The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The space was partly symbolic. The Nazi Party early shaped its identity by staking a claim to the street and fought with communist gangs for control of working-class neighborhoods of Berlin.83 At issue was not merely a few meters of urban “turf." The Nazis sought to portray themselves as the most vigorous and effective force against the communists—and, at the same time, to portray the liberal state as incapable of preserving public security. The communists, at the same time, were showing that the Social Democrats were unequipped to deal with an incipient revolutionary situation that needed a fighting vanguard. Polarization was in the interest of both.

  Fascist violence was neither random nor indiscriminate. It carried a well-calculated set of coded messages: that communist violence was rising, that the democratic state was responding to it ineptly, and that only the fascists were tough enough to save the nation from antinational terrorists. An essential step in the fascist march to acceptance and power was to persuade law-and-order conservatives and members of the middle class to tolerate fascist violence as a harsh necessity in the face of Left provocation.84 It helped, of course, that many ordinary citizens never feared fascist violence against themselves, because they were reassured that it was reserved for national enemies and “terrorists" who deserved it.85

  Fascists encouraged a distinction between members of the nation who merited protection and outsiders who deserved rough handling. One of the most sensational cases of Nazi violence before power was the murder of a communist laborer of Polish descent in the town of Potempa, in Silesia, by five SA men in August 1932. It became sensational when the killers’ death sentences were commuted, under Nazi pressure, to life imprisonment. Party theorist Alfred Rosenberg took the occasion to underscore the difference between “bourgeois justice," according to which “one Polish Communist has the same weighting as five Germans, front-soldiers," and National Socialist ideology, according to which “one soul does not equal another soul, one person not another." Indeed, Rosenberg went on, for National Socialism, “there is no ‘law as such.’ "86 The legitimation of violence against a demonized internal enemy brings us close to the heart of fascism.

  For some, fascist violence was more than useful: it was beautiful. Some war veterans and intellectuals (Marinetti and Ernst Jünger were both) indulged in the aesthetics of violence. Violence often appealed to men too young to have known it in 1914–18 and who felt cheated of their war. It appealed to some women, too.87 But it is a mistake to regard fascist success as solely the triumph of the D’Annunzian hero. It was the genius of fascism to wager that many an orderly bourgeois (or even bourgeoise) would take some vicarious satisfaction in a carefully selective violence, directed only against “terrorists" and “enemies of the people."

  A climate of polarization helped the new fascist catch-all parties sweep up many who became disillusioned with the old deference (“honoratioren”) parties. This was risky, of course. Polarization could send the mass of angry protesters to the Left under certain conditions (as in Russia in 1917). Hitler and Mussolini understood that while Marxism now appealed mainly to blue-collar workers (and not to all of them), fascism was able to appeal more broadly across class lines. In postrevolutionary western Europe, a climate of polarization worked in fascism’s favor.

  One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example, had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office. After its head, Joachim von Ribbentrop, became foreign minister in 1938, the party’s foreign policy office increasingly supplanted the professional diplomats of the Foreign Office. A particularly important fascist “parallel organization" was the party police. Fascist parties that aspired to power tended to use their party militias to challenge the state’s monopoly of physical force.

  The fascist parties’ parallel structures challenged the liberal state by claiming that they were capable of doing some things better (bashing communists, for instance). After achieving power, the party could substitute its parallel structures for those of the state.

  We will encounter the parallel structures again in the course of observing the process of achieving power, and of exercising power. It is one of the defining characteristics of fascism. Leninist parties did the same during the conquest of power, but then in power the single party totally eclipsed the traditional state. Fascist regimes, as we will see in chapter 5, retained both the parallel structures and the traditional state, in permanent tension, which made them function very differently from the Bolshevik regime once in power.

