The national elections of November 1919 were the most significant in Italy since the political and territorial unification of the country in 1870.
They were the first elections to take place under conditions approaching mass political democracy. All adult males had the vote. The electoral law of August 1919 introduced proportional representation with large multimember constituencies replacing the pre-war first-past-the-post, single-member constituency system.
These elections precipitated a crisis in the country’s parliamentary system. Italy’s first experience of mass democratic politics converged with a period of uninterrupted political, social and economic disturbances arising from the impact of an internally divisive war and a difficult transition from war to peace. Much of this opening chapter looks at how the elections provided the context for the emergence and rise of Fascism, initially an effect and then a cause of the political crisis they opened up.
The emergence of mass democracy was a dramatic challenge to the practice and management of oligarchic liberal parliamentary politics which had developed from unification to the eve of the First World War. From 1870 to the granting of near-universal adult male suffrage in 1912, national parliamentary institutions were raised on a narrow base of political participation. The electoral system reflected very real concerns among the country’s rulers – the liberal nationalist minority drawn from the educated and propertied middle class and the liberal aristocracy – about the survival and cohesion of the newly unified state.
They faced initially endemic disorder and criminality in the south, which was worsened by the impact of unification. For the southern peasants
and artisans, the new nation-state was a predatory one, imposing northern Piedmontese institutions and economic policies. These brought higher taxes, conscription and internal free trade, which destroyed previously protected southern industry. Banditry and crime in the south had always fed on peasant hostility to the exactions of the state. There was also the longer-term problem of the Catholic church’s official hostility to the Italian nation-state, based on the Papacy’s claim that unified Italy had usurped its central Italian possessions, which were seen as the guarantee of the church’s independence in the fulfilment of the universal mission to minister to all Catholics.
The evolution of parliamentary politics both mirrored and reinforced the mutual isolation of ‘legal’ Italy, the Italy of parliament, government and the state apparatus, and ‘real’ Italy of the mass of the population.
‘Real’ Italy was politically excluded by the limited franchise and the Pope’s non expedit decree of 1874 banning Catholics from participating in national politics as either ‘electors’ or ‘elected’. From the 1880s, governments were cobbled together through a process of trasformismo, which sprang from the practice of prime minister-designates co-opting their apparent political rivals into government and making in turn their parliamentary followings part of the new governmental majority. In blurring political differences, trasformismo at best represented a kind of liberal parliamentary consensus for the defence of liberal institutions and the political hegemony of the liberal political class against those forces, Catholic, democratic and Socialist, which threatened the disintegration of the state. At worst, trasformismo perpetuated government by corrupt parliamentary oligarchies.
One of the essential lubricants and guarantors of trasformismo was the promise of ministerial office, which opened up patronage, favours and influence to parliamentary supporters of the government and their small electorate. The other was the political and electoral interference of the prefects, the most important state officials in the provinces, who essen-tially brokered the relationship of interest linking government, parlia-mentary deputy and electors. Single-member constituencies and a limited franchise obviously facilitated the operation of the system, which was particularly effective in delivering the southern vote. Deputies repre-senting the south and the islands were the basic voting fodder for the parliamentary majorities of successive governments.
The workings of the parliamentary and electoral system became both cause and effect of the widening gap between the country and its formally liberal political institutions. Trasformismo certainly entrenched, if
it did not create, the disparity between the political and economic develop-ment of northern and southern Italy. The price exacted by the southern deputies for their parliamentary support was that government should maintain and not challenge existing socio-economic structures and control of local government in the south, to which the deputy and his electors were inextricably linked. This effectively precluded any reform of the latifundia, the large, poorly farmed estates prevalent in many areas of the south.
The backwardness of the south was essentially built into the function-ing of Italy’s parliament.
‘Transformistic’ practices also reduced parliament to a political cipher and helped to make the government and the state administration, rather than parliament, the focus of meaningful political activity. Man-aged elections and a largely docile parliamentary majority composed of southern deputies trading votes in parliament for government favours made for ‘bland parliamentary dictatorships’1 and the relative absence of political conflict in parliament over issues. Such a situation similarly inhibited, by making unnecessary, the formation of party organisations among liberals at either the constituency or the parliamentary level.
Since elections could be made and parliamentary majorities created so easily, liberal deputies had no need for party ties or support. They rather gathered themselves loosely in regionally based parliamentary groups and around leading politicians likely to be heads or members of governments.
Parliament, in other words, was not the centre of political activity of the country at large, but represented the interests of the liberal political class. An electoral and parliamentary system based on a limited suffrage, the fixing of elections and trasformismo could not reflect and represent divisions and conflicts within the nation as a whole. As a result oppos-itional movements to the left and right organised largely outside parliament and did not even really see parliament as a channel for the articulation and resolution of their interests and grievances. Catholic, Socialist and later, nationalist programmes were systematically opposed to parliamentary forms of government and were alternatives to them. If there was an inherent ‘crisis of the liberal state’, then this was it: the problem, intensifying with the growth of socialism from the 1890s, of how to integrate popular forces into the political and parliamentary processes of the nation.
