Eighty years ago the first great story of M’s conquest of power

When in my early twenties I had become a subject of the Einaudi publishing house, the two authors of their editorial catalog that were decisive for my training were Antonio Gramsci and Guido Dorso from Avellino. The first acclimatised me with Italo-communism, the second with the aromas of the Gobettian matrix that had been his in the 1920s, at the time of the victorious advent of fascism. Later, Carlo Muscetta, another exceptional Avellino, would be my professor of Italian literature at the university. In the immediate post-war period, he had imported the books of Dorso into the Turin catalogue, who died early in 1947 at the age of only 52. And indeed three of Einaudi’s four books by Dorso, who was a lawyer by trade, are posthumous. His only published book during his lifetime was The Southern Revolution, published by Gobetti in 1925 (when Dorso was thirty years old), a trick of which the enthusiasts of that valiant publisher are well aware. Yes, I must have spoken to Muscetta several times about Dorso over the years of our friendship, until he told my mother that he no longer had any intention of meeting me and this after the publication in 1987 of my Farewell comrades.

Well, the first of the Einaudian books by Dorso edited by Muscetta was in 1949 (Dorso had been dead for two years) the Mussolini’s conquest of powera book that the Avellino lawyer had begun to prepare in 1938. When fascism had reached the maximum of its sovereignty over Italian society and even if the threshold of the ravine on which it would have fallen was not far away, dragging our country in one piece. A book that was still largely in progress when Dorso died. Only the background documentation he collected remained as well as a sort of narrative line that unified that documentation. I imagine that Angelo Tasca made use of that book in his Birth and advent of fascism of 1950, the capital text in igniting the historiographical work of Renzo De Felice, the first who didn’t limit himself to cursing Mussolini’s fascism and its horrors and instead tried to understand why he won and lasted having his very wide approval. In recent years, Dorso’s Mussolini has been re-edited over and over again. The edition that bears the brand of that other great lord of Italian publishing named Nino Aragno is from 2022.

How is it worth reading Dorso’s book if you want to know what was happening in Italian society and politics when a gang of troublemakers started that ramshackle “march on Rome” which allowed the thirty-eight-year-old Duce to mount on the evening of 29 October 1922 on a sleeping car that from the Milan station would take him to receive from the hands of the King the baton of political command, a command that later became absolute. Eighty years before the best-selling books by Aldo Cazzullo and Antonio Scurati, the Gobettian lawyer brings together very interesting judgments and facts. Starting with the analysis of the political madness of a socialist party that for years he had been threatening the bourgeoisie with breaking their bones and that in the right moment he will be overwhelmed as regards the use of violence by the squadristi, many of whom had ventured into the most daring enterprises of the First World War and many of whom were hooligans. And all the more so since Mussolini, director of the Popolo d’Italia, is extremely skilled in passing on the idea that the violence of the fascists is a “retaliation” of that exercised for a long time by the most barricading Italian left. A socialist party which, in January 1921, was dealt the coup de grace by the nucleus that moved away from the left (among them, Angelo Tasca who thirty years later would overthrow his positions of January 1921) because they wanted to do what they had made the Bolsheviks in Russia, the nucleus that will give life to the Communist Party of Italy.

From that moment on, the Socialist Party was no longer a political force to rely on, given that three or four options, the most contrasting to each other, would tear apart within it. Mussolini in July 1921 mocks the socialist Filippo Turati who went to the King to say he was ready to form an anti-fascist coalition government, and he does so by recalling that the Socialist Party had expelled from its ranks an official of the Chamber guilty of no less than having participated at the funeral procession of King Umberto I, assassinated in Monza by an anarchist on July 29, 1900. Jokes aside, between 1921 and 1922, it is as if the entire spectrum of traditional Italian politics were revealed to be impotent in the face of the rise of fascism. When not an accomplice. At the time of the savage attack on 4 August 1922 against the premises of the Milanese editorial office of Avanti! in via Settala, the royal guards who were supposed to protect the fifteen socialists who had barricaded themselves there retreat to the applause of the black shirts. It was the fifth fascist assault against the Milan office of the socialist newspaper, which at the time was selling 300,000 copies.

Who were the “bad guys” in that month of October 1922, there is no doubt. But where the hell were the “good guys”, the ones who were supposed to oppose the three fascist columns aiming at Rome? Could the army have been, had it received orders from the 52-year-old General Pietro Badoglio? Not even in the slightest idea, most of the senior army officers were on Mussolini’s side. In the late morning of October 30, the King gave him the political command. The squadristi hadn’t shed a single drop of blood. On November 2, 1922, Mussolini was sitting in his cabinet when the writer Paolo Orano came to interview him. “The government is here, I am,” the Duce told him.