Nations are often accused of being divided into two, of being split into hostile, opposite and even irreconcilable parts. A character in Disraeli’s novel Sybil famously declared that England consisted of two nations, the rich and the poor, whose peoples were so ignorant of each other that they might have been ‘dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets’.1 The Spanish dictator, General Francisco Franco, also divided his country into two: one half was ‘true Spain’, valiant, Catholic and hierarchical; the other was ‘anti-Spain’, composed of liberals, marxists and freemasons, people so infected by the ideas of the Enlightenment and revolutionary France that, even if born on Spanish soil from Spanish parents, they could not be regarded as true Spaniards.
As befits a country of such diversity, the idea of ‘two Italies’ has several variants. The polarity between secular Italy and religious Italy goes back a long time, and that between town and country is even older. Yet the standard division is of course that between the north and the south. Sometimes this is mentioned simply to illustrate different degrees of wealth and economic development. More usually it comes with nuances and insinuations about race and lifestyle and habits of thought. Putting most of the clichés into a single sentence, many northern Italians today would subscribe to the view that the real division is one between a civilized, hard-working, law-abiding, European north and a backward, Arabized, idle and violent Mediterranean south. A century ago, a young nationalist intellectual, Giuseppe Prezzolini, claimed there was ‘an Italy of deeds and an Italy of words, one of action, the other of chatter and drowsiness, one Italy in the office, the other in the parlour’.2 As the editor of La Voce, a review that defined itself as ‘militantly idealist’, Prezzolini became a creator of another Italian divide, between those who supported and those who detested Giovanni Giolitti, the statesman who was prime minister four times between 1892 and 1914 and again for a year from the summer of 1920. Prezzolini disliked the dominant politician of the day so much that a special issue of his publication was called simply ‘Abbasso Giolitti!’, ‘Down with Giolitti!’
La Voce’s target was a clever and pragmatic liberal from Piedmont, an empiricist, an administrator, a believer in measured progress. Giolitti was not a great visionary but he was a great reconciler, which is what Italy needed at the start of the twentieth century. The previous decade had ended with a series of dreadful events – martial law in Sicily, colonial defeat in Africa, and bread riots causing at least eighty deaths in Milan – that culminated in the assassination of King Umberto by an anarchist at Monza in the summer of 1900. The atmosphere of the epoch reinforced Giolitti’s belief that the country needed social peace more than political reform just as it needed economic growth more than colonial adventures. Although he had stressed the importance of ‘beautiful legends’, he had done so for political reasons, not because he had much time for heroes or ideals or for attempting the task of turning Italy into a Great Power. Prosperity, he believed, would do more for national unity than expeditions to Eritrea. In the years before the Great War, when Giolitti was the most powerful politician even when he was out of office, national income increased by more than 50 per cent. Agricultural wages rose, the industrialization of the north-west took off and, owing to a determined government campaign against malaria, mortality rates were reduced.
Giolitti believed that the wealth gap in Italy was wider than in other countries and blamed the rich for provoking class conflict by making the poor pay high taxes on salt and cereals while they themselves were unwilling to levy a tax on wealth. Like his ally and predecessor as premier, Giuseppe Zanardelli, he insisted on remaining neutral during strikes, a stance that earned him the enmity of conservatives. When one aristocratic landowner from Mantua complained that, in consequence of a strike, he – ‘a senator of the realm’ – had been forced to drive his own plough, Giolitti’s response was to suggest he did this more often because he would then understand what a tiring job it was and perhaps pay his labourers better.3 Instead of dealing with strikes by sending in the army, as earlier premiers had done, he let them succeed or fail of their own accord. As a determined social reformer, he also reduced food taxes and introduced legislation on working conditions in factories.
Giolitti was a unifier who understood that national unity could not be achieved simply by repeating old formulas combining ideas of patriotism, conquest and self-sacrifice. It required the inclusion of groups that had not existed in 1861 such as political Catholics, who from 1904 began to participate in elections and whom he helped to incorporate into the body politic. More controversially, he reached out to the radical Left, to a collection of socialists, radicals and republicans, who at the polls in 1900 had succeeded in electing nearly 100 deputies to the Chamber. To the fury of the Right, Giolitti was prepared to go far to accommodate the socialists, not only by introducing social reforms but also by inviting them to join his governments. Moderates in the Socialist Party were tempted to cooperate but they invariably came up against the intransigence of dogmatic colleagues who refused to consider anything other than revolution; their inflexibility later did much to assist the rise to power of Benito Mussolini. In 1900, after the assassination of King Umberto, most socialist (and republican) deputies failed to attend the funeral or send condolences to the royal family or even turn up for the new king’s coronation oath in parliament. In 1912 the party expelled its most talented reformist leaders principally because they had gone to the Quirinale Palace to express sympathy with Umberto’s successor, Victor Emanuel III, after he had survived an attempt on his life. The socialists preferred to threaten revolution and preserve their ideological purity rather than collaborate with Giolitti and take some responsibility for running the state. Their history for thirty years from 1892 is one of schism and expulsion, a period that saw the departure from the party of syndicalists, anarchists, reformists and communists.
Despite the refusal of the socialists to play a constructive part in national life, the period of Giolitti’s ascendancy was a hopeful one, a time of civic progress, of relative prosperity and, with the enlargement of the franchise, of greater political participation. In fact it provided the best opportunity Italy ever had of becoming a successful, liberal nation-state. Yet few contemporaries were able to recognize this. The liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce later hailed it as an epoch of affluence and liberal ideas, but at the time he was a haughty critic. So was Piero Gobetti, another liberal, and so too was Gaetano Salvemini, a radical who condemned Giolitti as a dictator and as minister of the mala vita (criminal life) because, like most of his predecessors, he acquired his parliamentary majorities with the use of corruption and sometimes force, especially in constituencies in the south. Although Salvemini, like Croce, later admitted that his criticism had been excessive, it was by then too late. The calumnies that assailed Giolitti from the Left as well as the Right did much to damage the credibility of the liberal regime and weaken it to the extent that it could later be overthrown without difficulty by Mussolini.
