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the conciliation of class differences and was therefore superior. The

Corriere della sera
interpreted the results of the 1929 plebiscite precisely in these terms:

Our opponents, especially those who, from the columns of foreign newspapers,

persist in denigrating fascist Italy, have been defeated with their own weapons.

These people, who deny any legitimacy that does not come from below, which is

not delegated and consecrated by the wishes of the masses, will have to accept

with enormous surprise that the masses are entirely for Mussolini and for his authoritarian system. Democrats all over the world cannot deny that [...] the fascist regime is the most democratic regime that exists because it has total consensus of the greatest electoral mass that has ever voted in Italy.

Here, the intention was to justify the past history of fascism, which had

attracted such negative judgments from liberal opinion in the rest of

Europe, and also to provide Mussolini with a solid platform of apparent

popular support from which to carry out his expansionist foreign policy in

the future.

Within Italy, the regime hoped—through the plebiscite—to establish a

claim to power that went beyond the violent and coercive methods it had

used during the 1920s. The intention was to change the terms on which

certain groups within the population—mainly middle-of-the-road liberals

and Catholics– looked on the regime by inducing these groups to abandon

their residual reservations about the legitimacy of the regime. It should be

remembered that the plebiscite took place at a moment when the regime

had managed to realize the Conciliation with the Catholic Church. The

creation of an alliance between church and state, after seventy years of

hostility, undoubtedly represented a moment of triumph for the regime,

allowing it to assert further its role as undisputed and legitimate leader of

the national cause. In the same way that the overtures to the church were

made in the spirit of healing divisions, so the plebiscite was meant to con-

firm a generalized recognition of national purpose and common aim.

The path to legitimization of fascist rule was to pass, therefore,

through the recognition that the national cause was more important than

individual rights or liberties, and that the individual had significance only as part of the nation. The plebiscite was the perfect vehicle for the

implementation of this philosophy. It allowed people to vote without

allowing them any choice about who or what to vote for; it gave the

impression that people could participate in the decision-making process

without allowing any real popular intervention. It carried none of the risks

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of a genuinely free election, in which individual choice was the key

element, but it did permit the public expression of unanimity. People all

voted in the same way, were all seen to vote in the same way, and could all

be told that they had all voted in the same way. Collective unitary purpose

was expressed publicly and, by that expression, became fact; the methods

and objectives of fascism were therefore assumed to be legitimized in the

eyes of the public.3 The plebiscite permitted, therefore, the creation of a

new kind of public sphere in which the central features were not debate

and discussion but rather the
visible
manifestations of conformity to the common purpose. Unlike a democratic election, which invited voters to

consider alternatives and which generated divisiveness, the plebiscite was

intended to be an expression of collective solidarity. It was to be a
public
demonstration of
national
unity and a clear indication of how far Italy had traveled since the days of political fragmentation during and immediately

after the war.

Mussolini’s newspaper
Il Popolo d’Italia
summed up the situation a few

days before the 1929 plebiscite: “Factions have disappeared. Parties are

logically submerged. The region, the province, the [electoral] college have

made room for a deep and human reality—the Nation. In order for this

revival to be absolute, in order for Italy to be raised above the narrow view

of the [electoral] college and the absurd humiliation of parties, it has been

necessary [to invoke] the totalitarian conception of the plebiscitary election

[...]” (
Il Popolo d’Italia
, March 1, 1929).4This plebiscitary election was to be the concrete example of a newly united Italy under fascism. It was to impose a new image of the fascist movement on public opinion, both at

home and abroad.

——————

3 The process was described perfectly by Victor Klemperer regarding the November 1933

German plebiscite results. “If I have no choice but to read and hear something everywhere, it is forced upon me. And if
I
can hardly guard against believing it—how shall millions of naive people guard against it? And if they believe, then they are indeed won by Hitler and the power and the glory are really his”. (Klemperer 1998, 51).

