‘The people only have a one-syllable word left, to affirm and obey’

The genetic link between Italian Fascism and populism, or at least between Fascism and populism's popular appeal (Finchelstein Reference Finchelstein2017), was embedded in the fact that the very newspaper where Benito Mussolini started his career as a fascist was named Il Popolo d'Italia, and was founded to advocate the cause of Italy's intervention in the Great War. Right from its inception, the ‘people’ Fascism intended to address was a people-at-war, shaped by the demands, requirements and imperatives of conflict. Rather than being depicted as an idealised, romanticised entity, it was often portrayed as possessing some of the qualities most essential to wartime conduct, first and foremost passivity and obedience. As Mussolini himself acknowledged in his wartime diary, describing his fellow soldiers at the front, ‘Do these men love war? No, they don't. Do they loathe it? Not at all. They accept it as an unquestioned duty’ (Mussolini (Reference Mussolini1917) 1934, 128–9). And later, more explicitly: ‘For the people who relinquished their spades for rifles, we simply ask that they obey; and the Italian people, the people of the countryside and the people of the workshops, obey’ (Mussolini (Reference Mussolini1918) 1934, 315).Footnote ²

It is worth remarking that these virtues of compliance were claimed by Mussolini to defend the Italian people against the accusation of cowardice advanced following the defeat at the Battle of Caporetto. The argument was used a number of times. Curzio Malaparte, for instance, in his Viva Caporetto, or La rivolta dei santi maledetti, first published (and censored) in 1921, described the Italian infantry as the force that most captured the essence of the Italian people. Although illiterate, it ‘encapsulated the most forthright expression of our race and gave the measure of our possibilities, our tenacity and our spirit of sacrifice’. Despite repeated onslaughts, it headed towards enemy lines without heroic gestures, but ‘with that little trot, displaying noble courage and resignation’: ‘Our infantry, the most Christian of all, launched itself into the assault with human spirit: once, twice, ten times in a row’, simply because it had to be done:

Yet, as Franciscan friar Agostino Gemelli argued in his wartime applied psychology essay, having assumed that ‘the psychological life of our soldier mirrors the virtues and faults of our people’, it should be made clear that it mirrored above all ‘their candour, their primeval character, sometimes puerile elements, weaknesses, contrasting high feelings and selfishness’. From this perspective, widely shared in various parts of the political spectrum, the ‘people’ were the lowest stratum of the hierarchy of the nation, a notion of inferiority that was particularly apparent when compared to the self-awareness of the interventionist élite. Liberal democrat and former socialist Gaetano Salvemini took it for granted that they, the people, were different from we, the interventionists, even while marching to the front: ‘The people, the multitude of peasants, of workers, took up arms, silent and collected, without really seeing the idealist motives that drove us, but confusedly presaging them’ (Gemelli Reference Gemelli1917, 116). Similarly, in his aforementioned wartime notes, Mussolini remarked that ‘It is useless to request from the humble proletarian folks a great national conscience that they cannot have, simply because we have done nothing to give it to them’ (Mussolini (Reference Mussolini1918) 1934, 315).

This was a widely shared elitist attitude, with more than a hint of societal racism towards the common soldiers. Indeed, however virtuously the soldiers behaved, it was advisable not to offer too much praise. Historian Gioacchino Volpe, while drafting instructions for army officers to boost their men's morale in the fourth year of warfare – again, a task undertaken on a large scale after the Caporetto retreat – was not averse to encouraging them to praise the common soldier:

At the same time, Volpe recommended that after acknowledging the extent to which the soldier had suffered for his country, his contribution should be encompassed within the entire nation's endeavours: he ought to be reminded that ‘the war was a great national effort involving all classes’, as ‘the soldier must not be fed the idea that the war is only his, that is, the peasants' doing’ (Volpe (Reference Volpe and Volpe1918a) 1928, 59). Volpe, already a nationalist at the time, was keen to avert the danger that the war be felt as a ‘soldier's’ war, because soldier meant peasant, and peasants alone did not constitute a whole ‘people’, let alone a fighting one. A ‘people’ redeemed itself from the condition of plebs and servitude, and so became historically relevant, only when it had recognised in itself the reflection of the nation organised within the state. ‘Outside of this inner and sincere adhesion of the popular conscience to political life in its actual dynamic … there is Bolshevism or, as it was once said, anarchy’ (Volpe (Reference Volpe and Volpe1918b) 1928, 111–12).

