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Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

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Fascist Spectacle

University of California Press

At 10:55 on the morning of October 30, 1922, in a sleeping car of the DD17 train coming from Milan, Benito Mussolini arrived at the Termini station in Rome.1 With him he carried the written proof of the mandate bestowed on him by the king to become the new prime minister of Italy.2 After a brief stop at the Hotel Savoia, Mussolini headed to the Quirinale for a meeting with King Vittorio Emanuele III. He returned to the Quirinale that same evening with a list, to be approved by the king, of the ministers participating in his "national government." Amidst praises for Mussolini from newspapers, politicians, cultural personalities, and industrial elites, fascism's reign in Italy began.3

The circumstances leading to Mussolini's proclamation as prime minister were quite unusual. Only a few days earlier, on October 27, 1922, a group of fascists had mobilized with the plan of marching on Rome and occupying the capital.4 The leaders of the march held their headquarters in Perugia, a city one hundred miles from Rome, while Mussolini remained in Minlan. The core of the fascist forces was located on the outskirts of the capital, from where, according to the scheme, they would all be ready to converge on the city on October 28. Luigi Facta, the prime minister at the time, decided to proclaim martial law in Rome in order to protect the city. And although there were some doubts about the army's behavior in case of a clash with the fascists, from a military point of view Mussolini's Black Shirts were unlikely to be victorious.5 However, the unexpected happened. The king refused to sign the decree that established the state of siege. Mussolini, who had been negotiating with the government for a nonviolent satisfaction of his power demands, was invited to participate in a coalition dominated by conservatives and nationalists. Mussolini rejected the offer and imposed the condition that he form his own government. The king accepted, and on October 29 Mussolini was summoned to Rome, where he was officially proclaimed prime minister the following day. On October 31 the Black Shirts, who had been waiting for the order to march, reached the capital (many by special trains) and paraded before Mussolini and the king. The violent takeover of Rome thus never took place, and the Black Shirts' march-parade ended up being the choreographic appendix to Mussolini's legal appointment as prime minister.

Though the episode of the march unfolded along these peculiar lines, the fascist regime never accepted this historical account of its ascent to power. On the contrary, it elaborated its own interpretation of the march and always called the events of late October 1922 a "revolution."6 In his Milan speech of October 4, 1924, Mussolini proclaimed: "Like it or not, in October 1922 there was an insurrectional act, a revolution, even if one can argue over the word. Anyway, a violent take-over of power. To deny this real fact . . . is truly nonsense."7 A few months earlier he had told the Grand Council gathered at Palazzo Venezia: "Fascism did not come to power through normal means. It arrived there by marching on Rome armata manu , with a real insurrectional act."8 Fascist rhetoric made of the march a mythical event in the history of fascism. October 28 became the date of one of the most important fascist celebrations, the anniversary of the March on Rome, first observed in 1923 in a four-day commemoration.9 In 1927, the new fascist calendar identified the pseudo-march as the epochal breakthrough of fascism: years were counted beginning with October 29, 1922, year I of the "fascist era." In 1932 the regime remembered the Decennial of the Revolution with great pomp and later established a permanent Exhibit of the Revolution. In sum, although the march never occurred, and although behind the scenes Mussolini had actually tried to avoid an armed insurrection,10 the regime took the march to mark the beginning of the fascist epoch. By transforming a choreographed rally into a glorious event, fascism made of the March on Rome a symbolic moment in the construction of its own revolutionary identity. The mythicization of the March on Rome became a narrative device in fascism's elaboration of its own historical tale.

Jean-Pierre Faye claims that history, in the process of narrating, produces itself and that discourses, while telling about actions, at the same time generate them.11 In this book I will look at fascism's official symbolic discourse—manifested through images, rituals, speeches—as a text that narrates fascism's epics, that recounts its story.12 I will also interpret fascist discourse as producing, through a work of weaving and plotting, its own happening. In this context, the mythicization of the March on Rome appears as the opening prologue to fascism's creation of its own story/history.13

This cultural approach to the study of Italian fascism is founded on a notion of narrative as intersubjective discourse that takes place within a social space and a historical time.14 We resort to narration in our everyday world as a way to describe objects and events. Through these narrative presentations we establish mutual understanding with members of the collectivity to which we belong. A crucial means for social recognition, narratives also provide us with ways to organize reality and construct meanings: we make sense of our experience by telling stories that draw from a common stock of knowledge, a cultural tradition that is intersubjectively shared. In this process we develop personal and social identities as subjects of communication, social actors in the life-world in which we take part. As Habermas explains, people "can develop personal identities only if they recognize that the sequences of their actions form narratively presentable life histories; they can develop social identities only if they recognize that they maintain their membership in social groups by way of participating in interactions, and thus that they are caught up in the narratively presentable histories of collectivities."15 Following the critique of the traditional view of language as transparent and reflecting an existing reality, Habermas emphasizes the pragmatic dimension of language as communication. He suggests adopting a practical notion of speech acts as mediating and creating social meanings. Within this context, what Austin calls the performative quality of language, its ability to bring about a change, becomes another important feature of narratives. When we speak we indeed do more than describe events. We also produce actions, which then exercise profound consequences on social and historical processes.

The performative character of language draws attention to and dramatizes the relation between power and representation. Not only are there unequal positions from which discourse unfolds, as Habermas warns, but narratives of power are also able to create new categories of understanding, frames of reference, forms of interpretation that naturalize meanings and in turn affect the course of social action.16 Moreover, if we assume that power cannot subsist without being represented—if representation is the very essence of power, its force—then narratives also produce power while representing it.17 Because we normally tend to identify sense with...