Guide to Italian Republicanism in Risorgimento Era, Part 7: Fascism’s destruction of Italy’s Republican Inheritance

On the Rosselli assassinations, the outlawing of Masonic networks, how the monarchist-conservative line triumphed over the Mazzinian tradition and Meloni’s present-day Italy. By the early 1920s, Fascism (initially republican and anti-monarchist) co-opted nationalist rhetoric, crushed republican and socialist movements, and later compromised with the monarchy (until the 1943 Salò Republic). The PRI was banned in 1926, and many republicans joined anti-fascist resistance. The decline stemmed from the Risorgimento’s pragmatic compromises, failure to mobilize rural masses, internal divisions, and the shift to mass politics favoring extremism.

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Fascism Destruction of ITALY’S Republican Inheritance

THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC INSPIRED REPUBLICAN TRADITION that Mazzini systematized, Garibaldi enacted, and the transatlantic abolitionist network disseminated did not simply fade. It was destroyed, deliberately, systematically, and with extreme violence by Italian Fascism. The real consequences of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy that affected the Theosophical Movement in Europe and made “occultism” scapegoats in popular imagination as explained in Maurice Joly: Origins of the Protocols of Zion and its Impact on Theosophy was born from conservative instigation. This affected all radical associations and labor movements. Even before Fascism suppressed republicans, socialists and anarchists, the republican tradition was being displaced by the monarchy, and the narrative in Italy became overshadowed by competition between socialism, liberalism, and Catholic popular parties (Behind the Visual Propaganda of the ‘New Italian Woman’ in Fascism) as they declined.

This fault line can be traced through the Italian Risorgimento from its inception. Among the four figures conventionally honored as the “Fathers of the Fatherland” under Giuseppe Mazzini, Giuseppe Garibaldi, King Victor Emmanuel II, and Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour discussed in The Carbonari Movement in Italy: its Revolutionaries, and the Birth of Anti-Republican Conspiracy, two represented the republican-democratic line (Mazzini and Garibaldi) and two represented the monarchist-conservative line (Victor Emmanuel and Cavour). When unification was achieved in 1861, it was the monarchist-conservative line that triumphed. Italy became a constitutional monarchy under the House of Savoy, not the democratic republic Mazzini had spent his life fighting for. Mazzini died in 1872, still in exile, still a wanted man in the kingdom he had done more than anyone to create. Garibaldi, who had handed his conquests in Sicily and Naples to Victor Emmanuel with the famous greeting “I obey,” spent his last years in embittered semi-retirement on the island of Caprera.

The monarchist settlement did not extinguish the republican tradition. It was too deeply rooted in Italian political culture, too widely distributed through Masonic lodges, mutual aid societies, workers’ organizations, and the radical press. It was marginalized. The unified Italian state, from its inception, was governed by the liberal-conservative establishment that Cavour had assembled: monarchist, cautiously reformist, suspicious of popular democracy, aligned with the Church on some matters and hostile to it on others, but fundamentally committed to the preservation of elite governance and the suppression of radical alternatives.

DECLINE OF REPUBLICANISM AS POLITICAL FORCE IN PRE-FASCIST ITALY (1870-1922)

The Carbonari networks implicated in a grand conspiracy against the monarchs were part of movements that participated in Europe’s long struggle between secular and liberal ideas (Enlightenment popular sovereignty, Renaissance civic humanism) and the Catholic-monarchist alliance of divine-right kingship and papal temporal authority. In Italy, this pitted “civil religions” of nationalism and republican duty against the Church’s theocratic claims. Republicans framed their cause as moral regeneration against superstition, priestcraft, and dynastic theocracy, reflecting earlier jurisdictional conflicts and Enlightenment critiques. It was not atheism but a demand that spiritual authority remain separate from temporal power to allow a “Third Rome” of the people.

