CHAPTER IV
THE EUROPEAN WAR AND ITS EFFECTS
In March, 1914, the cabinet of Giolitti retired owing to some differences with the Radicals. The moment was full of difficulties and the new ministry was likely to have to deal with strikes and riots at home and complications out of Italy. Sonnino, leader of the Opposition and one of the best men that the Right could boast of, refused to form a new cabinet and managed to have the office entrusted to Salandra. The German Emperor, passing through Venice on his way to Corfou, had a long talk with the king and the Marquis of San Giuliano, the fact being considered a new proof of Italo-German friendship apparently even by the government, whose endeavours were all directed to secure a majority in both Houses and to avert the storm that was threatening at home.
The railways were on the verge of a general strike, the state officials were demanding better wages and tried to enforce their requests by forming a trade union; workmen and peasants made riots in various provinces, especially in the Romagne and Marche, where in June the Red Week gave the spectacle almost of a revolution. There however the Socialists and Republicans made such a poor show that it is likely to have done a good deal towards shaking Mussolini’s faith in popular revolution. Salandra and his ministers were so beset that they let foreign affairs go unheeded or at least treated them as a matter of minor urgency. It must have been a great shock to them to realise the imminence of war.
When the war broke out involving all the great European Powers the public generally believed Italy to be bound to back the Triple Alliance. Immediately the Socialists and the extreme Left stirred up a campaign on the ground that the Italian people were pacifists and supporters of international Socialism. It is not easy to say whether, even had it been pledged to do so, the government would have been able to obtain the support of the nation to enter war immediately. Morally the people were not ready to accept a war without attack or without provocation from somebody.[3] On the first of August Italy declared neutrality and on that day the _Giornale d’Italia_ clearly stated that such neutrality was not like that of Holland or Switzerland, and above all should not be considered as definitive.
The tenor of the press showed on which side an eventual intervention of Italy would take place. Everybody was either neutralist or interventionist, but nobody was in favour of an intervention on the side of the Triple Alliance. The most Germanophile never went farther than neutralism; all that they hoped and prayed for was the non-intervention of Italy.
The argument of the neutralist papers was based on a statement of the economic and individual sacrifices that war would involve, and a plea that Italy could not yet be fit to enter such a conflict. Anti-idealists or sceptics (as many of the sons of the heroes of the Risorgimento were) they all agreed to regard life as the supreme value and material well-being as its natural frame. Of war they only saw the destructive side. They were certainly logical. A conception of life so thoroughly materialist could not permit of a higher view of war; for war certainly does destroy life and if it can and does promote an improvement in the material conditions of life it is only as a remote consequence of the class changes, and the industrial and commercial stimulus carried in its trail. The immediate consequences are certainly unsettling and paralysing to business.
On the other hand the interventionists had as the basis of their argument a set of platitudes the abstract ideology of which was nearly as objectionable as the materialism of their opponents. France, Belgium and England were identified with right and civilisation, Germany and Austria with wrong and barbarity. Therefore Italy should have the honour of being among the righteous avengers of liberty and civilisation against their traditional foe, barbarity. This opposition of two abstractions to the materialism of their opponents betrayed the ideologic heirloom of the eighteenth century, so dear to the self-admiring minds of the educated mob. For there is such a thing as an educated mob and it is sure to be on the side that offers a high sounding rhetoric, a certain number of stock phrases and a fascinating ideology. It is so much easier to accept ready-made ideas than to work them out from actual reality.
