Italy

World War I and fascism

War and its aftermath

Conduct of the war

On Giolitti’s resignation in March 1914, the more conservative Antonio Salandra formed a new government. In June, “Red Week,” a period of widespread rioting throughout the Romagna and the Marche, came in response to the killing of three antimilitarist demonstrators at Ancona. When World War I broke out in August, the Salandra government stayed neutral and began to negotiate with both sides—a policy that Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino described as “sacred egoism.” The Austrians eventually agreed to grant Trentino to Italy in exchange for an alliance, but the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia) made a more generous offer, promising Italy not only Trentino but also South Tirol, Trieste, Gorizia, Istria, and northern Dalmatia. The Italians accepted this offer in the secret Treaty of London (April 1915) and joined the war against Austria-Hungary a month later, hoping for major territorial gains.

The negotiations, conducted by the foreign and prime ministers and a handful of diplomats, had been kept secret. The majority of deputies, meanwhile, favoured neutrality, as did former prime minister Giolitti, the major opposition groups (Catholics and Socialists), and most of the population. War therefore was supported only by the conservatives in government, by the Nationalist Association, a group formed in 1910 by Enrico Corradini and others to support Italian expansionism, by some Liberals who saw it as the culmination of the Risorgimento’s fight for national unity, by Republicans and reformist Socialists who knew nothing of the Treaty of London and thought they were fighting for national liberation, and by some syndicalists and extremist Socialists—including Benito Mussolini, then editor of the Socialist Party newspaper—who thought the war would bring about the overthrow of capitalism. Mussolini was soon expelled from the Socialist Party, but with help from the Triple Entente he managed to found his own alternative, pro-war newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”). Futurists and nationalists (including Gabriele D’Annunzio) agitated for intervention. In April–May 1915 the government, helped by a series of noisy demonstrations by pro-war activists (the so-called “Radiant Days of May”), pushed through its war policy despite the opposition of the majority in parliament and in the country. Neither Giolitti nor any other “neutralist” could form a government without renouncing the Treaty of London, betraying Italy’s new allies, and compromising the king. The Salandra government officially declared war against Austria-Hungary on May 23 and entered combat the following day. Meanwhile, despite a series of defections to the nationalist cause, the Socialist Party expressed its official position in the slogan “Neither adherence, nor sabotage.” Unlike its sister parties in the Second International (an international meeting of trade unions and socialist parties), the PSI did not get behind the Italian war effort. The reformist Claudio Treves voiced the pacifist opinions of the movement in parliament in 1917, when he made a plea that the troops should not spend another winter in the trenches. Other Socialists took a more active role against the war and distributed antiwar propaganda or organized desertions. Many Catholics also failed to support Italy’s participation in the war, although others took an active part in the conflict. In August 1917 Pope Benedict XV called for an end to what he called a “useless slaughter.”

In June 1916, after a series of military failures, the Salandra government resigned. The new prime minister was Paolo Boselli, who in turn resigned after the momentous military disaster at Caporetto in October 1917, which enabled the Austrians to occupy much of the Veneto in 1917 and 1918. This single battle left 11,000 Italian soldiers dead, 29,000 injured, and 280,000 taken prisoner. Some 350,000 Italian soldiers deserted or went missing, and 400,000 people became refugees. Only a strong rearguard action in November and December prevented further Austrian advances.

Caporetto signified the end of the war for many Italians and encapsulated the disastrous leadership of General Luigi Cadorna, as well as the terrible conditions under which the war was being fought. In some mountain regions, far more soldiers died from cold and starvation than from actual fighting with the Austrians. The generals themselves tended to blame the defeat at Caporetto on poor morale and “defeatism.” Cadorna blamed “shirkers” and called Caporetto a “military strike.” (Caporetto had coincided with the Russian Revolution of 1917). Cadorna himself was replaced by General Armando Diaz in November. Nonetheless, the invasion of Italian territory helped consolidate the war effort on the home front, and thousands of support committees, often sustained by middle-class groups, were formed to “defend the nation.” Some Socialist deputies and intellectuals, such as Turati, rallied to the war effort as the threat to Italian territory became clearer. After the war, the wounds of the defeat in 1917 were reopened in the long Caporetto Inquest of 1918–19, which blamed the invasion largely on various top military leaders.

The war was deeply unpopular both among the troops—mostly conscripted peasants who were undernourished and fighting for a cause few could understand—and among the civilian population back home, which included almost one million workers in arms factories who were also subject to military discipline. Many rebelled within the army. (It has been estimated that some 470,000 conscripts resisted call-up, 310,000 committed acts of indiscipline under arms, and 300,000 deserted.) More than one million soldiers came before military tribunals before a postwar amnesty was granted. Many once again saw the Italian state only as a repressive institution. Antiwar disturbances struck Milan in May 1917, and serious bread riots took place among the industrial workers of Turin in August 1917. Troops occupied Turin and took four days to restore order; some 50 demonstrators and 10 soldiers were killed in the clashes.

After November 1917 a more liberal government under Vittorio Emanuele Orlando rallied the country to defend its frontiers. Diaz made welfare concessions to the troops and fought a far more defensive campaign until October 1918, when, in the closing stages of the war, the Italians won a final, decisive victory at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. In reality, Italy’s victory was as much the result of the internal collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany as of any radical transformation in the capacities and motivations of the Italian army.

The cost of victory

Italy won the war, therefore, but at a huge cost: some 600,000 dead, 950,000 wounded, and a legacy of bitterness and division. The victorious patriots and nationalists now detested parliament, where the Giolittian majority had never supported the war, although they defended the idea of the nation and the war record of the Italian army. Many workers, peasants, Socialists, and trade unionists were disgusted by the costs of the conflict and were inspired by the revolutions in Russia and Germany. Returning veterans expected the land that they had been promised in 1917–18. The Italian flag became a powerful focus of division and hatred. War memorials were contested all over the peninsula. These divisions greatly weakened the postwar political regime and fractured elements of society.