However, it was by fighting in a war that a people could reveal its inner quality. A few weeks after Caporetto, with the retreat halted and the front stabilised on the Piave line, philosopher Giovanni Gentile pondered the averted danger of the army's dissolution in the face of the enemy advance, concluding that a country that failed to bounce back after a military defeat did not deserve to exist: ‘It would not have been a people that deserves to live in a free state, but instead, as our enemies like to portray us, a jumble of men without discipline of any kind’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile and Gentile1917) 1919, 62). A few lines later on he put it even more clearly:

The blurring of the lines between the concept of the ‘people’ and that of the nation was ingrained in the wartime political discourse. Only when lining up to march to the front could a people be considered a single and united entity, ‘a whole people, in which every citizen is already a soldier, with no will of his own, other than that of those who guide him to the battle’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile and Gentile1915) 1919, 31). Indeed, without a will of its own (indeed, on the eve of the war it had proven to be largely averse to the interventionist and patriotic campaign), and stripped of its political subjectivity, the ‘people’ acquired an evanescent, dematerialised state, which could be seen as equivalent to that of the nation. The nation, in turn, possessed a distinctive political subjectivity: ‘A nation without a determined conscience, without a formed personality is not a nation: and the more a nation is built, the more it acquires strength and the more its personality is enriched with traditions and aspirations. This, mind you, is not a different personality from that of the citizens: it is the very same conscience of every citizen, which implements in its will the will of the nation’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile and Gentile1915) 1919, 26).

On the other hand, when the ‘people’ was not contained within and dissolved in the nation, but was left to itself, then it was a mob, a disorderly and temperamental multitude governed by base instincts, whose emotions – as a young and still socialist Mussolini was cynically aware – were to be exploited and controlled in order to accumulate the amount of force necessary to achieve his revolutionary goal: ‘in certain cases and at certain times, we are “hooligans” too’ (Mussolini (Reference Mussolini1904) 2019).

Unsurprisingly, 20 years later, on the eve of the general elections where he would seize power, Mussolini did not deem it necessary to rouse the mob's instincts any more. In a famous article on Machiavelli published in his journal Gerarchia in April 1924, he denied the ‘people’ any substantial tangibility in the political realm: ‘First of all, the people was never defined. As a political entity, it is purely abstract. It is not known exactly where it begins, nor where it ends.’ Then he dismissed the popular sovereignty that was soon to be exercised at the polls: ‘The adjective “sovereign” applied to the people is a tragic joke. The people all, at most, delegate, but they certainly cannot exercise any sovereignty’. And finally, he based his conception of power on the same features of passivity and obedience that the people displayed during the war:

This standpoint, once advanced, was rapidly shared in the Fascist political discourse. Sergio Panunzio remarked that the Italian population was, if anything, the best fit for a plebiscitarian democracy, and fascism was the political regime that best suited its essential qualities. He maintained that ‘the Italian people do not lack any of the qualities needed to be a world-class people’, being ‘thrifty, frugal, modest in consumption, enjoyment and pleasures’, as well as being endowed with ‘lively intelligence’ and ‘great incomparable strength of will’. However, ‘the Italian people, which has all these virtues, needed only one thing to achieve its national and global purpose: to be directed, to be guided in its ideas and material aspects, and it found this in fascism’ (Panunzio Reference Panunzio1924, 39–40).

This set of arguments was so effective that it was deemed suitable to inform a political handbook for the ‘people's schools’, written by the National Fascist Party (PNF) secretary Augusto Turati: a collection of question and answers designed to ‘capture in a basic form the most important concepts of our political structure’ (Turati Reference Turati1929, 7–8), including the claim that fascism was ‘already born in the people’ before its seizure of power (Turati Reference Turati1929, 12). In this respect, the ‘people’ was tantamount to the national conscience, the fatherland and the race. Its components were soldiers in peacetime: ‘A faithful servant of fascism is every fascist who considers himself a soldier even if he does not wear the military uniform; a soldier even when he works in the office, in the workshops, in the yards or in the fields; a soldier bound to the rest of the army’, observing ‘silent, active and devoted’ discipline (Turati Reference Turati1929, 19–20).

