Programme and Postulates of the Fasci di Combattimento

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The founding 1919 programme of Benito Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento and the revised postulates adopted at its 2nd Congress of May 1920

Rivoluzione_Fasci

Following on from the formal founding of the Fasci di Combattimento at San Sepolcro in March 1919, the nascent Fascist movement began to come into its own, beginning its first organized attempts at street activism and engaging in its first violent raids against the Milan offices of Socialist newspaper Avanti! (of which Mussolini had previously been editor). At this point the closest thing the Fasci had to an official platform was contained in Mussolini’s San Sepolcro speeches; there was thus a need to publish a proper statement, an actual organized platform which would clearly spell out the Fascists’ goals and worldview. The result was the famous 1919 programme, first published in Mussolini’s newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia on June 6 and later distributed to the membership in manifesto format. This programme is fairly well-known today, mostly for its more moderate and ‘left-wing’ demands – as with the San Sepolcro speeches, its content reflected that Fascism was still for all intents and purposes mostly just a political expression of national-syndicalist ideals. Two events helped shift this stance further ‘right’ over the next year: the collapse of d’Annunzio’s rule in Fiume (transferring many of his supporters to Mussolini), and most especially the devastating results of the 1919 general election, where the Fascists were almost crippled as a result of their embarrassing rout by the Socialists and the Catholic Popolari. When the Fasci met in Milan for their 2nd Congress in May, 1920, there was thus an identified need to address and refine their existing programme in recognition of its inability to garner support. While Mussolini warned the delegates in a speech against drifting into conservatism and alienation from the workers, he and the other Fascists nonetheless voted in favor of adopting the Postulates outlined further below, with the movement adopting a more ‘flexible’ stance on issues such as republicanism, the Church, and industry. As Mussolini put it in a speech to the Congress: “We must not sink the bourgeois ship, but get inside it and expel its parasitic elements.” This new approach would prove a tactical success – by the end of 1921 a movement which had been almost wiped out by the 1919 election loss had swelled to a vital 250,000 members.

Programme
of the
Italian Fasci di Combattimento
Central Committee
MILAN – Via Paolo da Cannobbio, 37 – Telephone 7156

fasci_crossed

First published in Il Popolo d’Italia, June 6, 1919

Italians!

This is the national program of a movement that is soundly Italian.

Revolutionary, because it is antidogmatic and antidemagogic; strongly innovative, because it ignores a priori objections.

We regard the success of the revolutionary war as standing above everything and everybody.

The other problems – bureaucracy, administration, judiciary, school system, colonies, etc. – we shall consider after we have created a new ruling class.

Consequently, WE INSIST UPON:

For the political problem:

(a) Universal suffrage with a system of voting by list, with proportional representation, and woman suffrage and eligibility for office.

(b) Reduction of the age of voters to eighteen years; and that of eligibility for membership in the Chamber of Deputies to twenty-five years.

(d) Convocation of a National Assembly to sit for three years, its primary task to be the establishment of a new constitutional structure for the state.

(e) Formation of National Technical Councils for labor, industry, transportation, public health, communications, etc., to be elected by either professional or trades collectivities, and provided with legislative powers and the right to elect a Commissioner General who shall have the powers of a Minister. Continue reading →

Proclamation of the Spanish Falange of the J.O.N.S.

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Presented by José Antonio Primo de Rivera as a speech to Falangists at the Teatro Calderón, Valladolid, March 4, 1934

The following speech by José Antonio Primo de Rivera was made at the first major meeting of the Falange Española de las J.O.N.S., the unified movement created by the merger of the Falange Española and the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional-Sindicalista in early 1934. Three thousand fascists and national-syndicalists converged on the city of Valladolid for the event, filling the grand Calderón Theater which had been bedecked with massive black-and-red banners and Spanish flags. José Antonio, Ramiro Ledesma, Julio Ruiz de Alda, and other leaders of the new movement took the stage to a storm of fascist salutes, before the Jefe Nacional gave his address – a short, powerful speech stridently rejecting liberalism, socialism, and reaction while advocating a new path leading to a uniquely Spanish form of revolutionary-nationalism. The speech and meeting proved to be a baptism of fire – as the Falangists left the theater they were shot at by communists, with a street-fight promptly breaking out in which one Falangist was killed. Nonetheless, the meeting was regarded by the participants as a great success.

