This wasn’t my intent to post it like this, but the ‘net wins today. If I fiddle with this any more, my paroxysms of self-doubt with paralyze me so harshly that I won’t be getting out of bed tomorrow. (This is only a slight exaggeration.) Also, I know that my conclusion is a little rough, but I already admitted to having difficulties with that part of papers. So be kind!
(Oh, and unrelated pic is sorta related. In a way that isn’t explained in my paper. At all.)
Tools of History
Fascism is a word thrown to vicious effect in American and world politics, particularly by people who have little to no understanding of the term. However, it should be noted that even academics are unable to firmly lock in a solid definition for fascist. A. James Gregor acknowledges that the term is widely and loosely used as a catch-all term for anything ‘extreme right.’[1] Fortunately, the evolution and development of the Italian version of the phenomenon can be described, at least partially, by examining the recorded actions and words of its leader and creator, Benito Mussolini.
Mussolini, curiously, finds his opening and early momentum in his association with an art movement. The Furturists, led by Filippo Marinetti, were a frenetic group of young men that exalted fierceness, manly vigor and a determination to never stop moving.[2] However, it should be noted at this juncture that the most striking and lasting influence that Futurism seems to have placed in the consciousness of the Fascist movement is the glorification of war. Marinetti’s “The Futurist Manifesto” states as its ninth article:
“We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.”[3]
This sense of radical and violent nationalism can be found deeply imbedded in Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism”, written in 1932, wherein he described “…the State, which is the conscience of and universal will of the man in his historical existence.”[4] The point is more sharply drawn later in the same document, where Mussolini wrote:
“War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man in front of himself in the alternative of life and death.”[5]
However, Fermi notes that Mussolini was not always so ardently fond of war. He, as a young man, escaped his compulsory military service by spending much of 1903 and 1904 in Switzerland and being defended by the fiercely anti-militaristic National Socialist Party.[6] In the light of this information, Richard Jensen’s assertion that the Futurists first attracted the aspiring newspaperman and politician as a way to reach and sway to his cause the displaced, untrained soldier left over from the ‘Great War’[7] becomes disturbing.
Except Mussolini’s pre-World War I position as spokesman for the National Socialist Party via the paper Avanti! alters the notion that he was deliberately misleading, at least in this case. He was, in line with his Socialist Party principles of inter-nationality and anti-militarianism, deeply antagonistic to Italy’s involvement in the war. On 22 August 1914, Mussolini wrote in Avanti!:
“The Proletariat furnishes raw material, cannon fodder with which the states make their history…. War is the maximum exploitation of the proletarian class. After sweat, blood; after exploitation at work, death on the battlefield.”[8]
Anti-Austrian and pro-French sentiments, however, overwhelmed those principles in Mussolini and many of the proponents of Socialism, such as Frenchman and mutual admirer, Gustave Hervé. Most interestingly, in this period Mussolini made a glaring error. On 18 October, he published an article called “From Absolute to Active and Working Neutrality” describing the alteration in his stance, but he framed the wording as the idea of the Party. He surprised the other members of the Party, particularly his party mentor, Angelica Balabanoff, and, not surprisingly, they demanded his resignation from the paper.[9] Mussolini was not a humble man.
Mussolini’s expulsion from Avanti! was the impetus for the creation of his paper, Il Popolo d’Italia,[10] and that paper irrevocably demonstrated his absolute change of position on 23 May 1915 as Italy declared war upon Austria.