Organic hierarchy and totalitarian democracy

This idea of authoritarian and plebiscitary democracy, legitimised by the passive nature of (Italian) popular sovereignty, mirrored the leaderistic populism heralded by the Mussolinian political liturgy. But the dialogue between leader and crowd, the patriotic sacralised politics, and other traits of the populist choreography that formed the distinctive political rituals explored by George Mosse and Giovanni Gentile, so ingrained in the early representations and historical interpretations of fascism, might be quite deceptive in this respect. In fact, if the people-at-war was defined by its virtues of obedience and passive compliance, this same people-at-war also had to be compact and integrated, with its parts structured hierarchically to form the unity of the nation. As Augusto Turati remarked in his catechism of fascism, the Italian ‘people’ with latent fascism in its inner soul tended to coincide with the nation, which in turn was reflected in the state, which was ‘the national corporate state, the state that gathers, controls and accords the interests of all social classes’. This brand of corporatist statism was clearly asserted: ‘Is this integral corporatism possible? Yes, but only on the terrain of the state, because only the state is above the conflicting interests of individuals and groups, in order to coordinate them to a higher end. The implementation is made more rapid by the fact that all the economic organisations recognised, guaranteed, protected in the corporative state live in fascism; that is, they accept the doctrine and practice of fascism’ (Turati Reference Turati1929, 48).

Indeed, the ‘oceanic’ gatherings of cheering crowds, reflecting the absolute centrality of the Duce's charismatic leadership over a ‘people’ atomistically composed of indistinct individuals, were counterbalanced by the pageants held to mark civil festivities, formed by diverse and orderly groups. Turned into a weekly occurrence by the launch of the Sabato Fascista, following the same genetic code of political violence practised by squadrismo, codified from the very first celebrations of the anniversaries of the March on Rome and generalised by the network of mass organisations, these pageants emphasised the secularisation of ethos and military order that underpinned the regime's social life (Falasca Zamponi, Reference Falasca Zamponi2003; Ben-Ghiat, Reference Ben Ghiat2004).Footnote ³

From this perspective, the ‘people’, as well as coinciding with the nation, tended to reproduce the complex fabric of society, its modern and industrial features included, as was implied in the primeval focus on the produttore, or ‘producer’, which the Fasci displayed from the early 1920s onwards. Alfredo Rocco was keenly aware early on of the organised nature of the social fabric in its relationship with the state, when in November 1920, after the wave of industrial strikes and factory occupations and at the outset of the violent fascist surge, he famously warned of the danger of the state's sovereignty being overwhelmed by the growing strength of social and political movements: ‘The state is in crisis; the state is dissolving day by day into a multitude of minor aggregates, parties, associations, leagues and unions, which bind it, paralyse it, suffocate it; the state is losing, with uniformly accelerated motion, one by one, the attributes of sovereignty’ (Rocco (Reference Rocco1920) 1938, 631). At the time, Rocco envisaged a way out, intimating that the state should recover its strength and reassert it over the societal organisations: ‘The existence of trade unions is not bad in itself. It is bad that they constitute a state above the state.’ The state was to reassert itself over society; ‘the state is not separate from or superimposed onto society; it is society itself insofar as it organises itself, that is to say insofar as it exists and lives, because organisation is life. To have faith in the future of the state is therefore to have faith in the future of civil society, to have faith in the future of civilisation’ (Rocco (Reference Rocco1920) 1938, 644–5). A few years later, he could claim to have accomplished the task by means of his syndical and corporative law for the juridical regulation of collective labour relations (issued 3 April 1926), which, he argued, ‘has contributed most to giving the fascist state its character and its action a concrete social content’, and has also ‘solved the problem of Italian society being organised based on profession’ (Rocco Reference Rocco1927, 21). This problem was at the core of the liberal state's fragile framework, and its ‘fundamentally erroneous conception of social life, which disregarded the organic nature of society, the necessary differences between men, their different values, and the diversity of the functions entrusted to each individual in the complex and varied mechanism of social life’. Tackling the issue of an organic vision of society, he said, had been ‘one of the most important tasks of the fascist state’, one it managed to resolve through ‘the reorganisation of society on the basis of the productive function exercised by each individual, … which gave the fascist state a new strength and a new life’ (Rocco Reference Rocco1927, 22–3).