Furthermore, the pro-war groups were themselves bitterly divided when the war ended. Should Italy, at the Paris Peace Conference (1919–20), try to secure the terms of the Treaty of London, as Foreign Minister Sonnino urged, or should it support U.S. President Woodrow Wilson and adhere to the “principle of nationality”—that is, be willing to accept less territory in the Adriatic region, as the Left Liberals and Republicans advocated? In the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919), Italy gained Trentino, part of Slovene-speaking Gorizia, Trieste, the German-speaking South Tirol, and partly Croatian-speaking Istria. But Dalmatia was excluded, despite the Treaty of London, as was Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia), a Yugoslav port largely inhabited by Italian speakers, which Sonnino had also decided to claim; so too were any colonial territories in Africa or Asia and any claim on Albania. Nationalists therefore argued that Italy had been robbed of its rightful gains (“a mutilated victory”).

Orlando resigned in June 1919. When the new government of the Radical leader Francesco Saverio Nitti was also unsuccessful in foreign affairs, the flamboyant poet Gabriele D’Annunzio led a group of volunteers to Fiume in September and captured the city himself. Fiume became a centre of nationalist agitation for more than a year, and D’Annunzio was dislodged (by Italian forces) only in December 1920 when Fiume became, briefly, an independent republic. Fiume became a symbol of heroic nationalism for those Italians who had supported the war and felt betrayed by the postwar settlement.

Economic and political crisis: the “two red years”

Italy faced serious postwar economic problems. Wartime governments had printed money to pay for arms, and inflation intensified. By the end of 1920 the lira was worth only one-sixth of its 1913 value. Savings became nearly worthless, and rents collected by landowners plummeted in value. Meanwhile, the major arms and shipbuilding firms went bankrupt after the war for lack of government orders. Unemployment rose to two million as returning soldiers searched for work. Peasants, organized by trade unions, ex-servicemen’s groups, or Catholic leagues, seized land for themselves, especially in the south; agricultural labourers went on strike at harvest time. Trade unions, now operating again, pressed for higher wages, and strikes, including those in the public services, became routine. A series of stoppages paralyzed the railroads, as well as postal and telegraph services.

Throughout the biennio rosso (“two red years”; 1919–20), revolution appeared imminent. While spontaneous land occupations swept through the south, riots and lootings hit shopkeepers in the north and centre in the summer of 1919, and prices were cut by half throughout the country. Socialist deputies walked out of parliament in December 1919 to protest the presence of the king. They were attacked by nationalists, and widespread general strikes followed. In April 1920 the Piedmontese General Strike blocked work throughout Piedmont. The Socialist Party and the trade unions met in Milan to decide, absurdly, whether or not to call a revolution. They voted against, and Piedmont was isolated. In June 1920, mutinies, riots, and strikes hit the Ancona region and threatened to become an insurrection. Massive rural-worker agitation swept the whole of the Po valley and threatened the harvest during the summer of 1920. The Catholic “white” (as opposed to the Socialist “red”) union federation, the CIL (Confederazione Italiana Lavoratori), formed in 1918, grew massively throughout the biennio rosso, above all in the agricultural regions of the north and especially around Bergamo, Brescia, and Cremona. A Catholic left even emerged in the north that preached revolution and led long strikes in Lombardy and the Veneto. Yet this mass movement never linked up with the Socialists, whose ideological anticlericalism alienated them from all wings of the Catholic movement.

The biennio rosso concluded with sit-down strikes in which workers occupied most of the factories of the north in August and September 1920. For three weeks workers attempted to continue production, seeking to promote the idea that they could “replace the ruling class” in thousands of factories across Italy. Meanwhile, the government (led again by the wily Giolitti) and the industrialists waited for the occupations to fizzle out, which they eventually did. The factory occupations marked not the beginning but the end of the mass movements of the biennio rosso.

The Socialist Party was dominated by its maximalist wing, a faction led by Giacinto Serrati that abandoned the Socialists’ prewar and wartime reformist policy for a more radical approach, and by the New Order (Ordine Nuovo) group of intellectuals based in Turin around Antonio Gramsci. These Socialists continually proclaimed the need for revolution and their desire to “do as in Russia.” Reformist leaders, such as Turati, were isolated and vilified. However, the party did little to actually prepare for revolution, and its working-class base, as well as most trade union leaders, remained largely moderate and reformist. Only in Turin, where the factory council movement undermined both union and employer power, did revolutionary practice go beyond the empty rhetoric of the maximalists. As Serrati put it, the maximalists based their strategy on the view that “We Marxists interpret history, we do not make it.” Very little attempt was made to link up the two great classes of Italian society, the workers and the peasants, and the middle classes were either ignored or reviled as “doomed to disappear.” “Who does not work shall not eat” was one popular maximalist anti-middle-class slogan. Socialists and unions were extremely hostile to small property and favoured land collectivization, a policy that alienated the new class of small landowners created before and after the war across Italy. Catholic and Socialist unions also fought each other bitterly throughout this period and failed to form alliances to fight the Fascist onslaught against both movements after 1920. Each movement was hamstrung by its deep-rooted, ideological distrust of the other—the Socialists by their anticlericalism, the Catholics by their antisocialism.

The postwar coalition governments of Nitti (1919–20) and his successors Giolitti (1920–21), Ivanoe Bonomi (1921–22), and Luigi Facta (February–October 1922) were all weak and could do little except repress the strike movements by force or urge industrialists and landowners to make concessions not only on pay but even on “control” of the workplace. Inflation threatened the livelihood of many of those on fixed incomes, especially pensioners, administrative workers, and other groups not able to organize as effectively as industrial workers. These governments were powerless to keep prices from rising or to satisfy the demands of the unions. Nor was there any attempt at serious reform of the state or the economy—a project that Turati outlined in his Rifare l’Italia! (1920; “Remake Italy!”). The possibility of a democratic revolution was lost in the violence, bitterness, and fear of the postwar years.

