March on Rome

In the last days of October 1922, columns of Fascist Blackshirts converged on the Italian capital in a show of force meant to intimidate the government into handing over power. It worked without a battle. When King Victor Emmanuel III refused to approve martial law, the prime minister's position collapsed, and on 30 October the king appointed Benito Mussolini, leader of the National Fascist Party, as prime minister. The march opened the way to two decades of Fascist rule in Italy and became a founding myth of the regime.

Italy emerged from the First World War victorious but bitterly divided. In March 1919 Mussolini, a former socialist journalist, founded the first Fascist combat groups, though they won no seats in the elections that November. The years 1919–20, later called the "Red Biennium", brought waves of strikes, factory occupations and land seizures. Many landowners and industrialists, feeling unprotected by a government that tried to stay neutral, turned to the Fascists, whose squads were full of war veterans and willing to use violence.

In the same period the nationalist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio seized the Adriatic port of Fiume with armed followers in September 1919 and held it until December 1920, an episode that served in part as a model for the later march.

From 1920 the Blackshirt squads, or squadristi, attacked socialist politicians, trade unions and town councils, especially in the Po Valley and across northern and central Italy. Elected local governments were driven out, and the police often looked away or even helped the attackers. In the 1921 general election the Fascists ran on an anti-socialist list with the liberal leader Giovanni Giolitti and won 35 seats, bringing Mussolini into parliament. Later that year the movement became the National Fascist Party, with about 320,000 members by the end of 1921.

When socialists called an anti-fascist general strike in August 1922, Mussolini presented his movement as the guardian of order. Fascist squads burned socialist offices in Ancona and Genoa and wrecked the presses of the socialist newspaper Avanti! in Milan, where they also took over the city government. The national government did little in response.

On 24 October 1922, before some 60,000 supporters at a rally in Naples, Mussolini declared that the Fascists wanted to rule Italy. Four leaders, the "quadrumvirs" Emilio De Bono, Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi and Cesare Maria de Vecchi, were put in charge of the operation, while Mussolini himself stayed in Milan. As Blackshirt bands gathered outside Rome, Prime Minister Luigi Facta, who had already resigned but remained in office, prepared a decree declaring a state of siege. On 28 October the king refused to sign it.

Historians have offered several reasons for the king's decision: doubts about the army's loyalty, fear of civil war, worry about the ambitions of his pro-Fascist cousin the Duke of Aosta and, according to Denis Mack Smith, a wish to be rid of Facta's weak government. Industrialists urged Mussolini to share power with the conservative Antonio Salandra, but he refused and held out for the premiership. He was asked to form a government on 29 October and appointed the next day. Fewer than 30,000 men had actually marched, and some 25,000 Blackshirts paraded through Rome as the new coalition cabinet took shape.

The transfer of power took place within the forms of the constitution, the Statuto Albertino, rather than through the violent seizure later celebrated in Fascist propaganda. It was made possible by the readiness of the authorities to give way to intimidation, and by business leaders who believed they could control Mussolini. After the murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti on 10 June 1924, Mussolini moved to establish an open dictatorship. Participants in the march were later honoured with a commemorative medal.

Our 1920 map shows the Kingdom of Italy on the eve of the Fascist takeover, and the 1930 map shows it under Mussolini's rule.