The prime minister’s most vocal and virulent opponents were on the Right, men who loathed Giolitti because he had abandoned the project of making Italy great in favour of making it prosperous. They derided his idea of Italy as ‘Italietta’ (‘little Italy’), a place of bourgeois values, of citizens aspiring to leisurely lives with domestic servants and seaside villas at Viareggio or Posillipo. Giolitti’s most eloquent critics were the nationalists, a group of bellicose intellectuals who transformed themselves into a political party in 1910 and won seats in parliament three years later. Disappointed by the results of the Risorgimento and the national humiliations that had followed, they shared the frustrations of Carducci, the poet who had lamented that ‘the epoch of the infinitely great’ had been succeeded by ‘the farce of the infinitely small, the busy little farce of ponderous clowns’.4 Petulantly, they scoffed at democracy and liberalism – and even at the notion of individual liberty – because these had failed to make Italy a real state or Italians a real people. What the country required was strength and discipline sufficient for conquest and expansion and economic development. Still talking about the need to avenge Lissa, a battle fought before most of them had been born, they preached violence, glorified war and demanded an empire that included Libya, Corsica, Dalmatia and dominance in the eastern Mediterranean. Among the benefits of warfare listed by Giovanni Papini, an essayist and friend of Prezzolini, was the fact that corpses made better and cheaper fertilizers than chemicals. ‘What beautiful cabbages’, he reflected, could be grown in a field where hundreds of soldiers had been killed.
We love war, and we will savour it like gourmets as long as it lasts. War is horrifying, and precisely because it is horrifying and tremendous and terrible and destructive, we must love it with all our male hearts.5
Closely linked to the nationalists were the Futurists, a group of painters and intellectuals who exalted speed and worshipped technology. For their founder, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘a roaring automobile that seems to ride on a hail of bullets’ was more beautiful than a great Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. This hysterical character revelled in his iconoclasm, his desire to shock and his rejection of the world’s artistic heritage. He aspired to introduce punching into ‘the artistic struggle’ and encouraged people ‘to spit every day on the Altar of Art’. Library shelves should be burned, canals should be diverted to flood museums, and both Venice and Florence should be flattened for the sake of human progress. Yet the Futurists’ targets went beyond the artistic. In their notorious manifesto, published on the front page of Le Figaro in 1909, Marinetti announced, ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene … and scorn for women.’ Since women had been scorned for decades and in parts of the country enjoyed fewer rights than before unification, there was little the Futurists could do to make things worse. Their movement’s cult of violence, however, which was extolled in similar terms by nationalists and by that saturnine poet and sometime politician Gabriele D’Annunzio, helped create a political-cultural atmosphere that encouraged people to think of war as something necessary, inevitable and indeed hygienic. Even after the Great War, when the hygiene had taken over 600,000 Italian lives, Marinetti was calling for the abolition of pasta on the grounds that it encouraged pacifism. Luckily, any credibility he may have possessed when launching this campaign was punctured when he himself was photographed munching his way through a bowl of spaghetti.6
In 1911 the Futurists joined the nationalists and other adventurists in demanding the conquest of Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, the Ottoman provinces of Libya. For years, as they reminded their fellow Italians, they had ‘glorified love of danger and violence, patriotism and war’, which they defined afresh as ‘the only hygiene of the world and the only educative morality’. Many on the Left opposed the project, including a young socialist journalist, Benito Mussolini, whose violent anti-imperialism landed him in jail. So did some of the country’s finest and most independent minds, such as Einaudi and Salvemeni, who realized the expense would be huge and guessed that rewards from this ‘enormous sandpit’ would be meagre. Giolitti himself was neither eager for a war nor deluded about the economic benefits of colonialism. Other liberals shared his views yet reckoned that Italy should try to do something manly somewhere. The British were in Egypt and the French were in Tunis, almost in sight of the Italian islands of Lampedusa and Pantelleria; Italy thus ought to acquire some space in north Africa, even if only to prevent the French from occupying it. The country required a modicum of military prestige, as even so great a liberal as Fortunato admitted. After ‘a millennium and a half of shameful history’, he thought Italy needed to ‘secure a virile victory’ over somebody so as ‘to be able to face the future with confidence’. Unlike the Greeks, who had gained independence in 1830 by defeating the Turks, the Italians had never won anything by themselves. ‘For the first time in my life,’ he told his friend Salvemini, ‘I have a vision of the sanctity of war.’7
Nationalists and Futurists knew that Italy was a signatory of the Hague Conventions and a guarantor of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire, yet this knowledge made an invasion of Libya seem all the more exciting. They were proud that aggression would entail the breaking of treaties, the defiance of Europe and a revival of ‘the traditions of Cesare Borgia and Machiavelli’. While itching for a real battle, they were, however, convinced that conquest would be easy because the Turkish garrisons in north Africa would surrender, and the Arab population would not fight. Little notion of une mission civilisatrice entered their heads. They would go to Libya to enrich and aggrandize Italy; they would find minerals, they would find water, they would make the desert bloom. A leader and theorist of nationalism, Enrico Corradini, visited a Libyan oasis and went into ecstasies about the wild trees laden with olives and vines so heavy with fruit that bunches of grapes were lying on the ground. ‘Instead of a desert,’ he announced, ‘we are in the Promised Land.’8
The clamour for war became so loud that Giolitti decided with some reluctance to invade in the autumn of 1911. The Italian navy bombarded Tripoli, the army defeated the Ottoman garrisons there, and after a few weeks Italy announced the annexation of Libya, even though its forces occupied only 1 per cent of that enormous territory. As Turkey needed troops for its war against the Balkan League, it signed a treaty in 1912 that recognized Italy as the de facto ruler of both Libya and the Dodecanese islands, which had also been captured. The Italians believed the war was over and congratulated themselves on a great victory.
The treaty, however, applied only to Italy and the Ottoman Empire. With considerable naivety, the Italians had assumed that Libya’s Arabs would be pleased to see them and grateful to be rescued from their Turkish oppressors. They were thus astonished and furious when early on in the war an Arab force attacked them and won a small victory. Claiming that the Arabs had proved themselves to be ‘treacherous rebels’, Italian commanders sanctioned reprisals so murderous that even Kaiser Wilhelm objected. This policy was in any case a failure. The revolt intensified, and, after three more years of fighting, Italy retained only a few towns along the coast. Although the Italians struck some 140 different campaign medals to commemorate their Libyan triumphs, the real victors of the war were their opponents, the bedouin of the Senussi Islamic order.9
The prime minister was under no illusions about the performance of the army, but he could not let the public know the truth. He thus invented victories and falsified figures to protect Italians from learning that their generals were so inept they could not win battles unless they outnumbered their enemies by a ratio of ten to one. Neither could Giolitti let people know that the war had been expensive, cruel and ultimately unsuccessful. Returning soldiers might wonder why so many people had been killed to acquire a few palm trees and a desert, but the government succeeded in convincing a jubilant populace that resurgent Italy had performed feats worthy of the Roman Empire. The war thus became popular and led to a sprouting of establishments with African names, a Bar Tripoli in a town’s piazza or a Caffè Benghasi on its Via Cavour. Monuments were erected and street-names were changed to reflect the recent glory, especially in the north, where most of Italy’s armchair imperialists lived: the city of Turin named streets and piazzas after almost every place that had been occupied by Italian forces in Libya, Eritrea and Somaliland. The pretence of victory may have been Giolitti’s greatest disservice to his country, because the lie encouraged too many Italians to rejoice and feel warlike. Thus they soon became tempted to participate in the great conflict that was about to engulf Europe.
