Viva Balbo! – An Alternate Duce, an Alternate Italy

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lounge60

lounge60

Geekhis Khan said:
Well, my reading indicates that Balbo was pretty much against Corporatism, at least in terms of the massive bureaucracy and its divided loyalties. But maybe you Italian guys have info we anglophones do not.
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Yes,Balbo was not enthusiast about the heavy cavavan of corporativism;he hated the bureacracy.
But i dont'think that was aganist corporativism at all.
I think that thought at mixed system more slim and fast.
The problem is that "corporativism" in fascist Italy was a magic formula,but in reality nothing know true what was corporativism.
Was like the "paradise of workers" promised in USSR; a thing that
was carried out tomorrow (but "tomorrow" was not ever).
Balbo was a pragmatic type,so i think that took the few things that worked,and thrown away the others.
But one thing is important to know:
In Italy nothing (or very,very few),neither Balbo were for a free,competitive market ( or worse for "laissez faire") in anglosaxon way.​
 

Manfr

Well, my reading indicates that Balbo was pretty much against Corporatism, at least in terms of the massive bureaucracy and its divided loyalties. But maybe you Italian guys have info we anglophones do not.

Maybe he could get oriented towards "liberal paternalism", ala Singapore ...


Didn't know that about Mussie, but it sounds like him. Divide to Rule was his modus operandi. Also didn't know that about the DDR. I'd always assumes standard Communist one-party system, but then again they were all "dirty commies" here in the States back in the Cold War days. ;)

He even created a somewhat serious opposition party to his rule in the Salò Republic, called the National Republican and Socialist Rally !

In some eastern countries, where local parties where strong but collaborative, or otherwise non influent, the Soviets allowed them to survive, in order to better control their constituencies : Eastern Germany had a Liberal Democratic Party (members where former manager and small industrials), a Christian Democratic Union (local protestant believers), a National Democratic Party (petit-bourgeouis and soldiers) and an Agrarian Party ! Bulgaria and Poland both conserved their agrarian parties, while Czechoslovakia had a five-party system.
 

Archangel

Dr. Strangelove said:
Well, Salazar's Portugal was very corporativist and technically non-fascist. In fact, Salazar was opposed to many fascist policies that he saw as too progressive. The end result was that Portugal had 40 years of near 0% GNP growth.

btw, thanks for all this info that will be useful in my own post-WWII fascist Italy under Ciano. :D
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A good example of his bad economic policies is that it was necessary to have Caetano replacing him from 1968 on to have a more industrialising policy, and the beginning of modern social policies.
I believe Salazar had a pre-industrial economic thought.

Manfr said:
Salazar's clericofascist State allowed some (tiny) opposition representation in Parliament, as non-partisans elected in hellishly difficult confrontations ... I have an article about it, I'll check it out.
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I'm sorry, Manfr, but it was a defacto one-party-state and parliament. The short lived opposition movements created for scheduled elections, and usually banned shortly after, never elected anyone to the Parliament, even though they are believed to have won every contested election in the II Republic. The elections of 34, 38 and 42 only had the National Union running for the Parliamentary seats. Even the liberal wing during the Marcellist Spring, was elected in National Union lists.
A good link about this subject is this one, but it is Portuguese: http://www.iscsp.utl.pt/cepp/eleicoes_portuguesas/1934.htm
Edit, the link has some limitations, so this would be easier (http://www.iscsp.utl.pt/cepp/front800.php3), coupled with the dates for the election years (1934 - 1938 - 1942 - 1945 - 1949 - 1953 - 1957 - 1961 - 1965 - 1969 - 1973).
 
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Readman

Also, sorry I'm probably getting far too far ahead of myself if I am I apologize but wondering if Italy is going to be like Franco Spain type of fascism? I also have been enjoying the tidbits of info the other posters have been and look forward to more! Cheers
 

Geekhis Khan

Archangel, great stuff and thanks for the links!

Readman, welcome aboard; there will be some parallels to Francoist Spain, but I plan a different beastie entirely.
 

Geekhis Khan

RL has been a beast lately, but next week I'll be on work-related travel with nothing to do after work. I hope to get out a couple of updates that week. Again, my appologies everyone for the delays, but I want to get things right and not just half-arse it.
 

Geekhis Khan

FINALLY! An update. My apologies for the delay. That accursed RL has thrown everything at me from a blown transmission to a MRSA infection. Ironically all that time on the gurney with an IV in the arm lends one plenty of reading time. Not exactly the reading break I wanted, mind you, but still.


