War and Propaganda
Secret History: Pirelli and Bankers Actively Supported Mussolini
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
Mussolini’s Supporters
Benito Mussolini has a strong physical constitution although he suffers from syphilis. His robustness allows him to work round the clock…
These were the opening words of the long report on Mussolini and the Fasci di combattimento—combat squads—presented by Police Inspector General Gasti to the Italian Ministry of the Interior on 4 June, 1919. Gasti went on to list the rumored sources of finance for the Fascists and for Mussolini’s newspaper, the Popolo d’Italia, among them Pirelli, the rubber and cable company, and Ansaldo, the munitions company which had its headquarters in Genoa. Mussolini was supported by business—and the Church!
Ansaldo and Mussolini had been linked previously. Another police report, dated 22 August, 1918, described how there were insistent rumor in industrial and press circles in Milan that Mussolini, together with his newspaper, had been cornered by the Ansaldo company through the payment of large subsidies. And an intelligence survey of the same period stated:
Signor Pagliani [director of the Banca di Sconto, an important bank in which the brothers Pio and Mario Perrone, owners of Ansaldo, had a large stake] had paid 200,000 lire [some £20,000] to Mussolini.
It was even rumored that Ansaldo’s Perrone brothers were backing Mussolini to get more munition orders from the government. The question of who should get what of the dismembered Austro-Hungarian empire was much in the politicians’ minds at that time, and so Ansaldo had a strong interest in supporting publications like Mussolini’s Popolo d’Italia which took a strong anti-Yugoslav line—and which also made the prospect of war credible.
The war business gave Mussolini his first big break, in 1914, when he broke from the Socialist Party over the question of whether or not Italy should join the war. The Socialists strongly opposed Italy participating, and so Mussolini, an ardent advocate of Italy’s entry, sought and got backing from others who shared his view. The first edition of the Popolo d’Italia came out on 15 November, 1914, thanks to the backing of a group of industrialists in central Italy—for although considered a wild man because of his revolutionary socialist past, conservatives liked Mussolini’s line in nationalist rhetoric.
The gulf between Mussolini and the socialists widened, in 1919, with the war over and thousands of disgruntled ex-servicemen desperately looking for jobs. The Bolshevik revolution convinced many that revolution was imminent in Italy too, but it terrified the middle classes, industrialists and landowners. Mussolini, with his anti-Socialist combat squads, stepped into the breach and offered his services in the face of the government’s unwillingness or inability to deal with left-wing strikes and demonstrations. From 1919 until the March on Rome in October 1922, Italy became a sort of no-man’s land in which the Fascist squads gradually extended their terrorist tactics from the Po Valley in the north to the whole of north and central Italy, acting as strong-arm men for both landowners and industrialists and as strike breakers for the latter.
By 1921, after two years of violent expansion, the Fascists’ finances were said to be rocky, and so local representatives, mainly retired officers, were recruited and each given a beat to cover—tapping the local farmer or factory owner for funds in a polite sort of protection racket. The agents kept between 10 and 15 per cent of the takings and the remaining money was split 60 per cent for the central organization, which passed part of it on to the poorer squads, and 40 per cent to the squads in whose area the money had been raised. Some 5,819,975 lire, about £10 million at 2006 values, was raised in this way between October 1921 and December 1924—almost 60 per cent of the money coming from the province of Milan and nearly 25 per cent from Rome.
Contributions from banks, insurance companies and industry accounted for almost ¾ of the total—and this sum does not account for numerous contributions made directly to the local squads, particularly in the rural areas of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany. Nor does it include the subsidies given, either in the form of cash or advertising contracts, to the Popolo d’Italia. One of the important contributors, donating tens of thousands of pounds, was Giovanni Agnelli of Fiat, who was made a senator shortly after Mussolini came to power and whose contribution to the rise of Fascism was publicly acknowledged by the Duce.
