On 15 January 1921 Carlo went to Livorno to take part in the Seventeenth National Congress of the Socialist Party, which had stumbled from crisis to crisis in recent years. He was just twenty-one, and it says much for his awakening interest in left-wing politics that he chose to attend. ‘Today’, he wrote to Amelia, ‘I really felt a new man coming to life inside me.’ Watching her son’s passion taking shape, Amelia noted that he was a boy filled with ‘specific ideas, grandiose ambitions, so that even the ocean is now beginning to look small to him’. In Livorno, Carlo was introduced to Turati, and for the next six days he watched and listened as Turati’s ‘reformist’ wing, which believed in socialism through peaceful measures and alliances with other parties, battled it out with the massimalisti, who insisted on Marxism and social revolution by any means. By the time the delegates departed, after days of quarrelsome, agitated talk, the Italian Communist Party had been formed. But the splintered left had been severely weakened; all over the country the Fasci di Combattimento had been handed further ammunition for their rallying cry against communists and Bolsheviks.
All-out war was averted, and in May, the Italians were back voting once again; this general election, which saw 105 dead and 431 wounded in the violence that led up to it, resulted in yet another weak alliance. However, Mussolini won 35 seats and he was welcomed into parliament by Giolitti, who hoped thereby to draw the fascists’ sting. Mussolini announced that he would sit on the right, and, in one of his customarily obscure pronouncements, that he would at one and the same time be ‘conservative, progressive, reactionary and revolutionary, accepting the law and going beyond it’. He was determined, he declared, like the old soldier he was, to ‘act rather than to talk’. Lina Waterfield, the correspondent for the London Observer, noted that in the Chamber the new fascist members behaved like conquerors, and that Mussolini had the expression of a circus trainer holding his whip.
Then, on the last Sunday of February 1921, a bomb was thrown into a procession of liberal students on their way to lay a wreath at a ceremony for those who had died in the war. That same day, a squadrista gunman shot dead a socialist union leader, after which fascists and carabinieri paraded together through the streets brandishing trophies looted from the homes of known socialists. Over the next few days, it looked as if Florence was on the edge of civil war. ‘Fascism’, as Amelia wrote later, was beginning to cast ‘its vast menacing shadow’. Barricades went up, buildings were set on fire, fights broke out in the streets. The city became a tinderbox, the slightest spark enough to light a fire. When a young fascist was attacked by strikers as he cycled over the Ponte Sospeso, then beaten to death and his body thrown into the Arno, the army was called in: shops and restaurants were closed, trains stopped running and, for a while, the gas and electricity supplies were cut off.
At the congress of the Fasci di Combattimento in early November 1921, the National Fascist Party was born; it could already count on some 217,000 supporters. The word ‘fascist’ was now squarely in the vocabulary of the day, with its links to antiquity and romanità, and its symbol, the fasces, conferring on the bearer the solemnity of office and authority. A military tone was spreading. Writing to his mother from a short spell with the army as a reservist, Nello said that among his fellow officers there were many who seemed to ‘aspire to a dictatorship’.
By July there were said to be some 6,300 Florentines enrolled in squadre, and the number was growing. The Marchese Dino Perrone Compagni, known as the granduca of Tuscan squadrismo and who personally coordinated raids and selected targets, was losing ground to a more Machiavellian adventurer, Tullio Tamburini, a decorated veteran and itinerant calligrapher from Prato, who, promoted by Dumini, was busy setting up his own Fascio Autonomo. Tamburini was wily, deeply corrupt and renowned for his cruelty; he was also fanatical in his devotion to Mussolini.
It was becoming clear that in Tuscany, perhaps more so than in any other part of the country, the squadre were not only supported by the police, army and judiciary – who saw the fascists as helpful protectors of private property – but that serving policemen and soldiers were taking part themselves in the punitive raids. Sometimes one would be sent from one town to another to help set up and run a fascio. The fasci were flush with agreeable amounts of money, and it was rare to find a squadrista without a good weapon of his own. The men travelled on trains without bothering to buy tickets and ate in restaurants without paying the bill. When they needed a car, they requisitioned one at gunpoint. Another characteristic of the Tuscan fasci was the presence of many members of the same family within each group: in Arezzo the fascio had forty-two members from twenty families. Tuscan fasci, however, were also subject to tempestuous schisms, and nowhere more so than in Florence itself.
