The Squadristi Are Born
The cataclysm of World War I transformed the face of Europe. In Italy, Mussolini’s Fascists took credit for the victory and Austria’s subsequent granting of Southern Tyrol to Italy through the Treaty of Versailles (although they argued it was not enough). A triumphant Mussolini called for a “trenchocracy” made up of veterans to sweep out the technocrats and career politicians in order to make way for a strong state created by the “new man”: an antiegoist elitist who represented, nevertheless, the perfect balance between full individual and collective. The true enemy was not necessarily aristocracy anymore, since the trenchocracy could fill their shoes. Instead, the enemy became the “parasitic” rulers and workers who would not fit into the producerist ethos.92
A series of factory occupations and strikes brought on the “two red years” (biennio rosso) of 1919–1920. By this point, the Sorelian influence had died down, and syndicalists professed a more rationalist model. Mussolini in particular called alternately for workers to model themselves on the French Confédération générale du travail (General Confederation of Labor) and the national councils developed by Kurt Eisner’s Bavarian revolution.93 Amidst the revolutionary tumult, Mussolini joined some hundred other revolutionary syndicalists, futurists, and corporatists in founding the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (FIC—Italian Fasci of Combat). The FIC got its strength from a loosely knit group of spontaneously formed paramilitary organizations of anticommunist street fighters called the Squadre d’Azione, or the squadristi—more widely known as Blackshirts. Their expressed purpose was defending the “national community” (businesses and landowners) from “Bolshevik” worker militancy.
The chief organizer of the squadristi was Roberto Farinacci, who had built up his reputation through the early revolutionary syndicalist years as a violent anti-Semite. Those who formed fasci, or networked political organizations, would also form squadristi, and vice versa, rapidly bringing Fascism a fighting force to attack leftists (and even, to a lesser extent, Catholics and nationalists) in the streets and meeting spaces. The squadristi also developed a broad organizational capacity to absorb disenfranchised members of the public, growing with the help and support of veterans and officers, as well as a “grassroots” orientation through which its members elected their own commanders. Structured in this grassroots way, the squadristi became the bane of existence for leftists and intellectuals who disagreed with Fascism. Villages that supported the left were raided, and revenge attacks became justification for an increasing spiral of vigilantism.
On April 15, 1919, less than a month after the founding of the FIC, a mass rally occurred as part of a one-day general strike. Fascist army veterans attacked workers on their way to the rally, leaving three dead and many times that wounded. The mob, led by Marinetti, then advanced on Mussolini’s former journal Avanti!, which was ransacked and set ablaze. The group stole the press’s sign and brought it to Mussolini’s new press, Il Popolo d’Italia, where he greeted them from the balcony and delivered a speech.94
That September, the ultranationalist adventurer and aesthete Gabriele D’Annunzio stormed into the Croatian city of Fiume with 2,000 irregular troops, claiming it for Italy. Scholar Ernst Nolte claims, “for Italy’s younger generation, [D’Annunzio] was Nietzsche and Barrès all rolled into one.”95 Although it was rejected by Italy, D’Annunzio’s irredentist, protofascist occupation of Fiume lasted for a year. The radical aesthetic and ideology of D’Annunzio drew in an assortment of revolutionary nationalists, imperialists, and leftists who rebelled against the established leaders of the Socialists, Communists, and Liberals. After he surrendered and returned to Italy, the Fascists lauded D’Annunzio as a hero, and his aesthetics influenced the movement profoundly. He emerged as a possible rival to Mussolini for power in the Fascist movement but decided to submit to the latter’s authority.
The broad, overlapping space that attracted young radicals to D’Annunzio and the squadristi included the rejection of socialism as it existed in party form, faith in individual strength and purpose akin to the “cult of myself,” sacralized politics, misogyny, and the nihilist’s rejection of the modern in exchange for the radical desire for a “new age.” In less than two years, the movement grew from 31 to 834 fasci; from 870 members to nearly 250,000.96 Among the infamous calling cards of the squadristi were their black uniforms, daggers, black flags—sometimes emblazoned with the skull and crossbones or death’s head (teschio)—their rallying songs, like “Me Ne Frego” (“I Don’t Care”), and Farinacci’s torture tactic of choice: forcing subjects to drink castor oil.
While factory occupations raged on, Mussolini declared, “I accept not only workers’ control of factories, but also the social, cooperative, management [of industry]…I want industrial production to rise. If the workers could guarantee this rather than the owners, I should be ready to declare that the former have the right to take the latter’s place.”97 Mussolini’s platitudes included not only workers’ self-management but also republicanism, individualism, and anticlericalism. In one exclamation in 1920, Il Duce raved, “Down with the state in all its species and incarnations. The state of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow. The bourgeois state and the socialist. For those of us, the doomed (morituri) of individualism, through the darkness of the present and the gloom of tomorrow, all that remains is the by-now-absurd, but ever consoling, religion of anarchy!”98 Fascism was described, then, in terms approximating a different kind of nation, overcoming anarchy and the left by perfecting them and leading them toward the fulfillment of humanity’s spiritual mission. What remained was an elite order of veterans whose confidence and will could lead the country into a new age of national renewal. For these elites, anarchism remained presupposed in a spiritual sense, while the requirements of national unity implied a different political movement beyond the contradictions of anarchism and the state, beyond left and right.
Fascism in Power
Due to the behavior of the squadristi during the “two red years,” Mussolini had been unable to gain a credible following in the syndicalist movement. However, in 1921, Edmondo Rossoni left the third largest trade union organization, Unione Italiana del Lavoro, to set up the Confederation of Fascist Trade Unions. In the elections of that year, the Fascists’ undeniable power led to their admission into the National Coalition led by the aging liberal Prime Minister Giolitti, who believed he could contain them.99 Thirty-five Fascist deputies were elected—enough to destroy Giolitti’s government from within, leading to a new government led by Ivanoe Bonomi, who brokered a deal between Fascists, Socialists, and syndicalist leaders. Having to contend with regional squadristi leaders, Mussolini dissolved and reconstituted the squadristi into a national militia, putting Farinacci in charge of the consolidation of the squadristi into a top-down organization.100 Although Jews joined the Fascists in disproportionately high numbers, the movement grew increasingly anti-Semitic under the influences of Farinacci and leading ideologue Giovanni Preziosi.101 Despite claims that Mussolini’s party did not have strongly racist policies in the early years, its founding principles were explicitly imperialist and directed to nationalist chauvinism.
Fascists promised to subsume the revolutionary syndicalism of radical workers under a corporatist system with an overarching leadership council that advocated for a moderately better social wage for the “national community” while repressing autonomous leftist groups and creating an aesthetics of the “new man”—a modern and scientific actor, albeit mythical, powerful, and heroic, fusing politics, society, and economy into a grand, totalitarian project. By 1922, Mussolini’s party was allied with trade unions numbering half a million members. Yet for all its sindacalismo nazionale, Fascism remained largely a movement of the lower middle classes, particularly lawyers and journalists, backed by