Senator Alberto Pirelli, the tyre magnate, also provided solid financial endorsement of an equivalent magnitude, and so did Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, an immensely rich financier and industrialist who owned a vast empire of financial, engineering, electrical and steel companies that survived in his family’s hands until the 1960s. The Perrone brothers also contributed funds from Ansaldo and the Banco di Sconto. Few of these industrialists actually belonged to the Fascist Party. Their objectives were less creditable still. They wanted to protect their interests by any means possible. Denis Mack Smith says in his survey of modern Italy’s history that these liberals evidently put riches and comfort before liberty.
Now events played right into Mussolini’s hands, justifying the faith his industrialist backers had placed in him, for. In January 1921, the Socialists split, the Communists forming their own separate party. The consequence of the break-up was that membership of both the Socialist and Communist parties plunged from 216,000 in 1920 to less than half that in 1921. In March of the same year, an anarchist bomb attack in a Milan theater killed 21 and wounded 200, and then, in May, the Prime Minister Giolitti sprang general elections on the country and included the Fascists, who until then had no Member of Parliament, in a “National bloc”. This enabled the Fascists to return 35 deputies, including Mussolini, after an election campaign characterized by the violence of the Fascist squads. Between 8 April and 14 May 1921, 105 people were reported killed and 431 wounded.
Mussolini had of course adroitly tailored his movement’s economic programme to please his industrialist backers. In the 14 January 1921, issue of Popolo d’Italia he announced that capitalism was only at the beginning of its history—the electoral campaign of the “National bloc” had been financed by industry and Confindustria, the Italian employers’ federation that had been formed the previous year—and in his maiden speech to the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini advocated a return to what he called a “Manchesterian economy”, meaning free trade, no shackles on private enterprise, and a minimum of state intervention. He repeated this newly acquired conviction at the inaugural congress of the National Fascist Party, which changed the Fascist movement into a regular political party, in Rome in November 1921.
With the support of big business consolidated, and with large sectors of the army and the police on his side as well, Mussolini now needed the backing or at least the benevolent neutrality of the Church and the monarchy. So in 1922 discreet approaches were made to the Vatican, and on 20 September Mussolini made a speech at Udine in which he was sympathetic to the monarchy. Against the background of a general strike, called by the unions at the beginning of August to protest against the authorities’ toleration of Fascist violence, Mussolini completed with this speech the process of winning the approval of the establishment.
Five weeks later his Fascists had assembled between 15,000 and 25,000 poorly armed squadristi to the north and east of Rome. On 12 October, a delegation of industrialists, including Pirelli and the chairman of the Employers’ Federation, Antonio Benni, had told the Prefect of Milan that Italy needed another government in which the Fascists were included. And the Masons, who represented a great mass of army officers, intensified their political and economic support for the Fascists—to the tune of 3.5 million lire—about £5 million today—it was revealed later.
The National Syndicate of Cooperatives and the Agrarian Confederation also made their contributions. And the largest sum of all appears to have come from the Banking Association—some 20 million lire, nearly £40 million, raised by Italy’s equivalent of our own big banks to help Mussolini’s coup d’etat which, in the event, proved so straightforward he was able to save the money for other uses.
On 28 October, a group of industrialists, including Benni for the Employers’ Federation and the electricity tycoon Ettore Conti, went to Mussolini to try to persuade him to join a conservative coalition. By now the Fascists had the scent of real power in their nostrils and knew they had no need to compromise—not even for the sake of their industrial supporters. On the morning of 30 October 1922, Mussolini arrived in Rome by train and was designated Prime Minister. His army of marchers straggled in after him and a victory parade was held next day.
The crucial factor in Mussolini’s success had been not so much the spectacle of his followers marching into the nation’s capital—demonstrations were usual in Italy after the First World War—but the knowledge that behind them was the economic might of the North Italian business establishment. Jotting down a draft list of Ministers for his Cabinet, Mussolini got the portfolio of Industry and Commerce and scribbled the name of Ettore Conti. The tycoon declined, but he did suggest another name, Teofilo Rossi, and he was the man who got the job. Having helped the Fascists to power, big business had a vested interest in, keeping them there.
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