By mid-1921, fascism of one version or another controlled vast swathes of Tuscany. The movement had become a safe haven for criminals, for whom membership of a fascio conferred immunity from punishment. Police and carabinieri regularly arrested and punished socialists, but magistrates, whether fascist themselves or fearful for their own safety, went to great lengths not to convict squadristi; trials were marked by procrastination, intimidation of witnesses and mislaid evidence. The Florentine squadristi were generally regarded as the leaders, and so numerous and powerful were they that they regularly sent men to export fascism to neighbouring Lazio and Umbria and even distant Apulia. When Dumini and Tamburini decided that the high price of food should be brought down, an energetic young fascist called Umberto Banchelli was despatched with his men to teach shopkeepers a lesson. Those who proved stubborn were dosed with castor oil and their shops closed down ‘for theft’.
Then, on 29 June 1921, came a night of terrifying violence. The walled and gated town of Grosseto had shown itself to be uncooperative. Banchelli, who regarded himself as a ‘true paladin’, took twenty of his men under cover of darkness and, joined by other squadristi from Siena, Lucca and Arezzo, scaled the walls. That night, fifty-five people died; bookshops, lawyers’ offices, clubs were all destroyed. Burning down left-wing newspaper offices not only gave the premises ‘the aspect of a putrefying corpse’ but had the added advantage of ensuring that no news was published.
Until now, Salvemini and his disciples had been safe, lying low, trying to escape notice, keeping their anger to themselves. The members of the Circolo di Cultura continued to meet, but discreetly. Writing later, Calamandrei noted that they all felt that they were ‘witness to a miserable moral collapse of an entire people’ but that ‘first of all we needed to understand’. But the war was coming closer. On the night of 12 December 1921, Ernesto Rossi’s house was attacked by a band of squadristi and carabinieri. He defended himself with a rifle, and in the ensuing chaos, one carabiniere was killed and two others wounded. Rossi was arrested but eventually released. He got home to find his house ransacked and most of its contents destroyed by fire. The culprits were ‘unknown assailants’.
The violence continued. Faced with the impossibility of restoring calm, the new prime minister accepted Mussolini’s proposal for a pact of reconciliation between the socialists and the fascists, but the plan was rejected by the communists, the anarchists and the former Arditi, and even the socialists seemed more intent on keeping their ideological purity than making peace. Mussolini, wary of the growing power of the fascist leaders in the provinces – men now known as ras after the Ethiopian word for local chieftains – was eager to disarm some of his more independent followers. The ras would not hear of it; they kept their weapons. It was not long before, in the Popolo d’Italia, the accord between socialists and fascists was described as ‘dead and buried’. In its place came yet another proposal for reconciliation, with the intention of imposing some kind of structure on the disparate paramilitary forces. A pact was eventually signed, but it was never observed. It was all too little and it had come too late. Parliamentary democracy had failed to tame the fascists; on the contrary, it had given them legitimacy.
As the summer of 1922 approached, a new alliance
of liberals, democrats and Catholics was sworn in, even feebler than its predecessors. Salvemini, blaming Giolitti for making Mussolini ‘necessary’, continued to hope that Mussolini would eventually destroy himself because ‘è un clown’. In October a general strike was called against ‘the illegality of squadrismo’. Italy stopped. The fascists played their cards well. Orders went out to the different fasci to sit tight, do nothing other than fan fears of a Bolshevic takeover. A sense of menace and anarchy spread. Nello, with his reservists, was sent to guard a station. Turati called what was happening ‘our Caporetto’.
