As initial caveat, I am not an historian and I have not studied fascisms and Mussolini in depth. The origin of this blog entry is that I have read M, the son of the century, a novel written by Scurati on Mussolini and the Fascist seizure of power in Italy. At the same time, I teach a seminar on the Sociology of Luck at the EUI. This post is then the result of reading M in combination with reading various articles and books on the role of luck and contingencies in history and individual success for the seminar.
I now realize that before reading M I was naively convinced that that the March on Rome was a simple step in a chain of events all pointing to the inevitable seizure of power by the Fascist movement and Mussolini.
After reading Scurati’s book I understand that the Fascist movement was much weaker than my retrospective interpretation of history implied. In particular, in the days between the 24th (the day of a massive Fascist gathering in Napoli) and the 30th of October (the day in which Mussolini arrives to Rome to be nominated prime minister) things might have gone in many different ways compared to what has finally happened. Reading M, I was remined of an article by Ivan Ermakoff on the Structure of Contingency (from now onward SoC) published on AJS in 2015 (Ermakoff, 2015).
As discussed by Ermakoff in SoC, the notion of contingency refers to a class of processes and events whose actual outcome could also not have been or could have been otherwise. The notion of contingency connects with the idea of critical situations and turning point where history can take different trajectories out of single small event. Can we say anything positive about contingency going beyond acknowledging that something has happened by chance? Put another way: is there a way to identify some systematic properties and structure in contingencies? In addition to providing a theoretical answer to these questions, in SoC Ermakoff also performs an Event Structure Analysis of the meeting of the National Assembly in the night the 4th of August 1789 that ended up with the Noble and the Clergy renouncing to their feudal privileges. Such a radical outcome was not expected and come as a surprise to most of the participants in the Assembly and observers at the time[1]. Ermakoff studies the 4th of August night as an example of open-ended contingency.
Coming back to M, I have been struggling with the following question: is the March on Rome part of an historical robust trajectory or does it represent a contingent moment in a fragile sequence of events when history could have taken another turn?
The key turning point in the case of the March on Rome is well know and is the King (Vittorio Emanuele III) ’s decision not to sign the decree of Martial Law on the 28th of October. Had he firmed, the Royal Italian army would have had green lights to shoot on the fascists who had occupied public buildings around Italy and on the Fascists in case they attempted to get into Rome. Consequently, had the King signed the decree of the martial law, the fascist movement would have been quickly swept away since it had no chance against the Royal Italian army. Still, the critical turning point of the King refusing to sign the decree of the martial law arrives after four days when many other small events might have precipitated the situation into an unfavourable outcome for Mussolini.
Had the King come back one day earlier from his holiday resort or had Giolitti been Rome. Had the prime minister Frasca not gone to bed at 10 pm during the night when fascists occupied public buildings all over Italy. Or had not D’Annunzio had a cold. Or had one of the soldiers that were seizing the newspaper house where Mussolini was barricaded in Milan involuntary shoot his machine gun giving start to a gunfire and precipitating the situation into an armed conflict. All these counterfactuals are more or less plausible and each of them would possibly bring to alternative historical scenarios.
Under this lens, the March on Rome appears as an open-ended process where the actual outcome of Mussolini being appointed as prime minister paving the way to a dictatorship is one, and possibly not even the most likely, of many alternative outcomes. I now see that process between the 24th and 28th October as extremely fragile [2] .
Although I have not performed an in-depth Event Structure Analysis, I can sketch its main components. We know the timeline of the event, the front stage actors and their multiple locations. These are the main actors.