The issue was confronted by Giovanni Giolitti, Prime Minister at various points between 1903 and 1914. He attempted to narrow the growing alienation of parliament from country by harnessing or neutralising
popular movements whose strengths and interests were extra- and anti-parliamentary, without undermining the political hegemony of liberal élites. He encouraged a limited de facto abrogation of the papal veto on Catholic political participation by getting Catholics to vote with and for liberals against Socialists in ‘clerico-moderate’ electoral alliances. By intro-ducing social reforms, and urging the prefects to soften the use of the wide discretionary powers given to the police in illiberal and repressive legislation, he sought to strengthen reformists against revolutionaries in the Socialist Party. To this end, Giolitti also adopted an unprecedented stance of governmental neutrality and mediation in labour disputes of an economic rather than political nature.
Giolitti’s flexibility had its limits: his openness towards some Catholics and some Socialists was still a form of trasformismo and did not imply any fundamental changes in liberal parliamentary and electoral practice to accommodate new popular forces. Giolitti had a reformist strategy in the industrialising and developing north. This complemented and was made possible by the continuation of the customary methods of coercion, patronage and clientelism used to control southern politics and ensure the support of southern deputies for the government in office.
Characteristically, Giolitti’s concession of near-universal adult male suffrage in 1912 was part of a package to co-opt reformist Socialists into his government. Its democratising impact in the 1913 general elections was contained by the usual Giolittian holding operation: an anti-socialist electoral pact with the Catholics, and the clientelistic management of elections in the south. Giolitti’s pre-war reformism was finally broken and discredited by Socialist opposition to participation in government and to the Libyan War of 1911–12, which saw the revolutionary wing triumph over the reformists at the 1912 party congress. ‘Red Week’ in June 1914, marked by an antimilitarist general strike and a series of local popular insurrections, seemed to indicate the futility and danger of meeting social unrest and revolutionary agitation with Giolittian reformist methods.
This essentially political analysis of what happened in post-unification Italy points to a flawed process of national state formation after 1870.
Such a view implicitly runs counter to Croce’s more optimistic reading of Italy’s pre-war political development which has the effect of making Fascism an aberrant interruption of that development rather than an outcome of its imperfections. The alienation in liberal Italy of the mass of the people from the men and institutions which governed them would later be used by the Fascist regime to justify its positioning of
itself in recent Italian history as the force ‘completing’ the Risorgimento and
‘making’ Italians through the masses’ subordination to a powerful state.
By 1914, the problem of the popular masses’ involvement in national political affairs was evident enough, but not that its resolution would take the form of Fascism.
Yet some historians do seem to take matters in this direction, and in so doing, distance themselves even further from the Crocean idea of Fascism as ‘parenthesis’, and from the view that the real catalyst to the emergence of Fascism in Italy was the experience of the First World War.
The French intellectual historian, Zeev Sternhell, has tried to argue that as an ideology, fascism originated in pre-war France. He says that it emerged before the outbreak of the war as a fully-fledged, coherent ideology synthesising the two apparently polar ideological opposites, nationalism and socialism, the ‘socialism’ coming mainly from an anti-materialist reworking of Marxist socialism by the French thinker, Georges Sorel, and the revolutionary syndicalists he influenced. Sternhell has extended from pre-war France to pre-war Italy the view that fascism had a history before it had a name, that a fascist ideology existed before any political movement embodying that ideology, appearing to suggest that a similar germination of ‘fascist’ ideas occurred in liberal Italy.
Sternhell’s work is congruent with, though not necessarily identical to, a set of studies of the early twentieth-century intellectual and cultural ante-cedents to Italian Fascism, which indicate similar connections between ideas developed before the war and those of Fascism.
What can be made of these interesting and problematic developments in the study of the historical origins of Fascism? It does seem logically and historically odd to separate the ideology from the movement and to suggest that there was an already fully articulated ideology searching, as it were, for a movement. A Fascist movement and Fascist ideology presumably co-existed; they appeared at the same time as each other.
Only when Fascism emerged as a political movement did the ideological synthesis happen and become an observable phenomenon. But this does not rule out the fertilisation of the Fascist movement by ideas emerging in the pre-war period.
There was a European-wide cultural and intellectual ‘revolt’ in the 1890s and early 1900s. In Italy, as in France, this ranged a significant minority of the country’s educated ‘intelligentsia’ against the then domin-ant ways of thinking about and perceiving the world which assumed that everything was knowable through the use of human reason, rejecting metaphysical speculation for the ‘truth’ of empirically proven and tested
‘facts’. The intellectual non-conformists, in Italy as elsewhere, resented what they saw as the boring materialism and lack of ‘soul’ of their emerging urban, industrial, ‘scientific’ mass societies, and drew on the findings of the new social sciences, themselves, of course, signs of the dominant ration-ality of knowledge, which were exposing the basic irrationration-ality, and psycho-logical and emotional drives to much of human behaviour and actions.