Diplomatic and economic failures undermined middle-class confidence in government, especially when Giolitti also imposed taxes on war profits. In 1919 universal male suffrage and proportional representation were introduced for parliamentary elections. The result, in the new parliament elected in November 1919, was that the Socialists, with 30 percent of the vote, became the largest party, with 156 seats, and the new (Catholic) Italian Popular Party, with more than 20 percent of the vote, won 100 seats. These two parties dominated northern and central Italy. Giolitti had to bring the Popular Party into his government in 1920 and make many concessions to certain peasant interests, including giving guarantees to squatters and giving the Ministry of Agriculture to the Catholics. These reforms did not go far enough to satisfy the landless peasants but managed to terrify landowners. Furthermore, the two “subversive” parties won control of almost half the municipalities in the autumn of 1920, ensuring that Socialist or Catholic cooperatives would be given all local public works contracts. The radical language of the maximalist local campaigns particularly alarmed the urban middle classes.

In January 1921, during a congress in Livorno, the left wing of the Socialists split away to found the Italian Communist Party (Partito Communista d’Italia, later Partito Communista Italiano [PCI]; now Democrats of the Left [Democratici di Sinistra]), which increased middle-class alarm. In reality, this split was a sign of defeat and weakened the left. The Communist Party—led by Amadeo Bordiga (until 1924), who advocated abstention from elections, and then by Palmiro Togliatti—pursued a sectarian policy of eschewing anti-Fascist alliances, which made the victory of the right far easier than it might have been. The PCI began to depend heavily on support and orders from Moscow, a close relationship that was to last well into the 1970s.

The Fascist era

The rise of Mussolini

The political crisis of the postwar years provided an opportunity for militant, patriotic movements, including those of ex-servicemen and former assault troops, students, ex-syndicalists, and former pro-war agitators. D’Annunzio in Fiume led one such movement, but the ex-Socialist journalist Benito Mussolini soon became even more prominent, founding his fasci di combattimento (“fighting leagues”), better known as Fascists, in Milan in March 1919. The group’s first program was a mishmash of radical nationalist ideas, with strong doses of anticlericalism and republicanism. Proposals included the confiscation of war profits, the eight-hour day, and the vote for women.

Mussolini’s movement was initially unsuccessful, but Fascists soon began to agitate in the streets and against the left. In April 1919 Fascists and nationalists burned down the offices of the national Socialist daily, L’Avanti!, in Milan. Four people were killed, and the paper shut down for several days. This was the first demonstration of the ability of the Fascists to attack Socialist institutions. The offices of L’Avanti! were attacked twice more between 1920 and 1922. Organized militias began to attract support across Italy in an anti-Bolshevik crusade that united various social and political sectors and organizations. Local Fascist groups were soon founded in Emilia, Tuscany, and Puglia and by autumn 1920 were busy not only breaking up strikes but also dismantling Socialist and Catholic labour unions and peasants’ cooperatives and—often with police collusion—overthrowing newly elected local councils. Fascist squads, dressed in black-shirted uniforms and often financed by landowners or industrialists, used systematic violence to destroy these organizations. Thousands of people were beaten, killed, or forced to drink castor oil and run out of town. Hundreds of union offices, employment centres, and party newspapers were looted or burnt down. In October 1920, after the election of a left administration in Bologna, Fascists invaded the council chamber, causing mayhem and nine deaths. The council was suspended by the government. Later, Socialist and Catholic deputies were run out of parliament or had their houses destroyed. The biennio nero (“two black years”; 1921–22) destroyed opposition to the Fascists. Union organizations were crushed. The Federterra shrank from some one million members to fewer than 6,000 in less than five years. Unable to defend basic democratic rights or to prevent the criminal activities of a private militia that operated openly and nationwide, the state had lost all credibility.

Within a few months, paramilitary Fascist squad leaders controlled many rural areas of central Italy. Local bosses built power bases in various areas—e.g., Italo Balbo in Ferrara, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona, and Leandro Arpinati in Bologna. These men became known as ras (meaning “provincial viceroy” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language) and exercised considerable local power throughout the Fascist period. The Fascists had become a major political force, backed not only by landowners but also by many members of the urban middle class, including students, shopkeepers, and clerical workers. In May 1921, when Prime Minister Giolitti called new elections, 35 Fascists were elected to parliament as part of a government bloc of 275 deputies. In October Mussolini abandoned republicanism, and in November he formed his movement into a proper political party, the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista; PNF), which by this time was well-financed if ill-disciplined and extremely disparate. Local bosses remained paramount in their areas. The Fascists also organized their own trade unions, the Fascist “syndicates,” among strategic groups such as postal administrative workers and taxi drivers, to replace Socialist or Catholic organizations, to provide mass membership, and to control labour. These unions never managed to penetrate the organized working class but did have some support among the lower middle class and small landowners.

Mussolini manipulated this volatile situation in the next few months to his advantage, and the Liberal political establishment sought to conciliate him and the Fascist thugs. The police, the army, and much of the middle class sympathized with Fascist destruction of Socialist unions. Mussolini, as duce (leader) of fascism, gradually made himself indispensable in Rome, and the squads took over more cities in the provinces. Only a very few areas were able to resist the “Blackshirts” in street fighting, including Parma and Bari in 1922. Attempts by the left to organize defense squads against the Fascists were, in general, a failure. A major anti-Fascist protest strike, called by the Socialist-led Confederation of Labour in August 1922, quickly collapsed, strengthening Mussolini’s bargaining position even further. Fascists used the opportunity to inflict further damage on the left and union institutions, and the offices of L’Avanti! were again attacked and razed. In October 1922 Mussolini organized a “March on Rome” by Fascist supporters. Fascist squads, numbering about 25,000 men altogether, began to converge on the capital from all over Italy on October 26, occupying railway stations and government offices. Prime Minister Facta asked the king to declare martial law, but Victor Emmanuel III eventually refused in order to avoid possible army disloyalty or even a possible civil war. Instead, he asked Mussolini to form a government on October 29, hoping to tame him by constitutional means.

