Читать книгу Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism - Donald Sassoon - Страница 4

On the morning of 30 October 1922 Benito Mussolini arrived in Rome, not on horseback, as he may have originally fantasised, but on the overnight wagon–lit from Milan, aware that King Victor Emmanuel III was to appoint him Prime Minister and entrust him with the formation of a coalition government.

While the future Duce was discussing strategy with his fellow travellers and meditating in his sleeping compartment, his supporters were converging towards the capital, some by car, others walking, but mostly by special trains, chartered with the help of the government. It was the so–called ‘March on Rome’ which had started on 28 October.

Ten years later, in a diary written with more hindsight than is usually the case, Italo Balbo, one of the more violent followers of the Duce, wrote that, from the beginning, fascism possessed the certitude that its destiny was the conquest of power through a violent insurrectionary act that would mark a caesura between old Italy and a new emerging country.¹

It is often the case that those who proceed illegally try to find some legal reasons why they acted as they did. Sometimes revolutionaries insist on the legality of their actions, ignoring the short cuts they had to take. In Mussolini’s case it was almost the reverse. He preferred to pretend that he had taken power by force, and that power had been given to him because he had already won it on the battlefield. But Mussolini’s advent to power was – strictly speaking – quite legal. As the great liberal politician and former Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti explained to his constituents on 16 March 1924, Mussolini had been appointed constitutionally, had sworn allegiance to the King and the constitution, and had presented his programme to Parliament, from which he had asked and obtained full powers.²

Yet the language used by the fascists at the time and in the following years depicted an uprising and celebrated revolutionary violence – one of several influences of the Bolshevik Revolution on the fascists. On 29 October 1922, Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, announced that ‘The whole of central Italy, Tuscany, Umbria, Marche, and northern Latium is occupied by the Blackshirts,’ conjuring up an image of armed occupation.³ To a reporter of the Milan daily Corriere delta sera Mussolini declared: ‘Tell the truth. We have made a revolution unparalleled in the whole world … We have made a revolution while public services continued to function, without stopping trade, and with employees remaining at their desks, workers in their factories, and peasants peacefully tilling their fields. It is a new style of revolution.’⁴

This image of turmoil and radical change was reinforced with the passing of time. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, writing in 1924, claimed that the March had been a reaction ‘against all the ideologies of the previous century: democracy, socialism, positivism, and rationalism; it was the vindication of idealist philosophy’.⁵ The preface to a collection of Mussolini’s main speeches published in 1928 enthused thus:

In 1922 He marches on Rome. He is Italy on the move. The Revolution continues. After half a century of lethargy the nation creates its own regime. The State of the Italians arises. Their power emerges. Their virtues appear. Their empire is in the making. This great renaissance … shall have His name. Throughout the world an Italian century is opening up: the century of Mussolini. ⁶

And when Mussolini addressed the Senate on 5 July 1924 he boasted that fascism obtained power by an ‘unquestionably revolutionary act’, by force of arms, marching on Rome ‘armata manu’.⁷

Twenty years later, in 1944, as the Duce faced defeat, more sober thoughts surfaced. Having escaped from the prison where he had been confined by the same monarch who had originally appointed him, Mussolini, now a pathetic Nazi puppet, recognised that fascism had not come to power by revolution. A true revolution, he wrote, would have required a fundamental change in the institutional framework of the state, but this had been left untouched by the events of October 1922: ‘There was a monarchy before and there was a monarchy afterwards.’⁸ He forgot to add that the King would not have turned against him had not the Grand Fascist Council forced him to resign. The great dictator had come to power legally, and was removed legally, not just by an old institution, the monarchy, but also by one, the Grand Fascist Council, which he had himself created.

