Within a few months, paramilitary Fascist squad leaders controlled many rural areas of central Italy. Local bosses built power bases in various areas—e.g., Italo Balbo in Ferrara, Roberto Farinacci in Cremona, and Leandro Arpinati in Bologna. These men became known as ras (meaning “provincial viceroy” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language) and exercised considerable local power throughout the Fascist period. The Fascists had become a major political force, backed not only by landowners but also by many members of the urban middle class, including students, shopkeepers, and clerical workers. In May 1921, when Prime Minister Giolitti called new elections, 35 Fascists were elected to parliament as part of a government bloc of 275 deputies. In October Mussolini abandoned republicanism, and in November he formed his movement into a proper political party, the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista; PNF), which by this time was well-financed if ill-disciplined and extremely disparate. Local bosses remained paramount in their areas. The Fascists also organized their own trade unions, the Fascist “syndicates,” among strategic groups such as postal administrative workers and taxi drivers, to replace Socialist or Catholic organizations, to provide mass membership, and to control labour. These unions never managed to penetrate the organized working class but did have some support among the lower middle class and small landowners.
Mussolini manipulated this volatile situation in the next few months to his advantage, and the Liberal political establishment sought to conciliate him and the Fascist thugs. The police, the army, and much of the middle class sympathized with Fascist destruction of Socialist unions. Mussolini, as duce (leader) of fascism, gradually made himself indispensable in Rome, and the squads took over more cities in the provinces. Only a very few areas were able to resist the “Blackshirts” in street fighting, including Parma and Bari in 1922. Attempts by the left to organize defense squads against the Fascists were, in general, a failure. A major anti-Fascist protest strike, called by the Socialist-led Confederation of Labour in August 1922, quickly collapsed, strengthening Mussolini’s bargaining position even further. Fascists used the opportunity to inflict further damage on the left and union institutions, and the offices of L’Avanti! were again attacked and razed. In October 1922 Mussolini organized a “March on Rome” by Fascist supporters. Fascist squads, numbering about 25,000 men altogether, began to converge on the capital from all over Italy on October 26, occupying railway stations and government offices. Prime Minister Facta asked the king to declare martial law, but Victor Emmanuel III eventually refused in order to avoid possible army disloyalty or even a possible civil war. Instead, he asked Mussolini to form a government on October 29, hoping to tame him by constitutional means.
Mussolini became prime minister, therefore, in a more or less constitutional manner, but only after three years of near civil war in the country and an armed invasion of Rome. He was appointed by the king, and he headed a coalition government that included nationalists, two Fascist ministers, Liberals, and even (until April 1923) two Catholic ministers from the Popular Party. For 18 months he ruled through the usual government machinery, pursued a policy of “normalization,” and gradually concentrated power in his own hands. The Fascist squads were incorporated into an official Voluntary Militia for National Security. Ordinary middle-class job seekers flooded into the Fascist Party, making it more respectable and amenable; the nationalists also merged their organization into it, bringing with them much respectable backing in the south. In 1923 the electoral law was changed once more, so that a group of parties with the largest vote—even if only 25 percent of the total—would receive an absolute majority of the seats. This enabled the Fascists to attract most of the old Liberal deputies into a “national alliance.” In April 1924 elections were held under this system. In a climate of violence and threats, the Fascist-dominated bloc won 64 percent of the votes and 374 seats, doing particularly well in the south. The opposition parties—by now including the Popular Party—remained divided but won a majority of the votes in northern Italy. The Socialists, indeed, had by this time split again, and the left now consisted of three rival parties, which spent much time criticizing one another: the Communists, the Socialists, and the reformist Socialists. The Popular Party was disowned by the Vatican, and its leader, Luigi Sturzo, resigned at the Vatican’s request. The end of constitutional rule
Mussolini’s relative success as leader of a “normalizing” constitutional government did not last long. When the new parliament met, Giacomo Matteotti, leader of the reformist Socialists, denounced the recent elections as a sham and claimed there had been widespread intimidation of opposition voters. On June 10, 1924, Matteotti disappeared. His body was recovered on July 16, and he was later found to have been murdered by Fascist thugs led by the assistant to Mussolini’s press office, Amerigo Dumini. The “Matteotti crisis” aroused public distrust in Mussolini and the Fascists. Mussolini was suspected of personal complicity in ordering the murder to eliminate a troublesome opponent. The press denounced the government, and the opposition parties walked out of parliament. However, Mussolini still had a majority in parliament, and the king backed him. For some time Mussolini hung on, but by autumn his Liberal supporters were drifting away, and in any case the “normalization” policy infuriated Fascist extremists in the country—especially the local bosses who were threatened with dismissal by the new militia commander, an army general. They demanded a showdown, and Mussolini—who was too weak by this time to rule by constitutional means—had to agree. On Jan. 3, 1925, he made a famous speech in the Chamber of Deputies accepting “political, moral, and historical responsibility” for Fascist rule and Matteotti’s death and promising a tough crackdown on dissenters. The king made no move. On January 4, orders were given to prefects throughout Italy to control all “suspect” political organizations. Searches, arrests, and the elimination of several offices and organizations followed.
During the next two years, which included several failed assassination attempts, Mussolini disbanded most of Italy’s constitutional and conventional safeguards against government autocracy. Elections were abolished. Free speech and free association disappeared, and the Fascist government dissolved opposition parties and unions. At the local level, appointed podestas replaced elected mayors and councils. Freemasonry was outlawed—a real blow to most non-Catholic anti-Fascists. A Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State, run by militia and army officers, was set up to try anti-Fascist “subversives”; it imprisoned or sent to exile on remote islands thousands of political opponents, including the Communist leader Antonio Gramsci, and it imposed 31 death penalties. Other opposition leaders, such as the Liberals Piero Gobetti and Giovanni Amendola, died at the hands of Fascist thugs. Severe controls were imposed on movement into and out of Italy. Although the repression was carried out essentially by old state institutions such as the police and the army and not by Fascist bodies, in 1927 Mussolini established the main information network of spies, the Organizzazione di Vigilanza Repressione dell’Antifascismo (Organization for the Vigilant Repression of Anti-Fascism; OVRA). This network extended abroad, where the OVRA organized assassinations of those hostile to the regime—such as the brothers Nello and Carlo Rosselli, anti-Fascist intellectuals, in France in 1937.