Contemporary Issues in Historical Perspective Italian Fascism: Whatever Happened to Dictatorship?

*
Paul Corner
University of Siena

Renzo De Felices contention that fascism was, by the early 1930s, very much a regime based on the mass consensus of the Italians was widely contested at its publication, but it seems subsequently to have acquired a surprising degree of acceptance.1 This reception is surprising in the sense that, while a majority of German historians reacted violently to the thesis of Daniel Goldhagens Hitlers Willing Executioners (New York, 1997) and many still spend a great deal of their time trying to establish and document areas of dissent in what is admitted to have been an overwhelming consensus for Hitlerthat is, to put it bluntly, to rescue something honorable about Germans and about Germany from the horrors of Nazismin Italy the idea that there was a consensus for fascism seems to be welcomed almost with a sigh of relief. It is as though, if we were all agreed about fascism, then it must not have been so bad after all; history must have treated the fascist dictatorship too harshly. Without too much effort we are back to the wellworn cliche s of il fascismo bonario (kind-hearted fascism) and la dittatura allacqua di rosa (rosewater dictatorship), and collective guilt (if it was ever felt) turns into collective absolution. Far from being a past that does not pass, we have a past that presents no problems, reecting a complacency in respect to the fascist experience generated by a kind of complicity. By the same token, it has been noticeable for some time that there is more than a slight stigma attached to antifascism, particularly middle-class and intellectual antifascism: heroic no doubt on occasions, but essentially a deviation from the norm, and above all unbearable in its claim to sole possession of the historical moral high groundin reality nothing more than the vulgate of the winners. Some may argue that this is an understandable reaction to an excessive postwar emphasis on the antifascist resistance
* I would like to thank the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, for hospitality while writing a part of this in spring 2000. Claudio Pavone and Enzo Collotti were kind enough to offer me comments on an early draft. The title is a not-unintentional echo of Tim Masons Whatever Happened to Fascism? (see T. Mason, Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, ed. J. Kaplan [Cambridge, 1995], p. 323). 1 R. De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, 192936 (Turin, 1974). A recent example of the degree of acceptance of the consensus thesis was provided by Adriano Sofri, formerly the leader of the extraparliamentary Lotta continua and certainly no stranger to political discussion. Sofri writes, Even the argument about popular consensus for fascism is over, after having been [for long] a subject of scandal. There was a consensus. Amen (La Repubblica [Dec. 17, 2000]).
[The Journal of Modern History 74 (June 2002): 325351] 2002 by The University of Chicago. 0022-2801/2002/7402-0004$10.00 All rights reserved.

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as the moral basis of the republic, and consequently to an excessive demonization of fascism, yet the ease and the rapidity with which the theory of mass consensus has moved from the level of historical debate to that of the new common sense invites suspicion. Why is it that so many Italians seem happy to acceptindeed, seem determined to insistthat their parents and their grandparents were (to adapt a phrase) Mussolinis willing accomplices? In part, of course, the answer lies in a popular and supercial view of Italian fascism as essentially innocuous. This view rests to some extent on what might synthetically be termed the Mussolini buffoon concept, but it depends principally and more seriously on the often-expressed idea that Mussolinis only great mistake was his involvement with Nazi Germany, with consequent entanglement in the Second World War. A corollary of this is that Italian fascism really had few of the attributes of its northern ally and should not be considered on the same terms. Fascism was not Nazism; this is the persistent chant of those who wish to dismiss as derogatory the generic category of nazifascismo. Willing accomplices, it is said, are very different from willing executioners. After all, we are told, Italian fascism was not responsible for the Holocaust; even if Italy had its racial laws, they were not serious, and many Italian Jews escaped deportation because other Italians helped them.2 Thus, insistence on the ways in which fascism differed from Nazism (undoubtedly legitimate in many, but certainly not in all ways) serves to put Italian fascism in a more favorable light. Indeed, the more it is possible to differentiate it from the atrocities of Nazism, the more fascism can be made to appear essentially harmless. Mass consensus for fascism is not so difcult to understand, therefore; above all, it is not so reprehensible. In a way, it is the very existence of Nazism that eases Italian consciences and gets fascism off the hook. This position, evidently self-justicatory and self-exculpatory, has always existed in respect to fascism. But it has had a new impetus given to it recently as a result of the current political situation within Italy, which has seen historical argument turned into acrimonious political debate, much on the lines of the German Historikerstreit. The very evident desire of the new right (in part neofascist, if now formally postfascist) to attack the legitimacy of the rst republic has provoked not only forays against alleged communist permeation of Christian Democratic government (consocietivismo) but also attacks on the antifascist roots of the republic. And one of the best ways of attacking the antifascist tradition has been through the use of the concept of mass consensus for fascism. Within a more general process of psychological removal with respect to recent history, of an attempt to keep the skeletons permanently in the cupboard, the fascist phase is
2 This is a typical illustration of selective memory. It ignores, for example, the fact that many Italian Jews died in the German camps because fascist ofcials gave the registers of Jewish names to the Nazis, fully knowing what the consequences would be; see E. Collotti, ed., Razza e fascismo: La persecuzione contro gli ebrei in Toscana (19381943) (Rome, 1999), 1:28; also, by the same author, Il razzismo negato, in Fascismo e antifascismo: Rimozioni, revisioni, negazioni, ed. E. Collotti (Rome-Bari, 2000), pp. 35575. In much the same way, Italian atrocities committed in Africa during the 1930s have been almost totally removed from popular consciousness.

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presented as a normal moment of national development, a moment in which Italians concurred with their rulers and that does not justify the vilication accorded it by history. The normalization of fascisma historical revision in a direction favorable to fascism, that isinevitably appears to undermine the authority of the antifascist position. The same result has been achieved by recent attempts to arrive at some kind of national pacication after the bitter ideological struggles of the postwar era. This has frequently involved a welcome attempt to understand the motivations of all contending partiesfascists and antifascists, partisan resistance ghters, and those who supported the fascist puppet state (the Repubblica sociale italiana or Repubblica di Salo ` ). But the effect has been to suggest that, since everyone had their motives, since even some fascists acted in good faith, all points of view are therefore acceptable and should be considered on the same level. At this point there occurs what has been termed a kind of dulling of conscience and of historical memory;3 understanding becomes forgiveness which becomes acceptance and justication, after which all historical condemnation of fascism is declared to be ideologically based and is to be rejected. This has produced a view of the past that is strangely devoid of values; necessary distinctions become blurred and then cease to exist. It seems that, as time passes and it becomes easier to forget the torments of war and the responsibility of fascism for that war, it has also become easier to propose the idea that it was the antifascists, and not the fascists, who were fundamentally out of step with their times. Assessments of fascism based on current political battles (and De Felice, who died in 1996, is clearly at the mercy of his own supporters in this respect) should not be allowed to deect from the complexity of the problem, however. Was there a mass consensus for fascism? And if so, what was the nature and the extent of that consensus? Revisionism, with its tendency toward an at least partial rehabilitation of fascism, emphasizes the elements of compromise, collaboration, and consent at the cost of other, less palatable aspects of the regime. Sometimes it even seems legitimate to ask the question, Whatever happened to dictatorship? And even when the repressive aspects of dictatorship are acknowledged, they are minimized and pushed rmly into the background. It seems that loss of political liberties for more than twenty years was really a relatively unimportant feature of life, which, when all was said and done, went on much the same despite this loss. The intention of this article is twofold. The rst is to suggest that, in the current rush to assert mass consensus for Italian fascism, the aspect of repression has been grossly neglected. The second is to insist that, in any attempt to evaluate popular attitudes toward fascism, it is necessary to take into account many other aspects of fascism besides direct repressionaspects that are not directly repressive but that nonetheless constitute instruments of a fairly rigid social control. We are not so much concerned, therefore, with the direct question of whether there was con-

3 C. Pavone, The Two Levels of the Public Use of History or, Rather, of the Past, Mediterranean Historical Review, 2002 (forthcoming).