Mussolini had given up on the ‘revolution’ well before his train approached Rome on that fateful late–October morning. The seductive appeal of power had made itself felt some time before, when he had become aware that he could get what he wanted more easily and speedily by compromising with the monarchy – one of the gestures that decisively propelled much of the political establishment into granting him full powers. Mussolini had realised there was no point in launching a major enterprise to grab power if power was his for the taking. His more naive followers had not grasped this strategic point. As they marched under incessant rain they assumed they were making history, but the Duce arrived in Rome before them in his wagon–lit to be driven to the palace, where he declared himself to be His Majesty’s ‘loyal servant’.⁹

This was no act of renunciation. Mussolini claimed that he had wanted to avoid a civil war, but in reality he could not have taken power any other way. His ‘army’ of fascists was not strong enough. They could have been easily thwarted, and Mussolini himself could have been arrested without difficulty in Civitavecchia–halfway between Pisa and Rome – where the army had blocked the line so as to be able to prevent the camice nere (Blackshirts) converging on Rome if necessary. Mussolini could have been stopped at any time.

Rome was well defended. General Emanuele Pugliese was given the job of organising the defence of the capital; not an arduous task, since the columns of marching fascists were slow–moving. The army occupied public buildings, set up barbed wire, coordinated troop movements. Pugliese assured the Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, that he would have had no problems in restoring order. In Milan it was no better for the fascists. They had entered into the barracks of the Alpini only to face an irate colonel who told them that if they did not leave immediately they would be arrested. They left sheepishly.¹⁰

General Pugliese, loyal to the crown, had more than 10,000 troops under his command.¹¹ A further 28,000 troops controlled the roads to the capital. Pugliese ordered the railway lines to Rome to be cut fifty kilometres north of the city, and four hundred policemen would have been sufficient to bring the so–called March on Rome to a complete halt.¹² Thus, as clearly established by army documents, the army was in complete control of the ‘marchers’.¹³ Had it been instructed to stop the fascists, the march would have been halted.¹⁴

General Pugliese had leaflets distributed to officers and soldiers:

In these grave hours everyone must bear in mind the oath of loyalty to the Sacred Majesty the King and to the Statute, fundamental law of the state which safeguards the freedom and the independence of Italy. No one has ever dared march against Rome, mother of civilisation, and suffocate the idea of freedom she represents.

You must defend Rome to the last drop of your blood and be worthy of her history.

Major–General Emanuele Pugliese, commander of the Division. ¹⁵

The marchers were left free to camp outside Rome. They numbered 30,000 to 40,000. They were amateur soldiers playing at revolution, poorly armed (hunting rifles, old army guns, little ammunition) and no match for regular troops – as the more aware among the marchers realised only too well. A diary kept by a student noted that the marchers were frequently reassured that the army would never fire upon them.¹⁶ In turn the fascists were reminded by their leaders that ‘the Army is the supreme defender of the Nation’, that ‘it must not be involved in the struggle’, that fascism had high esteem for the army, and that ‘fascism does not march against the forces of public order’.¹⁷ Indeed, troops were often used to provide food for the Blackshirts, pitifully soaked by the ceaseless rain.

Mussolini was perfectly aware of the weakness of his ‘troops’, which is why he took little interest in their military preparedness and efficacy, receiving only two messages from the marching fascists.¹⁸ He had chosen to concentrate on the ‘political’ front, remaining aloof in Milan, almost as if to signal that he was not a postulant.

The tragicomic aspects of the March should not lead one to underestimate its political significance. The fascists occupied towns of the importance of Cremona, Pisa and Siena, and cut the telegraph and telephone wires connecting Pisa to Genoa and Florence. The link was quickly re–established, without diminishing the symbolic impact of the fascist advance. Cars and trucks were requisitioned and used to convey supporters towards Rome. Fascist activists were freed from the Bologna prison where they had been incarcerated.¹⁹ Much of this encountered little opposition. The fascists had in fact been allowed to behave as a state within a state, parading uniformed supporters, talking openly of ‘seizing’ Rome, negotiating with local authorities and in some cases being welcomed by them. No left–wing force would have been allowed to behave like this. The legitimisation of the fascists could not have been more obvious.