“O mother Italy, we offer thee, without fear and without regrets, our life and our death.”[11]
Mussolini did not voluntarily enlist for combat as did many of the young men who read his inflammatory articles published in that year. In August of 1915, he was re-called into active service[12] after a nine-year lapse from his original year-long training in the peacetime Italian army.[13] Despite being wounded in the trenches of the War, Mussolini derived much of his influence on Italian politics afterwards with poor peasant soldiers and fierce young officers who come home to an Italian government that could not fulfill the promises made to them.[14]
Mark Jones attributes some of the post-War environmental acceptance of Mussolini’s virulent nationalism to a floundering sense of displacement among the Italian people in the wake of the loss of the battle of Caporetto,[15] while Fermi links it to the civil unrest relating to a weak Italian governments rotating in and out directly after the war and a growing fear of Socialism and Socialists. The American President Wilson and the League of Nations also share in some of the blame, according to Fermi and Mussolini, for frustrating Italian nationalist notions when allowing certain coveted territories self-determine their new rulers.[16] Most prosaically, William Brustein crunched numbers of voting patterns and socio-economic statuses between 1919 and 1921 and came to the conclusion that many of the formerly Socialist voters jumped ship according to their new statuses as land-owners.[17]
The date for the official beginning of Italian Fascism is March 23, 1919,[18] when Mussolini and 100 others, many of them young men who fought in the War[19] form the Fasci di Combattimento. The title of the movement and the group was appropriated from earlier revolutions; Sicilian peasants are recorded to have revolted as a fasci, or bundle, as early as 1893 and Marinetti even uses the term for his group.[20] Sadly, there isn’t a published manifesto originating from that Spring, but later Mussolini would remark on the occasion with:
“We allow ourselves the luxury of being aristocratic and democratic, reactionary and revolutionary, legalistic and illegalistic, according to the circumstances of place, time and environment in which we are compelled to live.”[21]
This line contrasts nicely with a small selection from his article, “Which Way is the World Going?” published on 25 February 1922:
“The soulless, drab egalitarianism of the democracy, which has taken the colour out of life and crushed all personality, is on its deathbed. New kinds of aristocracy are arising, now that we have proof that the masses cannot be protagonists, but only the tools of history.”[22]
After the 1922 March on Rome, Mussolini had managed to set himself in a position to use those tools. In his own way, he appears to have believed whole heartedly in his own cause and his own worthiness to lead that cause. Never does he seems to be have been conflicted by his own contradictory statements. Rather the reverse, if “Mussolini is always right,” the eighth maxim of the 1934 Fascist Decalogue and the tenth maxim of the 1938 version, is taken into consideration.[23]
The Fascist State arose in Italy not only due to the tireless efforts of Mussolini, but also in the vacuüm created by ineffectual government, lack of unified cultural identity and thwarted nationalistic pride. There is possibly no other century and place that could have produced and followed such a man. The words of that man, who, perhaps, would have better titled Il Stato than Il Duce, sum up his extraordinary view of himself and his Party with far more deftness than an outsider:
“In the Fascist State the individual is not suppressed, but rather multiplied, just as in a regimental soldier is not weakened but multiplied by the number of his comrades. The Fascist State organizes the nation, but it leaves sufficient scope to individuals; it has limited useful or harmful liberties and has preserved those that are essential. It cannot be the individual who decides in this matter, but only the State.”[24]
[1] A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2004), 3.
[2] Richard Jenson, “Futurism and Fascism.” History Today 45, no. 11: 35. 1995.
[3] Adrian Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile. (New York: Harper and Row, Publisher, Inc. 1975.)
[4] Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile. 41. “The Doctrine of Fascism.” It is of note that Giovanni Gentile was a co-contributor and is credited by Lyttleton as writing the first half of the manifesto, with only the second half written by Mussolini, despite the contemporary crediting of Mussolini alone.
[5] Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile. 47.
[6] Laura Fermi, Mussolini. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1961, 38.
[7] Jenson, “Futurism and Fascism.”
[8] Fermi, Mussolini. 102-107.
[9] Fermi, Mussolini. 105-106.
[10] Fermi, Mussolini. 107.
[11] Fermi, Mussolini. 131.
[12] Fermi, Mussolini. 134.
[13] Fermi, Mussolini.. 48.
[14] Fermi, Mussolini. 151.
[15] Mark Jones, “From Caporetto to Garibaldiland: Interventionist War Culture as a Culture of Defeat.” European Review of History—Revue européene d’histoire. 15, no. 6: 659-674. 2008.
[16] Fermi, Mussolini. 152.
[17] William Brustein, “The ‘Red Menace’ and the Rise of Italian Fascism.” American Sociological Review. 56, no. 10: 652-664. 1991.
[18] Fermi, Mussolini. 153-154.
[19] Jenson, “Futurism and Fascism.”
[20] Fermi, Mussolini. 153.
[21] Fermi, Mussolini. 156.
[22] Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile. 66.
[23] Stanislao G. Pugliese, Fascism, Anti-fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 146-147.
[24] Lyttleton, Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile. 56. “The Doctrine of Fascism.”