Mussolini, the leading player. In the days preceding the March on Rome he transfers all the power and control over the Fascist movement to four men (the quadrumviri, Bianco, Balbo, de Vecchi, Del Bono, see this entry on a fresco-picture of them and Mussolini still visible in a church in Montreal) and remains trenched in Milano, in the background, far away from the locations where action is taking place, for the whole critical period
Facta, the prime minister in charge. He goes to bed early every day. Incidentally, the description of Facta who goes to bed early, at at 9.30 (something that he apparently did regularly according to Scurati’s account) in the most critical night for democracy in Italy, sleeping dressed and covering himself his wet coat, while the information of the attacks perpetuated by the Fascists squat to main public buildings all over Italy keep arriving to Ministry all through the night, provides the best image of the mediocrity and depressive weakness of the Prime Minister and in general of the Italian State in those crucial times.
The quadrumviri, a mixed group of men with different personality, ambitions and interests.
The Fascists squads camping outside Rome. They are poorly armed, badly equipped, starving and under the rain. They look more like a posse than an army. For the Italian readers, they look more like an Armata Brancaleone than squads ready for an armed insurrection, but I guess the comparison is ungenerous with the genial Monnicelli’s movie.
Salandra who opts for becoming prime minister in a coalition government that would include a number of fascists ministries.
The old Giolitti who had already been five times prime minister, the first one in 1892, staying out of the front lines, invoked as a kind of deus ex machina that could solve the government crisis
The list could go on and Scurati’s books provided details to fill it in. There are also a myriad of more anonymous characters whose actions might have also had a big impact.
Let’s go back again to Ermakoff’s essay. Ermakoff makes a critical distinction between two types of contingencies. The first type of contingencies are chance events (or happenstance that occurs at the intersection of two independent causal sequence of events[3]), while the second type of contingencies is due to endogenous unpredictability emerging from the complex interaction of the actors involved in the process. Ermakoff identifies mutual uncertainty as a key trait of the latter type of contingency[4]. Mutual uncertainty occurs in “situations in which the members of a group simultaneously make their actions conditional on one another’s and are at a loss to figure out where they collectively stand”.
What is then interesting, and this is probably the main insight of this post, is that Mussolini fostered unpredictability in the process. He repeatedly refused to move from Milano to Rome to meet the other actors of the institutional crisis because in that case he would have been forced to seal agreements. He also refused to speak with his own people that he had put in charge of the insurrection. Mussolini had transferred all power to the quadrumviri. He did so certainly to shift responsibilities in case the insurrection had failed and in order to be able to negotiate a deal in that case. In doing so however he also increased systemic uncertainty, given the divisions and different strategic views among the four men in charge. He actually let them pursue contradictory strategies, like negotiating to being part a coalition government with Salandra as prime minister, or trying to convince D’Annunzio to become prime minister of a different and even more improbable coalition government. He himself sent contradictory messages on the peaceful nature of the March, while publishing articles referring to armed insurrection.
In this way, he maximised the imprevisibility of the contingency[5]. Taking Mussolini perspective, one might reduce the whole course of action to bluffing and lying on multiple tables. But from a more structural point of view and in line with Ermakoff’s idea, the contingency of the March on Rome lies in the mutual imprevisibility that pervaded the situation. This mutual imprevisibility was consciously manipulated by Mussolini, heightened by the weakness of the other actors and by the absence of clear institutional rules concerning the government crisis and the martial law.
While the contingency in Ermakoff’a analysis of the night when the Nobles and the Clergy gave their feudal privileges up emerges from the interaction of different unpredictable individual actions (that paradoxically lead to an outcome against their own interests), here the contingency and mutual unpredictability emerges from a strategic behaviour of one of them and the painful weakness of the others.
This is just an intuition that could be developed further in a more systematic study. This line of thoughts opens up to another question on whether contingencies can be strategically promoted by canning leaders. This question is ultimately a version of the Latin motto fortuna audaces iuvat. Whether it is possible to subject such a motto to empirical investigation is also a matter for future reflection.