So lacking in revolutionary secrecy was the preparation for the March that the chief conspirators, when they met a few weeks earlier in Bordighera on the Italian Riviera, were invited to lunch by Queen Margherita, the Queen Mother, whose villa was nearby and who openly sympathised with the fascists.²⁰

It is difficult to stage a coup against an army, particularly in the absence of civil war, desertion, economic catastrophe or widespread civil disorder. The March on Rome was little more than an ill–coordinated demonstration aimed at increasing the pressures on the politicians in Rome. Mussolini – who had considerable strategic flair – realised that much was to be gained by remaining broadly inside the limits of legality while permitting regular forays outside it. But such a strategy could only work if wider liberal opinion had been prepared to tolerate the fascists’ ambiguous attitude to legality.

The outgoing government of Luigi Facta had drafted a decree declaring a state of emergency which would have empowered the army to take drastic measures against the marchers. The King had been expected to sign it, but he refused. Instead he asked Mussolini, the leader of one of the smallest parties in Parliament, to form the next government.

When Mussolini arrived in Rome he was welcomed by a few hundred well–wishers. The reporter of the Corriere della sera – a paper that despised Mussolini but had come to regard him as an inevitable and necessary evil, indispensable to keep the socialists at bay – described the welcoming crowd as ‘immense’, the image enhanced by the description of women throwing flowers at the man of destiny.²¹

The ‘march’ had not been in vain. It was part of a symbolic theatre aimed at highlighting the exceptional circumstances surrounding the Duce’s accession to power. Its purpose was not to conquer Rome but to provide the choreography, the necessary human material, for what was later glorified as la Marcia su Roma.

Thus at eleven on the morning of 31 October, Mussolini, a black shirt visible under his formal suit, as if to symbolise the two faces of fascism – respectability and barely concealed violence – turned up at the Quirinale Palace to receive his new appointment and submit the list of ministers who would serve in the new government. ‘I beg Your Majesty’s forgiveness,’ he said, ‘if I am still wearing my black shirt, but I come from a battle which, fortunately, has left no casualties… I am Your Majesty’s loyal servant.’²²

The new government was a genuine coalition. The fascists were far too weak to hog for themselves the lion’s share of ministries. Apart from Mussolini – who kept the Foreign and Interior ministries – only three ‘real’ fascists obtained portfolios: Aldo Oviglio (Justice), Alberto De Stefani (Finance) and Giovanni Giuriati (in charge of ‘recently liberated lands’, i.e. those which had been under Austrian rule until the end of the Great War). There were also two members of the armed forces (General Armando Diaz at the War Ministry and Admiral Paolo Thaon di Revel at the Navy), one nationalist (Luigi Federzoni at the Colonies), one right–wing liberal (Giuseppe De Capitani at Agriculture), and two Catholics of the Partito popolare (Vincenzo Tangorra at the Treasury and Stefano Cavazzoni in charge of Labour and Social Security).

It looked almost like a ‘normal’ conservative government. Many of the ‘true’ fascists were disappointed, but the political elites were relieved. Mussolini’s deferential behaviour towards the institutions seemed to confirm their belief that, while mouthing revolutionary rhetoric, he would be able to check the black–shirted hotheads surrounding him.

He had, after all, repeatedly given signs of moderation. And when, on 3 August 1921, he had negotiated a pact (the patto di pacificazione) with the socialists aimed at bringing violence on both sides under control, he had irritated the more militant squadristi, people such as Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo and Roberto Farinacci, who did not hesitate to accuse him of being excessively accommodating. Faced with what amounted to an internal revolt he had threatened to resign, thereby resolving the crisis.²³ The opposition he had faced showed that his control was not yet absolute, but the incident played into his hands because it confirmed that, unlike his acolytes, he was a shrewd politician able to play on several registers at once.