It was not likely, however, that such claptrap should move the people to war. Fortunately, there was another side to the question and that was the chance of getting Trento and Trieste, in whose intellectual life the old spirit of the Risorgimento had kept two strongholds. All that was Liberal and traditional in the Italy of the nineteenth century rose to the bait. The highest form of Italian Liberalism and its aftermath Nationalism, unfurled their standard with the old zest and their followers displayed their immortal eagerness to make this last addition to their forerunners’ building of Italy. Not only were they splendid in the propaganda days, but they were the first to enlist, and both young Nationalists and old Liberals made it a point that “no gentleman should stay at home.” Naturally the echo they aroused was far from being general. If all the Liberals and the Nationalists were gentlemen not all the so-called gentlemen belonged to these parties; there was as much political indifference among the higher classes as among the lower. But it is only fair to say that the war which gave rise to the national and political consciousness whose first expression is Fascism was mainly due to the pressure and the enthusiastic campaign of Italian Liberalism and its offspring Nationalism.
This much being said in praise of the Nationalists, it may be remarked from the Italian point of view that the misrepresentation of the time and of the character of the world conflagration could not have been carried much farther. It was indeed the last flare of their imported notions of political reality. For nearly five centuries intellectual tradition had bestowed upon Italians a mentality which is historical nearly beyond understanding for foreigners. It will be traced back in another chapter from Dante’s _De Monarchia_, but it may be here taken from its first practical assertion. Machiavelli, at the end of the fifteenth century, acting as Chancellor and Secretary of Florence, was honoured with the unlimited trust of the _Gonfaloniere a vita_ and in every respect proved himself worthy of such high consideration. He was exceedingly grateful to the man who entrusted him with missions, the official charge of which could not have been legally bestowed upon him. Yet, whatever his regard for the high-mindedness of his principal, from a close study and strict observation of political facts he came to the conclusion that nothing could prevent the Gonfaloniere’s policy from failure.
Dino was elected _Gonfaloniere a vita_ when the son of Lorenso il Magnifico had to leave Florence in a hurry after having failed to avert the transit of Charles the VIII and his troops through Florence. Cosimo and Lorenzo dei Medici had only ruled for about half a century but the changes which had taken place during that time in Tuscany and in the whole of Italy were so great that history shows whole centuries which have not displayed half of the difference made, for bad or good, by the civilisation of the time. History was indeed at a turning of the road so that when Dino came in power there was as much difference between the political world anterior to the Medicean rule and his own as there is between the sweet and gentle art of the Beato Angelico, and that of Signorelli who introduced realism in his own vigorous art. Good Dino, however, having been chosen Gonfaloniere to bring Florence back to its former virtuous ways, looked to the old Republican days for a model of government, and he failed to give his fellow citizens the political advantage that would have met their needs just as Signorelli would have shown himself a failure if he had painted exactly as the Beato had done. Machiavelli was no optimist, but whatever the weakness of his conception of history due to the philosophical notions of his time, he did not give himself up entirely to abusing the wickedness of the people. Sure enough, they were wicked—far more so than they had been before the Medicean had corrupted them—yet they were above all different and had, therefore, to be governed according to different ideas.
It is no wonder, therefore, that the Florentine Secretary should have spent so many hours of his enforced leisure after the realisation of the event, the inevitability of which had so long haunted him, to warn his contemporaries and the posterity of the necessity of governing not according to a mummified ideal, but in harmony with one’s own time. _Bisogna riscontrarsi coi propri tempi_ and to do so he recommends the statesman again and again to get direct information of that which he calls _la verità effettuale delle cose_, that is effective or actual truth in matter of politics. It is both the experimental method of Galileo and Vico’s historical understanding of society that are alluded to in this constantly recurrent admonition of the man whose shrewdness was to blind posterity for several centuries and throw the power and depth of his political genius in the dark.
In 1915 such an excellent jurisconsult as Prof. Salandra and such a first-rate diplomat as Sonnino seemed to realise but little that such a principle existed. At best they harped on Trento and Trieste, when they did not display their rhetoric on the conflict between civilisation and barbarity. Still this territorial conquest, whatever its importance as a traditional ideal to realise, was presented above all as a rectification of the northern frontiers strictly necessary for the safety of the nation and ethnologically justified. Nobody ever seemed to realise that this aim should not have been the first objective to a nation which lacked that which is the very essence of the national entity, that which entitles a collectivity to have ethnological frontiers, in short a national conscience and a national will.
