THE FASCIST REACTION

There were signs well before the autumn of 1920 that the Fascist ment would find its vocation as an anti-socialist reaction. The move-ment’s national congress in May 1920 confirmed an opportunistic drift to the right, now that the PSI was clearly the major political beneficiary of ‘1919-ism’. The new programme accentuated the inter-class appeal of corporate representation and of ‘productivism’. The anticlerical and republican thrust of 1919 Fascism was sufficiently diluted by the leader-ship to cause the departure of many of the Futurists and Republicans who had founded and joined the first fasci.

Also, in the spring and the summer of 1920, the movement experi-enced its first real local, political and organisational success in the border region of Venezia Giulia and more particularly in the port of Trieste.

Here the fascio was organising the city’s Italian population against the

‘Bolshevised’ Slavs. Such a potent mix of nationalism and anti-socialism was never repeated elsewhere, but the Trieste experience anticipated much of what was to happen more generally from late 1920. Aided by the Italian military garrison occupying Trieste under the terms of the Armistice, the fascio had set up armed and mobile paramilitary squads which attacked the premises of Slav organisations in the city.

It was clear that from at least the summer of 1920 the Fascist leader-ship wanted to generalise the formation of militarised units in the fasci and instructed their leaders to make this an organisational priority. Signifi-cantly in terms of timing and function, the first meaningful contact and collaboration between many fasci and the local political and socio-economic establishment coincided with the municipal elections of October–

November 1920. Clearly anticipating services to be performed in the forthcoming elections, Leandro Arpinati reformed the Bologna city fascio in September on the basis of an approach for an anti-Bolshevik force of 300 men from the Association of Social Defence. This was a lobby of local industrialists, tradesmen and farmers, formed in April to protect property and order during the strikes and popular agitation of the biennio rosso. Similar arrangements were simultaneously being made in, for instance, Venice, Leghorn and Brescia, often accompanied by the reconstitution or indeed formation of fasci. Such was the case in Ferrara, where after several false starts the fascio was founded formally only in October 1920. Fascist activity in these local elections helped to make them credible as the virile activist vanguard of a broad middle-class front against socialism.

Again important in timing and purpose, the incidents which sparked off a more general anti-socialist reaction occurred as an immediate result of the Socialist victory in the elections. In a quite deliberate and premed-itated repudiation of the election result, the Bologna fascio provoked violent incidents disrupting the official inauguration of the Socialist mayor and city council on 21 November 1920. As the Fascists hoped, the disorder eventually justified the suspension of the council and the nomi-nation of a prefectural commissioner to administer the city. Similar incidents took place in neighbouring Ferrara in December and in both provinces made the fascio the focus of middle-class hostility to the social-ist political and economic control of the town and its rural hinterland.

Fascism, then, emerged as a mass movement from the autumn of 1920 when it began to benefit from the class and patriotic reaction to socialism. The movement expanded above all in the towns and coun-tryside of north and central Italy, especially in Tuscany, rural Piedmont and the Po Valley provinces of Emilia, Lombardy and Venetia, where the post-war social and political conflicts had been most bitter and intense, and socialism appeared to be at its strongest. In much of the south and the islands, Fascism was almost completely absent or insignificant before late 1922, except for Apulia, a part of eastern Sicily and some of the major cities like Naples and Bari, confirming the symbiosis between

Fascism and socialism. Although the central committee had encouraged the militarisation of the fasci and thereby helped to equip Fascism for its anti-socialist role, the expansion of the movement from late 1920 occurred largely independently of the leadership in Milan. Fascism’s growth was not the fruit of Mussolini’s charismatic and dynamic leader-ship. It was financed, led and controlled locally, and the movement became an aggregate of provincial Fascisms shaped by their local settings. The provincialism and diversity of Fascism was important, but the movement developed with a broadly similar pattern and momentum, though at a varying tempo.

The crucible of Fascism in the northern countryside was the Po Valley, and the model of ‘agrarian Fascism’ was provided in Ferrara. Here, Fascism inserted itself into the long-standing and bitter class conflict exacerbated by the agitation of the biennio rosso between agricultural employers and landless labourers organised in Federterra. The nucleus of the squads formed within the fascio of the main town were ex-army officers and students, with both the taste for action and adventure, and some experience and expertise in organised violence. They carried out the first reprisals in the surrounding countryside. These ‘punitive expe-ditions’ were effective because in planning and execution they combined mobility and concentration of armed force against largely unarmed and unknowing opponents. The squads leapfrogged from commune to commune, simultaneously attacking socialist organisations and founding rural fasci.