The third monarch of united Italy was Victor Emanuel III, who became king after his father’s assassination in 1900. Short in stature, modest in character and retiring in disposition, he was not at all like his predecessors. Although he too had suffered a mainly military education, he liked reading books, and his interest in warfare was historical rather than physical. Neither as pompous as his father nor as bombastic as his grandfather, his sense and moderation in the early years of his reign did much to raise the prestige of the monarchy. Yet he was also a marrowless man, whose characteristics of fatalism and irresolution led him to make a series of decisions between 1915 and 1946 that were disastrous for his country and fatal to his dynasty. In 1915 and 1940 he joined world wars that were unpopular with most of his subjects; in 1922 he refused his own government’s request to declare martial law and prevent Mussolini from coming to power; and in the 1940s his failure to acknowledge his unpopularity by abdicating in favour of his son (until it was too late) encouraged Italians to vote for a republic.
In 1914 Italy was still a member of the Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany, which seemed no more logical then than it had at its conception in 1882. It certainly made no sense to Victor Emanuel, an anglophile who disliked the Germans, especially their Kaiser, who treated him with arrogance and condescension. Nor was it in the interests of Italy to be aligned against Britain, a country which, apart from supplying it with coal, had always supported it, had never tried to conquer it, and whose navy would be extremely threatening to its coastline in the event of hostilities. At no stage in its 150-year-old history has Italy needed to fight a war, and it should have been easy to avoid one that pitted its old supporters, France and Britain, against its more recent allies. Yet the country never liked to stay on the sidelines, at least not for very long, and the belligerent Powers in 1914 suspected that, despite the neutrality proclaimed in August, it would join the side most likely to win and demand a high price for doing so.
Italy’s dilemma about whose side to join in a European conflict was not a new one. Indeed it had existed for so long that military planners had never known whether to build fortifications on the north-eastern Alps against Austria or in the north-western mountains facing France. At the outbreak of the Great War the dilemma hinged on the question of how much territory the rival sets of allies could offer. War against France was often a temptation because the French were irritatingly successful neighbours who had grabbed Tunisia, even though it was closer to Italy. Yet apart from a slice of north Africa, Italy could not aspire to gain very much from France except possibly Nice and perhaps Corsica, an island with associations with Genoa and the (originally Florentine) Bonapartes, but not likely to be much more of an asset than Sardinia.
More tempting was the idea of fighting the traditional enemy Austria, even though it had been a formal ally for thirty-three years, because victory would gain Italy the terre irredente, the ‘unredeemed lands’ still in Habsburg hands such as the Italian-speaking city of Trento and the partly Italian city of Trieste. Known as ‘irredentists’, the Italian aspirant redeemers promoted this scheme of conflict as a fourth ‘war of independence’, as what the philosopher Giovanni Gentile considered a struggle to complete the Risorgimento, to obtain the desired lands and to achieve for the nation a sense of regeneration. They did not pretend that they would be fighting to liberate an oppressed people because even their foreign minister had recently praised the Austrians for their excellent administration of Trento and Trieste. Instead they would be fighting so that they could consider themselves – and be considered by others – as a martial nation.
In the spring of 1915, encouraged by Germany, the Austrian government offered Italy territorial concessions to induce it to remain neutral. Vienna was willing to give up Trento and most of the surrounding province, to grant autonomy to Trieste, to withdraw in Friuli as far as the east bank of the Isonzo River, and to approve an Italian occupation of Valona on the Albanian coast of the Adriatic. For Giolitti as for most politicians, this seemed a generous offer that should be accepted. Yet the government, led by Antonio Salandra (the prime minister) and Sidney Sonnino (the foreign minister), dismissed it as ‘dubious and absolutely inadequate’. This pair of politicians had decided that Italy must join the war and obtain for itself territory far in excess of the ‘unredeemed lands’. Realizing that they were in a minority, they worked in secret – ‘we two alone’, as Salandra told his partner – preventing anyone except in due course the king from knowing what was going on and keeping parliament in recess for six crucial months in case it demanded the right to debate matters of war and peace. The behaviour of Sonnino was perplexing to those who remembered him as a social reformer, a prudent economist, a sceptic of colonialism and a scoffer at the idea that Italy had any serious claim to either Trento or Trieste. Although in August 1914 he wanted Italy to join Austria’s side straightaway, he then completely changed his mind. Together with Salandra, he also abandoned the essential Mazzinian tenet that people should own and govern their own territories for a policy that would gain Italy expanses of Habsburg territory where Italians were in a minority, often a very small one.
Salandra and Sonnino haggled hard in their secret negotiations with the Triple Entente – Britain, France and Russia. As the prime minister admitted in an unfortunate phrase, Italy’s ‘sacred egoism’ was the determinant of his country’s foreign policy; no moral considerations were apparently involved. At the secret Treaty of London, which Victor Emanuel authorized in April 1915, the Italians were promised, along with Trieste and the Trentino, Gorizia, Istria, the South Tyrol, part of Dalmatia, a bit of Albania and most of the islands of the eastern Adriatic. If all went well in the war, the nation would acquire a million people who were not Italians but Croats and Slovenes and German-speaking Austrians. In return for these promises, Italy was obliged to declare war on both Germany and Austria, though in the event it delayed its declaration against Berlin for another sixteen months, persisting until September 1916 in exporting goods to its allies’ chief enemy.
