The Theory of Fascism

The crisis of the fascist regime, brought about by the Matteotti affair, has clarified and defined fascism’s physiognomy and content. Before the March on Rome, the fascist party was nebulous and undefined. For a long time, it did not wish to qualify itself or function as a party. Fascism, according to many “blackshirts” from the early days, was not a faction, but a movement. It wished to be, more than a political phenomenon, a spiritual one, and to represent, above all, a reaction of the victorious Italy of Vittorio Veneto against the policy of disparaging that victory and its consequences. The composition and structure of the fasci explained their ideological confusion. The fasci conscripted devotees from the most disparate social sectors: in their ranks, students and officials mingled with literati, employees, nobles, peasants, and even laborers. Fascism’s top brass could hardly be a more motley crew. It is composed of socialist defectors like Mussolini and Farinacci; ex-combatants loaded with medals like Igliori and De Vecchi; futurist literati like Filippo Marinetti and Emilio Settimelli; recently-converted ex-anarchists like Massimo Rocca; syndicalists like Cesare Rossi and Michele Bianchi; Mazzinian republicans like Casalini; Fiumanists like Giunta and Giuriati; and orthodox monarchists from the Savoy dynasty-addicted nobility. Republican, anticlerical, and iconoclastic in its origins, fascism declared itself more or less agnostic toward the regime and the Church when it became a party.

The fascists draped a national flag over all their illicit undertakings and all their doctrinaire and programmatic stumbles. They claimed exclusive representation of Italianness and aspired toward a monopoly on patriotism. They fought to hoard for themselves the soldiers and maimed veterans of war. Mussolini and his lieutenants’ demagogy and opportunism were amply rewarded, in this respect, by the socialists’ political bumbling, whose foolish and inopportune anti-militarist bellowing had made them enemies of most soldiers.

The taking of Rome and power aggravated the fascist error. They found themselves flanked by liberal, democratic, and catholic elements, which exerted upon their mentality and spirit a constant and irritating influence. Furthermore, fascism saw its ranks swell with those people seduced solely by success. The composition of fascism became increasingly unorthodox, both socially and spiritually. For this reason, Mussolini could not carry the coup d’etat through to its fullest extent. He arrived at power through insurrection; but he immediately searched for the support of the parliamentary majority, inaugurating a policy of compromises and deal-making. He tried to legalize his dictatorship, vacillated between dictatorship and parliamentarism, and declared that fascism should enter into legality as soon as possible. But this fluctuating policy could not eliminate the contradictions that undermined fascist unity. They did not hesitate to manifest within fascism two antithetical mentalities. An extremist fraction advocated for the integration of the fascist revolution into the Statute of the Kingdom of Italy. The liberal-democratic state should, by their judgment, be replaced by a fascist state. A revisionist fraction demanded, on the other hand, a more or less extensive rectification of the party’s politics. They condemned the arbitrary violence of the provincial ras. These ras, as the regional bosses and condottieri of the fascist party are labeled, in reference to the Abyssinian headmen, exert over the provinces a medieval and despotic power. Revisionist fascists rebelled against racism and the squadre d’azione, the militias dedicated to combating worker militancy. The most categorical and authoritative revisionist leader, Massimo Rocca, sustained arduous polemics from the extremist leaders, which held vast repercussions. He wished to define and set, between the two lines, fascism’s function and ideology. Until then, fascism had been pure action, but began to feel the need for theory as well. Curzio Suckert assigned to fascism a Catholic, medieval, anti-liberal and anti-Renaissance spirit. The spirit of the Renaissance, of Protestantism and liberalism, was labeled as adulterating and nihilist, spiritually contrary to Italy’s essence. The fascists failed to notice that, since their earliest outings, they had designated themselves, above all, as proponents of the idea of the nation, an idea of clear Renaissance origins. The fact seemed not to hinder them particularly. Mario Pantaleoni and Michele Bianchi spoke, on the one hand, of the projected fascist state as a syndical one, while the revisionists, on the other hand, appeared tinged with a vague liberalism. Massimo Rocca’s theses provoked the outrage of all the extremists, until the fascist sect officially excommunicated him as a dangerous heretic. Mussolini did not get involved in these debates. Missing from the polemic, he occupied a centrist position in absentia, and was careful to not compromise himself with too precise an answer when grilled on the matter. “After all, what does the theoretical content of a party matter? What gives it strength and life is its tonality, its will, the spirit of those who constitute it.”

