Saturday Showcase | May 30, 2020 | AskHistorians Archive Observer

Week 137

Municipal outlets for preserved meat

The consortium retail agency, in an effort to compensate at least in part for the present scarcity of cured meats, is going to make available to the citizens an amount of high quality preserved bovine meat, at the cost of L. 0.50 per hectogram.

For the sale of this special product, a new outlet has been already provided, opening today [July the 31^st 1919] in via Garibaldi 20. Where consumers will be able to purchase as well salmon and sardines of quality brand: L. 2.25 for boxes of 450 grams, neat, of salmon; L. 2 for boxes of 200 grams and L. 1 for boxes of 100 grams of sardines in oil.

Better hurry up before they run out of that quality meat!

The Licenses and Cards [rationing] Bureau informs that, for the next month [of August 1919], the amount of rice remains the same, of one and a half kilograms per person.

And, since we are done with public service announcements, let's return to the usual.

Last week, we continued our examination of the way Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia balanced, or attempted to balance, elements of clear “national” - or nationalist, to some degree – imprint, such as the special attention reserved to Adriatic matters, the consistent anti-Yugoslav perspective, the frequent inclusion of news and reports painting an unfavorable picture of the French Eastern Mediterranean policies; and, in so far as internal matters, a prominent anti-socialist tone, albeit maintaining an explicit (but, on practical grounds, rather tenuous) discrimination between the “Official Socialists”, and especially the leadership of the Socialist Party and of the General Confederation of Labor, and the proletarian masses, a keen eye for the “anti-Bolshevik” initiatives of various “national” and “national-patriotic” associations and organizations, as well as a far from exclusive, lingering tone of “bourgeois resurgence”; with elements of “democratic” imprint, deriving both from certain “radical” fascinations, also not uncommon among Mussolini's “national” audience, and from the original “left-interventionist” connotations of Mussolini's interventionism, such as the (discontinuous) presence of vague formulas of financial and land expropriation, designs of far reaching institutional reforms of (or leaning towards a) republican character, the adoption of a “combatantist” angle in the examination of military matters (both in relation to the demobilization process and to the imminent publication of the Caporetto inquest), even when the former seemed to conflict with a more institutional “national” perspective.

This attempt to strike a balance or – perhaps better – to manage the coexistence of different and often conflicting themes, all to varying degrees characteristic of the interventionist experience, and all, from Mussolini's perspective, in some way reducible to a common interventionist denominator; while possible on the pages of the Popolo d'Italia and, to some degree, effective within the public mind, was a much more dubious proposition in so far as the creation of an actual political program. As Arturo Finzi pointed out in his letter (July 27^th 1919) discussing the perspectives of Mussolini's new “Unity and Action” initiative for a “democratic” block in preparation for the elections of November 1919

In all frankness – Finzi explained, after listing the contents of Mussolini's recently published speech of July 19^th – these factors of unity can secure the agreement of all parties; of all men, from the dreariest reactionary, to the reformers, including the official ones like Turati; war profiteers and combatants; trust bourgeoisie and proletariat; but they can't be the foundation of an effective program […]

The speech – which De Felice described, not entirely without reason, as “one of his most fortunate of the time” - rested on the fundamental assumption that the unity of the “democratic” interventionist forces was necessary, first and foremost, if one wanted to offer a concrete resistance to the mounting socialist presence within the Country, and especially within the city of Milan. And that, consequently, such a call to unity had to prevail over any other ideological “prejudicial” and that any examination of those secondary discriminating factors had to be postponed until after the political and social ground had been secured.

Yet, Mussolini's proposition also appeared to rest on the assumption that the multi-faceted interventionist experience could suffice, by itself, as foundation of a new political action. Which seemed to ignore that – besides the fact that many figures of the “democratic” field did not appear, unlike Mussolini, to take “interventionism” as the fundamental, age defining, new political impulse arising from the war, and therefore were unwilling to continue to pursue an “interventionist” political identity, now that the war had removed the need to uphold the unity of the national front – those many facets of the interventionist field had never really been the expression of one, single, unifying, dominant impulse; but, rather, that the experience of the intervention had represented, for different groups and individuals, something different – for some of them even entirely different – and that the Great War, the European War, or the Italian War, had been something they had approached moving, each one, along a path of their own. There was very little in common, outside of “interventionism” itself, between the interventionism of Bissolati and that of Pantaleoni, that of Giuriati and that of De Ambris, that of the old Milanese radico-socialisti, like Finzi, and that of the Southern small-bourgeois masses which had, at times enthusiastically, adopted Salandra's dubious political program of national renovation, and between those masses and the liberal-conservative supporters of Salandra, such as Luigi Albertini. Also – and not to be overlooked in understanding the perspective of a man like Finzi – for a large portion of “democratic” interventionism, the observance of the “supreme needs of the Motherland”, after the intervention and much more prominently after Caporetto, had signified a very obvious sacrifice of their particular political identity (especially for those coming from the old “subversive” parties) in favor of the adoption, by and large, of broad “national” and anti-defeatist themes, with the interventionist front adapting to the tune of the “national-interventionist” marching songs. As the Great War ended, it stood to reason for many of them – those, at least, who had been more reluctant or found it harder to adjust to the new rhythm – that a return to a less “national” and more particular perspective was a necessary step in order to reestablish a political identity of their own, and even to consolidate an autonomous presence within the public mind; at least if they wished to avoid getting lost into the vast constellation of the many groups and grouplets of the former interventionist front. In doing so, they had to face the extremely difficult odds of marking their separation both from the openly “anti-national” forces of the Official Socialists, from the old institutional forces and from the nationalist tones of the various “national-interventionist” groups – to rely on their interventionism as a distinction from the other “subversive” parties, and on their “democratism” as a distinction from the nationalist and “national” interventionist forces.