Matteo Millan's article is part of an important wave of scholarship that investigates the central role that violence played in Fascist governance throughout the long two decades of Benito Mussolini's rule.Footnote ¹ Whether at the level of street beatings, worker exploitation (including the use of forced labour) or abuses and mass death in a large network of Fascist concentration camps and confinement spaces (prisons, mental hospitals, penal colonies) that extended to Africa and the Balkans, it is only in the last decade that Italian Fascist violence has been taken seriously. I use this phrase with intent, to highlight the enduring impact of older historiographies that fostered a grave underestimation of Italian Fascist violence and minimised Italians’ agency and responsibility for such violence. Generated by nationals wishing to preserve the notion of Italians as brava gente (good people),Footnote ² German emigrés such as Hannah Arendt, who concluded that Italy was a ‘non-totalitarian or, at the most, semi-totalitarian’ state,Footnote ³ or a broad Anglo-American tradition of caricaturising Mussolini as a ‘sawdust Caesar’ and submissive follower of Hitler, such interpretations of Italian Fascism as a ‘lesser evil’ allowed its actual evil to be assumed but often not empirically documented.Footnote ⁴ It is worth recalling that for over a decade following the First World War it was Mussolini's rather than Hitler's regime that stood out as Soviet Russia's ‘enemy twin’, and that by the late 1920s Mussolini and his followers were using the term totalitarian as a means of advertising the distinctiveness and originality of their approach to governance.Footnote ⁵

It is this period that is Millan's main focus as he makes his argument that the squadrist movement had an impact that far exceeded its political utility as a vehicle for Mussolini's ascent to power. Born, like Fascism itself, out of the energies of the First World War, squadrism's revolutionary identity lay in its mission of bringing about creative destruction.Footnote ⁶ Domesticating its decentralised violence became a political as well as a public relations priority for a Fascist National Party (PNF) in transition to top-down governance and repression. The legislation of 1925–9 that established the dictatorship's disciplinary and policing apparatus coincided with the purges and internal exiles of many squadrists: both have traditionally been viewed as the victory of the state over the PNF. Millan takes issue with this overly neat schematisation and with the sharp division between Fascism as movement and Fascism as regime (a division most famously posited by Renzo De Felice). Even as Mussolini and his administrators and police declared squadrism to be an ‘anachronism’, they quietly populated the party bureaucracy with former squadrists – a bureaucracy so vast, by the 1930s that it constituted a state within a state, and was viewed as such by many ordinary Italians. From Bologna and Florence, respectively, 43% and 61% of the squadrists were assimilated into PNF offices, mostly in low-level positions, but every Minister of the Interior until the fall of the regime had a squadrist past, as did every Minister of Popular Culture, and even the head of the movie studio Cinecittà. ‘What took place between 1925 and 1929 was not the defeat of the party by the state, but a transition whereby the cultural and practical elements of squadrism were fully metabolised by the regime’, he concludes (000).Footnote ⁷

Among the merits of Millan's essay is his employment of under-utilized Ministry of Interior documents on the punishments meted out to former squadrists for the same behaviours that had helped to create the proper climate of male camaraderie and collective fear needed for the seizure of power. Drug use, homosexuality, brothel running – all practices common on the battlefield and its continuation on the streets of Italy in 1919–22 – were now criminalised in what Millan rightly interprets as a strategy of de-politicisation of those who could not be integrated into the regime. He brings out the sentiments of betrayal and bitterness among diehard first-hour Fascists who saw the practice of violence now in the hands of members of a state bureaucracy – informers, prison wards, the various policing forces – that had lost sight of the revolutionary ideal. Of course, such a bureaucracy was necessary to sustain the kind of capillary and everyday violence meant to demoralize and intimidate Italians. And many squadrists joined that security bureaucracy, too, or found a new home in another state organisation: the Militia, established by Mussolini in 1923 as an independent armed force.Footnote ⁸ Throughout the regime, the Militia's rhetoric and structure (squads formed its base units, with Legions uniting fifty or more squads) kept alive the Fascist credo of violence as regenerative. As the author notes, Militiamen were assigned to political confinement areas, where they beat and harassed not only anti-Fascists but rogue squadrists as well.