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sensus or not, but more with the conditions in which attitudes toward the regime were formed and choices made. Indeed, in the light of the factors examined here, I will suggest that it may be necessary to revise fairly drastically the meaning usually given to the term consensus. This does not imply any intention of underestimating the political novelty represented by fascism and its great mobilizing capacities, or of attempting a return to the picture painted by many e migre antifascists in the late 1920s and early 1930s of an Italian people constantly straining at the leash in order to be rid of the regime. The relationship between oppressors and oppressed is obviously far more complex than such a picture would suggest. In his biography of Mussolini, De Felices approach to the question of consensus is, in fact, moderate and cautious: we believe thatwhen everything is consideredit is correct to say that the ve years from 29 to 34 were for the fascist regime and . . . for Mussolini as well, the period of greatest consensus and greatest solidity.4 While asserting that the high point in the popularity of fascism came briey with the proclamation of Empire in 1936, De Felice sees the years preceding this moment as being those of stability and relative calm, with a population that was, all in all, ready to accept fascism and to go along with the regime. This judgmentwhich, it must be stressed, is far more tentative and qualied than is often supposedis based on a fairly comprehensive examination of popular opinion as shown through reports from various (mainly ofcial or party) sources and from a survey of the economic situation, again conducted largely through ofcial publications. The picture presented could be criticized as being slightly haphazard in its approach and somewhat selective, particularly in its choice of sources, but there is undoubtedly ample evidence to justify the authors conclusionswithin his own terms of reference.5 This is an important qualication because it is precisely here that De Felices approach needs to be questioned. His view is curiously one-dimensional. Put very simply, he looks for open protest against fascism, nds very little, nds instead many ready to give vocal and material support to the regime, and thus concludes that there was a consensus for the regime. In some ways, he undoubtedly has a point. The history of Italy prior to World War I is marked by frequent, spontaneous, often bloody popular protest against authority. This kind of protest does die out after the biennio rosso (the red years of 1919 and 1920, which saw the high point of revolutionary socialism), at least if we are to believe the reports of the prefects; the army massacres of protesting peasants do become a thing of the past. This may have more to do with changes in societychanges that had made the necessity for organization of protest obvious (and here both the experience of the war and of Italian socialism would have had an effect)than with lack of discontent. More probably, as we shall see, it reects the consequences of fascist victory, which ensured that there was no po4 De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, p. 55. It has to be said that, in subsequent years, De Felices statements on the subject become more extreme under pressure of attack from his critics. 5 Possibly the biggest lacuna is the absence of any serious treatment of popular opinion in rural areas, given that during the fascist period more than 50 percent of the population was still employed in agriculture.

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litical space for protest and that hostility to the regime could never get a foothold and emerge as open rebellion.6 Certainly it has to be recognized that, in post-1925 Italy, there were many pressing reasons for not voicing protest. The defeat of the working class and the peasants at the hands of the fascist squads had been heavy and humiliating; there had been little that was glorious in the collapse of socialism. People were left to reect on political obtuseness and lack of vision, and on deep divisions that had become even deeper with defeat. The Popular Front mentality, which might have done something to heal these divisions, established itself only with great difculty in Italy and was never really able to heal the splits on the left provoked by analyses based on ideas of social fascism. There was, in fact, very little to inspire an active continuation of the struggle. And, where protest is punishable and apprehension is virtually assured, people are inclined to keep quiet. Mussolini himself made no bones about this. Echoing Machiavelli, he warned, I declare that I want to govern, if possible, with the consent of the greatest number of citizens possible; but, while waiting for the formation of this consensus, for its growth and its strengthening, I am taking to myself the maximum of available force. Because it may turn out that, by chance, force will create consensusand in any case, should consensus be lacking, there is always force.7 Mussolinis statement inevitably prompts the question, Can lack of protest in these circumstances be taken as a sign of consensus for the regime? In fact, the methodological problems of measuring consensus under dictatorship are very great. What does lack of protest mean? In a sense, the more efcient a totalitarian dictatorship, the more it will appear to have the consent of the population. Following the line proposed by James Scott, the unearthing of hidden transcripts of dissent (by which he means, more or less, indirect evidence of opposition) would, of course, be a great help.8 As with Nazi Germany, efforts have been made in this direction, but the results remain inconclusive, and it may be legitimate to doubt the extent to which totalitarian regimes do throw up such transcripts. Even so, Scotts suggestion warns us against too ready an acceptance of the public transcript of events and attitudes as the only truth. This is of particular relevance when dealing with a regime such as fascism, which combines the exercise of authority with the search for adulation and acceptance. Public expressions of support were precisely what fascism wanted, and it is hardly surprising that there were those ready to provide them: the benets of doing so were obvious. And, as far as fascist claims to enjoy popular consensus are concerned, a regime that requires unanimity of support will generally claim that it has that unanimity; it is part of the game to assert as reality what may in fact be wishful thinking. The public transcriptin this case the fascist transcripthas to be treated with

6 The concept of the lack of political space for opposition is developed in T. Mason, The Containment of the Working Class in Nazi Germany, in the collection of his essays entitled Nazism, Fascism and the Working Class, ed. J. Kaplan (Cambridge, 1995). 7 B. Mussolini, March 7, 1923, quoted in E. D. Susmel, ed., Opera omnia di Benito Mussolini, 35 vols. (Florence, 195163), 19:163. 8 The reference is to J. C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, Conn., 1990).

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great caution, therefore. And it is as well to be aware of what is public. For example, the provincial reports from prefects to the Ministry of the Interior (documents on which De Felice, like many other historians, bases many of his judgments) are internal and condential documents, but they are also very much public transcripts in the sense that they are written for a small but very inuential audience (Mussolini was his own Interior Minister, as many prefects learned to their cost). Prefects in fascist Italy, like prefects anywhere, tended to try to show diligence by listing the number of operations against subversives, criminals, or whatever, while at the same time playing down difculties in order to show that their provinces were under complete control. Thus popular demonstrations, where they are admitted, are always presented as being exclusively economic in origin and never as containing political content. The same can be said of many other documents produced by fascist ofcialsparty chiefs, union leaders, and so on. The knowledge that total consensus was the required end could easily induce people in authority to minimize problems, give a favorable gloss to their own activities, and even perhaps on occasions to report a consensus that was not really present. Absence of well-recorded, serious popular protest against fascism is, therefore, a dubious indicator of consensus, just as repeated assertions that everyone is behind the duce are not necessarily to be taken at face value. But it is fairly obvious that, as long as we remain at this level of consideration, we are moving in the realm of the undemonstrable. There is the risk of encountering what Scott calls the political equivalent of the Heisenberg principlethat is, the difculty of demonstrating that what is not present (i.e., protest) would have been present had it not been for those factors that prevented it from making itself evident.9 In light of this, it is perhaps more instructive to ask a slightly more complex question: not only, Why no, or so little, obvious protest? but also, What happens to those who do step out of line under fascism?and, closely linked, What do people think will happen to them if they dont obey the rules? The answers to these subsequent questions may help us give an answer to the rst.

THE ROLE OF DIRECT REPRESSION

Under totalitarian regimes, peoples fears are obviously related to the question of repression, sometimes to that of terror. Few would seriously put in doubt that, in Nazi Germany, the prospect of what might happen to you if you did overstep the limit was sufcient to discourage most forms of open opposition. The list of possible fates was fairly longfrom beatings to unemployment, from prison to the camps to straightforward execution. And you might simply disappear, as many did. Terror was a huge force in discouraging unauthorized activities, and even wayward thoughts, and it is not hard to credit stories of people becoming literally paralyzed with fear when they found themselves confronted unexpectedly by the Gestapo. The most potent weapon of all was, perhaps, the uncertainty of ones
9

Ibid., p. 72.

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fate. Terror was linked not only to fear of very real reprisals but also to the world of rumored nemeses, in which the victims own imagination was brought powerfully and terrifyingly into play.10 According to most accounts, this kind of terror was less obvious in fascist Italy. After the rst fascist onslaught between 1921 and 1922, where the violence of squadrismo did very clearly constitute a kind of terror, the explicit use of violence became less common, even if it was always present as a threat. One of the legacies of agrarian fascism to the fascist movement in general was, in fact, the resolution of contentions through the use of force or the threat of the use of force. Throughout the ventennio the twenty years of the regimethe politics of fascism were always the politics of the bully; the Blackshirts never left anyone in doubt that violence against opponents was an acceptable method of action, a constituent part of fascist style, something frequently and proudly described as exquisitely fascist. The attempts of central government after the March on Rome to stamp out what had become the technically illegal violence of its own hotheads were never totally successful, as a succession of unauthorized political murders made clear.11 As we shall see, Mussolini preferred, where possible, to use the police to control dissent, but the threat of a return to the violence of the squads, like the menace of the return of socialism, was utilized when required.12 That said, the current popular impression is that Italian fascism was a fairly tolerant regime in which it was possible to be relatively independent, providing a certain lip service was paid to the fascist authorities. Reference is often made to (in reality, limited) cultural and intellectual freedoms and to the jokes about fascism and about Mussolini that were in common circulationjokes that are said to demonstrate not only a healthy cynicism about the regime but also a certain laxity in permitted behavior. Equally, historians have drawn attention to the persistent mugugno the generalized moan about thingswhich was a commonplace of everyday life, apparently registered by the authorities but usually allowed to pass without any serious repressive action. Indeed, it is said that a certain irreverence toward fascism was seen by the authorities as something of a safety valve, useful in releasing tensions and controlling discontent. The emphasis placed on what might be termed fascist tolerance should not be allowed to mislead us about the extent of real repression, however. It is instructive that, in a recent study of Nazi terror, the same point is made about Nazi tolerance of jokes and minor complaints directed at the regime. Eric Johnson writes: Most ordinary Germans knew that they could get away with telling political jokes, complaining about Hitler and other Nazi leaders, listening to illegal
10 See, in particular, R. Gellately, The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 19331945 (Oxford, 1990). 11 Private lists of proscription containing the names of opponents seem to have existed in some areas, clearly an effective instrument of terror; see A. Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy, 19191929 (London, 1973), p. 296. 12 See A. Lyttelton, Fascism in Italy: The Second Wave, Journal of Contemporary History 1 (1966): 75100.

