but, with the passing of emergency laws against such activity, these eventually dwindled.
Trieste established a pattern of operation for the squads: mobilization, then provocation, followed by violent action and destruction of leftist infrastructures and organizations. This was wholly connived by the police and local industrialists who supported such operations and thus facilitated the rise of violent fascism in the city. Being better funded and more numerous than the anti-fascists, the fascist gangs soon took control of the streets in Trieste, which led to mass arrests of militants and many anti-fascists going into exile to escape fascist retaliation.
Piombino
Fascism developed more slowly in the militant town of Piombino, where anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists were well organized and made retaliatory attacks on local fascists after Squadristi violence in places like Pisa. The 144th Battalion of the Arditi del Popolo was launched with anarchist, communist and socialist militants to the fore. Following an assassination attempt on a socialist in 1921, militants from the Arditi attacked the local fascists. The Royal Guard came to the fascists’ aid but were disarmed and the Arditi controlled the city for several days. As elsewhere, the Pact of Pacification that the socialist leadership signed with the fascist government fractured anti-fascist militants, weakened the Arditi del Popolo, and ultimately only aided fascism.
The anarchist Morelli was putting up posters against the pact when fascists attacked him. Despite firing back, he was killed. Police arrested two hundred anarchists that night, many of them Arditi militants. The fascists realised their chance and attacked opposition printing presses and offices, only to be confronted by militant anti-fascists and rescued by the ever-sympathetic police. In 1922, fascists again tried to take Piombino but were again repulsed by the well-organized Arditi. In June, using a fascist funeral as a pretext, Squadristi, with Royal Guards from Pisa, destroyed socialist offices and meeting places (despite the pact). They attempted to occupy union offices and the anarchist printers but faced militant responses for a day and a half before taking over the city. Many more anti-fascists faced a future in exile.
The year 1922 was that of Mussolini’s fabled March on Rome, which was accompanied by Il Duce’s declaration that he was prepared to rule by machine gun if need be. Mussolini himself did not march to Rome but caught the train. Fascist violence erupted in the capital, with attacks on radical newspapers and bookshops and with public book-burning. Squadristi attacks on opposition media and their printing presses ensured a one-sided account of events the following day.
Fascist violence continued with the murder of three opposition MPs and savage beatings given out to other opponents. Following the kidnapping, beating and murder of the socialist parliamentarian Matteoti by fascists in 1924, which nearly united oppositional forces against Mussolini, Il Duce increased his control over social and political life in Italy. Socialist and communist deputies such as Gramsci were arrested and their parties banned, so activists were forced to work covertly. Organizations and clubs were illegal ‘and even wine shops suspected of serving as meeting places for “subversives” were closed down’.35 All of these police actions were enthusiastically accompanied by Blackshirt fascist squads and meant that any consolidated anti-fascist activity was going to be extremely difficult in a one-party state.
The consolidation of power by Mussolini did not mean the squads went away, and, in fact, they still proved to be uncontrollable in some parts of the country. Once in power, the fascist squads had no one left to fight, their raison d’etre had vanished, and they resorted to either infighting or found new enemies to bully, which enervated a movement at risk of becoming stale. Some squads were dissolved following party discipline, whilst others simply disguised themselves as leisure associations. Many Squadristi had been calling for a second wave of violence, more out of adventure than political expediency it seems, so they selected new targets in the shape of catholic institutions and freemasons. Leading fascists such as Farinacci wanted to maintain the squads as a bulwark against any possible anti-fascist or industrial agitation as well as to maintain a vital symbol of fascist ideology. However, given the mounting evidence of corruption, blackmail and extortion coming in from the provinces, Farinacci had a difficult case to make; it was obvious to many party functionaries that the Ras were a law unto themselves and very keen on maintaining the status that had elevated them from nowhere men to political somebodies. However, Farinacci, under pressure from Mussolini, was forced to curb the influence of the squads and made moves to suppress them, although, in some areas, they were still used in their traditional scab role of intimidating workers and suppressing working-class organization.
By the 1930s, Mussolini, although hardly exporting fascism in any great measure, was supporting fascist organizations in other countries: the British Union of Fascists benefited from his patronage, as did the Croatian fascists led by Anton Pavelic. In the 1930s. Mussolini supplied men and materiel to Franco during the Spanish Civil War, and he demanded that any captured Italian anti-fascists be deported and executed. Italian fascist mercenaries were humiliated by anti-fascist forces, including Italians at Guadalajara, which proved most embarrassing for Il Duce. He had to satisfy himself by torpedoing neutral ships that he suspected were carrying supplies to the Spanish Republic.
From Prisoners to Partisans!
The anti-fascists who were lucky enough to escape from Italy to France, or even further to America, avoided arrest and imprisonment, whilst those who remained often faced heavy sentences and regular persecution. Many anti-fascists were interned under new provisions for containment of political opposition and were exiled to islands in the Mediterranean. Relations in these camps between anarchists and communists were often fractious, especially with the commencement of the Spanish Civil War. Isolated and in bad conditions, many anti-fascists were stuck there for the rest of their sentences; some had their tariffs extended due to violent insubordination, whilst others remained in the camps until 1943 and the collapse of Mussolini’s regime.
Italian anti-fascists in France faced mixed fortunes: many were arrested and deported back to Italy and the camps, some went to fight in Spain, and others managed to live clandestinely in Vichy after 1941. The difficulty of political activity and life under fascism and in exile is illustrated by the case of Egidio Fossi, an anarchist who, in 1920, was sentenced to twelve years, the first two of which were spent in solitary confinement. Released under a general amnesty in 1925, he was continually harassed by fascists until he escaped to France where he was pursued by the police. Fossi left to fight in Spain in 1936, and in 1940 he was arrested and sent to a German labour brigade. Freed in 1943, he returned to Piombino to join the anarchist struggle. In 1920, another anarchist, Adriano Vanni, was tried with Fossi and, after the general amnesty, fascists attacked him, so left for exile in France. Finding life just as hard there, he returned to Italy where fascist persecution continued. In September 1943, when Italy surrendered, Fossi was a key anarchist organizer in the partisans, and after the liberation he confronted the fascist thugs who had harassed him previously. Incredibly, he did not seek the ultimate retribution.
Pietro Bruzzi was a Milanese anarchist who had lived in Russia and France before fighting in the Spanish Civil War. He was deported from France and spent five years on the isle of Ponza. The deposition of Mussolini and his replacement by the Badoglio regime did not mean instant liberation for anti-fascists, especially anarchist ones, and Bruzzi remained in internment. Like others though, he escaped and joined an anarchist partisan group back in Milan, only to be betrayed, arrested and tortured ‘with such ferocity that his face was completely smashed. He gave no information to the Nazis and was subsequently shot. Before dying he still had the strength to shout, “Viva l’anarchia!”’36 Following his death, Milanese anarchists formed the Malatesta and Bruzzi Brigades and fought alongside the socialist Matteoti Brigade to liberate the city. As the partisan struggle intensified in 1943, the local anti-fascists seized weapons including ‘a small calibre piece of artillery,’ which was put to good use by destroying a German truck.37 The Germans
