I. ‘Hostile to all forms of authority’?

‘The violent ones? I need them as well!’Footnote ¹ Benito Mussolini said this to a senator, Ettore Conti, the day after the elections of 6 April 1924. Who were these violent ones? It became clear a few weeks later, when Giacomo Matteotti was brutally murdered by a gang of ex-squadristi.

Matteotti's murder and the outrages committed by blackshirt ‘action squads’ caused considerable embarrassment to Mussolini and the National Fascist Party (the PNF), but the Duce's words to Conti show his awareness that squadrista violence was an essential prop to his personal power and to Fascism itself. They also point to a much more complex historical question: how important was the paramilitary component inside political movements that resorted largely to political violence? The very considerable degree of autonomy that the paramilitaries seem to have enjoyed within Fascist movements could prove a double-edged weapon, however: it was indispensable in the struggle to gain power, but dangerously de-stabilising once power had been gained. The practice of violence is not without its long-term consequences.

However aware of its usefulness, many Fascists considered that violence was no more than a tool for attaining a political end – a temporary one at that, and one not to be over-used. In 1921 Mussolini talked in terms of ‘surgical' or ‘gentlemanly’ violence and condemned those who saw it as ‘a school, a system or, worse still, an aesthetic’.Footnote ² This scarcely squares with the habitus of squadristi: their personalities, their mindset and their social practice had all been forged through violence. Squadristi and Fascist paramilitaries in general, saw violence not simply as an instrument in the political struggle but as a lynch pin of their individual and group identity.Footnote ³ This means that squadrismo, as a lifestyle and a political practice, could not be eliminated simply by invoking law and order or administrative discipline or the need to adapt to the political needs of the moment. Both during the struggle for power and during the period of consolidation, ‘the taming of the revolution’ (to borrow a phrase from George Mosse) was one of the biggest challenges facing the Fascist movements.Footnote ⁴

Once one has set one's feet on the path of violence it is hard to get off it again. This was a problem not only for the Italian Fascists, but for many other European fascist movements as well. In Hungary in the late 1930s, Admiral Miklós Horthy was forced to invoke Law III, passed in 1921 for use against subversives, in order to maintain control over the Arrow Cross paramilitaries led by Ferenc Szálasi.Footnote ⁵

Even in a reasonably stable democracy like France, paramilitary organisations were an established and prominent feature of political action. The Croix de Feu, for example, defined itself essentially through violence and used it as a political tool.Footnote ⁶ However, incessant street fighting and displays of armed force seriously undermined the Croix de Feu's image as a disciplined and united organisation. When the Croix de Feu mutated into the Parti Social Français (PSF), its leader, François de La Roque, hoped to win over moderates who feared that the Croix's paramilitary demonstrations might be the prelude to a violent seizure of power.Footnote ⁷ In point of fact, the emergence of the PSF was not enough to stem the outrages of its most violent militants and this proved a serious impediment to the party's electoral strategy, at least in the early stages.Footnote ⁸

Even the most successful fascist movements had to grapple with such dynamics. The most notorious example is the ‘Night of the Long Knives’, when Hitler ordered the systematic extirpation of the leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA) and the murder of its commander, Ernst Röhm.Footnote ⁹

Hitler's speech in the Reichstag the day after the purge encapsulates the trajectory of paramilitary violence. The SA, he said, was full of ‘permanent revolutionaries . . . [who had] completely lost touch with the human social order’ and turned into ‘moral degenerates’. The only way to get rid of these ‘pathological enemies of the State . . . and of all authority’ was to kill them.Footnote ¹⁰ The opposition between authority and militarism could scarcely be put more starkly and the solution was equally drastic. What Hitler was condemning, however, was not the intensity of SA violence but its autonomy, its refusal to serve the needs of the Reich.

In this article I shall show how Italian Fascism successfully resolved the same contradictions in its own strategy for gaining power. I shall be using documents that are seldom consulted: the personal files of squadristi sent into ‘political confinement’ (confino di polizia).Footnote ¹¹

In sections II–III I shall examine the contradictions between Fascism's use of and condemnation of squadrismo. Even while leading figures in the PNF, and Mussolini himself, urged the squadristi to renounce violence, that same violence was proving very useful in entrenching Fascist power in the great cities of northern Italy. In 1925–6 the condemnation of squadrismo became much more strident and the previous ‘merits’ of the blackshirts were abruptly forgotten; many of them were sent into internal exile as ordinary criminals or dangerous anti-Fascists. In Sections IV–V I shall analyse the accusations against squadristi, and their defences, to reveal the varied political cultures that dwelt beneath the Fascist umbrella. In the final section I shall show that the condemnation was, despite appearances, only skin deep: internal political confinement was used not to repress squadrismo but to discipline it. By examining the mechanics of confinement I shall reveal not only the techniques of power used by the Fascist state, but also the relationship between individual histories and the larger dynamic of Fascist politics.

By exploring squadrismo, therefore, I hope to throw some light on a central problem in the historiography of Fascism.

