Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy

Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy

Introduction: The Fascist Archipelago

In the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas lie several archipelagos of small Italian islands, some measuring only a few hundred meters across: the Pontine Islands, southwest of Rome; the Aeolian Islands, north of Messina; the Aegadian Islands, west of Sicily; the Pelagie archipelago, some two hundred miles south of Sicily, closer to the shores of Tunisia; and, finally, the Tremiti Islands, off the coast of northern Puglia in the Adriatic.¹ A handful of these islands – Ponza, Ventotene, Lipari, Ustica, Favignana, Pantelleria, Lampedusa, San Domino, and San Nicola – have served as sites of confinement, exile, and punishment for thousands of years. In the time of the Roman Empire, most of them hosted political exiles, often bothersome family members of the emperor.² Throughout the nineteenth century, the Italian peninsula's various kingdoms used them as penal colonies. After Italy's Unification in 1860, the islands continued to serve as sites of punishment, exile, and, during times of war, internment.³ Although today these places are beautiful, sun-drenched tourist destinations, at the beginning of the twentieth century most were desolate, desiccated, wind-swept rocks. Their coasts – high, jagged cliffs – rendered them virtual prisons amid vast expanses of rolling sea.

Between 1926 and 1943, Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime arrested and deported tens of thousands of Italians to these islands.⁴ In the 1930s, when the island “confinement colonies” became too full, the regime exiled “less dangerous” detainees to small, isolated villages in the Mezzogiorno, Italy's impoverished south.⁵ By the end of the decade, there were more exiles on the mainland than detainees on the islands. Placing a half-dozen anti-Fascists in one village, a few Jehovah's Witnesses in another, a homosexual here, a mafioso there, and so on, the Fascists implanted across southern Italy a vast, man-made archipelago: hundreds of islands of exile inhabited by the regime's political and social outcasts. Over the course of the dictatorship, institutions of punishment and confinement proliferated. By the time of Italy's involvement in the Second World War, there were concentration camps, political prisons, work houses, confinement colonies, and sites of internment scattered throughout the entire Italian peninsula.⁶ This archipelago of repression was not only geographic but also social: the Fascist regime carefully focused state-backed violence and repression on select communities, classes, and public and private spaces. Within the sea of “normal” society, there were thus myriad islands of repression.

This book began as a history of the Fascist system of political confinement (confino politico) told through the experiences of political detainees.⁷ However, the files state authorities kept on these people – which contain police reports, correspondence between state agencies, denunciations, letters written by detainees and their families, medical records, and other documents – revealed to me the history of more than just one institution of repression.⁸ Individually and collectively, these sources told the stories of ordinary people, families, and communities living under a violent Fascist dictatorship.⁹ By telling the history of the Fascist archipelago, this book seeks to establish that the Mussolini dictatorship ruled Italy through violence. I use the term violence in two, closely related senses. The first is “the exercise of physical force in order to injure, control, or intimidate others,” typically by persons who were “acting illegally.”¹⁰ Fascists and police, according to official sources, regularly “killed,” “beat,” “clubbed,” “punched,” “slapped,” “kicked,” “hit,” and otherwise used spontaneous “force” and “acts of violence” against citizens. Police reports also often used euphemisms for these types of violence and other methods of torture.¹¹ The second, broader meaning of violence in this book refers to state practices which, although technically legal, were so broadly defined in the legislation and applied with such executive discretion that they can hardly be said to have been bound by the law: the summary removal of people from their homes in the middle of the night; confinement in dirty, vermin-infested jails and prisons, without explanation or access to law courts; the thirst, hunger, and disease that were rife within the island confinement colonies; the trauma of poverty, which the police state knowingly and sometimes deliberately inflicted on wives and children of detainees; the revocation of business permits for political motives; the intimidation of living under a one-party regime whose supporters shared in the state's monopoly on violence and truth; and the political discrimination practiced by Fascists in distributing employment, welfare, and other state assistance.¹² The regime used these two types of violence – one illegal, the other legal – to punish Italians or coerce them into conforming to certain standards of political and social behavior. In select cases, public-security authorities, Fascists, or militiamen applied legal measures in conjunction with physical assaults and criminal behavior. Broadly and ambiguously defined police powers often begot abuse, mistreatment, and torture, so that Fascists and police operated in a “gray zone” between legality and illegality. Finally, in word and deed, the Fascist regime constantly reminded Italians that although it did not engage in physical or lethal violence on a mass scale, it claimed the right to beat, torture, and kill select enemies with impunity. For the intended audience, this threat meant that one truly never knew what to expect from a knock on the door. The fear of punishment unfettered by the rule of law was, for many Italians, a form of terror. The twentieth century – the century of genocide, concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, and extreme evil – has perhaps obscured how little it takes to frighten large numbers of ordinary people. Violence, albeit an ordinary kind of violence, was central to the policies and institutions of Fascist rule.

