Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (20 page)

He even terrified Mussolini, who always disliked large-scale violence, especially violence for its own sake, and wrote and spoke against it.
¹⁶⁸
But the expansion of fascism, which pushed him and thirty-five other deputies into parliament in May 1921, had also placed him, and other former socialists, in a minority within the movement. At the fascist Congress of Rome the same year, he was forced to compromise. In return for being made
Duce
, he agreed to violence, and 1922 was the year of fascist terror. In effect, the
authorities connived while a private, party army began an internal conquest. In city after city, the town halls were stormed, socialist councils driven out of office by force, and local prefects, who wished to use the police to resist fascist illegality, were dismissed. The parliamentarians could not agree to form a strong government under Giolitti, who would have snuffed Mussolini out – the
Duce
would not have fought the state – because the Vatican effectively prevented the Church-influenced parties and the moderate socialists from coalescing. The new Communist Party (as later in Germany) actually hoped for a fascist regime, which it thought would precipitate a Marxist revolution.
¹⁶⁹
When Balbo seized Ravenna in July 1922 the socialists responded by calling a General Strike, which was a disastrous failure.

Italy was not a happy or a well-governed country. It had appalling poverty, the highest birth-rate in Europe and, after Germany, one of the highest inflation-rates. The
risorgimento
had brought disappointment instead of the promised land. The war and its victories had divided Italy rather than united it. The parliamentary regime was grievously corrupt. The monarchy was unloved. The state itself had been at daggers with the Church since 1871, and was denounced from every pulpit on Sundays. The public services were breaking down. There was genuine fear of a Red Terror, for the Catholic newspapers were full of Lenin’s atrocities and the Russian famine. Mussolini was not personally identified with violence. On the contrary: he seemed to many to be the one to stop it. He had become a wonderful public speaker. He had learnt from d’Annunzio the gift of conducting a quasi-operatic dialogue with the crowd (’A
chi l’Italia?’
‘A
noi!’).
But he was not just a demagogue. His speeches specialized in the wide-ranging philosophical reflections Italians love. Liberals from Benedetto Croce downwards attended his meetings. By the early autumn of 1922 his oratory had acquired a confident and statesmanlike ring. He was now in secret contact with the palace, the Vatican, the army, the police and big business. What, they all wanted to know, did he want? At Udine he told them, in the last of a series of major speeches given all over the country: ‘Our programme is simple: we wish to govern Italy.’
¹⁷⁰
He would govern Italy as it had never been governed since Roman times: firmly, fairly, justly, honestly, above all efficiently.

On 16 October 1922 Mussolini decided to force the issue, believing that if he waited, Giolitti, the one man he feared, might steal his role. He arranged for a march on Rome for the end of the month, by four divisions totalling 40,000 blackshirted men. Many army and police commanders agreed not to fire on them, and his paper, Il
Popolo d’Italia
, carried the banner:
I grigioverdi fraternizzano
con le Camicie Nere!
Mussolini had a lifelong capacity for hovering uneasily between grandeur and farce. By the time his ill-equipped, badly clothed and unfed army had halted outside Rome, in pouring rain, on the evening of 28 October, it did not present a very formidable spectacle. The government, though weak, had a Rome garrison of 28,000 under a reliable commander and it agreed to proclaim a state of emergency. But Rome buzzed with rumours and misinformation. The little King Victor Emmanuel, tucked up in the Quirinale Palace, was told only 6,000 ill-disciplined troops faced a horde of 100,000 determined fascists. He panicked and refused to sign the decree, which had to be torn down from the walls where it had just been posted. At that point the government lost heart.

