Introduction: Coming Out of the War—Entering Fascism

Italy barely had time to emerge from the experience of war that it entered the much longer one of Fascism. Indeed Fascism seized power quickly: indeed, only four years elapsed between the end of the Great War and the showdown, later celebrated as the March on Rome, that led to appointing the movement’s leader, Benito Mussolini, as head of a government. It ended an era marked by revolutionary and counterrevolutionary attempts, civil and political violence, and complex territorial, economic, and moral reconstructions from which few European countries had remained immune. Italy’s experience was not isolated, therefore, much less anomalous compared to other nations; it did, however, give birth to a new experiment in those years involving government by a political force that represented, in the Italian laboratory, the expression of the new European right-wing. The chapter is presented as an introduction to the fascist ventennio, the twenty-year fascist period, starting with Italy's experience in the Great War. It analyzes the tactics of the seizure of power, the weakness of the liberal state, and the division among anti-fascist political forces. Subsequently, the chapter reconstructs the various steps that led to the construction of a totalitarian state. In this context, historical cases of European Fascism were connoted not only by the construction of a strong and centralizing state dominated by a single political force and marked by a dictatorship possessed of a personal character, but also by closely interlinked interests between the political class, bureaucratic classes, and private business that strengthened the economic power of certain economic groups duly protected by an interventionist state. The limits of the Italian approach to the totalitarian model were historical, therefore, determined by the institutional and economic context in which the new political movement sought to act and the compromises it had to make in order to establish itself. Compromises were therefore made with both the nationalists and new allies: Catholic Church, and the Army, which guaranteed the relationship between the Savoy dynasty and the fascist state. Beyond its parliamentary and institutional implications, the reaction to Matteotti’s assassination in 1924 represented a symbolic instance of ultimate moral revolt, but it also signaled the beginning of the end of the legal order in the country. Starting with 1926 a new legislation punished as crimes all legal and illegal attempts to oppose Fascism and accentuated the exodus of opponents to foreign countries. The repression apparatus began to display its first successes when the political police managed to intercept and arrest opponents of Fascism and a Special Court convicted them with very harsh sentences, practically decimated the leadership of all parties, especially members of the Communist Party, including the secretary Antonio Gramsci.