Very few people were aware of the treaty’s terms until they were published by Russia’s Bolshevik government at the end of 1917. Many Italians were then appalled to learn that they had been fighting not only for the unredeemed lands but also for territory that was not by any standards Italian. Their country’s support had been put up for auction, and their young men had been dying not, as in the Risorgimento, for the patria but for what war memorials were soon calling ‘greater Italy’, a grander, larger and more powerful Italy that included Slav territories as well as the German-speaking South Tyrol. Salvemini lamented that Italy had thus entered the war with ‘the knife of Shylock rather than the liberating banner of Mazzini’.10
A majority of parliamentarians opposed the idea of their country going to war, and over 300 of them left their visiting cards in Giolitti’s hotel in Rome as a sign of support for the old statesman’s attempt to stop Italy from joining the hostilities. Opponents of the war included the socialists, most active Catholics in parliament and the pope, Benedict XV, who refused to sanction it as a just cause. The principal interventionists were the nationalists, men such as Papini who had trumpeted the need for blood to oil the wheels of the future and for ‘cadavers to pave the way of all triumphal processions’.11 Nationalists and Futurists were united in believing that a bloodbath would ‘purify’, that it would regenerate the nation, that it might even be a spiritual experience that would wipe out the stain of Lissa and Custoza. Giolitti’s opposition gave them new opportunities to ridicule the former premier and to brand him and other ‘neutralists’ as defeatists and even traitors: D’Annunzio excelled himself by inviting cheering crowds to kill such people. Although the interventionists were easily outnumbered by opponents of the war, they were well organized and knew how to influence public opinion. During what they called ‘the radiant days of May’ 1915, they brought huge crowds on to the streets and into the piazzas, arousing them to a state of delirium and inciting them to shout day after day for war. While this support was doubtless pleasing for the government, it did not influence the decision that had already been taken by the three men who counted, the prime minister, the foreign minister and the king. Victor Emanuel admitted later to the British ambassador that Italy had gone to war despite the fact that large majorities of its population and its parliament had been opposed.
The leaders of the combatant powers were criticized later for not foreseeing the length of the conflict or the scale of the carnage. Yet they had the excuse that, as their countries had not fought in Europe for several generations, it was difficult to predict the effect that machine guns, trenches and barbed wire might have on the tactics of a battle. Salandra and Sonnino had no such excuses. Although the prime minister claimed that an Italian invasion of Austria would quickly finish the war, he had had ample time since August 1914 to notice that invasions were no longer the speedy affairs they had once been. A glance at the stalemate on the Western Front should have been enough to convince him that the tactical advantage lay with the defending force, while a study of the battles that had already been fought, from the Marne to the Masurian Lakes, should have shown him that the war he demanded would cost hundreds of thousands of casualties. Lack of foresight was accompanied by such incompetence as a war leader that Salandra was forced to resign in 1916. In later years he advised the king to appoint Mussolini as prime minister and, despite subsequent qualms about fascism, he became a senator of the kingdom.
The chief theatre of war for the Italians was the valley of the Isonzo in Friuli, where they expected to defeat Austria (which was simultaneously fighting the Russians in the north and the Serbs in the south) before crossing the Carso Plateau and capturing Trieste. It turned out to be the most contested zone in the whole war. While their allies on the Western Front fought three battles of Ypres, the Italians engaged the Austrians in no fewer than twelve battles of the Isonzo, a statistic that by itself testifies to the limited imagination of the Italian commander, General Luigi Cadorna. The first eleven ended in stalemates, the front line advancing or sometimes retreating a few kilometres, but the last in 1917 (usually known as Caporetto) was a thumping victory for the Austrians and their German allies.
All countries, especially Britain, had unimaginative commanders who ordered their infantrymen to advance in straight lines, elbow to elbow, against well-defended positions, but Cadorna was in a league of his own. He failed to concentrate his forces, he attacked on too wide a front, he sent his men over open ground against barbed wire and machine guns, and he repeated these mistakes. His forces invariably outnumbered the Austrians, who were busy on their other two fronts, by a ratio of five to two, and he almost always suffered higher casualties than his opponents. These would have been even higher if Austrian soldiers had not sometimes felt pity for their enemies and risked court martial by encouraging them to retreat before they were gunned down.12
Cadorna was an obtuse and deluded general who liked to compare himself with Napoleon: when things were going really badly on the Isonzo, he consoled himself with the thought that not even the great Corsican could have fought better on the banks of that accursed river. His reaction to setbacks for which he was responsible was to sack or transfer his officers, singling out those who had shown spirit and originality: during the two and a half years of his command he removed more than 200 generals and over 600 colonels and battalion commanders. Another habit of his was to blame the poor fighting qualities of his soldiers, who were punished for their failings more savagely than their counterparts in the armies of Germany, France, Austria and Britain. Cadorna insisted that even mildly mutinous behaviour should be countered with summary executions. He also revived the ancient Roman custom of decimation, executing by lot a proportion of a censured unit’s soldiers, a practice guaranteed to kill innocent men. Before offensives military police with machine guns were stationed behind the trenches, ready to shoot at soldiers who appeared to dawdle as they were going over the top.
In the summer of 1917 Rudyard Kipling travelled to the Italian front and convinced himself that he was viewing a ‘new Italy’ in possession of an army comparable to the old Roman ‘exercitus’: even the generals – ‘wide-browed, bull-necked devils’ or ‘lean narrow hook-nosed Romans’ – resembled sculptures of classical times.13 A few weeks later, the illusion dissolved as the exercitus crumpled before the German–Austrian offensive at Caporetto and was forced to retreat all the way way back to the River Piave, not far north of Venice. 40,000 soldiers were killed or wounded, 300,000 were taken prisoner, and 350,000 deserted, disappearing into the hills and attempting to find their way home. The army lost vast quantities of weapons including 3,000 machine guns and 300,000 rifles. And the nation lost 14,000 square kilometres that contained a million of its citizens. There is little evidence that the return of the Austrians to Friuli, fifty years after their departure, was greatly regretted by the region’s inhabitants.
Cadorna had held on to his post for so long because he had secured the king’s support, and this allowed him to browbeat the prime minister and the cabinet. The disaster of Caporetto failed to dent his complacency, and he even managed to convince himself that public opinion would not tolerate his dismissal as the army’s commander. When the British and French insisted on his resignation, he blamed ‘the notorious ingratitude of the House of Savoy’.14 His replacement was General Armando Diaz, who held the line on the Piave and sensibly refused to launch costly offensives. In October 1918 the new commander eventually ordered an advance and won the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, a victory hailed as one of the greatest of all time, one that by itself caused the destruction of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire. In fact it was achieved with the support of French and British units at a time when the Germans were already beaten, the empire was already dissolving, and the Viennese government was seeking an armistice.
