The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  Comparison, finally, has little bite at the early stages, for every country with mass politics had a fledgling fascist movement at some point after 1918. Comparison does show that the map of fascist intellectual creativity does not coincide with the map of fascist success. Some observers contend that fascism was invented in France, and attained its fullest intellectual flowering there.110 But fascism did not come close to power in France until after military defeat in 1940, as we will see in more detail below.

  The first to test early fascism at the ballot box was Mussolini. He imagined that his antisocialist but antibourgeois “antiparty" would draw in all the veterans of Italy and their admirers and turn his Fasci di Combattimento into a mass catch-all party. Running for parliament in Milan on November 16, 1919, on the original San Sepolcro program, with its mixture of radical domestic change and expansionist nationalism, he received a total of 4,796 votes out of 315,165.111 Before becoming a major contender in Italian political life, he would have to make adjustments.

  To understand fascism whole, we need to spend as much energy on the later forms as on the beginnings. The adaptations and transformations that mark the path followed by some fascisms from movement to party to regime to final paroxysm will occupy much of the rest of this book.

  CHAPTER 3

  Taking Root

  Successful Fascisms

  Between the two world wars, almost every nation on earth, and certainly all those with mass politics, generated some intellectual current or activist movement akin to fascism. Nearly ubiquitous but mostly ephemeral, movements like the Greyshirts of Iceland1 or the New Guard of New South Wales (Australia)2 would not interest us urgently today had not a few of their kind grown big and dangerous. A few fascist movements became much more successful than the general run of fascist street-corner orators and bullies. By becoming the carriers of substantial grievances and interests, and by becoming capable of rewarding political ambitions, they took root within political systems. A handful of them played major roles in public life. These successful fascisms elbowed a space among the other contending parties or interest groups, and persuaded influential people that they could represent their interests and feelings and fulfill their ambitions better than any conventional party. The early ragtag outsiders thus transformed themselves into serious political forces capable of competing on equal terms with longer-established parties or movements. Their success influenced entire political systems, giving them a more intense and aggressive tone and legitimating open expressions of extreme nationalism, Left-baiting, and racism. This bundle of processes—how fascist parties take root—is the subject of the present chapter.

  Becoming a successful participant in electoral or pressure-group politics forced young fascist movements to focus their words and actions more precisely. It became harder for them to indulge their initial freedom to mobilize a wide range of heterogeneous complaints, and to voice the scattered resentments of everyone (except socialists) who felt aggrieved but unrepresented. They had to make choices. They had to give up the amorphous realms of indiscriminate protest and locate a definite political space 3 in which they could obtain positive practical results. In order to form effective working relations with significant partners, they had to make themselves useful in measurable ways. They had to offer their followers concrete advantages and engage in specific actions whose beneficiaries and victims were obvious.

  These more focused steps forced the fascist parties to make their priorities clearer. At this stage, one can begin to test fascist rhetoric against fascist actions. We can see what really counted. The radical rhetoric never disappeared, of course: as late as June 1940 Mussolini summoned “Proletarian and Fascist Italy" and “the Blackshirts of the Revolution" to “the battlefield against the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the West." 4 As soon as the fascist parties began to take root in concrete political action, however, the selective nature of their antibourgeois rhetoric became clearer.

  It turned out in practice that fascists’ anticapitalism was highly selective.5 Even at their most radical, the socialism that the fascists wanted was a “national socialism": one that denied only foreign or enemy property rights (including that of internal enemies). They cherished national producers.6 Above all, it was by offering an effective remedy against socialist revolution that fascism turned out in practice to find a space. If Mussolini retained some lingering hopes in 1919 of founding an alternative socialism rather than an antisocialism, he was soon disabused of those notions by observing what worked and what didn’t work in Italian politics. His dismal electoral results with a Left-nationalist program in Milan in November 19197 surely hammered that lesson home.

  The pragmatic choices of Mussolini and Hitler were driven by their urge for success and power. Not all fascist leaders had such ambitions. Some of them preferred to keep their movements “pure," even at the cost of remaining marginal. José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange Española, saw his mission as the reconciliation of workers and employers by replacing materialism—the fatal flaw of both capitalism and socialism—with idealism in the service of Nation and Church, though his early death in November 1936 before a Republican firing squad saved him from the hard choices Franco’s success would have forced on him.8 Charles Maurras, whose Action Française was a pioneer of populist anti-Left nationalism, let his followers run for office only once, in 1919, when his chief lieutenant, the journalist Léon Daudet, and a handful of provincial sympathizers were elected to the French Chamber of Deputies. Colonel François de La Rocque’s Croix de Feu disdained elections, but its more moderate successor, the Parti Social Français, began running candidates in by-elections in 1938.9 Ferenc Szálasi, the former staff officer who headed the Hungarian Arrow Cross, refused ever to run for office again after two defeats, and preferred nebulous philosophizing to maneuvers for power.