Note that the first 3-4 "chapters" will be before the POD as necessary background, as few people outside of Fascists Studies know very much about Balbo. Keep reading, though: many hidden "hints" about the coming ATL are in there. ;)


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Chapter 1: From Mazzini to Alpini

“[I am] a child of the century which has made us all democratic anticlericals and republican sympathizers; anti-Austrians and irredentists who hated the bigoted and reactionary Hapsburg tyrant.” – Italo Balbo, Diario, 1922 [1]

“Dress Balbo in sixteenth century armor, put him at the head of a band of daredevil horsemen, and he would look as if he had been taken live from Del Cossa’s paintings in the Schifanoia Palace.” – R. Forti and G. Ghendi, L’avvento del fascism: Cronache ferraresi (Ferrara, 1923) [1]

“[Balbo is] A reincarnation of the militant and magnificent Italian princes of medieval days.” – G. Ward Price, I Know These Dictators, 1937 [1]



balbo1.jpg

Young Balbo during the Great War, 1915-18


Italo was born to be Duce. Even as a child in short pants he was a little aspiring dictator; of the [ancient Republican] Roman type, I mean. In school he blatantly asked his teachers why did they not address the beggars with riverisco (respects)…ha! ‘When I’m grown up, I’ll support you all!’ he would say to his classmates, rich and poor. Even then the demagogue! (laughs)

Had he studied as he incited rebellion he could have been a teacher, like the rest of us. Father and mother, our sisters and myself, all teachers. Italo? Adventurer and later dictator. I blame those damned fantasy books. Salgari [author of pulp pirate romances] and Verne were his favorites, but also Robinson Crusoe and even American cowboy Buffalo Bill! No wonder he fancied himself a corsair.

That is really why he followed Mazzini: the adventure, the rebellion. He even to this day swears he is still a Republican at heart, but no, it was the adventure. He was made for Fascism. Well, also [because of his older brother] Fausto. Father [Camillo] was a Monarchist, Fausto a Mazzinian [Republican], and I, of course, a Revolutionary Syndicalist. Ha, leave it to Fascism to unite all three views. Always the arguments over dinner! Father’s one rule was, of course, no hitting your fist on the table. Italo, of course, worshipped Fausto. Fausto protected him from father’s wrath. When Fausto died [in 1912, of tuberculosis] Italo took it hard. He and [sister] Egle tried to support each other. He was and I guess still is close to Egle and mother [Malvina Zuffi].”

Edmondo Balbo, Italo’s older brother, from a taped interview in 1962.


Italo Balbo was born on the 5th of June, 1896, though he always celebrated his birthday on the 6th. He was born in Quartesana, a suburb of the city of Ferrara…a city which had last seen glory in the Renaissance. Perhaps it was this ancient, fading glory that drew his thoughts like a magnet towards the free-spirited adventurism of the age of musketeers…

He was the youngest child of two school teachers: his stern and staunch father Camillo (1855-1931) and his devout and beloved mother Malvina Zuffi, whose ancestry included Ferrarese nobility…though Balbo might better be called petit bourgeois…

…as a schoolboy he showed a penchant for charity, raising money for the needy, a habit that lasted his entire life, even as Governor and later Duce sending money home to his sister to distribute to the poor of Ferrara [2]. The ironic contrast between this charity and the savagery of his days as a squadrista, and his policies against “enemies of the State” once Duce, has not been lost on this biographer…

…despite his parent’s occupation, which all of his siblings would also pursue, Balbo was a mediocre student, more interested in daydreams and youthful pursuits than formal education. Despite this, his thirst for knowledge was insatiable…and he spent many an hour studying his father’s collections of plants, minerals, and other specimens…eventually his self-taught pursuit of knowledge would lead to a university education and the title “Dottore”…even at a young age Balbo showed a talent for writing and journalism, editing his own small newspaper the Corriere Padano while still a teen…he counted among his associates artists, poets, philosophers, journalists, even politicians and military men…

…such an attitude and lust for life seems fitting for a man whose father is quoted as saying “it is necessary to do, to act, to move [1].”

From Roman Eagle, the Biography of Italo Balbo by Giuseppe Bosco, PhD., Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago.


