12 saturday review Saturday June 11 2022 | the timesdoubt that the constant strikes, riots and
violence at that time also created a ‘great
fear’. There was an atmosphere of civil
war.” When in 1921 anarchists bombed a
Milan theatre, killing 21 people, the fascists
made the funerals of the slain a national
fascist event. They then ran Bucco out of
his Bologna stronghold by force. The tide
had turned. Town after town was, in effect,
taken over by fascist gangs.
One hundred years ago this autumn the
fascists — despite having won only 35 out
of 500-odd seats in the Italian parliament
the year before — marched on Rome. King
Victor Emmanuel III refused his prime
minister’s request to sign a martial law de-
cree to stop them. Days later Mussolini
was appointed prime minister. After
that it was the usual consolidation of
dictatorial power. Some of it hap-
pened quickly, some at a more
Putinesque pace. It was complete
by 1926.
Foot doesn’t spend that much
time on what fascist Italy was
like for the ordinary Italian and
what made Aurelia recall it as
such a wonderful time. The new
regime was loud, centralised and
repressive. The marshes were
drained, the railways ran on time,
dissidents rotted in jail or were
pursued in exile, sovereign nations were
invaded and despoiled.
Everything was a mobilisation. Foot
tells the story of how the World Cup-win-
ning Italian football team of 1934 came to
England and played what came to bea bloody disaster
Italian blackshirts
during the Second
World War. Below:
Mussolini in 1940books
Strikes, fear
and a turncoat
hack: the fascist
road to power
The braggadocio of
Mussolini led to the
deaths of a million
people in wars and
empire-building, says
David Aaronovitch
J
ohn Foot’s father, Paul, used to
speak of great West Country get-to-
gethers of the Foot family (or the
“Feet”, as John calls them) at which
his Italian great-grandmother Au-
relia would shock the assembly with her
recollections of life under Mussolini. The
celebrated Feet were mostly Liberals or
Labour, or, as in the case of Paul, revolu-
tionary socialists. Even so, the matriarch
— when the subject was raised — would
say: “Ah, the fascism! It was wonderful!”
Whether Aurelia was the inspiration for
her great-grandson to go on to study and
teach Italian history (at Bristol Univers-
ity), he doesn’t say. But she certainly didn’t
inspire him to become a fascist. Whatever
magic the blackshirts performed for Aure-
lia in 1930s Bologna, Foot sets the human
bill of fascism in power at a million dead in
wars Italy didn’t have to fight and the
bloody establishment of an empire that
Italians didn’t want.
His book is an explanation of how the
disaster of Mussolini’s seizure of power
happened, and a recounting of how his re-
gime fell. But without that much Musso in
it. As Foot says, he has not written yet
another biography of Benito Mussolini,
that violent, brilliant turncoat journalist
whose Johnsonian mega-boosterism filled
the air with braggadocio, new buildings
and tragedy. Instead it looks at events al-
most entirely through the eyes and the ex-
periences of the left-wing radicals that fas-
cism was created to combat and — to a
lesser extent — of leading fascists. In that
sense it is a history of Italian activism, re-
volutionary and reactionary. This is by nomeans a criticism of Foot’s book, which, as
a result of its focus, tells the interested
reader stories that they will have probably
never heard before.
Foot locates the genesis of fascism in a
coming together of two great forces in the
teenage years of the 20th century. The first
was a powerful but disparate workers’
movement, often led by revolutionaries,
and the second was the advent of the First
World War. These forces created a violent
instability in Italian politics.
The left was anti the war. The nationalist
right was in favour of it. In 1914, as strikes
paralysed Italy, the formerly anti-war edi-
tor of the socialist newspaper Avanti! per-
formed a volte face and came out in favour
of Italy’s participation. For that he was
sacked and expelled from the Socialist
Party. In 1915 Mussolini got his way and
Italy joined the war on the side of the Allies.
It was for the most part a bloody disaster
with a victorious end — 600,000 Italians
were killed, millions maimed, millions
more traumatised. Meanwhile the left had
organised even bigger strikes in northern
industrial cities such as Turin, which in
1917 led to what seemed like a revolution-
ary moment when, led by “maximalists”
such as the socialist Ercole Bucco, a seizure
of power seemed possible. But there was
no party, no programme, no Lenin.
In 1918 Italy emerged from the war vic-
torious and polarised. And a new force,
radicalised and energised by patriotism
and savagery, began to emerge. In March
1919, Foot writes, “a somewhat ragbag col-
lection of people... including Futurist art-
ists, poets, journalists, army veterans”
came together in Milan to form the Fasci
Italiani di Combattimento: the Italian
Fighting Bands, with Mussolini as their de
facto leader or Duce.
What followed was three years of
chaos. Foot describes how fascist
squadristi — roving bands of
armed blackshirts — would de-
scend on left-wing newspapers,
party offices, the houses of
known left-wingers; beating
people up, setting buildings on
fire, forcing opponents to drink
castor oil and from time to time
killing them.
Some of the far left were at first
unworried by the threat to demo-
cracy. Bucco, for example, expressed
contempt for the parliamentary system.
“We have always felt disgust for demo-
cracy,” he said, “and seen it as a horrible
thing.” As Foot writes, this was a period
when militancy won big benefits for Italy’s
workers. “But,” he adds, “there is littleBook of the week
Blood and
Power
The Rise and Fall
of Italian Fascism
by John FootBloomsbury,
432pp; £25known as the Battle of Highbury. England
went 3-0 up and the Arsenal captain and
England player Eddie Hapgood recalled:
“The Italians had gone berserk and were
kicking everybody and everything in
sight.” After the match the dressing room
was like a “casualty clearing station”.
Fascism was a creed that demanded
enemies. In 1938 it was the Jews. As Ger-
many experienced Kristallnacht, Italy
promulgated its race laws, helped along
by the usual prostituted opinion of “race”
scientists and intellectuals. Jews lost an
array of civic rights. As Foot writes, this
was a big shock to Italy’s small Jewish pop-
ulation, many of whom were fervent patri-
ots and monarchists who had also fought
in the Great War. A significant number —
as many as a quarter of the adults — were
also fascist party members. Some went
underground, some fled, many just bore it.
Angelo Formiggini, Foot tells us, was a
publisher and intellectual who had volun-
teered and fought in the First World War.
But he was Jewish. On November 28, 1938,
Formiggini climbed 200 steps to the top of
the historic Torre Ghirlandina in Modena
and threw himself to his death on the
square below. He left a letter — not unhu-
morous — to the people of Italy explaining
his actions. They never got to hear of it.
Despite the Captain Corelli mythology,
Italian soldiery in the fascist era was not
gentler than its German allies. The Italian
empire was a story of massacres of civilians
and Italian occupation of European
countries could be similarly brutal. Musso-
lini’s son, Bruno, provided an account of