This regime of ordinary violence profoundly affected the minutiae of everyday life under Fascism. Although only fifteen thousand Italians experienced political confinement, the fearful and traumatic episodes that preceded these sentences were familiar to vastly broader sections of Italian society: tense run-ins with feared Fascists; house searches conducted by police or Fascist militiamen; the arrests and interrogations of neighbors, family members, co-workers, and other witnesses in the wake of some trifling offense to Mussolini; the pressure to conform, to nod silently while angrily disagreeing; the fear of reprisals, repercussions, and discrimination, based on one's past behavior; and the economic decline of a political suspect and his family, witnessed by friends, family, and neighbors. The case files of Fascism's political detainees reveal patterns of physical attacks, threats, intimidation, and discrimination that were so mundane, banal, and similar, that they can only have occurred repeatedly literally ad infinitum, hundreds of thousands, even millions, of times over the course of two decades. Consequently, public and private spaces – particularly the iconic spaces of public life (e.g., the bar or the piazza) – were transformed into sites of fear and intimidation.¹³ State policies established parameters for coercive action wherever there were highly charged spaces of social conflict: bars and taverns, piazzas and streets, train stations, trams, courtyards, public dormitories, jails, factories and work sites of manual laborers, and sometimes family homes. Politicized social conflict almost always involved a member of one of Fascism's constituencies (e.g., Fascists and militiamen, white-collar workers, professionals, state employees, and bar and small shop owners) initiating processes that led to the punishment of a member of a vulnerable group (e.g., political suspects, citizens “indifferent” to the regime, and a whole host of “social outsiders,” including the poor, the unemployed, alcoholics, ex-convicts, and the mentally ill).¹⁴ Granting citizens coercive power – whether they used it in good political faith or not – created a mechanism that bound many Italians, particularly Fascists, to the regime. Once Fascists and others became accustomed to calling on the state to resolve mundane conflicts in their favor, there was no turning back. Anyone who attained power, wealth, status, satisfaction, or revenge by exercising authoritarianism became heavily and irreversibly invested in the system. Therefore, political confinement, formal proceedings, and imprisonment might have been inflicted on relatively small numbers of people, but political conflict, arrests, interrogations, intimidation, threats, and silent sufferings were quotidian – they were hyperordinary.

The Era of Extraordinary Violence

In addition to exposing the centrality of “ordinary violence” to Fascist rule, this book aspires to position the case of Fascist Italy within the scholarly literature on political violence and totalitarian terror, fields of study from which the Italian case is too often excluded.¹⁵ In the period after the First World War, European states, Italy first among them, constructed legal and institutional apparatuses for punishing and confining unprecedentedly large numbers of political prisoners.¹⁶ More than a dozen authoritarian regimes established special courts, executive tribunals, secret police, and new institutions of confinement and punishment. Governments segregated these institutions from the regular judicial and prison systems in order to tightly control the prosecution of political crime. In most cases, with the exception of the Soviet Union, these new apparatuses of political repression primarily targeted the Marxist left and its affiliated organizations. Over time, however, many governments introduced increasingly broad definitions of “crimes against the state.” Political prison sentences and other sanctions were meted out to people for merely holding Socialist or “antinational” ideas. Introduced in most cases to defend the established capitalist order, these novel practices of mass political repression marked a radical break with nineteenth-century liberal models of constitutional rule and criminal justice.¹⁷

A few interwar regimes – notably Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and, I argue, Fascist Italy – set themselves apart by heavily involving militarized political parties and ordinary citizens in the implementation of coercive policies intended to effect a utopian social transformation. Unlike conservative, military, or monarchical authoritarian regimes, these states – which scholars often compare using “totalitarian” or “fascist” paradigms – sought not to repress mass society but instead to mobilize their populations through propaganda, party-controlled participatory organizations, and police-state terror.¹⁸ Although the utility of the totalitarian model as a comparative tool appears to be waning, connecting the case of Fascist violence to the literature on totalitarian violence – or, specifically, National Socialist and Soviet terror – highlights several important features of the Fascist repressive apparatus.¹⁹ The Mussolini regime's police, party, prisons, and propaganda, together with the real and metaphorical archipelagos described in the preceding text, performed most of the same core functions as the terror apparatuses of the Nazi and Soviet regimes.²⁰ The police state crushed the political opposition and stifled dissent, and then went on to target “objective enemies” whose behaviors, tendencies, and inherent traits Fascists deemed inimical to the regime.²¹ The Nazi and Fascist regimes in particular operated in strikingly similar fashions, first “cleansing” the nation of Communists and anti-Fascists, then stepping up their campaigns against ethnic and religious minorities, homosexuals, alcoholics, common criminals, and other categories of enemies and “social outsiders.”²² Upon a few select groups, both regimes imposed suffocating surveillance and control.²³ By persecuting these groups, and spreading fear among others, both aspired to advance their projects of social transformation, forcing people to adapt their behaviors to the expectations of the national government and its ideology. Moreover, in order to penetrate society more deeply, these regimes involved the party, paramilitary organizations – in Italy, the National Fascist Party (PNF) and the Fascist Militia (MVSN) – and ordinary citizens in the implementation of repression and coercion through policing, spying, informing, and other denunciatory practices.²⁴ Consequently, as in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, contending with political repression and state-backed violence constituted a way of life for many people in Fascist Italy. How people acted in public, at work, and even at home were in part conditioned by their understandings of the regime's policies and the ever-present potential for violence and punishment.