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BBC broadcasts, and dancing to swing music. They simply had to be careful.13 Johnson provides very detailed accounts of the ways in which Germans broke the rules and documents the fact that, even when the authorities moved to suppress minor illegal activities, people usually escaped with a few nights in prison and a warning. Often the authorities simply could not be bothered to pursue matters. Yet thousands did die in the camps, even before the war. The point to be made is that a relative laxity in the face of small acts of resistance to authorityacts that in no way endanger the structure of a regimedoes not preclude a savage repression in other areas. In fact, in Germany, most Germans might not fear that the Gestapo would murder them for telling jokes about Hitler; but, as Johnson shows very well, Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and communists had every reason to fear a horrifying end for very much less. Terror, which might sometimes appear arbitrary and indiscriminate, was in fact highly selective, as the targeted groups learned to their cost. A tolerance of innocuous antiregime activities committed by the majority is not by itself, therefore, a sufcient reason for assuming that repression is not an important factor in maintaining control; Germans knew they had to be careful and not overstep the limits. If this conclusion is applied to the Italian case, it suggests that the often cited laxity of the regime (the regime bonario) could well accompany a considerable level of direct repression within Italy. It reminds us that the absence of an Italian Auschwitz (although there were around fty internment camps for Jews and other political prisoners in Italy by the end of 194014) should not lead us automatically to assume that there was not harsh repression under fascism. Yet this is precisely what has happened. Emphasis on consensus seems to have distracted attention from the role of repression. While no one denies the existence of some repression, for many it has become a secondary issue, unimportant and to be set aside with the technique of the purtuttavia (yes, but . . .). But a very considerable repressive mechanism was constructed by fascism. Mussolini himself boasted in his famous Ascension Day speech of 1927 that fascism had greatly increased police numbers, and this was reected in an undoubted rise in the level of police control. Criminal statistics would also seem to bear this out (while also testifying to economic hardship).15 In a society of uniforms, the police were always present, in one guise or another. Many arrests sprang from relatively minor public order offensesdrunkenness in particularin which individual dissatisfaction with everyday conditions of life boiled over into political protest. Examples of people being arrested for shouting down with the duce or long live socialism
13 E. A. Johnson, The Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York, 1999), p. 485. 14 Collotti, ed., Razza e fascismo, 1:28. 15 Criminal statistics indicate a sharp increase (from 7,594 to 16,099) in the number of those convicted for economic crimes (swindles, worthless checks, etc.) between 1926 and 1930 (when statistics are interrupted) and a consistent increase in public order offenses (from 16,855 to 19,912) for the same period. In 1927 the prison population shot up to 50,473 from a more usual 39,000 40,000; see Istituto centrale di statistica (ISTAT), Sommario di statistiche storiche italiane, 1861 1955 (Rome, 1958), pp. 97, 101.

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when leaving the osteria late at night are not difcult to nd.16 This seems to have been protest that does indeed constitute in some way a hidden transcriptthe expression of rage and frustration when the bonds of rational control have been loosened. In most cases, it appears, arrests for such offenses, particularly for what was known as denigration of fascism, would result in a night in the cells and a note in the police les. Second offenders might be dealt with more harshly.17 A much heavier hand was used against more serious opposition activity, however. Rather surprisingly, in the context of a chapter dedicated to demonstrating the existence of a consensus for fascism, De Felice quotes (albeit in the footnotes) a gure of some 20,000 police operations against opponents of the regime in an average week in late 1930resulting in arrests, the seizure of arms and opposition pamphlets, and the closure of meeting places.18 This suggests a consensus for fascism that was at best somewhat strained. Twenty thousand interventions per week is certainly not a small number; it mounts up to well over a million in the course of a year. Moreover, it demonstrates a very high degree of sensitivity toward any form of oppositionsomething which had, in fact, been one of the dening characteristics of fascism from the outset. To this number it is necessary to add operations by the other repressive forces, represented in every locality by the fascist militia (the MVSN) and the carabinieri. The recent publication of a massively documented history of the OVRA, the fascist secret police, conrms this vision of extreme sensitivity to opposition.19 Formed ofcially in 1927 (and based, like so much of fascist repressive legislation, on the exceptional legislation of the First World War), the OVRA (which took this name only in 193020) developed a vast and widely diffused network of agents both in Italy and abroad and proved very successful at inltrating antifascist groups and
De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, p. 82. The principal characteristic of punishment seems to have been that it was totally erratic, although things were likely to go badly if Mussolini were brought into question personally. Thus one man was simply given a warning for declaring that the Italians are already a mass of pigs and thieves, a discredit to the nation. And now they want to go to civilize the colonies when we need civilizing ourselves; while another was given ve years in prison (through the direct intervention of Mussolini) for stating that if Matteotti had been in the place of Mussolini . . . things might have gone better. A similar case was that of the poor gardener and pig-keeper who, in order to express his irreducible sentiments of aversion to Italy and to the Personalities of State, had named his four pigs Victor Emmanuel, Crown Prince, Mussolini, and Prefect, names which he shouted out loud in German when he needed to clean the pigsty. He got ve years, again as a consequence of the personal intervention of Mussolini. See P. L. Orsi, Una fonte seriale: I rapporti prefettizi sull antifascismo non militante, Rivista di storia contemporanea 2 (1990): 280303. My thanks to Claudio Pavone for indicating this article to me. 18 De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, p. 83. 19 M. Franzinelli, I tentacoli dellOVRA: Agenti, collaboratori e vittime della polizia politica fascista (Turin, 1999). The study is the rst to utilize the archival records of the secret police in a systematic way. 20 The signicance of the acronym has never been established. Indeed, it may never have meant anything precisely. It seems that the choice was made by Mussolini with the express intention of instilling fear through mystery and uncertainty. Initially the secret police operated from Milan as the Limited Company for Southern Wines; see Franzinelli, I tentacoli, p. 67.
16 17

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disseminating mutual suspicion among Mussolinis opponents. Emigre organizations in France, Belgium, and Great Britain were penetrated by spies and agents provocateurs without great difculty and were often reduced to silence. Within Italy, the police frequently attempted to instigate antifascist operations, particularly bomb attacks, in order to convince the population at large that the antifascists were, in reality, dangerous antisocial criminals.21 The organization used all the usual means of recruiting agents. Some were blackmailed into collaboration with threats of exposure of nancial or sexual transgressions; some were found among disillusioned socialists or communists anxious to atone for past errors; some were recruited from poverty-stricken dissident fascists who saw cooperation with the secret police as a chance for economic survival and political rehabilitation.22 The OVRAwhose director, along with the chief of police, reported every morning personally to Mussolinidemonstrated a typically totalitarian obsession with detail in its investigations and built up over the years a huge data bank of les on political suspects in Italy and abroad. It was particularly efcient in crippling the Partito Comunista dItalia and the liberal antifascist organization Giustizia e Liberta ` during the early 1930s. Between 1930 and 1934 (De Felices years of consensus), more than six thousand militant members of these organizations were arrested as the result of a great increase in police activity in the face of economic recession.23 Methods used to interrogate and break down suspects seem to have been worthy of any police state. Torture was common, as were beatings; psychological pressure involving friends and family was frequently brought to bear.24 The
21 One of the most famous, and also one of the most unpleasant, cases of inltration revolved around the gure of the police spy Carlo Del Re, who managed to gain the condence of the Milanese professor of chemistry and member of Giustizia e Liberta ` , Umberto Ceva. Ceva, imprisoned for allegedly plotting a bomb attack on the Prefecture of Milan, was eventually induced to kill himself rather than reveal the name of his accomplice (in fact, his betrayer), Del Re, to the police. On Del Re, see ibid., pp. 94112 and, by the same author, Fascismo e repressione del dissenso: Nuovi documenti su Carlo Del Re, agente provocatore fascista, Italia contemporanea 211 (1998): 37097. 22 The case of Tommaso Beltrani (or Beltrami) is exemplary and illustrates well this kind of recruitment. For his career, during which at times Beltrani seems to have been almost a triple agent, see P. Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 19151925 (London, 1975), pp. 23360; and Franzinelli, I tentacoli. 23 De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, p. 86; P. Spriano, Storia del Partito comunista italiano, 5 vols. (Turin, 196775), 2:298. It is important to note the part played by anonymous denunciations in helping the police root out opposition. See M. Franzinelli, Delatori! (Milan, 2001), who effectively destroys the myth that the anonymous informer was a feature of Nazi Germany but not of fascist Italy (see, e.g., R. Gellately, Backing Hitler [New York, 2001], p. 138). 24 Aquarone judges that both for the methods used and for the quality of the greater part of its members, the OVRA showed itself to be one of the most repugnant instruments of the totalitarian State. He quotes the intransigent fascist leader Farinacci (who knew something about unpleasant people), who described the OVRA as being unfortunately made up of some of the worst elements in society. Farinaccis comments were provoked by the fact that he had himself been the subject of an OVRA investigation (A. Aquarone, Lorganizzazione dello stato totalitario [Turin, 1965; reprinted 1996], p. 108). By the mid-1930s, as Franzinelli testies, it seems to have been normal practice for fascist leaders to use the OVRA to gather information on their political rivals within the fascist party.