There can be no doubt that the years between the March on Rome and 1926 were a decisive period within the ventennio, the two decades of Fascist supremacy. This period is traditionally interpreted as an internal power struggle between two currents of Fascism: on the one hand, government Fascism as incarnate in Mussolini and the moderates, anxious not to scare off their allies and determined to suppress all forms of illegal action, including squadrismo; on the other, local Fascism in the person of ex-squadristi leaders, intolerant of all restraint and determined to use violence to maintain their own power. It is generally assumed that these two Fascisms had very different political programmes and perspectives on the movement's future – differences made irreconcilable by the assumption of government after the March. If Mussolini was to maintain his grip on power for the ‘duration’, one of his most urgent and immediate tasks was to put a final stop to squadrismo and its destabilising influences. According to this interpretation, the formation of the Milizia, the progressive bureaucratisation of the Fascist Party and the strengthening of the position and powers of the prefects were all aimed at subordinating the party to the state. The exceptional legislation of 1925–7 is therefore seen as the culmination of the process whereby the party was neutered.Footnote ¹²

More recently, close study of the party machine and of local conditions, individual biographies and cultural impacts, has made it possible to draw a clearer picture of the relationship between state and party. Attempts to have been made to reconstruct, more precisely, the party's contribution to the fascistisation of Italian society. Research has also revealed the shifting political mechanisms within the overall progress towards totalitarianism.Footnote ¹³

As I shall attempt to show in this article, the alleged breach between state and party was much more superficial than is usually thought. There has been a tendency to stress the progressive elimination of radicalism and underestimate the influence of what Renzo De Felice has called ‘Fascism-as-movement’, that is, the most intransigent and violent manifestation of Fascism.

What took place between 1925 and 1929 was not the defeat of the party by the state, but a transition whereby the culture and practices of squadrismo were fully metabolised by the regime.Footnote ¹⁴ It is no paradox to see squadrismo as an adumbration of the ‘totalitarian nature of Fascism’.Footnote ¹⁵

From 1926 onwards the party became steadily more hierarchical, largely as a consequence of Mussolini's own decisions. The same period saw an ever more rapid fascistisation of the state. State and party had different tasks and different functions, and the rivalry among the centres of power was bitter and intense; however, the struggles were purely internal, and limited to a political context that was unequivocally Fascist. In a regime which recognised only one party – the Fascist Party – and had placed most of the key sources of power in the hands of men who derived their political legitimacy from their status as ‘protagonists of the Fascist revolution’, it makes little sense to argue in terms of the party's subordination to the state. Indeed, the ‘institutionalisation’ of dictatorship and totalitarianism was mainly due to the party itself.Footnote ¹⁶

By tracking the process whereby squadrismo was brought to heel, this article will endeavour to show how far the attitudes and practices forged by squadrista militancy contributed to the construction of the regime, and to demonstrate that squadrismo was not a casualty of the political evolution of Fascism, but one of its essential characteristics.

II. The usefulness of squadrismo

On 23 March 1919, in Milan, Benito Mussolini inaugurated the Fasci di Combattimento (virtually untranslatable, but can be rendered as ‘Combat Leagues’). The Fascist movement had a difficult birth and its political importance was initially limited, although it soon drew attention to itself by some ominous acts of violence.Footnote ¹⁷ The movement grew exponentially from 1920 onwards, with Fasci di Combattimento springing up all over central and northern Italy. In rural areas especially, they contributed decisively to the suppression of all other political and trade union organisations, particularly those affiliated to the Socialist Party and, to a lesser extent, the Popular Party (Partito Popolare). Thousands of squadristi formed ‘action squads’ and spread terror through the countryside, destroying the premises of ‘subversive’ parties, occupying whole towns, beating up and humiliating political opponents. This squadrista violence profoundly undermined the institutions of Italian governments, which proved wholly incapable of maintaining law and order, especially as it was not uncommon for the police, and even some prefects, to side openly with the blackshirts.

The confrontations became so violent that some scholars have seen them as an outright civil war. In one comparatively short interval, between November 1918 and June 1921, 986 people were killed in this political violence.Footnote ¹⁸

Mussolini's strategy for the seizure of power culminated on 28 October 1922, when thousands of squadristi marched on Rome, determined to take over the government lock, stock and barrel. King Victor Emmanuel III made a virtue of necessity by appointing Mussolini to lead the new administration; but this did not check the squadrista killings that were going on all over Italy.Footnote ¹⁹ For thousands of blackshirts, participation in squadrista militancy from 1920 to 1922 was the ultimate formative experience – politically, mentally and strategically.

In the aftermath of the March on Rome, Mussolini's attitude to squadrista violence was ambivalent. On the one hand, he promised a rapid demobilisation; on the other, in his inauguration speech to the Chamber of Deputies he bluntly threatened to put his faithful blackshirts back on the streets if necessary. Collectively, the squadristi were insubordinate and violent, but they were Fascism's, and the Duce's, indispensable iron fist. On 10 November 1922 Agostino Lanzillo wrote in Il Popolo d'Italia, the daily paper founded by Mussolini himself, that ‘the squadristi have not yet outlived their usefulness, because Mussolini cannot save Italy without them’.Footnote ²⁰

The creation of the Voluntary Militia for National Security (Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale, MVSN), ostensibly to bring the old action squads to heel, did not put an end to squadrismo.Footnote ²¹ In the province of Massa-Carrara, for example, the Disperata squad simply went on operating under the orders of Renato Ricci, beating up large numbers of socialists and communists, and even members of conservative parties. In Florence, ex-Disperata men who had enrolled in the 92nd Legion of the MVSN, commanded by ‘consul' Tullio Tamburini, continued to use squadristi methods and tactics, repeatedly breaking the law with total impunity. Other squads, like the Vola in Genoa, disguised themselves as sporting teams and continued to wield their big sticks. Still others transformed themselves into neighbourhood party circles, but retained the same modus operandi, as happened in Milan.