Nobody seemed to realise it, but there was one man who did, and there we have the second flare of genius to be credited to Mussolini. He had become gradually conscious through constant contact with the working class, and the middle class as well, that they would never be fit for political life unless they acquired what they lacked through sacrifice. The recent Red Week had shown him that they would not fight, that they might set traps for other people’s lives, but they would not face either blows or death for anything; and when the war came he saw that there Italy had the one chance it could have to acquire what the genial people who called themselves its citizens lacked to lift themselves into the higher sphere where human beings are prepared to live and to die for their political ideas.
It is, in fact, this national conscience, this spiritual and, therefore, unlimited gift that the war has bestowed upon Italy, and it is only now that Carducci, the most typically civic of all Italian poets, could write with perfect truth:
“Ei dipinga il trionfo dell ’Italia Assorta novella tra le genti.”
Nevertheless it is not Fascist Italy, it is not the real friends of Italy, who will ever find fault with the ideas that brought Italy to join the Allies and face the tragic ordeal of war. For it was the war, the mystery of death faced by millions of her sons, which has made Italy a moral value, and a first-rate historical factor in the present political world. The select minority that was the brain and soul of the Risorgimento has disappeared; national consciousness now fills the individual consciences of the majority, and this extension of the national conscience had nothing to do with the extended vote; it is a consequence of the war. Personality, national personality means actual unity of conscience and will just as much as individual personality. Such personality has effectively been born in Italy out of the ordeal that meant direct or indirect sacrifice from every man and woman, for nobody would doubt the reality of the object for which his sacrifice was made. Italy and her star were, up to 1915, a good theme for popular or academic literature, but when it had required blood and tears from every home it became that which could easily be transformed into the most awful and objective reality. Hence the religiousness of their new realisation of Italy.
It loomed indeed awful, like an obscure divinity, when it called men who did not quite know why they had to fight to the supreme sacrifice. One has to keep in mind how little civilisation and barbarity, pompous words, meant to the Italian lower class, and how little Sicilians or Neapolitans cared for Trento and Trieste. After Caporetto it was a different matter. The traditional foe was on their land, and by then they had realised what war meant. Therefore, one may say that their national soul was tempered between Caporetto and the Armistice, and that only then they became an ethical value, a spiritual entity or rather personality fit to play a part in the constructive history of the world. The point cannot be over-stated.
It is only through the war that the spiritual reality of the country was enabled to strike roots in the souls of the labourers and middle class men, ceasing thereby to be the monopoly of a small intellectual and aristocratic minority.
The subjects of the King of Italy all became Italian citizens, and the people was finally one in its full independence; it was, indeed, the last act of the Risorgimento.
Few foreigners, no foreigner so to speak, had in 1915 a fair idea of what was the state of mind of the Italians and still less of what could be their mentality. It will not be too daring to say that in this ignorance lay the cause of all the diplomatic difficulties and of the fallacious appreciations of what that country could give, or has actually given, with the consequent mutual vexations that were to strain the relations between the Allies and Italy.
The author had already, in 1915, spent two years in Italy and studied a good deal; yet youth did not allow at the time more than an intuition of the fact—the conviction of which was to be acquired by ten years of experience, observation and study. The Allies expected too much of a generation whose fathers had fought the Wars of Independence with sheer heroism and with material means that England or France would have considered hardly fit for a colonial campaign. On the other hand, they overlooked the possibilities of a people who had in front of itself the whole of its national future, an historical mentality which was likely to keep it from the sterilising conception of positivism, abstract idealism or materialism, once it should have reached a clear sense of its own secular reality, a Lacedemonian frugality, and finally intellectual forces not inferior to those of the Kantian and Hegelian Germany. The Italians for their part had to overcome a radical scepticism. They had a very poor opinion of what military achievement they could get out of their lower class, their traditional financial deficiency made them fear economic destruction almost more than the life sacrifice of so many men. Munitions were a nightmare, renewal of their coal and wheat stocks a puzzling problem. They had to trust blindly to the Allies. In fact it is a wonder that they should have overcome the sense of despondency that might have paralysed them altogether.