Italian Fascists by no means ruled more violently than the National Socialists, the Bolsheviks, or even Franco's Nationalists, all of whom adopted more formalized systems of repression, more clearly defined utopias, and incalculably more brutal strategies of rule.²⁵ Nevertheless, more so than any of these regimes, violence was central to the ideology and practice of Fascism. The Fascists viewed violence as a vital force capable of bringing about a moral and physical regeneration, or “reclamation” (bonifica), of the organic nation.²⁶ Violence, for Fascists, was not merely a strategy or technique for achieving political goals, but also a “‘positive’ formative experience in its own right.”²⁷ In many ways, Fascists compensated for their relative ideological and programmatic vacuity by ascribing immense transformative power to interpersonal and military violence. The biographies of the regime's hierarchs (gerarchi) or Ras (bosses) underscore the specificity of Fascist attitudes toward political and military violence. Virtually all of the Ras had orchestrated terror, murdered people in Italy, or committed war crimes abroad.²⁸ Italo Balbo, the Ras of Ferrara, pioneered the tactics of agrarian squadrismo (squad violence): selective murder, beatings, force-feeding of castor oil to political opponents, ritual humiliation, and arson.²⁹ In the two years before Mussolini became prime minister in 1922, the Ras led squads of Black Shirts, who carried out a campaign of political terror throughout northern Italy that killed several thousand people, wounded tens of thousands, and forced tens of thousands of others to leave their communities or Italy altogether.³⁰ Fascists murdered prominent political opponents – Giacomo Matteotti most famously – and used interpersonal violence in their everyday lives.³¹ Following the consolidation of Mussolini's power and the suppression of squadrismo, Fascists were deprived of domestic arenas for large-scale paramilitary violence. However, with the outbreak of war in Ethiopia, most Fascist bosses eagerly rushed to East Africa. Giuseppe Bottai, who held several important ministries under the regime, recalled that Fascists regularly committed small-scale, “bestial” war crimes, and that, “naturally, even if one did not speak about them, everyone gossiped about them.”³² For Ras and rank-and-file Fascists alike, squad violence, political violence, and military violence were inextricably linked and had forged their very identities as Fascists.³³ For Bottai, Fascism provided the opportunity to profit from his desire, awakened by the Great War, “to live war in the depth of [his] consciousness.” Bottai recalled, “war, this fact dominated my life after 1914. Twenty years and more of life inside war.”³⁴

Despite the special valence of violence for Fascists, several factors imposed restraint, at least domestically, relative to other interwar regimes. Fascism harbored no ideological or programmatic imperative to kill its own citizens. In Germany and the Soviet Union, the guiding political ideologies, extreme in their utopianism, explicitly demanded the liquidation of entire groups of people.³⁵ Even in Spain, the Franco regime displayed a powerful, singular determination to extirpate the “anti-Spain.”³⁶ Mussolini's “revolution” also brought no changes to the class structure and did not effectively break down the parochialisms of Italian society, in part because Mussolini eventually tempered repressive violence, most notably by suppressing squadrismo. Moreover, Italy did not experience a true civil war, which certainly contributed to the escalation of killing in Russia and Spain. Finally, Moscow, and later Berlin, presided over vast, land-based empires, in which most populations viewed the Germans and the Soviets as hostile, occupying powers.³⁷ These immense spaces, far removed from the metropole and populated by ethnic “others,” created fields of operation without moral limits.³⁸

It should be noted, however, that when Fascist Italy acted outside of its borders – for example, in Libya, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, and Greece – the military committed horrible, genocidal atrocities, fueled in part by Fascism's propensity for deploying violence gratuitously.³⁹ In the colonies and at war, Fascists thus found their own spaces free from institutional or ethical constraints.⁴⁰ In a similar environment, precipitated by the collapse of the Fascist regime and the German occupation of northern Italy between 1943 and 1945, die-hard Fascists resurrected squadrist tactics against the anti-Fascist resistance and Jews. These atrocities – committed by the regime, its military, and individual Fascists – were extreme and illegal, even by the standards of the day. All told, the Fascist regime's seizure of power, repression, and wars left a “body count” of an estimated one million dead.⁴¹ However, these acts of extraordinary violence occurred largely on the periphery, temporally and geographically removed from the Fascist regime that ruled the Italian peninsula and its people between 1922 and 1943. In the view of a great many scholars, Italy under Mussolini was a more or less “normal” police state that often governed with the consent of its citizens.⁴² Not since the 1920s has a book on Mussolini's Italy featured the term terror.⁴³ Challenging this view, this study exposes the Mussolini regime's mechanisms of mass repression and positions them within the historical continuum of Fascist violence.

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