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objective was, of course, the confession. One antifascist, with direct experience of the methods of the OVRA, recounted:
The agents provocateurs who succeed in inltrating our organization are the people who propose the formation of armed groups, bomb attacks, etc., and who, by denouncing the colleagues with whom they have been in contact, provide the police with their material for indictments. And these are the crimes to which the colleague must confess as he is being beaten up. After the police have succeededthrough beatings, starving, never-ending interrogations, torture, etc.in getting the declarations they want, if the accused does not conrm before the judge the confession extorted from him, he is sent back to the police so that he can be made to conrm the confession with the usual methods. This kind of treatment has been used for months in certain cases.25

On several occasions, these procedures produced suicides and strange deaths in police custody. In reality, the OVRA had a dual function. Its rst was the repression and discrediting of antifascist opposition; but its second was to deter, to inculcate fear in all those who felt they might possibly be the targets of repressive action. This was to be the kind of fear characteristic of terror: fear of a largely unknown and untouchable organization that did not seem to respond to any of the xed categories of justice and public order. As the periodical of the antifascist exiles in Paris, the Becco giallo, put it, We dont know where it has come from, but the nightmare of the OVRA has entered into the esh, the blood, the bones of many. There are those who see its shape in every shadow; who shudder at every movement of a curtain; who go into a cold sweat at the creak of a piece of furniture or the squeak of a door.26 The writer considered that this fear was based on an exaggerated vision of the capacities of the secret police but was forced to add that it is the myth that counts, and unfortunately the myth of the OVRA holds sway over the fear of the antifascist masses. In this respect, it is worth suggesting that those who argue that fascist repressive measures were aimed only at antifascist opponents of the regime and did not touch the great majority of the population go rather wide of the mark. This may have been what happened, but it must be recognized that the existence and the fear of repressive mechanisms were precisely the factors that would impede and discourage the open expression of opposition to fascism. After all, antifascism was not, as it sometimes seems to be represented, a kind of preconstituted category into which people either tted or did not t, but a sentiment capable of being expressed or suppressed and remaining silent. It is obvious that organs like OVRA were designed to make people remain silent. People feared not only the police but also the judicial system, which they might nd at the end of their interrogations. Under liberal governments, of course, the magistracy had traditionally been closely linked to the executive. Always tending toward conservatism, the magistracy had had little difculty in adapting to the
25 26

Franzinelli, I tentacoli, p. 242. Ibid., p. 240.

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needs of the fascists.27 Even before the March on Rome, during the years of squadrist violence, the courts had distinguished themselves for acquitting the fascist aggressors and convicting the socialists who tried to defend themselves from fascist violence.28 The Special Tribunal for the defense of the fascist state, instituted in 1926, featured judges who were army ofcers or consuls of the fascist militia and defending lawyers who were always, after 1928, of demonstrated national sentiment (for national read fascist) and also, on occasion, police informers.29 If the number of death sentences passed was relatively small, many of the 13,000 people who passed through the courts between 1927 and 1940 received heavy prison sentences. Some, like Antonio Gramsci, did not survive the experience. It is difcult, therefore, to accept the judgment of Pierre Milza, in his recently published biography of Mussolini, even though it is a judgment typical of many: Totalitarian in its project of creating a new man and in the fascistisation of civil society, fascism never corresponds in one essential way to the denition which Hannah Arendt and company give to totalitarianism, in the sense that it never attempts to dismantle what there was of a State of Law and to give birth at any time to a real police state.30 The evidence seems to point very much in the opposite direction. Beneath an apparent laxity and an overt paternal benevolence, fascism had constructed both the mechanisms of the police state and the judicial system to go with it. The internal logic of fascism, by which fascism provided its own legitimization, guaranteed that the case against opponents of fascism was proven before it was even contested. As Adrian Lyttelton has put it, referring to Justice Minister Roccos justication of the 1926 Public Safety Law:
With this at repudiation of all doctrines of natural law or individual rights went the abolition of all distinctions between the State as a permanent entity and the Government of the moment. The safety of Fascism and the safety of the State were treated as identical. In accordance with these premises, all vestiges of the responsibility of the executive for its actions were annulled. The citizen was left without redress; the police were no longer required to produce reasons to justify the imposition of restrictions on liberty. The police authority, for example, enjoyed absolute discretion in granting authorization to form associations or to exercise certain professions.

27 See Aquarone, pp. 95 ff.; C. Schwarzenburg, Diritto e giustizia nellItalia fascista (Milan, 1977). 28 G. Neppi Modona, Sciopero, potere politico e magistratura, 18701922 (Bari, 1969), pp. 215 ff. 29 On the workings of the Special Tribunal, see S. Trentin, Dieci anni di fascismo totalitario in Italia: Dallistituzione del Tribunale Speciale alla proclamazione dellImpero (19261936) (Rome, 1975) (original ed., Paris, 1937); also Aquarone, pp. 1026, and Schwarzenburg, chap. 6. For the quality of the judges and defense counsel, see F. Tacchi, Un professionista della classe dirigente: Lavvocato negli anni 20, in Libere professioni e fascismo, ed. G. Turi (Milan, 1994). 30 P. Milza, Mussolini (Paris, 1999), p. 569.

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As Lyttelton concludes, November 1926 saw the birth of a police state.31 Certainly, Mussolini was not Hitler or Stalinand here it is possible to agree with Milzabut (again we meet the consequences of favorable comparison) it is not necessary to create the worst kind of police state in order for it to qualify for that denition. Intolerance of opposition and repression of opposition of all forms were fundamental characteristics of fascist rule; public order was the prime concern of Mussolini throughout the ventennio. Only this can explain the fact that every morning began in the same waywith a meeting with the chief of police.

THE ROLE OF THE PARTITO NAZIONALE FASCISTA AND THE FASCIST TRADE UNIONS
If the impact of direct repressive mechanisms on Italian society needs to be reemphasized, that of less obvious and direct methods of social control should not be neglected. The readiness of the OVRA to utilize private family questions indelities, nancial difculties, personal weaknesses, and so onin order to induce people to collaborate has already been noted. But it was not only the OVRA that used these methods. The research carried out in the archives of the PNF in both Turin and Pistoia illustrates to a remarkable degree the extent to which the party also used its inuence over the private sphere in order to maintain strict social control.32 The party was undoubtedly one of the principal vehicles of social advancement, but ordinary people often needed to join the party simply in order to gain employment, and this was not always easy. One report of a police informer in 1933 speaks of a strong concern and an active discontent [among workers] because of the combination of the difculty of obtaining the fascist card and the necessity of having it in order to get a job to live with less difculty.33 But even possession of the card did not resolve all problems; indeed, by attracting the attention of the party, the individual might make him- or herself more open to control. Local party organizations kept records on a very large number of individuals often enrolled fascistsand these records document in detail the political history of those who had invited scrutiny, the problems they may have created, and, in particular, their family circumstances.34 The same records outline the action taken against those considered in some way to be troublemakers. Frequently, when it was judged necessary to intervene against an individual, the party would issue a

Lyttelton, The Seizure of Power (n. 11 above), pp. 29798. My comments are based on papers given at a conference on the Fascist Party held at the Istituto piemontese per la storia della Resistenza in Italia, Turin, December 1999in particular on the papers, still unpublished, of G. Perona, G. Turi, and M. Palla. 33 Franzinelli, I tentacoli, p. 232. 34 This was part of a wider transformation of Italy into a bureaucratic regime through the multiplication, in every area of life, of operations of registration, numbering, keeping of personal records and controls; G. Melis, Storia dellamministrazione italiana, 18611993 (Bologna, 1996), p. 375.
31 32

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general warning that involved both the individual and the family of that person. An opponent would be not only warned that he would lose his job but also informed that his children would not nd work if certain attitudes or activities judged hostile to the party did not cease. Here, as with the OVRA, exploitation of the family would seem to have been an important element in fascist control of dissent. It is hardly necessary to stress that fascism was utilizing one of the central structures of Italian societyone of the institutions to which people owed most loyalty, and where, in a sense, people were most vulnerable. While people might readily risk their own skin in operating against the regime, it was far more difcult to do so when the consequences were likely to be felt by the family. And fascist threats were clearly not idle threats; the party, given its pivotal role in local society, could very easily transform its words into actions. Many families were forced to transfer to other districts as a result of PNF pressures of this kind; many others very probably recognized that it was better to toe the line and keep quiet. Such pressures obviously permitted no appeal; falling foul of the party could have consequences that were difcult to reverse. In such circumstances, people became vulnerable to the blackmail of the regime; reinstatement in normal life could always be regained by offering information about colleagues and fellow workers. The role of the fascist union in regimenting the working class was very similar to that of the party. In many circumstances, as reported above, it was necessary to belong to the union in order to gain employment.35 This was particularly so in the cities of the north, where the employment exchanges were run by the fascist syndicates and the fascist union card was therefore an essential requirement for work in the large factories. Obviously this card was in the gift of the fascist authorities something that gave the fascists enormous possibilities of leverage and control in relation to the working class.36 It is true that, during the years of the crisis, enrollment in the fascist unions increased markedly in most sectors. De Felice explains this through a lengthy quotation from Piero Capoferri, the fascist chief of the Milan unions, who (in his memoirs published in 1957) attributed this increase to a better functioning of the unions in respect to the workers. He argued that changes made in these yearsfor instance, in the way that workers were repre-