Mussolini, for an impatient man, played his cards skilfully. When he was telephoned in Milan by the King’s
ADC
, General Cittadini, and offered partial power in a new ministry, he simply replaced the receiver. The next day, 29 October, he graciously consented to form his own government, provided the invitation by phone was confirmed by telegram. The wire duly came, and that evening he went to Milan Station in state, wearing his black shirt, to catch the night-sleeper to Rome. As it happened, the wife of the British ambassador, Lady Sybil Graham, was also on the train. She saw Mussolini, who was surrounded by officials, impatiently consult his watch and turn fiercely on the station-master, ‘I want the train to leave exactly on time’, he said. ‘From now on, everything has got to function perfectly.’
¹⁷¹
Thus a regime, and a legend, were born.

In the last decade of his life Mussolini became an increasingly tragic, even grotesque, figure. Looking back from this later perspective it is hard to grasp that, from the end of 1922 to the mid-1930s, he appeared to everyone as a formidable piece on the European chess-board. Once installed, he did not make any of Lenin’s obvious mistakes. He did not create a secret police, or abolish parliament. The press remained free, opposition leaders at liberty. There were some murders, but fewer than before the
coup.
The Fascist Grand Council was made an organ of state and the Blackshirts were legalized, giving an air of menace to the April 1924 elections, which returned a large fascist majority. But Mussolini saw himself as a national rather than a party leader. He said he ruled by consent as well as force.
¹⁷²
He seems to have possessed not so much the will to power as the will to office. He wanted to remain there and become respectable; he wished to be loved.

In 1924 the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the most vigorous of the opposition deputies, ended these illusions. Mussolini was generally believed to be responsible.
¹⁷³
Deputies had been killed before, and it is curious that this particular crime aroused such fury in Italy and raised
eyebrows abroad. It did Mussolini great damage, some of it permanent, and became for him a kind of Rubicon, cutting any remaining links with the socialists and liberals and driving him into the arms of his extremists. In a very characteristic mixture of arrogance and fatalistic despair, he announced the beginning of fascism in a notorious speech delivered on 3 January 1925. Opposition newspapers were banned. Opposition leaders were placed in
confino
on an island. As Mussolini put it, opposition to the monolithic nation was superfluous – he could find any that was needed within himself and in the resistance of objective forces – a bit of verbal legerdemain that even Lenin might have envied.
¹⁷⁴
He produced a resounding totalitarian formula, much quoted, admired and excoriated then and since: ‘Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ A whole series of ‘fascist laws’ were drawn up, some constitutional, some punitive, some positive, the last being the
Leggi di riforma sociale
, which purported to bring the Corporate State into existence.

But there was always something nebulous about Italian fascism. Its institutions, like the Labour Charter, the National Council of Corporations and the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, never seemed to get much purchase on the real Italy. Mussolini boasted, ‘We control the political forces, we control the moral forces, we control the economic forces. Thus we are in the midst of the corporative fascist state.’
¹⁷⁵
But it was a state built of words rather than deeds. After all, if Mussolini’s totalitarian definition represented reality, how was it he was able to come to terms with the Church, which was certainly ‘outside the state’, and even sign a concordat with the Vatican, something none of his parliamentary predecessors had been able to do? He once defined fascism as ‘organized, concentrated, authoritarian democracy on a national basis’.
¹⁷⁶
Yes: but what was all this authority
for?
One senses that Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a Marxist, albeit a heretical one; and to him ‘revolution’ was meaningless without large-scale expropriation, something the bulk of his followers and colleagues did not want. So the fascist Utopia tended to vanish round the corner, leaving only the despotism. As late as 1943, just before the débâcle, an article in
Critica fascista
by the young militant Vito Panunzio declared that the regime could still win provided it at last brought about the ‘fascist revolution’.
¹⁷⁷
By then Mussolini had been in apparently dictatorial power for more than two decades.