Thus it happened that the Italians did actually achieve far more than they expected, far surpassing their own opinion of their military efficiency; whilst doing far less than the Allies had expected. Hence no end of misunderstandings. They thought that they had surprised us by an unsuspected revelation of force and efficiency and they ascribed our rather disappointed attitude to envy and fear of their new power. Before the war they thought too little of themselves, because, as we have said, they were still nationally unconscious, while the British and French governments overrated the forces that they might contribute without acknowledging their ambitions to develop the latent forces of which they were conscious. Such misunderstanding was to breed all the difficulties that we knew of at the end of the war. The Italians had been victorious in war, they had triumphed over their enemies, and above all over themselves, since they had asserted their reality as an actual political value. But they were defeated in peace, or at least were on the very point of being defeated and destroyed by peace.
* * * * *
The several Treaties of peace, the conferences of the Allies, were a long sequence of disappointments to the people of Italy. The incomprehension of the real state of things in that country reached such a degree that had Socialism in Italy been endowed with a more violent vitality Bolshevism would have flourished. The propaganda of the Socialist party increased daily on ground most favourably prepared by the general discontent and received moreover the collaboration of the so-called _Popolari_—a kind of Social Catholic party that in theory was to take the place of the clericals. Whether their leader, Don Sturzo, a man of remarkable power, realised the sacrilegiousness of using Catholic priests to pervert the minds of the peasants or not, the Popolari brought their violences to such a pitch in some provinces that they not only matched, they surpassed the Reds.[4] Naturally, these parties and the men who were not supposed to belong to them, but were flattering them in case of an eventual revolution, were wont to represent the war and the sacrifices that had been made by the country as the cause of all the social and economic difficulties. To them, the only consequence of the war was the destruction of what had been laboriously done between 1870 and 1915.
It was at this juncture that some people banded together their aspirations, which seemed in the main to be the realisation in the Adriatic of all the value of what they called “their mutilated victory.” They had mostly been in the trenches, and they clustered round Gabriele d’Annunzio who led them to occupy Fiume, which was still under the control of the Allies. The Allies left the whole affair to Italy and had the Italian government, or a strong party, backed d’Annunzio and his friends, the course of events would have been different. The country wanted Fiume, certainly, but with what will did they want it? With a will that was national at last, because it was not moved exclusively by Irredentism, and did not identify itself with the will of the upper classes, but was a feeling with the whole people. They had deserved it; they were conscious of a right acquired through the common trial of the whole nation. It was, however, more a velleity than a will. The new spiritual life was quivering, it could express itself in a puerile gesture of the hand towards the object of its passion, but it could not yet express itself in action. Will or velleity—it was certainly the first manifestation of a really national life striving against the paralysing scaffolding of its political organisation. The professional politicians had been trained when politics were merely a question of technical detail, when to be a Deputy meant merely a job as a bargainer, to get the votes of the people for a party on the understanding that the party would satisfy the arbitrary and personal requirements of its electors, with the possibility of coming to power any day in one of the incredible combinations that came to life almost daily and made the Chamber a nursery of ministers.
On the 28th of September, 1919, the government appointed General Badoglio Extraordinary Commissioner of the Venezia Guilia and accepted a discussion on the matter in the Chamber. Neither the men in power nor the opposition felt it possible to accept the suggestions of the Press, of various associations, and even of their friends who were urging the necessity of Fiume’s annexation. The Ministry gave in its resignation after dissolving the House and the elections returned 157 Socialists, among whom were moderate men like Turati and Treves and many new men whose programmes were openly revolutionary, and over a hundred _Popolari_. These parties had a good deal in common. Their propaganda had been nearly perfect and had appealed to the people by that definiteness and practicalness of purpose which is the main string to pull in order to move Italians to action. They were not dreamers and even in their worst or best ideals they were for definiteness of means and purpose. There is in the Italian mind such a strong tendency to take a realistic view of things that to this characteristic the best and the worst of their history might be traced for twenty centuries.
