STORY

October 1922, when the fascists marched on Rome

Benito Mussolini (in the center) joined the fascists of the march on Rome in October 1922. Behind him, second from the left, we recognize Italo Balbo, Ras de Ferrara, in a black shirt.

© George Rinhart/Corbis via Getty Images

Text by: Olivier Favier Follow

9 mins

On the morning of October 28, 1922, 26,000 ill-armed fascists, without food and drenched in driving rain, gathered in Rome.

Four hundred riflemen were enough to stop their progress.

Three days later, however, their leader, Benito Mussolini, took over as head of government, a position he held for more than twenty years, until July 25, 1943.

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Like Germany, Italy is a country of recent unity.

It won its existence as a state in 1861 following a second war of independence – the first having ended in failure – before retaking Venetia from Austria-Hungary in 1866 and Rome from the papacy in 1870. Parliamentary monarchy, liberal Italy remains an incomplete democracy.

Elections have long been held by suffrage based on property - in which 2% of the population take part - and illiteracy affects three-quarters of the population, despite very advanced laws on compulsory education, which the State does not have the ways to apply.

The industrialization of the country affects exclusively the North, around the said industrial triangle, Milan-Turin-Genoa.

The rest of the country is essentially agricultural.

Misery is everywhere.

Cholera still killed thousands of people in the early 1910s in Naples, nutritional deficiencies made pellagra an extremely widespread disease in the north, tuberculosis and malaria wreaked havoc.

Italy is then the first country of emigration in the world.

On the eve of the war, in 1913, 900,000 people left in search of a better life.

1915-1918: "War, the only hygiene in the world"

Since 1882, the country has been allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

But the desire to take back from the latter the “irredent lands” – not returned – around the city of Trieste shakes up a government initially won over to neutrality.

Among the “interventists”, we find a former revolutionary socialist who broke the ban, Benito Mussolini and futurist artists who saw in war “ 

 ”.

Italy thus tipped over to the side of the allies in 1915. Unlike their French counterparts, the Socialists nonetheless retained their neutralist position for a long time, which essentially boiled down to a very symbolic formula: “ 

 ”.

In 1917, the defeat at Caporetto made the threat of invasion tangible.

There is then a broad patriotic consensus.

Only a few left-wing figures, including Giacomo Matteotti, continue to affirm their absolute opposition to the conflict.

The following year, the victory of Vittorio-Veneto led to the collapse of Austria-Hungary.

Italy is on the winning side, but the right of peoples to self-determination promised by US President Wilson prohibits him from annexing lands whose population is mainly Slavic.

The country is ruined.

In 1919, Benito Mussolini founded the combat beams in Milan while the writer Gabriele d'Annunzio occupied Fiume – now Rijeka – on the Dalmatian coast.

Both take advantage of the anger of former officers who suffer from the return to civilian life and join former elite troops, the

, with brutal methods.

But Mussolini will above all offer his services to business owners and landowners threatened by the social unrest of the “ 

 ”, the two red years.

1919-1920: the brief golden age of socialism at the polls and in the streets

Driven by the electoral laws of 1912 and 1919, which established universal male suffrage and the proportional system, the socialists were on the rise, winning 32% of the vote in the November 1919 elections. However, if the reformist fringe counted on this victory to change the institutions of the country, the maximalists look to the side of Soviet Russia and dream of revolution.

In fact, the party refuses the alliance with the bourgeois parties and the popular mobilization has above all the effect of unleashing the reaction.

In January 1921, the Communists led by Pietro Bordiga, Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti split from the Socialist Party at the Congress of Livorno.

The following year, in October, the founders of the Socialist Party, Filippo Turati and Anna Kuliscioff, were expelled from the party by the so-called maximalist majority which continued to regard the Bolshevik experience with benevolence.

The reformists then gathered in the Unitary Socialist Party around the now deputy Giacomo Matteotti.

Portraits of Filippo Turati, founder of the Italian Socialist Party, and Errico Malatesta, anarchist theorist, at the Anna Kuliscioff Foundation in Milan.

Both died in 1932, the first in exile in Paris, the second in Rome, reduced to silence.

© Olivier Favier

As the left divided, Benito Mussolini's Italian combat groups changed into the National Fascist Party in November 1921 and developed a network of armed militias, the squadrists, led locally by "Ras1", which sowed terror, particularly in the regions where the “subversives” – left-wing political and trade union activists – are most established: Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont and Tuscany.

