In 1923 Matteotti’s predictions and fears proved well-founded. Fascism consolidated its grip on the state, thanks in part to two decisive reforms: the school reform of Giovanni Gentile and the electoral reform known as the Acerbo law. At the beginning of the year Giacomo (photos 7.1.1) is grappling with the organization of the new party, the PSU, which must equip itself to counter the fascistization of the state (7.1.2, 7.1.3). The young secretary starts the membership campaign and devotes himself to organizing the new party structure, based in Rome – where the Matteotti family has finally found a home, at 40 Via Pisanelli, Flaminio (7.1.4) – without, however, slowing down his intense parliamentary activity (7.1.5, 7.1.6).

In the early months of the year, James is often around Europe: he is in Berlin (7.1.7, 7.1.8), Paris and London, where he makes contacts with European social democratic parties and speaks at conferences and conventions, in preparation for the establishment of the IOS, the Workers’ and Socialist International, which proposes itself as a democratic alternative to the Communist International. By now he lives a semi-clandestine life: in February his passport is withdrawn.

The theme of countering fascism and defending the garrisons of freedom, in Parliament, but especially in the countryside and in the factories, is at the heart of the political line Matteotti outlines in the Directives of the PSU (7.1.9) which are circulated early in the year. The Directives will also form the program for the now upcoming elections, to be held in the spring of the following year, and are presented at public meetings, made increasingly difficult by the regime’s vigilance and repression, in several cities in Italy. The program of the new party marks a further break with the maximalist tradition: for the construction of a new society, the reformists of the PSU focus on economic planning, infrastructure, modernization of the country, and the leverage of education. But, above all, they no longer turn only to the proletariat: building a solid embankment against the spread of dictatorship also requires the contribution of the productive middle classes and all democratic consciences.

The party’s newspaper is a historic paper, “La Giustizia”, which was transformed from a weekly into a daily, based in Milan. It is edited by Claudio Treves

It is thanks to the “full powers” that Education Minister Giovanni Gentile (7.1.10, 7.1.11) with the total support of Mussolini (7.1.12, 7.1.13), he drafted and had approved, starting in April, royal decrees that profoundly changed the structure and purpose of the national education system, decisively orienting the school and university world toward a new order: authoritarian, classist, centralist and confessional.

For Mussolini it is “the most fascist of reforms”, for Turati and Matteotti it is “the truncheon applied to the school”.

The one Gentile wanted was an elite school, made to train the ruling class of an authoritarian and reactionary country. In three years of implementation, consistent with the minister’s premise (7.1.14, 7.1.15), the school population drops by 30 percent, in elementary and high school; the university population drops by 18 percent. But Mussolini also appreciates the reform for another reason: the new school will be a powerful tool for fascist propaganda, essential for forging, starting with the Balilla and the little Italians, the fascists of tomorrow. “Believe, obey, fight” becomes the precept of the fascist “catechism” (7.1.16).

In May 1923, Velia and Giacomo – who were finally living together with their children in the Roman house – again split up: she (photos 7.2.1, 7.2.2) moves to Fratta Polesine, with the children, where she has to help her aging mother-in-law, who has been managing the family fortune alone for years. She soon writes to her husband, however, that she cannot last: “Mother thinks almost with certainty that we will spend the summer here; but if it is like these early days, I could not endure it”.

On July 2, in Siena for the Palio (7.2.3), along with his wife and brothers-in-law, Matteotti is attacked: recognized by a group of fascists, he is beaten up and forced to leave the city.

A few weeks later, the family gathered for their summer vacation in the mountains, on the Altopiano delle Rocche plateau in the heart of Abruzzo. A few photographs (7.2.4) return us to a 38-year-old Giacomo, serene together with the children in Roccaraso (7.2.5, 7.2.6). It will be his last summer.

That August, too, is marked by the long trail of blood shed by the fascists: on the 27th, in Argenta where he is parish priest, Fr. Giovanni Minzoni is brutally murdered (7.2.7) who had fought in defense of scouting and against squadrist violence.

But the most politically significant event of that tumultuous season occurred in the fall: on November 18, the electoral reform bearing the name of Giacomo Acerbo became state law (7.2.8, 7.2.9). The measure, enacted after bitter disagreements in the parliamentary chamber and between the political camps, maintains the proportional system but gives an extraordinary majority prize – equal to two-thirds of the parliamentarians – to the list that exceeds 25 percent of the vote. With the support of the old liberal ruling class and a now-splintered People’s Party, Parliament condemns itself to dissolution and delivers itself into the hands of Mussolini (7.2.10).