  Fascist success depended as much on allies and accomplices as on the tactics or special qualities of the movements themselves. The assistance given to Mussolini’s squadristi in the Po Valley by elements of the police, the army, and the prefectoral administration has already been noted. Wherever public authorities winked at direct action against communists or socialists without troubling themselves too much about the niceties, a door was opened to fascism. At this point, judicial and administrative due process was fascism’s worst enemy.

  In the Italian case, the old centrist deal maker Giovanni Giolitti took an additional step to give Mussolini legitimacy. Pursuing the hallowed Italian parliamentary tradition of trasformismo,88 he brought Mussolini into his centrist-nationalist coalition in the parliamentary elections of 1921 to help fight the socialists and the Popolari. Mussolini, who had refused to be coopted as a young socialist, accepted with alacrity as a Fascist, though this aroused some opposition among party purists. Mussolini’s thirty-five seats brought the gift of respectability. Now he was available for all antisocialist coalition builders. Bringing new parties into the system is usually a profoundly wise political step, but not when it rewards violence and an unrepentant determination to abolish democracy.

  Having assembled a catalogue of preconditions, intellectual roots, and longer-term structural preconditions, we might be tempted to believe we can foresee exactly where fascism is likely to appear, grow, and take power. But that would mean falling into a determinist trap. There remains the element of human choice. It was by no means guaranteed that a nation fitted with all the preconditions would become fascist. Only the “vulgar" Marxist interpretation holds that capitalism will eventually get into trouble and inevitably need to adopt a fascist formula to save itself, and even sophisticated Marxists have ceased to believe in such inevitability.

  As we will see in the next chapter, it took the decisions of powerful individuals to open the gates to fascism. That was the final essential precondition of successful fascism: decision-makers ready to share power with fascist challengers.

  CHAPTER 4

  Getting Power

  Mussolini and the “March on Rome”

  The myth that Mussolini’s Fascists conquered power by their sole heroic exploits was propaganda—one of their most successful themes, evidently, for many people still believe it. Since Mussolini’s “March on Rome" lies behind the widespread misinterpretation of the Fascist entry into office as a “seizure," we need to scrutinize that event stripped of its mythology.

  During 1922 the squadristi escalated from sacking and burning local socialist headquarters, newspaper offices, labor exchanges, and socialist leaders’ homes to the violent occupation of entire cities, all without serious hindrance from the authorities. They took Fiume back from its international administration on March 3 and assaulted Ferrara and Bologna in May, chasing out socialist city governments and imposing their own programs of public works. On July 12, they occupied Cremona and burned the headquarters of both socialist and Catholic unions and devastated the home of Guido Miglioli, a Left Catholic leader who had organized dairy farm laborers in the region. A “column of fire" through the Romagna arrived in Ravenna on July 26. Trent and Bolzano, with their large German-speaking min
orities, were “Italianized" in early October. The Blackshirts had developed such formidable momentum that the capital city of Rome could hardly fail to be next.

  When the annual Fascist Congress convened on October 24 in Naples—its first foray into the south—Mussolini was ready to see how far the wave would take him. He ordered the Blackshirts to seize public buildings, commandeer trains, and converge on three points surrounding Rome. The “March" was led by four militants who represented the multiple strands of fascism: Italo Balbo, war veteran and squadrist boss of 87

  Ferrara; General Emilio De Bono; Michele Bianchi, ex-syndicalist and founder of the interventionist Fascio of Milan in 1915; and Cesare Maria De Vecchi, the monarchist leader of Piedmontese Fascism. Mussolini himself waited prudently in his Milan newspaper offices, not far from a possible Swiss refuge in case things went wrong. On October 27, squadristi seized post offices and train stations in several northern Italian cities without opposition.