Mussolini and the PNF always used, or threatened, violence as a means to an end: both the survival of the squads and the creation of the Militia were crucial to a strategy of retaining power by eliminating all forms of pluralism.Footnote ²²

The political value of squadrista violence was carefully calculated. The squadristi acted under orders and were protected by local leaders (also known as Ras, the title given to Abyssinian headmen). In places where opposition and socialism were still strong, as in the great industrial cities of the north, squadrismo was an instrument of ‘permanent intimidation.Footnote ²³ But squadrista violence also played an important role in the party's internal struggles. The Ras’ continual violence and provocation kept tension levels high, and in this way they justified their arbitrary power and unleashed yet more violence, either on the anti-Fascist opposition or on their enemies within the party.

In Milan, for example, Mario Giampaoli's squads were responsible for the kidnap and torture of former trade union secretary Ulisse Brigatti, whose mangled body was then dumped in a remote rural area. Milan's squadristi also practised bribery and extortion at the expense of tradesmen and shopkeepers; any who refused to pay were beaten up. Some of the violence was completely gratuitous. A slight accident with a car was enough to earn a savage beating for one inoffensive civilian, ‘out of sheer brutal malignity’.Footnote ²⁴ In Turin, any citizen or shopkeeper who forgot to tear out the date 1 May from the calendar might be belaboured with stick or cudgel. The same sort of thing happened in Genoa, Bologna, Florence and other cities in northern and central Italy.

Gratuitous, even commonplace, as such violence was, it enabled the squadristi to ‘throw their weight about and strike fear into everybody’.Footnote ²⁵ The fact that the squads enjoyed the protection of national and local leaders legitimised their violence and convinced them that they could do as they liked, while the population as a whole was frankly terrified. This violence had a profound effect on Italian society: not only on those who practised it, but also on those who suffered or witnessed it: squadrismo generated a ‘collective habituation to violence’ which conditioned ‘Italians’ responses’ to the tyrannical, repressive and racist policies of the Fascist Regime.Footnote ²⁶

This banalisation of violence turned out to be an excellent means of controlling and prevent dissent, the best possible way to demonstrate that no form of opposition was possible and so prepare the ground for dictatorship, consensus and the ‘new Fascist order’.Footnote ²⁷ Paradoxically, however, even as squadrismo was underwriting the new regime, it was simultaneously writing its own death warrant.Footnote ²⁸

The road to centralised party control was opened under the aegis of Roberto Farinacci, PNF Secretary from 1925 to 1926, who openly favoured the squadristi. From 1920 Farinacci was the most authoritative radical voice in the party. He could himself be seen as the archetype of the brutally determined squadrista; politically, he equated the consolidation of the party with outspoken radicalism. His successor Augusto Turati, sometime Ras in Brescia, guided the party from 1926 to 1930 with a view to strengthening the PNF and making it integral to, but not passively subordinate to, institutionalised Fascism.Footnote ²⁹ To this end, Turati embarked on a series of large-scale purges designed to undermine the power bases of local Ras. Over four years some 100,000 members were ejected, many of them squadristi.Footnote ³⁰

Local ‘Fascisms’ were islets of autonomy: their strong provincial roots, going back to the beginnings of the movement, seriously impeded the centralising efforts of the government and the PNF leadership. The Ras knew very well that their position in the country depended on control of their own territories; without squadrismo they might be in serious danger of losing all that they had gained.

The period from 1925 to 1926 was crucial for the PNF. The party was now a recognised institution and seemed fated to become a vessel for propaganda and a means of channelling loyalty towards central government and, in particular, the Duce. But if that is what it became, there can be no doubt that it was squadrista violence that, at least to an extent, made it possible.

There were three attempts on Mussolini's life between April and October 1926; every time he escaped unhurt.Footnote ³¹ The attacks, which caused a public outcry, were used as a pretext for radically tightening the apparatus of repression: instead of being managed locally by the squadristi, it was taken over by the state.Footnote ³² The passing of the Consolidated Public Safety Act (Testo Unico di Pubblica Sicurezza) was a key stage in this process.

III. The Consolidated Public Safety Act

On 31 October 1926, a young man named Anteo Zamboni fired a pistol at Mussolini as his car drove between ranks of spectators in Bologna's main street. The bullet missed its target by a hair's breadth, but within seconds a mob of Fascists had seized Zamboni and lynched him on the spot. A few hours later, Italy was swept by a wave of Fascist reprisals. There was street fighting in Genoa, in course of which Elia Bernardini, a carabiniere, was killed by the squadrista Vittorio Nizzola. In Naples, a gang of blackshirts burst into the home of the philosopher Benedetto Croce and did serious damage to the library; the premises of Catholic organisations in the Veneto were wrecked.Footnote ³³ Despite pleas for calm by party leaders, similar scenes were enacted all over Italy.

