On Saturday 8th October, 2022, the Cambridge History Forum held a conference to mark the centenary of the March on Rome of October 1922. Welcoming guests, Dr David Smith (President of the Forum) explained that this was a special online event and thanked Professor John Pollard for putting the programme together. Professor Pollard then referenced recent developments in Ukraine and Italy in stressing how no-one had imagined at the planning stage just how topical the events being considered today would become.
Following this introduction, Dr Celia Donert (Wolfson College, Cambridge) opened the programme with a panoramic analysis of ‘The New Europe: Revolution and Counter-Revolution after the First World War’. Setting a broader European context for events in Italy, she emphasised that the upheaval associated with World War I continued in many ways until 1923. Revolutions, wars of independence, ethnic conflicts and/or civil wars occurred in Russia, Ukraine, Finland, the Baltic States, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Italy and Ireland. The temporal boundaries of the War have thus been stretched to encompass an ongoing cycle of violence and crisis from c.1911-1923, including – in another contemporary resonance – an outbreak of Spanish ‘flu which killed more than fifty million people worldwide. Paramilitary groups and mass displacement of peoples were characteristic of the era, with the Freikorps in Germany typical in their glorification of a culture of brutal violence and hostility to democracy and communism. Exploring explanations for these phenomena, Dr Donert suggested that arguments emphasizing the mobilising power of defeat were more persuasive than theories of ‘brutalisation’, the latter failing to adequately encompass the victorious powers in the War. In this context of collapse, with dynastic empires vanishing, ‘shatter zones’ lacking law, order or authority were created in Central and Eastern Europe. Taking an even broader lens, the emergence of mass politics, nationalist and socialist movements since c.1870 helped pave the way for a pan-European ideological conflict involving Wilsonian ideas of democracy and radical ideas on both the Left (as in Russia) and Right; Italy was to be a key example of the latter.
There were more positive signs, such as the establishment of the Save the Children Fund in 1919, and indeed work since 1989 has tended to rehabilitate the much-maligned League of Nations as a precursor to later forms of internationalism and co-operation. The Treaty of Lausanne thus could have signaled more optimistic trends, of which the Dawes Plan (1924), Locarno Treaty (1925) and Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) could all serve as examples. Ultimately, however, Dr Donert emphasised that a decline in actual violence after c.1923 masked the continuation of a rhetoric of violence and street fighting. Furthermore, these legacies from 1917-23 and the era of the First World War also fed into the Second World War. Questions then discussed the aforementioned extended time-frame for the First World War – one which has been proposed by historians of Central and Eastern Europe – and the ways in which this earlier conflict helped to sow the seeds for World War II.
Turning more specifically to Italy, Professor Richard Bosworth (Jesus College, Oxford) then examined ‘The March on Rome: a Centenary and its Meaning’. After suggesting reservations with attempts to extrapolate meanings of fascism (with a small ‘f’) as an ideology from the nature of Fascism under Mussolini in Italy, Professor Bosworth emphasised three key points regarding Liberal Italy’s involvement in World War I: Italy entered the war as a conscious decision in 1915; the war cost three-quarters of a million lives, more than the 500,000 lost in World War II; and the victory was felt to be a hollow one – ‘the mutilated victory’ as it was termed at the time. Surveying the rise of the Fascist movement in this context, Professor Bosworth noted that it was strongest in 1920 in the cities, notably in Trieste. This, significantly, was in the region of Italy which was nearest to the areas of Central and Eastern Europe examined by Dr Donert in the first lecture. The Fascist violence witnessed in Trieste was then mirrored in other parts of Italy as Fascists would typically descend on socialist meetings in a truck and beat up (possibly murder) their opponents. In Italy the years 1921-22 witnessed a series of victories for the Fascist movement over the socialists in what amounted to a class war. In November 1921 the National Fascist Party was formed under the former journalist Mussolini, who emerged as a skilled politician and became an increasingly significant figure. He based himself in Milan, a key city financially, economically and politically. By October 1922 large parts of Northern Italy had been ‘marched on’ and had a Fascist administration imposed.
