It may seem like a paradox today, but it is a fact: at the 17th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party (photos 6.1.1) being held in Livorno in a climate of extraordinary tension, close to civil war, there is much talk about joining the Communist International and the future structure of the party, but nothing is said about the fascism sweeping the country and threatening democratic institutions and workers’ organizations.

On January 15, 1921, at the Goldoni Theater (6.1.2), the reformist wing led by Filippo Turati (6.1.3) was clearly in the minority and the group of “ordinovists” (named after the publication founded in Turin by Antonio Gramsci and other Turin socialists) led by Gramsci, Togliatti, Tasca and Bordiga (6.1.4, 6.1.5, 6.1.6, 6.1.7) presses for the majority, maximalists, who thrive on the messianic expectation of revolution, to expel them and join the Communist International; this will not happen and the pro-Soviet wing will leave the hall to found the Communist Party of Italy-Italian Section of the Communist International. It is a victory for the sectarian Bordiga and, apparently, for Turati, but the truce within the Psi will be short-lived. The rift in the Italian left is deep and will have significant repercussions (6.1.8, 6.1.9, 6.1.10, 6.1.11).

In a highly confrontational context, Matteotti is enrolled to speak in support of the reformist thesis but will never take the floor: the news reaches him that the socialist mayor Temistocle Bogianckino has been arrested in Ferrara (6.1.12) and the secretary of the Chamber of Labor Gaetano Gilardini, both for the events at the Castello Estense the previous December – with numerous dead left on the ground after the fascist squads stormed the city hall – and to prevent them from reaching Livorno. Now the fascists are rampant and assault the Camera del Lavoro. Matteotti rushes to Ferrara. He arrives on Tuesday the 18th to rescue his comrades and to assume immediate leadership of the Camera del Lavoro. The black shirts are waiting for him: he is attacked, spat on, roughed up while the forces of order, evidently on the basis of instructions received and a line of conduct that will become habitual, do not intervene (6.1.13).

In January and February, fascist violence intensified in Polesine: a hundred or so Fascists from Ferrara burn down the headquarters of the Socialist Employment Office in Pincara, then go to Lendinara where they set fire to the Peasant League, break into the home of the chief delegate Luigi Ghirardini and kill him with two musket shots; on the night of February 25-26, 16-year-old squadrista Edmo Squarzanti dies, caught in the crossfire of his comrades during the agitated stages of an assault.

Already the previous year, in Milan, the headquarters of the socialist newspaper “Avanti!” had been attacked and devastated (photos 6.2.1, 6.2.2); now the fascist “action squads” were rampant throughout Italy, imposing themselves with brutality (6.2.3, 6.2.3.1).

On January 31, 1921, Giacomo Matteotti (6.2.4) denounces fascist violence in the Chamber: in the speech he acknowledges that the Psi does not fear individual incidents of violence as such: “We are a party [.] that necessarily foresees violence and knows that, in harming an infinity of interests, it will have more or less violent reactions, and it does not regret it”; he admits that there were violent episodes on his side as well: “it may have happened that the theorization of revolutionary violence, which aims at suppressing the bourgeois state, and replacing it with the socialist state, may have led some people into the error of episodic acts of violence”.

But quite different, Matteotti argues, is the nature of the fascist movement:

“Today in Italy there is an organization publicly recognized and known in its adherents, its leaders, its composition and its headquarters, of armed gangs, which declare (they have this courage which I gladly acknowledge) they openly declare that they intend acts of violence, acts of reprisal, threats, violence, fires, and they execute them as soon as any fact committed by the workers to the detriment of the bosses or the bourgeois class occurs or is pretended to occur. It is a perfect organization of private justice; this is incontrovertible”.

Finally, he accuses President Giolitti, who interrupts him dryly, of being “complicit in all these acts of violence”. He concluded by calling for a return to the rule of law and said, “on our own behalf, never before have we felt that we are defending together the cause of socialism, the cause of our country and the cause of civilization”.