Barely five days after the attempt in Bologna the Minister for the Interior, Luigi Federzoni and the Keeper of the Seals, Alfredo Rocco, tabled before the Council of Ministers a series of ‘administrative’ regulations intended to put an end to subversive violence while simultaneously reining back the worst excesses of the Fascists. The very next day, Federzoni's proposals were included in the new Consolidated Public Safety Act, which governed all aspects of law and order. Although it was a presented as an emergency measure, the Act had actually been in the governmental pipeline for some time.Footnote ³⁴ It was a key stage in the organisation of repression in the Fascist police state.Footnote ³⁵

All parties, associations and organisations ‘taking action against the regime’ were dissolved and their publications suppressed and internal political confinement (confino di polizia) was instituted. Anyone even suspected of plotting against the state could be required to spend between one and five years (extendable ad libitum) in some godforsaken village in southern Italy, or in a penal colony on one of the islands, in insanitary accommodation, virtually cut off from the outside world and constantly harassed by supervisors. Internal confinement was an essentially administrative process: it was independent of the criminal law and acknowledged no legal safeguards or burden of proof. No crime was necessary before sentence was passed: it was enough if the victim was suspected of meditating an act against the state. The procedure was administered by provincial commissions comprising the prefect, the provincial chief of police (questore), the local commander of carabinieri and an MSVN official. By statute, these commissions had the widest discretion and autonomy: they were explicitly exempted from the rule of law.Footnote ³⁶ On 8 November the Chief of Police, Arturo Bocchini, explained in a circular sent to all prefects that the authorities and agencies responsible for public safety were now entirely independent of the judicial system, and could impose penalties and deprive citizens of their liberty whenever they detected a threat to ‘the undisturbed and peaceful existence of the positive social and economic systems that are the essence of the regime’.Footnote ³⁷

The annihilation of freedoms by this new law profoundly changed the Italian legal order and drastically modified the liberties and social rights of Italians. Ostensibly in defence of the state, the elimination of opposition was formalised as one of the principal functions of that state. It marked another step towards identifying Fascism with both the state and the nation, and enshrined that process in law.

Accused of failing to prevent attacks on the Duce, Federzoni resigned and acknowledged all the ‘objective difficulties’ he had encountered during his term of office, particularly that of resolving the contradiction between safeguarding the authority of the state and respecting the autonomy of revolutionary Fascism.Footnote ³⁸ Extremists considered that the spate of attacks on the Duce showed that normal police measures were ineffective. In point of fact, the measures taken to defend the state against subversion also created the conditions for bringing the PNF to heel once and for all. Once the state and the police had the right tools for combatting anti-Fascism and could exercise pervasive, ‘institutionalised' intimidation, there was no further need for squadrista repression.Footnote ³⁹ A few weeks later, in a circular to prefects on 5 January 1927, the Duce set the idea in stone: ‘now that the state is equipped with all necessary means of prevention and repression’, ‘squadrismo’ had become an ‘anachronism’.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Consolidated Public Safety Act was the starting point for a process of ‘institutionalising’ violence and terror as part of everyday life.Footnote ⁴¹ Nevertheless, if the state was in a position to pass new measures to suppress liberty and strangle the rule of law, it was largely thanks to squadrismo. The special legislation did no more than ‘give legal backing to de facto powers’ – powers created by squadrista force and long-term squadrista action, an inheritance now appropriated and consummated by the state.Footnote ⁴²

These widespread purges completely destroyed the power networks governing Fascism in some of Italy's chief cities. In Genoa, Milan, Bologna and Turin especially, the former local leaders were utterly expelled from Fascist political life and their faithful followers were exiled to political confinement colonies.Footnote ⁴³ This may not have ended the power of local interests or the party's internal struggles, but it did radically re-shape squadrismo as an instrument of political struggle.

For the first time, verbal condemnation and active repression were acting in the same direction. Did it really mean that squadrismo's day was done? By analysing the personal files of confined squadristi it is possible to reconstruct the violent methods of territorial control used after the March, distil some notion of squadrista culture and identity and reveal the disciplinary mechanisms used against former blackshirts. Appearances notwithstanding and whatever Mussolini himself might say, we shall see that squadrismo was by no means an ‘anachronism’.

IV. The criminalisation of squadrismo

Although squadrista activities were more or less illegal, before the passing of the Consolidated Act they had possessed a certain political legitimacy – the legitimacy that distinguishes politically inspired violence from pure criminality.Footnote ⁴⁴ It was because squadrismo had this political legitimacy that the blackshirts’ illegal acts had rarely encountered any criticism from local police chiefs or prefects. Now, all of a sudden, the prefects realised that their cities were heaving with criminals and delinquents dressed in black shirts.Footnote ⁴⁵ This does not mean that many of the accusations made against squadristi were untrue; but until very recently they had been generally tolerated and considered justified. The change in the political environment typified by the passing of the Consolidated Act brought with it a change in society's attitude to squadrismo.

The Provincial Commissions brought two main accusations against the squadristi: they had not realised that the time for violence was over and they were immoral and depraved.Footnote ⁴⁶ Those who were sent into internal confinement were accused of being addicted to violence and incapable of understanding ‘true’ squadrismo – which, said the provincial police chiefs (questori) and prefects, was supposed to be disciplined, gentlemanly, aristocratic and surgical. However, the real squadrismo had never been like that, as the police chiefs and prefects knew very well.

