Neither Bluff nor Revolution: The Corporations and the Consolidation of the Fascist Regime (1925-1926)

The main historiographical approaches to the topic of fascist corporatism illustrate the limits of the historical experience and, above all, the gap between the magniloquence of the corporatist project and the modesty of its practice. This perspective, which recalls some scholarly judgements and political critiques of the inter-war period, tends to overshadow or to underestimate the function of corporatism as a means of national and international legitimacy of the Fascist solution. The purpose of this chapter is to put under the spotlight the ability of corporatism - both of its doctrine and of the politics presented as “corporatist” - to generate forms of allegiance, loyalty, and participation to Mussolini’s regime, and to promote Italian Fascism as a new model of political force. The chapter will examine the circulation of corporatist myths in some milieux other than the Fascist hierarchy (namely entrepreneurial lobbies, the Catholic sphere, technocratic structures, trade-union groups, academic elites and so forth), turning the attention from ideological production, and from the comparison between theory and practice, to the reception of corporatism by Italian society. In order to define the field of research, and supposing that Fascist corporatism succeeded to impose itself as an alternative model of political and economic system well before the big crisis of the 30’s, my analysis will focus on a crucial passage in building the Fascist rule: The two-year period (1925-26) when Mussolini’s government approved Rocco’s labour law, exhibited as the first step towards a full-fledged corporatist system. The analysis will be based on a wide range of sources - newspapers not yet controlled by the regime, trade-union press, Public Security documents etc., but also foreign press and books - that allow to reflect upon the perception of Fascist corporatist politics during its start up stage.