On March 10, Giacomo Matteotti gave another long and well-documented speech in the House in which he listed and condemned fascist violence. He mentions all the latest episodes that occurred in his Polesine, fraction by fraction. He recounts how the squadist actions unfolded: “In the middle of the night the camions of fascists arrive in the villages”: led by the Agraria, the black shirts surround the house of the chieftain and threaten to burn it, make him get out, seize him and torture him. If he resists, he is killed instantly (6.2.5, 6.2.6).

Matteotti is the first to sense the full danger and seriousness of the fascist phenomenon, and he is among the first to experience it. On March 12, two days after his denunciation in Parliament, he is attacked in Castelguglielmo (6.2.7) where he went to a meeting with the leagues, accompanied by the mayor of Pincara. Fascists from the province had concentrated there, who prevent the meeting and ravage the league office. He is taken to the Agraria headquarters, seized for hours, beaten and insulted; then he is loaded onto a truck and driven around the countryside, repeatedly threatened with death. Possibly raped. They release him in Lendinara late at night and force him to walk back to Rovigo. They warn him that if he does not want to be killed, he must not return to Polesine. This is the “banish”, and it is part of the strategy of dismantling socialist reorganizations that the Agraria, after having fine-tuned it in Polesine and Emilia, will export throughout Italy. The ban on returning to one’s constituency, effectively marking the political death of Socialist deputies, is no mere threat. Precisely for violating the banish, Giuseppe Di Vagno (6.2.8) was shot dead in Mola di Bari on Sept. 25, 1921, by the Caradonna fascist squads. He had returned to his native Apulia to hold a rally to inaugurate the local party headquarters. His killers, many of them minors, would go unpunished. A reformist and pacifist like Matteotti, Giuseppe Di Vagno was the first Socialist deputy assassinated by the fascists (6.2.9).

On May 15, 1921, Italians went back to the polls. Noting the political instability of the fragile majority supporting him, the elder Giolitti (photos 6.3.1) wanted the elections to seize the political opportunity represented by the Livorno split and take advantage of the laceration in the socialist camp. In his national list – the “bloc” – consistent with the policy of involving the oppositions he had already experimented with vis-à-vis the Socialists and Populars, he also included the Fascists (6.3.2, 6.3.3, 6.3.4).

It will be the beginning of the end of liberal democracy, but few at the moment realize this. Mussolini (6.3.5) lands in Parliament with 35 Fascist deputies, who are joined by 10 Nationalist representatives.

In the May elections, Giacomo Matteotti – who is fighting for local autonomy in Montecitorio (6.3.6) – is elected deputy again in the Padua-Rovigo constituency. With over twenty thousand preferences, he is the first of those elected, even though, because of the ban, he was denied the opportunity to campaign. However, the Socialists lost, in the Veneto, almost two-thirds of the votes they had gained two years earlier, falling to 24.9 percent, even below the national average (at 25 percent). The moderate-conservative bloc reached an absolute majority nationwide (55 percent). Red administrations lost support because of their inconclusive maximalism and, above all, violence: the election campaign is marked by intimidation and assaults on many political and union offices.

