March on Rome (1922): How Mussolini's Fascists Took Power

The March on Rome was the mobilisation of tens of thousands of Fascist militiamen, the Blackshirts, towards the Italian capital between 27 and 29 October 1922. Rather than resist, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to proclaim martial law and invited the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini to become prime minister. The episode created the first fascist government in history and became a model, and a warning, for anti-democratic movements across Europe.

Background: Italy after the First World War

Italy emerged from the First World War on the winning side but deeply unsettled. Around 650,000 Italian soldiers had died, the state was heavily in debt, and inflation eroded wages and savings. Many nationalists believed the peace settlement, including the Treaty of Versailles and the treaties that accompanied it, had denied Italy the territory it had been promised, notably on the Adriatic coast. The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio popularised the phrase “mutilated victory” and in 1919 seized the port of Fiume (Rijeka) with a band of volunteers.

At home, 1919 and 1920 became known as the biennio rosso, the “two red years”. Strikes, land occupations and the occupation of factories in the industrial north frightened landowners, industrialists and much of the middle class. The Italian Socialist Party had become the largest party in parliament, but it was divided and did not seize power. The liberal governments of the period, led by figures such as Francesco Nitti and Giovanni Giolitti, struggled to build stable majorities in a parliament fragmented by proportional representation.

The rise of Fascism and the plan to march

Mussolini, a former socialist journalist who had broken with his party to support Italy’s entry into the war, founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919. The movement did poorly in the 1919 election, but from late 1920 it grew rapidly through squadrismo: armed squads of Blackshirts, often veterans and students, who attacked socialist town halls, trade union offices, cooperatives and newspapers, especially in the Po Valley and Tuscany. Landowners and local authorities frequently funded or tolerated them, and the police often looked away. Hundreds of people were killed in this violence between 1920 and 1922.

In the May 1921 election the Fascists won around 35 seats as part of Giolitti’s “National Blocs”, which gave them parliamentary respectability. In November 1921 the movement became a formal party, the National Fascist Party (PNF). By 1922 it claimed several hundred thousand members, and its squads controlled entire provinces. When anti-fascist unions called a “legalitarian” general strike at the start of August 1922, the squads broke it by force, occupying city councils in Milan, Genoa and elsewhere. The failure of the strike convinced many conservatives that only the Fascists could guarantee order, and convinced Mussolini that the state would not seriously resist him.

Through the autumn of 1922 Mussolini pursued two strategies at once. He negotiated with liberal leaders, including Giolitti, Antonio Salandra and the prime minister Luigi Facta, about Fascist places in a new cabinet. At the same time the party prepared an insurrection, giving command of the militia to four leaders known as the quadrumvirs: Italo Balbo, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Emilio De Bono and Michele Bianchi.

At a large Fascist congress in Naples on 24 October 1922, Mussolini declared that either the government would be handed to the Fascists or they would take it by marching on Rome. The quadrumvirs set up their headquarters in Perugia. The plan was for squads to seize prefectures, telegraph offices and railway stations across northern and central Italy on the night of 27-28 October, while columns gathered at Santa Marinella, Monterotondo and Tivoli, within striking distance of the capital, with a reserve at Foligno.

What happened

On the night of 27-28 October Fascist squads occupied public buildings in many towns, particularly in Tuscany, Umbria and the north, often without meeting opposition. Columns of Blackshirts, estimated by most historians at roughly 20,000 to 30,000 men, assembled outside Rome in heavy rain. Many were poorly armed and poorly supplied. Rome itself was defended by a regular army garrison of comparable size under General Emanuele Pugliese, with artillery, armoured cars and orders to hold the city.

In the early hours of 28 October Facta’s cabinet decided to proclaim a state of siege, which would have placed the army in charge of public order. Telegrams announcing martial law were sent to the prefects. But when Facta brought the decree to Victor Emmanuel III that morning, the king refused to sign it. The order was withdrawn and Facta’s government resigned.

The king then asked Antonio Salandra, a conservative liberal, to form a government that would include Fascist ministers. Mussolini, waiting in Milan close to the Swiss border, refused to serve under anyone else. On 29 October Salandra gave up, and the king’s aide telephoned Mussolini to invite him to Rome to form a government. Mussolini insisted on a written telegram, then took the overnight train from Milan. He arrived on the morning of 30 October and was received by the king the same day. His cabinet was sworn in on 31 October, when the Blackshirts, by then allowed into the city, paraded before the king. Scattered clashes, notably in the working-class San Lorenzo district of Rome, caused a number of deaths.

