At any rate because of these considerations, I decided to go to Cannes. I collected ten thousand lire for necessary expenses. My brother, Arnaldo, went to convert them at a money changer and brought me the equivalent in French money, which amounted to no more than five thousand, two hundred francs. Though I had followed the course of foreign exchange this little personal experience made a deep impression. It made me realize an angular fact; the Italian currency had lost nearly half of its value in comparison to French currency! It was a grave symptom. It was a humiliation. It was a blow to the self respect of a victorious nation, a vexing weathervane; it indicated our progress toward bankruptcy! Up leaped the thought that this situation must be cured by the vital strength of Fascism. It was one of our opportunities; the desperate developments unfortunately had not compelled the government, or political parties, or parliament itself to act. The monstrosity of inflation instead gave to everybody a fatuous, inconsistent, artificial sense of prosperity.
The Cannes conference had no importance; it was a preface for Genoa. It was clothed in an atmosphere of indifference. International meetings had followed each other with tiresome regularity here and there in resorts of Europe which appeared pleasant places to hold meetings. The last reunions had lost interest and were, instead of being important, the object of newspaper satire and of mocking “couplets” in comic reviews. To me, however, the sojourn at Cannes gave a means of extracting personally, from a direct and realistic examination of peoples and events, deep and well-rooted conclusions.
The Cannes conference had provoked a sudden ministerial crisis in France. Briand, whom I interviewed in the course of these days, resigned without waiting for a vote of the Chamber of Deputies. And I, in an article of January 14th, 1922, entitled “After Cannes,” having given due weight to the numerous sharp interrogation marks of the international situation, concluded:
“The unsolved problems, questionings and challenges could be ranged in line to infinity. It is urgent, instead, to take note of the most important lesson of the French crisis. It is a bitter verification. It will bring the masses of the populations who suffer morally and economically to say in their hearts, ‘These gentlemen are either without conscience, or they are powerless and flabby. They either have no wish to make peace or they are not able to make it. A Europe in such terrible spiritual and economic conditions as those of the present must embark on reason or sink. The Europe of to-morrow, broken in divisions of impoverished peoples, may become a colony: two other continents are already high up on the horizon of history!’”
To the plight disclosed by the wide picture of the European horizon unfolding to my eyes, was to be added that due to our domestic troubles, always growing a little worse.
I have always spoken as a journalist, as a politician, as a deputy, of the existence of two Italies. One appeared to me freed from servitude. It was noble, proud, loyal, devoutly dedicated by a bloody sacrifice of war, resolved to be always in the first rank to defend the right, the privilege and the great name of the Italian people. On the other side, however, I saw another Italy, dull to any consciousness of nobility and power, indifferent to origin and traditions, serving obscure “isms,” a slave to apathetic tendencies, cold, egotistic, incapable of gallantry, dead to sacrifice.
In a thousand hardships, in numerous fights, those two Italies were arrayed by immutable destiny one against the other; their opposition was revealed in bloody manifestations, typical of the fierce and final struggle between the Fascisti and their enemies. To see in its right light the character of this antithesis, let us examine some of the typical episodes.
In Pistoia, for instance, a brave officer, Lieutenant Federico Florio, who fought valiantly during the War and who had followed D’Annunzio in Fiume, was treacherously murdered by a deserter anarchist, Cafiero Lucchesi. It was a crime premeditated by a craven to strike down a gallant man. This criminal outrage filled the souls of the Fascisti with utter indignation. The last words of our martyr were simple and solemn, “I am sorry now I will not be able to do something else for my Country.” No more. Then the agony came. I felt that such sacrifices cemented indissolubly the unity of Fascism.
“A formidable cement!” I wrote in my paper. “It binds the Fascisti legions; a sacred and intangible bond keeps close the faithful of the Littorio. It is the sacred bond of our dead. They are hundreds. Youths. Mature men. Not a party in Italy, nor any movement in recent Italian history can be compared to Fascism. Not one ideal has been like the Fascist—consecrated by the blood of so many young souls.
“If Fascism were not a faith, how did it or could it give stoicism and courage to its legions? Only a faith which has reached the heights, only a faith can suggest those words that came out from the lips of Federico Florio, already bloodless and gray. Those words are a document; they are a testament. They are as simple and as grave as a passage from the Gospel.