Their reports represented the March on Rome as a turning point. Before that, blackshirt violence ‘was justified if criminal activity by subversives was disturbing the peaceful evolution of national life, [but] there was no such justification once Fascism had become established'.Footnote ⁴⁷ Many squadristi had turned out to be devoid of the ‘merits’ that they had acquired during the revolutionary era, and had continued to act violently and arrogantly to the detriment of ordinary people, and even of Fascism itself. Squadristi condemned to political confinement had always tried to disguise their ‘hooliganism as something conducive to the good of Fascism, although their actions actually damaged the good name of the party’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In police eyes these activities were completely anti-Fascist: while ‘thanks to Fascism, the Nation had regained the law and order so necessary to civil life’, squadristi seemed incapable of understanding ‘that the time of mindless violence is over’.Footnote ⁴⁹Squadrista violence in the old, heroic age might be considered ‘necessary’ and ‘conducive to National aims’; such violence after the March was ‘useless and anachronistic’.Footnote ⁵⁰

Many prefects and police chiefs went further than this, assuming that ‘the merits of squadrismo’, acquired in the earlier phase, were bogus: a record of violence became evidence of an intrinsically corrupted nature. ‘Once the bloody struggle was over, once power had been gained, there was no need for day-to-day violence’, and at that point there emerged the ‘moral depravity’ characteristic of so many old squadristi. It made no difference that they had been ‘serving soldiers always eager to take part in the riskiest exploits’. Once the ‘state of emergency’ was over and there was no further need to fight subversives, squadristi thought that ‘they could do what they liked' and used their ‘political antecedents as a safe-conduct’.Footnote ⁵¹ In view of their merits, squadristi believed themselves to be untouchable and outside the law. Such interpretations were obviously tendentious, but there was a grain of truth in them. After the March, many squadristi did indeed capitalise on their own past, using it in various ways as a strategy and as cultural baggage.Footnote ⁵²

If the blackshirts thought that the past justified the future, the provincial commissions for the confino thought the opposite: that their actions before the March were no more than an adumbration of the moral depravity they were subsequently to exhibit. The blackshirts did not understand that the time of violence was over; they refused to obey the regime because they were ‘displaced', ‘immoral', ‘born criminals’.

The second recurrent accusation against the squadristi was that they were depraved and perverted. They were to be judged not so much on what they had done, as for being a danger to society – at least in the opinion of adherents of the school of positivist legal thinking headed by Cesare Lombroso and Enrico Ferri.Footnote ⁵³ The aim was to ‘show how the individual already resembles his crime before he has committed it’.Footnote ⁵⁴

A great many accusations related to sex. Squadristi were accused of being sexually promiscuous, seducing married women, frequenting ‘ladies of ill fame’ or even running brothels.Footnote ⁵⁵ A ‘dissolute’ squadrista whose life had been ‘principally dedicated to gambling and women’ had ‘neglected his duties as a husband and father’ and could not, of course, be described as a good Italian, much less a good Fascist.Footnote ⁵⁶ Others were accused of such ‘unspeakable acts’ as paedophilia and homosexuality. To avoid scandal it was necessary to confine ‘these really dangerous, habitual criminals’ who were ‘as corrupt as they could be’.Footnote ⁵⁷

Other squadristi were accused of drug addiction and (of course) dealing.Footnote ⁵⁸ Still others devoted their lives to ‘idleness and drink’, which they got for nothing by ‘flaunting their squadrista past’ or threatening landlords and customers. Another recurrent accusation was that the squadrista was capable ‘of anything, particularly avoiding work and having a good time’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Politically speaking, these interpretations led to a de-politicisation of squadrismo, while concealing a very extensive network of mutual support and complicity between Fascism at national and at local level.Footnote ⁶⁰

The cultural implications were equally significant. In all probability the accusations levelled against squadristi had some foundation in fact. It is interesting, however, that such behaviour had not previously been proclaimed either illegal or morally reprehensible; it was simply an ingredient of masculine solidarity within the squadrista community. Brothels, carousing, homosexuality, punitive expeditions were all part of the individual and collective identity of the blackshirts.Footnote ⁶¹

Discipline and political order could not be restored without normalising sexual relationships and eliminating all forms of immorality, which was now both a crime and a political offence.Footnote ⁶² The ‘new Fascist man’ must combine the intransigence, strength and courage of the squadrista with the discipline and rectitude of an upright family man. It was no coincidence that this new conformity was imposed alongside a campaign to increase the birth rate.Footnote ⁶³ When taming revolution as when remodelling and re-educating the population (according to the projects of Human Reclamation that the regime initiated in the late 1920s), the Fascism needed to discipline the virility of the squadrista. What was allowed to happen inside Italy, however, was quite different from what could happen elsewhere: wherever violence was unconstrained – in the colonies, in war, in the campaign for racial purity – the squadrista inclination towards sexual and moral transgression was not only legitimised, but encouraged as a means of oppression and domination.Footnote ⁶⁴

All this marks the Consolidated Act and the new ‘ultra-Fascist’ legislation as a political, as well as a cultural, watershed which profoundly changed the paradigm of ‘masculine hegemony’.Footnote ⁶⁵ In this context, reducing the blackshirts to the level of criminals and perverts helped to de-politicise, and ultimately criminalise, squadrismo itself.Footnote ⁶⁶

V. The (self) justification of squadrismo

The immediate cause of the clash between police authorities and squadristi was contemporary politics, but everything depended on interpretations of the past. As we have seen, prefects and local police chiefs considered that the need for violence in the pre-March phase had temporarily masked the intrinsic corruption in the minds of men who were still spoiling for a fight. The squadristi answered this argument by invoking the past as they saw it: not just the past of individuals, but the entire myth of squadrismo of which each individual's story was a part.

Accused of being bogus Fascists, the squadristi proudly evoked their own past. Very many of them described themselves as ‘Fascists from the outset’, and boasted of having taken part in ‘all the conflicts and riskiest endeavours’. They had suffered serious injuries; they had devoted a large measure of their personal resources to finance blackshirt action. Having ‘deserved so well' of Fascism, they surely deserved leniency whatever their offences. Hence they took care to emphasise that they had acted in good faith and that their violence was intrinsically moral. They represented themselves as young men who had been swept away by the ‘underlying idealism and morality of Fascism and the greatness of its Founder and Leader’, by the ‘sacred passion of squadrismo’.

