Mussolini’s Italy

R J B Bosworth, Mussolini’s Italy. Penguin, 2006.

Bosworth evidently has leftish sympathies, and his book gives a basic account of fascist Italy from Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922 down to his last stand in the Nazi-backed “Salo Republic” in northern Italy in 1943-5. Along the way it offers many interesting snippets of fact.

All that is good. The blurbs, however, describe the book as “beautifully written”, which it is not. A mannered, orotund style makes the book much longer than it need be, and sometimes leaves you in doubt as to what Bosworth is actually saying.

The book concerns itself much with polemic against other historians. Which is fine: except that either Bosworth is drastically oversimplifying those other historians’ views, or (if he is accurate) what they say is so daft that refutation is not very interesting.

Bosworth’s polemic is, on the one side, against those who claim that the fascist regime was basically good and sound, and not at all heavy-handed; and, on the other, against those who would claim that it was able to make enthusiastic, or at least fully compliant, fascists out of all Italians; that it could make a full and complete reality of the term “totalitarian” (first used in politics, apparently, as a term of self-praise by the fascists).

We already know that the fascists killed hundreds of workers in their preliminary “squadrist” sallies before they took power, and that opponents of the regime like the Marxist Antonio Gramsci were jailed (in Gramsci’s case, driven to death by jail conditions), or fled the country.

We also know that Mussolini’s regime was much slower than similar dictatorships to exert its full pressure. Trade unions and opposition parties were not fully crushed until 1926, four years after Mussolini took power. The full apparatus of the “corporate state” was not introduced until the mid 1930s.

Even then, political dissidents were generally only jailed or exiled to remote villages in Italy, not sent to death camps or shot out of hand as they were in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia. Amadeo Bordiga, Gramsci’s predecessor as leader of the Communist Party, was released from jail in 1930. He pursued his (presumably well-paid) career as an engineer, and as long as he kept quiet about politics, which he did, the government did not trouble him. He was not asked to renounce his views, and didn’t; from 1944, he returned to political activity as an unrepentant revolutionary anti-Stalinist communist.

The philosopher Benedetto Croce – though, like many other liberals, including some like Gaetano Salvemini who became well-known agitators against fascism from exile – he at first welcomed Mussolini’s seizure of power, soon became an unashamed opponent of the regime. He remained living in Italy. He had no access to the mass media, but the government did not try to stop him expressing his views in private conversation.

On top of all that, we know that even under Stalin’s vastly more bloodthirsty regime, “totalitarianism” was never complete, but always supplemented “at the bottom” by all sorts of dodges, work-arounds, and evasions. See, for example, Lynne Viola (editor), Contending With Stalinism (Cornell University Press, 2002).

It seems obvious common sense, then, to conclude that Mussolini’s Italy must have been riddled with vastly more dodges, work-arounds, evasions, and “reinterpretations” of fascism. Sometimes what seems obvious common sense is not true, and in such cases it is of great value to have our assumptions refuted. But Bosworth’s lengthy exercises in demonstrating that what we would have thought anyway, from naive common sense, is actually true, and exercising much sarcasm at the expense of other historians who allegedly argue differently, are not so helpful.

Obviously there were some enthusiastic, “fully-converted” fascists. Bosworth would help us if he could identify who they were.

In fact he only offers hints. The fascist movement pre-1922 was heavily based on world-war veterans, indignant at the anti-war attitude of the big majority of the Italian labour movement, and on activists of “border fascism” in such areas as Trieste.

Its membership was almost entirely confined to the northern cities. Paradoxically, when Mussolini, in power, called referendums, fascism would appear stronger in the south. In the northern cities a small minority would still dare to cast votes against Mussolini; in the south, almost no-one.

In July 1943 the Fascist Grand Council deposed Mussolini and, soon afterwards, went over from alliance with the Nazis to the Anglo-American side in the war. For two years Italy was divided between a Nazi-occupied north, nominally ruled by Mussolini (the Salo Republic), and a south, under the monarchy and a “post-fascist” government, aligned with the Allies. German and Anglo-American troops fought to hold or shift the border between north and south.

The north, then, had once again become the “more fascist” part of Italy, and the south the “less fascist”. Except that Bosworth’s detailed account indicates that support for Mussolini in the north was miniscule, his nominal rule upheld only by Nazi firepower; in the south, there was virtually no “de-fascist-isation”. Often the same elites – nominally Liberal before 1922, nominally Fascist between 1922 and 1943, and then nominally Christian Democrat after 1943 – ruled with very little change.

The post-1945 fascist movement, the MSI – long by far the strongest fascist movement in Western Europe, now given a “post-fascist” makeover by Gianfranco Fini and integrated into Silvio Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance – had its base in the south, not in the north.

Bosworth notes, interestingly but without making any summary or comment, that a lot of the initial fascist cadres came from the revolutionary syndicalist movement.

Mussolini himself had been a well-known figure on the left of the Italian Socialist Party, splitting early in World War 1 over his support for the war. Not many people came from the Socialist Party with him.

The syndicalist movement, however, had a full-scale split over the war. A new union federation, the USI, was formed by those who went with the French CGT in, first, advocating Italy’s entry into the World War on the side of the Allies, and, then, supporting the war once Italy was in it.

Some of those syndicalists had also supported Italy’s seizure of Libya as a colony in 1911.

Their chief argument, and one that was taken up as a frequent theme of fascist ideology, was that Italy was a “proletarian nation” by contrast with the “plutocratic” greater powers.