  Hitler and Mussolini, by contrast, not only felt destined to rule but shared none of the purists’ qualms about competing in bourgeois elections. Both set out—with impressive tactical skill and by rather different routes, which they discovered by trial and error—to make themselves indispensable participants in the competition for political power within their nations.

  Becoming a successful political player inevitably involved losing followers as well as gaining them. Even the simple step of becoming a party could seem a betrayal to some purists of the first hour. When Mussolini decided to change his movement into a party late in 1921, some of his idealistic early followers saw this as a descent into the soiled arena of bourgeois parliamentarism. 10 Being a party ranked talk above action, deals above principle, and competing interests above a united nation. Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life—an “antiparty" 11—capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle. José Antonio described the Falange Española as “a movement and not a party—indeed you could almost call it an anti-party . . . neither of the Right nor of the Left."12 Hitler’s NSDAP, to be sure, had called itself a party from the beginning, but its members, who knew it was not like the other parties, called it “the movement" (die Bewegung). Mostly fascists called their organizations movements 13 or camps14 or bands15 or rassemblements 16 or fasci: brotherhoods that did not pit one interest against others, but claimed to unite and energize the nation.

  Conflicts over what fascist movements should call themselves were relatively trivial. Far graver compromises and transformations were involved in the process of becoming a significant actor in a political arena. For that process involved teaming up with some of the very capitalist speculators and bourgeois party leaders whose rejection had been part of the early movements’ appeal. How the fascists managed to retain some of their antibourgeois rhetoric and a measure of “revolutionary" aura while forming practical political alliances with parts of the establishment constitutes one of the mysteries of their success.

  Becoming a succ
essful contender in the political arena required more than clarifying priorities and knitting alliances. It meant offering a new political style that would attract voters who had concluded that “politics" had become dirty and futile. Posing as an “antipolitics" was often effective with people whose main political motivation was scorn for politics. In situations where existing parties were confined within class or confessional boundaries, like Marxist, smallholders’, or Christian parties, the fascists could appeal by promising to unite a people rather than divide it. Where existing parties were run by parliamentarians who thought mainly of their own careers, fascist parties could appeal to idealists by being “parties of engagement," in which committed militants rather than careerist politicians set the tone. In situations where a single political clan had monopolized power for years, fascism could pose as the only nonsocialist path to renewal and fresh leadership. In such ways, fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European “catch-all" parties of “engagement,"17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants.

  Comparison acquires some bite at this point: only some societies experienced so severe a breakdown of existing systems that citizens began to look to outsiders for salvation. In many cases fascist establishment failed; in others it was never really attempted. Fully successful fascist implantation occurred in only a few cases in Europe between the wars. I propose to discuss three cases in this chapter: two successful and one unsuccessful. Then we will be in a better position to see clearly what conditions helped fascist movements to become implanted in a political system.

  (1) The Po Valley, Italy, 1920–22

  Mussolini was saved from oblivion after the nearly terminal disaster of the elections of November 1919 by a new tactic invented by some of his followers in rural northern Italy: squadrismo. Some of his more aggressive disciples there formed strong-arm squads, squadre d’azione, and applied the tactics they had learned as soldiers to attacking the internal enemies (in their view) of the Italian nation. Marinetti and some other friends of Mussolini had set the example in their April 1919 raid on Avanti.18

  The squadre started their career in the nationalist cauldron of Trieste, a polyglot Adriatic port taken from Austria-Hungary by Italy according to the terms of the postwar settlement. To establish Italian supremacy in this cosmopolitan city, a fascist squad burned the Balkan Hotel, where the Slovene Association had its headquarters, in July 1920, and intimidated Slovenes in the street.

  Mussolini’s Blackshirts were not alone in using direct action for nationalist aims in postwar Italy. Mussolini’s most serious rival was the writer-adventurer Gabriele D’Annunzio. In 1919–20 D’Annunzio was, in fact, a far greater celebrity than the leader of the tiny Fascist sect. He was already notorious in Italy not only for his bombastic plays and poems and his extravagant life, but also for leading air raids over Austrian territory during World War I (in which he lost an eye).

  In September 1919, D’Annunzio led a band of nationalists and war veterans into the Adriatic port of Fiume, which the peacemakers at Versailles had awarded to the new state of Yugoslavia. Declaring Fiume the “Republic of Carnaro," D’Annunzio invented the public theatricality that Mussolini was later to make his own: daily harangues by the Comandante from a balcony, lots of uniforms and parades, the “Roman salute" with arm outstretched, the meaningless war cry “Eia, eia, alalà.”

