Reconsidering the March on Rome

Albanese, Giulia

doi:10.1177/0265691412448165

Cited by 2 publications

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“…They would quickly ‘run away’ if attacked, they were ‘grotesque’, a ‘rag-bag’, not serious, a joke – the whole thing was an ‘Italian comedy’. This way of seeing the squadristi brought everyone together – moderates, Communists, antifascists, even the Fascists themselves (Albanese 2012). It tallied with the idea that the main blame for Fascism should be attributed to the Socialists, the liberal state and the king.…”

Section: They Could/would Have Been Defeated What If – the Power Of T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual

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2023

Mod. Italy

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This historiographical article will argue that the March on Rome (October–November 1922) was the end point of a serious and at that point unique insurrectionary project, which followed three intense years of Fascist violence (where the state had rarely if ever taken on the Fascists, and had often colluded passively or actively with them). It was accompanied by violence and constant threats of further violence, in Rome and across Italy. It was in no way a bluff – but also stood as a warning to all those who still imagined that Fascism could be opposed, on the streets, in parliament, or at the ballot box. The violence hit bystanders, but was also targeted at the private homes of communists, socialists and hated liberals, and at centres of urban resistance in Rome itself. This article will look in detail at the ways historians have understood the March on Rome, and systematically removed the violence from that event, ignored the March itself and played down the role of the squadristi. It will also look at the powerful role of a ‘what if’ counter-factual which has dominated most accounts of the March on Rome to date, with some recent exceptions.

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Section: They Could/would Have Been Defeated What If – the Power Of T...mentioning

confidence: 99%

The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual

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2023

Mod. Italy

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Response to Matteo Millan: Mapping Squadrist Violence

Ben‐Ghiat¹

2013

Contemporary European History

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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. 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), 2 German emigrés such as Hannah Arendt, who concluded that Italy was a 'non-totalitarian or, at the most, semitotalitarian' state, 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. 4 It is worth recalling that for over a decade following the First World

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Reconsidering the March on Rome

Cited by 2 publications

References 1 publication

The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual

The March on Rome revisited. Silences, historians and the power of the counter-factual

Response to Matteo Millan: Mapping Squadrist Violence

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