The First World War cost Italy a million casualties – one-third wounded, two-thirds dead – from a population of 35 million people. At the front its soldiers had suffered at least as badly as those of any other nation. Except perhaps for the Turks, they were the worst fed, worst led, worst clad and worst equipped in the conflict; they were expected to cut through Austrian barbed wire with implements resembling garden secateurs. Such deprivations may help explain why so many men deserted and why over half a million were taken prisoner. One German officer, the future General Rommel, recalled how at Caporetto Italian soldiers were so delighted to surrender that hundreds of them threw away their rifles and rushed at him, shouting ‘Evviva Germania!’15 Yet the prisoners had a miserable time in captivity. Since their own government feared that the thought of eating well in a prison camp would be an incentive to surrender, it refused to send food parcels to its captured soldiers in Germany and Austria. This policy, which no other country adopted, resulted in the deaths of 100,000 men from hunger and diseases brought on by starvation.16
It has often been claimed in Italy that the Great War made the country feel more patriotic, but there is little proof of this except among people who were patriots already. Conscripts naturally saw parts of their country beyond their provinces, and they were thus able to meet other Italians, even if their dialects made it difficult to communicate with them. Yet the evidence does not suggest that they cared very much for the cause, especially the soldiers who came from the south and were sent to northern mountains to die for places they had never heard of. Soldiers seldom exhibited signs of patriotic sentiment and sometimes they even spat at the national flag. Nor did they display much hostility to the enemy; it seemed that Italians no longer even pretended to hate the Austrians. Southern men employed ingenious methods to avoid conscription, including putting tobacco leaves under their arms, which gave them an artificial fever that appeared to be malaria. An American anthropologist found a Sicilian villager who made himself ill by eating cigars, while two of his neighbours even blinded themselves so as to be unfit for military service.17
Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, the prime minister in 1918, told parliament that Italy’s victory had been one of the greatest in recorded history, a fantasy that encouraged him and his supporters to make extravagant claims at the peace conference in Paris that opened in January 1919. In addition to gaining what he called Italy’s ‘God-given’ borders in the Alps, Orlando demanded Fiume, a Croatian port with an Italian middle class that had formerly been administered by Hungary. Although the city had not been included in the provisions of the Treaty of London, and though it was superfluous now that Trieste was in Italian hands, Orlando insisted on acquiring a place which, he mysteriously asserted, was ‘more Italian than Rome’.18 Sonnino, who was still foreign minister, was even more demanding than Orlando. In Paris the Italian delegation claimed it was ‘a matter of no significance’ that the South Tyrol (as Austria called it; for Italians it was the Alto Adige) contained over 200,000 German speakers, because they were there only as a ‘result of violent intrusion and foreign invasions’ in the past.19 Italy needed the Alpine watershed, insisted Sonnino, for its security and independence; it required a strategic ‘natural’ frontier rather than a purely ethnic one. He did not explain why Italy needed a strategic frontier when, in all recent wars between Italy and Austria, the aggressors had been the Italians.
If its western allies had remained limited to Britain and France, Italy would have stood a reasonable chance of gaining most of its demands; the Treaty of London had after all promised it a good deal of extra territory. In 1917, however, the United States had entered the war under a high-minded president with strong views about the right of peoples to self-determination: the ninth of Woodrow Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points stated that the ‘readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality’. This was plainly an appalling principle for Sonnino, who was intent on acquiring a large chunk of Dalmatia even though its population of 610,000 was almost entirely Slav and included only 18,000 Italian-speakers. One Italian diplomat supported his view by arguing that self-determination may have been ‘applicable to many regions but not to the shores of the Adriatic’.20 Arguments of this sort bewildered the American president, who could not understand how the nation of Garibaldi and Mazzini could aspire to rule subject peoples.
The Italian government’s response to Wilson was to send troops to the eastern Adriatic and impose Italian rule, a policy so provocative that it led to the resignation of the two most left-wing members of the cabinet in Rome. When he could not get his own way in Paris, Orlando tried another tactic. He walked out of the conference and waited in Rome for the allies to offer concessions and implore him to come back. As the delegates of the other three principals shared the view that Italy had contributed little to the conference except in discussions about its own borders, they were content to let him stay there until he decided, somewhat sheepishly, to return. Wilson had already agreed to let the Italians have the South Tyrol, a decision he later regretted, but he refused to concede Dalmatia, which was ear-marked for the new Yugoslavia.
Spurred on by the rhetoric of D’Annunzio and the nationalists, Orlando and Sonnino had raised such expectations that Italians were bound to feel disappointment at a settlement that was inevitably a compromise. Since Italy did not receive everything it wanted, its people were encouraged to believe that it had done badly out of the war, that it had been betrayed by its allies (who according to propaganda had been saved from defeat by the Italian army), and that the settlement was, in D’Annunzio’s searing phrase, a ‘mutilated peace’. Yet in fact Italy did quite well from the Treaty of Rapallo (1920) which, while denying it Dalmatia and Fiume, granted it the Trentino and the South Tyrol, Trieste and the Carso, plus Gorizia, Zara and several islands in the eastern Adriatic. Another gain for Italy was the defeat and dismemberment of its traditional enemy, the Austrian–Hungarian Empire, whose chief component was now confined to the Austrian heartland. Some Italians resented their exclusion from the allocation of the German colonies in Africa, from running a mandate in the Middle East, and from receiving no colonial additions except for a few border changes in Libya and east Africa. And they had a point, even if Italy had proved itself an inept colonial power so far. France and Britain liked to boast of their administrative skills as colonizers, but French policy in Lebanon led to predictable conflict and eventually to a ferocious civil war, while British policy in Palestine introduced a bloody antagonism that was showing few signs of abating nearly a century later.
Trento had been linked with Trieste to create Italy’s chief slogan of the war, a fact reflected by changes in street names all over the country. The Neapolitans had to sacrifice St Ferdinand so that his square could become Piazza Trento e Trieste, just as the Sardinians of Cagliari awoke one day to find a Viale Trieste meeting a Viale Trento in the long Piazza Trento. The city of Trento itself had once been the capital of powerful prince-bishops and, as the natural meeting-place between the Italian and Germanic peoples, had been chosen as the site of the great council that in the sixteenth century proclaimed the dogmas of the Counter-Reformation. With 90 per cent of its population speaking Italian, the Trentino was a legitimate national objective, as the Austrians had recognized by offering most of it to Italy before the fighting started. Its northern neighbour, the South Tyrol (now the Italian province of Bolzano), was a correspondingly unjustifiable aim because 90 per cent of its people were German-speakers. Italy’s insistence on possessing it has led to disputes and occasional violence since the Second World War. Tyroleans from both sides of the Alpine border – men wearing Lederhosen and fancy braces and dripping with folksy Gemütlichkeit – still gather at the city of Innsbruck to demand ein Tirol. Even today, when one visits the town of Bressanone, north of Bolzano, one feels one is not in Italy but in Italian-occupied Austria.
The ‘Fourth War of the Risorgimento’ provided its quota of martyred heroes. The most prominent Trentino was Cesare Battisti, a passionate irredentist who enlisted in the Italian army in 1915, was captured by the Austrians soon afterwards and was executed in the moat of Trento’s Castello di Buonconsiglio. Parts of that majestic castle now form a shrine to Battisti. You can see the room where he was sentenced and the spot where he was hanged, and you can tell from the photographs of his last minutes that he died well: having made no attempt to avoid death by renouncing his beliefs, his gaze is fierce, fearless, stern and unrepentant. A square in the old town is named after him, but his chief memorial is a vast mausoleum erected on a hill across the river. Consisting of fourteen bridged pillars in a circle, its lettering proclaims that Cesare Battisti prepared Trento for its new destiny and its union with the patria.