Even those squadristi who admitted to having acted wrongfully maintained that they had always done so out excessive zeal for Fascism. The ‘boldness, perhaps the rashness, the generosity . . . and youthful impulsiveness’ of their actions bore witness to their dedicated patriotism, which was so great that they were ‘happy to risk life and freedom to ensure the triumph of the Idea’.Footnote ⁶⁷ At most, they could be accused of ‘believing that the end justifies the means . . . owing to their excessive attachment to the Fascist Party’. They could not understand why they could possibly be blamed for fighting for Fascism and its Duce.Footnote ⁶⁸ Their past life, seen in these terms, was ‘too solid, too pure to be stained with . . . appalling calumnies’; indeed their past life was the best proof that their rightful place was among the purest and most genuine of Fascists.Footnote ⁶⁹

The squadristi were well aware of the fundamental hypocrisy underlying the accusations against them: their violence had been approved at the highest levels of the party. They themselves were not politicians, but ‘merely’ squadristi. They had simply carried out the orders of local politicians, who had had ‘no complaints’ when they beat up anti-Fascists or ordinary people in order to ‘change their outlook on Fascism’.Footnote ⁷⁰

This was obviously intended to defend the squadristi and shift the blame on to local leaders. However, when blackshirts proudly vindicated their own violence they were scorning the most elementary defensive tactics, and this only made their position worse. Typical is a letter written by Leopoldo Maurelli, one of Milan's most active and violent squadristi working for the local party secretary, Mario Giampaoli: ‘What were we accused of? The accusation against me is simple and very much to my credit! Returning from Bologna after the attack on Your Excellency in October 1926, still full of grief and indignation, I thrashed the ex-secretary of the Milan trade unions, a certain Brigatti, well known for his obstinate subversive propaganda’.Footnote ⁷¹ Some actually boasted that they had been prosecuted ‘dozens of times’ for participating in punitive expeditions or of having thrashed a nobleman because he had failed to doff his cap as the Fascist pennant went by.Footnote ⁷²

The alienation felt by former blackshirts is very clear, now that they were being treated on a par with ‘mere anti-Fascists’ and ‘criminals’. To be imprisoned ‘among the lowest criminals and the most dangerous malefactors’ was a contradiction in terms. How, asked many squadristi, could ‘long-established Fascists’ be treated like subversives and ‘anti-national elements’? They argued that Article 184 of the Consolidated Act ‘clearly and explicitly refers to subversive and anti-national elements’, and it was ‘simply impossible’ to assign to that category, ‘either actually or potentially, people who had for so long been battling against all those who dared to denigrate Fascism and the nation’.Footnote ⁷³

Despite their tendentiousness, such statements by squadristi reveal the disjunction between their personal outlook and the new reality fostered by developments in 1925–6. This disjunction seems to convey the inertia and persistence of the squadrista habitus. Their sense of individual and collective identity had been moulded by their experience of squadrista militancy, and they stubbornly continued to interpret reality in the light of social, political and cultural categories shaped before the March and reinforced thereafter.

VI. Disciplining squadrismo

Despite the inertia of the squadrista outlook and practices, the humiliating accusations, the political confinement and savage punishments inflicted on their leaders, the very fact that squadrista violence ceased to be important seemed to show that ‘these people are to be thrown away . . . like a squeezed lemon’.Footnote ⁷⁴ In fact, confino turned out to be a very flexible and adaptable instrument. Its full repressive force was brought to bear on squadristi who had no political backing and were living in poverty on the margins of society: unemployed, drunk, ‘amoral', ‘unbalanced', they were blamed with scant regard for their past and often treated not so much like anti-Fascists as like other marginalised, politically defenceless victims. This was another facet of the instrumentalisation and disciplining of squadrismo: poor squadristi were perceived as ‘dangerous refuse’ within society.Footnote ⁷⁵ For that very reason, their repression had no contemporary resonance; it could be very severe and long-lasting.

A different discourse applied to squadristi imprisoned after the great purges ordered by the PNF. Their confinement must be seen as an extreme measure against those who refused to submit; wherever the link between the Ras and the squadristi was weak, temporary expulsion from the party, a warning or an admonition were enough to being even the most riotous blackshirt to heel.

At other times, punishment was replaced by various kinds of positive discipline. By conferring lesser or greater administrative or political office on squadristi and Ras, the regime secured their loyalty and could continue to exploit their abilities.Footnote ⁷⁶ In return, they must have been willing to acknowledge the Duce's sole authority, formally at least.Footnote ⁷⁷ Mussolini himself remarked that it was ‘incredible how a squadrista captain changes when you make him a councillor or a mayor’.Footnote ⁷⁸

It is interesting to note that from 1926 onwards all the under-secretaries in the Ministry of the Interior (with Aldo Finzi as an important forerunner) were ex-squadristi. They also provided many leading civil servants. In 1937 15.3% of prefects were ex-squadristi, rising to 29.4% if only ‘Fascist prefects’ are taken into account.Footnote ⁷⁹ The percentages change little if considered over a wider span of time: the biographical records complied by Alberto Cifelli show that of the 433 prefects who held office between 1922 and 1943, 63 (14.5%) were described as squadristi. The percentage is not all that high, but if we take account of the numbers of pre-Fascist prefects who remained in office, and the preference given to ex-squadristi when making appointments in the PNF and MVSN, they are far from negligible, particularly as the squadrista prefects included some particularly violent and brutal former Ras: witness Marcello Vaccari, Oscar Uccelli and Temistocle Testa; the so-called ‘grand duke of Tuscany’, Dino Perrone Compagni; the Roman Italo Foschi; the Ras of Ancona, Giuseppe Mastromattei; and Giovanni Mosconi, Rino Parenti and Tullio Tamburini.Footnote ⁸⁰

An excellent example is the career of Tullio Tamburini, a thoroughgoing squadrista. As undisputed head of the Florentine squads, which were among the most violent and resolute in Italy, he was appointed after the March to command the 92nd Legion ‘Francesco Ferrucci’, which was to become one of the notorious and brutal units of the MVSN.