The Nationalists had been returned in very small number, but were mostly young, with considerable intellectual culture, fit and ready to assume responsibilities. They had all done active service in the war and were sorry to see its meagre result. They required an audacious and strong policy without being able, however, to see clearly how this was to be realised. Liberals held a good many seats but they were so split up that they should rather be considered as a set of groups than as a party; they even called themselves different names and had no common programme.
After these elections one had the impression of watching the systematic extinction of the flickering flame that had signalised the coming to light of the new national conscience. One must have spent those years in Italy, have actually lived the life of the Italians, felt all their actual experiences and at the same time have had a good historical and intellectual grounding in all that concerns the country, to understand fully the tragedy of it. They seemed to precipitate themselves from the soaring heights of national conscience to the lowest and vilest egotism. Material well-being was again the order of the day and not yours or theirs or the children’s, but _mine_. Beyond that nothing. Reality was again atomistic and the atoms constitutive of it were absolutely irrelatives. Nobody seemed to reflect; all were acting and behaving like children. Truly it is the subjectiveness of the period that must be taken as its characteristic. They seemed to move each in his own world. Even financially they seemed to have reached an unbridled licence. The constant principles that regulate economic relations which form the basis of society were disregarded. Objective reality was ignored just as it is ignored by children and to a certain degree by artists. They had the economic deficit constantly on their lips—but never had such spendthrift way of living been displayed in their country—and they seemed to overlook the moral deficit betrayed by such an atomistic subjectiveness.
Consider the factories. It is evidently a high rate of production that will ensure the interests of both labour and capital. Well, the workmen, or women, set themselves to get higher wages as they have done in most countries, but in the north and centre of Italy they did it with such a childish and, therefore, savage and lawless will that the works had to be shut in many instances and were not reopened until the advent of Fascism. So that it can be said that by not taking into consideration the actual production as a whole, and the owner’s interest, they reduced their legitimate desire for a better life to the destructive whims of children and ruined their own interest.
The schools reflected the same destructive state of mind. That which makes the school is surely not the building; the children are not pupils if they do not learn, and neither is the master a teacher except inasmuch as he does actually teach. Discipline having slackened to such a degree that it bordered on anarchy the pupils had one fixed idea to do no work, and a great many of the teachers—not all indeed, for the teaching body has always counted in Italy a number of first-rate men—had the same purpose. Teaching and learning were reduced to a ghostly shadow by the reduction of schools to a subjective purpose by both parties. The professors saw in their function the title it gave them to their stipend and the pupils attended school just for the degree or the promotion to which such attendance entitled them.
Such a false vision of life is certainly not natural to the Italian people, and it had taken a great deal of trouble to introduce it in a country the mentality of which is above all realistic. It is natural to think that the Socialist and Popolari leaders were guilty of the most criminal falsehoods.
On the 15th of June, 1920, when Giolitti was called upon to form a new ministry, the government of Nitti had wrought such havoc in the few months he had been in power that the old statesman was hailed _Salvatore della Patria_ on his coming to power by the very people who had called him a traitor five years before. Yet the new government found that the best thing to do was to let things go on as they were, with the result that factories were taken possession of by workmen, and a strong reaction took shape under the wings of the new-born Fascism, which came out with the simple programme of restoring order _even against the state_ if it was necessary.
Public opinion at the end of the year gave a clear proof of the depressing influence the government had had on the national conscience allowing Giolitti, who had truly never been a Nationalist, to compel d’Annunzio and his men to evacuate Fiume without any protest against the bombardment inflicted upon them. When, in the next spring, the elections took place, all the old parties were there again with the addition of Fascism. The men of the new party were mostly new to politics altogether, whilst some came from all the old parties (including the Socialist) and they had all of them taken an active part in the war. In the districts they had made national blocks with Nationalists and Liberals and the few seats they obtained were not lost by the _Popolari_ or Socialists, who were returned in the same proportion as they had been in the last House.