Luigi Sturzo (7.2.11), the priest who in 1919 had appealed “to all free and strong men” (7.2.12) and had founded the People’s Party, firmly expressed his opposition during the parliamentary debate. But despite having recently been elected secretary of the party at the Turin Congress (7.2.13), he is forced to resign before the law is passed. This is a severe blow to parliamentary democracy and is also a clear sign of where the Vatican’s political sympathies are heading. Aware of the authoritarian drift sweeping democratic institutions, Matteotti continues his battle in Parliament and in the press. In November, “Critica Sociale” hosts a well-documented article of his – The Italian Deficit Series (7.2.14) – in which he demolishes the financial policies of the Mussolini government. It is an anticipation of the firm denunciation he will make, months later, of the alleged balanced budget boasted, especially abroad, by the Duce. Thanks to his solid expertise in budgets, Matteotti, with the force of numbers and the rigor of figures, dismantles Mussolini’s and Minister de’ Stefani’s “giro accounts” (7.2.15).

New election law made, Mussolini presses for elections as soon as possible. The vote is set for April 6, 1924. The United Socialist Party, spurred on by Matteotti, closes ranks and prepares for the election. The new membership campaign gets under way (photos 7.3.1, 7.3.2) and, above all, efforts are made to spread and publicize the party’s program, contained in the Directives published the previous year.

In January, the secretary rejected a proposal by Palmiro Togliatti who, on behalf of the Communist Party of Italy, proposed an agreement to create “a united front of proletarian opposition to fascism” on the condition that the “return to statutory freedoms” be excluded as a political objective For Matteotti, the proposal was inadmissible and accused the Communists of having “divided and weakened the Italian proletariat at times of the most serious oppression and danger”.

In a climate of growing difficulties due to police repression and rampant fascist violence, a troubled campaign begins. After the PSU was denied several squares, it finally manages to set the first date on January 20 in Turin, at the Scribe Theater (7.3.3). Here Turati expounds the party line; Secretary Matteotti then speaks, presenting his line of radical and uncompromising opposition to fascism as a premise for the moral and political redemption of the country. His speech is greatly appreciated by two young men who, although they did not join the PSU, came to listen: their names are Piero Gobetti (7.3.4) and Carlo Rosselli (7.3.5). They cannot know that their fates will intersect with that of Matteotti and Italy.

In February, Matteotti published, edited by the United Socialist Party, the first edition of the dossier A Year of Fascist Domination, printed in Rome (7.3.6).

It is the first – and will remain for decades the only one – detailed, analytical and well-documented exposition of the crimes of fascism: a lucid indictment that nails Mussolini’s regime to its responsibilities and denounces it before the public opinion of Italy and the world. The repressive apparatus is immediately unleashed. Matteotti delivers a copy, having it registered, to the Library of the Chamber, but the copy disappears and the publication is nowhere to be found. The text punctiliously describes all the Fascist government’s economic and financial failures and non-promises. In addition, Matteotti lists, one by one, with dates, places and names the violence perpetrated by fascist squads in Italy since the end of 1922.

The text is preceded by a lapidary sentence:

“The fascist government justifies the armed seizure of political power, the use of violence and the risk of civil war, with the urgent need to restore the authority of law and state, and to restore the economy and finance by saving them from extreme ruin.

Instead, the numbers, facts and documents collected in these pages show that never so much as in the fascist year has arbitrariness replaced law, the state enslaved to faction, and divided the nation into two orders, rulers and subjects”.

And so he concludes:

“…to fascist domination only one thing is certainly due: that the profits of the speculation of capitalism have increased by so much, than the wages and the smallest resources of the working class and the intermediate classes have decreased, that they have lost together all freedom and all dignity as citizens”.

One Year will be reprinted in June, after the assassination, in 2,500 copies, at a cost of 4 lire, all of which will sell out. A concise anticipation of the indictment is in the article entitled After a Year of Fascist Domination, which Matteotti entrusts to the columns of “Critica Sociale” in January (7.3.7, 7.3.8).

The election campaign continues in a climate of rampant violence. Fascist squads carry out systematic intimidation and assault. Numerous candidates are attacked and beaten. Antonio Piccinini (7.3.9) will be assassinated, in his Reggio Emilia, on February 28 and his corpse displayed as a warning to anti-fascists. The PSU will make arrangements for him to be equally voted in: it is the only case in Italy of a deceased person elected to Parliament (7.3.10).