Yet the story of Battisti’s last year is more complicated than a simple and moving tale of martyrdom. A leader of the Trentino Socialist Party, Battisti had been a deputy in the parliament in Vienna and also, for a brief time, of the Diet of Innsbruck. However noble his behaviour and understandable his motives, he was by any legal standard a traitor to Austria who had joined the army of a foreign power that had reneged on its alliance and attacked the state of which he was a citizen. Similarly treacherous had been the earlier actions of Battisti’s most conspicuous counterpart in Trieste, the nationalist Guglielmo Oberdan, who deserted from the Austrian army and fled to Italy before returning in 1882 with the intention of killing the Habsburg emperor, Franz Josef. As Italy had just become a formal ally of Austria, the attempted murder of his legal sovereign might thus be seen as an act of double treachery. Yet memorials to this aspirant assassin can be found not only in Trieste but all over Italy. Even the small Sardinian island of La Maddalena contains a Via Oberdan; even sensible Bologna has a plaque on its town hall saluting the martyr’s stand against ‘tyrants abroad and cowards within’.
Trieste had been a fishing village until the Habsburgs transformed it into a free port at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Thereafter it grew to be a vast commercial emporium and a vital deep-sea port for the Habsburg Empire. It became one of those great multiethnic cities on the shores of the Mediterranean, as Venice had once been and Istanbul and Alexandria still were, a tolerant, open-minded place where its foreign businessmen – Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Egyptians – lived prosperously among an indigenous population of Italians, Slovenes and Jews of diverse origins. Its multicultural complexity is well illustrated in the person of its most famous writer, who called himself Italo Svevo (Italo the Swabian), whose real name was Schmitz, whose father’s family was Jewish-Hungarian and his mother’s Jewish Triestino, who went to school in Germany, who wrote badly in Italian and who felt comfortable only when speaking and writing in the dialect of his native city. Svevo was a businessman and an unsuccessful novelist when in 1907 he employed an Irish tutor to improve his English. The Irishman, also obscure at the time, was James Joyce, who became an enthusiast for Svevo’s work, promoted its author as ‘the Italian Proust’ and gained for his friend a late but enduring fame by persuading a French firm to translate and publish The Confessions of Zeno, written when Svevo was in his sixties. Recognition in Italy soon followed.
Italians were in a majority in Trieste itself but were outnumbered by Slovenes in the suburbs and the surrounding countryside. Although they included a smattering of nationalists, mainly students, very few of them volunteered to fight for Italy in 1915. The inhabitants understood a basic truth about their city: economically, Italy did not need Trieste – just as Trieste did not need Italy – but Austria and Trieste needed each other. The port is today linked to Italy only by a strip of land to the north-west; its real hinterland is Croatia and Slovenia, and its natural trading relationships are with central Europe, which is why the Austrians had encouraged its development. No rational person really believed that Trieste would prosper from unification with Italy. Even Sonnino, in the days when he cared more about economics than expansionism, admitted that the city would be ruined if it became part of the Italian kingdom.
Trieste is still a nineteenth-century city, one that was prevented from becoming a twentieth-century metropolis because the Paris peace conference abolished its role, severing it from its hinterland and handing it to Italy. Its new masters did little to retard its now inevitable decline. While it became Italian so late that it was spared an epidemic of statues, its streets were renamed – one even commemorates the ineffable Cadorna – and it received a Museo del Risorgimento which, perhaps because Trieste took no part in the real Risorgimento, is seldom visited and is only open two mornings a week. After unification with Italy, the city’s trade languished – and failed to recover – and its population declined. Today the steamers have gone, the docks are idle, the quays are used mainly by pleasure vessels. Trieste’s contact with the non-Italian world has also withered. Until the advent of budget airlines, you could not fly from it direct to any foreign city except Munich and even in 2008 you could not travel by rail to Ljubljana (the nearest city) unless you were prepared to arrive at a quarter to two in the morning.
Trieste is an evocative place for sentimentalists, for connoisseurs of decadence, and for a travel writer who depicts ambience as well as Jan Morris, who has written of ‘the sweet tristesse that is onomatopoeic to the place’.21 You can sip hot chocolate at a café in the great square (the Piazza Unità d’Italia), you can follow in the footsteps of Svevo and Joyce, you can listen to a town band playing the ‘Radetzky March’, and you can sense the enchantment of Miramar, the seaside castle built by the Archduke Maximilian before he went to Mexico and was shot as its emperor. Yet you will feel, even if you are not a nostalgist like Morris (and myself), that it is a place without a purpose and you may wonder why it had to be ruined for so tawdry a cause as Italian expansionism. Today, when nationalism in Italy barely exists, the exercise strikes one as peculiarly pointless. According to an opinion poll taken at the end of the twentieth century, a large majority of Italians did not even realize that Trieste was in Italy.22
In 1915 a middle-aged Italian left France, where he had gone to escape his creditors, and at the age of fifty-two enlisted in his country’s armed forces. In the course of the war he served in the army, the navy and the air force, and his extraordinary exploits, which cost him an eye and other injuries, included both a torpedo-boat raid and a flight over Vienna, which he ‘bombed’ with pamphlets written by himself. The name of this improbably exotic hero was Gabriele D’Annunzio, a sorcerer with words, a novelist of the erotic life and a poet of twilight and sensuality too talented to deserve Croce’s dismissive label, a ‘dilettante of sensations’. He was both a cruel and a charismatic man, part nietzschean and part narcissist, an occasional politician and a perennial philanderer. He inaugurated the trend of the shiny scalp that was copied by Mussolini and later by Yul Brynner and later still by millions of youthful-hearted men throughout the western world.
Like the nationalists and Futurists, D’Annunzio despised those who preferred the assurance of comfort to the risks of adventure. Like them, he desired colonies and national grandeur, he wanted Italians to recover their masculine vitality and thus he exhorted his compatriots to do what he himself often did – ‘to dare the undareable’. He insisted the Mediterranean should become ‘mare nostrum’, a phrase that reverberated in fascist heads with an effect similar to his words ‘mutilated peace’ which persuaded many people to share his views on the injustice of the peace treaties and the perfidy of allies who liked to belittle Italy. His post-war aims were the same as the government’s – the Treaty of London plus Fiume – but the politicians eventually and reluctantly accepted the settlement. D’Annunzio did not. In September 1919 he decided to dare the undareable and capture Fiume for Italy.
