Fasci Italiani di Combattimento

Political party in Italy (1919–1921)

The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (English: "Italian Fasces of Combat", also translatable as "Italian Fighting Bands" or "Italian Fighting Leagues") was an Italian fascist organisation created by Benito Mussolini in 1919. It was the successor of the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, being notably further right than its predecessor. The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was reorganised into the National Fascist Party in 1921. The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was founded by Mussolini and his supporters in the aftermath of World War I, at a meeting held in Milan in March 1919. After making his way back to Milan, Mussolini returned to the position of chief editor of Il Popolo d'Italia, the newspaper he had originally founded in November 1914 to advocate for Italian entry into the war. The readership of the newspaper had declined in his absence, but Mussolini successfully revived the paper with a focus on war commentary. He sought to appeal to the former members and supporters of the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria, who had been ardent pro war activists under his leadership in 1915. Mussolini envisioned a new political movement led by war veterans, argued that only those who had fought for their country were fit to govern, Mussolini at this time "appeared successively as champion of the League and then nationalist, as socialist and then conservative, as a monarchist and then republican" and actively wished to keep all his political options open. There was a great deal of confusion regarding what the new organisation officially stood for. For the left, there were proposals to make Italy a republic based on equal suffrage for both sexes (at the time, only men could vote), to introduce referendums, to abolish the Senate, and to eliminate all titles based on caste or class, among others. The manifesto of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento was published on the following day in Mussolini's newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia, which was closely connected to it. However, Il Popolo d'Italia was not the official newspaper of the Fasci and always remained a separate organisation from it; the official publication of the movement was the weekly newspaper Il Fascio, which was established sometime later when its publication became financially viable. Soon after its foundation, the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento began engaging in political violence against its enemies. On 15 April 1919, the offices and printing equipment of the main socialist newspaper, Avanti!, were attacked and destroyed by a group of fascists led by Marinetti and Ferruccio Vecchi. Mussolini himself did not claim responsibility for the attack, but he defended it and considered it "the first material achievement of the fascist revolution". In November 1919, parliamentary elections were held in Italy. The Fasci Italiani di Combattimento allowed each of its local branches to approach the election however it saw fit. Many local branches decided on their own electoral program, some moving sharply to the right, although Mussolini and his Milan branch put forward a leftist and anti clerical program. This was an attempt to win votes away from the socialists, but it proved to be an electoral disaster when Mussolini and his party gathered fewer than 5,000 votes, compared to 190,000 votes for the socialists in Milan alone.

After the disastrous results in the November 1919 election, the membership of the Fasci dwindled, with fewer than 4,000 members left by the end of the year. Mussolini briefly considered leaving politics, emigrating away from Italy and pursuing a career in writing fiction. However, it soon became apparent that the newly elected parliament was unable to form any governing coalition. The largest party were the Socialists, a situation that alarmed the conservatives and made them seek new political allies to block any potential socialist government. They also declared themselves in support of Gabriele D'Annunzio's seizure of power in the city of Fiume, and asked for public donations to support D'Annunzio. This money never reached D'Annunzio and was appropriated by the Fasci for their own purposes. During the Biennio Rosso, in the summer of 1920, a wave of strikes and factory occupations by socialist workers further persuaded industrialists and landowners to provide financial support to the fascist movement. The fascists recruited heavily from the countryside, and their membership grew tenfold during the last seven months of 1920. Mussolini himself had relatively little control over the fascist armed squads at this time, but he used them to project an image of strength at the negotiating table with other political parties. For the elections of May 1921, the Fasci entered into a coalition with the government of Giovanni Giolitti, who believed that he could use them against the socialists and the newly founded Italian Communist Party. The coalition led by Giolitti was called the National Bloc, and Mussolini presented his Fasci as representing the "extreme right wing" of this group; this was the first time that he identified himself as being on the extreme right. He began to speak of Italians as being a superior race and said that "fascist foreign policy was summed up in the words 'imperialism' and 'national expansion. A few months later, Mussolini decided to transform the relatively decentralised Fasci Italiani di Combattimento into a more tightly organised political party under his control. Thus, in November 1921, the Fasci was renamed and reorganised as the National Fascist Party.