On November 20th,1920, crowds gathered outside Bologna’s splendid, medieval Palazzo d’Accursio to celebrate the election of the new socialist mayor, railway worker and trade unionist Ennio Gnudi. White doves with red ribbon collars were released to celebrate the socialist victory. A group of fascists, intent on disruption, were present too and as Gnudi moved to the balcony to greet the crowd, shots rang out.
The gathering descended into violence and chaos, leaving 11 dead. Ten were ordinary, mostly working class people in the crowd, while one, Giulio Giordani, was a city councillor and a nationalist war hero. The fascists celebrated Giordani as a fascist martyr with a lavish funeral while the other 10 victims were barely remembered. Gnudi never took office, spending the next 25 years in exile. He returned to Bologna in November 1945, resuming work in the railway and as a trade unionist but died in 1949, perhaps never fully adjusting to life after fascism.
John Foot’s deeply human history of fascism centres on stories like these, placing the stories of individuals – those who brought fascism to power, those who fought against it and those who suffered under it – at its centre. Although the book covers the whole fascist ventennio and its aftermath, its real strength lies in its close investigation of the fascist rise to power in early 1920s Italy; a trajectory characterised both by an escalating pattern of illegal paramilitary violence and intimidation, and the consistent failure of state institutions to arrest this process.
Fascism had few real ideas at its core, fitting itself around the fears and desires of its supporters. Mussolini’s real innovation, Foot points out, was the use of violence to disrupt democracy. How were people not appalled? Through the close study of a series of violent incidents like that of Gnudi, Bologna’s “mayor for an hour”, and using eyewitness accounts and memories, Foot shows how the fascists, with the collusion of media and state, consistently crafted a narrative that spun fascist violence as “good” in contrast to the “bad”, disruptive violence of socialism, while dismantling democracy themselves.
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The thread of violence is continued throughout the “20 years” of fascism, in the brutal, racist violence of the Libyan and Ethiopia invasions, in the anti-Semitic racial laws of 1938 and in the senseless, protracted and tragic end to fascism, in war.
The final scene that Foot paints is the spectacle of Mussolini’s death. Shot by partisans with his mistress in April 1945, the bodies were returned to Piazzale Loreto in Milan for display. The piazza was packed as people pressed in to check for themselves that the duce was dead. There are eyewitness accounts, photographs, newsreel footage, as well as rumour and myth about that day. Anger and words of vengeance blended with ridicule and an almost carnival atmosphere, as people spat, shouted and fired at the corpses. Even at its end, violence was key to fascism; the brutal fact as well as the spectacle of it and its endless, contested meanings.