Key people

• Benito Mussolini (1883-1945): founder and leader of Fascism, who combined the threat of insurrection with negotiation and became Italy’s youngest prime minister at 39.
• Victor Emmanuel III (1869-1947): King of Italy, whose refusal to sign the martial-law decree decided the crisis. His motives are still debated; he later remained head of state throughout the dictatorship.
• Luigi Facta (1861-1930): liberal prime minister whose weak coalition was unable to confront the Fascists.
• The quadrumvirs: Italo Balbo, Cesare Maria De Vecchi, Emilio De Bono and Michele Bianchi, who commanded the militia during the march.

Why the state gave way

Historians agree that the army could almost certainly have dispersed the Blackshirt columns had it been ordered to do so. The decisive choice was political. The king seems to have feared civil war, doubted whether officers would fire on men who included many veterans and nationalists, and may have worried about rivals within the royal family, such as his cousin the Duke of Aosta, who was sympathetic to the Fascists. Senior military figures, industrialists and many liberal politicians also believed that Mussolini could be “constitutionalised” by giving him office.

The divisions of the left mattered too. Socialists, communists and the Catholic Popular Party had not formed a common front against Fascism, and the failed August strike had exhausted the unions. For much of the political class, Mussolini looked like a lesser evil than either continued disorder or a revolution from the left.

Consequences

Mussolini’s first cabinet was a coalition including liberals, nationalists and members of the Popular Party, with only a handful of Fascist ministers, though Mussolini himself also held the interior and foreign ministries. In his first speech to the Chamber of Deputies in November 1922 he warned that he could have turned the chamber into a camp for his squads but had chosen not to. Parliament gave him a comfortable vote of confidence and then granted his government emergency powers for a year.

Over the following years the constitutional facade was steadily removed. The Blackshirts were turned into a state militia in early 1923. The Acerbo Law of 1923 gave two-thirds of the seats to the list that won the most votes, and the April 1924 election was held amid widespread intimidation. The murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti by Fascist thugs in June 1924 caused a crisis, but on 3 January 1925 Mussolini took responsibility for what had happened in a speech that marked the start of open dictatorship. Laws passed in 1925 and 1926 banned opposition parties, censored the press and made Mussolini answerable only to the king.

Myths and facts

Myth: Mussolini led his men into Rome. In fact he stayed in Milan, ready to flee to Switzerland if the attempt failed, and reached Rome by sleeping car after he had already been invited to govern.

Myth: Fascism took power by force of arms. The march was a threat rather than a military victory. The decisive act was the king’s refusal to sign martial law and his legal appointment of Mussolini, followed by a parliamentary vote of confidence.

Fact: the regime later inflated the event. Fascist propaganda turned the march into a heroic revolution. Italy’s Fascist calendar counted its years from the March on Rome, and a large Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution opened in Rome for the tenth anniversary in 1932.

Legacy

The March on Rome showed that a mass movement using street violence could be brought into government by conservative elites who hoped to control it. Adolf Hitler admired Mussolini’s success and tried to imitate it in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 1923, which failed. A decade later Hitler too was appointed legally, when Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933 with the backing of conservative politicians.

Mussolini’s dictatorship lasted until July 1943, when the Fascist Grand Council and the king removed him after Allied landings in Sicily. The monarchy’s role in 1922 damaged its reputation, and Italians voted to abolish it in a referendum in June 1946.

Timeline

• 1919, 23 March: Mussolini founds the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan.
• 1921, May: Fascists win around 35 seats in the general election.
• 1921, November: The movement becomes the National Fascist Party.
• 1922, 31 July - early August: An anti-fascist general strike is broken by Fascist squads.
• 1922, 24 October: Mussolini threatens to march on Rome at the Fascist congress in Naples.
• 1922, 27-28 October: Squads occupy public buildings; columns gather outside Rome.
• 1922, 28 October: The king refuses to sign the martial-law decree; Facta resigns.
• 1922, 29 October: The king invites Mussolini to form a government.
• 1922, 30-31 October: Mussolini arrives in Rome, is received by the king and his cabinet is sworn in; the Blackshirts parade through the city.
• 1925, 3 January: Mussolini’s speech to parliament opens the path to open dictatorship.

Why it matters

The March on Rome brought the first fascist government to power in Europe, not through a military victory but because the king and the liberal establishment chose to accommodate a violent movement rather than confront it. That pattern, of elites hoping to tame extremists by giving them office, would be repeated with even graver consequences in Germany a decade later.