The Pursuit of Italy

by David Gilmour

  RUPTURED ITALY

  In 1915 a middle-aged Italian left France, where he had gone to escape his creditors, and at the age of fifty-two enlisted in his country’s armed forces. In the course of the war he served in the army, the navy and the air force, and his extraordinary exploits, which cost him an eye and other injuries, included both a torpedo-boat raid and a flight over Vienna, which he ‘bombed’ with pamphlets written by himself. The name of this improbably exotic hero was Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sorcerer with words, a novelist of the erotic life and a poet of twilight and sensuality too talented to deserve Croce’s dismissive label, a ‘dilettante of sensations’. He was both a cruel and a charismatic man, part nietzschean and part narcissist, an occasional politician and a perennial philanderer. He inaugurated the trend of the shiny scalp that was copied by Mussolini and later by Yul Brynner and later still by millions of youthful-hearted men throughout the western world.

  Like the nationalists and Futurists, D’Annunzio despised those who preferred the assurance of comfort to the risks of adventure. Like them, he desired colonies and national grandeur, he wanted Italians to recover their masculine vitality and thus he exhorted his compatriots to do what he himself often did – ‘to dare the undareable’. He insisted the Mediterranean should become ‘mare nostrum’, a phrase that reverberated in fascist heads with an effect similar to his words ‘mutilated peace’ which persuaded many people to share his views on the injustice of the peace treaties and the perfidy of allies who liked to belittle Italy. His post-war aims were the same as the government’s – the Treaty of London plus Fiume – but the politicians eventually and reluctantly accepted the settlement. D’Annunzio did not. In September 1919 he decided to dare the undareable and capture Fiume for Italy.

  Before the war Fiume had served the eastern parts of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire in the way that Trieste had provided for the northern portions. Like Trieste, it was an important city for its Italian businessmen but not important, economically, for Italy: its commercial focus was fixed firmly on the Balkans. Even more than in Trieste, its divisions of class and ethnicity coincided: an Italian bourgeoisie dominated a Croatian working class to such an extent that none of the town’s schools taught in Croatian. After the war and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Croatian majority moved to take over the city in line with the principles of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Alarmed by this development, Italians in Fiume clamoured for unification with the ‘fatherland’, a cause that dismayed the government in Rome, which knew that international opinion was against it and that France was already positioning itself as the protector of the nascent Yugoslavia.

  In Italy Fiume became a rallying-cry for nationalists and adventurers who volunteered alongside disbanded veterans known as ‘arditi’ to fight for its ‘liberation’. In a classic case of history repeating itself as farce, the volunteers shouted ‘Fiume or Death!’ while the inhabitants of the city responded with ‘Italy or Death!’ At a crucial moment D’Annunzio arrived to lead the volunteers into the city and from a palace balcony proclaimed the annexation of Fiume to Italy. Officers of the Italian army stationed around the city were ordered to prevent his entry, but they behaved like Marshal Ney in March 1815, and the poseur in D’Annunzio delighted in playing the part of Napoleon, even baring his chest and telling them to shoot him. He duly became director of a vulgar and hedonistic Ruritania known as the ‘Regency of Carnaro’.

  The Italian government under Francesco Nitti had no idea how to deal with the ‘operatic dictatorship’ of D’Annunzio, which lasted over a year and was not overthrown until Giolitti returned as premier and sent troops into Fiume at the end of 1920. Although D’Annunzio quickly surrendered, he could claim a victory of sorts because Fiume became a free port and, four years later, was annexed anyway by Mussolini; as with Trieste, its incorporation into Italy deprived it of its hinterland and ruined it economically. Although nationalists claimed the Fiume episode was a triumph, Salvemini regarded D’Annunzio’s adventure as ‘a source of dishonour and ridicule for Italy’.23

  One observer who found it neither dishonourable nor ridiculous was Benito Mussolini, who supported D’Annunzio in the pages of the newspaper he then edited, Il Popolo d’Italia. He noted how the comandante (as the dictator liked to call himself) manipulated crowds with speeches from a balcony, how he elicited the desired responses (as Garibaldi had once done) and how he stirred audiences up with crescendoes culminating in a mysterious and meaningless cry, ‘Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!’ The journalist in Milan could also appreciate the importance of uniforms and parades, of the resonance of the word duce, of the usefulness of such gestures of masculinity as the arm outstretched in a ‘Roman’ salute. It would be simplistic to call D’Annunzio Mussolini’s John the Baptist (as many people later did), but he was a precursor, at least in style. Soon after Mussolini became prime minister, D’Annunzio tactlessly told him that fascism had taken all its ideas from dannunzianesimo and invented nothing by itself.