With their man now Prime Minister, the foot–soldiers of fascism went home triumphantly, confident that this was the first stage of a revolution that would sweep throughout Italy, transforming the country. Many of their comrades, however, were quickly seduced by the charms of the political establishment they had sought to destroy. They began to experience the pleasures of wielding power, of being feared and envied, and of basking in the respect of those they had hitherto viewed with awe.

The old elites, of course, despised Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith and a schoolmistress. They were alarmed by his plebeian tones and his rough and populist language, yet they recognised him as someone prepared to do the dirty work they themselves were not able or willing to do. Some intellectuals openly admired him, or were not prepared to criticise him. The distinguished historian Gioacchino Volpe praised Mussolini well before the March on Rome.²⁴ Benedetto Croce, the most revered philosopher in Italy, sent his good wishes to the new Prime Minister, while keeping his distance. Writing in 1944 of his contacts with Mussolini, Croce, in what were essentially self–justificatory notes, while barely able to disguise his pleasure at being esteemed by the Duce, explained that he had refrained from ever meeting him because they just did not belong to the same social circles: ‘There were differences between us to do with differences of social milieu, family and culture; and I have always held the view that men get on together if they have had a similar education rather than if they share the same abstract ideas.’²⁵

Mussolini too made sure that everyone knew he did not belong to the same class as Croce. In 1931, wildly overemphasising his antecedents as a ‘man of the people’, he wrote with some pride that he belonged to the class of those who shared a bedroom that doubled up as a kitchen, and whose evening meal was a simple vegetable soup.²⁶ It is true that life in his native Predappio, a small town near Forli, was hard, but in reality his parents were not poor: they both worked – his father as a blacksmith, his mother as a teacher – and his father owned a bit of land which he rented out.²⁷ Mussolini was baptised in the local church and received a religious education. Yet his father was a socialist, who had named his son Benito after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Juarez, and given him the middle names Amilcare and Andrea after two Italian socialist leaders, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.

Locally, Mussolini’s parents were people of some importance, not quite the dispossessed peasants described in later hagiographies; yet compared to the politicians who had ruled Italy since its unification, Mussolini was certainly a ‘man of the people’. The twenty–five Prime Ministers who preceded him may have been very different from each other, but they all belonged to Italy’s elites. Some, such as Cavour, De Rudini, Menabrea, Ricasoli, Sonnino and Lamarmora, were aristocrats; the majority were grands bourgeois – lawyers, academics, doctors and army officers. All had university degrees or had been to the military academy. Mussolini had left school at eighteen to be a primary school teacher. For a man of such humble origins to have become Prime Minister was a remarkable feat.

What are handicaps in some circumstances occasionally turn into advantages. During the First World War Mussolini had shared the lot of the ordinary soldier, the boredom as well as the fear. He could speak about life in the army with some authority, unlike the overwhelming majority of politicians. His war diary has the ring of truth. It avoided the absurd rhetoric of D’Annunzio (who had fought with considerable valour): ‘After two months I am beginning to know my comrades … Do they love war, these men? No. Do they hate it? No. They accept it as a duty that cannot be questioned. Those from the south have a song that goes like this: “And the war must be made, ‘cos that’s what the King wants.” ’²⁸

A humble start in life may have prepared Mussolini to be more in tune with what ordinary people thought, and may have helped him to perform in the public sphere, embellishing his rhetoric with a language more vivid and more readily understandable than that deployed by his socially more polished rivals. But it would be a mistake to assume that rabble–rousing populism was a major factor in Mussolini’s advent to power. Electorally speaking, fascism had not been a great success. The first election the fascists fought, that of 1919, turned out to be disastrous. It is true that the party, or rather the movement – since they refused to call themselves a party until 1921 – had just been founded, but so had the Catholic PPI (the Partito popolare italiano) – and this immediately won a major victory in the 1919 election. If anyone could be deemed to represent the ‘new’ Italy it was, in 1919, not Mussolini but the PPI, which was the de facto representative of the Catholic masses, or perhaps the Partito socialista italiano (PSI), still the main party of the urban workers and the new intelligentsia. The fascists did a little better in the election of May 1921, but only because they were part of Giolitti’s blocco nazionale, along with liberals and right–wing nationalists. Giolitti had hoped to neutralise the fascists, and Mussolini had been ready to compromise to achieve parliamentary gains, though as soon as they were elected the fascist deputies sat at the far right of the Chamber, in opposition to Giolitti. Even so, they had not been able to muster more than thirty–five MPs out of 535. One cannot say that Mussolini had been swept to power by a wave of electoral support.

