Abstract
Reviewed by: Chris Millington, Swansea University, UK
This book investigates the ways in which the symbol of the Great War veteran was formulated as ‘a cultural construct… manipulated by the fascist movements and regimes’ (8) of interwar Europe. The case of Italy accounts for most of the analysis, with France, Germany and Spain, examined too. The author’s aim is to investigate how by 1940, ‘the symbol of the fascist and the symbol of the veteran had coalesced in the minds of many Europeans’ (278), when, in fact, the great majority of ex-servicemen did not engage in extremist politics.
The origins of the ‘fascist veteran’ stereotype can be traced to the closing years of the Great War when the Russian peace with Germany and the Italian retreat at Caporetto prompted a remobilization of the war effort in Italy. Military authorities recast the soldier at the front as a ‘combatant’ rather than a mere ‘serviceman’, and an array of nationalist symbols were deployed to engender a love of the fatherland and a violent hatred of the enemy. A campaign against shirkers and pacifists at home sought to shore up civilian morale. Meanwhile, Mussolini – disappointed with the outcome of the revolution in Russia – looked to a new political constituency that could carry the war through to victory: the ‘trenchocracy’ of the front soldiers.
The positioning of the veteran on the nationalist right was by no means inevitable. By 1919, the Italian veterans’ movement was politically diverse; only the elite arditi joined Mussolini’s nascent Fascist movement. However, the arditi’s violent attacks on socialists marked the beginning of an association between the veteran and anti-Bolshevism. The signing of the Treaty of Versailles saw the intensification of the nationalist struggle to claim the symbol of the veteran. By the end of the year, even foreign observers reported the ‘overall militaristic, anti-government and anti-socialist’ stance of Italian veterans, now largely assumed to be followers of Fascism (62). Yet Fascism had not yet come to dominate the veterans’ movement. In fact, violence between Fascists and anti-fascists was akin to ‘a civil war between veterans’ (89).
Mussolini gradually brought the veterans to heel. He was helped, in part, by the fascist sympathies of sections of the national veterans’ association, the Associazione Nazionale Combattenti (ANC). Veterans and fascists took part together in ceremonies to commemorate, for example, the March on Rome. However, tensions could run high at the grassroots level, especially where ANC sections were suspected of harbouring anti-fascist sentiment or where veteran leaders took seriously the association’s commitment to apoliticism. Violence between pro-Fascist veterans and recalcitrant ANC members erupted in places. In March 1925, Mussolini’s dissolution of the ANC’s central committee and the imposition of a sympathetic leadership effectively snuffed out any independence of action on behalf of the veterans.
The image of the fascist veteran reached beyond Italian borders during the late 1920s. Veterans across the continent came into contact with Italian Fascism through the Fédération Interalliée des Anciens Combattants, an organization that catered for the ex-servicemen of the former allied nations. Nicola Sansanelli, one of the leaders imposed upon the ANC in 1925, was nominated FIDAC president in September 1927. Exchange trips between Italian and foreign veterans reinforced the stereotype of the fascist veteran, nowhere more so than in France where the Faisceau transposed the Italian model, albeit adapted to French sensibilities and political circumstance. On the other hand, in Germany, Hitler did not appeal specifically to the veterans as a political constituency, even if he lionized their heroism.
In 1929, the ANC – now 500,000-strong – restated its loyalty to Mussolini, implicating itself in the move toward totalitarianism and beating the drum for Mussolini’s Italian Empire after 1935. The veterans’ loyalty proved useful at this time, when the Duce sought to extend the influence of fascism throughout the continent. Sections of the ANC abroad worked to this end and the Italian veterans thus, ‘acquired a decisive role in the expansion of Fascism’ (203). Indeed, exchanges and engagements with Italian veterans could prompt radicalization in home countries.
Nevertheless, during the 1930s the model of the Italian veteran could not be transferred wholesale from a country with an established fascist regime to countries were fascist parties were in their infancy. Consequently, parties and leagues developed outside Italy that, while being unable to ignore the Italian precedent, stressed their own national singularity. Hitler himself now posed as a self-sacrificing and disabled veteran (at least during the presidential election campaign of 1932). The Nazis’ interest in, and appeals to, veterans intensified once Hitler took power, in stark contrast to their policy during the 1920s. In France and Spain, too, the symbol of the veteran, heavily indebted to the Italian example, provided a key theme in the propaganda and appeal of the Francoist and Pétainist regimes.
The book succeeds in demonstrating the transnational understandings of, and appropriations from, Italian Fascism. It succeeds in refocusing attention beyond ostensibly narrow national case studies, although the majority of the analysis does relate to Italy. While the transnational approach of this book is to be welcomed it is employed at the expense of specifically national understandings of the Fascist phenomenon; contemporaries looked to their national histories too in attempting to understand events in Italy. However, this is a minor quibble about an excellent book.