Mussolini became prime minister, therefore, in a more or less constitutional manner, but only after three years of near civil war in the country and an armed invasion of Rome. He was appointed by the king, and he headed a coalition government that included nationalists, two Fascist ministers, Liberals, and even (until April 1923) two Catholic ministers from the Popular Party. For 18 months he ruled through the usual government machinery, pursued a policy of “normalization,” and gradually concentrated power in his own hands. The Fascist squads were incorporated into an official Voluntary Militia for National Security. Ordinary middle-class job seekers flooded into the Fascist Party, making it more respectable and amenable; the nationalists also merged their organization into it, bringing with them much respectable backing in the south. In 1923 the electoral law was changed once more, so that a group of parties with the largest vote—even if only 25 percent of the total—would receive an absolute majority of the seats. This enabled the Fascists to attract most of the old Liberal deputies into a “national alliance.” In April 1924 elections were held under this system. In a climate of violence and threats, the Fascist-dominated bloc won 64 percent of the votes and 374 seats, doing particularly well in the south. The opposition parties—by now including the Popular Party—remained divided but won a majority of the votes in northern Italy. The Socialists, indeed, had by this time split again, and the left now consisted of three rival parties, which spent much time criticizing one another: the Communists, the Socialists, and the reformist Socialists. The Popular Party was disowned by the Vatican, and its leader, Luigi Sturzo, resigned at the Vatican’s request.

The end of constitutional rule

Mussolini’s relative success as leader of a “normalizing” constitutional government did not last long. When the new parliament met, Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the reformist Socialists, denounced the recent elections as a sham and claimed there had been widespread intimidation of opposition voters. On June 10, 1924, Matteotti disappeared. His body was recovered on July 16, and he was later found to have been murdered by Fascist thugs led by the assistant to Mussolini’s press office, Amerigo Dumini. The “Matteotti crisis” aroused public distrust in Mussolini and the Fascists. Mussolini was suspected of personal complicity in ordering the murder to eliminate a troublesome opponent. The press denounced the government, and the opposition parties walked out of parliament. However, Mussolini still had a majority in parliament, and the king backed him. For some time Mussolini hung on, but by autumn his Liberal supporters were drifting away, and in any case the “normalization” policy infuriated Fascist extremists in the country—especially the local bosses who were threatened with dismissal by the new militia commander, an army general. They demanded a showdown, and Mussolini—who was too weak by this time to rule by constitutional means—had to agree. On Jan. 3, 1925, he made a famous speech in the Chamber of Deputies accepting “political, moral, and historical responsibility” for Fascist rule and Matteotti’s death and promising a tough crackdown on dissenters. The king made no move. On January 4, orders were given to prefects throughout Italy to control all “suspect” political organizations. Searches, arrests, and the elimination of several offices and organizations followed.

During the next two years, which included several failed assassination attempts, Mussolini disbanded most of Italy’s constitutional and conventional safeguards against government autocracy. Elections were abolished. Free speech and free association disappeared, and the Fascist government dissolved opposition parties and unions. At the local level, appointed podestas replaced elected mayors and councils. Freemasonry was outlawed—a real blow to most non-Catholic anti-Fascists. A Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, run by militia and army officers, was set up to try anti-Fascist “subversives”; it imprisoned or sent to exile on remote islands thousands of political opponents, including the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, and it imposed 31 death penalties. Other opposition leaders, such as the Liberals Piero Gobetti and Giovanni Amendola, died at the hands of Fascist thugs. Severe controls were imposed on movement into and out of Italy. Although the repression was carried out essentially by old state institutions such as the police and the army and not by Fascist bodies, in 1927 Mussolini established the main information network of spies, the Organizzazione di Vigilanza Repressione dell’Antifascismo (Organization for the Vigilant Repression of Anti-Fascism; OVRA). This network extended abroad, where the OVRA organized assassinations of those hostile to the regime—such as the brothers Nello and Carlo Rosselli, anti-Fascist intellectuals, in France in 1937.

The prefects—mostly still career civil servants—retained their traditional dominance over local government, and the new podestas were nearly always landowners or retired army officers rather than Fascist enthusiasts. The Fascist party itself was soon swamped by more than a million job seekers and clerical workers, and thousands of the original Fascists were purged. The party, and the militia, soon had little to do except engage in propaganda and parades. The Fascist regime was mostly run by the traditional elites in the military and civilian bureaucracy, which were linked, as previously, to landowners and the court. That said, it was much more authoritarian and also much more nationalistic and interventionist than the Liberal governments had been. By the 1930s the Fascist Party dominated all aspects of daily life, from the workplace to the schools to leisure activities. However, many of the regime’s opponents merely went along with its formal elements to procure space for protest and underground activity.

Fascist indoctrination was never really successful, but the press was tightly censored, motion picture newsreels were largely government propaganda, and the regime controlled the new radio broadcasting. It also ran semicompulsory Fascist youth movements, and new textbooks were imposed on the schools. Moreover, the government provided mass leisure activities, such as sports, concerts, and seaside holidays, which were genuinely popular. These attempts to create consent went hand in hand with the coercion imposed by the regime through the OVRA and its enormous network of spies. The fear of arrest, imprisonment, or economic marginalization hung over thousands of anti-Fascists and former oppositionists, and silence replaced the propaganda of the biennio rosso. Fascist control of daily life reached right down to the most basic levels. In 1938 the government imposed the use of Voi as the formal pronoun instead of Lei and banned handshakes in all places of public work. Foreign words and names were replaced. Bordeaux became Barolo, film became pellicola, and German place-names were Italianized. The walls of offices, schools, and public buildings were covered with slogans and murals paying homage to Mussolini and fascism, such as “Mussolini is always right” or “Better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.”