Votes, of course, are not everything, not even in a democracy. The real strength of the Fascist Party, as measured by the size of its membership, had been growing steadily throughout 1921. In March of that year the fascists numbered 80,000. By June the party had 204,000 members (62 per cent of them in the north). By May 1922 there were 322,000 members, and the Fascist Party had become the strongest in Italy.²⁹ The tipping point had been their inclusion in Giolitti’s national bloc at the May election. This somewhat legitimised them in the eyes of many, for in the course of the electoral campaign they recruited substantially, and at a faster rate than ever before, more than doubling their numbers from March to reach 187,000 at the end of May 1921. This surge was overwhelmingly concentrated in some regions of the north and the centre, so that their activities appeared far more important and greater than if their support had been spread throughout the peninsula.³⁰

The liberal establishment was scared of the fascists, but even more scared of the left and the trade unions. This explains why the violence of the squadristi remained unchecked; and the more unchecked it was, the more it grew. The fascists, while allowed to use violence, were never sufficiently strong to be able to topple the existing political order, yet not so weak as to be ineffectual. Besides, political violence was far more prevalent in the years following the First World War than it is now. When a left–wing revolt threatened the Weimar republic in 1919 even a social democrat such as Friedrich Ebert, then Chancellor, was prepared to use the Freikorps (a right–wing militia of veterans) to crush it, murdering in the process Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.

After the fascists came to power, in just over five years, at a speed dictated by events rather than by any carefully–worked–out strategic plan, what was still, technically, a constitutional government turned into a dictatorship. The existing system of proportional representation – the cause of parliamentary fragmentation – was abolished in 1923, and a new electoral system was devised aimed at guaranteeing an overwhelming majority to the victorious coalition. Then, by a combination of brutality and questionable legal proceedings, the opponents of fascism – socialists, communists, trade unionists, democratic liberals and the few conservatives who had repented of their early support for fascism – were eliminated, stripped of power, beaten in the streets by fascist squads, forced into exile, or jailed. New laws and new institutions finished off the old liberal state: a Special Tribunal with reliable judges armed with retroactive legislation cowed what was left of the opposition. Press restrictions muzzled the few remaining independent newspapers. New, pliable, fascist trade unions replaced the rebellious sindicati that had held, or so it was said, the country to ransom. A new law for the ‘defence of the state’ abolished all political parties. Even the Fascist Party lost its importance. The instrument of Mussolini’s seizure of the state, the party had become irrelevant to the wielding of power. As the new social order emerged and the old one withered away, local fascist–led brutalities subsided and law and order were restored. Normality and routine were back on track. By the late 1920s the constitutional regime which existed when Mussolini had become Prime Minister was defunct. As the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti explained, the dictatorship was not established in 1922, but in the years between 1925 and 1930.³¹ Yet the social, educational and foreign policies Mussolini pursued in government in these first years in power were perfectly in continuity with those of its predecessors.