The first electoral success does not quell the fascist attack on democratic institutions. On the contrary, there is a new wave of systematic and militarized violence in the very months following the vote, which, moving from Emilia and Matteotti’s Polesine, spreads to the entire country (6.3.7, 6.3.8). Born in that context, from the ashes of a red biennium that is turning into a black biennium, is the controversial “Pacification Pact”, or agreement, signed on August 3, 1921 between socialists and fascists. The agreement is signed in Montecitorio, in the office of Chamber President Enrico De Nicola (6.3.9), under the auspices of Benito Mussolini, who supports the pact after discussions with Prime Minister Ivanoe Bonomi (6.3.10). Mussolini, perhaps aiming to break the socialist front, seizes the moment to present himself to Parliament and public opinion as the peacemaker of an Italy torn apart by civil war. Signing the pact are Socialist deputies Pietro Ellero and Tito Zaniboni and Fascist deputies Giacomo Acerbo and Giovanni Giuriati (6.3.11, 6.3.12). The agreement is, however, as predicted by many, very short-lived. The regional congress of the Fasci of Emilia and Romagna, convened urgently on August 16 in Bologna, rejected the Pacification Pact and called for the convening of a national congress of the Fasci (the National Fascist Party, or PNF, officially saw the light of day the following November). On that occasion, the Ras, the powerful local Fascist hierarchs among whom the figures of Italo and Roberto Farinacci stand out, express their total extraneousness to the signed pacts and openly take sides against Mussolini, accusing him of having succumbed to pressure from the palace and the Socialist enemy; posters plastering the city read a condemnation that sounds like a warning: “Those who have betrayed, will betray”. Immediately the Fascist leaders of Florence and Venice and Perugia joined in, denouncing the Pact as well; Mussolini, pressed by internal opposition, had no choice but to back down. And the tide of black violence rises again (6.3.13, 6.3.14, 6.3.15).

In February 1922, in the House of Representatives, Giacomo Matteotti vetoed the attempt by Giolitti, whom he continues to consider the representative of the worst old Italian politics, to build a governing majority with Socialist abstention.

PSI’s membership campaign (photo 6.4.1) gets off to a difficult start in a climate of systematic aggression of workers’ organizations and democratic movements by fascist squads. Party headquarters, Labor Chambers, territorial branches of workers’ and cooperation organizations are the target of black paramilitary bodies (6.4.2, 6.4.3). Trade unions are also hard hit by the repressive wave financed by Confindustria and Confagricoltura: the number of CGdL members (6.4.4) and of Federterra drops dramatically.

It was in this context that, inspired by Matteotti who was already beginning to record and document with punctilious meticulousness the assaults and ravages of the black shirts, the Socialist Party leadership had a first, organic document of denunciation drafted and published. It is entitled Socialist Inquiry into the Deeds of the Fascists in Italy (6.4.5) and will be published in March in Milan, in the Avanti! editions. The text meticulously describes the wide range of violence perpetrated by fascist squadrism against socialist militants and institutions in the period between the spring of 1919 and June 1921 (6.4.6).

Since the end of February to lead the government, which is no longer able to control the situation, is Luigi Facta (6.4.7) who calls himself a “Giolittian with a faded personality”. His first government lasts a few months, his second even less: he will be overwhelmed by the March on Rome, which he is unable to stem.

For the reformist socialists led by Turati, the only road now viable to counter the squadrist threat is a grand coalition of democratic parties to put a check on the rising fascism, which is still in the minority in the country and in Parliament. Talk of “collaboration” began and, with the support of part of the Parliamentary Group, on July 28, 1922 Menè Modigliani (6.4.8) presents an agenda to call for a shared commitment to countering illegality and violence that continued to hit political and economic organizations with a subversive impact capable of overwhelming the state. Modigliani called for decisive action “in defense of freedom and the right to organize understood as an inescapable precondition of the civil future of Italy and its productive classes”. The following day, while consultations were underway for what would be the second Facta government, Filippo Turati gave an unequivocal signal that he had chosen the legalitarian path to the defense of institutions. Contrary to an established tradition among socialists, he ascends to the Quirinal (6.4.9), hoping for a decisive democratic breakthrough. He will be disappointed by his conversation with the king (6.4.10), but his choice marks a now irretrievable fracture between the two souls of his party, the reformist and the maximalist ones, who still trust in the revolutionary turn. A new split is now inevitable in what remains of the great socialist house.

