“The coup against Rome has the whole of Italy hanging by a thread. The liberal and socialist newspapers give each day in large print the price of the lira relative to the sterling. Currency depreciation causes enormous anguish“. With these words, the Catalan writer Josep Pla described, in a Time.news entitled In Full Counterrevolution and dated October 27, 1922, the first moments of the coup call of Benito Mussoliniwho had called his followers, many violent and armedto throw themselves on the Italian capital to induce the king Victor Emanuel III to hand over power. A young Pla thus began his journalistic deliveries on the so-called march on rome and the takeover of the first fascist dictatorship of history
Pla had announced it to his brother the previous September. His intention, he had explained, was to travel to northern Italy to write “a short history” about the fascism, after having already spent six months (from March to August 1922) in the transalpine country. With this preamble, the Catalan writer had committed himself to the Madrid newspaper the sun and the Barcelonan Advertising (in which it will publish under the heading Notes from Italy).
However, according to Narcís Garolera in the prologue of the volume European cards, events rushedand from October and the following three months, Pla (then barely 25 years old) will write for the two newspapers around 50 chronicles in which he will narrate, with a critical spirit, the capitulation of the liberal government of Luigi Factsthe fascist uprising and the consolidation of the dictatorial regime of Mussolini.
The immorality of democracy
From the outset, Pla is very impressed runaway inflationthe poverty and all the social breeding ground accompanying the fascist coup. Sometimes, he also compares this social degradation with the situation in Spain, being he one of the few Spanish journalists (the only one, according to some sources) that covers the coup uprising on the ground. So much so that he even gets involved in a controversy with Ramiro de Maeztuauthor of an article entitled The ideal fascism, whom Pla accuses of waging “an admirable campaign” on “the naivety of pacifism and the immorality of democracy“. “Fascism has come almost entirely to suppress criticism. This has always been the ideal of Spanish militarism“says Pla.
The protest sector with fascism to which Pla belongs also allows him to make a disenchanted X-ray of the strata of the fascist troops, among which he highlights those who they march on rome that, for the most part, they come from rural areas. On the other hand, says Pla, the squad members “students and gentlemen have stayed in Florence”, while “the young nationalists have also remained in the rear.”
In line with his reflections, Pla defines fascism as a “protectionist” and nationalist plutocracy that, despite its little parliamentary weight, has been taking over the masses that supported the socialism. “When the European war broke out, Mussolini (…) became an interventionist, militarist and patriot, and founded, expelled from socialism, The People of Italy“, remembers Pla. But it is with “the dissatisfied with peace”, after the Great War, that fascism is createdAdd.
The Italy of the lock
This drift, continues Pla, is seen particularly in the Umbrian and Tuscan cities, such as Perugia and Florence, as well as in those of Emilia Romagna, including Ferrara and Bologna. A city, this one, that the Catalan considers one of the epicenters of fascism when this movement starts, after the murder of 10 fascists in December 1920, to grow quickly in Emilia Romagna and expand from there to the rest of the country.
The reason is that, “fascism having taken over the agricultural unions (…) who is not fascist does not eat“, explains a fascist to Pla, whose testimony the Catalan transcribes in From Florence to Bologna on a fascist train. This is also why, after the March on Rome was completed, as usually happens in dictatorships, the fascist regime shows his cruelest face. So, “many personalities from the socialist and popular party” have to go through “the disgusting humiliation of having to gobble down a good glass of castor bean before the chirigota of a fascist squad armed to the teeth“. In Italy “no longer governs more than the bar.”