The Enemy of My Enemy: Gaetano Salvemini, Benito Mussolini and the Politics of the Liberal State, 1910–1914

Abstract

The murder of Unitary Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti by fascists in June 1924 prompted Gaetano Salvemini to call for the resignation of Prime Minister Benito Mussolini and thrust the professor back into the midst of active politics as a leader of Florentine antifascism.1 Arrested and then forced into exile, Salvemini became perhaps Mussolini’s most ardent adversary. But there was a period before his antifascism hardened when the historian concurred with the man who would become il Duce, most notably in their mutual, but divergent opposition to what they separately viewed as the malignant status of both the Socialist Party (PSI) and the Liberal State. In the years before World War I, Salvemini urged fundamental changes in what he saw as a moribund political system and pushed for an alternative to its longtime leader, Giovanni Giolitti, whom he labeled “Il Ministro della Malavita.”2 And while Salvemini promoted his democratic agenda largely (and uncomfortably) within the reformist faction of the PSI, Mussolini held democracy in contempt, opposed reforms as a subversion of the socialist revolution, and began his move to take leadership of the party and to drive it toward a revolutionary agenda.