Balbo first joined the Partito Mazziniano in 1911, then the vessel of his now old friend Felice Albani. He was then already a journalist, even though only 15. [General Ricciotti] Garibaldi [3] was an admirer, which of course only fueled his [Balbo’s] drive and pride. Balbo had tried without success to join Garibaldi’s Albanian expedition in 1910, after all…

Balbo spoke eloquently of the need for revolution, for irredentism, eventually for war with the hated Hapsburgs. While neither I nor Michele [Bianchi] could steer him towards the necessity of syndicalism, he at least knew the importance of the strong national state. But the politics, the economics…that, never really mattered. For Balbo, Mazzinianism was a way of thinking, a sense of total revolt against reality, a permanent protest against the actual state of things [4].

It is no small irony that the boy who would become governor of Libya at first opposed the conquest [of Libya from Turkey in 1911]. Why? To go against the grain, against reality, against the government [4]. Of course, being Mazzinian would eventually lead him to the truth of the necessity of the Fascist state…[as a Mazzinian] he was by nature against the Marxists and anarchists and in favor of Nationalism, and he was certainly not the only gerarchi to come from Mazzinianism. And what a gerarchi!

Even then, back before the war, Balbo was a squadrista at heart. When anti-war socialists and anarchists threatened Corridoni’s speech at Porta Romana [in 1914], it was Balbo that led compatriots, cudgels in hand, to protect the sacred oratory. In Ferrara he led a groups demanding war “or we’ll run you out of office”. They fought the police to protect the sacred honor of the tricolor [flag]. Finally, he and the Fascio Rivoluzionario distributed a manifesto for intervention, despite the Liberal state’s admonishments to the contrary…

…do not ask why Italo Balbo wanted, willed the war. Like so many others he did not know himself. What he knew was that intervention was necessary and that it was necessary to struggle and agitate for intervention. [4]

Sergio Panunzio, Syndicalist philosopher and early Fascist intellectual in his Memoirs of Revolution.


The political scene of Italy was as charged as the international scene at this time [the 1910’s] with the Italian public growing ever more disaffected with the Liberal state. Many differing political opinions clashed and struggled for supremacy in this tumultuous environment, merged, divided, formed coalitions, dragged each other down. A short list will include all manners of opinions from left, right, and center: Royalists and Republicans, Nationalists and Internationalists, Marxists and Capitalists, Liberals and Socialists, Papists and Anti-Clericals, Authoritarians and Anarchists, Corporatists and Anti-Corporatists, Conservatives and Futurists…

…The roots of Italian Fascism grew from two startlingly different seeds. One was the Authoritarian Nationalism of Enrico Corradini. The other was the Radical Revolutionary Syndicalism of Sergio Panunzio. Add to the mix former Socialists like Alfredo Rocco and the first Duce Benito Mussolini…
…Corradini’s putsch took the Italian Nationalist movement by storm, centralizing the institutions and driving the core objectives towards the authoritarian… democratic Nationalists were alienated and many left the movement… Objectives of the party now included an authoritarian national state built on national “myths”, militarism, and anticipation for the future…all citizens were expected to sacrifice individual goals for the greater need of the national state, if necessary to die for the common good…a collectivist “proto-Corporatism” where everyone worked together for the common good of the nation rather than individually or divided by class…

…The syndicalist connection is less apparent to the casual student of Fascism. While Corradini had syndicalist sympathies, it still seems a long leap from the international Marxist roots of Radical Syndicalism to Marxism’s modern “enemy” Fascism…

…The bridge from international Marxism to National Syndicalism, the core of Fascism, lies in the specifics of Italy’s national socio-economic situation. As a proto-industrial state just emerging from agrarianism, many among the various subsets of greater Italian Marxism, such as Panunzio and Rocco and eventually Mussolini, began to question whether Italy was “ready” for proletarian revolution when she barely had a proletariat at all! This lead, interestingly enough, to a growing movement within Socialist and Syndicalist circles to bridge the gap between the emerging industrial state and the late industrial society necessary for true Marxian revolution. The contemporary failures of the young Soviet Russian economy merely fed these worries. Only through rapid industrialization and emergent capitalism, the emergent theory went, could the young nation create the proper conditions for the “inevitable” proletarian revolution! Philosophers in the Soviet Union would derisively call this “shortcut Marxism”, which is ironic considering Lenin’s and Stalin’s own attempts to do effectively the same thing through executive will with proto-Industrial Russia.

Furthermore, Italian syndicalists began to grow increasingly worried for the fate of the emerging national entity. Reactionary foreign intervention against the Russian revolution, which came alarmingly close to succeeding, foretold an equivalent fate for an emergent Marxist Italy, a nation far too vulnerable to outside involvement as the last centuries’ history had shown time and time again. In yet another astonishing turn, Radical Syndicalists began to see a need for a strong national state…a Proletarian Nation capable of both spurring the necessary industrial growth and defending the young nation from foreign intervention.