In December 1925 Tamburini's career appeared to come to an abrupt halt. In the night of 3/4 October, Florence suffered a veritable deluge of ‘generalised terrorism’ – thrashings, vandalism, arson – as local squadristi turned on the city's bourgeois anti-Fascists, killing at least three of them. The repercussions, spreading outside Italy, of what Tamburini himself called a ‘second St Bartholomew's eve’ goaded the PNF into a savage purge – though it was less radical than might appear. Tamburini was barred from all political office, lost the command of his legion and was sent into a sort of ‘gilded exile’ in Libya, far from his faithful squadristi and his main power base.Footnote ⁸¹ From Africa, Tamburini showered Mussolini with letters attesting to his ‘eternal heartfelt fidelity to the Duce’, invariably adding a reminder of his abilities as a squadrista.Footnote ⁸² He did not remain in Libya for long. In September 1926 he joined the newly formed Milizia Forestale (the ‘Forest Militia’, a special branch of the MSVN), though he had none of the technical skills which the branch's officers were supposed to possess. It was not by chance that from 1926 to 1935 he was always posted to unstable border zones such as the Trentino-Alto Adige and the Venezia Giulia. In 1936 he was appointed Prefect of Avellino, a small town in southern Italy. Just before war broke out he was transferred to Ancona, one of Italy's most important ports. In 1941 he became Prefect of Trieste where, in collaboration with Temistocle Testa, Prefect of Fiume (who also had a past of violent squadrista), he conducted a sustained and ferocious campaign of repression against rebel Slavs in the borderlands, mobilising the ‘forest’ legion of Udine which he had commanded in 1935/1936.Footnote ⁸³ When the Italian Social Republic was formed in September 1943, Mussolini appointed Tamburini Chief of Police. When party men were appointed as prefects, the distinction between state and party became much less clear. As the role and powers of the prefects increased, the appointment of ex-squadristi embodied this union of state and party and proved a highly effective instrument of social control and repression, especially in the most restive provinces.

Much more numerous, however, were the squadristi in the party hierarchy. Some 80% of the 709 federal secretaries who held office between 1921 and 1943 had entered the party before the March on Rome.Footnote ⁸⁴ Moreover, according to the 1932 PNF Constitution, the leading offices in the party were open only to ‘blackshirts who had fought and worked for the revolution, or former members of Fascist youth organisations’.Footnote ⁸⁵

The same dynamics affected ordinary squadristi. For example, 43% of Bologna's ex-squadristi and 61% of Florence's gained positions in the PNF's political hierarchy, although most (84%) were relatively humble ones, such as the members of federal councils or the directors of neighbourhood party circles.Footnote ⁸⁶ Many worked as teachers or instructors in PNF youth organisations, since they were (naturally enough) thought to embody the spirit of the former ‘action squads’ and were therefore best able to train youthful ‘minds’ and ‘muscles’ for the ‘battles of political life’: yesterday's blackshirts were called on to conduct the physical and political education of tomorrow's squadristi.Footnote ⁸⁷

Minor local offices – from the Fascist supervisor of a block of flats to the chair of the local Fascist benevolent organisation – and local government jobs at communal, provincial and federal level were often reserved for unemployed and dissatisfied squadristi in an attempt to head off their continual, and sometimes violent, complaints.Footnote ⁸⁸ From the late 1930s onwards, however, such ex-squadristi increasingly tended to be involved in arbitrary incidents and attacks on anyone who showed the smallest sign of disrespect or mockery of the regime.Footnote ⁸⁹

Some squadristi who did not have friends in political circles or were marginalised, worked as informers for the Political Police or for the secret police OVRA; often they were sent to spy on former comrades.Footnote ⁹⁰

Accommodating squadristi in the PNF and disciplining them were both intended to confine their innate violence within limits; but this did not mean that the regime wanted to dispense with their skills, particularly in situations where violence could be relatively unconstrained.

Many squadristi found an opportunity to re-live their youth and to refute the accusations brought against them, in the conquest of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War.Footnote ⁹¹ The Bolognese squadrista Arconovaldo Bonacorsi, who became famous in 1923 for beating up the dissident Alfredo Misuri and in 1926 for boasting of having killed Anteo Zamboni, fell out of favour in 1934, but in 1936 was selected personally by Mussolini to conduct Fascist operations in the Balearic Islands, where he acted with pitiless brutality. He ended his career as General Inspector of blackshirts in East Africa.Footnote ⁹²

Squadrista skills could also come in useful in confinement island colonies (the ‘Fascist archipelago’, as defined by Michael Ebner).Footnote ⁹³ They went there both as exiles and as watchmen and jailer over other internees. In the penal colony on the island of Lipari, for example, there were many ‘armed units’ of MVSN militants who engaged in ‘mere pointless shows of force’: armed with sticks and ‘long leather thongs’, they rampaged among exiles and islanders alike, bringing back the ‘good old days of squadrismo’.Footnote ⁹⁴ Many of these militants were chosen from among the most violent ex-squadristi, who were free to indulge their ‘violent proclivities’ within the penal colony.Footnote ⁹⁵

Co-opting former blackshirts into the regime's apparatus of policing and repression, as officials, spies or jailers, was the most direct way of re-deploying the spirit – and the violence – of the ‘heroic age’. But what happened to those who suffered political confinement in person? Did they really suffer the same fate as anti-Fascists and common criminals?

