A Very Unenviable Precedent

In these contentious times, when the epithet "fascism" is tossed about so frequently and easily, with little or no historical consciousness, it seems to me to be beneficial to review aspects of real historical fascism and how it was experienced a century ago. I refer, of course, to the movement and regime which invented the term, Fascist Italy, which experienced the rise, rule, and catastrophic collapse of fascism over the course of a little more than two decades in the early-mid 20th century.

So, in addition to watching MUBI's Italian drama, Mussolini, Son of the Century, (a dramatic fictionalized version, which nonetheless effectively illustrates the abject failure of the political class and its liberal constitutional order of king, parliament, and political parties, to check Fascism's ascent to power), I have also recently re-read the most comprehensive history of the subject with which I am familiar, R.J.B. Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy:  Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (NY: Penguin, 2006). And I have accompanied that by re-reading the classic journal of one of the participants in the disastrous finale of Italian fascism, The Ciano Diaries 1939-1943 (Doubleday, 1945), the diary kept by Benito Mussolini's son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944), during his ears as Italy's Minister for Foreign affairs.

Writing in the wake of the post-Cold War reshaping of Italian politics, Bosworth provides a thoroughly comprehensive appreciation of post-Risorgimento, post-unification early 20th-century Italian politics and culture. Bosworth highlights the limitations of the Risorgimento project of a united liberal Italy. One familiar feature of that failure was emigration. "In 1913, the year when departures peaked, 407,475 Italians entered North America, 148,850 the countries of South America and 307, 627 left for Europe, France and Germany." The U.S. has greatly benefited from Italy's failure, but it remains united liberal Italy's failure. Bosworth quotes Olindo Malagodi's claim that emigration was the most obvious token of "national inferiority." 

Notably, the rise of the fascist dictatorship came as a consequence of the First World War. Technically, Italy was one of the war's winners, but it hardly felt itself to be such, suffering what was famously termed la vittoria mutilata. "Most workers and virtually all peasants hated the idea of conflict and at least the latter often knew little about the nation except as a malign conscripting and taxing force." It was not just that "inadequate roads symbolized the partial and erratic penetration of the state into Italian lives," Liberal Italy also lacked charisma. "Perhaps because the Italian nation was so partially made and its institutions so uncertainly framed, perhaps because King Victor Emmanuel III was not physically imposing, ... perhaps because the countering charisma of the Catholic Church .... was still so uneasily integrated into. national identity, quite a few Italians can be found engaged in wartime quest for a duce." While little of that early 20th-century Italian experience may appear all that relevant to contemporary American politics, certainly the pervasive sense of institutional liberalism's failure even after its ostensible victory in the Cold War and the desire for charismatic strong leadership have obvious resonances with what happened a century ago.

Fascism rose to power in Italy in the context of significant social breakdown, strikes, and political street violence. According to Bosworth, some 3000 Italians died as a result of political and social instability between the end of the war and October 1922. Thankfully the U.S. has experienced nothing quite comparable in the 21st-century. (Actually, compared to other 20th-century tragedies, "Italians got off lightly," a factor which. may have contributed to what Bosworth calls "the softness, compromise, confusion or lack of rigour of Italian Fascism, compared with later fascist movements.")

Bosworth has written an excellent narrative of Italian Fascism's rise, its imperialist aspirations, its ill-fated alliance with Germany, and its tragic denouement. That is all familiar territory. Throughout. however, it is an account of two simultaneous, if seemingly somewhat contradictory factors. The first is the exposure of the weakness of the liberal constitutional order (king, parliament, political parties) and their failure to oppose fascism effectively (until belatedly and irresponsibly at the end). This has its parallel of a sort in the breakdown of the constitutional order of checks and balances in our own contemporary context. The second was the weakness of the system, due to its failure either to abolish completely the constitutional alternative (always present as a threat in the king) or to penetrate more profoundly into the traditional and apolitical depths of society, where "out in the towns and countryside, ideology was perpetually conditioned by Italians' recourse to familial and other forms of loyalty and patronage whose cast was as frequently local as it was Italian, let alone Fascist."

The U.S is not Italy, and the de-centralizing, apolitical forces which have historically conditioned American civic society have often been praised in positive contrast to the more traditional and familial forces militating against civic society in Italy. That said, at least before we began "bowling alone," the presumed strength of local and associational identities among Americans could be seen as a strong bulwark against any serious ideological or other centralizing authoritarian movement. Churches have been particularly hit hard by the "bowling alone" phenomenon, but may still be able to draw upon simmering reserves of spirituality - especially the Catholic Church, blessed at this historical juncture to have an American Pope. 

In this regard, what Count Ciano wrote in his Diary may appear applicable here and now as well as there and then: "Superficially, maybe, they [Italians] scorn the Church, but they are religious at heart, and especially in times of peril do they draw near the altars." 

In my reflections on the Mussolini phenomenon and its applicability (or not) to today, I have likewise continued to be impressed by Ciano's Diary, which, as Bosworth remarks, "remains one of the great texts for any who seek to understand the Fascist regime." In many ways, Ciano is a revealing personal portrait of regime hangers-on, whether in Italian Fascism or in more contemporary approximations of authoritarian-adjacent movements and  governance. He also lifts the curtain on the flawed characters to whom fell the responsibility to check the dictatorship's power.

At a formal level, the checks and balances were still there (as they are here), but those charged to exercise those checks temporized. Thus, for example, as early as March 1940 (early not in terms of the history of the dictatorship but of its disastrous foreign war policy), Ciano records that "the King feels that it may become necessary for him to intervene at any moment to give a different direction to things; he is prepared to do this and to do it with despatch." In historical fact, of course, it took the King another 3 years and 4 months to act. Some "despatch"!

Such was the sad story of Italian fascism, which, propelled into prominence by the political, social, and economic calamities of World War I and its aftermath, was maintained in power by the institutional weaknesses of the liberal constitutional order and the personal and political failures of those charged with maintaining it (king, parliament, political parties). History does not repeat itself, but there is much to learn from what happened in Italy a century ago - a lesson and a warning.