Rather surprisingly, Mussolini's blackshirts (the squadristi) have never really received the attention accorded to Hitler's paramilitary groups.Footnote ¹ It is interesting, therefore, to read an article that seeks to remedy this situation. Millan argues that the traditional view of squadrismo as important before the March on Rome but of less relevance in later years – indeed, as something of a liability – is too simplistic and needs revision. He sees the influence of squadrismo as permeating the regime throughout its existence and suggests that historians have been too quick in seeing the death of squadrismo in the supposed ‘subordination’ of the Fascist Party to the state in the years immediately following 1925.

Millan asserts that, despite institutional conflicts and disciplinary actions against many unruly blackshirts, ‘the cultural and ideological fabric of squadrismo’ was ‘absorbed into that of the state’ (000, 000) in the course of the ventennio, becoming an integral part of Fascism by the second half of the 1930s and pushing the regime in the direction of an increased radicalisation. He argues that, if ‘down’ after 1925, therefore, the blackshirts were never quite ‘out’ and managed to retain sufficient influence to condition the regime in many important ways, returning to a position of some prominence after the conquest of Empire and the intervention in the Spanish Civil War. This reappearance, he suggests, was really no more than an expression of the fact that Mussolini, despite speeches to the contrary, had aimed more to discipline than to eliminate squadrismo, which remained useful to him.

In the main this reading of events can be readily conceded, although one or two qualifications are perhaps in order. While it is undoubtedly correct to say that the threat of violence was essential for Fascist maintenance of power after 1925, it seems slightly excessive to argue that the persistence of squadrismo in various forms after 1925–6 was an indication that the PNF had not been subordinated to the state. In that period Mussolini's battle (and that of Turati) was less with the remnants of the provincial action squads – the hooligans who still refused to pay their restaurant bills – than with the politically serious intransigents, whose programme of a radical fascistisation of the state threatened moderate equilibria. Former squadristi and intransigents often overlapped, but they were not always the same people, as sometimes suggested here; for example, Italo Balbo, after all the architect of provincial squadrismo in 1921–2, was anything but intransigent in his political attitudes and the same is true of many other leading Fascist figures. What happened in 1925–6 was the defeat of the intransigent wing of the party, clearly signalled with the exclusion of Farinacci; the continuing undercurrent of blackshirt violence did not make this defeat any less real. The state did reaffirm its authority, as made abundantly clear in Mussolini's orders to the prefects in 1927 and 1929 and in the indignant reaction of many local Fascist leaders to these circulars.

Where Millan is certainly right is in identifying the continued existence of a problem of the ex-squadristi throughout the whole of the ventennio – an under-researched problem – and in recognising the space this gave to violence. The blackshirts were a thorn in the side of many provincial administrations, not least because they had become used to being above the law and this presumption of immunity encouraged violent solutions to problems. Political violence had, of course, been theorised as the agent of ‘purification’ of the nation and many squadristi had a continuing difficulty in distinguishing between national and personal interest in their pursuit of the Fascist lifestyle. Millan sees pressures from the blackshirts as leading, indirectly, to the institutionalisation of ‘violence and terror as a part of everyday life’(000) through the Consolidated Public Safety Act of 1926, passed ‘largely thanks to squadrismo’ (000). This reaffirmation of the role of violence in Fascist domination throughout the regime is very welcome, as is the reminder that this violence was often gratuitious and random in its operation (although something more might have been said about the different types of violence utilised during the regime). And if ‘terror’ is perhaps a bit too strong a description, when compared with the sentiments generated by the Gestapo among certain groups in Germany, it is a useful antidote to the idea that violence disappeared after 1922 and that the Italian regime represented nothing more than Fascism with a friendly face. Violence may have been less systematic after 1922 but it was implicit in the regime throughout, as so many documents in the state archives make evident – and Millan does well to stress this point. Not all of it was former blackshirt violence, of course, and it would be wrong to impute to the remnants of squadrismo all the later violence of the regime. If the methods of squadrismo did undoubtedly permeate the Fascist movement, this was not because of what happened after 1925–6 with the refusal of many blackshirts to behave; rather it was a legacy of the first years of Fascism – those before the March on Rome. As widely recognised, the imprinting Fascism received from provincial squadrismo in 1921–2 never disappeared in subsequent years. To speak of blackshirt methods being ‘metabolised’ (000) into Fascism between 1925 and 1929 is to slightly post-date something that had happened much earlier, therefore, even if, quite correctly, Millan notes the increasing visibility of these methods in the later 1930s with the beginnings of the ‘totalitarian phase’.

