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 January 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.”