The Fascist squads were directly financed and equipped by local farmers’ and business associations, which in some places actually founded fasci with a clear anti-socialist function and set up the sons and relatives of their members as squadrist commanders. They began a system-atic campaign to destroy by violence and pressure the organisational fabric of socialism, physically smashing up party and union premises, intimidating and humiliating socialist organisers and leaders, importing and protecting ‘blackleg’ labour, enforcing tax boycotts against Socialist councils as a prelude to their dissolution by the prefect or imposed resignation. This was a campaign by landowners and commercial leaseholding farmers to put a definitive end to working-class agitation and organisations by force, and restore more congenial labour and con-tractural conditions. Cowed and intimidated braccianti were recruited into new syndicates, not formally Fascist even by name, but led by ex-revolutionary syndicalists in the fascio and clearly linked to it. The employers renegotiated with them, to the exclusion of Socialist and

Catholic organisations, labour contracts which reversed or diluted the gains of 1920. This was a process with a built-in and accelerating momentum, as the pillars of socialist power in the countryside – the unions and the town halls – were brought to the point of disintegration by squadrist coercion and intimidation, and the sanction of unemploy-ment. Unprotected in their persons or their jobs by the PSI and Federterra, the large number of day labourers pressurised into joining the new syndicates at least had immunity from violence and some prospect of employment.

The Fascists also won a rural lower-middle-class base in parts of Emilia, Lombardy and Venetia among sharecroppers, small tenant farmers and small peasant proprietors. Some of these had recently improved their position and extended their holdings or purchased land by taking advantage of wartime demand for agricultural products and inflationary reductions in rent and mortgage payments, as well as the panic selling in 1919–20 by landowners fearing Socialist expropriation.

Rural Socialism threatened these newly acquired gains, as it did the interests of those mezzadri and tenant farmers who were initially organised by Federterra in the successful campaign for the revision of rental con-tracts in 1920. The Socialist goal of a collectivised agriculture where everyone would be a landless worker, evidently sacrificed actual and aspiring peasant proprietors. More immediately, Federterra’s labour market monopoly was applied to large and small farmers alike, and all had to employ their quota of braccianti. Fascist protection against the leagues under the slogan of ‘the land to those who work it’ was accompanied in some Po Valley areas, starting with Ferrara, by a modest but much-publicised redistribution through the agency of the fascio of land made available by the landowners for the settlement of braccianti on sharecrop-ping contracts. Forcibly challenging the labour monopoly of Federterra, and ruthlessly exploiting the contradictions of the PSI’s land policy and the heterogeneity of its rural coalition of 1920, the fasci had managed to bring together both large landowners and leaseholders, and smaller farmers in an anti-socialist alliance.

The Fascist land policy of June 1921 would strain to reconcile the interests of large and small farmers and formalise the alliance under the slogans of ‘agrarian democracy’ and ‘productivism’. It was regarded as socially desirable to make sharecroppers out of landless labourers and thereby build a fence against agrarian socialism. But no general redis-tribution of land was envisaged, and the commercial estates were inalienable and indivisible because they were efficient and productive.

The policy basically reworked that of the Bolognese association of commercial farmers since 1919. It foreshadowed the formation of the Fascist ‘integral syndicate’ in Bologna and other Po Valley provinces from late 1921, a single organisation for all farmers and landworkers which located the ‘productivist’ larger farmers within a wider ‘community’

of ‘producers’.

In a matter of four months the squadrist offensive in Ferrara led by Italo Balbo, the opportunistic young Republican ex-army officer in the pay of the agrarian association, had turned the province around by the spring of 1921. Most Socialist councils had been forced to resign, and the syndicates, which had no members in February 1921, were 40 000-strong in June. No other situation was reversed so rapidly or so dra-matically. Bologna province counted six fasci in March 1921 when the large-scale squadrist attacks began, and forty-three by October with a membership of about 12 000; in Padua, the single city fascio existing in March had become sixteen fasci and over 5000 members in June, almost all located in the Po basin. The disproportionate size of the Bologna city fascio, about 5000-strong, indicated the importance of the initial impetus which the provincial capitals gave to the expansion of the movement.

