27-29 October 1922 · Rome, Italy
The March on Rome and the Rise of Fascism
On 27-29 October 1922 Mussolini's Blackshirt militias marched on Rome; rather than use the army against them, King Victor Emmanuel III offered Mussolini the premiership. Fascism thus presented the 20th century with a new political format — mass mobilisation, leader cult, corporatist state, nationalist mythology — a formula that would serve as a model for Hitler and much of inter-war Europe.
Italy emerged from the First World War a 'victorious but disappointed' country: promised territories were withheld, war debts were heavy, cities had high unemployment, the countryside saw land occupations, the streets were filled with socialist strikes. The former socialist journalist Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento in 1919; this paramilitary movement physically smashed socialist unions, cooperatives and party offices. Landowners and industrialists funnelled money to the Blackshirts; army commanders looked on with sympathy; a frightened middle class wanted order.
In October 1922, after a display of force at the Fascist congress in Naples, Mussolini ordered the march on Rome. On 27-29 October roughly 25,000-30,000 Blackshirts moved on the capital; the army was much larger and better armed, and could have stopped them. Prime Minister Facta declared martial law; King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the decree and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini entered Rome by train, in a suit, by constitutional means. The 'revolution' was in fact a surrender.
The first years were a coalition. The 1924 kidnapping and murder of the opposition socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti by Fascists triggered a crisis. In January 1925 Mussolini assumed sole responsibility; in 1925-26 opposition parties, press freedoms and independent unions were eliminated. The dictatorship was now open: corporatist chambers, the secret police (OVRA), the Lipari prison island, the cult of Mussolini as 'Duce', peace with the Vatican via the Lateran Accords (1929). The invasion of Ethiopia (1935-36), intervention in the Spanish Civil War and finally the 1939 Pact of Steel with Hitler pulled Italy into the Axis. In 1945 Mussolini was captured and shot by partisans.
Fascism was a 20th-century invention and resists a single definition: opposed to liberalism, Marxism and traditional conservatism alike; mobilising the masses around a cult of nation, leader and violence; claiming a corporatist 'third way' that closed class conflict inside the state. The Italian model inspired Hitler in Germany (1933), Franco in Spain and a wide arc of movements from Romania to Croatia. After 1945 it was defeated as a form, but it had opened a field of possibility — authoritarian mass politics — that has not closed since.
Gallery
Location
Rome, Italy · OpenStreetMap →
Sources
- March on Rome — Encyclopaedia Britannica
- R. J. B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 — Penguin / Oxford University Press
- The Cambridge History of Italy, Volume 4: The Twentieth Century (eds. Adrian Lyttelton et al.) — Cambridge University Press