As is well known, the laws authored by Rocco, which initiated the construction of the authoritarian corporative state, partly replaced the unsuccessful institutional reform project drafted by the Commission of Eighteen, or Soloni, chaired by Giovanni Gentile, and rejected by the Grand Council in October 1925. The Commission of Eighteen was composed of Fascist ‘supporters’ inclined to an authoritarian interpretation of the Albertine Statute, and did not satisfy Mussolini, who appointed Rocco alone to carry out the task (Uva Reference Uva1974). However, it is worth mentioning that in his capacity as chairman of the Commission, Gentile, in his concluding report, declared the need for ‘the differential character of the Fascist State’, and that there should be ‘contact between the State and the national productive forces, whether or not they are unionised, whether or not they can be unionised, that is, with all the forces that exist and operate within the nation, which is the contents of the state’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile1925) 1932, 21). Gentile's acknowledgement of the need to redefine the relationship between the state and social organisations was particularly relevant when it came to illustrating the wide reach of the ‘realistic’ concern of connecting with productive society. Gentile later widened his perspective, remarking that this realistic concern called into question the very foundation of liberal individualism, in a sentence often quoted by Irene Stolzi: ‘when [the fascist state] has to reach the individual, it does not seek him as that abstract political individual which the old liberalism assumed to be an indifferent atom; instead it seeks him as only it can find him […] as a specialised productive force’ (Gentile Reference Gentile1928, 50; Stolzi Reference Stolzi2007, 167; Stolzi Reference Stolzi, Cappellini, Costa, Sordi and Fioravanti2012, 500). In comparison, Rocco's angle was clear-cut:

However, this ability of the fascist state to connect with the ‘modern’ shape and structure of society by encompassing organised labour within its boundaries, as in Rocco's constitutional strategy (Battente Reference Battente2005, 425–49; Cerasi Reference Cerasi2018; Cerasi Reference Cerasi and Cerasi2019), was grounded on a concept of the ‘people’ that remained ambiguous. It was a ‘people’ divided between two opposite yet complementary dimensions: the cheering crowds and the orderly arrangements of the pageants; the obeying nature of the peasant soldier, and the constructive activity of the produttore. To combine the two sides of the coin, to put together a ‘people’ able to act as a political subject, it then had to be imbued with a political soul and character. A soul which only the ruling Fascist party was able to provide, thereby triggering a circle of self-referentiality that underpinned Fascism's main political weakness.

A political soul for the Italian people

The role of the Fascist party to provide a political soul to a defective Italian ‘people’ was acknowledged by Giuseppe Bottai at the time of its ‘revisionist’ campaign in the mid-1920s (De Grand Reference De Grand2000, 41). At first, in his deliberate manufacturing of a self-reliant strategy within mainstream fascism, he envisaged the dissolution of the party in the regime-building process (‘Is it necessary, in other words, to overcome the party? Abolish it?’ Bottai Reference Bottai1925a), and to transfer the original fascist revolutionary drive into the state, in order to achieve its complete conversion into a fascist state (Bottai Reference Bottai1925b; Mangoni Reference Mangoni1974, 113). He later retracted his steps when confronted with the fait accompli of Mussolini's resolution to leverage on the party one of the many readjustments of the strategic purpose assigned to the PNF: ‘In these conditions of life and struggle, the Party must still be a Militia under the orders of the Leader of the Revolution and cannot indulge in excessive criticism and introspection that could dampen action and weaken willpower’ (‘Il Congresso del |Partito’ 1925, 241). From then on, he settled on a twofold stance: on the one hand, it had to be acknowledged that the state had in effect become a fascist state, but on the other hand, in order to remain politically viable, it had to undergo a revolutionary ‘second wave’, or at least aim for progressive improvement. He saw the best means of achieving this in the corporative state, as the realisation of totalitarian democracy.

