CHAPTER I

IS FASCISM A REVOLUTION?

If one may judge of the importance of a political event by the number of articles and books printed on the subject there is no question but that Fascism is one of the most important movements of the post-war world. Strange to say, however, the light thrown by most of these publications fails to illuminate the points most interesting to foreigners. This is probably due first of all to the fact that most of the writers have written either for or against it; moreover, this movement, being peculiarly Italian, is difficult for a foreign mind to grasp. In any case, it is a fact that in spite of all the good or bad will of the journalists this revolution is far from being understood. The lack of intelligent information regarding it is felt everywhere; and it would be difficult to say whether the misrepresentation is greater among those who admire it and, seeing in it a universal remedy for all modern woes, want to introduce its method in other countries; or among those who consider it just as a matter of incidental and local politics. I shall try to put it in its historical setting, and I shall consider myself fortunate if I can throw light on its relation to the political past of Italy, and to the present political conceptions of other countries.

The first question that invariably arises is whether Fascism is or is not a revolution. This, however, must be answered by another: what is a revolution? No word stands in greater need of a sound, common-sense definition, yet a definition of it stands on the very threshold of any impartial research on Fascism.

Is revolution merely a change of government? This is not sufficient. If it were, the fall of Louis Philippe from the throne of France would be a revolution; yet it is obviously by a license that one speaks of it as the Revolution of ’48. The form of government may change without any substantial alteration of the régime. Then does revolution imply a change of régime? Yes, but, again, what is exactly a change of régime?

Without following any further this method of investigation let us define Fascism as the introduction of a new conception of the relation between State and Citizen, a new conception of political reality. It is, therefore, a doctrine, a system, and as such is philosophy expressing itself in history. This admitted, it is necessary to guard against the abstract bent. of philosophical researches. The deepest currents of speculative thought would never bring about a single change of government by themselves; but then they do not exist by themselves. It is only in the synthesis of history that we find them at play in the world of historical reality, which is what it is because thoughts and deeds are one.

The March on Rome did certainly mark the confluence of two streams coming to mingle their waters between the banks of the Tiber. One was torrential, the impulse coming from a fifty years’ accumulation of economic and political mistakes in Italy. The other was deeper, slower, the contribution of centuries of Italian philosophy enriched by the intellectual thought of all Europe. The torrent is represented by the political antecedents of Fascism: the deep stream by the philosophical antecedents of Fascism.

To illustrate my figure a period of history presents itself as an example. It does not correspond exactly to the present movement in Italy, but it is at any rate familiar to one and all: the French Revolution. We see there, also, the typical stream of philosophical life carving a deep bed for the river to come: in the minds of intellectuals, in the consciousness of the people, abstract theories or works of artistic vulgarisation, prepare the bed for the river that will become, under the impulsion of actual circumstances, an irresistible torrent. So that this revolution whose intellectual pedigree makes it the offspring of Descartes, and Hobbes, of Grotius, Locke and the English political writers, besides the Encyclopædists, Voltaire and Rousseau, has to the highest degree the qualities that make it an element of universal life, and a fertilising principle in the politics of all Europe. On the other hand it receives, undoubtedly from the economic and political conditions of France, the particular determinations that distinguish it as French, as belonging to the eighteenth century. The form it took actually between 1790 and 1795 could not be introduced anywhere else; under that form it was exclusively French, because—we must insist on the point—it had received it as its actual and concrete determination from its immediate antecedents.

Actuation, realisation, concrete life, whatever the field we move in, whether we consider politics, artistic creation, or natural life, it requires two elements, the one universal, the other particular. Now history shows that the universal element spreads, notwithstanding frontiers and the will of men. Its force of expansion is a quality common to all ideas; but the particular is not to be imported, and it is as impossible to introduce it in foreign lands as it is to confine the other to any land. Hence the political applications of the same theories in different countries differ from each other as do the countries themselves. These differences, economic, political, religious, intellectual, in a word the historical differences existing between two countries determine the differences that the same theory will undergo when it is adopted by the people of different nations.

The Italian patriots at the end of the eighteenth century were very few, and all, without exception, intellectuals. Some belonged to the higher or lower aristocracy, some belonged to the upper middle class, but all were scholars, men of the widest reading. It would be difficult to find nowadays a body of men so well informed. For one thing, production has increased immensely and life has lost the leisure that allowed intellectual tastes to be satisfied. The fact remains that at the close of that century Italy could boast of men aware of its inferior position, of its non-existence as a nation. Such men were ready to try anything, and did try to imitate the French revolution in so far as they could by founding the small republics that lasted one season or two, dying away like plants of distant countries, when they are planted in our soil. Their zeal, however, was not sterile, they failed in their immediate purpose, because they wanted to introduce not only ideas but the actual form in which these were expressed. A constitution, a battle, the plan of a town, a project of economic reform, each of these things is an expression endowed with an æsthetic value varying with the degree of perfection attained by the man who worked it out, and gave the idea that prompted him a suitable realisation. But the essential quality of the æsthetic creator is to be on a particular theme, the voice of his time and of the body of men he represents in his act of creation. The men of the revolution were by no means fair representatives of the people of France; but when they drew up the constitution they certainly realised on the whole the desiderata of most Frenchmen. Giving expression, giving form to the ideas that had agitated the whole century, they did it in the only way that could be a French way in those days.

Now the will of Napoleon, when he wished Italy to be politically a copy of France, was a very empirical will, and the men who tried to carry out his wishes because they loved Italy were not any more transcendental. In this question they took no notice of what were the spiritual and political conditions of their country, and yet surely a constitution is an expression of mind. In all this however their blunder paved the way to a better understanding of the matter. Everybody realised that in order to have anything like an independent government the first thing was to be a great and unified country. When the ideas that had led in France to the Revolution and Republic were developed in Italy, according to the mentality of the great Italians, they blended with all that was particular to Italy and expressed themselves in an Italian movement: the Risorgimento. It cannot be over emphasised, for the importance of the point is great; the same ideas that caused the Republic to become for more than a century the form of French government, gave birth to the Kingdom of Italy.

Roughly, the same can be said of Fascism. Its ideas and doctrine will spread whether they meet with favour or hostility, because they are Italian just as Liberalism is English, that is to say they are Italian in their methods of actuation and perfectly universal in their philosophical content.

“Equality, fraternity, liberty,” was the eighteenth century cry, and it might be the cry of the Fascists. Their revolutionary contribution to the history of politics is the denial of natural rights, natural rights being understood as something the determination of which is anterior to the birth of man, as the quality of a cabbage or a rose tree is anterior to its birth. Right is so narrowly linked to duty that for this school of thought it cannot be anterior to consciousness. Therefore man must be considered and rated in the State only according to spiritual value and actual economic or intellectual interest.

The natural rights of man are denied. The spiritual value, entitling man to citizenship, cannot be acquired by him once for all and enjoyed without effort. He must daily and continuously be working for the vindication of the rights he has won, and for the conquest of those he seeks. Citizenship is not a chattel lying in a man’s possession: its only reality is bound to the performing of the duties correlative of rights. There Fascism meets with all our religious communities; in all Israelite and Christian Communities or Churches the new-born child is admitted on the pledge, taken for him by sponsors, that he will discharge his duties and accept the law of the community of which he becomes a member. Such a pledge he has to confirm on his coming to adult state.

Citizenship becomes, finally, with the whole of political reality, a moral, spiritual and Christian reality, and the only real equality of men can be attained in a State in which each man is rated according to actual value. For citizenship, taken as a birthright of man, is a remains of Pagan times, when it was the lot of some to be born slaves and of some to be born citizens.