The Dynamics of Fascism 1011
Italian women with gas masks line up for the Duce as part of a parade of 70,000 fas
cist women and girls in celebration of the twentieth anniversary of fascism in 1939.
illegal, most workers remained skeptical about Mussolini. The fascist gov
ernment did limit the workday in 1923, and in 1935 it introduced a five-day
workweek. But employers broke contracts with impunity. The conditions of
life for sharecroppers and other landless laborers worsened.
In other respects, some things went on as before. In the south, where
peasants particularly resented and resisted the state, the Mafia provided an
alternative allegiance, a parallel underworld government. Mussolini failed
to destroy the power of the Neapolitan and Sicilian Mafias, even though
the number of Mafia-related killings fell dramatically. The Church also
remained at least an alternative source of influence to fascism. A Catholic
revival, which included a rapid rise in the number of priests and nuns, was
independent of fascism. Pope Pius XI lost some of his enthusiasm for
Mussolini’s fascism, denouncing in the early 1930s “the pagan worship of
the state.’’ Few Italians paid attention to the Duce’s attempts to convince
Italians to stop singing in the streets, or his insistence that they dress
babies in fascist black shirts. That not all Italians listened to Mussolini’s
bombastic rhetoric (nor to the Catholic Church) was demonstrated by the
continuing fall of the birthrate (from 147.5 births per 1,000 in 1911 to
102.2 in 1936), despite the call of the Duce for more baby soldiers and the
ban on the sale of birth-control devices. Massive emigration out of Italy
continued throughout the 1920s and 1930s. However, overall, most Ital
ians still supported Mussolini, if only passively.