The resulting political system was one envisaged neither by the radical wing of fascism nor by the conservatives. The former thought they would get rid of the monarchy, of the old ruling classes, of clericalism, of a timorous bourgeoisie which had sold Italy to foreigners. The new fascist society, so they dreamed, would demarcate itself sharply from the pathetic liberal Italy which had achieved so little in its sixty years or so of existence. The March on Rome became their foundation myth. In truth it had been – as we have seen – little more than a paltry gathering of useful idiots, but in the telling and the retelling of it, the March was transformed into a revolutionary movement, the vanguard of patriotic Italians of all classes, concerned and dismayed by the corruption and decadence of the old liberal state. According to this narrative, they had rallied around a new leader, Mussolini, and his new party, the unsullied and uncorrupted Partito nazionale fascista, that had denounced the inability of the old governing classes to stand up to the Great Powers and to make Italy great again. In so doing these patriots had also definitively repulsed the menace of Bolshevism and socialism, and the strikes and subversion which had threatened hard–working citizens and led the country to the verge of the abyss. Responding to the call of destiny, the Duce had led thousands, perhaps tens of thousands – even, in some hyperbolic accounts, 300,000 – to Rome (the Corriere della sera estimated the number of demonstrators to be between 45,000 and 50,000³²). With the country at his feet, Mussolini could have, as he declared later, transformed Parliament into a bivouac for his legions. Instead he demonstrated his love of country and his sense of responsibility and accepted the offer to become the King’s Prime Minister.

Power, however, is seldom found in a single place, a handy central control room whose keys, once acquired, provide one with complete mastery. Even in a dictatorship, especially one in which the conventions are always changing, power is the result of a constant and extenuating negotiating process. The real losers are the outsiders. Isolated from the power structure, they do not see the compromises, the bargaining, the positioning, the back–stabbing, the fear of losing, the joy of winning, and the ephemeral nature of what appears permanent. From the outside a dictatorship looks like a formidable ‘totalitarian’ machine, in control and unassailable. When it crumbles (one thinks of Portugal in 1974–75, Spain in 1975–77, Iran in 1979, the Soviet Union in 1989–91, and South Africa in 1990–94), almost everyone is taken by surprise, except perhaps the more alert among those who led the old regime.

The key question to be addressed here is not how the dictatorship was consolidated, or why Mussolini succeeded in transforming a constitutional government into an undemocratic regime, or even why he was able to maintain himself in office so effectively for twenty years, and lost power only because he dragged his country into a devastating war. The key question is why Mussolini obtained office in the first place; that is, why, given the circumstances described, the leader of an electorally unpopular party, with no nationwide support and no control over the military, became Prime Minister.

Events developed in the way they did because of a unique conjuncture in which each participant, unlike a chess grandmaster, could not plan his next move in advance, with the knowledge that commonly agreed rules bind the players, that each must wait his turn, that only certain moves are allowed. Like all political grand games, the Italian crisis of 1922 brought to the fore a multiplicity of actors, with no fixed rules, with no clear boundary between friend and foe, and no obvious resolution. Only later, when the dust had settled, could each side count its losses and its gains, curse the wrong moves made or congratulate itself on its mettle and luck.

Mussolini realised – partly from experience, partly by instinct – that in order to be accepted by all as the supreme leader, he had to please those who had not been entirely convinced by his performance so far, and inevitably to disappoint some of his supporters. The views of the country began to matter to him more than those of the party. By 1923 he was warning his supporters that ‘The country can tolerate one Mussolini at most, not several dozen.’³³

What were the circumstances which made reasonable and rational people hold the view that the country had become ungovernable, or at least that it could not be governed in the old way? In 1920 Lenin, who knew a thing or two about revolutions, explained to some of his excessively enthusiastic followers that one cannot make a revolution at will, but that it can only occur when two conditions are fulfilled: ‘It is only when the “lower classes” do not want to live in the old way and the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way that the revolution can triumph. This truth can be expressed in other words: revolution is impossible without a nationwide crisis (affecting both the exploited and the exploiters).’³⁴

