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Response to Matteo Millan: Squadrismo and Fascist Violence in the Long Term

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 October 2013

PAUL CORNER
PAUL CORNER*
Affiliation:
Centre for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes, University of Siena, via P. A. Mattioli 10, I - 53100Siena; prcorner@gmail.com
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Extract

Rather surprisingly, Mussolini's blackshirts (the squadristi) have never really received the attention accorded to Hitler's paramilitary groups. It is interesting, therefore, to read an article that seeks to remedy this situation. Millan argues that the traditional view of squadrismo as important before the March on Rome but of less relevance in later years – indeed, as something of a liability – is too simplistic and needs revision. He sees the influence of squadrismo as permeating the regime throughout its existence and suggests that historians have been too quick in seeing the death of squadrismo in the supposed ‘subordination’ of the Fascist Party to the state in the years immediately following 1925.

Type
Paramilitary Violence in Italian Fascism: A Discussion
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 22 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 575 - 578
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 See, for example, Bessel, Richard, Political Violence and the Rise of Nazism: the Stormtroopers in Eastern Germany 1925–34 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Fischer, Conan, Stormtroopers: A Social, Economic and Ideological Analysis 1929–35 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983)Google Scholar; Merkl, Peter, The Making of a Stormtrooper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

2 De Felice argued that Fascism had, essentially, two faces – the more revolutionary ‘movement’, represented by many of the provincial blackshirts and by Farinacci, who pushed for a complete ‘fascistisation’ of the Italian state, and the more moderate and, in some respects, conservative ‘regime’, which preserved many aspects of the Liberal state and did not contest either the industrial or the bureaucratic establishments. According to De Felice, it was the second which dominated after 1926.

3 Corner, Paul, The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini's Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.