What started with radical, revolutionary, international, and even anarchic syndicalist thought began to coalesce around the writings of Panunzio and Rocco. Neo-Hegelian transcendental collectivism replaced the Kantian empiricist individualism of classical Liberalism and the class-based post-positivism of Marxism, driven by a philosophy of collective consciousness…

With war brewing on the continent and dissatisfaction with the Liberal state growing, the authoritarian Nationalists of Corradini and the Radical Sydicalists of Panunzio found natural allies in one another. While Nationalism was moving towards collective Corporatism, Radical Syndicalism was seeing merit in a strong, authoritarian national state. It was only a matter of time until the two seemingly disparate political philosophies found common cause…

…All these ideas came together in the work of Giovanni Gentile whose emergent “Actualism” envisioned a post-war rise of a revolutionary “new state” with the “fully rational and concrete” collective will which would lead Italians of all classes to work, united like the rods of the fasces, towards the common goals of the “national” Italians. Gentile’s Actualism would form the philosophical cornerstone from which nationalists and Syndicalists would bridge their philosophies, creating the National Syndicalist foundation of the emerging post-war Fascist party.

From Warriors, Diplomats, Statesmen, Dictators – the Political and Diplomatic History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, by Dr. Eric Spellman, Harvard University, 1994


Balbo attempted repeatedly to join in some sort of military adventure, first in 1910 when, lying about his age, he attempted to join Ricciotti Garibaldi’s Albanian expedition, even saving up to buy long pants so as not to suffer the ridicule of the other soldiers. His explanatory letter to his mother begged forgiveness, but in the end he had but little choice to return home, mortified, when the expedition was cancelled. He again tried in 1914, before his nation was even at war. He joined an expedition of Garibaldini volunteers hoping to join the French at Argonne. They were turned back at the border.

Five days before war was declared by Italy, belatedly joining the Entente, Balbo volunteered for duty. One anecdote, quite possibly apocryphal but accepted as fact during many decades of Fascist rule, had him advancing to the front against orders. He was accepted for duty on July 4th, 1915, but released from duty on November 8th. Though no official reason has ever been found, he always claimed it to be a result of built-in prejudice against volunteers.

Balbo finally got his chance for war late in the conflict. In September of 1916 he was drafted with the class of 1896. After five months of training at Modena he became a reserve officer in the 8th Alpine Regiment, Val Fella Battalion. It was a course that led eventually to the terror and hell that was The Grappa.

Balbo at War, by Col. Georges DeSale, École Spéciale Militaire de Saint-Cyr, 1972, translated by Col. John McLaren, The Citadel Military Academy, 1986.

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Note a piè di pagina:

1 – all OTL quotes

2 – OTL…as governor of Libya he sent money home for such alms

3 – the son of national hero Giuseppe Garibaldi (1847-1924)

4 – these two sentences and this paragraph are taken from OTL quotes by Panunzio
 

DuQuense

What you describe is very much in the plan. "Fourth Shore Italy" will remain to present day, with...interesting repercussions. Some of these have been hinted at in the last update. What it hasn't been hinted at but will appear eventually is the flip-side: the impact of a large Arab-Berber minority on Italian culture!
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Bridging the two will be difficult. Remember at this time it was illegal for Italians to have affectionate relations with African Natives.

The common Defense against this charge was to claim Rape.

Your Honor - I have no Affection for my Housekeeper:rolleyes: - Those 8 children are the result of My Raping her every night for the past 20 years.:eek:
 

Geekhis Khan

maverick said:
Yay! It's started!:)

I love the style and the writing, it's so enjoyable...
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Thanks!

DuQuense said:
Bridging the two will be difficult. Remember at this time it was illegal for Italians to have affectionate relations with African Natives.

The common Defense against this charge was to claim Rape.

Your Honor - I have no Affection for my Housekeeper:rolleyes: - Those 8 children are the result of My Raping her every night for the past 20 years.:eek:
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There's other methods of cross-culteral interaction than interbreeding.

lothaw said:
This is pure gold. Brilliantly researched. I can't wait for the next update.
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Thanks! I'll get to the next update as soon as possible.
 

Jimbrock

I like it. Especially how its all taken from textbooks, hinting a little, slowly giving us a picture of the present.

Keep it up.
 
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