Anti-Fascist movements

For a long time, organized anti-Fascist movements remained weak, divided, and illegal and had no access to press or radio. The Communists were soon the most significant of these movements, as they had an underground organization and some Russian support and finance, but even they had only 7,000 members at most and had great difficulty in spreading their propaganda in Italy. Spies within the movement exposed many of the underground networks before they even had a chance to put down roots. New anti-Fascist groups were founded occasionally, but the secret police soon cracked down on them. Apart from the Communists, only Justice and Liberty, an alliance of republicans, democrats, and reformist Socialists founded by Carlo Rosselli and others in 1929, managed to build up a clandestine organization in Italy and a strong organization abroad, above all in France and Switzerland. Most prominent anti-Fascists were in prison, in “confinement” on remote islands, or in exile and had little contact with Italian reality. Mussolini had disbanded unions and replaced them with new syndicates with little bargaining power. Strikes were illegal and more or less ceased to occur. Employer power was reimposed in both the countryside and the city after the union victories of the postwar years, although the welfare corporatism of the Fascist regime allowed workers important economic benefits.

The only strong non-Fascist organization in the country was the Roman Catholic Church. The Vatican implicitly supported Mussolini in the early years and was rewarded in February 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, which settled the “Roman Question” at last. Vatican City became an independent state, Italy paid a large financial indemnity to the pope for taking over his pre-1870 lands, and a concordat granted the church many privileges in Italy, including recognition of church weddings as valid in civil law, religious education in secondary as well as primary schools, and freedom for the lay Catholic organizations in Catholic Action. However, the government soon began curbing Catholic Action, seeing it as a front for anti-Fascist activity by former members of the Popular Party. The Catholic youth organizations were closed for a time in 1931. When they reopened, they had to avoid sports, but, even so, they grew considerably in the 1930s. They were a serious rival to the Fascist youth bodies and trained a new generation that often managed to avoid Fascist indoctrination. The 1929 concordat remained in force until the 1980s and was the legal basis for continued church dominance of Italian society after World War II. The Fascist regime could easily enough repress forms of local opposition such as demonstrations and strikes, but anti-Fascist feeling became more widespread after the mid-1930s.

Nonetheless, Italy sent some 60,000 “volunteer” militiamen, as well as about 800 warplanes, 90 ships, and 8,000 jeeps, to fight on the side of Mussolini’s ideological cohort, Francisco Franco, in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). This Italian force was defeated in 1937 at the Battle of Guadalajara. By the end of the war, some 4,000 Italian troops were killed and 11,000 injured. Italian anti-Fascists also fought Mussolini’s troops in Spain, a rehearsal for the civil war in Italy after 1943. Many of these Italian anti-Fascists joined the Spanish Republican armies (notably, four Italian companies in 1936), inspired by Carlo Rosselli’s cry “Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy.” In all, at least 3,000 Italians fought on the anti-Fascist side, about 200 of whom had traveled directly from Italy. Some 500 Italian anti-Fascists were killed and 2,000 injured in the war. Leading Italian Communists and Socialists were Togliatti and Pietro Nenni.

Italy’s increasingly close alliance with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany was resented and feared, even by many Fascists. So too was the shocking decision to impose sweeping Nazi-like anti-Semitic laws in 1938. These laws followed a long racist campaign organized by the Fascist press and media. Under these laws and decrees, signed by the king, Jews were condemned as unpatriotic, excluded from government jobs and the army, banned from entering Italy, and banned from attending or teaching school. In addition, all Jews had to register with the authorities, limits were placed on their economic activities, and they were forbidden to marry “Aryans.” In 1939 all books by Jewish authors were removed from the shops. Many Jews left Italy, while others were marginalized within Italian society. It had become clear that the Fascist government was likely to involve Italy in a disastrous European war, as indeed it did in 1940.

Economic policy

Fascist intervention in the economy was designed to boost prestige and military strength. In the early years the Fascists compromised with the business establishment and rescued failing banks. However, in 1926 the lira was suddenly revalued for political reasons, and Italy suffered all the usual consequences of an overvalued currency. Exports fell sharply, unemployment rose, wages were frozen or even cut, and prices fell. The steel, electricity, and chemical industries expanded, for their markets were domestic, and they were helped by cheaper raw material imports; industries producing textiles, food, and vehicles, which depended on foreign markets, declined.

When the Great Depression came after 1929, these deflationary processes were accentuated, although the government increased spending on building roads and on welfare in order to provide employment. The leading banks, which had lent heavily to industry, had to be rescued in the early 1930s, as did many large industrial companies. Two new state-run holding companies, the Italian Industrial Finance Institute (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano; IMI) and the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale; IRI), were set up to bail out failing firms and to provide capital for new industrial investment; they also provided trained managers and effective financial supervision. Italy thus acquired a huge, state-led industrial sector, which was especially important in banking, steel, shipping, armaments, and the supply of hydroelectricity. However, these firms were not nationalized. Instead, they operated in the market as private companies and still had many private shareholders. In the long term they gave Italy a modern infrastructure—including roads and cheap energy—a sounder financial sector, and some efficient modern industries in expanding sectors such as chemicals and synthetic fibres. Most industrial development, and most workers, remained in northern Italy, although by this time large steelmaking and shipbuilding plants had been started at Naples and Taranto. After 1931 vast tracts of land were reclaimed through the draining of marshes in the Lazio region, where gleaming new towns were created with Fascist architecture and names—Littoria (now Latina) in 1932, Sabaudia in 1934, Pontinia in 1935, Aprilia in 1937, and Pomezia in 1938. Peasants were brought from the regions of Emilia and the Veneto to populate these towns. New towns, such as Carbonia, were also built in Sardinia to house miners for the revamped coal industry.

After October 1925 the Fascist syndicates, or trade unions, were the sole recognized negotiators for workers’ interests. Strikes and lockouts became illegal, and wages fell between 1927 and 1934, but the syndicates had considerable political influence. They secured a shorter workweek (40 hours in November 1934), higher welfare benefits (such as family allowances, also introduced in 1934), and public works schemes, and they also helped run leisure and social activities. In 1934 the Fascists also set up “corporations”—mixed bodies of workers and employers—to resolve labour disputes and supervise wage settlements. Despite much rhetoric and propaganda about them, they had little impact in practice and virtually none on industrial management or economic policy making.