In Italy in 1922, the first condition was no longer extant. The ‘lower’ classes, the workers and peasants to whom Lenin had successfully appealed in Russia in 1917 and in the immediately succeeding years, had been soundly defeated. The trade union unrest which had manifested itself in the ‘red years’ of 1918–20 had been quelled. As for the agricultural workers of central and northern Italy, they had been brutally put down by sheer fascist violence, violence which was often justified in terms of re–establishing order. The rural workers of the south had remained silent, barely aware of the momentous political game being played elsewhere. The second condition (‘the “upper classes” cannot carry on in the old way’) applied to a limited extent. The ‘upper classes’, if one can use this terminology to designate interlocking elites seldom able to present a monolithic face, realised that they could no longer go on in the old way, but they were not sure what the new way might be. They looked for an option whereby, to paraphrase Tancredi’s famous remark in Tommaso de Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, ‘Everything must change so that everything remains the same.’ As the uncertainty of the elites grew, their unity, never their strongest card, faltered. Mussolini was one of several options they considered. They hoped that he would clear the ground from under the socialist and communist rabble, wipe out those trade unions before which they had trembled, and would then settle down, content with the trappings of power, cutting ribbons, strutting around, visiting schools, ennobling friends and relatives. Mussolini’s assigned role was to cleanse the country of the red menace and then turn himself into a figurehead. The old establishment would rule in the shadows, as it had always done.

Mussolini’s capture of power was seen by many of his contemporaries, at home and abroad, as the result of his exceptional qualities of leadership. He was the true ‘man of destiny’, the embodiment of die Weltseele (the World Spirit), to use Hegel’s description of Napoleon when he saw the Emperor riding through the city of Jena on 13 October 1806, the eve of the battle.³⁵ Mussolini was one of the first modern leaders to achieve power in exceptional circumstances, outside the normal rules of politics. He had not been anointed by divine right, as under the ancien régime, nor – as in most democracies – gone through the legitimate process of succession as the leader of a major established political party. In the course of the twentieth century such men of destiny appeared with alarming regularity, and they continue to do so in the twenty–first. But Mussolini’s predecessors were rare. Only in Latin America had dictators or caudillos come to the fore in the course of the nineteenth century, men like Juan Manuel de Rosas in Argentina, Antonio de Santa Anna in Mexico and Jose Antonio Páez in Venezuela; but they all owed their accession to their military positions. Like the first Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell, they were men on horseback. Louis Napoleon (who eventually crowned himself Napoleon III) did achieve office, like Mussolini, by exploiting a paralysis among the leading political forces, but unlike Mussolini he obtained power by winning a genuine presidential election – in 1848, with an overwhelming popular mandate, to the surprise of the political establishment. Only then did he proceed, on 2 December 1851, to stage a coup d’etat. Unlike Mussolini he had no organised party to back him, nor did he need to compromise with an existing monarchy.

The nearest European predecessor of Mussolini was his contemporary Primo de Rivera, who in September 1923 was appointed dictator by the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII; but his dictatorship was short–lived. In Poland Józef Pilsudski was, like Mussolini, a former socialist leader, but unlike him he became a national hero in the course of the Soviet–Polish war of 1919–21, at the end of which he proclaimed an independent Polish republic and became the first head of state of the newly resurgent Poland. Having resigned this position in 1922 he returned to power in 1926, when the country, like Italy, was in the throes of parliamentary paralysis, and controlled the destiny of Poland until his death in 1935. Thus there were few if any historical precedents for Mussolini. This explains, at least in part, both his rapid rise and the difficulties even his contemporaries faced in trying to explain the phenomenon.