This is not the place to applaud anyone or to cheer. Here no one is anybody, each is only a mere component, a soldier of this task-force set on a task which is ours and that of Spain.

Let me tell anyone about to cheer yet again that I will not thank him for the acclaim. We have not come here to be applauded. What is more, I might almost say that we have not come to teach you anything. We have come here to learn.

There is a great deal to be learnt from this land and this sky of Castile by us, who in many cases live far removed from them. This land of Castile, which is the land of no airs or graces, the essence of land, the land which is neither local color, nor the river, nor the boundary, nor the hillside. The land which is certainly not the sum of a number of estates, or the basis of certain landed interests to be haggled over in assemblies, but which is land itself, land as the repository of eternal values, austerity of conduct, the spirit of religion in life, speech and silence, the solidarity of ancestors and descendants.

And above this quintessential land, the quintessential sky.

The sky so blue, so bare of passing clouds, so utterly without the greenish reflections of leafy groves, so purely blue that one might say it was almost white. And so Castile, with the quintessential land and the quintessential sky gazing at one another, has never been resigned to being a mere province; it could not help but aspire at all times to being an empire. Castile has never managed to understand what is local, it has understanding only for what is universal, which is why Castile denies itself the certainty of limits, perhaps because it is unlimited, both in scope and in stature. And therefore Castile, that land encrusted with wonderful names – Tordesillas, Medina del Campo, Madrigal de las Altas Torres – that land of the Chancery [i.e. the medieval Chancery], of fairs and castles, that is, of justice, trade and militia, gives us an idea of what constituted the Spain we no longer possess, and oppresses our hearts with a deep sense of loss. Continue reading →

‘Fascism of the First Hour’

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Benito Mussolini’s speeches of March 23, 1919, at Piazza San Sepolcro, proclaiming the founding of the Fasci di Combattimento

Sansepolcrismo On 23 March, 1919, a meeting was held in a hall at Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro. The audience of roughly 120 people comprised an eclectic mixture of Arditi, Republicans, soldiers, national-syndicalists, Futurists, nationalists, and revisionist socialists. Nobility rubbed soldiers with peasants; famous artists like Marinetti mingled with decorated officers like Captain Ferruccio Vecchi. Many of the attendees wore black shirts and carried clubs and black flags. The purpose of the meeting, as organized by infamous ex-socialist Benito Mussolini and his syndicalist compatriot Michele Bianchi, was to weld the many like-minded nationalist-revolutionary fascio into a single, united organization under centralized leadership. Mussolini opened the meeting with a morning speech, and closed it with an evening speech – speeches which announced the birth of a new political movement founded on nationalism, corporatism, and class-collaboration. These early addresses are especially notable for their pro-republican sentiments and ambivalent stances on democracy, indicative of early fascism’s status as a political expression of national-syndicalist ideological concepts.

Mussolini’s Morning Speech

First of all, a few words regarding the agenda.

Without undue formality or pedantry, I shall read to you three declarations that seem to me to be worthy of discussion and a vote. Later, in the afternoon, we can resume discussion of our platform declaration. I must tell you right off that we dare not bog down in details; if we wish to act, we must grasp reality in its broad essentials, without going into minute details.

FIRST DECLARATION

“The meeting of March 23 extends its greetings and its reverent and unforgetful thoughts first of all to those sons of Italy who have given their lives for the grandeur of the fatherland and the freedom of the world, to the wounded and sick, to all the fighters and ex-prisoners who carried out their duty; and it declares that it is ready to give energetic support to claims of both a material and moral nature that may be set forth by the servicemen’s associations.”

SECOND DECLARATION

“The meeting of March 23 declares that it is opposed to the imperialism of other peoples at the expense of Italy, and declares that it is opposed to any eventual Italian imperialism that works to the detriment of other people. It accepts the supreme postulate of a League of Nations, which presupposes the integrity of each nation – integrity which, so far as Italy is concerned, must be realized in the Alps and along the Adriatic through her claim to Fiume and Dalmatia.” Continue reading →