In agricultural policy, the government aimed at self-sufficiency by encouraging grain production after 1925 (“the battle for wheat”). Mussolini was filmed and photographed as he cut grain, bare-chested, in fields throughout Italy. Grain was grown for symbolic reasons in city centres such as Milan’s Piazza del Duomo (Cathedral Square). A high tariff was reimposed on imported wheat, and grain prices were kept artificially high. Production rose sharply as northern farmers used more chemical fertilizers. In much of the south the climate was less favourable for growing wheat, but vineyards and olive groves were nonetheless plowed up, especially after 1929 when the world price of olive oil halved. The real beneficiaries of this policy were the large farmers of the Po valley and of the southern latifundia. These men also benefited most from the government’s land-reclamation schemes, forming their own consortia and receiving government money to drain or irrigate their own land. Moreover, during the Depression they could buy land cheaply from the smaller landowners because many of the peasants who had acquired land during and after World War I were forced to sell after 1926.

After Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935–36, the League of Nations subjected the Italian economy to sanctions. This led to a more extensive drive for national self-sufficiency, or autarky; imports were replaced where possible by native products, and most exports were diverted to Germany and Switzerland or to Africa. Ethiopia, once conquered, became a vast drain on resources. The government expanded its intervention and licensing role, encouraged official cartels and quasi monopolies, and shifted resources from above to heavy industry and armaments. All this led to budget deficits, big tax increases, and capital levies, which were hugely resented because they mainly went to pay for wars in Africa and Spain. Resented too was the obvious corruption of the Fascist governing clique, without whose permits—available at a price—nothing could be done. Among the members of the various conservative groups, including those in the army, the civil service, the law, and the church, which in the mid-1920s had looked to fascism to protect their interests, some had realized by the late 1930s that fascism was unreliable and began to withdraw their support.

American restrictions, European recession, and Fascist economic nationalism combined to curtail emigration drastically in the 1930s, from more than 600,000 people per annum before 1914 to fewer than 50,000 per annum. The closing of emigration outlets hit the south particularly badly. Because they could not go abroad, rural Italians moved to the cities. Rome doubled in size between 1921 and 1940, and northern cities attracted many rural emigrants, especially from the south. Fascism attempted to halt these movements through an anti-migration law in 1938. This measure banned migrants from moving within Italy without a job at their intended destination, and made many Italians “clandestine” in their own country. However, the law had little practical effect in preventing migration. Meanwhile, government policy encouraged population growth by providing tax incentives to have children and excluding the childless from public jobs. Admittedly, all this had little effect before 1937. Italians married later than ever and had fewer children than previously, so much so that in several northern and central regions the birth rate dropped below replacement level in the 1930s.

Foreign policy

As time passed, Fascist foreign policy became more expansionist. In particular, Mussolini aimed at acquiring territory in Africa and in the Mediterranean, for which he adopted the ancient Roman term mare nostrum (“our sea”). Even in 1923, in his first year in office, he briefly invaded the Greek island of Corfu to avenge the murder of four Italian nationals forming part of an international boundary delegation. During the next decade he played the European statesman, and in 1924 he reached an agreement with Yugoslavia that gave Fiume to Italy. He also continued to strengthen the Italian hold on Libya, to build up the armed forces, and to plan further expansion in Africa—particularly in Ethiopia, where the defeat at Adwa in 1896 still needed to be avenged. In October 1935 Italy finally invaded Ethiopia—one of the first conquests was Adwa—and by May 1936 had conquered the country and proclaimed the Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, emperor of Ethiopia. Ethiopia had been the only remaining country in Africa to escape colonization. Nearly 400,000 Italian troops took part in the conflict. The army employed brutal methods, including massacres and poison gas bombs. After an attempt in February 1937 on the life of the “viceroy” of Ethiopia, General Rodolfo Graziani, Italian forces arrested and shot hundreds of Ethiopians. However, the war was popular at home and among Italians abroad, especially in the Italian American community. Racist propaganda depicted the Ethiopians as backward barbarians “civilized” by the Italian army. The colonial wars coincided, not by chance, with the period when the regime enjoyed its maximum popularity.

Italy made further colonial gains in April 1939 with the invasion of Albania. Italian control over Albania already had been growing throughout the 1920s through agreements with the Albanian regime. Moreover, in 1933 Italian had been made obligatory in Albanian schools. When Albania’s King Zog refused to accept a trade agreement, however, the Italian army took control of the main strategic centres of the country and installed Italian loyalists in the civil service. Victor Emmanuel was made king of Albania. King Zog escaped to Greece.

The Italo-Ethiopian War antagonized the British and French governments, led to sanctions by the League of Nations, and isolated Italy diplomatically. Mussolini moved into Hitler’s orbit, hoping that German backing would frighten the British and French into granting further concessions to Italy. However, the policy failed to bring further territorial gains in Africa. Furthermore, Italy became the junior partner in the “Rome-Berlin Axis,” and in 1938 Mussolini had to accept Hitler’s annexation of Austria, bringing the German Reich right up to the Italian border. In May 1939 Mussolini entered a formal military alliance with Hitler, the “Pact of Steel,” which further reduced his scope for maneuver. Not only was each country committed to take part in any conflict involving the other, defensive or otherwise, but each leader was to consult the other before taking any military action. Even so, when the Germans unexpectedly invaded Poland in September 1939, Mussolini insisted on remaining neutral.

World War II

Military disaster

Only in June 1940, when France was about to fall and World War II seemed virtually over, did Italy join the war on Germany’s side, still hoping for territorial spoils. Mussolini announced his decision—one bitterly opposed by his foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano—to huge crowds across Italy on June 10. Italy’s initial attack on the French Alps in June 1940 was quickly cut short by the Franco-German armistice. The real war for Italy began only in October, when Mussolini attacked Greece from Albania in a disastrous campaign that obliged the Germans, in 1941, to rescue the Italian forces and take over Greece themselves. The Germans also had to lend support in the hard-fought campaigns of North Africa, where eventually the decisive second battle of El-Alamein (October 1942) destroyed the Italian position and led to the surrender of all of Italy’s North African forces in May 1943. Meanwhile, the Italians had lost their extensive empire in eastern Africa, including Ethiopia, early in 1941; and 250,000 Italian troops in Russia, sent to help the German invaders, suffered untold hardships. The epic winter retreat of the Alpine division left thousands dead. In all, nearly 85,000 Italian troops failed to make it home from Russia.