Two significant intellectual and political influences on non-conformist opinion should be mentioned here, since practically every fascist leader of the inter-war period, including the ‘first’ fascist, Benito Mussolini, read them or read about them in some form or another, and cited them as having an impact on their political thinking and conduct. Gustave Le Bon’s work on the psychology of crowds seemed to demonstrate that what inspired people as a mass to collective action were their emotions and feelings, not rational discourse and argument. The way for a politician to reach people, then, was by tapping into their subconscious will and soul, not by trying to convince them of the logic of his case. Georges Sorel, reacting against what he condemned as reformist Socialist parties’
capitulation to democratic parliamentary politics and in order to recover socialism’s revolutionary ‘soul’, emphasised the need for violence in smashing the bourgeois order, which denoted the will to act, the force of people’s emotional attachment to socialist revolution. He thought that the same mobilising and energising function would also be achieved by the use of political ‘myths’, that is, visionary and inspir-ational sets of core beliefs felt in the popular subconscious and conveyed by word and images. As adapted by Mussolini and other fascists, the popular pull of the ‘myth’ was its capacity to evoke a mass response and inspire political action, not necessarily in its objective ‘truth’ or ‘reality’.
The counter-cultural ‘revolt against reason’ was fed into the activities of several political or cultural movements and personalities in pre-war Italy.
They all specifically targeted the Giolittian ‘system’ as the embodiment of the safe, small-minded ‘little Italy’ (Italietta), consigned to being an inter-national nonentity in a ‘social Darwinist’ world of the growing global economic, military and imperial rivalry among the world’s industrial and industrialising powers at the turn of the twentieth century. The Italian Futurists, attempting to bridge politics and culture, played politics as art, celebrating in iconoclastic public displays and gestures the dynamism, speed and exhilaration of the modern machine age, con-demning everything that was ‘past’, old, established and traditional.
Their glorification of violence and of the ‘beauty’ of war as the supreme arbiter of individual and national worth was shared in a rather more
placid way by intellectuals writing for a pre-war journal in Florence, La Voce, who looked to war and empire to realise the then inadequate spiritual and cultural national consciousness-building among Italians.
The self-dramatising hyperbolic nationalist poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Nietzschean hero figure personified, gave his presence and his poetry to every nationalistic campaign going, in his one-man mission to ‘educate’
the Italian people into a national consciousness.
The personal, political and ideological connections between these cultural movements and personalities, and Mussolini and Fascism, were undeniable. The Futurists joined the early Fascist movement in 1919–20, and even though many of them were alienated by the movement’s apparent move to the right, its founder and leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, stayed on to become an important, even iconic, figure in the cultural politics of the Fascist regime. D’Annunzio was both Mussolini’s ally and his only serious rival for leadership of the nationalist camp after the First World War. Mussolini read and collaborated on La Voce before the war, while still a socialist leader, and incorporated some of its counter-cultural approaches into his idea of revolutionary socialism.
This, perhaps, is the point. The pre-war ‘revolt against reason’ provided ideas on which post-war Fascist leaders and the movement drew on setting out their political stall as Fascists. You might also be able to say that some of a generation of university-educated young men were influenced by pre-war intellectual and cultural developments which pushed them in nationalistic directions and opened them up to the appeal of the post-war Fascist movement. But in the end, Sternhell’s argument for an ideological fascism emerging by 1914 is not persuasive in the case of Italy, nor indeed, in the case of France. Whatever Mussolini’s pre-war contacts with La Voce, you cannot plausibly transform Mussolini, or indeed La Voce, into an ‘ideological’ fascist or even prehistoric
‘proto-fascists’, at this point in time. Neither can we use the same labels to categorise in 1914 the revolutionary syndicalists who joined the Fascist movement at its founding in 1919, and the Nationalists who even-tually merged into the Fascist Party in 1923, shortly after Mussolini came to power. The syndicalists’ ideological transition from revolution-ary syndicalism to ‘national syndicalism’ by 1918 was the result of their reading of the First World War experience in Italy. It was during the war that Mussolini and the Nationalists came closer together on both internal and international issues. What bridged Mussolini’s stance as a revolu-tionary socialist in 1914 and his re-invention as the first fascist in 1919 was the First World War. As for those pre-war disaffected young
middle-class would-be intellectuals, they were also the combatant generation, and their service as front line junior officers during the war was probably as, if not more formative, than exposure to the counter-cultural ideas of the decade before the war. It was, in other words, the war experience which was decisive in making some, and by no means all, of the pre-war critics and opponents of giolittismo into Fascists.