2023-05-08 15:56:43
At the age of 29, an unknown leader from Forlì conquered the national party and the direction of «Avanti!» with a very harsh attack against the deputies
Reggio Emilia, 8 July 1912
The XIII is celebrated at the Ariosto theater National Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI). And around 2.15 pm he takes the floor, for what will be the decisive intervention of the whole debate, a delegate from Romagna. He is about to turn 29, he was released a few months earlier from the prison where he had been imprisoned for demonstrating against the colonial war in Libya. His name is Benito Mussolini.
The stranger
Leader of the PSI in the Forlì area, coming from an experience in Switzerland and another in Trentino (then an Austrian possession), for many militants he is almost a stranger, but perfectly embodies the revolutionary sentiments of the majority of the audience, tired of the moderate and accommodating politics of the socialist parliamentary group, dominated by the reformists. Mussolini brings with him an agenda that rejects the report presented by the PSI deputies to Congressdefined as “poor, skeletal”, and deplores the “political inaction” of the group in Montecitorio, “which has contributed to demoralizing the masses”.
The list
This harsh political judgment is followed, in the text, by what the Romagna agitator himself calls a “proscription list”, which requests that Leonida Bissolati, Angiolo Cabrini and Ivanoe Bonomi be expelled from the partyreformist parliamentarians guilty of having gone to the Quirinale to congratulate King Vittorio Emanuele III who had just escaped an attack.
«Lean, harsh, talks jerky»
The same provision is invoked against Guido Podrecca, who in the Chamber sided in favor of the colonial enterprise in Tripoli (seven years later Podrecca will be among the founders of the Combat Fasci). Mussolini takes the floor. And the news from the Corriere della Sera underlines his profound harmony with the audience, who applaud him repeatedly: «The speaker, thin, harsh, speaking jerkily, with sinceritypleases Congress, who feel they have in him an interpreter of their feelings».
The attack on “germs”
The speech is very polemical, sometimes violent. Mussolini, in addition to reading his agenda, calls for the end of the political autonomy of the parliamentary group, whose “moral ease” he deprecates. He declares that the attempt on the life of Vittorio Emanuele III had to be considered as a normal “injury to the king’s trade”. He compares the reformist deputies of the PSI to «pathogens entering the bloodstream». He concludes with a profession of intransigence: “Bissolati, Cabrini, Bonomi and the other waiting parties can go to the Quirinale, even to the Vatican, if they want, but the Socialist Party must declare that it is not willing to follow them either today, or tomorrow, or ever” .
Victory
Congress goes into a frenzy. At the time of the vote, the revolutionary line supported by Mussolini prevailed by far with 12,556 congressional votes. Two other motions, softer towards right-wing reformists, obtained respectively 5,633 and 3,250 votes, while there were 2,072 abstentions. The reprobate are therefore expelled, while the young man from Romagna emerges triumphant from the Congress and is naturally elected to the leadership of the party.
The direction of «Avanti!»
The final consecration comes in November. Mussolini is appointed director of the official newspaper of the PSI, the «Avanti!»
, which is also the main tool with which the party addresses its base. It is a task of the utmost importance, with which the sanguine Romagna becomes a fundamental point of reference for all socialistsbut also for a wider area that includes revolutionary syndicalists and all those who are fed up with the compromised political balance embodied in the figure of the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti.
The marriage
Thus Mussolini moved from Romagna to Milan, where the editorial staff of the «Avanti!»
. Dal 1910 he has a steady partner, Rachele Guidiwhom he married civilly in 1915, but this does not prevent him from cultivating other romantic relationships. In 1910, his first daughter, Edda, was born in Forlì. The second son, Vittorio, will instead be born in Milan in 1916. At the head of the «Avanti!» Mussolini demonstrates a brilliant talent as a communicator. Within a couple of years the newspaper almost doubled its sales, from an average of 34,000 to 60,000 copies per day, with peaks of 100 thousand. The line is marked by maximum intransigence towards bourgeois institutions.
He teased him to the communists
In the cases in which the police shoot into the crowd, killing striking workers, unfortunately frequent in that historical phase, the socialist director uses fiery words: «No violence is more legitimate – he writes – than that which comes from below as a human reaction to the criminal policy of the massacre”. He is not surprised that Mussolini gathers the convinced consent of many young socialists who then, years later, will become enthusiastic about the Bolshevik revolution. Some, like Angelo Tasca and Amadeo Bordiga write in the «Avanti!» or in the magazine Utopia, which the leader from Romagna founded in order to be able to think about politics outside the shackles of the party. In memory of this past convergence, a now fascist Mussolini, in his first speech to the Chamber on June 21, 1921, he will make fun of the communist deputies calling them his own “spiritual children”.
May 8, 2023 (change May 8, 2023 | 3:56 pm)
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