In short, the war was an almost unrelieved succession of military disasters. Poor generals and low morale contributed much to this outcome—the Italian conscripts were fighting far from home for causes in which few of them believed. In addition, Italy had few tanks or antitank guns; clothing, food, vehicles, and fuel were all scarce; and supplies could not safely be transported to North Africa or Russia. Italian factories could not produce weapons without steel, coal, or oil, and, even when raw materials were available, production was limited because the northern Italian factories were subject to heavy Allied bombing, especially in 1942–43. Heavy attacks destroyed the iron ore production capacities on Elba, off the Tuscan coast, and damaged several industrial zones, particularly in northern Italian cities such as Genoa, La Spezia, Turin, and Milan. Naples and other southern cities also were bombed, as was the San Lorenzo district of Rome. (The San Lorenzo air raid, carried out by U.S. forces in July 1943, killed more than 3,000 people.)

Bombing indeed was one of the causes of the first major strikes since 1925. In March 1943 the leading factories in Milan and Turin stopped work in order to secure evacuation allowances for workers’ families. By this time civilian morale was clearly very low, food shortages were endemic, and hundreds of thousands of people had fled to the countryside. Government propaganda was ineffective, and Italians could easily hear more-accurate news on Radio Vatican or even Radio London. In Friuli–Venezia Giulia, as in Italian-occupied Slovenia and Croatia, the local Slavic population supported armed Resistance movements, and anti-Italian terrorism was widespread. In Sicily landowners formed armed bands for possible use against mainland interference. On the mainland itself the anti-Fascist movements cautiously revived in 1942 and 1943. The Communists helped to organize strikes, the leading Roman Catholics formed the Christian Democratic Party (now the Italian Popular Party) in 1943, and the new Party of Action was founded in January 1943, mainly by republicans and Radicals. Leading Communists began to reenter Italy, and their party began to put down deep roots across the country. By this time most of the leading clandestine parties were more willing to work together to overthrow fascism. In March 1943 they signed an agreement to do so.

A further consequence of the war was the internment of hundreds of thousands of Italian emigrants across the world, especially in Britain and the United States. Italians, even with strong anti-Fascist credentials, were rounded up and sometimes stripped of their citizenship. This draconian policy left a legacy of bitterness and recrimination which lasted for years on both sides.

End of the regime

By the summer of 1943 the Italian position was hopeless. Northern and eastern Africa had been lost, the northern Italian cities were being regularly bombed, war production was minimal, and morale had collapsed. So too had the Fascist regime, which could no longer command any obedience. Court circles began sounding out Allied terms, which of course included the removal of Mussolini. In July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily, and within a few weeks they controlled the island. On July 24–25 the Fascist Grand Council met in Rome for the first time since the beginning of the war and passed a motion asking the king to resume his full constitutional powers—that is, to dismiss Mussolini. In a dramatic decision, a substantial majority of the members voted against the duce. The king dismissed Mussolini the same day and installed Marshal Pietro Badoglio, an elderly World War I veteran who had fought in Ethiopia, as prime minister. Spontaneous demonstrations followed throughout the country, in which statues of Mussolini were torn down, Fascist symbols removed, and political prisoners released. At first the authorities did not react, but, in the five days after July 25, troops shot dead 83 demonstrators. The army took over the key positions in Rome, the duce was arrested, and the main Fascist institutions, including the Fascist Party, were dissolved. On July 27 Badoglio formed an interim government that consisted mostly of ex-Fascists.

Badoglio assured Germany and the Italian people that the war would continue, but he also attempted, rather feebly, to reach armistice terms with the Allies. German troops began pouring into Italy. Heavy Allied bombing continued over most Italian cities. Strikes broke out throughout the country. Allied troops arrived on the Italian mainland in early September but met heavy resistance from the Germans at Salerno. The Badoglio government agreed to an armistice with the Allies, and U.S. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Allied commander in chief in the Mediterranean, announced it on Sept. 8, 1943. Under this agreement (the so-called Short Armistice), the Italian government promised to cease hostilities against the Allies and end its alliance with Germany.

The Germans immediately took over Rome. In the previous few weeks, they had already taken over most of central and northern Italy. The Italian army, left without orders even to defend Rome, was disintegrating despite some brave spontaneous fighting (the official beginning of the Resistance) at Porta San Paolo. The king and his government fled south to Brindisi, leaving Rome to the Germans. Chaos reigned among Italian troops, and thousands deserted, while others joined the Resistance forces. At Cephallenia, a Greek island, Italian troops refused to obey German orders to give up their arms, and thousands of them were shot or deported. In late September the Badoglio government signed a “Long Armistice,” which virtually gave up military and political control over Italy, as well as control of the mass media and financial institutions, to the Allies. This agreement was not made public during the conflict.

Badoglio officially declared war on Germany on October 13. Italy became a war zone. For 18 months the Allies fought the Germans up the peninsula, wreaking untold devastation throughout the land. The Allies took Naples in October 1943 but reached Rome only in June 1944, Florence in August, and the northern cities in April 1945.

The Allies ruled the south after September 1943, and Badoglio’s government had very little influence on events. The anti-Fascist parties, which detested Badoglio and wanted the king to abdicate, refused to join the government until April 1944, when the Communist Party leader Palmiro Togliatti agreed to do so. Scholars disagree on whether this decision was autonomous or came in response to orders from Moscow. When Rome was liberated, Victor Emmanuel was replaced by his son, Umberto, as “lieutenant general of the realm,” and the leading anti-Fascist parties formed a nominal government led by the reformist Socialist Ivanoe Bonomi, who had been prime minister from 1921 to 1922.