4 It is worth noting that the 1929 plebiscite provided an opportunity for Mussolini to discipline further the unruly elements within the Fascist Party. By proclaiming that local, provincial office was incompatible with the role of parliamentary deputy, the fascist leader was able to remove several powerful local leaders from their power base, bringing them to Rome where they could be more easily controlled. Here, it is obvious that the denial of the elective principle, combined with the principle of top-down designation, greatly reinforced the leader’s position; it was this system that was ratified by the plebiscite.

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At the same time, the regime was very careful not to suggest that the

origin of fascist legitimacy came from the people. The former revolution-

ary syndicalist, now fascist, leader Michele Bianchi explained why in a very

revealing homily: “The fascist government doesn’t depend for its existence

on the consensus of the electoral body, in the same way as the government

of a family doesn’t depend on the wishes of the children. Mussolini’s gov-

ernment, entrusted with the realization of a portentous historical mission,

has too great a responsibility for it to be conditioned by the passing vote

of the electoral body” (
Corriere della sera
, March 3, 1929). And Mussolini himself left no doubts that the future of the regime was not in question:

“No one should delude themselves that they can—with a few votes—im-

pose some ephemeral conditioning on the regime, which tomorrow will be

more totalitarian than yesterday” (
Corriere della sera
, March 23, 1929).5

This denial of any kind of legitimization by the people may be one of

the reasons why it is difficult to find evidence that the plebiscites put a

bargaining weapon into the hands of the people. In respect of both plebi-

scites, there appears to be very little interaction between the people and the

authorities. Why was this so? In other dictatorial regimes, particularly post-

Stalinist communist regimes, workers seem on occasions to have been able

to sell their votes at a price (see the contributions of Bohn and Richter in

this volume). In Italy, there is no indication of bargaining over the vote.

There are several probable reasons for this. It has to be remembered that

the working class was, at this time, much smaller than it was in either Ger-

many or the USSR in both relative and absolute terms. More relevant per-

haps was the heavy defeat suffered by the working class in the 1920s, with

the collapse of the occupation of the factories in 1920 and the subsequent

reorganization and restructuring of the industrial workforce in such a way

as to disturb radically the traditional links of worker solidarity. The fascist trade union monopoly, firmly established after 1927, ensured that the unions functioned almost exclusively as a vehicle of communication between

workers and bosses, and not as an instrument of pressure. Structural fac-

tors may have played a role here as well. The fact that most industrial units

in Italy were still small, employing fewer than 15 people, undoubtedly had

an influence. Bosses had a much freer hand to sack and suspend workers in

these small companies. In the context of a country characterized by an

——————

5 He made a similar statement when announcing the plebiscite in December 1928: “I need hardly remind you that a revolution can be consecrated by a plebiscite, never over-thrown”. (Aquarone 1965, 158).

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excess of labor and persistent unemployment, the prospect of losing one’s

job had an enormous cautioning effect.6

But a further reason lies no doubt in the fact—mentioned above—that

the fascist regime, unlike many other dictatorships, made no pretence of

drawing its authority from the people. Despite all its efforts surrounding

the plebiscites, the fascist movement was, in reality, self-legitimating and

self-justifying; it appealed to the needs of the Nation, which it claimed to

interpret, not to those of the people, whose interests were subordinated to

those of the Nation. Workers were less able to argue—as they could in

some communist states, for example—that the formal justification of the

regime gave them the right to vote. If workers in Italy tried this, they sim-

ply lost their jobs, and, in any case, there were always fascist thugs ready to

deal with them.

The 1929 Plebiscite: Its Organization and Results

So, what actually happened in 1929? Such information as we have speaks

of a short campaign (on Mussolini’s instructions), with intensive organiza-

tion of the vote by fascist groups, which used public meetings, street

demonstrations, and posters and leaflets. Mussolini himself did not partici-

pate in the campaign, no doubt trying in this way to underline the differ-

ence between an ordered election under fascism and the public chaos of

those before fascism. In many places, the priests also advocated support

for the regime from the pulpit. The desire for a great public demonstration

of popular consensus and the fear of any hostile vote are made very clear

by the instructions sent out to the voting stations. Voters were to be

handed two ballot papers. One—printed in the colors of the national tri-

color—for “Yes”; the other—on plain, poor quality, paper—for “No”.