The Condottiere: Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler

In May 1938, Adolf Hitler visited Rome to meet Benito Mussolini. Achille Beltrame, the illustrator of the Sunday edition of the Corriere de la Sera between 1899 and 1945, captured the encounter for the cover of the 8 May edition.

By demonstrating that it was possible to overturn the economic and social order, the Russian Revolution disrupted European politics. Many conservative-minded people abandoned their liberal political principles and seemingly more solid and essential embraced beliefs and values like religion and authority. The threats of the new era demanded new discourses and new strategies to avert chaos. Individual liberties and parliamentary government were not enough to survive in an anarchic world.

They also believed that only violence could preserve social order. The parties of the new radical right organized armed militias to end Factory strikes, peasant unrestor to fight worker organizations suspected of having revolutionary goals. Worker parties and unions created their own militias, both to defend themselves and to attack their enemies. Weapons were freely available and violence between fascist and fascistic groups on the one hand and antifascists on the other became daily ocurrences.

Liberalism and democracy were on the defensive during the 1920s. Benito Mussolini and the Fascist Party came to power in Italy in October 1922; Spain and Portugal came under military dictatorships in 1923 and 1926 respectively; almost all the fragile democracies that came into existence after the collapse of the great empires turned into authoritarian regimes.. In March 1933, Hitler took control of all power in Germany.

In this context of uncertainty and instability, with liberal parliamentarism and democracy in retreat across Europe, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931.

At first, workers’ organizations welcomed the Russian Revolution for having overthrown the bourgeois order, but Bolshevik authoritarianism led social democrats and anarchists to reject it. Even so, the counter-revolutionary radical right that was emerging then tarred anything that hinted at revolution: anarchiss, socialists or other kinds of Marxists, as communist. Also those who they considered the necessary collaborators: the liberals and democrats who had opened the gates to revolution. 

MML