2023-06-05 18:32:43
Two hundred people gather in Piazza San Sepolcro in Milan: bold people, futurists, former trade unionists. Confused ideas and a marked propensity for the use of political violence
Not many have responded to Benito Mussolini’s appeal. There are less than two hundred participants in the meeting called in Milan by your newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia for March 23, 1919, a date that will go down in history for the foundation of the Combat Fasci. At first the meeting had been convened at the Dal Verme theatre, then the scarce adhesions from the rest of Italy led the organizers to fall back on the more intimate hall of the Industrial and Commercial Alliance located in Piazza San Sepolcro. It was made available by the entrepreneur Cesare Goldmann, a Jew and a Freemason: paradoxically, two categories of people who would later suffer the persecutions of fascism.
Several of those present are former revolutionary syndicalists who have joined Mussolini in the name of the interventionist choice: Cesare Rossi, Michele Bianchi, Luigi Razza (the last two will become ministers). Then there are the arditi, the members of the chosen corps of shock troops demobilized after the end of the war, who find it hard to get used to civilian life again and they created an association with a strong nationalist orientation: the meeting chaired by one of them, Captain Ferruccio Vecchi, tall, pale, with haunted eyes. Another important component consists of the Futurists, a cultural current that has always exalted war as the only hygiene in the world: their best-known and charismatic exponent, the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leads them to Piazza San Sepolcro.
Mussolini is experiencing a problematic moment. After the victorious end of the First World War, interventionism seems to have lost its raison d’être, especially as the exhausted country struggles to recover, and the masses are fascinated by the myth of the Bolshevik revolution, agitated by the socialists. The future dictator is sympathetic to the demands of the workers, especially ex-combatants, but his main purpose is to keep the rift open between those who wanted war and those who opposed it, branding his former PSI comrades as anti-nationals, enemies of Italy.
In his introductory speech on 23 March in Piazza San Sepolcro, Mussolini read three declarations: one in support of the requests of ex-combatants; the second claims the maximum possible territorial expansion, with the annexation of Fiume and Dalmatia to Italy; but the most important is the third, which commits the fascists to sabotage by all means the candidacies of neutralists of all parties. Those who are against the war, especially the socialists, have no right to participate in public life. And the expression by all means contemplates the use of violence not too covertly.
The audience to which Mussolini is addressing has rather confused ideas, mixes extremist nationalism with subversive ambitions. The director of the Popolo d’Italia listened to the interventions of the debate and, in his second speech, declared that the fascists were on revolutionary ground, but rejected without appeal the Bolshevik experiment which, he claimed, ruined Russia’s economic life. In his opinion it is a question of separating the official Socialist Party from the proletariat, of satisfying the needs of the masses by detaching them from the maximalist and internationalist extremism of the PSI. He speaks openly, in this regard, of economic democracy.
On the political level, Mussolini sets no limits to his ambitions, convinced that the old liberal ruling class’s days are numbered: If the regime is overcome – it thunders – we will have to occupy its place. In the meantime, he calls for proportional representation (at the time there was a single-member majority system), the vote for women and the abolition of the Senate (that feudal body), whose members are appointed by the king. Then a national assembly, he continues, will have to choose the institutional form of the state, and the fascists are now pronouncing themselves for the end of the monarchy and the transition to the republic.
This approach is transfused into the program of the Fasci, published by the Popolo d’Italia on 6 June 1919. The text obviously speaks of valorising the revolutionary war, but at the same time calls for the legal eight-hour working day, minimum wages, the participation of workers’ representatives in the technical functioning of the industry. The anti-plutocratic imprint of the fascist manifesto is clear, proposing the nationalization of all arms and explosives factories and a strong extraordinary progressive tax on capital. There is also an anti-clerical note, where the seizure of all the goods of the religious congregations is demanded.
However, the voters are not enchanted. In the elections of 16 November 1919, the Fasci presented themselves on their own only in Milan and obtained a few thousand votes. Although the proportional system has been introduced, Mussolini remains excluded from the Chamber. But his followers have made themselves heard for other reasons. On April 15, 1919, three weeks after the meeting in Piazza San Sepolcro, a mob of fascists led by Vecchi and Marinetti attacked and set fire to the headquarters of Avanti!, the PSI newspaper in Milan: the balance of the clashes of four dead, including a woman, Teresa Galli. And on 3 November, at the Gaffurio theater in Lodi, the fascists fired on socialist militants who were trying to disturb their rally, killing three. These are the first signs of the squadron offensive.
In the next months Mussolini will turn right to intercept the consensus of the middle class. And some participants in the gathering of San Sepolcro, linked to the primitive left line, will detach themselves from him. One of them, Enrico Jacchia, died in Spain in 1937 fighting against Francisco Franco’s troops supported by fascist Italy. Another, Alfonso Vajana, will participate in the Resistance.
June 5, 2023 (change June 5, 2023 | 17:02)
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