Before the war Fiume had served the eastern parts of the Austrian–Hungarian Empire in the way that Trieste had provided for the northern portions. Like Trieste, it was an important city for its Italian businessmen but not important, economically, for Italy: its commercial focus was fixed firmly on the Balkans. Even more than in Trieste, its divisions of class and ethnicity coincided: an Italian bourgeoisie dominated a Croatian working class to such an extent that none of the town’s schools taught in Croatian. After the war and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the Croatian majority moved to take over the city in line with the principles of Wilson’s Fourteen Points. Alarmed by this development, Italians in Fiume clamoured for unification with the ‘fatherland’, a cause that dismayed the government in Rome, which knew that international opinion was against it and that France was already positioning itself as the protector of the nascent Yugoslavia.
In Italy Fiume became a rallying-cry for nationalists and adventurers who volunteered alongside disbanded veterans known as ‘arditi’ to fight for its ‘liberation’. In a classic case of history repeating itself as farce, the volunteers shouted ‘Fiume or Death!’ while the inhabitants of the city responded with ‘Italy or Death!’ At a crucial moment D’Annunzio arrived to lead the volunteers into the city and from a palace balcony proclaimed the annexation of Fiume to Italy. Officers of the Italian army stationed around the city were ordered to prevent his entry, but they behaved like Marshal Ney in March 1815, and the poseur in D’Annunzio delighted in playing the part of Napoleon, even baring his chest and telling them to shoot him. He duly became director of a vulgar and hedonistic Ruritania known as the ‘Regency of Carnaro’.
The Italian government under Francesco Nitti had no idea how to deal with the ‘operatic dictatorship’ of D’Annunzio, which lasted over a year and was not overthrown until Giolitti returned as premier and sent troops into Fiume at the end of 1920. Although D’Annunzio quickly surrendered, he could claim a victory of sorts because Fiume became a free port and, four years later, was annexed anyway by Mussolini; as with Trieste, its incorporation into Italy deprived it of its hinterland and ruined it economically. Although nationalists claimed the Fiume episode was a triumph, Salvemini regarded D’Annunzio’s adventure as ‘a source of dishonour and ridicule for Italy’.23
One observer who found it neither dishonourable nor ridiculous was Benito Mussolini, who supported D’Annunzio in the pages of the newspaper he then edited, Il Popolo d’Italia. He noted how the comandante (as the dictator liked to call himself) manipulated crowds with speeches from a balcony, how he elicited the desired responses (as Garibaldi had once done) and how he stirred audiences up with crescendoes culminating in a mysterious and meaningless cry, ‘Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!’ The journalist in Milan could also appreciate the importance of uniforms and parades, of the resonance of the word duce, of the usefulness of such gestures of masculinity as the arm outstretched in a ‘Roman’ salute. It would be simplistic to call D’Annunzio Mussolini’s John the Baptist (as many people later did), but he was a precursor, at least in style. Soon after Mussolini became prime minister, D’Annunzio tactlessly told him that fascism had taken all its ideas from dannunzianesimo and invented nothing by itself.
Mussolini was thirty-six at the time of Fiume and had for long been displaying that volatility and inconsistency that were essential features of his character. As a socialist revolutionary he had described the Libyan war as a crime against humanity, had helped to organize protests and a strike against it and had gone to prison for five months as a result. His subsequent zeal in expelling reformists from the Socialist Party led to his appointment as editor of the party’s newspaper, Avanti!, a post that gave him a useful platform to attack the interventionists and argue for neutrality at all costs in the Great War. In October 1914, however, he changed his mind completely and decided that the war would be a good thing after all, especially if it ended in a bloodbath which resulted in revolution. He therefore left Avanti! and set up a rival newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, which received subsidies from countries eager for Italy to join them in the fighting. The lavish new life that Mussolini was soon relishing in Milan was largely funded by the British secret service.
The editor of Il Popolo welcomed Wilson’s Fourteen Points but, on realizing their implications for Italy’s ambitions, changed his mind and denounced them. The former enemy of nationalism and imperialism now became a proponent of Italy’s ‘imperial destiny’, demanding territories and ‘booty’ in the Balkans and the Middle East. In March 1919 he founded a movement called the fasci di combattimento, composed of a few hundred Futurists, nationalists, war veterans and former revolutionaries united by not much more than post-war disgruntlement. Although this group evolved into the Fascist Party two years later, it had few characteristics – beyond a propensity to violence – that would later be regarded as fascist. Its jumble of policies and lack of identity must have been evident to voters, who gave it less than 2 per cent of the vote in Milan in the elections at the end of 1919. Yet even before then these early fascists had revealed their preference for force over the ballot-box. A group of them, consisting mainly of arditi, had smashed up the office and printing-works of Avanti! in the spring. The leader of the fasci, a former socialist and editor of the paper, had by then identified their chief enemy as the Socialist Party.
There were good reasons for many people, even socialists, to feel exasperated with the performance of Italian socialism. At the elections that humiliated the fasci, the socialists had won more than 150 seats, making them the largest party in the Chamber, ahead of the Popular Party (the new Catholic party), which had 100 deputies, and Giolitti’s liberals, who were reduced to 92. In a functioning democracy the socialists would have entered the government, either in coalition or as a minority with outside support, as social democrats had already done in Sweden and the Labour Party did soon afterwards in Britain. In Italy they refused. When Victor Emanuel opened the new parliament, the socialist deputies walked out, singing ‘The Red Flag’ and shouting ‘Long live the socialist republic!’
In retrospect the ‘socialist threat’ to Italy seems to have been exaggerated but it appeared real enough at the time. ‘Red Week’ in the summer of 1914, when Emilia-Romagna seemed on the brink of revolution, had been a warning. The summer of 1920, when hundreds of thousands of people went on strike and occupied factories and shipyards, seemed still more like a pre-revolutionary situation. Giolitti, who was nearly eighty, refused to intervene and managed to defeat the socialists – and the possibility of revolution – with a policy of non-violence. He also invited moderate socialists to join his last cabinet and help him create that social peace which had been the chief object of his political life. Again they declined. The largest party in Italy refused to act responsibly and continued to frighten conservatives by talking about republicanism and revolution. Even when it became clear that its intransigence was driving Italians towards Mussolini, it concerned itself more with issues of ideological purity than with the fate of the country. Under Lenin’s orders from Moscow, the extremists tried to expel the moderates at the party conference in Livorno at the beginning of 1921; when the vote went against them, they marched off to form the Italian Communist Party. Later in the year the socialists again refused to collaborate in government and in the summer of 1922 committed the folly of calling a general strike. Three years of remorseless irresponsibility had by then convinced millions of people that liberal Italy was destitute, ungovernable and ripe for bolshevism. Only too late did some socialists realize that they had allowed the fasci to transform themselves from a motley group of malcontents into a force capable of becoming a government. Similar behaviour by the German Left led to a similar result in its country ten years later.