It was once the work of defining fascism had arrived at this point that Matteotti was suddenly assassinated. At first, Mussolini announced his intention to purify the fascist ranks. Under the pressure of the storm unleashed by the crime, he sketched out a normalization plan in a speech in the Senate. In that instant, Mussolini was urged to appease the liberal elements that sustained his government. But all his efforts to wrangle public opinion failed. Fascism began losing sympathizers and allies. The defections of the liberal and democratic elements that had flanked and supported fascism in the beginning for fear of the socialist revolution gradually isolated Mussolini’s government from all non-fascist opinion. This isolation pushed fascism to a more belligerent position by the day. An extremist mentality prevailed within the party. Mussolini still tended, at times, to use a conciliatory language in the hopes of breaking or mitigating the combative spirit of the opposition; but in reality, fascism returned to its warlike strategy. In the following national assembly, it was the extremist tendency that dominated the fascist party, with Farinacci serving as its archetypal condottiere. The revisionists, led by Bottai, capitulated all along the line. Then, Mussolini named a commission for the reform of the Italian Statute. In the fascist press, there reappeared the thesis that the demo-liberal state had to make way for the fascist-unitary state. This state of mind in the fascist party saw its most emphatic and aggressive manifestation in the rejection of deputy Giunta’s resignation from his position as Vice President of the Chamber of Deputies. Giunta resigned once the King’s procurator sued for authorization to process him as responsible for the aggression against the dissident fascist Cesare Farol, while the majority of fascists wished to protect him with a thunderous and explicit declaration of solidarity. Such an attitude could not be maintained, though the fascist majority, compelled by a flurry of protests, reluctantly rescinded their support in a later vote. Mussolini needed to muster his full authority to force the fascist deputies’ retreat. He failed, however, to stop Michele Bianchi and Farinacci from declaring their discontent at this opportunistic maneuver, a maneuver based on considerations over parliamentary tactics.

Super-fascism, ultra-fascism, whatever we wish to call it; it contains more than just one aspect. It runs from the racist and squadrista fascism of Farinacci to the integralist fascism of Michele Bianchi and Curzio Suckert. Farinacci embodies the spirit of the squadrista blackshirts who, after their gruesome training in the punitive raids against the unions and socialist cooperatives, marched on Rome and ushered in the fascist dictatorship. Farinacci is a tempestuous and fiery man, a man interested not in theory but in action, the most genuine type of fascist ras. He has in the palm of his hand the whole province of Cremona, where he directs the New Cremona newspaper that habitually threatens opposition groups and politicians with a second fascist “wave.” The first “wave” was the one he led to the conquest of Rome, and the second, according to Farinacci’s own staunch verbiage, would sweep away all the enemies of the fascist regime in a new St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. A former rail worker and socialist, Farinacci has the mind of an organizer and condottiere. The opposition press often remarks on his tendency to barrel through his articles and speeches with little regard for grammar, which, in his ferocious hate, he jumbles up with democracy and socialism. He wants to be, in every instant, a true blackshirt. More intellectual, if no less apocalyptic, than Farinacci, are the fascists of Rome’s deliriously imperialist L’Impero newspaper, directed by two initially futurist writers, Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli, who invite fascism to definitively liquidate the parliamentarian regime. Fascist Italy, armed with the magistrate’s fasces, has, according to L’Impero, a lofty mission in the present chapter in world history. The newspaper also praises this second fascist wave. Michele Bianchi and Curzio Suckert are the theorists of integral fascism. Bianchi sketches out the technique of the fascist state and conceives of it as a sort of vertical trust of syndicates or corporations, while Suckert, director of La Conquista dello Stato, busies himself with philosophical contrivances.

In the fascist party, there coexists with this tendency a moderate, conservative faction, which rejects neither liberalism nor the Renaissance, and which works for the normalization of fascism and strives to put the Mussolini government on track within bureaucratic legality. They form the nucleus of the moderate tendency of the former nationalists of L’Idea Nazionale absorbed by fascism immediately following the coup d’etat. The ideology of these nationalists is more or less the same as the old liberal right. Timid monarchists, they oppose the fascist coup compromising even slightly the bases of the monarchy and the Statute. Federzoni and Paolucci represent this tepid wing of fascism.

But, for their temperament and fascist antecedents in the style of Federzoni and Paolucci, they embody less than anyone true fascism, but are rather prudent and measured conservatives. No exorbitant romanticism, no desperate medieval nostalgia, can rile them up. They lack the condottiere mindset. Farinacci, on the other hand, is an authentic exemplar of fascism. He is the man of the cudgel, provincial, fanatical, catastrophic and belligerent, in whom fascism is not a concept, not a theory, but a mere passion an impulse, a cry, an “alala!”