“If it is a question of lamenting, if it is a question of condemning, if it is a question of regretting the victim, if it is a question of pressing our prosecution of all the guilty and those responsible, we here repeat that this will be done calmly and inexorably. But if from this very sad happening some one seeks to draw an argument for anything but a wider reconciliation of all men on the basis of an accepted and recognised need of national concord—if any one should try to stage upon this tragedy a show of selfish political character for the purpose of attacking the government, it must be known that the government will defend itself at any cost. The government, with undisturbed conscience, sure of having already fulfilled its duty and willing to do it in the future, will adopt the necessary means to crush a trick which, instead of leading to the harmony of Italians, would trouble them with the deepest dissensions and passions.”
These words did not penetrate minds already hardened. And there happened exactly what I had foreseen; the opposition threw themselves on the corpse of Matteotti in order to poison the political life of Italy and to cast calumnies on Fascism both in Italy and abroad.
The course of Italian public life from June till December, 1924, offered a spectacle absolutely unparalleled in the political struggle of any other country. It was a mark of shame and infamy which would dishonor any political group. The press, the meetings, the subversive and anti-Fascist parties of every sort, the false intellectuals, the defeated candidates, the soft-brained cowards, the rabble, the parasites, threw themselves like ravens on the corpse. The arrest of the guilty was not enough. The discovery of the corpse and the sworn statement of surgeons that death had not been due to a crime but had been produced by trauma was not enough.
Instead, the discovery of the corpse in a hedge near Rome, called the Quartarella, unstopped an orgiastic research into the details which is remembered by us under the ignominious name of “Quartarellismo.”
Fortunes were built on the Matteotti tragedy; they speculated on portraits, on medals, on commemorative dates, on electric signs; a subscription was opened by subversive newspapers and even now the accounts are still open.
The opposition parties and their representatives in the chamber retired from Montecitorio and threatened not to participate further in legislative work; to this movement and to those who espoused it was given, by false analogy with the well-known event of Roman history, the name of Aventino. But the Aventino group was here reduced to a grotesque parody, in which hate and nakedness of power now reunited men of the most diverse political complexions. They ranged all the way from Socialists to Liberals, from Democrat-Masons to Populars, who pretended to be called Catholics. Clandestine meetings were held. They abused in every way the liberty of the press and of assembly, in order to destroy Italian life. Fanatical elements waited hour after hour for Fascism to be overthrown. In the background of this ignoble dramatic farce, there stood out the figure of senator Albertini, the happy owner of the newspaper. This man was willing to scrape in the garbage, to listen to all the dirty rogues, to collect the most mendacious pamphlets, trying somehow, sometime, somewhere, to hit at me and at Fascism.
I did not have a moment of doubt or discouragement. I knew the attitudes, postures and poses of these adversaries. I knew that if they could they would have ignobly used the corpse of the Socialist deputy as an anti-Fascist symbol and flag. But their ghoulish politics passed the bounds of my imagination. Besides these speculators, there were those on the timid and flabby fringes of Fascism. They let themselves be led astray by the political atmosphere. They did not perceive that an episode is not the stuff of which history should be made. In the name of a sentimental morality, they were willing to kill a great moral and political probity and knife the welfare of an entire nation.
In this situation there were also many repentant Magdalenes, and many, impelled by the sad habit of many Italians to consider as pure gold the acts and the work of any opposition, hid their Fascist insignia and, trembling, abandoned the Fascist nation, already grown red-hot from a thousand attacks and counter-attacks of its adversaries.
We were going back into the depths of a revolutionary period, with all the excesses of such an abnormal time, all its spites, troubles, and explosions. An atmosphere was formed in which many magistrates, often under Masonic influence, could certainly not give equitable and faultless judgments. Various parties beyond the borders were giving help to the Socialists at home. It was then clear to what extent anti-Fascism was still abroad in certain international zones where Democracy, Socialism and Liberalism had consolidated their weight of patronage, blackmail and parasitism.
All this might have created for a moment, in certain political atmospheres, the illusion that the government had weakened. In December, 1924, at the end of that painful three months, some were calculating the days of life of our ministry. A great hope sprang up in the hearts of the politically hungry. There was, in fact, a miserable maneuvre on the part of the three former presidents of the council; they were able to delude themselves and others. But these professional political men have so little practical sense that they could not understand that with one breath I could have given an order to the Black Shirts which would have overturned once and for all their fancies and their dreams.