35 The comments here are related specically to the working class, but it is worth noting that professional people (lawyers, doctors, chemists, architects, engineers, etc.) also had to demonstrate good fascist credentials in order to qualify for membership in the fascist professional ordera condition of practicing the profession. See G. Turi, ed., Libere professioni e fascismo (Milan, 1994). 36 See G. Sapelli, Fascismo, grande industria e sindacato: Il caso di Torino, 1929/35 (Milan, 1975), p. 153: joining the union could be understood as a favourable factor in getting employment. The unions in reality controlled the employment exchanges and were thus in a position to blackmail workers in search of a job. Many workers were in a very weak position in any case; those who were not legally resident in the commune where they worked were often prevented from registering as unemployed. If they tried to do so they were likely to be compelled to return to their commune of origin under the terms of the legislation that attempted to prevent internal movement of labor within Italy.

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sented in legal controversies and in the speed with which these controversies were resolvedmeant that they felt themselves better protected. This may have had some impact. Undoubtedly the fascist unions understood the importance of making gestures toward the workers; particularly during the crisis, they remained consistently ambiguous in their attitudes, trying to please both bosses and workers. Nonetheless, it is difcult not to think that, in a moment of heavy unemployment, the key question for most workers was likely to be access to and stability in employment. The precise interpretation to be given to De Felices conclusions in this respect remains unclear, therefore. De Felice writes, The progressive increase in the number of those enrolled in the unions conrms this testimony of Capoferri, even if, undoubtedly, a part of the newly enrolled was motivated by the greater chances that those organized in the union had to nd work again, if sacked, than the rest.37 We are inevitably left asking, Yes, but what part? 90 percent or 10 percent? There is a very signicant difference. Given that it seems unwise to put too much trust in the testimony, written with the benet of hindsight, of the fascist leader involved, the suspicion must inevitably remain that, in years of severe unemployment, the blackmail effect of a hostile labor market would be stronger than any perception that the fascist unions had become more favorable to the workers.38 This would conrm the impression, formed in relation to other aspects of the regime in the early 1930s, that economic crisis did a great deal to help fascism by making recourse to party and union institutions virtually unavoidable.39 Workers might not like fascism, but the fascist union was the only means available to them for making their case in contested questions concerning pay, for arguing a point about a sacking, or for seeking some new employment. They simply had no alternatives. In such circumstances, therefore, it is perhaps forcing the evidence to see a pragmatic enrollment in the unions, dictated by necessity, as enthusiasm for fascism.40 Crisis compelled conformity. In this respect, it may be no accident that the years of consensus coincide so precisely with the years of severe economic hardship.

De Felice, Mussolini il duce: Gli anni del consenso, p. 92. Ofcial gures, which exclude agricultural workers, show rates of 2025 percent in many months. But these gures were contested even by loyal fascists. See M. Gabellini, Studi e polemiche (Como, 1935), who reproduces (p. 185) his own article from Lidea sociale (1933); it [the deliberate reduction of the numbers] is a result of that strange mentality which declaims, visibly satised, Here the crisis doesnt exist. What nonsense. Is it enough to deny the existence of unemployment for it to disappear? 39 Sapelli, pp. 16688. 40 The judgment of the Belgian economist Louis Rosenstock-Franck on the unions was short and to the point: The essential characteristic of fascist syndicalism is the total lack of real participation of the workers in the life of the union. See N. Tranfaglia, ed., Il corporativismo e leconomia dellItalia fascista (Turin, 1990), which reproduces chap. 6 of the original Les e tapes de le conomie fasciste italienne: Du corporatisme alle conomie de guerre (Paris, 1939). The quotation here is from p. 156 of the Italian edition.
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THE ROLE OF WELFARE ORGANIZATIONS AND FASCIST ASSISTENZIALISMO

As Tim Mason pointed out with respect to Nazism, repression, neutralization, and integration are not mutually exclusive.41 Indeed, repression and neutralization of opposition can lead to eventual acceptance and integration. After years of dissimulation, the face may come to t the mask. Central to this process of adjustment is often the question of access to benets. Mason suggests that many people must have accepted some aspects of the Nazi regime while rejecting others, exactly as people do in nondictatorial political systems. In a very effective comparison, he has argued that Nazism combined the workhouse with the supermarket, and that, by looking at what the supermarket offered, Germans may have been induced to accept some kind of partial compromise with the Nazis. Benets might thus blur the edges of opposition. The concept is undoubtedly useful. Even if Italian fascism could never remotely offer what the German supermarket might offer German workers, small benets in a country of generalized poverty might induce some form of acceptance of fascism.42 That said, it is still legitimate to question the terms on which this acceptance took place. Consensus suggests, perhaps misleadingly, a voluntary adherence to a program, something done from choice, determined preciselyby what is on offer. And fascism clearly did everything it could to make it look as though the people had chosen the benets of fascism spontaneously. But, again, it is necessary to ask what happened to those who chose not to accept or who, for a variety of reasons, were considered not acceptable by fascism and excluded. In short, what was the price of access to, or exclusion from, the supermarket? The eld of fascist welfare and social assistance is perhaps one of the best areas in which to seek an answer to these questions.43 Fascism boasted that it had developed a system of social services that was among the most advanced in Europe a claim that has been reproduced rather uncritically in much of the subsequent literature on the subject.44 Certainly the various schemes for social insurance against illness (tuberculosis in particular), unemployment, industrial accidents, and
Mason (n. 6 above). On this comparative issue, see P. Corner, Consensus and Consumption: Fascism and Nazism Compared, Italianist 3 (1983): 12738. 43 It should be emphasized that here I am concerned principally with the aspects of social control related to fascist assistenzialismo rather than to the question of the good or bad functioning of the system. For a detailed account of the way the system worked, see D. Preti, La modernizzazione corporative: Economia, salute pubblica, istituzioni e professioni sanitarie (Milan, 1987); and (published since the completion of this article) F. Bertini, Il fascismo dalle assicurazioni per i lavoratori allo stato sociale, in Lo stato fascista, ed. M. Palla (Florence, 2001), pp. 177313. 44 See, e.g., Milza (n. 30 above), p. 887. Many of the older technicians (i.e., those employed for their technical competence rather than their fascist credentials) who developed these schemes, particularly those who had worked with Francesco Saverio Nitti before and immediately after the First World War, were not afraid to point out that most of the real initiatives in the direction of social security had been taken before the arrival of fascism and were only further developed by fascism.
41 42

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old age brought an enormous number of people into the orbit of the statemore particularly, in this case, into the orbit of the variously named fascist organizations, or enti, which had responsibility for directing these operations. The system erected had profound mobilizing implications, requiring the participation of a large part of the population. With certain notable exceptions, almost all dependent labor was involved, paying obligatory contributions and, at least in theory, enjoying the right to benet. Thisthe right to benetwas generally dened as deriving from work, from participation in production, and not from citizenship; social security was in the interests of the worker but always bearing in mind the superior needs of the Nation . . . ; the citizen worker [is the] depository of the highest social obligation after that of bearing arms: the social obligation of work.45 The criteria of inclusion were based on concepts of national efciency, and ultimately national strength, rather than on those of a social justice based on reaction to poverty or need. And, indeed, where the question of poverty was confrontedand it was generally addressed with strong overtones of moral stigmathe response was always given in terms of national solidarity, which required that the less fortunate be looked after in order that they should become more worthy of the nation.46 If one is to judge from their internal publications, the various enti seem to have been almost endlessly active. This was particularly true during the years of the crisis when assistance to the unemployed, especially in the cities of the north, was at its highest, putting the fascist organizations at the center of the social picture. While the level of this type of assistance declined after the crisis, public intervention in many other areas of day-to-day life was expanded continuously during much of the 1930s. Local ofcials, apparently permanently obsessed with statistics, never tired of listing the fact that they had assisted so many thousand people in the course of the year with the expenditure of so many thousand lire. Provincial reports documented meticulously the numbers of the unemployed who had received subsidies in money or kind, of mothers-to-be who had received prenatal check-ups, of the tubercular who had been sent off to sanatoriums, of the children who had enjoyed free47 holidays at the fascist holiday camps (colonie) at the sea or in the mountains, and of widows and widowers permitted to live a dignied old age through the generosity of their state pensions. What were termed the realizations of fascism were publicized to a massive extent, often in glossily illustrated books that stressed efciency, modernity, andabove allthe debt Italy owed to fascism and to the duce.48 Welfare was a wonderful vehicle of propaganda for fascism,
45 Istituto Nazional Fascista per la Previdenza Sociale (INFPS), Al di la ` del lavoro e al di la ` del salario (Rome, 1942), p. 10. 46 For an explicit rejection of the concepts of liberty, equality, and social solidarity, see ibid., p. 7, where it is argued that the concepts turned out to be a benet reserved for the privilege of the few and denied in practice to the acquisitive capacities of the mass of the workersa judgment that many may nd more applicable to fascism itself. 47 The colonie were, of course, nanced through the fascist enti, which were in turn nanced by the contributions of the workforce, deducted at source from the pay packet. 48 See, for an excellent example, M. Casalini, Le realizzazioni del regime nel campo sociale (Rome, 1938).