  As the occupation of Fiume turned into an international embarrassment for Italy, D’Annunzio defied the government in Rome and his more conservative nationalist backers drifted away. The Fiume regime drew its support increasingly from the nationalist Left. Alceste De Ambris, for example, an interventionist syndicalist and friend of Mussolini, drafted its new constitution, the Charter of Carnaro. D’Annunzian Fiume became a kind of martial populist republic whose chief drew directly upon a popular will affirmed in mass rallies, and whose labor unions sat alongside management in official “corporations" that were supposed to manage the economy together. An international “Fiume League" attempted to assemble the national liberation movements of the world as a rival to the League of Nations.19

  Mussolini uttered only mild protests when the old master political fixer Giovanni Giolitti, once again prime minister of Italy, at the age of eighty, negotiated a settlement with Yugoslavia in November 1920 that made Fiume an international city, and then sent the Italian navy at Christmas to disperse D’Annunzio’s volunteers. This did not mean that Mussolini was uninterested in Fiume. Once in power, he forced Yugoslavia to recognize the city as Italian in 1924.20 But Mussolini’s ambitions gained from D’Annunzio’s humiliation. Adopting many of the Comandante ’s mannerisms, Mussolini managed to draw back to his own movement many veterans of the Fiume adventure, including Alceste De Ambris.

  Mussolini succeeded where D’Annunzio failed by more than mere luck or style. Mussolini was sufficiently thirsty for power to make deals with leading centrist politicians. D’Annunzio gambled all or nothing on Fiume, and he was more interested in the purity of his gestures than in the substance of power. He was also fifty-seven years old in 1920. Once in office, Mussolini easily bought him off with the title of prince of Monte Nevoso and a castle on Lake Garda.21 D’Annunzio’s failure is a warning to those who wish to interpret fascism primarily in terms of its cultural expressions. Theater was not enough.

  Above all Mussolini bested D’Annunzio by serving economic and social interests as well as nationalist sentiment. He made his Blackshirts available for action against socialists as well as against the South Slavs of Fiume and Trieste. War veterans had hated the socialists since 1915 for their “antinational" stance during the war. Big planters in the Po Valley, Tuscany, Apulia, and other regions of large estates hated and feared the socialists for their success at the end of the war in organizing the braccianti,or landless laborers, to press for higher wages and better working conditions. Squadrismo was the conjunction of these two hatreds.

  Following their victory in the first postwar election (November 1919), the Italian socialists had used their new power in local government to establish de facto control over the agricultural wage-labor market. In the Po Valley in 1920, every farmer who needed workmen for planting or harvesting had to visit the socialist Labor Exchange. The Labor Exchanges made the most of their new leverage. They forced the farmers to hire workers year-round rather than only seasonally, and with better wages and working conditions. The farmers were financially squeezed. They had invested considerable sums before the war in transforming Po Valley marshlands into cultivable farms; their cash crops earned little money in the difficult conditions of the Italian postwar economy. The socialist unions also undermined the farmers’ personal status as masters of their domains.

  Frightened and humiliated, the Po Valley landowners looked frantically for help.22 They did not find it in the Italian state. Local officials were either socialists themselves, or little inclined to do battle with them. Prime Minister Giolitti, a true practitioner of laissez-faire liberalism, declined to use national forces to break strikes. The big farmers felt abandoned by the Italian liberal state.

  In the absence of help from the public authorities, the large landowners of the Po Valley turned to the Blackshirts for protection. Glad for an excuse to attack their old pacifist enemies, fascist squadre invaded the city hall in Bologna, where socialist officials had hung up a red banner, on November 21, 1920. Six were killed. From there, the movement quickly spread throughout the rich agricultural country in the lower Po River delta. Black-shirted squadristi mounted nightly expeditions to sack and burn Labor Exchanges and local socialist offices, and beat and intimidate socialist organizers. Their favorite forms of humiliation were administering uncontainable doses of castor oil and shaving off half of a proud Latin moustache. In the first six months of 1921, the squads destroyed 17 newspapers and printing works, 59 Peoples’ Houses (socialist headquarters), 119 Chambers of Labor (socialist employment offices), 107 cooperatives,
83 Peasants’ Leagues, 151 socialist clubs, and 151 cultural organizations.23 Between January 1 and April 7, 1921, 102 people were killed: 25 fascists, 41 socialists, 20 police, and 16 others.24

  The Po Valley Blackshirts’ success was not based on force alone. The Fascists also gave some peasants what they wanted most: jobs and land. Turning the tables on the socialists, the Fascists established their own monopoly over the farm labor market. By offering a few peasants their own small parcels of land, donated by farsighted owners, they persuaded large numbers of landless peasants to abandon the socialist unions. Land had been the heart’s desire of all Po Valley peasants who had too little (as smallholders, sharecroppers, or renters) or none at all (as day laborers). The socialists quickly lost their hold on these categories of farmworkers, not only because they had been exposed as unable to defend their postwar gains, but also because their long-term goal of collectivized farms was unattractive to the land-hungry rural poor.

  At the same time, the squadristi succeeded in demonstrating the incapacity of the state to protect the landowners and maintain order. They even began to supplant the state in the organization of public life and to infringe on its monopoly of force. As they became more daring, the Blackshirts occupied whole cities. Once installed in Ferrara, say, they would force the town to institute a program of public works. By early 1922, the Fascist squads and their truculent leaders, such as Italo Balbo in Ferrara and Roberto Farinacci in Cremona—called ras after Ethiopian chieftains—were a de facto power in northeastern Italy with which the state had to reckon, without whose goodwill local governments could not function normally.