When, after forty-eight hours, the squadre were ordered to attack the strikers, much of the country was with them. Police and carabinieri stood by while trade-union offices cooperative buildings, left-wing political headquarters and the homes of the strikers were destroyed. After the offices of the socialist Avanti! were raided, Mussolini spoke of ‘the great, the beautiful, the inexorable violence’. Two hundred and twenty-one local socialist offices were ransacked. Squadristi occupied buildings, took over the trains and buses. Formed into platoons and companies, armed with machine guns and with small cannons mounted on their trucks, they operated unopposed. In one place, a butcher and his squadra descended on a village with fifty litres of castor oil, rounded up ‘suspects’ and decreed how many glasses of oil each would be made to swallow. The socialist mayor was given three; a municipal councillor one. The butcher measured out the doses. They called it ‘magic exorcism’, purified by castor oil, after which the men could return cleansed to la patria.* Elsewhere, the squadristi painted the beards of their victims with the colours of the Italian flag.
One of their leaders was the young ras Italo Balbo, a showy, well-connected journalist, lawyer and Freemason, who had led a punitive march across the top of Italy and then declared war on left-wing Bologna, where an honest prefect, Cesare Mori, had succeeded in jailing some of the more violent fascist thugs. Mori, pursued by shouts of ‘Mori, mori, tu devi morire!’ – ‘You must die!’ – was hounded out. Carlo had first come across Balbo at his institute in Florence, when he saw him thumping the table after failing an exam, demanding that the professor give him eighteen marks out of twenty. The professor said nothing and fled, pursued by Balbo’s shouts: ‘Either you give me eighteen or it will end badly.’ He got his marks.
Other cities fell to the fascists: Cremona, Viterbo, Novara, Rimini and Ravenna. In Carrara, the ras, Renato Ricci, put his squadristi to purging places of work. Milan, Ancona, Bari, Terni and Varese fell too. In September, Civitavecchia and Savona capitulated. And so it went on. Fascism had become a power, able to intimidate and get rid of hostile prefects, its mounting authority tacitly endorsed by the government in Rome. All over Italy, people were looking to Mussolini and to the provincial ras, now the effective heads of local government, having captured the state machinery from within. Dumini and his Disperata had never worked harder: Florence was now second only to Bologna as the leading urban centre of fascism.
From the calm of their house in Via Giusti, Amelia, Carlo and Nello looked on, appalled. For the first time they thought they detected signs of anti-semitism and Carlo warned that they should start thinking about possible attacks, ‘before it is too late’.
Events were moving so fast that it was hard to see how they could be stopped. And yet, soon after the failed strike, something took place that showed that, had they been united and strong, the forces of democracy might have proved a match for the fascists. A punitive raid of squadristi, with Italo Balbo at its head, advanced on Parma. The questore, who until now had stood up to the fascists, said he did not have enough forces to counter such a raid, and ordered his carabinieri to remain in their barracks. However, the word went out, and the men of Parma, armed with sticks, pitchforks, hunting rifles, lengths of railway track and knives, and helped by the women and children, began to build barricades. By dawn, Parma looked like a battle zone. Look-outs were posted in church belfries. At nine the next morning, Balbo ordered his men to attack. The inhabitants stood firm. Next day, the squadristi appeared to be gaining ground. Singing ‘The Red Flag’ at the tops of their voices, the men of Parma swarmed over the barricades. Thinking that they were merely a vanguard and would be followed by many more, the fascists fell back. From the windows, the women hurled bowls filled with oil and petrol. This continued back and forth for five days. On the sixth day, at 7 o’clock in the morning, the fascists withdrew. From their vantage points, people watched and cheered as lorries, cars, trucks and bicycles were seen streaming out of the city. It was a rout.
But Italy was exhausted, its people cowed by the violence, fearful for their future; they longed for tranquility. In Rome, the government appeared to be paralysed. Some 2,500 people had died in street-fighting and punitive expeditions, and countless more had been injured. By the summer of 1922 the army of squadristi in their black shirts had swollen to around 300,000, and they were now dangerously fragmented and out of control. Against this background, Mussolini summoned to Rome the ten most prominent fascist leaders to discuss mounting a challenge against the ineffectual liberal government. At a second gathering in Milan, on 16 October, Mussolini announced that he had been tentatively offered two ministerial posts. He had refused: he wanted six or nothing.