  Mussolini was thirty-six at the time of Fiume and had for long been displaying that volatility and inconsistency that were essential features of his character. As a socialist revolutionary he had described the Libyan war as a crime against humanity, had helped to organize protests and a strike against it and had gone to prison for five months as a result. His subsequent zeal in expelling reformists from the Socialist Party led to his appointment as editor of the party’s newspaper, Avanti!, a post that gave him a useful platform to attack the interventionists and argue for neutrality at all costs in the Great War. In October 1914, however, he changed his mind completely and decided that the war would be a good thing after all, especially if it ended in a bloodbath which resulted in revolution. He therefore left Avanti! and set up a rival newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which received subsidies from countries eager for Italy to join them in the fighting. The lavish new life that Mussolini was soon relishing in Milan was largely funded by the British secret service.

  The editor of Il Popolo welcomed Wilson’s Fourteen Points but, on realizing their implications for Italy’s ambitions, changed his mind and denounced them. The former enemy of nationalism and imperialism now became a proponent of Italy’s ‘imperial destiny’, demanding territories and ‘booty’ in the Balkans and the Middle East. In March 1919 he founded a movement called the fasci di combattimento, composed of a few hundred Futurists, nationalists, war veterans and former revolutionaries united by not much more than post-war disgruntlement. Although this group evolved into the Fascist Party two years later, it had few characteristics – beyond a propensity to violence – that would later be regarded as fascist. Its jumble of policies and lack of identity must have been evident to voters, who gave it less than 2 per cent of the vote in Milan in the elections at the end of 1919. Yet even before then these early fascists had revealed their preference for force over the ballot-box. A group of them, consisting mainly of arditi, had smashed up the office and printing-works of Avanti! in the spring. The leader of the fasci, a former socialist and editor of the paper, had by then identified their chief enemy as the Socialist Party.

  There were good reasons for many people, even socialists, to feel exasperated with the performance of Italian socialism. At the elections that humiliated the fasci, the socialists had won more than 150 seats, making them the largest party in the Chamber, ahead of the Popular Party (the new Catholic party), which had 100 deputies, and Giolitti’s liberals, who were reduced to 92. In a functioning democracy the socialists would have entered the government, either in coalition or as a minority with outside support, as social democrats had already done in Sweden and the Labour Party did soon afterwards in Britain. In Italy they refused. When Victor Emanuel opened the new parliament, the socialist deputies walked out, singing ‘The Red Flag’ and shouting ‘Long live the socialist republic!’

  In retrospect the ‘socialist threat’ to Italy seems to have been exaggerated but it appeared real enough at the time. ‘Red Week’ in the summer of 1914, when Emilia-Romagna seemed
on the brink of revolution, had been a warning. The summer of 1920, when hundreds of thousands of people went on strike and occupied factories and shipyards, seemed still more like a pre-revolutionary situation. Giolitti, who was nearly eighty, refused to intervene and managed to defeat the socialists – and the possibility of revolution – with a policy of non-violence. He also invited moderate socialists to join his last cabinet and help him create that social peace which had been the chief object of his political life. Again they declined. The largest party in Italy refused to act responsibly and continued to frighten conservatives by talking about republicanism and revolution. Even when it became clear that its intransigence was driving Italians towards Mussolini, it concerned itself more with issues of ideological purity than with the fate of the country. Under Lenin’s orders from Moscow, the extremists tried to expel the moderates at the party conference in Livorno at the beginning of 1921; when the vote went against them, they marched off to form the Italian Communist Party. Later in the year the socialists again refused to collaborate in government and in the summer of 1922 committed the folly of calling a general strike. Three years of remorseless irresponsibility had by then convinced millions of people that liberal Italy was destitute, ungovernable and ripe for bolshevism. Only too late did some socialists realize that they had allowed the fasci to transform themselves from a motley group of malcontents into a force capable of becoming a government. Similar behaviour by the German Left led to a similar result in its country ten years later.