But if Mussolini did not practise fascism, and could not even define it with any precision, it was equally mystifying to its opponents, especially the Marxists. Sophisticated Anglo-Saxon liberals
could dismiss it as a new kind of mountebank dictatorship, less bloodthirsty than Leninism and much less dangerous to property. But to the Marxists it was much more serious. By the mid-1920s there were fascist movements all over Europe. One thing they all had in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind. They fought revolution with revolutionary means and met the Communists on the streets with their own weapons. As early as 1923 the Bulgarian peasant regime of Aleksandr Stamboliski, which practised ‘agrarian Communism’, was ousted by a fascist
putsch.
The Comintern, the new international bureau created by the Soviet government to spread and co-ordinate Communist activities, called on the ‘workers of the world’ to protest against the ‘victorious Bulgarian fascist clique’, thus for the first time recognizing fascism as an international phenomenon. But what exactly was it? There was nothing specific about it in Marx. It had developed too late for Lenin to verbalize it into his march of History. It was unthinkable to recognize it for what it actually was – a Marxist heresy, indeed a modification of the Leninist heresy itself. Instead it had to be squared with Marxist-Leninist historiography and therefore shown to be not a portent of the future but a vicious flare-up of the dying bourgeois era. Hence after much lucubration an official Soviet definition was produced in 1933: fascism was ‘the unconcealed terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements of finance capital’.
¹⁷⁸
This manifest nonsense was made necessary by the failure of ‘scientific’ Marxism to predict what was the most striking political development of the inter-war years.

In the meantime, Mussolini’s Italy was now an empirical fact, just like Lenin’s Russia, inviting the world to study it, with a view to imitation, perhaps, or avoidance. The historian of modern times is made constantly aware of the increasingly rapid interaction of political events over wide distances. It was as though the development of radio, the international telephone system, mass-circulation newspapers and rapid forms of travel was producing a new conception of social and political holism corresponding to new scientific perceptions of the universe and matter. According to Mach’s Principle, formulated first at the turn of the century and then reformulated as part of Einstein’s cosmology, not only does the universe as a whole influence local, terrestrial events but local events have an influence, however small, on the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics, developed in the 1920s, indicated that the same principle applied at the level of micro-quantities. There were no independent units, flourishing apart from the rest of the universe.
¹⁷⁹
‘Splendid isolation’ was no longer a practicable state policy, as even the United States had implicitly admitted in 1917. There were many who welcomed
this development, and saw the League of Nations as a response to what they felt was a welcome new fact of life. But the implications of global political holism were frightening as well as uplifting. The metaphor of disease was apt. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century had migrated over the course of more than fifty years and there were some areas it had never reached. The influenza virus of 1918 had enveloped the world in weeks and penetrated almost everywhere. The virus of force, terror and totalitarianism might prove equally swift and ubiquitous. It had firmly implanted itself in Russia. It was now in Italy.

If Lincoln Steffens could detect a working future even in Lenin’s Moscow, what might not be discerned in totalitarian Rome? Mussolini could not or would not conjure a new fascist civilization out of his cloudy verbal formulae. But what he liked doing and felt able to do, and indeed was gifted at doing, was big construction projects. He tackled malaria, then the great, debilitating scourge of central and southern Italy.
¹⁸⁰
The draining of the Pontine Marshes was a considerable practical achievement, as well as a symbol of fascist energy. Mussolini encouraged Balbo, a keen pilot, to build a large aviation industry, which won many international awards. Another fascist boss, the Venetian financier Giuseppe Volpi, created a spectacular industrial belt at Mughera and Mestre on the mainland. He also, as Minister of Finance, revalued the lira, which became a relatively strong currency.
¹⁸¹
Train, postal and phone services all markedly improved. There were no strikes. Corruption continued, perhaps increased; but it was less blatant and remarked upon. In Sicily, the Mafia was not destroyed, but it was effectively driven underground. Above all, there was no more violence on the streets. Some of these accomplishments were meretricious, others harmful in the long run. But taken together they looked impressive, to foreigners, to tourists, to many Italians too. No Utopia was emerging in Italy, but the contrast with hungry, terrorized Russia was striking. To those north of the Alps, who rejected alike the Bolshevism of the East and the liberalism of the West, the Italian renaissance seemed to offer a third way.