At times Millan seems to overstate the importance of squadrism. Given the complexity and range of Fascist policies and bureaucracies, it is hard to agree that squadrism was ‘a practice that contributed to the shaping the entire construction and organization of the dictatorship’ (000). Such an assessment has more validity at the level of ideology, political culture and social practice, as his article provides a pathway for further research in these areas. One would be in the realm of Fascist masculinity. Certainly, the figure of the squadrist heavily influenced ideals of Fascist manhood, entwining it with the performance of aggressive acts. Violence was exalted and displayed ‘as an expression of one's own personality as well as a fulfilment of an important social mission’ (000). Such an ethos also had traction among Italians too young to have participated in the March on Rome. Up to the mid 1930s, memoirs of former blackshirts appeared that fueled fantasies of squadrism as a space and time of unlimited liberties (random sexual encounters, gang-rapes, the ambiguous homosociality of military life, the annihilation of others) hardly imaginable to those growing up in a police state.Footnote ⁹

Another would be squadrists’ roles in the military campaigns that dominated Italy after 1935 and the symbolic importance of their participation. In this regard, as in so many other things, the Ethiopian War was a watershed: Fascism's first mass mobilisation, it allowed squadrists, under the umbrella of the Militia, to regroup on the battlefield, as Millan points out. Ethiopia was billed by the regime in its visual and print propaganda as a revolutionary and epic event and as a place where the squadrist spirit of masculine freedom and transgression could find new expression. The Ethiopian invasion was itself an outlaw enterprise, which caused Italy's expulsion from the League of Nations, and its battlegrounds ‘an experimental field of violence’ in which aerial bombing and chemical weapons were used as instruments of governance as well as conquest.Footnote ¹⁰ The Militia's contribution to the Ethiopian War was the subject of no less than eighteen official Istituto Luce documentaries and the blockbuster empire feature Luciano Serra, pilota (Goffredo Alessandrini, 1938), channelled the squadrist ethos in its story of an Italian emigrant who returns to Ethiopia under an assumed name to fight in the Militia. A hand-to-hand combat scene that culminated in a stabbing with a Militia-issued dagger and publicity that referenced the mythical aridity shock troops who were a nucleus of squadrism sent the message to those who wanted to hear it: Ethiopia, together with the Italian Empire, was the new frontier of Fascist violence, and the Militia, the equivalent of the Foreign Legion, a place that welcomed all regardless of their past, as long as they knew how to kill.Footnote ¹¹

Although more research is required in this area, the battlefields of the Second World War would seem to continue the pattern set in the Ethiopian campaign: the Militia as ‘an organized context within which [men] could experiment with camaraderie and collective violence’.Footnote ¹² Nicola Labanca points to similarities between the military tactics utilized in the colonies and in the Balkan territories of Fascist occupation: in Libya and Ethiopia, as in Greece and Yugoslavia, which included not only typical internments, executions and deportations, but a recourse to ‘abnormal’ practices (as Italian commanders in Yugoslavia euphemistically referred to them) in which the Militia was heavily involved.Footnote ¹³

My own preliminary research in United Nations War Crimes documents indicates that Militia battalions were responsible for some of the worst abuses, which replicate practices of violence initiated twenty years earlier – the forced ingestion of castor oil, beatings with clubs, and burning and sacking of public and private buildings – and recreate the collective ecstasy and transgression that marked squadrist culture, as when sacking and raping expeditions went on for several days, fuelled by cocaine and drink.Footnote ¹⁴ Although these behaviours formed part of the arsenal of violence proper to the practice of war in general, as Joanna Bourke and others have so aptly shown, the particular culture of war that pervaded the Militia had its conscious roots in ‘the spirit of 1919’ and the idea of the Second World War as a last chance to return to Fascism's mythical pure origins. That promise would be briefly fulfilled, for some, during the Republic of Salò (1943–5), a biennium that set the parameters for public memory of the entire Fascist period. By the end of the war, the Italian press and purge bodies used the terms collaborator and resister to refer to the positions Italians took during the Salò Republic, rather than to their actions during the preceding twenty-one years of Mussolini's rule.Footnote ¹⁵ Such distinctions became accepted in the early scholarship on Italian fascism, facilitating a kind of quarantining of evil as proper to the exceptional and foreign-tinged ‘Nazifascism’ of Salò. Millan's research on the continuing influence of squadrism during the dictatorship undoes a similar blackboxing of the blackshirts. Not only was the fabric of squadrist practices and ideologies ‘absorbed into that of the state’, as he concludes (000), but for ordinary Italians the shared experiences of personal and public humiliation and destruction that came out of the squadrist years were a step in a collective habituation to the violence that would continue throughout the two decades of the regime.