The monarchist Piedmont strategy (Cavour) proved more pragmatic, and 1861 Kingdom of Italy marginalized republicans. Mazzini died in exile (1872), still refusing the monarchy. The Italian Republican Party (PRI, founded 1895) remained small, focused on anti-clericalism and anti-monarchism but overshadowed by socialism, liberalism, and Catholic popular parties. However, post-1870, economic crises, mass emigration, and the rise of organized socialism and anarchism fragmented the left. Republicans participated in WWI interventionism but could not compete with mass parties after 1919 universal suffrage. By the early 1920s, Fascism, initially republican and anti-monarchist, co-opted nationalist rhetoric, crushed republican and socialist movements, and later compromised with the monarchy (until the 1943 Salò Republic). The PRI (Italian Republican Party) was officially banned in 1926, and many republicans joined anti-fascist resistance. The decline stemmed from unification’s pragmatic compromises, failure to mobilize rural masses, internal divisions, and the shift to mass politics favoring extremism.

FASCISM AGAINST FREEMASONRY AND DEMOCRATIC LEFT IN ITALY

Fascism completed what the monarchist settlement had begun. Mussolini’s movement, which seized power in 1922, displaced the republican tradition, and systematically dismantled the institutional infrastructure through which that tradition had been maintained and transmitted. Their reason for doing so, was their adoption of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy spreading in both Germany and Italy by conservative Catholics. The squadristi (Fascist paramilitary squads) attacked and destroyed the offices of L’Avanti!, the Socialist newspaper, and targeted the meeting halls, printing presses, and organizational headquarters of the labor movement, the republican parties, and the radical associations.

The Fascist regime outlawed Freemasonry, which was a devastating blow, because the Masonic lodges had served, since the era of the Carbonari, as the primary associational infrastructure for non-Catholic, anti-clerical, democratic-republican political organizing. To outlaw Freemasonry was, as historians have noted, “a real blow to most non-Catholic anti-Fascists” who had inherited the Carbonari-era tradition of secret associational life and transformed it, over the course of the nineteenth century, into a network of civic organizations, charitable institutions, and political clubs.

The Special Tribunal for the Defense of the State (established in 1926) provided the judicial mechanism for the systematic persecution of anti-Fascists. Republicans, socialists, communists, anarchists, and liberal democrats were arrested, tried before military tribunals, and sentenced to imprisonment or internal exile (confino) on remote islands and in impoverished southern villages. The regime’s intelligence apparatus infiltrated exile communities abroad, monitoring and disrupting the activities of anti-Fascist organizations in France, Switzerland, Britain, and the Americas.

ASSASSINATION OF THE TRUE MAZZINIAN HEIRS: THE ROSELLI BROTHERS

The most terrible symbol of Fascism’s destruction of the republican inheritance was the assassination of Carlo and Nello Rosselli in Bagnoles-de-l’Orne, France, on June 9, 1937. Remember, that Mussolini and Gentile claimed that Fascism was the heir to the Risorgimento and Mazzinianism. The Rosselli brothers were anti-Fascist intellectuals who explicitly carried the Mazzinian republican tradition into the twentieth century. Carlo Rosselli had founded Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Liberty), a movement that combined Mazzini’s moral republicanism with a modern commitment to social democracy and antifascism. He had fought in the Spanish Civil War against Franco who began as a conservative monarchist officer loyal to the old order and turned to Authoritarianism and Fascism. The Spanish Civil War pushed Franco into alliance with the Fascists. Carlo Rosselli enacted, in the Mazzinian tradition, the universalist obligation to combat tyranny wherever it arose. Their murder, ordered by Mussolini’s secret police and carried out by French far-right assassins, was not merely a political crime. It was the deliberate severing (and hijacking) of a lineage.

The diarchy of Victor Emmanuel III and Mussolini represented the convergence of the two forces that had always opposed the Mazzinian line, which was the monarchist tradition, which subordinated popular sovereignty to dynastic legitimacy, and the authoritarian-nationalist tradition, which subordinated individual liberty to state power. Fascism adopted and weaponized the conservative, clerical, and monarchist currents that had contested Mazzini’s universalism from the moment of Italian unification, while destroying the universalist, egalitarian networks that had connected Italian republicanism to global democratic movements.