As part of this careful positioning, the notion of the ‘people’ used by Bottai resulted in a very straightforward view of totalitarian democracy. Moving away from the historicistic trope of the unfinished nature of the Risorgimento for want of revolutionary participation by the people, and from the anti-liberal argument of corrupted parliamentary customs, Bottai denied that modern Italy had ever been a democracy before the arrival of Fascism: ‘If by democracy we mean both the material and spiritual participation of the people in the state, we can say that democracy has never existed in Italy since the particularistic democracy of the communes.’ Indeed, coming as it did after the Great War, ‘Fascism is the revolution of the people that [had] remained outside the state’: in order to ‘turn the people into a nation, the state had to be subverted, and while socialism had no intention of doing this, Fascism understood it, born in the squares to call the people to get revenge against the false shepherds’. A new kind of democracy was in order:

Bottai's ability to seize the crux of the political debate, while managing to foster and steer its advancement, has been widely recognised in existing studies on the topic (Mangoni Reference Mangoni1974; De Grand Reference De Grand1978; Galfré Reference Galfré2000). It might be worth remarking that, in this perspective, his own standpoint was as sharp and incisive in its argument as it was middle-ground in its strategic positioning, with an ability to integrate – rather than reinforce – the different angles. His moderate balancing helped him to escape the ‘revisionist’ discussion with Roberto Farinacci about the role of the PNF, by stressing the need to defend the party ‘at a time when Fascism is about to face its decisive challenges’ (Bottai Reference Bottai1925d). This same ability allowed Bottai to rapidly envisage the corporative issue as the most suitable new terrain for promoting closer interpenetration of fascism, the people and the institutions, and ultimately the making of a totalitarian democracy.

There is no space here to delve into the thriving literature on fascist corporatism and its capacity to generate a steady stream of political, economic and juridical discussion (Santomassimo Reference Santomassimo2006; Stolzi Reference Stolzi2007; Gagliardi Reference Gagliardi2010; Cassese Reference Cassese2010; Pasetti Reference Pasetti2016; Costa Pinto Reference Costa Pinto2017). However, one highlight of this was a complex and intense debate about fascism and the French Revolution, and ultimately about totalitarian democracy (Tarquini Reference Tarquini2011, 141–5). This concept was developed by Bottai, who created an original blend of the various strands of the discussion as a conclusion of sorts to the debate. The result was a combination of authoritarian statism, references to the wartime experience as political legitimation, and an organic concept of corporative organisation as a reshaping of statehood to meet the social and productive requirements of modernity. As he claimed as a newly appointed professor of corporative law in his opening speech at the University of Pisa, the universality of the democratic principles of 1789 could only be achieved through fascism. The passage is worth quoting:

The reason, from this perspective, that only the corporative state could fill the void vacated by the empty form of the liberal state, was because corporative citizenship encompassed the produttore as well as the voter; social and economic life as well as political life. The corporative ‘people’, therefore, was a varied, solid, three-dimensional entity, capable of reflecting the diversity of social and economic life within an orderly and well-organised hierarchy, and so solving ‘the problems of contemporary life’. In this ‘realistic’ assumption, the corporative ‘people’ was able to give (organised and hierarchical) substance not only to the vacant liberal subject, but also to the indefinite, impalpable and passive body whose main feature was to obey. In terms of their view of the ‘people’, plebiscitarism and corporative organicism are therefore two sides of the same coin, namely totalitarian democracy. And the two sides could not be detached: on the one hand, when connected with leaderistic plebiscitarism, organic corporatism was prevented from acquiring that deliberative capacity which was to a certain extent envisaged in its first drafts, such as those sketched out by Gino Arias in the Soloni constitutional committee (Ottonelli Reference Ottonelli2012), and became prone to authoritarian outcomes such as those provided by Alfredo Rocco. On the other hand, when combined with organic corporatism, leaderistic plebiscitarism acquired the hierarchical order derived from the military and wartime experience and was integrated into the national dimension.