In March Matteotti is in Sicily for campaigning. On the 23rd, while dining at a restaurant in Cefalù (7.3.11) with some comrades, a squad of fascists attacks him, intimidating him to leave. Carabinieri arrive, who advise Matteotti to leave through the back door. He refuses: “I don’t go out the secondary doors, I go out the main doors”. On his way to the station the fascists follow him and a “comrade”, Giuseppe Miceli, snatches his hat, which for years will be kept as an heirloom by a local fascist family.

Yet not everyone, even in the party, is ready to commit: as Giacomo writes to his wife Velia, “it is time for petty cowardice”. The PSU secretary is among the few who understand that the clash with Mussolini that will take place with the vote will be decisive for the fate of the party, of democracy, of the country. At the end of March he writes to Turati:

“First of all, it is necessary to take, with respect to the Fascist Dictatorship, a different attitude from the one we have held so far. Our resistance to the regime of arbitrariness must be more active; not yielding on any point: not abandoning any position without the strongest, the highest protests”. The election campaign is fiery, radicalized for or against Mussolini and fascism (7.3.12, 7.3.13, 7.3.14). At last, on April 6, we will vote (7.3.15, 7.3.16). Giacomo Matteotti was re-elected as deputy on the list of the United Socialist Party, which, despite having been founded for little more than a year, obtained 5.9 percent of the vote and 24 deputies, surpassing the Psi, (5 percent), and the Communists, (3.7 percent). Only the People’s Party, among the non-fascists, did better, getting 9 percent. But Lista Nazionale – Mussolini’s “big list” – garnered 4,653,488 votes, or 64.9 percent (7.3.17, 7.3.18). An overwhelming fascist majority takes office in the new parliament (7.3.19).

Taking note of the outcome of the vote, Matteotti is ready to give battle both nationally and internationally. He is clear that the regime’s propaganda abroad is particularly effective and is imposing the image of an Italy pacified thanks to the Mussolini regime. He therefore decides to undertake a trip to major European capitals to illustrate to socialists and the general public the tragic reality in which the country finds itself. He also intends to produce English, French and German language editions of A Year of Fascist Domination to document the true face of the dictatorship. He will have to expatriate clandestinely because he is still without a passport.

First, however, he indulges in a short trip that testifies both to James’ love of culture, and theater in particular, and the spirit of challenge that always animates him. Eleonora Duse (photos 7.4.1), considered the greatest actress of her time, had passed away on April 21 in Pittsburgh, while on tour in the US. The solemn funeral was held, in Italy, in Asolo, and the ceremony became a regimental kermis; James, however, attended, confused in the crowd (7.4.2), to pay the ultimate tribute to the great actress, and on his return he finds a ride in a fascist truck, posing as an actor.

In late April he is in London, where he has contact with J. Ramsay McDonald’s Labour (7.4.3), then in government. The English translation of A Year of Fascist Domination will be published, shortly after the assassination, in Independent Labour Party editions under the title The Fascists Exposed. A Year of Fascist Domination. (7.4.4, 7.4.5). In the introduction Oskar Pollak, after succinctly introducing the author, recounts his meeting with Matteotti the previous April:

We asked him why he intended to take such a big risk [returning to Italy] and he simply replied, “Our people need encouragement. They will understand that we are not obliged to endure everything in silence […] The worst thing, unbearable even for the strongest among us, is that for two years now, you have been leaving home in the morning not knowing whether you will return in the evening…”. He said this very calmly. And then he went back to Italy and died.

A French version is also published after Matteotti’s assassination under the title Une année de domination fasciste (7.4.6, 7.4.7) edited in Brussels by the publishing house L’Églantine. Matteotti’s text then reaches the German world through an essay by journalist and writer Hanns-Erich Kaminski, Fascismus in Italien, Grundlagen, Aufstieg, Niedergang (Fascism in Italy: foundations, ascension, decline) published in Berlin in 1925. An extensive summary of Matteotti’s work is included in the appendix, with the title: Ein Jahr Fascisten-Herrschaft (7.4.8, 7.4.9).

Back in Italy Matteotti signed, on May 25, his last article in “La Giustizia” and wrote: “I have always seen a substantial identity among all socialists and a clear antithesis only with communism”.

On May 24 – a strongly evocative date – of 1924, the XXVII legislature had been inaugurated in the House, in the presence of the king (7.4.10). In the chamber of Montecitorio were present, with Mussolini, 374 Fascist deputies. The following May 30 (7.4.11) the first session is held, chaired by Alfredo Rocco (7.4.12), and the chamber is called, surprisingly and against parliamentary practice, to validate en bloc the election of Fascist candidates.