Mussolini was systematically underestimated by both allies and opponents. The initial reaction of the Italian Communist Party was muted. The Theses of Rome (March 1922) – the communists’ founding document – do not mention fascism at all. Even an astute thinker like Antonio Gramsci, at the time of the seizure of power, dismissed the possibility that Mussolini might hold the fascist movement together, and like many commentators assumed that eventually it would split between an intransigent wing and a legalistic one. Writing in August 1921, Gramsci had suggested that by concentrating on Bologna instead of Milan, fascism was ‘in fact freeing itself from elements like Mussolini – always uncertain, always hesitating as a result of their taste for intellectualist adventures and their irrepressible need for general ideologies – and becoming a homogeneous organisation supporting the agrarian bourgeoisie, without ideological weaknesses or uncertainties in action’.³⁶

Even in 1924, when the construction of the regime was well under way, Gramsci’s writings on Mussolini stressed the importance of the image of the dictator, rather than his policies:

He was then, as today, the quintessential model of the Italian petty bourgeois: a rabid, ferocious mixture of all the detritus left on the national soil by the centuries of domination by foreigners and priests. He could not be the leader of the proletariat; he became the dictator of the bourgeoisie, which loves ferocious faces when it becomes Bourbon again, and which hoped to see the same terror in the working class which it itself had felt before those rolling eyes and that clenched fist raised in menace? ³⁷

This is not to say that the image or the personality of the new leader was unimportant. While it is true that the seizure of power would not have taken place without a favourable conjuncture, personalities do matter. Mussolini was in the right place at the right time, but he was also the right man. Marx, who tended to overestimate impersonal forces in history at the expense of personalities, perceptively pointed out, in the second paragraph of his famous 1852 essay on Louis Bonaparte, that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self–selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’

In this book I will follow this suggestion and seek to reconstruct the ‘circumstances given and transmitted from the past’ – the conjuncture – that enabled Mussolini to reach power. But no inevitability or determinism is assumed here. Matters could have gone differently. Circumstances made it possible for Mussolini to become Prime Minister of Italy, and further factors made possible the subsequent itinerary of the regime; but there is a world of difference between the possibility of an event and that event occurring.

Mussolini did not just appear as a new leader. He was a new, modern leader, one who possessed, to use a word now abused but then recently given a new meaning, ‘charisma’, a magnetic personality exuding power not because power had been foisted upon him by established political rules, but by virtue of some God–given, unfathomable qualities. Max Weber had defined charismatic authority – contrasting it with more usual forms of authority (traditional and legal–rational) – as a quality of ‘an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.³⁸

Mussolini’s merit was to have exploited to the full the cards that fate (history) had handed him. There was, of course, an element of luck – a concept seldom deployed by historians – for even the ablest of men cannot be aware of all the possibilities. In the end, one has a ‘good’ hunch and acts accordingly. After all, Mussolini’s demise came about, at least in part, because of a ‘bad’ hunch: a miscalculation regarding the probable outcome of the Second World War. His initial (correct) instinct had been to keep out of it, just as his instinct almost twenty five years earlier had been to enter a war. Of course, in 1940 it was not unreasonable to assume that Hitler would win the war, and that it would be more advantageous to be in than out. But Nazism was defeated, dragging along with it into the maelstrom fascism and its man of destiny. Another dictator, Francisco Franco, had tried to join in Hitler’s war, but, luckily for him, he was rebuffed by the Germans.³⁹ He thus ruled Spain until his dying days, allowing his apologists to celebrate his cunning in staying out of the war.

Italian fascism was wiped out by a world war, but it was also born out of war. Of all the factors that made fascism possible, the First World War was the most important. The war accelerated changes in Italian society, destabilised the country’s parliamentary system and realigned its politics, thus contributing decisively to the conjuncture which enabled Mussolini to become Prime Minister in 1922. But it was far from being the sole factor. The changes brought about by the war made it difficult to return to the unstable system which had preceded it. Without the war, Italy may have had the opportunity to evolve otherwise and to follow a different, liberal, path towards modernity. Equally, it would have been possible to resolve the post–war crisis without creating the conditions for a fascist takeover of the state. As Paul Corner has argued, ‘The identification of possible origins of fascism in the decades before 1922 is a very different matter from suggesting that these origins had a necessary and inevitable outcome in the March on Rome.’⁴⁰