  Giolitti’s refusal to use force to break the strikes and end the occupations may have scuppered the chance of a socialist revolution, but it alarmed northern landowners and industrialists, who concluded that in future they would have to protect their interests themselves. At hand were growing numbers of tough and violent fascists only too eager to assist them. Not content with a defensive role, squads of black-shirted thugs soon went on to the attack, beating up and killing socialists and burning their offices, their cooperatives and their local clubs, the case del popolo. Giolitti tried to tame the fascists by offering them an alliance in the election he called in 1921. Their candidates, he believed, would be like ‘fireworks’: they would ‘make a lot of noise but … leave nothing behind except smoke’.24 He was disastrously mistaken. His offer gave the fascists a measure of respectability and the means to win thirty-five seats, and in return they gave him nothing at all, not even support after the election, following which Giolitti was forced to resign. Nor did his gesture lessen their violence. Scenting that the socialists were already beaten, the party’s squadristi went on the rampage in 1922, marching through the Po Valley, occupying town halls, expelling socialist councils, killing hundreds of ‘reds’ and again setting fire to their buildings. Surprised by their success, and by the fact that the police and the army did little to impede them, the fascists turned north to occupy Trento and Bolzano. They had succeeded in creating an extraordinary situation, transforming themselves into a counter-state that was tolerated by the real state.

  Even with Giolitti’s help in the elections, the Fascist Party held only 7 per cent of the seats in parliament, less than a third as many as those gained by either the Socialist Party or the Catholic popolari. Yet in the late summer of 1922, while the socialists were calling a general strike, the fascists were baying to take over the state, by constitutional means if possible, by coup or insurrection if not. In October they decided to force their way into government by staging a ‘march on Rome’, and on the evening of the 27th their squads occupied government offices and telephone exchanges in key areas. They could easily have been stopped by the army and the police, but the prime minister Facta, a liberal lightweight, dithered until after midnight. Eventually he and the cabinet advised the king to declare a state of emergency and impose martial law. At two o’clock in the morning Victor Emanuel agreed, and the army quickly recaptured the occupied buildings and blocked the roads and railways into Rome. Later in the morning, however, the king changed his mind and refused to sign the decree of martial law that his prime minister had prepared. After Facta resigned in consequence, Victor Emanuel offered his job to Salandra, the former premier, who asked Mussolini to join him in government. When the fascist leader declined to serve under him, Salandra successfully urged the king to resist the claims of Giolitti – the one politician who might still have been able to save Italy from fascism – and invite Mussolini to become prime minister.

  It was a remarkable case of collective liberal suicide. Political Italy had suddenly and unnecessarily saddled itself with a prime minister who was the leader of a small political party which had gained power as a result of an armed insurrection. As Donald Sassoon has suggested, this could not have happened had the ‘establishment’ not decided it wanted Mussolini 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 always had done.’25 In the event the king became the figurehead, and the establishment – or much of it – was excluded from power.

  Many liberals acquiesced in Mussolini’s takeover and continued to do so for some years. They believed that their state had been too weak and the political system – which had not become a party system – too unstable. Sixty-one years of liberal government had produced eighty-six ministers of education, eighty-eight ministers of justice and ninety-four ministers of the navy; one minister of agriculture had taken office on Christmas Eve and left it on Boxing Day.26 How could administration function in such a manner? Certainly the liberals underestimated Mussolini, as did Catholics and socialists; like the king, they did not believe that the fascist leader intended to make himself a dictator. Even intellectuals of the stature of Gobetti and Salvemini could not see much difference between him and Giolitti; even Croce was ecstatic about the prospect of having Mussolini as prime minister.