Giolitti’s refusal to use force to break the strikes and end the occupations may have scuppered the chance of a socialist revolution, but it alarmed northern landowners and industrialists, who concluded that in future they would have to protect their interests themselves. At hand were growing numbers of tough and violent fascists only too eager to assist them. Not content with a defensive role, squads of black-shirted thugs soon went on to the attack, beating up and killing socialists and burning their offices, their cooperatives and their local clubs, the case del popolo. Giolitti tried to tame the fascists by offering them an alliance in the election he called in 1921. Their candidates, he believed, would be like ‘fireworks’: they would ‘make a lot of noise but … leave nothing behind except smoke’.24 He was disastrously mistaken. His offer gave the fascists a measure of respectability and the means to win thirty-five seats, and in return they gave him nothing at all, not even support after the election, following which Giolitti was forced to resign. Nor did his gesture lessen their violence. Scenting that the socialists were already beaten, the party’s squadristi went on the rampage in 1922, marching through the Po Valley, occupying town halls, expelling socialist councils, killing hundreds of ‘reds’ and again setting fire to their buildings. Surprised by their success, and by the fact that the police and the army did little to impede them, the fascists turned north to occupy Trento and Bolzano. They had succeeded in creating an extraordinary situation, transforming themselves into a counter-state that was tolerated by the real state.
Even with Giolitti’s help in the elections, the Fascist Party held only 7 per cent of the seats in parliament, less than a third as many as those gained by either the Socialist Party or the Catholic popolari. Yet in the late summer of 1922, while the socialists were calling a general strike, the fascists were baying to take over the state, by constitutional means if possible, by coup or insurrection if not. In October they decided to force their way into government by staging a ‘march on Rome’, and on the evening of the 27th their squads occupied government offices and telephone exchanges in key areas. They could easily have been stopped by the army and the police, but the prime minister Facta, a liberal lightweight, dithered until after midnight. Eventually he and the cabinet advised the king to declare a state of emergency and impose martial law. At two o’clock in the morning Victor Emanuel agreed, and the army quickly recaptured the occupied buildings and blocked the roads and railways into Rome. Later in the morning, however, the king changed his mind and refused to sign the decree of martial law that his prime minister had prepared. After Facta resigned in consequence, Victor Emanuel offered his job to Salandra, the former premier, who asked Mussolini to join him in government. When the fascist leader declined to serve under him, Salandra successfully urged the king to resist the claims of Giolitti – the one politician who might still have been able to save Italy from fascism – and invite Mussolini to become prime minister.
It was a remarkable case of collective liberal suicide. Political Italy had suddenly and unnecessarily saddled itself with a prime minister who was the leader of a small political party which had gained power as a result of an armed insurrection. As Donald Sassoon has suggested, this could not have happened had the ‘establishment’ not decided it wanted Mussolini to ‘cleanse the country of the red menace and then turn himself into a figurehead. The old establishment would rule in the shadows, as it always had done.’25 In the event the king became the figurehead, and the establishment – or much of it – was excluded from power.
Many liberals acquiesced in Mussolini’s takeover and continued to do so for some years. They believed that their state had been too weak and the political system – which had not become a party system – too unstable. Sixty-one years of liberal government had produced eighty-six ministers of education, eighty-eight ministers of justice and ninety-four ministers of the navy; one minister of agriculture had taken office on Christmas Eve and left it on Boxing Day.26 How could administration function in such a manner? Certainly the liberals underestimated Mussolini, as did Catholics and socialists; like the king, they did not believe that the fascist leader intended to make himself a dictator. Even intellectuals of the stature of Gobetti and Salvemini could not see much difference between him and Giolitti; even Croce was ecstatic about the prospect of having Mussolini as prime minister.
The world’s first and most quintessential fascist dictator thus achieved power by constitutional means – as did his future ally Adolf Hitler a decade later. Mussolini did not need a revolution like Lenin, or an army revolt like Franco, or the usual coups and murders that have cleared the way for other tyrants. Yet, just as he wanted people to think him more brutal than he really was, so he liked to claim that he had seized power by marching on Rome rather than receiving it at the hands of the king. There was in fact no march on the capital. A few thousand fascists, bedraggled and ill-equipped, gathered in the rain outside the city gates on 28 October, but, if the king had signed the decree of martial law, the armed forces could have dispersed them without difficulty. Mussolini himself did not pretend to march. He travelled by sleeping-car from Milan to Rome, a journey he compared to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon.
Mussolini gave notice of his intentions when, after becoming prime minister on 29 October, he addressed the deputies, telling them he could have converted their ‘deaf and grey’ Chamber into a barracks for his ‘legions’, that he could have abolished parliament and formed a government consisting solely of fascists, and that he had not done those things only because he had ‘not wanted to, at least not for the moment’. The new premier often made it plain how much he despised democracy, how he regarded it as a foreign import unsuitable for Italians, but his liberal opponents seldom took him seriously. They seemed satisfied that at least he had acted legally, swearing allegiance to the king and the constitution and appointing a cabinet with a majority of non-fascists, including four liberals and the Great War’s triumphant general, Armando Diaz. They did not notice signs of incipient megalomania when Mussolini made himself foreign minister and interior minister as well as prime minister – a trend that accelerated crazily so that by 1929 he held eight of the thirteen posts in the cabinet. Nor did enough of them worry that his squads were beating up and sometimes killing political opponents, notably and notoriously his most courageous critic, the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who was murdered in June 1924. A supine parliament passed laws that muzzled the press, guaranteed a fascist majority in the Chamber and established the apparatus of an authoritarian state. It paid a predictable penalty: all political parties were soon abolished except for one, the Partito Nazionale Fascista.
Giolitti was the first of the liberals to realize their mistake, but by then it was too late to rectify it. In January 1925 he voted to censure Mussolini in the Chamber but received the support of only thirty-six deputies. Many more would have voted with him had the socialists not chosen to ‘secede’ from parliament, one of several gestures they made that played into the hands of Mussolini. Giolitti observed that Italy had got the government it deserved; he might have said more aptly that the socialists had the government their behaviour had merited. In 1928 the old statesman, the greatest figure of Italian liberalism, died at the age of eighty-five. Mussolini did not attend his funeral. Nor did the king, whom he had served well.