The two sides were welded together by a shared view of the ‘people’: passive, obedient and hierarchically unified. From this perspective, the distinctive brand of fascist totalitarian democracy was grounded in the negative qualities attributed to the ‘people’ of which it was the political outcome. How far those negative qualities ultimately derived from the original elitism professed by the socialist Mussolini, with his cynical appreciation of the crowds’ potential, as we mentioned above, is a matter of debate; in any case, these different yet integrated features resulted in a loose pattern, multifaceted enough to encompass different sides.

Giovanni Gentile in 1925, when head of the Soloni committee for constitutional reforms, was anything but sanguine on the corporate and organic framework the fascist state was to assume; yet three years later, in 1928, he acknowledged the ‘democratic’ nature of the fascist state, and regarded the corporative structure as the most suitable tool to achieve it. Not only did he declare that ‘the fascist state … is a popular state, and in this sense a democratic state par excellence’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile1928) 1934, 49), he also reckoned that ‘this character of the fascist state is the source of the great social and constitutional reform that fascism was carrying out, by establishing the syndical corporative regime and moving towards replacing the liberal state with the corporative state’ (Gentile (Reference Gentile1928) 1934, 48).

It is worth noting that the fact Gentile came to consider the corporative fascist state as a combination of nationalism, syndicalism and liberalism, which was able to surpass all three by establishing a new and modern form of statehood, was facilitated by his unique historicism (Roberts Reference Roberts2007, 8–24). By the end of the 1920s, however, an effective synthesis of the various arguments on this topic had been reached: as in Bottai's argument, elements of different origins were combined, creating a paradigm that could easily be used at different levels. The two-sided notion of plebiscitarism and corporative organicism, of the leader's charismatic appeal and the corporative state's integrated hierarchy, was a rhetorical scheme repeated over and over again across the next decade: anyone reading political publications or browsing academic journals will see it employed frequently.

An extensive study of the use of this two-sided paradigm in different domains of Fascist political culture during the 1930s would be instrumental in appreciating its influence and the true extent of its dissemination. The paragraphs below, however, present a selection of its usages in different contexts, and offer a tentative interpretation.

Bottai's brood and the people

In spite of his undisputed importance, Giuseppe Bottai has not yet received the full attention he deserves. In particular, with the exception of De Grand's pioneering book, and some major in-depth studies focused on his actions in the corporative sphere (De Grand Reference De Grand1978; Amore Bianco Reference Amore Bianco2012), his contribution to the organisation of the regime's political culture has not yet been thoroughly examined. What Mussolini called Bottai's ‘brood’ included not only, as the expression might suggest, a bunch of followers and pupils, but rather, according to his own recollection, a wider ‘group of older and younger friends’, committed to maintaining a critical attitude and conducting a constant work of revision ‘to prevent anything from bringing about a disconnect between Fascism and the country’ (Bottai (Reference Bottai1949) 2008, 49–50).

The group's reach in the political debate was wide and varied (Mangoni Reference Mangoni1974), and not solely due to the prestige of Bottai's main political journal Critica fascista and its special spin-offs including the Archivio di studi corporativi and Il diritto del lavoro, nor his effective promotion of academic corporative studies. The group functioned as a think-tank: its members were active in the public debate, and also occupied key roles in government, party and trade union organisations and initiatives. Gherardo Casini, for instance, was deputy editor of Critica fascista, but also general editor of the Confederation of Fascist Trade Unions’ house organ, Il lavoro fascista; Ugo D'Andrea was a regular contributor to Critica fascista and to mainstream newspaper Il Giornale d'Italia, but he also worked as a national trustee at the Centres for Corporate Culture and Propaganda, a network of centres based on Gentile's National Fascist Institute of Culture (Vittoria Reference Vittoria1982, Vittoria Reference Vittoria1984, Vittoria Reference Vittoria1986, Vittoria Reference Vittoria2021). Riccardo Del Giudice, as well as writing for a variety of ‘Bottaian’ journals, was a trade union leader, then member of parliament, professor of labour law, and undersecretary to the minister of education during Bottai's tenure (Parlato Reference Parlato1991; Parlato Reference Parlato2000).

