Mussolini 1883-1915 by Spencer M. Di Scala & Emilio Gentile

Author:Spencer M. Di Scala & Emilio Gentile
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Mussolini: Socialist (Not Syndicalist) Interventionist

With the foundation of Mussolini’s new daily Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), he again found himself alongside the syndicalists. He was not only in the company of the theoreticians such as Sergio Panunzio and Agostino Lanzillo, to whom he had already given space in Avanti!, and above all in his own review Utopia, but also alongside the robust minority of the USI that immediately supported intervention (Corridoni, De Ambris, Edmondo Rossoni, Michele Bianchi and Ottavio Dinale). 84 What part did syndicalist ideas and attitudes play in Mussolini’s “conversion” to intervention and to his militancy before and until the radiose giornate, the “Radiant Days” of May that led to Italian intervention in World War I? Reference has often been made to the tòpos, to the characteristics, of revolutionary war, that is, that a war can become the opportunity to create a crisis within the state; this was a view which Panunzio had supported during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 as well as more recently, and, indeed, Panunzio played a certain role in Mussolini’s transition to interventionism. 85 However, on reading Mussolini’s articles during Il Popolo d’Italia’s first months of life, the above-mentioned tòpos is given little emphasis. Rather, there is support for French civilization against its German counterpart, of Latin against Germanic culture. 86 Furthermore, syndicalist theoreticians had already gone over the same ground during the war in Libya, and then too they, like Labriola, approved of the campaign in Tripolitania, as they argued that war overseas would modernize Italy and that from that war would come the revolution. 87 Of greater interest for Mussolini was the practical example given by De Ambris and Corridoni: both had been determined opponents of the Libyan War but were among the first in the revolutionary camp to side with intervention and mobilize through their foundation of the Fasci d’azione (Action Groups). However, even in this case, although Mussolini had opened the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia to their writings and supported their campaigns, he maintained a certain autonomy on the question of intervention.

The rhetoric of Mussolini the Interventionist differed little from that of Mussolini the Revolutionary, apart from the antimilitarism, which obviously disappeared. It was the same overlay of different traditions with a greater emphasis upon the Jacobin and Blanquist variant, the celebration of patriotic war and of “the people in arms,” as well as the “sacrifice” of Jaurès, who was assassinated because of his opposition to the war; this was the Jacobin myth of a revolutionary, patriotic and warlike France that was ever present in Mussolini’s newspaper after May 1915. 88 On the other hand, the France of syndicalism disappeared from Mussolini’s political horizon. If the French pacifist Gustave Hervé’s decision immediately to support the war had an effect on Mussolini, the majority of the CGT supported the war through necessity more than anything else. As Léon Jouhaux, the secretary of the union (which was still formally “revolutionary”), explained: it was not a war of revolution but

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