If one evokes October 1922 immediately the memory goes to the March on Rome. But that decisive month in the history of Italy opens, right in the capital, in the House of the People on Via Capo d’Africa (photos 6.5.1), with another event of great political significance. In fact, from October 1 to 4, the 19th Congress of the Socialist Party was held, marking a new painful laceration: the reformist wing of Turati and Matteotti was expelled by Giacinto Menotti Serrati’s maximalist majority (6.5.2) who decided, with this act, to fulfill the conditions set by Moscow for membership in the Communist International. The rift is deep and concerns not only the choice between communism and socialism but also the strategy towards fascism. Turati’s reformists, in fact, are accused of “collaborationism”, that is, of being in favor of a policy of coalition-collaboration, precisely-with the popular and liberal democrats to create a common front against fascism; the maximalists consider such a solution a betrayal of the working class and an impediment to “doing as in Russia”. 21 years later, with the “Salerno turn” in March 1944, Togliatti espoused the thesis that had been Turati’s and Matteotti’s; but now the watchword is “socialists with socialists, communists with communists” (6.5.3, 6.5.4).

On the morning of October 4, the expelled reformists (6.5.5) gathered at the headquarters of the Proletarian University (also in the People’s House) and formed the United Socialist Party (PSU), a name intended to emphasize that it would include not only those belonging to the reformist fraction but all socialists who do not want to subject themselves to the “dictatorship of the so-called Moscow International”. The word FREEDOM and the rising sun stand out in the symbol of the new party (6.5.6). To the new formation (6.5.7) the old historical core of reformism – led by Turati, Kuliscioff, Treves and Modigliani – and 63 deputies out of 122 join; the secretariat is entrusted to the “young” Giacomo Matteotti (6.5.8), appreciated for his preparation combined with lucidity and tenacity in political action. Giacomo (6.5.9), already caught up in frantic organizational activity, accepts in a spirit of service, but days later confides in a letter to his wife Velia: “Meanwhile, to drown completely I have also accepted the secretary of the Party. But for a short time I hope”. Instead, he will be secretary until his death.

Events press on. On October 24, the Congress and grand gathering of the National Fascist Party is held in Naples (6.5.10): it is the dress rehearsal for the march on Rome (6.5.11, 6.5.12). On Oct. 28 – led by quadrumvirs Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi, Emilio De Bono and Cesare Maria De Vecchi – 25,000 black shirts reach Rome, which will become 300,000 in Mussolini’s famous inaugural speech in the Chamber. The king refuses to sign the state of siege of the capital-the army was already deployed (6.5.13) – proposed by the weak Facta government and on October 30, after hours of convulsive confidential negotiations between the Square and the crown, summoned Mussolini, who had arrived in the Capital by sleeping car to parade with the quadriumvirs (6.5.14), and gives him the mandate to form the government (6.5.15). On Nov. 16, the new head of government debuts in Parliament with a very harsh speech that has the flavor of an unexecuted, but barely postponed, threat looming darkly over the Chamber: “I could have made of this deaf and gray Chamber a bivouac of maniples….”. This is just the beginning of the authoritarian turn that would change Italy for a twenty-year period: many are beginning to speak of a “fascist regime”. Giacomo Matteotti, who has the long eye of the great politician, disagrees: that of Mussolini is for him, from the very beginning, a “dictatorship”.

On the strength of the public square and the support of the crown, Mussolini immediately demanded “full powers”, and Matteotti, as a reformist and a convinced parliamentarian, supported the first of the great battles that would oppose him to Mussolini, but in vain. On December 3, Parliament passes the law delegating “Full powers to the King’s Government for the reorganization of the tax system and public administration”. The Secretary of the PSU is the minority speaker and strenuously opposes the measure: he already knows that it will be the snake egg from which the decrees for the progressive fascistization of the State will be born.

Also in December, the PSU secretary delivers another harsh speech in the House against the fascists and calls them “gangs of criminals”. They shout at him to keep quiet. “Do not insult”, the quadriumvir De Vecchi intimates to him. “I thought that reminding professionals of their profession was not an insult”, retorts Matteotti, continually interrupted. The clash is now head-on.