Oppositions are displaced. Filippo Turati invites Matteotti (7.4.13) to ask to speak: he picks up his few papers and intervenes at arm’s length. He disputes the validity of the elections, says they were held under the threat “of an armed militia” in the service of the head of government. Crashes, interruptions, insults start. Fascist deputies descend from the hemicycle, President Rocco makes them clear out. “We’re going to end up doing in earnest what we didn’t do”, intimates Roberto Farinacci (7.4.14) to Matteotti. “You would do your job”, he replies. Rocco tries several times to take the floor from him, then invites him to speak yes, “but prudently”. Matteotti replies dryly, “I don’t want to speak either prudently or imprudently, but parliamentarily”, and continues his denunciation of the fraud and the climate of violence and intimidation in which the election campaign took place by enumerating, as is his style, data, facts and circumstances. The PSU secretary is particularly documented: he has asked comrades to send him detailed accounts and is preparing an update of his book-dossier A Year of Fascist Domination.

After numerous interruptions and threats, he managed to conclude after more than an hour – without interruptions the speech would have lasted 20 minutes – with a vibrant appeal: “You declare every day that you want to re-establish the authority of the state and the law. Do it, if you are still in time; otherwise you do, truly, ruin what is the intimate essence, the moral reason of the Nation. If, on the other hand, freedom is given, there may be errors, momentary excesses, but the Italian people, like any other, has shown that it knows how to correct them by itself. We deplore, on the other hand, that it is intended to show that only our people in the world cannot stand up for themselves and must be governed by force. But our people were rising up and educating themselves, even with our work. You want to drive us back”.

To my colleague Giovanni Cosattini (7.4.15) who congratulated him on the effectiveness of the speech bitterly replied, “Now prepare my memorial service” (7.4.16).

Throughout the speech Mussolini gives obvious signs of impatience, seeming to murmur to his people that he must be freed from Matteotti. In his memoir, press bureau chief Cesarino Rossi reports that the Duce demands that he no longer go around. A few days earlier, after all, from the columns of “Il Popolo d’Italia” Mussolini had written that Matteotti would be found “with his head broken (but really broken)”.

Another clash, this time a direct one, took place in Parliament the following June 4 when Matteotti harshly rebuked Mussolini for the contradictory position taken by the government on amnesty for deserters. In those hours the goons of the fascist Cheka led by Amerigo Dumini (7.4.17) are already in Rome, at the Hotel Dragoni, ready to strike. Meanwhile, the PSU secretary continues to frontally attack Mussolini and his government in the English and Italian press. The dictatorship, with its corollary of violence, malfeasance and corruption are documented in the articles that come out in those days in “The Statist”, “Echi e Commenti”, and in “English Life” the following July 6.

In June Matteotti applies for a passport and this time, surprisingly, he is given one. He needs it to go to Austria, to the Second International, but he gives it up at the last moment; in fact, he does not want to miss the parliamentary debate on the provisional budget exercise, for which he has long prepared his speech, set for June 11.

Until the very end Matteotti stubbornly and rigorously committed himself to the work of punctiliously documenting Mussolini’s crimes. On the evening of the eve of the assassination, Turati and Anna Kuliscioff are in Rome and invite him to dinner, but Giacomo politely declines, explaining that he is busily working on the long-awaited speech he is scheduled to give in Parliament on June 11 and on A Year and a Half of Fascist Domination (7.4.18), an update in his book-denunciation. He is fully aware that the political stakes at stake in those hours were enormous: they had cost many lives and demanded perhaps one more, his own. In the short biography that his friend and collaborator Aldo Parini would write immediately after the crime, Matteotti’s lucid words to Raffaele Rossetti are quoted (7.4.19):

“Italians have too many times been deceived by the leaders in whom they had placed their trust; today they are willing to believe only those who show them their blood”. On the afternoon of June 10, 1924, in Rome, at the hands of the Fascists, a life was broken and a season closed. Those that followed, the long years of dictatorship and then of war and Resistance, made Matteotti-as Carlo Rosselli would write in the memoir entitled Eroe tutto prosa- “the symbol of anti-fascism and anti-fascist heroism”. A few days, as dismay and outrage over Matteotti’s passing grew in Italy and abroad, “Critica Sociale” dedicated its cover to the Martyr (7.4.20).