The republic of Salò (the Italian Social Republic) and the German occupation

In the meantime the Germans had rescued Mussolini from his mountain prison and restored him in the north as ruler of the “Italian Social Republic,” a last-ditch puppet Fascist regime based in Salò on Lake Garda. The republic tried to induct those born in 1923, 1924, and 1925 into its army, but only 40 percent of young men responded. Many others deserted soon after the call-up. In a congress held in Verona in November 1943, the “republic of Salò” seemed to take a leftward turn, calling for an end to the monarchy and a more worker-oriented ideology, but this program never went into practice. Some of the leading Fascists who had voted out the duce in July 1943, including Mussolini’s son-in-law, the former foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano, were tried by a Fascist court and shot. Meanwhile, Fascist officials collaborated with the German army and essentially followed Hitler’s orders as the war continued in the north and centre. Official and unofficial armed bands roamed the big cities arresting suspected partisans (members of the Resistance) and terrorizing the local population.

The German occupiers ruled through violence and the aid of the local Fascists. Throughout German-occupied Italy, Jews and oppositionists were rounded up and sent to detention camps or prisons. Many Jews were sent straight from Italy on trains to concentration and extermination camps in Poland and Germany. In all, nearly 9,000 Jews were deported under the Germans. Only 980 returned. The biggest deportation occurred in Rome in October 1943, when the Germans gathered more than 1,000 Jews from the city’s ghetto and sent them to death camps. The Jewish community had been forced early on to hand over gold and money to the German army. One concentration camp on Italian soil, near Trieste, also had an oven for burning bodies. Some 8,000 Italians (of whom 300 were Jews) were deported to Mauthausen in Austria. Only 850 came back alive.

The German army responded to partisan activity with violence and reprisals. A series of massacres of civilians and partisans accompanied the German occupation and gradual retreat up the peninsula. In March 1944, after a partisan bomb attack killed 33 members of the occupying forces in Rome, the German army shot 335 people (Jews, Communists, and others) in the Fosse Ardeatine, caves located outside the city. This massacre was one of the biggest of the war in Italy and has inspired controversy ever since. (In the 1990s a former Nazi captain, Erich Priebke, was arrested in Argentina and, after two dramatic trials, was convicted in Rome for his role in the massacre.) Elsewhere the German army carried out frequent brutal and random massacres of civilians as they retreated northward, above all in Tuscany and Emilia, where German troops destroyed an entire village of some 1,800 people at Marzabotto in 1944. In addition, the Germans deported hundreds of thousands of young men to work as forced labourers in Germany and elsewhere. Fiat workers struck against these deportations in March 1944. Many of those deported died en route.

Mussolini faded from view and appeared less and less in public, making his last speech in Milan in December 1944. As defeat became more and more likely, he made plans for his escape and tried to negotiate a deal with the Allies. In April 1945 Mussolini and his government fled to Milan, and later, disguised as a German soldier, he attempted to cross the border to Switzerland. Discovered by Communist partisans, he was shot in a small town on Lake Como. His body was taken to Milan and displayed for a time in Piazzale Loreto, along with the bodies of several other Fascist ministers and leaders, hung by their feet at a service station in front of huge festive crowds. These events have generated controversy and debate ever since. Other leading Fascists were executed across Italy during the days of liberation. Mussolini’s remains, after being interred in various places, were finally buried in 1957 at his birthplace in Predappio, in the Romagna.

The partisans and the Resistance

After September 1943, partisan Resistance groups were active throughout northern and much of central Italy. Often they were former soldiers cut off from home and still in possession of their weapons. Many were young men fleeing Mussolini’s attempts to conscript them. Others were urban evacuees or released prisoners of war. Many were recruited, organized, and armed by the anti-Fascist parties or at least owed vague allegiance to one of them. They were most active in summer in the hills and mountains, where they were usually supported by the peasants, and they tied down thousands of German troops. In some areas they were a virtual armed uprising against not only the Germans and Fascists but also against the local landowners. Partisans were fighting three types of war: a civil war against Italian Fascists, a war of national liberation against German occupation, and a class war against the ruling elites. Communist Party groups fought all three types. Catholic or monarchist partisans, on the other hand, fought only one or two of these. There were also terrorist groups operating in the cities, and major strikes in industrial areas sabotaged war production. Sometimes, different partisan groups came into conflict with each other, but in general the Resistance was united. Nonetheless, those who actually fought as partisans were a small minority of Italians, and most civilians and ex-soldiers simply waited for the war to end. In all, about 200,000 partisans took part in the Resistance, and German or Fascist forces killed some 70,000 Italians (including both partisans and civilians) for Resistance activities. Ultimately, however, these figures do not indicate the extent of civilian participation in the Resistance, which scholars continue to debate.

The various political parties organized most of the partisan units, but they also cooperated with one another and the Allies. The Communist Party, although still very small in 1943 (about 5,000 members), led the largest group of partisans (at least 50,000 by summer 1944), drawing on years of experience in underground organization and on Yugoslav support. Success in the Resistance transformed the Communists into a major force in postwar Italian politics. The new Party of Action was also very active in the Resistance, constituting about one-fourth of all partisan units. It had a strong commitment to radical political change (including the change to a republic and a purge of officials) as well as to military victory. The Christian Democrats included roughly 20,000 partisans, and both Socialists and Liberals had significant armed bands in some areas. Partisans of different political persuasions normally worked together in local Committees of National Liberation (CLNs), which coordinated strategy, cooperated with the Allies, administered liberated areas, and appointed new officials. Above all, they organized the uprisings in the northern and central cities, including Milan in April 1945, which fell to the partisans before Allied troops arrived. In some cities the partisan liberation appeared to be a revolution—as in Genoa, Turin (where the Fiat factories were occupied), and Bologna—and red flags, Italian flags, and American flags greeted the “liberating” Allied troops. Some smaller zones actually became “republics” for weeks or even months, such as Alba and Val d’Ossola in Piedmont. Many radical partisans expected there to be a revolution in postwar Italy and failed to hand in their arms at the bidding of the Allies in 1945. Still, the partisans’ cooperation in the CLNs had laid the foundation for postwar political collaboration.