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undoubtedly giving many the impression that, for the rst time, the Italian state actually cared for them. And, since a vast proportion of the population was required to participate in the obligatory assistance schemes, the related propaganda impact was likely to be very strong, with a penetration involving social groups that had previously remained relatively untouched by the state. Participation was, of course, one of the keywords of the regime. Through personal participation people were directly involved in the programs and thus became the actors on the stage; as the targets of propaganda they also constituted the audience. This was, indeed, the area in which the apparent benets of fascism might blur the edges of opposition, as people who might for other reasons be convinced opponents of fascism were tempted to take what fascism offered in terms of assistance and accept some kind of partial reconciliation with the regime. In the straightened circumstances of the 1930s, the temptation to compromise principles was likely to be particularly strong. Opposition could be effectively neutralized by contact with state services and by the promises they made. Here attitudes might be determined less by political sentiment than by the opportunism of immediate necessity. On a simple cost/benet calculation, the cost of paying lip service to the regime was at most moral, the benets very tangible. A closer examination of the mechanisms of welfare suggests, however, that the attractions of fascist benecence, or the neutralizing power of the services, were only part of the picture. Certainly, people might nd many aspects of the programs attractive and worthwhile; it is not difcult even today to nd elderly Italians whose memory of fascism is linked, for example, to the experience of holidays or day trips enjoyed under the aegis of the fascist party. These were undoubtedly novel experiences for many and involved large sections of the population.49 But social assistance should also be understood as one of the mechanisms of social control. In this respect the issue is less what people received from the various aspects of the system than what they had to do to qualify for services and assistance. As already stated above, the prime qualication for participation in most of the schemes was work; indeed, it was the essential factor, given that contributions were levied on wages at their source. But, even so, not all workers qualied. For example, domestic servants, actors, andafter 1938persons of non-Aryan race were excluded. These were relatively small categories numerically, but the same was not true of the landless agricultural laborers (braccianti), who were excluded from participation and from benets for most of the ventennio. They constituted, according to the 1931 census of population, around 35 percent of the total agricultural population, although the true gure was probably nearer to 40 percent. More signicantly, they were the category most susceptible to heavy unemployment. Their exclusion was justied on the grounds that the braccianti were
49 Again it is to be noted that, although fascism presented these programs as its own inventions (and people continue to believe this), there was already a well-consolidated tradition of factory holidays, workers trips to the sea, and so on, in existence before fascism. The real fascist innovation, of course, was that of persuading the participants to relate the experience to a political party and to the state.

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said to be a shifting population of casual labor and that it was therefore difcult for them to pay contributions on a stable basis. In reality, as the parliamentary discussions between 1919 and 1922 had demonstrated, the landowners simply did not want to pay their part of the contributions for the braccianti in their employment.50 In the late 1930s, when certain categories of landless laborers were nally admitted to certain programs, their rights to many benets were limited by other factors. Unemployment pay was refused those who had sources of income or employment other than day labor; even a small vegetable garden or allotment was judged to constitute a further revenue and thus excluded braccianti from benet.51 The exclusion of the landless laborers said a lot about where power lay in fascism; the landowners of the Po valley may have become politically less important during the years of the regime, but they were still sufciently powerful as a lobby to be able to maintain their control over legislation concerning their particular workforce. In general terms, exclusion relegated people to a kind of ghetto of isolation from the state, something that wouldparadoxicallymake them more dependent on state handouts and fascist charity in times of need.52 Of greater importance, because far more people were involved, is the way in which assistance programs worked to discipline those who were included. Here a variety of factors operated. The key point, however, is that it was impossible to have access to services or to benets without passing through one of the fascist organizations sometimes more than one. Participationin the sense of going along with the regimewas, to all intents and purposes, compulsory, therefore. Access to most services was broadly similar. People would have to ll in special application forms, available on request from the fascist organization in question.53 They would usually have to present, with their application, their work documents (the libretto di lavoro), which were the evidence that they were or had been in employment. This
50 Proposals were made in 1919 to introduce a scheme that would give unemployment pay to the braccianti, a measure that could have had extremely important political consequences in the circumstances of the immediate postwar period. The large landowners blocked it consistently until the rst fascist government abandoned the idea in late 1922. See E. Campese, Lassicurazione contro la disoccupazione in Italia (Rome, 1927), pp. 4648. 51 Landless laborers with vegetable gardens lost both ways. They were likely to be classied as small proprietors from the point of view of the population census, thus permitting the fascists to claim success for their much-proclaimed policies of sbracciantizzazione (the elimination of the class of braccianti). If so classied, of course, the braccianti were no longer dependent labor and did not come within the terms of social insurance. If not so classied, they were excluded on the grounds of having a secondary source of income. The fate of the families of sharecroppers was somewhat analogous. The sharecroppers (mezzadri) were continually extolled by fascism for their sturdy rural independence and family spirit, but families of sharecroppers were specically denied any subsidy if the head of the family contracted tuberculosis precisely on the grounds that they were sturdy, independent, family orientated, and so on, and could therefore look after themselves. See, for the relevant legislation, INFPS, p. 51. 52 Local fascist organizations had the job of drawing up lists of the deserving poor each year. These lists were published every December, and only those on the lists could ask for assistance. See Partito Nazionale Fascista, Federazione Provinciale dei Fasci Femminili, Nozioni per Visitatrici Fasciste (Padua, 1937), p. 25. 53 INFPS, pp. 3132.