The first characteristic of the Fascists was that they seemed to have the same programme as the Nationalists, whilst they were displaying the power of mass organisation that had been till then the privilege of Socialists and _Popolari_. (This characteristic holds good up to now.) They wanted to realise the political programme of the best men of Italy by lifting the working class up to it. As to their aim it was then exclusively the political and moral realisation of the practical and spiritual value they ascribed to the war victory. They had nothing like an abstract programme. When realisation is not one with conception—and such has been the case for the last two centuries—the political systems stated on paper appear all harmony, and their consequences all for the best; but the trouble begins as soon as their application is sought.
Fascism has no ideologies but a cogent system of ideas able to give what ideologies will never give, promptitude and coherence of action. These ideas serve as a criterion of action rather than a theory. If it draws the attention of foreigners as a beacon light it is because it does show a way out of the abstraction that in a certain sense seems to have perverted our modern vision of social and economic reality. The method it enforces of looking invariably at both the terms of any one relation is practical, as only can be a method the axle of which is a highly philosophical conception. For the divorce between thought and action pronounced by the philosophy of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries might induce us to believe that speculative thoughts had nothing to do with everyday life, whereas the simplest and humblest action or relation to be productive has to be the direct and immediate expression of a thought, scientific or speculative. The peasant who lifts his axe over his head before striking it into the wood is not making a choreographic flourish with his tool; its weight is augmented by the height to which he lifts it and the combination of the force of gravitation with his own sends his blade to the core of the wood. He certainly does not think of the force of gravitation, but he acts upon it. In the first contract, tacit though it may have been, the man who lacked hands to plough his fields and the men who had no field to plough, came into a relation that was the typical relation of the one and the many which has stood as the fundamental problem of ethics and politics in the philosophy of all ages. When synthesis rules theory and a synthetic view of reality rules practice then the relation is kept in consideration as the living bond of the two parties, and the greater product of the harvest is the common aim. But when analytic methods, either empirical or rational, prevail in philosophy, practical life is infected with a ferocious individualism, the necessary consequence of which is the unjust attribution of the harvest to one of the two terms, to the ruin of the relation which has to be bilateral if it is to be at all.
This concrete way of looking upon every economic and social problem does not indeed present itself as a miraculous way of removing the class struggles, which are, after all, one of the main forces at play in the civilising process of mankind. It is merely the way of looking at it that befits the intellectual level reached by man through the efforts of genius and through the blood and tears of the many by which social and economic progress is achieved.
After all that has been said it is surely unnecessary to point out the absurdity of considering Fascism as a reactionary tendency. It goes indeed steadily forward and its leader would not have the historical mind he has, if it meant to reject the labourers’ claim to preserve the recognition of their interests, which is the one noble conquest of socialism. The “reaction” was never against the working classes’ rights; it was against all rights that did not spring from duties. It was against exclusive power—tyrannical as all exclusive powers are bound to be—that it reacted with the full consent of the population, as sick of being bossed by a mob minority as the mob had been to be bossed by the gentry fifty years before. Truly it would be a strange illusion of the upper classes if they were to believe that Fascism had come to restore “the good old times”; for that which it has come to restore or rather to establish is the really Christian equality of men. Christian because it intends rights to be consonant with spiritual value and actual recognition of duties.
The revolutions of the past were always justified by the necessity of enforcing the claims of a single class. Fascism in its synthetic view of life strives to enforce the rightful claims of all classes, and considers them rightful as far as they present rights and duties on the same plane. If it looks to the past it is to understand the present, but its knowledge and understanding of history do not allow it to believe that history proceeds backwards.
Part II
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTECEDENTS OF FASCISM