Three days later, having made Perugia their headquarters, the fascist leaders divided Italy into twelve sectors and began to arrange an uprising. There was a dry run on the 24th, when thousands of squadristi attended a fascist congress and shouted ‘Roma! Roma! Roma!’ The new fascist hymn, ‘Giovinezza’, with its rousing call to fraternal courage and national salvation, was chanted, again and again. The atmosphere was jubilant, the message plain. From Perugia, where the leaders continued to wait, an ultimatum was delivered: it demanded that Mussolini be appointed prime minister. Parliament dithered.
Mussolini and his followers, during the March on Rome
From different corners of the country, travelling by lorry, train, car and bicycle, fascist supporters began to converge on Rome. The weather was bright. Looking out from his embassy window, a French diplomat, François Charles-Roux, noted an ‘extraordinary flowering of shirts’, none of them white: the black of the fascists, the sky-blue of the Nationalists, the green of the agricultural workers, the grey ‘from who knows what grouping’, and just a few reds, worn by those who worshipped Garibaldi. In the cities where opposition was expected – Milan, Turin, Parma – the local fascists quietly, smoothly, took control. In Florence, Tamburini sent his men to occupy the telephone exchange and the main post office. Then he organised for 2,380 men to leave on a special train for Rome.
Mussolini, shrewdly, stayed in Milan and, ostentatiously, went to the theatre. On 29 October came a call from the king, asking him to form a government. That night, he boarded the sleeper for the capital, where a suite had been prepared for him at the Hotel Savoia. His manifesto was ready: it promised ‘the glorious soldiers of the new Italy’ a government worthy of la patria. The next day, wearing a black shirt under his formal suit, and spats and a bowler hat, he called on the recently elected prime minister, Luigi Facta. Outside, his squadristi prowled around the city, singing ‘Giovinezza’ and ‘Eia! Eia! Eia! Alalà!’, D’Annunzio’s battle cry, occasionally looting and brandishing their weapons; some were disgruntled that they had seen no action. They were instructed to remain calm. Rome was described as being in a ‘fever of delight’, and florists had run out of flowers.
Mussolini – the man who had led a rebellion against the state and whose followers continued to commit atrocities – was offered and accepted the post of prime minister, to which he added those of minister of the interior and of foreign affairs, both crucial for managing the secret areas of government. It was to be another coalition – but from which the communists and socialists were excluded. The socialists had in any case been further weakened when, at their Seventeenth Congress not long before, the reformist wing – and Turati – had been expelled. Outside Italy, the March on Rome received surprisingly little att
ention. As The Times in London remarked, mobs were part of the ‘very pulse of this dramatic and theatrical nation’.
On 31 October 1922, at the age of thirty-nine, Mussolini became Italy’s youngest ever prime minister.
Salvemini wrote to a friend in Paris that Italy was ‘on the verge of madness’. Turati continued to call for a united front against the ‘dictatorship’, saying that he would happily gang up with the devil, ‘if only fascism could be defeated’. Luigi Albertini’s prestigious Corriere della Sera, which had written a sharp attack on the fascists, fell silent after its offices were invaded by squadristi: there was no point in writing, he said, if every thought would now be ‘mutilated’. Not everyone shared their despair. There had been 86 ministers of education and 88 ministers of justice in just 61 years of liberal government: many found it easier to see events as yet one more government crisis, with its attendant change of cast.
It could, of course, have been otherwise. Against the estimated 25,000 Blackshirts, uncoordinated and often poorly led, stood a trained army of 28,000 regular soldiers ready to defend Rome. But the vacillating king, who had at first been persuaded to declare martial law, changed his mind and refused to sign the decree; both the powerful Duke d’Aosta, a popular and courageous soldier during the war, and the queen mother were on the side of the fascists; the new Pope, the Milanese Pius XI, was intent on strengthening the power and prestige of the Vatican; and the socialists and liberals had lost their way. With almost no violence and almost no opposition, a coup d’état had effectively taken place. Only much later would it be realised that the threat of a Bolshevik takeover, cleverly fanned by the fascists, had in fact been grossly exaggerated. Recalling an earlier assault on the city, a Catholic priest observed: ‘We, in 1870, defended Rome far better.’
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 11