FASCISMO. – MUSSOLINI, BENITO (v.). The origins of f. go back to the period immediately preceding the First World War: to the internal conflicts within Italian socialism and the emergence within it of new tendencies; to the crisis in public opinion in the country before the war between the Central Empires (with regard to which Italy, despite having concluded the Triple Alliance treaty, demanded the fulfilment of broad territorial aspirations for the completion of national unity) and France and Great Britain (toward which, on the one hand, affinity of culture and language drew it, and, on the other, the political traditions of the liberals); to the clash between two mentalities and two ways of life, one of which saw in the peaceful evolution of political situations the sole source of all civil progress, while the other saw in war and violence, and in the school of physical courage, other and higher values. In that climate of conflict, the political vocation of the founder of the fasci movement had gradually taken shape; his choice inclined toward profoundly innovative solutions, toward syndicalist socialism, the reversal of alliances, and intervention in the war in order to win through sacrifice those aspirations that seemed capable of being satisfied through diplomatic negotiations.
With the end of the 1914–18 war, the enthusiasm aroused by victory and the disappointments suffered in the diplomatic negotiations for peace, the combatants’ return to civilian occupations, and the demobilization of the great war industry had provoked further conflicts and hardships in Italian public opinion: the Fascist movement entered into these conflicts and hardships. Founded in Milan in March 1919, it asserted both the need for governmental action intended to defend Italy’s contribution to the war and the need for a dignified and orderly return to work for veterans.
Around these two motives, men of differing origins and training could easily gather, and in fact did gather; for many of them, adherence to the new political movement did not seem supported by conscious rational considerations, but was dictated by the vitality of the action directed by the movement’s leader, by the lack of scruple with which an entire political world was attacked—a world to which the Italian youth raised during the war seemed irredeemably alien—and by the possibility of perpetuating in civilian life the tone and military habits acquired during the formative years of youth. That indistinct and predominantly critical program, on the other hand, enabled f. to win the support of forces capable of contributing greater political experience and financial resources.
The quality of the men who composed the Fascist movement, their aspirations, and the immediacy of its action soon made f. the strongest element of reaction against the spread of socialism. To check the violence, strikes, and disorders that, strengthened by the victories in Russia, the socialists had unleashed throughout the country, action squads were formed; and, primarily in an anti-socialist capacity, f. joined with other right-wing parties in an electoral bloc in the political elections of May 1921 and gained its first representation in Parliament. With this first electoral success came the expansion of the movement from the great industrial cities of northern Italy to central and southern Italy, as well as its transformation from a movement of elites (as it liked to describe itself) into a movement and organization of increasingly broad masses: the first workers’ unions arose, propaganda spread through the countryside, and the movement was organized as a party: the National Fascist Party.
Strengthened by its new organization and by the successes achieved in the cities and countryside against socialism, the Fascist party demanded active participation in the government of the country; when the governmental majority refused, the party decided to exert determined pressure in order to achieve its aim: the demonstrations of October 1922 (culminating in the “March on Rome”) advised the king to entrust Mussolini with the task of forming the cabinet. From this point begins the history of f. in power: at first together with other political representatives and later alone.
At this point, the history of f. as a political movement seems to be absorbed into the history of the Fascist State, the State whose government f. had entered and which it directed through its own men; the concealed internal political dissensions (from the Matteotti assassination to the conduct of the war in Abyssinia; from the alliance with Germany to the war alongside it) are, more than disagreements within the party, disagreements and conflicts within the Italian political class in power.
Having come to power, f. turned actively to the reform of the State and of Italian public life, as well as to foreign and colonial policy, translating into action the impulses that had characterized its activity from its very beginnings: the affirmation of a strong State internally and externally, and the recognition of the function of labor within discipline and order.
Following these directives, f. began the constitutional transformation of the State with the proclamation of the “Charter of Labor” as the fundamental law of labor; with the creation of the Grand Council of f. (an organ comprising the highest hierarchies of f. and of the government and thus institutionally ensuring the connection between party and government); with the appointment of the secretary of the fasci as a minister of the Kingdom; and finally with the suppression of the Chamber of Deputies and the creation of a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations composed of representatives of the Fascist political organizations and of the organizations of production. These transformations were accompanied by extensive legislative activity which, among other things, carried out the reform of the Codes of civil law, civil procedure, criminal law, and criminal procedure.
