Our principal object is to insure complete and definite peace for Italy and the whole of Europe—an essential condition for a solid beginning of the work of reconstruction.... In order to achieve this complete peace we must, without delay, establish friendly relations with all other peoples, and, without restriction, begin normal relations even with the Russian Government.
The veteran premier, to win the support of the Socialists against the Communists, whose spread was alarming, promised a bill amending the constitution to make declarations of war and treaties and agreements with foreign powers subject to the sanction of Parliament.
It was none too soon. In the middle of September the industrial workers, especially in the north, seized steel factories in a large number of localities and established Soviets. They insisted that the employees should supervise the buying of raw materials, the selling of the finished product, the adjustment of the scale of wages, and the general conditions of work in the factories. The next month there were peasant risings in Sicily. Revolution seemed imminent. But the Government matched its moderation in foreign policy with a conciliatory attitude toward the workers. Instead of using force, Premier Giolitti announced his intention of introducing a measure, sponsored by the cabinet, imposing a form of syndical control upon the manufacturers. It was also proposed to confiscate war profits, increase death-duties and taxes on unearned incomes, and encourage copartnership in industries.
These wise concessions enabled the Giolitti Government to cut the budget deficit by lessening the subsidy on imported cereals. This raised the price of bread, a courageous measure. The General Election of May, 1921, was far more peaceable than had been anticipated. The Socialists lost thirty seats, and the Clericals (Popolari) gained eight. A new party, which had been opposing Socialists and Communists in many places by violence, entered the Chamber with twenty seats; they called themselves Fascisti. The majority of the Cabinet in the new Chamber was so small that Giolitti resigned, and was succeeded by Signor Bonomi. In the autumn of 1921 the Fascisti held a congress at Rome, in which they transformed their organization into a regular political party. During the congress the street fighting that had begun earlier in the year in other cities broke out on a small scale for the first time in Rome. When Parliament reopened on November 24, the Fascisti took issue in a noisy fashion with the Communists.
The Bonomi Cabinet was forced out of office at the beginning of February, 1922, by a combination of circumstances difficult to analyze. The immediate cause was the union of the Democratic coalition with the Socialists, who protested against Bonomi’s rapprochement with the Vatican. But that this was not a real issue soon became evident. The new Cabinet, headed by Signor Facta, failed to win the confidence of the country, which was becoming, under the impulsion of the Fascisti, impatient of government by compromise. Successive cabinets had failed utterly to suggest, much less put into execution, fiscal measures for rehabilitating the finances of Italy. The country was gradually drifting toward anarchy.
In the late summer of 1922, when parliamentary leaders, after the resignation of Signor Facta, appealed to Giolitti to come to Rome to advise the King, a sudden coup d’état put an end to the “rule of the old men.” Fascisti from all over Italy poured into Rome on every train, wearing black shirts and armed, and singing the death-knell of the old political system:
“Giovinezza, giovinezza
Primavera di bellezza.”
Socialists and Communists were quickly cowed. The governmental troops, most of them members or sympathizers of the Fascisti, could not be counted upon. The King had the choice of calling Benito Mussolini, leader of the Fascisti, to form a cabinet, or of losing his throne. The Fascist movement had made such great progress in Italy since 1920 and was so well organized that civil war was out of the question. Almost everybody sympathized with the program of the Fascisti. So Mussolini became premier, and has been the uncontested, though unconstitutional, ruler of Italy for more than a year.
Fascismo is primarily a movement of the youth of Italy, under youthful leaders, most of them born half a century after Giolitti, and none of them in the same generation with the men who were the political leaders of Italy up to the summer of 1922. Despite the pronouncement of the first Rome congress, in the autumn of 1921, Fascismo is not a political party. Its strength as such is negligible. Born at a meeting in Milan in 1919, its purpose, in the words of Mussolini, was defined as a movement “of the spiritual forces of Italy to awaken in Italians the full sense of their own greatness and destiny as a nation.... And it proposes at any cost, even at the cost of Democratic conventions, to crush any tendency that may threaten to drag the Italian people into the morass of Socialism, Bolshevism, and Internationalism.” From the beginning of the movement Mussolini has insisted that the future of the nation must be in the hands of those who are to live that future, and that the time had come to put Italy into her true place among the nations of the world.
From 1920 to 1922 Italy was ripe for revolution. Several parties formed armed bands. The Socialists lost because of Communist excesses and the ungenerous attitude they adopted toward army officers. After all, the war, with its heavy sacrifices, had captured the imagination of the young; and there was much idealism and sincere patriotic feeling among the youth of Italy. They reacted strongly against the Socialist teaching of pacifism and internationalism. The middle class in the cities began to be alarmed at the tendency of the Socialists to assume that only those who worked with their hands were useful members of society and had rights. It was inevitable that the Socialist bullying and terrorism should lead to armed resistance on the part of the more conservative elements. Mussolini, himself of the lower classes, was keen enough to realize that the great mass of the Italian people would welcome a movement directed against the lawlessness of extreme radicalism. He and the principal men he gathered around him to direct Fascismo had all up to the last year of the war been militant Socialists. They had come into prominence through fighting the Government, and the outlaw spirit dominated them. They abhorred politics. And so, although they were sincere syndicalists, they had broken with official Socialism when the movement became a political party, using its energies to win votes.