MAZZINIAN TRADITION IN POSTWAR ITALIAN REPUBLIC

This rupture had transatlantic consequences. The networks that had connected Mazzini’s London exile to Garrison’s Boston, Fuller’s revolutionary Rome to the New-York Tribune‘s readership, and Garibaldi’s Montevideo to the hemispheric abolitionist movement were severed. The Italian republican tradition, which had been a living force in transatlantic democratic politics for nearly a century was driven underground, scattered into exile, and subjected to a deliberate campaign of cultural erasure. The Fascist regime appropriated the nationalist elements of the Risorgimento, the cult of the nation, the rhetoric of Italian greatness, and the memory of military glory, while systematically destroying the universalist elements that had given the Risorgimento its moral authority and its transatlantic resonance.

Mazzinian tradition did not survive. The recovery of this tradition after Fascism’s defeat was both necessary and difficult, and the Italian Republic, established by the constitution of 1948 restored the republican form that Mazzini had demanded, but the philosophical infrastructure, the associational networks, and the transatlantic connections that had sustained the Mazzinian tradition had been profoundly damaged. The postwar Italian republic was shaped more by the Cold War division between Christian Democracy and Communism than by the Mazzinian synthesis of moral duty, universal brotherhood, and democratic self-governance. Mazzini’s legacy was honored in monuments and street names but rarely engaged as a living philosophical resource.

MAZZINI IN PRESENT-DAY ITALY AND MELONI’S ITALY

The problem still exists, because of this complex history into the present-day under Meloni. Meloni, e.g., represents a partial, selective, and contested attempt to revive elements of the Mazzinian tradition, particularly its patriotic, duty-oriented, and nation-building aspects after decades of marginalization in the postwar Republic. Americans in the present looking in define any of these characteristics as Fascist. It is however true, that this revival is filtered through a conservative-nationalist lens with post-fascist historical roots, rather than a full philosophical or associational restoration of Mazzini’s democratic-republican synthesis.

Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia (named after the opening of the Mazzinian-influenced national anthem by Goffredo Mameli) actively invoke Mazzini. Her signature slogan “God, Homeland, Family” (“Dio, Patria, Famiglia”) is often traced (by her and supporters) to Mazzinian roots. This cultural signaling is a reclamation of Risorgimento patriotism as a “native” Italian tradition that predates both fascism and the postwar left-liberal order. Her government’s stability, Atlanticism, and pragmatic European Union engagement do show a willingness to operate within institutions while pushing back against what she sees as eroded national agency. However, there is a difference between republicanism and conservative governance, even in our times, and Meloni demonstrates this. The conservative cultural-particularist defense of protecting Italian and Western identity comes from globalist exploitation of cosmopolitanism, since all sides have justified their positions using Mazzini. Meloni draws her influences more from postwar right-wing subcultures, Catholic conservatism and the reaction against exploitative practices resulting from globalization and mass immigration.

Mazzini was a fervent anti-monarchist republican democrat, but Meloni operates comfortably within the 1948 Republic (which she has not sought to overthrow) and comes from a political lineage (from the MSI to AN and the FdI) with historical skepticism toward that Republic’s founding anti-fascist mythos. Her emphasis is more on order, identity, and authority than Mazzini’s revolutionary popular self-governance, which is why a few have begun to advocate for the rebirth of political Mazzinianism, as clearly, the original radical republican tradition has been overshadowed by the visionaries of socialism, communism, neo-fascism, liberal internationalism — and underlying it all, the resilient staunch conservative traditionalists strategically playing against them all.

Meloni’s party has post-fascist organizational roots and personnel continuity, and she has worked to normalize the heritage of her party’s roots by condemning fascism’s crimes while reclaiming patriotic symbols. Critics see continuity with authoritarian nationalism, while supporters see a legitimate recovery of pre- and non-fascist Italian identity.

SIDELINED VISION OF RISORGIMENTO REPUBLICANISM MODEL

Italian republicanism represented a high-minded but ultimately sidelined vision of a moral, duty-based alternative to both monarchy and theocracy. It shaped the Risorgimento’s radical edge and left a legacy in the 1946 Republic, but its pre-Fascist decline highlights the tension between ideological purity and political realism in a deeply Catholic, fragmented nation. Fascism in Italy did not simply break with the country’s republican inheritance, but appropriated, distorted, and ultimately destroyed the democratic, civic, and ethical republican tradition that had emerged from the Risorgimento.