  The world’s first and most quintessential fascist dictator thus achieved power by constitutional means – as did his future ally Adolf Hitler a decade later. Mussolini did not need a revolution like Lenin, or an army revolt like Franco, or the usual coups and murders that have cleared the way for other tyrants. Yet, just as he wanted people to think him more brutal than he really was, so he liked to claim that he had seized power by marching on Rome rather than receiving it at the hands of the king. There was in fact no march on the capital. A few thousand fascists, bedraggled and ill-equipped, gathered in the rain outside the city gates on 28 October, but, if the king had signed the decree of martial law, the armed forces could have dispersed them without difficulty. Mussolini himself did not pretend to march. He travelled by sleeping-car from Milan to Rome, a journey he compared to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.

  Mussolini gave notice of his intentions when, after becoming prime minister on 29 October, he addressed the deputies, telling them he could have converted their ‘deaf and grey’ Chamber into a barracks for his ‘legions’, that he could have abolished parliament and formed a government consisting solely of fascists, and that he had not done those things only because he had ‘not wanted to, at least not for the moment’. The new premier often made it plain how much he despised democracy, how he regarded it as a foreign import unsuitable for Italians, but his liberal opponents seldom took him seriously. They seemed satisfied that at least he had acted legally, swearing allegiance to the king and the constitution and appointing a cabinet with a majority of non-fascists, including four liberals and the Great War’s triumphant general, Armando Diaz. They did not notice signs of incipient megalomania when Mussolini made himself foreign minister and interior minister as well as prime minister – a trend that accelerated crazily so that by 1929 he held eight of the thirteen posts in the cabinet. Nor did enough of them worry that his squads were beating up and sometimes killing political opponents, notably and notoriously his most courageous critic, the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who was murdered in June 1924. A supine parliament passed laws that muzzled the press, guaranteed a fascist majority in the Chamber and established the apparatu
s of an authoritarian state. It paid a predictable penalty: all political parties were soon abolished except for one, the Partito Nazionale Fascista.

  Giolitti was the first of the liberals to realize their mistake, but by then it was too late to rectify it. In January 1925 he voted to censure Mussolini in the Chamber but received the support of only thirty-six deputies. Many more would have voted with him had the socialists not chosen to ‘secede’ from parliament, one of several gestures they made that played into the hands of Mussolini. Giolitti observed that Italy had got the government it deserved; he might have said more aptly that the socialists had the government their behaviour had merited. In 1928 the old statesman, the greatest figure of Italian liberalism, died at the age of eighty-five. Mussolini did not attend his funeral. Nor did the king, whom he had served well.

  11

  Fascist Italy

  ITALIA ROMANA

  The early fascists liked to think of themselves as revolutionaries, and until lately many of them had been socialists, syndicalists, republicans, anti-clericals and even libertarians. Mussolini claimed he too was still a revolutionary and he often talked about ‘the fascist revolution’. Yet it was difficult for them to take revolutionary positions when their main enemies were the socialists, their main supporters were the petty bourgeoisie, and their main backers were the landlords and capitalists who had paid them to defend their property.

  Mussolini’s way of dealing with this problem was to insist that fascism was both modern and traditional, conservative and revolutionary, a movement that drew from the past yet looked to the future. He thought of himself as an iconoclast like Marinetti and longed to destroy the image of Italians as innkeepers and mandolin players. Like the Futurists, he was an enthusiast for speed and technology, and he enjoyed the backing of their leader, who thought fascism a logical extension of Futurism and invented a new movement, aeropittura futurista (Futurist painting from the air), which he baptized as ‘the daughter of fascist aviation and Italian Futurism’.1 Yet Mussolini could not endorse Futurist yearnings to flood Italy’s museums and burn down its libraries because he needed to reassure Catholics and conservatives. He also needed to promote the past – specifically the classical past – to remind Italians of what they were capable of achieving. With modern history, however, he had to be selective: thus he identified Garibaldi and Crispi as antecedents who had tried to make Italy great but simultaneously he derided most other politicians. Fascism was happy to be regarded as the final stage of the Risorgimento so long as people realized it was also a revolutionary rupture with the liberal past and its futile spokesmen.