, Guglielmo Ferrero suggested an interpretation of the Government's weakness as a consequence of a “democratization crisis” with Nitti being unable to reconcile the new democratic instances arising after the Great War with the traditional system of power centered around Giolitti's “parliamentary dictatorship”. And Fiume, again, as a symbol of this crisis.

Nitti's government was born weak from this disease, and even weaker since it didn't know it was sick. […] Who was Nitti? A man of the parliament first and foremost, that is a much skilled player […] as used back in peacetime; hence shallow, frivolous, shrewd, skeptic, crass enough to be good at it; but furthermore able to hide this necessary crassness under a thin, shiny coat of varnish […] He was also an economist, that is a one-eyed man, like many other practitioners of that discipline who, studying men in so far as they work, produce, save, keep tidy businesses and make money, fall prey to the idea that men can't do anything else: that they can't just as well be idle, wasteful, wanton, grow poor and go mad. […]

What could the Great War represent for such a soul? […] An excess impossible to explain, a form of madness, and more concerning a contagious one! […] Nitti had risen to power with the mindset of an alienist, who's reluctant for both formation and character to make use of the straitjacket […] ready to smile back at the follies of his patients, to pretend, to leave them be […] at least until they threaten to set the place on fire. […] When, one bad day, the matter of Fiume fell on his lap. This one looked like a much worse folly than the other ones, worth a straitjacket indeed. He let it slip at the Parliament and was forced to walk back on his words the day after. But from that day on, he was no longer in charge. […]