Alongside these reforms, which aimed at a profound transformation of the liberal and secular State that f. had found upon assuming the government, one must recall the conclusion of the Lateran Treaty and of the Concordat with the Holy See: through the former, the Roman question was resolved by recognition of the State of Vatican City; through the latter, an attempt was made to regulate the status of religion and of the Catholic Church in Italy, renouncing the secularization of the State and giving effect to Article 1 of the Albertine Statute, thereby opening the way, including in Italian legislation, to what is the right and mission of the Church. This was to lead to an entire orientation aimed at recognizing the prerogatives and mission of the Catholic Church, especially in the field of the so-called mixed matters, after the respective limits had been agreed-
But the backlash that the Lateran Pacts provoked among the more anti-Catholic Fascist currents, together with the justification of them that the head of government offered in Parliament at the price of heretical assertions, irreverence, and lack of scruple, refuted and stigmatized by Pius XI in his message to Cardinal Gasparri of 30 May 1929, and above all the “totalitarian” conception of the life of the State, which fascism soon showed itself unable to shed even in its relations with the Church and on points mutually agreed upon, impoverished the significance of the agreements and indeed opened the way to the sudden outbreak of controversies and the eruption of sporadic violence. The most bitter conflict broke out in the winter of 1930 over Catholic Action, which nevertheless had received official recognition from the State in Article 43 of the Concordat. On 2 June, an order was issued for the immediate dissolution of all youth associations; but fascism had to yield before the pontifical authority, strengthened by the conscience of the Catholic world, and it did so with the agreements of September 1930.
Fascism introduced profound innovations in the field of labor through the organization of trade unions as entities under public law, the judicial settlement of collective disputes, a broad network of insurance for workers, and the corporative regulation of production. In the sphere of production, fascism strove to direct the expansion of Italian industry toward the southern regions and endeavored to intensify agricultural production by completing extensive land-reclamation works in central and southern Italy. It then aimed to coordinate public and private interests in order to lead the country toward economic self-sufficiency.
These reforms carried out by fascism in the social, economic, and cultural life of the country looked more to the State than to the individual, more to the people and to the vision than to the individual person. The policy of fascism appears to have been dominated by the idea of an authoritarian and hierarchical State, in whose name individual freedom could be sacrificed to a certain extent. Thus, dissent found no opportunity to express itself, or could be rapidly stifled through administrative sanctions (police confinement); criticism was tolerated only insofar as it was conducted within the party (“constructive” criticism); and work in the professions, the bureaucracy, and the factories was monopolized by trade unions of a political character.
This policy of authority at home was accompanied, in the field of international relations, by a policy of intransigence and prestige: prestige and protection for Italians abroad (schools and Italian houses in the major foreign cities, strengthening of the work of the “Dante Alighieri,” resistance against the policy of assimilation of Italian emigrants); claims to the rights arising from the Italian victory in the 1914–18 war, especially in the form of colonial compensation; the claim for Italy of the role of a great power; a policy of penetration in Albania (ending with the proclamation of the Italo-Albanian personal union); colonial expansion and the campaign against Ethiopia; and a policy of Italy’s presence in the most important international affairs. This policy of active Italian participation in international life ultimately led fascism to take part, alongside Germany, in the Second World War.
In the domestic as well as the foreign sphere, the political activity of fascism and the implementation of its program of government were supported by the declaration of an official party “doctrine”: a doctrine of the authoritarian and corporative State in opposition to the democratic and liberal State. Yet, rather than being driven by its own original political doctrine, fascism seems to have been guided by more immediate and contingent needs that it had carried with it from its very beginnings: on the one hand, criticism of liberal and democratic political institutions, which, already in the aftermath of the 1914–18 war, had revealed themselves incapable of guiding the increasingly burdensome machinery of the internal State, with the enormous complex of services and functions that it had assumed; on the other hand, an awareness of the values of the Italian nation in the world.
These two motives of fascism (criticism of liberal society and democratic institutions, and the enhancement of the national tradition) were such that they could easily assert themselves outside Italy as well. Around Italian fascism, therefore, in the period between the two wars, fascist and fascist-derived movements arose in Europe (Germany, Spain, Portugal, Hungary, Romania, Greece) and beyond (Turkey, Argentina, Brazil); this expansion of fascism beyond Italy’s borders reveals that, apart from the intrinsic value of the formula, it presented itself as an attempt to overcome a crisis that was unfolding between 1920 and 1940.