But toward the end of the Nineteenth Century and in the first years of
the Twentieth a vigorous spirit of reaction began to manifest itself
in the young men of Italy against the preceding generation's ideas in
politics, literature, science and philosophy. It was as though they
were weary of the prosaic bourgeois life which they had inherited from
their fathers and were eager to return to the lofty moral enthusiasms
of their grandfathers. Rosmini and Gioberti had been long forgotten.
They were now exhumed, read, discussed. As for Mazzini, an edition of
his writings was financed by the State itself. Vico, the great Vico, a
formidable preacher of idealistic philosophy and a great
anti-Cartesian and anti-rationalist, became the object of a new cult.
Positivism began forthwith to be attacked by neo-idealism.
Materialistic approaches to the study of literature and art were
refuted and discredited. Within the Church itself modernism came to
rouse the Italian clergy to the need of a deeper and more modern
culture. Even socialism was brought under the philosophical probe and
criticized like other doctrines for its weaknesses and errors; and
when, in France, George Sorel went beyond the fallacies of the
materialistic theories of the Marxist social-democracy to his theory
of syndicalism, our young Italian socialists turned to him. In Sorel's
ideas they saw two things: first, the end of a hypocritical
"collaborationism" which betrayed both proletariat and nation; and
second, faith in a moral and ideal reality for which it was the
individual's duty to sacrifice himself, and to defend which, even
violence was justified. The anti-parliamentarian spirit and the moral
spirit of syndicalism brought Italian socialists back within the
Mazzinian orbit.
Of great importance, too, was nationalism, a new movement then just
coming to the fore. Our Italian nationalism was less literary and more
political in character than the similar movement in France, because
with us it was attached to the old historic Right which had a long
political tradition. The new nationalism differed from the old Right
in the stress it laid on the idea of "nation"; but it was at one with
the Right in regarding the State as the necessary premise to the
individual rights and values. It was the special achievement of
nationalism to rekindle faith in the nation in Italian hearts, to
arouse the country against parliamentary socialism, and to lead an
open attack on Freemasonry, before which the Italian bourgeoisie was
terrifiedly prostrating itself. Syndicalists, nationalists, idealists
succeeded, between them, in bringing the great majority of Italian
youth back to the spirit of Mazzini.
Official, legal, parliamentary Italy, the Italy that was
anti-Mazzinian and anti-idealistic, stood against all this, finding
its leader in a man of unfailing political intuition, and master as
well of the political mechanism of the country, a man sceptical of all
high-sounding words, impatient of complicated concepts, ironical,
cold, hard-headed, practical--what Mazzini would have called a "shrewd
materialist." In the persons, indeed, of Mazzini and Giolitti, we may
find a picture of the two aspects of pre-war Italy, of that
irreconcilable duality which paralyzed the vitality of the country and
which the Great War was to solve.
V
The effect of the war seemed at first to be quite in an opposite
sense--to mark the beginning of a general _débâcle_ of the Italian
State and of the moral forces that must underlie any State. If
entrance into the war had been a triumph of ideal Italy over
materialistic Italy, the advent of peace seemed to give ample
justification to the Neutralists who had represented the latter. After
the Armistice our Allies turned their backs upon us. Our victory
assumed all the aspects of a defeat. A defeatist psychology, as they
say, took possession of the Italian people and expressed itself in
hatred of the war, of those responsible for the war, even of our army
which had won our war. An anarchical spirit of dissolution rose
against all authority. The ganglia of our economic life seemed struck
with mortal disease. Labor ran riot in strike after strike. The very
bureaucracy seemed to align itself against the State. The measure of
our spiritual dispersion was the return to power of Giolitti--the
execrated Neutralist--who for five years had been held up as the
exponent of an Italy which had died with the war.
But, curiously enough, it was under Giolitti that things suddenly
changed in aspect, that against the Giolittian State a new State
arose. Our soldiers, our genuine soldiers, men who had willed our war
and fought it in full consciousness of what they were doing, had the
good fortune to find as their leaders a man who could express in words
things that were in all their hearts and who could make those words
audible above the tumult.
Mussolini had left Italian socialism in 1915 in order to be a more
faithful interpreter of "the Italian People" (the name he chose for
his new paper). He was one of those who saw the necessity of our war,
one of those mainly responsible for our entering the war. Already as a
socialist he had fought Freemasonry; and, drawing his inspiration from
Sorel's syndicalism, he had assailed the parliamentary corruption of
Reformist Socialism with the idealistic postulates of revolution and
violence. Then, later, on leaving the party and in defending the cause
of intervention, he had come to oppose the illusory fancies of
proletarian internationalism with an assertion of the infrangible
integrity, not only moral but economic as well, of the national
organism, affirming therefore the sanctity of country for the working
classes as for other classes. Mussolini was a Mazzinian of that
pure-blooded breed which Mazzini seemed somehow always to find in the
province of Romagna. First by instinct, later by reflection, Mussolini
had come to despise the futility of the socialists who kept preaching
a revolution which they had neither the power nor the will to bring to
pass even under the most favorable circumstances. More keenly than
anyone else he had come to feel the necessity of a State which would
be a State, of a law which would be respected as law, of an authority
capable of exacting obedience but at the same time able to give
indisputable evidence of its worthiness so to act. It seemed
incredible to Mussolini that a country capable of fighting and winning
such a war as Italy had fought and won should be thrown into disorder
and held at the mercy of a handful of faithless politicians.
When Mussolini founded his Fasci in Milan in March, 1919, the movement
toward dissolution and negation that featured the post-war period in
Italy had virtually ceased. The Fasci made their appeal to Italians
who, in spite of the disappointments of the peace, continued to
believe in the war, and who, in order to validate the victory which
was the proof of the war's value, were bent on recovering for Italy
that control over her own destinies which could come only through a
restoration of discipline and a reorganization of social and political
forces. From the first, the Fascist Party was not one of believers but
of action. What it needed was not a platform of principles, but an
idea which would indicate a goal and a road by which the goal could be
reached.
The four years between 1919 and 1923 inclusive were characterized by
the development of the Fascist revolution through the action of "the
squads." The Fascist "squads" were really the force of a State not yet
born but on the way to being. In its first period, Fascist "squadrism"
transgressed the law of the old régime because it was determined to
suppress that régime as incompatible with the national State to which
Fascism was aspiring. The March on Rome was not the beginning, it was
the end of that phase of the revolution; because, with Mussolini's
advent to power, Fascism entered the sphere of legality. After October
28, 1922, Fascism was no longer at war with the State; it _was_ the
State, looking about for the organization which would realize Fascism
as a concept of State. Fascism already had control of all the
instruments necessary for the upbuilding of a new State. The Italy of
Giolitti had been superceded, at least so far as militant politics
were concerned. Between Giolitti's Italy and the new Italy there
flowed, as an imaginative orator once said in the Chamber, "a torrent
of blood" that would prevent any return to the past. The century-old
crisis had been solved. The war at last had begun to bear fruit for
Italy.