The marches before the march. The fascist conquest of Italian municipalities in 1922

Abstract

The power that fascism originally sought to conquer was not the central one of the national government, but the peripheral one of municipal administrations. The March on Rome itself was preceded by a long series of marches on other Italian cities and was the outcome of an encirclement of the national capital city, which implied the fascistization of urban centers and provincial and regional capital cities. This essay retraces the sequence of citizen coups which began in the spring of 1922 and expanded the territorial bases of the «fascist state» through
the insurrectional force action. Their operational constant became the initiative of the provincial squadrism, which took steps to militarily conquer the local authorities not administered by fascism and, above all, socialist municipalities. The political constant was instead the consensus of the social groups that had been excluded from the previous power system and did not delay in embracing the fascist reaction that was mobilizing locally to replace it. Finally, the seizure of power in the municipalities allowed fascism to complete the occupation of the real country before the conquest of the government obtained with the March on Rome.