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libretto was held by the employer and had to be requested from the employer.54 If they were applying for unemployment pay, they would also have to produce a certicate of unemployment from the fascist labor exchange. Usually they would have to present a medical certicate; and, for many services, they would have to present a detailed account of the circumstancesnancial and medicalof all members of the family. Any request for assistance meant dealing rst with the fascist authorities and the employers, therefore. More signicant is the fact that applications would usually be vetted by committees formed of those functionaries competent in the particular area and by local dignitaries, including representatives of the local PNF and the civic administration. For example, the 1937 regulations for the formation of certain assistance committees stipulated that they should be composed of the head of the local Fascio, the head of the Fascio femminile, the local president of the Opera Nazionale Balilla (the fascist youth movement), the president of the Opera Nazionale Maternita ` e Infanzia, the president of the Provincial Association of War Veterans, the local president of the Association of War Handicapped, and the leading provincial doctor.55 And control did not stop there. If benet was granted, people had to present themselves to the authorities on a regular basis in order to withdraw the money. The unemployed, for example, had to sign in every day at the labor exchange. In the later years of fascism, these committees would have before them, besides the information included in the application, a written report on the person or the family concerned from the visitatrice fascista (fascist woman visitor). These gures, in some ways analogous to those in Weimar Germany who aroused so much resentment among the working class for their alleged snooping into private circumstances, were endowed by the authorities with a heavy moral function. Their task was dened as that of rooting out malingerers and the work-shy, and they were instructed to use strong methods with the apathetic, moral hypochondriacs who relax in their misery as if it were a bed which has become comfortable through long use.56 They were encouraged in their reports, therefore, to mention untidiness, dirtiness, laziness, and signs of excessive consumption of alcohol (i.e., empty bottles)all factors that could be brought into play in deciding whether families would receive assegni familiari (child benets) or subsidies in kind or not, whether children would be allowed to go on holiday to the colonie, and so on. Sometimes, on the basis of these reports, fairly drastic disciplinary measures would be taken against the family. Particularly involved because of the demographic policies of the regime, the Opera Nazionale Maternita ` e Infanzia had the power to take children away from their parents and to require assignment to an institution of education and instruction or, for more difcult cases, temporary reclusion for reasons of public safety of children from 9 to 18 years old and even connement in
Ibid., p. 29. U. Lovo, LEnte Opere Assistenziali (Padua, 1937), pp. 45. Other committees required the presence of the local chief of police and the fascist podesta ` (mayor). 56 Partito Nazionale Fascista, Federazione Provinciale dei Fasci Femminili, Corso Preparatorio per Visitatrici Fasciste (Novara, 1940), p. 12.
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institutes of reeducation and improvement for teachable subnormal children and deviants from 9 to 18 years old.57 Thus the application for public assistance risked provoking a strong repressive reaction from the authorities. All these procedures meant, of course, that access to benets was determined by authorities either near to fascism or specically fascist. And it was determined in this way in various stagesby the employer, possibly the doctor, the fascist visitor, the committee. Such a situation was not by itself necessarily abnormal: state benets are, after all, generally administered by state authorities. But in fascist Italy the strict identication of the state with fascism meant that the system was very obviouslyrun in such a way as to reinforce fascist control. In part, as already stated, this meant showing that assistance was real and that people should be grateful to the fascist state for it; the propaganda aspect was undoubtedly extremely important. In part, however, the right of access to the benets of the system depended on fascist approval, and this gave fascism an enormously inuential lever vis-a ` -vis the population. As one fascist writer acknowledged, the Istituto Nazional Fascista per la Previdenza Sociale (INFPS) was an extremely powerful instrument of political action and should be used as such.58 It was very much a case of the stick and the carrot; benets were available, but clearly they were available only to those who conformed to the rules laid down by fascism. Otherwise people would be punished and benets withheld. On the one hand, fascism proclaimed the wonders of the system; on the other, it threatened to exclude the unworthy from that system on the grounds that they were subverting the national cause. The rules were in many ways unwritten rules and could only be guessed at something that gave the authorities a great deal of discretionary power. Fascism had constructed a system of benets that, in theory, involved most of the populationand then reserved the right to say who should and who should not benet. Inclusion and exclusion were politically determined, therefore. It is here that we come closer again to the questions of consensus and opposition under fascism. Direct police repression of dissent is one thing, exclusion from the apparent benets of a welfare system another. The second is much more subtle in its mode of operation; it is clearly an implied threat that need rarely be made explicit, but, for a large part of the population who do not dream of open and vocal opposition, it is likely to be more potent. Open opposition is able to identify its enemy and act accordingly; reaction to the discretionary use of power is far more difcult, precisely because the terms on which that discretion is exercised are more difcult to identify with any certainty. Without enforcing order through draconian measures of repression, fascism could ensure its hold on the population through its control of the distribution of relatively scarce resources. After 1925, most people were
57 Ibid., pp. 19 and 22. The number of minors (persons under the age of eighteen) kept in special institutes of correction and reeducation rose dramatically from 975 in 1927 (more or less the yearly average up to that point) to 8,966 in 1939. The precise signicance is not clear, but the increase certainly shows a much greater degree of control of the condition of young people within the family. See ISTAT (n. 15 above), p. 103. 58 INFPS (n. 45 above), p. 10.

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probably not in the position of having to make the choice about fascism as a political movement; but they did have to make choices about houses, jobs, schools, pensions, welfareall of which were controlled by the fascist authorities. In other words, they were forced to go towards fascism.59 People might have little choice in the matter of conforming, therefore; exclusion from subsidies or other benets could damage the family far more than the individual. To put it another way, for most people the necessity of conformity with the fascist system would be so obvious that it would make any choice almost automatic. Discretionary power, of course, could not only deny access and take away benets, but also provide them. This was the other side of the coin. Controlling everything, the fascist authorities were in a position to reward collaborationindeed, in some circumstances to buy some kind of consensus. Where the allocation of public housing was concerned, political afliation was likely to have the better of real need.60 Housing queues that tend to last for years are excellent guarantors of good behavior. But it is in the realm of the concession of pensions that the possibility of using state power for party ends is particularly apparent. According to the Annuario statistico italiano an ofcial sourcemore than half the applications for pensions made between 1931 and 1935 were turned down.61 The reasons are not given, but it is clear that a discretionary element on the part of the authorities is present. This impression is conrmed when one considers that between 1929 and 1939, while the total number of pensions for the disabled and the elderly rose from 174,588 to 572,515, the proportion of disability pensions in this gure rose from 31 percent to 56 percent. Moreover, the proportion of these paid to people resident in the south of Italy rose from 14 percent to 21 percent. In absolute terms, therefore, the south saw an increase in the number of disability pensions paid from 7,680 to 66,621, a rise of some 900 percent.62 This can, of course, be read as an extension of the welfare network as the state itself extended

59 See the conclusions of Sapelli: The organisations for assistance carry out a fundamental role in reinforcing the provincial capillary structures of the PNF which, in this area, was able to utilise all discretionary instruments to select and then dismantle pre-existing areas of solidarity, in order then to reconstruct, through an out-and-out use of charity, interest systems among social groups reduced to the level of simple survival, on the basis of a client network, in Annali della Fondazione G. Feltrinelli, vol. 20 (197980) (Milan, 1981), p. xxxii. Also illuminating on the impact of the crisis and the response of employers is A. Cento Bull, Capitalismo e fascismo di fronte alla crisi: Industria e societa ` bergamasca, 19231937 (Bergamo, 1983), chap. 4. 60 Often the rst houses would go to those in need who genuinely qualied for them, the others to the less qualied. See Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, p. 286. The same priorities are described in G. Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism (London, 1936), p. 335. 61 G. Gaddi, La mise ` re des travailleurs en Italie fasciste (Paris, 1938), p. 148. Gaddi quotes the Annuario Statistico Italiano 1937, p. 239. 62 Figures, but not conclusions, drawn from L. Beltrametti and R. Soliani, Alcuni aspetti macroeconomici e redistributivi della gestione del principale ente pensionistico italiano (1919 39), Rivista di storia economica 16, no. 2 (2000), tables 5 and 6. This article demonstrates the ways in which the enormous surpluses generated by the contributions made to INFPS were utilized to nance other projects, the most notable being the launching of the state holding company IRI in 1933.

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its control, but the disproportionate rise in the south gives rise to the suspicion, at least, that fascism was using the pension system to extend its political control through a typical patron-client relationship. This meant complaisant bureaucrats and doctors; but, given that these were categories generally favorable to fascism, this was unlikely to constitute a problem. Conclusions exactly of this kind have, of course, been drawn about the relationship between disability pensions, Christian Democracy, and the south for the 1950s and 1960s.63 Discretionary use of power could operate in a further way, reinforcing fascism in a classic process of divide and rule. The complicated mechanisms of welfare and social insurance, which created numerous different categories among workers and assigned different levels of benet to each category, aimed very clearly at the fragmentation of any residual worker solidarity as people struggled to maintain differentials that were advantageous to them or to rise to the level of the more privileged. As peoples expectations were fragmented, so were their requests. New hierarchies were established and reinforced by preferential treatment. This was true among blue-collar workers, where different jobs brought differing benets, but it was particularly true of the division between workers and the impiegati the white-collar employees of state and private administration. The class generally considered to have been the backbone of the regime (in part created and certainly greatly reinforced by the regime) was rewarded by favorable treatment vis-a ` -vis workers in nonclerical jobs. An immediate indication of class preference was the fact that benets for children of workers were stopped when the children reached sixteen; in the case of the impiegati, they were stopped when the children reached eighteen. It was clearly assumed that middle-class children would stay longer in education. Impiegati also had privileges when it came to recognition of the right to disability pensions. Workers qualied if their earning capacity was reduced, by illness or accident, to less than one-third of what it had been previously, whereas for the impiegati it was sufcient that it should be reduced by half.64 The same distinction is apparent in the difference in the value of pensions paid to impiegati and workers. The white collars were accorded particularly preferential treatment, given that most workers consistently paid a higher proportion of their total income in contributions than did the impiegati (around 1520 percent and 1015 percent, respectively; the more you earned, the less you paid proportionately; the contributions were in every sense regressive). Yet pensions for impiegati were 114 percent higher than those paid to workers, on the basis of the full payment of the necessary contributions for both categories. Even on those rare occasions when impiegati and workers ended up having made exactly the same total contribution to the pension fund, impiegati inexplicably received signicantly higher pensions.65
See D. Hine, Governing Italy: The Politics of Bargained Pluralism (Oxford, 1993), p. 63. U. Belloni, La previdenza sociale a favore dei lavoratori (Novara, 1940), p. 78. 65 INFPS (n. 45 above), p. 14. The level of pensions is not strictly relevant to the question of social control, except in the sense that the continued existence of relative poverty did undoubtedly strengthen the hand of the fascists. In this respect it should be noted that the examples given in the literature on pensions, which speak of pensions of 5,600 lire per year for a worker with forty63 64

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The position attributed to an individual in the social hierarchy was extremely important in deciding the way in which he or she was treated, therefore. This inevitably gave considerable discretionary power to those fascist authorities responsible for determining classes and categories within the hierarchy. And the more people were aware of the economic importance of distinctions between social classes and subgroups, the more those who perceived that they beneted in comparison to others were likely to hold to fascism and to the politics of hierarchy. Within classes and categories, fascism also maintained the traditional division between men and women. In some occupations, the standard, published rates of pay for women were half those offered to men.66 Often both gender and social class were factors that inuenced access to benets, with gender inevitably following and reinforcing distinctions made on the grounds of class. This was what fascism called the discipline of difference that avoided the absurd levelling of equality and imposed respect of the hierarchical order.67