Elsewhere the pace of growth was slower. This was in part because of the resilience and even resistance of workers’ and peasants’ organisations, in part because a less-differentiated rural social structure did not allow the Fascists to recruit allies outside the big farmers against the Socialist leagues as effectively as in the Po Valley. The reliance on violence was correspondingly greater and the class interests it served all the more exposed. In central Tuscany, where mezzadria predominated, it was almost a straight fight between the fasci and squads sponsored by the agrarian association and the sharecroppers’ organisation. In the wheat-growing areas of Apulia, the lack of any intermediate peasant groups meant that the action of the employer-backed squads against the braccianti leagues was not mitigated by any Fascist land policy, however dema-gogic, and even the syndicates had little weight. Generally outside Ferrara, agrarian Fascism finally broke the back of Socialist rural organisations during the winter to the spring of 1921–22, often with the help of battle-hardened squads from neighbouring provinces and usually employing the methods of the Ferrara model: squadrism, syndicalism and the destabil-isation of local government.

In what became the Fascist strongholds of the Po Valley and Tuscany, the violent defence of both urban and rural middle class and propertied interests met in Fascism. Squadrism linked the Fascism of town and

country in very obvious ways. It was usually the city fascio which first exported organised violence to the countryside. Any attempt to defeat socialism would have to confront the complementary urban and rural sources of its power in these areas, the agricultural unions and political control of the local council. Again, social and economic activities in town and country were inextricably interlinked. Many people had interests in both urban and rural areas, and much of local industry, trade, finance and the professions were concerned with servicing the needs of agriculture, or processing and refining agricultural products and employing peasant labour. Such connections evidently made industri-alists and bankers as concerned as farmers about agricultural wage levels and general agricultural profitability and any threat to it.

The movement’s counter-revolutionary alliance of threatened urban and rural interests therefore reflected this characteristic interpenetration between town and country. But even where this did not exist, Fascism took a basically similar form as an anti-socialist reaction, because industrial and agricultural employers faced the same kind of problems at broadly the same juncture and adopted the same violent solutions. Local indus-trialists founded Fascism in the small manufacturing towns and ports along the Ligurian coast and in the Tuscan mining and industrial towns, using the same complementary tactics of squadrist violence and syndicalism and with the same motivation as ‘agrarian Fascism’. So, the Carrara fascio was led and organised in the interests of the marble quarry owners and traders, but over 75 per cent of its 1600 members were workers, mainly blacklegs recruited to the squads by the local Fascist boss, Renato Ricci.

There were, however, more nuanced attitudes to Fascism among indus-trialists than was usually the case with farmers. Smaller-scale provincial industrialists and manufacturers funded and supported their local fasci at source. Some big industrialist concerns, particularly those that had expanded frenetically during the war like Ansaldo and Ilva, were conse-quently most exposed to the effects of the transition to a peacetime economy and Giolitti’s confiscatory tax policies. They continued to fund Mussolini and Il Popolo d’ltalia, as they had in fact done during the war and afterwards. Their connections to the Milanese leadership of Fascism rather than to the provincial movements might have reflected some con-cern over the apparently limited horizons and objectives of squadrism.

But this was a caveat scarcely worth making in Tuscany where indus-trialists large and small, including managers of the Ansaldo businesses in the region, enthusiastically backed Fascism. The reservations which

existed were found to be more among the large entrepreneurs of the major industrial cities of Lombardy and Piedmont, including Gino Olivetti, Giovanni Agnelli and other Turin businessmen. For some of these industrialists the impact of the recession from late 1920 through 1921 was softening up labour without the need for recourse to Fascist squads. Their violent and crude methods of restoring industrial peace were anyway often seen as undermining the continuity of production and destructive of good relations with the workers and their unions in the factory. As a result the Fascist syndicates, elsewhere the appendages of squadrism, found it difficult to make much headway among workers of the big industrial centres, a situation that persisted long after Mussolini came to power in October 1922.