By arguing that the influence of the blackshirts varied over the years but never really ceased to exert a powerful influence over the progress of the regime, Millan resists Renzo De Felice's distinction between ‘movement’ and ‘regime’Footnote ², arguing for a symbiosis between the two and insisting that, ‘corrected’ and ‘disciplined’, the impulse that squadrismo represented was absorbed into the mainstream of the regime during the 1930s, with the courageous blackshirt becoming the archetype of New Fascist Man. There is much to support this thesis, but the vision of a squadrismo eventually incorporated and, in a sense, finally triumphant may be just a little too neat. This is in part because it assumes a unity to squadrismo which in a vast number of provincial centres never existed and in part because, as a result, it fails to take account of the enormous damage done by many ex-squadristi to the functioning of the regime in its second decade. The damage was not just that of counter-productive hooliganism and petty criminality, masquerading as the authentic expression of Fascism, although that certainly existed, as Millan analyses very well. This could be controlled and, again, Millan is right to spend time on demonstrating the mechanisms used to discipline the unruly. The damage was linked much more to the part played in the provincial context by those former blackshirts who did not always get to the point of meriting confino but who nonetheless resisted discipline. Much of the documentation coming from the provincial federations in the 1930s points to the fact that the disruption caused by discontented (and often unemployed) blackshirts served to weaken the federations, often to the point of creating a virtual paralysis. The discontent was generated less by any high-minded ideological commitments than by more straightforward competition for position within the local community. The squadristi who had ‘made the revolution’ (000) demanded to be rewarded – and they demanded to be rewarded as blackshirts because this was the essential element of their identity. What was at stake was less the use of violence or the justification of the methods of squadrismo (although the ‘myth’ of squadrismo was useful to their ends) than personal interest and opportunity – interest no doubt heightened after 1932 by hearing the slogan ‘make way for the young’ when the old had not yet been fixed up. But, as prefects frequently found out when they attempted to buy off one group of blackshirts with jobs within the municipal administration, such actions only increased further the acrimony of a rival groups. These problems of internal divisions were never resolved and they did enormous damage to the party, creating hostilities and turning many people away from any kind of active collaboration with the regime. Moreover, the blackshirts’ perpetual appeals to Mussolini himself, over and above the federale or the prefect, short-circuited the structures of authority and created tensions. Indeed, no doubt for largely instrumental reasons, the former blackshirts were often among the most severe critics of the provincial party machine, denouncing, in the name of the ‘first Fascism’, the evident corruption and inefficiency of the local PNF and seriously denting its legitimacy among the population. In this sense it may be more useful to talk about a disjunction between many aspects of provincial Fascism and the Fascism of the centre, rather than that presumed to exist between a radical and a moderate Fascism.

These observations do nothing to detract from Millan's main point, which is that the role of violence within the regime has been underplayed in most recent assessments of the functioning of the regime. My aim is simply to suggest that the perpetrators of violence and, in particular, the ‘old guard’ of former squadristi, often played a double role, useful to the regime in some ways, as suggested by Millan, but also extremely damaging in others. Disciplining them did not remove the problem. As I have argued at greater length elsewhere, the failure of Fascism owed much to its alienation of the population at the provincial level and here continued violence and persistent political infighting, both of which involved the former blackshirts (but not only these), played a very large part in impeding any permanent stabilisation in many provincial federations.Footnote ³