“From that point on there was only one truth – and it was Fascist”

COMMENT / Professor Richard Bosworth The March on Rome had two evident characteristics, raising issues that lingered through the Italian dictatorship and today dividing historians in their assessments of ‘the Italian road to totalitarianism’ (a word invented in Italy).

On the one hand there was violence and murder. The Fascist squads were armed and belligerent. Once the king had appointed Mussolini as prime minister, the Fascists raged through the working-class suburb near San Lorenzo, a raid that culminated in the burning of the small local socialist library. It was a demonstration that, from that point on, there was only one truth – and it was Fascist. Between 18 and 20 December, a still more brutal assault on working-class Turin followed.

Yet Mussolini had not himself marched with the squads. He had stayed by the telephone in Milan, negotiating with this politician and that one. His government was a coalition. Only in January 1925 did he pronounce himself ‘dictator’ of an entrenched ‘totalitarian regime’, where “all [must be] for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state”.

In 1922 the king, the Vatican and almost the whole of the national establishment backed the new government. This dictatorship won considerable consensus, one reason being that, in contrast with Hitler’s radical revolution, most of the time the ‘duce’ “worked towards Italians” – at least, those from the comfortable classes.