From 1926 onwards, perspectives on squadrismo evidently changed. But the apparent severity visited on confined squadristi should not be misunderstood. A squadrista internee was an internee de luxe: they were sent to remote but peaceful villages in southern Italy, lived in private apartments instead of the overcrowded barracks of the penal colonies and were seldom placed under surveillance. More important still, they were generally pardoned shortly after being sentenced.

The average length of political confinement among the sample analysed for this article was 321 days. This includes both squadristi exiled for political reasons and social outcasts, who (as we have seen) were usually treated more harshly. Moreover, fifty-seven squadristi were sent to places on the mainland; only seven spent their entire period of exile on an island and twenty-five spent part of the time on the mainland and part in penal colonies. Although Mussolini and the prefects asserted that they would treat errant Fascists in the same way as anti-Fascists, the period of exile of many squadristi was short and did not involve much privation. Victims of political purges undoubtedly enjoyed certain advantages. The average period of exile for Bolognesi purged in 1934 was a mere 66 days (against about a sentence of 3 years 8 months on average) and for Gerardo Bonelli's former henchmen in Genoa it was 156 days (against a sentence of more than 3 years). Followers of the Milanese Ras Mario Giampaoli remained for longer: 300 days.

The experience of political confinement convinced many blackshirts that their future depended on complete submission to Mussolini. By initiating a relationship of direct subordination and dependence, confino acted as a means of discipline, rather than of repression or punishment. It turned a squadrista into ‘a man more tempered in the faith’, no longer filled with ‘the ardour of youth’ but willing to involve himself in new deeds of violence wherever the regime wanted to make use of him.Footnote ⁹⁶ Mussolini required proofs of submissiveness: his ‘acts of clemency’ were conditional on receipt of a letter or telegram from the confined person expressing ‘submission and devotion to the Duce’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Lenient sentences were not straightforward tokens of magnanimity: they were an expression of the absolute omnipotence of the dictator. This shows that confino, as an administrative process and an arbitrary one at that, was effective in creating a direct relationship of subordination to the dictator, perceived as an all-powerful leader who held not just the destiny of Italy, but the life of every Italian, in the hollow of his hand. The private sphere was forcibly and inescapably locked into the mechanisms of public power.Footnote ⁹⁸

After their period in confinement, many squadristi buried themselves in the deepest anonymity and never caused any further trouble. Others, as we have seen, embarked on new careers, fought in the colonies, in Spain, in the Second World War, or joined the ranks of the Social Republic's most fanatical defenders.Footnote ⁹⁹ For the squadrista, external expansion and internal revolution were closely connected.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Confino did not always achieve its purpose, however. Sometimes ‘lenient treatment . . . had no beneficial effect’ and could indeed make a squadrista ‘worse than before . . . neither correctable nor usable’, as one prefect put it.Footnote ¹⁰¹

‘Correctable’, ‘usable’: these two words sum up the real purpose of political confinement as visited on ex-squadristi. Paradoxically, the criminalisation of squadrismo through the 1926 Consolidated Act created a neatly docketed pool of experts in political violence directly linked to the ‘machinery of power’. Having measured themselves against the regime, the squadristi realised that their only possible future lay with the orthodox cult of the Duce and the acceptance of current hierarchies. By creating a new kind of political crime, the regime secured the allegiance of a group of faithful and intransigent squadristi who became some of the most zealous apostles of fascistisation. The political usefulness of violence perfectly matched the persistence of the individual squadrista's conduct, capability and mindset. Political confinement served to mould squadrista criminality into ‘one of the mechanisms of power’. If squadrismo had been a victim of that power, the victimisation had not lasted for long.Footnote ¹⁰²

The period from 1925 to 1928 may have seen the decline of squadrismo, but not of the squadristi, their outlook or their skills, which continued to be useful, so long as they were firmly incorporated into the hierarchical, disciplined structures of the regime. The cultural and ideological fabric of squadrismo was altered and absorbed into that of the state.Footnote ¹⁰³ This does not mean that the squadrismo of the 1930s was a logical and ineluctable outcome of what came before. Only by taking a long-term view can we discern the true evolution of squadrismo and perceive how the practice and ideology of violence interacted to produce a long-term strategy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The facts show that squadrismo cannot be interpreted as an aspect of ‘Fascism-as-movement’; rather it was a practice that contributed to shaping the entire construction and organisation of the dictatorship. Once tempered by discipline, the squadrista became the archetype of the Fascist New Man.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The regime more or less accepted that violence was an indispensable tool for the construction of political identity; this view was not the prerogative of a few nostalgic squadristi. If we ignore what the squadristi actually did and how they contributed to the progressive radicalisation of the regime, we will be left with a partial and, in the last analysis, unduly mitigated vision of the dictatorship.