Announcing their intention to march on Rome in October 1922, the Fascists now declared themselves willing to tolerate the monarchy, to compromise with the Pope and to pursue liberal economics (rather than imposing large taxes on industrialists); opposition to votes for women also accompanied these other ideological shifts. In the context of some form of Fascist armed action and some degree of confusion associated with the pouring rain, negotiations between Mussolini (in Milan), the King and the liberals ended with Mussolini being made Prime Minister, a post he was to hold until 1943. At this point, it was far from clear – notably from an examination of his statements – that Mussolini was a fascist as a political scientist might define the term. In concluding, Professor Bosworth emphasised that the King remained as constitutional Head of State; indeed, there were two national anthems in the Fascist era! Similarly, the Catholic Church, class, regionalism and family remained important sources of loyalty, despite Fascist propaganda proclaiming the unity of the nation. Finally, an aspect of continuity between Liberal and Fascist Italy was an abiding sense of Italy as ‘the least of the great powers’. In answering questions Professor Bosworth reported that the finding of Mussolini’s appointment book has suggested he governed by interview, seeing a series of officials throughout the day.
The final presentation of the morning was delivered by Dr Nathan Kunkeler (Oslo University) on the topic of ‘The March Beyond Rome: the Impact of the Fascist Seizure of Power in Europe’. Drawing on themes from the first two talks as well as introducing much new material, Dr Kunkeler commented that what spread beyond Italy – fascism with a small ‘f’ – rarely resembled Mussolini’s ideology. Although the Fascist movement in Italy had attracted little attention prior to 1921, the seizure of power prompted approving comment from many foreign ambassadors and journalists, notwithstanding their distaste for the movement’s violence and the restrictions on liberties for which it stood. These features of Fascism also prompted a certain aloofness amongst Northern European right-wing parties such as the Dutch Conservative Party. From the Left the movement was associated with the derogatory term ‘White Guard’, derived from the Russian Civil War. Figures on the Right such as Oskar Heikinheimo saw the Italian Fascists as his ‘intellectual comrades’ while General Miguel Primo de Rivera, who seized power in Madrid in 1923, saw Mussolini as an inspiration. In the mid-1920s fascist groups appeared in Scandinavia, with the Swedish and Danish parties in particular having a strong military presence.
Where the March of Rome served as a more direct inspiration in other countries its legacy was perhaps more ambiguous. In Finland, for example, Lapua staged a March on Helsinki in 1932 but overestimated its influence in so doing and was crushed. Previously, this organisation had kidnapped politicians (dumping them over the Soviet border) and pressurised the government, in 1930, into passing anti-Communist laws. The Munich Putsch in Germany in 1923 prompted Hitler – through its failure – to focus on legitimate campaigning strategies (alongside the threat of paramilitary violence) as a route to power; this of course also very much drew on the precedent of Mussolini’s tactics and appointment in 1922. Another feature of the 1920s to emerge from Dr Kunkeler’s wide-ranging talk was the sheer range of fascist imitations across Europe, with movements appearing in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal and Spain in the North and West as well as Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland and Romania in the East. Finally, there was a clear link back to the themes presented by Dr Donert in the example of groups such as the Danish Baltic Auxiliary Corps, who had been involved in the Baltic anti-Bolshevik campaigns of the years 1917-23. Questions focused on whether the March on Rome had made a difference, and in response Dr Kunkeler elucidated the difficultly in disentangling the March from the Fascist seizure of power more generally. The importance of the Baltic was also stressed and the example of a Swedish combat organisation leader who claimed the ‘status’ of having volunteered in Wrangel’s White army during the Russian Civil War was noted. Finally, the extent to which Italian Fascism was eclipsed by the rise of Nazism in Germany was explored along with subsequent tensions between the two movements around events in Austria in 1934.
These points were discussed by Professors Pollard and Bosworth alongside Dr Kunkeler and led into the final forum discussion which focused on the broader context for paramilitary groups, the comparative lack thereof prior to 1914 and the uniqueness or otherwise of the militarised aspects of Germany’s pre-war culture. Connections with anti-semitism and imperialism were also considered, along with the case for studying Mussolini – on which the point that Mussolini was in many ways a more typical dictator than Hitler was made by Professor Bosworth. A connection with the original rationale for this special event was made through consideration of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Rome in 1972. In yet another link to current affairs, it was suggested in relation to this that post-war Italy had been explicitly constructed as an anti-Fascist state and that much of the terminological flexibility surrounding ‘fascism’ as a concept resulted from the USSR’s espousal of anti-fascism as a banner under which they had fought Nazism during World War II. In closing Dr Smith thanked all the speakers for a fascinating set of talks and Professor Pollard for chairing the conference. After an excellent and extremely thought-provoking programme on the context for events in Italy, our next conference in March 2023 will focus on Russia.
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