  The Italian government was ill-equipped to meet this challenge. Indeed, an effective government had hardly existed since February 1922. We noted in the last chapter how postwar dreams of profound change brought a large left-wing majority into the Italian parliament in the first postwar election, on November 16, 1919. But this Left majority, fatally divided into two irreconcilable parts, could not govern. The Marxist Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) held about a third of the seats. Many of the Italian socialists—the “maximalists" — were hypnotized by Bolshevik success in Russia, and felt that mere reform was a betrayal of this moment of opportunity. Another third of the Italian chamber was held by a new Catholic party, parent of the powerful post-1945 Christian Democrats, the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), some of whose members wanted radical social reform within a Catholic context. Catholics, even those favoring profound changes in Italian land tenure and class relations, disagreed passionately with the atheistic Marxists over religion in the schools. No alliance was possible, therefore, between the two halves of what might otherwise have comprised a progressive majority. In the absence of other workable alternatives, a heterogeneous coalition of liberals (in that period’s sense of the word) and conservatives struggled after 1919 to govern without a solid majority.

  As we saw in the last chapter, the solution adopted by Prime Minister Giolitti was to include the Fascists on his ticket (the “National Bloc") for new elections in May 1921. This was the first of several crucial steps by which the Italian Establishment tried to coopt Fascist energy and numbers for their own survival. While the temptations of office might have “transformed" the Fascists in normal times, as it had domesticated and divided Italian socialists before 1914, Italy was not living in normal times in 1921.

  When the government of the well-meaning but overwhelmed Ivanoe Bonomi, an associate of Giolitti’s center-Left, lost a vote of confidence in February 1922, it took three weeks to find a successor. Finally an even more subaltern Giolitti lieutenant, Luigi Facta, reluctantly assumed the prime ministry. His government lost its majority on July 19. When the emergency came, Facta was serving in only a caretaker capacity.

  Nevertheless, the prime minister began vigorous countermeasures. With the king’s approval, Facta had already reinforced the Rome garrison with five battalions of disciplined Alpine troops. Now he ordered police and railroad officials to stop the Fascist trains at five checkpoints and began preparations to impose martial law.

  Meanwhile Mussolini quietly left the door open for a political deal. Several old political warhorses were trying to defuse the crisis by “transforming" Mussolini into a mere minister within yet another liberal-conservative coalition cabinet. The aged deal maker Giolitti was widely regarded as the most plausible savior (he had evicted D’Annunzio by force in 1920, and had included Mussolini in his 1921 electoral list), but he was in no hurry to reassume office, and Mussolini remained noncommittal in meetings with his representatives. Further to the right, the nationalist former prime minister Antonio Salandra also offered cabinet seats to Mussolini’s party. By the time the squadristi began mobilizing, these negotiations had become becalmed by mutual rivalries, by the refusal of most socialists to support a “bourgeois" government, by indecision about whether to include Mussolini or not, and by Mussolini’s calculated hesitations.

  The socialists contributed their bit to the emergency. Although nearly half the socialist deputies, led by Filippo Turati, finally agreed on July 28 to support a centrist government without Mussolini if one could be formed, the other half expelled them from the party for treasonous class collaboration. What the Italian Left could agree on was a general strike on July 31. Although this was billed as a “strike for legality," intended to reinforce constitutional authority, it had the effect of inflating Mussolini’s appeal as a bulwark against revolution. Its speedy collapse also revealed the Left’s weakness.

  Prime Minister Facta’s emergency measures nearly succeeded in blocking the Fascist march in October. Four hundred police stopped trains carrying twenty thousand Blackshirts at three of the checkpoints— Civita Vecchia, Orte, and Avezzano. About nine thousand Blackshirts who evaded the checkpoints or continued on foot formed a motley crowd at the gates of Rome on the morning of October 28,1 poorly armed, wearing makeshift uniforms, short of food and water, and milling about in a discouraging rain. “In ancient and modern history, there was hardly any attempt on Rome that failed so miserably at its beginning."2

  At the last moment King Victor Emmanuel III balked. He decided not to sign Prime Minister Facta’s martial law decree. He refused to call Mussolini’s bluff and use the readily available force to exclude the Blackshirts from Rome. He rejected Salandra’s last-minute efforts to form a new conservative government without Mussolini, who had by now refused Salandra’s offer of a coalition. Instead he offered the prime ministry directly to the young upstart Fascist leader.