Final addendum
In the critical days of the March on Rome history and Italy could have gone in another direction. Fascists could have been swept away and Mussolini either killed in the confrontation or arrested. Italy could have remained a monarchic democracy and the history of the XX century would have been different. Alternatively, a large coalition government that included some Fascist ministries could have formed. This might have led to a confrontation between the most radical wing of the Fascist movement and the more monarchic and pro-establishment one, possibly to a scission in the Fascists camp, the repression of the populistic wing and so on. This alternative scenarios are what the so called “what if history” is about (Cowley, 2001). Under certain situations, a change in just one small event can imply that history follows radically different trajectories. “What if” history is partly an exercise for airport books (“what if Napoleon had not had haemorrhoids at Waterloo?) but also a serious academic endeavour to build counterfactuals, moderate historical determinism and strengthen causal explanation in history (Sterelny, 2016). I am not expert enough to build these different counterfactual scenarios based on alternative but rather plausible outcomes of the March on Rome, nor I am actually interested in that exercise. I am more intrigued by the role of luck in human affairs and in the structural characteristics of luck (which sounds like an oxymore). It happens to me what has already happened when I was studying compensatory advantage: it is the Baader-Meinhof (frequency bias) effect discussed in another entry of this blog. I now see luck everywhere, even if it is a topic that is almost systematically ignored by sociologists. Going back to literature, it is also interesting to compare the “what if” view of history, with the interpretation of history given by Tolstoy in War and Peace, that I have discussed in another blog entry together with his sociological intuitions. There is no space for contingencies and “what if” in War and Peace. To be continued…
References
Cowley, R. (Ed.). (2001). What If? 2. Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. Putnam’s Sons.
Ermakoff, I. (2015). The Structure of Contingency. American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), 64-125.
Hales, S. (2020). The Myth of Luck. Philosophy, Fate and Fortune. Bloomsbury.
Sauder, M. (2020). A Sociology of Luck. Sociological Theory, 38(3), 193-216.
Sterelny, K. (2016). Contingency and History. Philosophy of Science, 83(4), 521-539. https://doi.org/10.1086/687260
[1] The deputy Joseph-Michelle Pellerin wrote in his diary that night: “Posterity will never believe what the National Assembly did in the space of 5 hours.” They “have annihilated abuses which had existed for 900 years and against which a century of philosophy had struggled in vein” (quoted in T. Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary. The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789-1790), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996.
[2] Sorry again, I could not resist. Adding footnotes in order to qualify and expand an argument in another directions is the original sin of academics (but expanding this argument itself would require a footnote of the footnote so I recur to a bracket; enough of this meta-footnote and back to the original footnote that one might remind originated from referring to the March on Rome as a “fragile period”). Interestingly, “fragility” is a key component of a definition of luck in philosophy. According to the modal theory of luck, luck is an event that is fragile and consequential. Fragility means that in any second there are many possible close alternative worlds that coexist. A lucky or unlucky event shifts the subject (or history) from one of this world to a close one with a radically different subsequent trajectory. For a more in-depth discussion of fragility and a modal theory of luck see Hales, S. (2020). The Myth of Luck. Philosophy, Fate and Fortune. Bloomsbury.
[3] An example of chance event is William III’s horse that steps on a molehill ultimately causing the king’s death. The causal sequence that brings William III’s horse in a given direction is independent from the one followed by the mole in its excavation. In this case the contingency occurs when the two trajectories intersect (see again Ermakoff, I. (2015). The Structure of Contingency. American Journal of Sociology, 121(1), 64-125. ). Disregarding the role of chance, the mole is still celebrated as an hero by the catholic Jacobite societies in Scotland.
[4] I believe that the notion of contingency might be fruitfully applied to study individual life course and related to the concept of luck that is conventionally defined as “chance with consequences”, see Sauder, M. (2020). A Sociology of Luck. Sociological Theory, 38(3), 193-216. We could build on such definition of luck and refine it by arguing that luck is an event that occurs either by chance or due to complex interactions out of the control of the reference subject, whose outcome is therefore apriori indeterminate, and that has consequences for the subject. We could then define luck as contingency (either ruled by chance or indeterminacy) with consequences.
[5] It would be interesting to find out whether he did so consciously or unconsciously. Maybe this is already well known but I don’t know.