The group's influence also went beyond the efforts of its most dedicated members. Bruno Spampanato, for instance, a professional journalist and trade union leader,Footnote ⁴ did not strictly belong to the ‘brood’ – indeed, he was a radical fascist – but he made a name for himself in 1932 by initiating the famous ‘Rome or Moscow’ debate with an essay published in Critica fascista, in which he compared Italian fascism to Soviet communism, seeing them united by both being popular revolutionary regimes (Mangoni Reference Mangoni1974, 226–77). He pushed his case further in a brochure entitled Popolo e regime, arguing that the alternative was ‘not Rome or Moscow, but Rome and Moscow, or old Europe’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 65). His main aim was to present his set of ideas on fascism for the use of ‘unknown comrades’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 14), including his own reworking of the two-sided paradigm of the ‘people’. Indeed, his entire argument hinged on a vague and unsubstantial concept of the ‘people’, which he saw as equivalent to the nation (‘The nation is geographically, politically and historically the body in which the people circulate … the nation is the becoming of the people’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 19). In a similar way to Gentile, he drew on the nationalist topic of Fascism fulfilling the task of integrating the masses into the state that the Risorgimento had failed to achieve: ‘The revolution of the Blackshirts is national, because it aims to complete the unitary process, creating in Italians a national conscience, a solidarity of the people, a sense of the state’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 95). He also drew on Mussolini's trivialised Paretian argument of the circulation of the elites as the inner workings of politics: fascism aimed for ‘healthy, complete democracy, which gives the masses the possibility of consciously circulating in the state, and the state the possibility of regulating this circulation’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 40). The outcome was ‘a totalitarian, organic democracy, in which the people live not merely to exercise political activity, not merely to claim social rights, but to serve the idea of the state entirely on every level, to become its body and soul, to be its interpreter at every moment, at every time’: a totalitarian democracy which ‘will make the myth of popular sovereignty reality through the substantial and complete adherence of the masses to the institutions’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 42). In ‘Bottaian’ terms, therefore, the most advanced tool for integrating the masses was the corporative state, which ‘achieves this sum of political, economic and idealist life because it is built on the indestructible structures of the complete, perfect organisation of the people as a whole in the fascist system’, thus proving the superiority of Rome over Moscow: ‘A totalitarian state: this is the state of the fascists. It is a sign that the whole people participates in it’ (Spampanato Reference Spampanato1932, 96).

One of Bottai's fields of influence – and one to which little attention has yet been paid – was the creation of a system of trade union schools (Parlato Reference Parlato2000, 80–88; Cerasi Reference Cerasi2020). These were an interesting cultural experiment within the newly established network of Centres for Corporate Culture and Propaganda (guaranteed by the presence of two of Bottai's close associates, journalist Ugo D'Andrea and jurist Dario Guidi), whose structure was modelled on the wide-reaching network of the National Fascist Institute of Culture, founded in 1925 by Giovanni Gentile to incorporate and replace the extensive web of provincial cultural institutes formed under liberal rule (Vittoria Reference Vittoria1982; Vittoria Reference Vittoria2021). Established at the end of the 1920s in some of the main Italian cities (including Florence and Genoa, which were the first to be founded), and incorporating aspects of education, popularisation and academia, the trade union schools were aimed at trade union leaders, but operated through the support of university bodies and teachers: indeed, they did not depend on the trade union organisations, but were eventually attached to the local university. Bottai wanted them to provide technical training for a new generation of trade union leaders, following the political guidelines of corporative fascism. According to Gino Arias, professor of political economics in Florence and organiser of the local trade union school, they were meant to be ‘real schools of corporative culture’, and to address not only professional trade unionists but all those who ‘feel the need to understand the value of corporative doctrine, in all its moral and political meaning’ (Notiziario 1932, 13). Due to their position at the juncture of political popularisation, professional training and academic culture, the classes and their teachers were well suited for playing a key disseminating role.