CONCLUSIONS: CONSENSUS AND REGIMENTATION

The intention here is certainly not to deny that there was any consensus for fascism. To do so would be to identify fascism mistakenly with a simple authoritarianism. Obviously many groups did benet from fascism and accorded their support to the regime for reasons of material gain, social status, a conservative defense of what was thought to be law and order, or for real, if misguided, ideas related to national resurgence. The lay religion of fascism, which for some was certainly a kind of faith, undoubtedly had many highly committed followers.68 And there was a difference in the support given to Mussolini himself at a popular level and that given to the functionaries and the corrupt spoils system of the regime.69 But the claims made for mass consensus for fascism are a somewhat different matter and go beyond the recognition that some groups, in particular the urban middle and lowermiddle class, did support the dictatorship.70

three years of employment (see Belloni, p. 85), are belied by the national statistics. In 1938, for example, the average old age pension was 852 lire per year. If it is calculated that impiegati received much more than workers, then it seems likely that the average workers pension was in the region of 300400 lire per year, or 3035 lire per month, at a time when a male domestic worker was paid 48 lire per week; INFPS, pp. 4148. 66 Belloni, p. 96. 67 INFPS, p. 8. 68 On this theme, see the fundamental work of Emilio Gentile; in particular, Il culto del littorio (Rome-Bari, 1994). 69 The denition is that of Melis (n. 34 above), p. 357. On the distinctions made by popular opinion between Mussolini and the regime, see L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario: Storia di una biograa 19151939 (Rome-Bari, 1991). 70 The quality of some of this support emerges clearly in the illuminating study by V. de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, 1981), who concludes, on the basis of her research on the fascist leisure organizations, that the very low level of politicization of activities, dictated by fear of the consequences of political debate, produced

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My purpose is to make two points about how the question of consensus should be considered. The rst is to query the way in which the repression/consensus division is usually presented. A re-reading of De Felicebut not only De Felice leaves the impression that repression and consensus are, to use a metaphor, two halves of the same apple; what is not controlled by repression and prevention is controlled by active choice. We are presented with what appear to be alternatives a kind of specular relationship between agreement and disagreement. The above remarks are intended to suggest that this vision is largely mistaken, at least inasfar as the mass of ordinary Italians were concerned. After all, the existence and the threat of repression can by itself determine silence and acceptance of the status quo; in this sense, in some circumstances, repression and passive acquiescence should be seen as elements along a continuum. But it is surely also mistaken to assume that, when the individual moves out of the sphere of activity that might be controlled by direct repressive measures, he or she automatically moves into a sphere in which there is freedom of choice and in which consent or dissent become the alternatives available. Much of what I have said aboveabout employment, housing, and in particular welfaresuggests that fascist control was very strong in all these areas and that what might be termed access to civil society was rmly in the hands of fascist organizations and fascist ofcials who could use their very large discretionary powers as they wished. In reality most people had little choice in their behaviornot, or not only, because Italy was a police state that repressed active opposition very efciently, but also because so many areas of normal civil activity were also controlled by fascism. Popular reactions to fascismin this case, absence of open protestcannot be judged, therefore, by the same criteria that would be applied to popular political reactions under democracy. To do so is to risk misreading the meaning of silence and to misunderstand the kind of control a totalitarian regime exercises. It is not so much made up of repression, terror, and the thought police as it is of the control of most of the essential elements of ordinary life, creating a situation in which acceptance of the rules of that control, and the observance of those rules, is a necessity of survival, not a choice. It is this that generates the spontaneous plebiscites so typical of totalitarian regimes. After the initial seizure of power, fascism created a situation in which the vast majority of people were not presented with the choice of being either fascist or antifascist; there was simply no feasible alternative to toeing the line if you wished to continue to lead a normal life.71 Except for a relatively
a generalized political apathy among participants. See also the conclusions of P. Melograni, Rapporti segreti della polizia fascista (Rome-Bari, 1979), p. 10: the consensus of the Italians for the regime was a very limited consensus and much less politicised than appearances suggested. Almost always the masses participated at political demonstrations as a ritual: the circulation of information was curbed by censorship and the degree of debate was extremely limited, even within the PNF. 71 Exemplary in this context is the reply of a disappointed fascist to the question about his experience of fascism while a young man, Were you forced to enrol in the GUF [fascist university groups]? We were not forced to join. But there was no other choice (Gianni Granzotto, quoted in A. Grandi, I giovani di Mussolini [Milan, 2001], p. 126).

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privileged and/or very courageous few, antifascism was just not an option. It should be noted that when fascism collapsed literally overnight in July 1943, for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which was a disastrous war, this was the rst time since 1925 that many Italians had been presented with a choice, an alternativeand they took it with impressive rapidity. This, of course, makes the whole question of the mass consensus extremely problematical. Indeed, it suggests that it might be better to abandon the word consensus because it is burdened with connotations of choice that are in reality absent in the situation in question. If we want to say that, by the early 1930s, the mass of the people went along with fascism without obvious and open protest, that there was a kind of pragmatic acquiescence with the regime, then there is no problem. This would in many ways conform to De Felices concept (used by him for the period after the armistice of September 8, 1943) of a vast grey area among the population, in which people attempted to avoid making choices that would identify them with one side or the other.72 But if we move from the recognition of nonresistance to fascism to the idea of a popular consensus based on choice, we are perhaps going beyond what is legitimate and ignoring the totalitarian nature of fascist control of society. This may not have been the monolithic, big-brother totalitarianism to which George Orwell has accustomed usa vision that may in fact mislead. Not all totalitarianisms have to be the same, and in Italy, as is well known, autonomous centers of power such as the church and the monarchy did continue to provide certain limits to fascist control. But, in the context of day-today existence, fascism did exercise a totalitarian control that was extremely widely diffused in its operation, present in every local context, and able in one way or another to permeate almost all areas of everyday life. It produced a form of regimentation, of conformism, that was based not on choice but, on the contrary, on the lack of any real alternatives. And successful regimentation was the precondition of effective mobilization. To deny this is to miss the essence of fascism. The absence of alternatives prompts a second, nal consideration. The use of the concept of consensus to suggest that people chose fascism and that, by this token, fascism is somehow less reprehensible cannot be accepted if, at the same time, it is agreed that most people really had no choice. Yet this slippagefrom a claim for the existence of a consensus for fascism to a justication of fascism (justied because chosen and supported spontaneously by the people)is part of the cultural operation now taking place in Italy, directed from areas of center-right and self-styled liberal thinking. This is not the open justication of the regime by the former neofascist chief, now leader of the right-wing Alleanza nazionale
72 De Felice uses this concept to argue that the majority of Italians shared neither the antifascist ideals of the resistance nor the extreme fascist position of the repubblichini (the supporters of Salo ` ) and to suggest that most people were simply too occupied with the problem of survival. I dont think its right to speak of opportunism. I prefer the concept of opportunity; each choice was made as a simple necessity (R. De Felice, Rosso e Nero [interview edited by P. Chessa] [Milan, 1995], pp. 5860). He never extends the idea backward in time to relate it to his theories of consensus for fascism, although it would seem reasonable to do so.

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and deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, who will wear his description of Mussolini (the greatest statesman of the [twentieth] century73) around his neck for the rest of his political career; it is a much more subtle operation of revision that seeks to discredit the antifascist tradition and masquerades as a political pragmatism devoid of the allegedly preaching ethical values of the founding fathers of the rst republic.74 Hence the contemptuous references to antifascist judgments on fascism as being no more than the vulgate of the winners; hence the recent attempts at the rehabilitation of Mussolinis Repubblica di Salo ` and the invitations to empathize with our boys of Salo ` ; hence the shouts of joy at revelations about the compromises of prominent antifascists with the regime;75 hence, above all, the continual repetition of the mass consensus theme to suggest that, in the end, fascism was not that bad after all. In the face of this campaign, it is necessary to review the evidence and to recognize, on the basis of this evidence, that fascist dictatorship ensured, for the vast majority of people, that there were no choices to be made; that this is what constitutes the real totalitarian nature of fascism (and not the greater or lesser level of open and direct repression); and that it is this that makes Italian fascism directly comparable to its justly reviled partner and ally, German Nazism.

La stampa (March 30, 1994). For example, the prominent journalist Giuliano Ferrara, who argues against an ethical (i.e., antifascist) basis for politics: we believe that democratic politics has other, more empirical, bases, and that it must attempt to correct and improve mans condition through experiment, not impose an obligation in any one direction (Il foglio [June 5, 2000]). Ferrara does not say who decides what constitutes improvement in this context. 75 See the ecstatic reaction of the right to the publication of A. dOrsi, La cultura a Torino fra le due guerre (Turin, 2000), in which he documents the various compromises the philosopher Norberto Bobbio, one of the most inuential intellectuals associated with the foundation of the republic, made with the regime when a young man.
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