  Mussolini arrived in Rome from Milan on the morning of October 30, not at the head of his Blackshirts, but by railway sleeping car. He called upon the king clad incongruously in morning coat and black shirt, a sartorial reflection of his ambiguous situation: partly a legal claimant to office, partly the leader of an insurrectionary band. “Sire, forgive my attire," he is said to have told the king, mendaciously, “I come from the battlefields."

  Why did the king thus rescue Mussolini from a rashly overplayed hand? Mussolini had cleverly confronted the sovereign with a hard choice. Either the government must use force to disperse thousands of Blackshirts converging on Rome, with considerable risk of bloodshed and bitter internal dissension, or the king must accept Mussolini as head of government.

  The most likely explanation for the king’s choice of the second option is a private warning (of which no archival trace remains) by the army commander-in-chief, Marshal Armando Diaz, or possibly another senior military officer, that the troops might fraternize with the Blackshirts if ordered to block them. According to another theory, the king feared that if he tried to use force against Mussolini, his cousin, the duke of Aosta, reputed to be sympathetic to the Fascists, might make a bid for the throne by siding with them. We will probably never know for sure. What seems certain is that Mussolini had correctly surmised that the king and the army would not make the hard choice to resist his Blackshirts by force. It was not Fascism’s force that decided the issue, but the conservatives’ unwillingness to risk their force against his. The “March on Rome" was a gigantic bluff that worked, and still works in the general public’s perceptions of Mussolini’s “seizure of power."

  It was only on October 31, with Mussolini already in office, that about ten thousand Blackshirts, finally fed and given dry clothes, were accorded a compensatory parade through the streets of Rome, where they provoked bloody incidents.3 That very evening the new prime minister bustled his awkward squads out of town in fifty special trains.

  Mussolini later worked hard to establish the myth that his Blackshirts had taken power by their own will and force. The first anniversary of what was supposed to have been their arrival in Rome wa
s commemorated in 1923 with four days of pageantry, and that date—October 28—became a national holiday. It also became the first day of the Fascist New Year when the new calendar was introduced in 1927.4 On the tenth anniversary, in October 1932, a national exhibition, the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, had as its centerpiece the heroic deeds of the march’s “martyrs." 5

  Hitler and the “Backstairs Conspiracy”

  Only in Italy did fascism come to power in its first élan, in the turbulent days following World War I. Elsewhere, except in Russia, traditional elites found less disruptive ways to reestablish stability and recover some semblance of normalcy after the earthquake of World War I.6 The other early fascist movements, offspring of crises, shrank into insignificance as normal life returned in the 1920s.

  But first Hitler, taken in by Mussolini’s mythmaking, attempted a “march" of his own. On November 8, 1923, during a nationalist rally in a Munich beer hall, the Bürgerbräukeller, Hitler attempted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them to support a coup d’état against the federal government in Berlin. He believed that if he took control of Munich and declared a new national government, the Bavarian civil and military leaders would be forced by public opinion to support him. He was equally convinced that the local army authorities would not oppose the Nazi coup because the World War I hero General Ludendorff was marching beside him.7

  Hitler underestimated military fidelity to the chain of command. The conservative Bavarian minister-president Gustav von Kahr gave orders to stop Hitler’s coup, by force if necessary. The police fired on the Nazi marchers on November 9 as they approached a major square (possibly returning a first shot from Hitler’s side). Fourteen putschists and four policemen were killed. Hitler was arrested and imprisoned,8 along with other Nazis and their sympathizers. The august General Ludendorff was released on his own recognizance. Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch" was thus put down so ignominiously by the conservative rulers of Bavaria that he resolved never again to try to gain power through force. That meant remaining at least superficially within constitutional legality, though the Nazis never gave up the selective violence that was central to the party’s appeal, or hints about wider aims after power.9