Augusto Fantechi was one of the founders of the trade union school in Florence. His career gathered momentum in the late 1930s, when he was appointed to the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations and then, in February 1940, was named president of the Istituto Luce. Hs main publication, issued in 1938, dealt with the transformation of the concepts of democracy and the ‘people’, reworking, almost to the letter, the aforementioned tropes, and particularly the two-sided notion of the ‘people’ (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938). The Italian ‘people’, which was late to establish political unity, acquired ‘a clear and precise awareness of itself and of its own greatness’ (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 10) only with the Great War, while ‘at the same time, the need for energetic and authoritarian leaders to govern this people and for this people also emerges’, revealing the Italian people's obeying nature (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 13). Fascism was therefore a legacy of the war in more than one sense: most notably in that its doctrine aimed to continue the ‘greatest revelation of modern war’, which was that ‘the people reconciled with their homeland must be included in the life of the state’ (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 14). This inclusion, achieved through the ordeal of the war and accomplished by fascism, transformed the very concept of democracy and of the ‘people’, who were ‘no longer seen as the sum of individuals who are foreign to one another, but as a complete and perfect fusion of citizens … that achieved their potential only in the state, in the sense of a unified and unbreakable whole of people and nation’. The ‘identifying of the people with the state’ accomplished through fascism (Fantechi, Reference Fantechi1938, 15) should be considered as a ‘higher phase of the democratic idea’, and ultimately a ‘totalitarian and authentic idea of democracy’, stemming from the historical experience of the people's war, of which Fascism was a legacy. Indeed, if ‘by democracy we mean the government of the people, we shall see that this has so far been unrealised and is unrealisable in parliamentary democracy’ (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 17).

The new democracy, in the sense of ‘the people's participation in government’, that would revolutionise twentieth-century political life would therefore be ‘authoritarian and hierarchical’, and would put into practice ‘the ideas proclaimed by the French Revolution’ (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 21–4). From this perspective, the ‘people’ coincided politically with the concept of nation, and legally with that of the state (Fantechi Reference Fantechi1938, 74–5), Referring to Mussolini's pronouncement ‘The people is the body of the state and the state is the spirit of the people. Under the fascist concept, the people is the state and the state is the people. the instruments through which this identity is realised in the state are the party and the corporations’, (Mussolini Reference Mussolini1935, 33), and relying on Bottai's set of ideas, a corporative version of totalitarian democracy was proposed, in which the ‘people’ that would constitute its foundation was dissolved into the social bodies that formed the corporative system:

This outcome was echoed in a booklet published by Francesco Ercole in the same year of 1938, part of a series published by the National Fascist Institute of Culture and designed to reach a wide audience. The legal historian and former minister of national education outlined a version of statist corporatism that allowed him to further develop the equivalence between ‘people’ and ‘state’. Through its unique corporative system, the fascist state succeeded in ‘bending trade unionism from being an organ of disintegration into an organ of political integration’ (Ercole Reference Ercole, Mancini and Ercole1938, 43). Therefore, the Fascist state not only has its foundation in the ‘people’, but the ‘people’ can be fully integrated with the state:

What prevented the ‘people’ dissolving completely into the state and entirely relinquishing its identity was the corporative frame, which formed the basic structure for its legal existence:

This extreme totalitarian democracy, based on the identification of the ‘people’ in the state, which dissolved the ‘people’ into the state leaving only the corporative framework as the mark of its legal existence, was argued for in Ercole's authoritarian statism, but could also be phrased in syndicalist terms, as Tullio Cianetti – at the time head of the industrial trade unions – did in September 1938. Cianetti also believed that Fascism was a ‘genuine people's regime’, a ‘state that achieves perfect democracy’, the latter understood ‘in the legal sense, because in the fascist view, the people is the state and the state is the people: the instruments for achieving this identity in the state are the party, the trade union and the corporations’: in short, ‘the equivalence of the people and the state can be seen in the concept – now clear to everyone – of a totalitarian state’ (Cianetti Reference Cianetti1938, 13–14). Again, only in fascism could true democracy be achieved: corporative political representation was the true ‘representation of the interests of the nation’, creating an ‘organic state which, as we have said, is the truest and simplest definition of the regime, [and which] no longer admits the distinction between people and state’ (Cianetti Reference Cianetti1938, 89). The distinctive feature of Cianetti's perspective was the emphasis on the professional basis of the corporative system (i.e., on the categoria, or ‘category’): Cianetti stated that ‘the people manifests itself through the “categories”, which achieved ‘the identifying of corporative representation with the interests of the people’:

Competing interests

The author declares none.