Political leaders are assassinated in front of their homes, the "Houses of the People" and the offices of socialist newspapers set on fire, opponents attacked with clubs and forced to drink castor oil, they are exposed to the crowd while they are seized with irrepressible diarrhoea.

1921-1922: the squadrist militias, armed wing of fascism, choose terror

 In the elections of May 1921, the Fascists entered the Chamber with 35 deputies2, united with other parties of the “National Bloc”.

The Socialist Party remains the first formation in the Assembly, despite the departure of the Communists who obtain only 15 deputies.

They nevertheless remained foreign to the four successive governments until October 1922.

In the Chamber, Giacomo Matteotti denounces the squadrist violence which strikes socialists, anarchists, communists and popular – the future Christian Democrats.

In September 1921, the socialist deputy Giuseppe di Vagno was assassinated in the middle of the street in Mola di Bari, in Puglia.

Fear, weariness and a sense of helplessness drive the masses away from leftist parties.

Reproduction of the painting by Pelizza da Volpedo, “Il quarto stato” (1901), in a square in the village of Volpedo, in Piedmont.

A crowd of peasants – the proletarian “fourth estate” as opposed to the bourgeois “third estate” of the French Revolution – advance towards the residence of a large landowner.

© Olivier Favier

The socialists succeeded in obliging by law the large landowners to hire agricultural workers during the winter, thus wanting to put an end to their miserable condition as seasonal workers.

The law not being applied, the Ras de Ferrara Italo Balbo mobilized with its squadrists 40,000 unemployed agricultural workers in May 1922. Surrounding the prefecture, it forced the state authorities to pay the sums owed by the bosses.

In Parma, on the other hand, the fierce resistance of the inhabitants of the suburb of Oltretorrente led by Guido Picelli, forced him to withdraw.

October 1922: the march on Rome brings Italy into dictatorship

In October 1922, Benito Mussolini ordered his troops from Milan to march on Rome.

The king, who fears for his throne, refuses to sign the proclamation of the state of siege wanted by the head of government Luigi Facta.

The

, who was preparing to flee to Switzerland in case of failure of his operation, thus receives everything he hoped for: power, without even having to go through early elections.

The communist Antonio Gramsci was then in Moscow, where he described Mussolini as a " 

 " and considered that " 

 ".

Among the socialists, some seem ready to negotiate.

In the street, the attacks redoubled and the threats rained down to the Chamber, where many deputies now sit armed.

In April 1924, the new elections took place in a general climate of intimidation, violence and manipulation.

The Acerbo law of November 1923 reintroduced majority voting.

The fascists and their allies now have nearly two-thirds of the seats.

The three left-wing parties only total 15% of the vote.

During the campaign, a socialist candidate, Antonio Piccinini, was assassinated.

1924: the murder of Giacomo Matteotti announces the switch to a totalitarian regime

On May 30, 1924, Giacomo Matteotti gave a final speech in which he denounced the many irregularities in the elections and demanded their cancellation.

He has just published a book immediately translated into English and French,

, where he establishes, among other things, a detailed and chilling account of all the exactions committed.

As he left the Chamber, he confided to his comrades: “ 

.

»

Portrait of Giacomo Matteotti in his house in Fratta Polesine (Veneto), now transformed into a museum.

© Olivier Favier

On June 10, when he was preparing to denounce in the Chamber the abusive contracts of fascist power with an American oil company, he was kidnapped by killers subservient to Mussolini who immediately stabbed him.

His body was found in August near Rome.

The opposition left the Chamber in protest, power wavered, but no one now had the power to overthrow it.

On January 3, 1925, Benito Mussolini finally spoke to the deputies about the death of Giacomo Matteotti:

“ 

.

»

1 Name given to lords in the Ethiopian feudal system and by extension to local leaders of fascist armed bands in Italy.

2 Three will lose their seats because they were under thirty years old when they were elected.

Our selection on the same subject:

• To listen :

→ Legislative in Italy: Giorgia Meloni, on the far right all

→ Is the world powerless in the face of the rise of populism?

• To read on RFI:

→ Crowds of Italian tourists pilgrimage to Mussolini's birthplace

→ How far-right violence resurfaced in Europe

→ The century of Angelo del Boca, an uncompromising historian of contemporary Italy

• Read

  elsewhere:

→ Emilio Lussu,

, Editions du félin, 2009. A first-hand account of the first years of fascism.

→ Antonio Scurati,

, Les Arènes, 2020. We can hear him talk about his novel which recounts in detail Mussolini's accession to power in the program La marche du monde.

→ Emilio Gentile,

, Gallimard, 2015.

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