The murder of Giacomo Matteotti

At about a quarter past four on the afternoon of 10 June 1924, on the banks of the Tiber in Rome, five Fascists dragged into a car the deputy Giacomo Matteotti, secretary of the Unitary Socialist Party and the most unyielding opponent of Benito Mussolini in parliament. Matteotti fought back, and his abductors stabbed him to death in the car and buried him in woodland outside Rome. His body was not found for more than two months. The crime provoked a wave of outrage in Italy and abroad, and Mussolini’s government went through its gravest crisis since coming to power. The opposition walked out of parliament and waited for the king to dismiss the prime minister. The king did nothing, and on 3 January 1925 Mussolini assumed “political, moral and historical responsibility” for what had happened and began to build a dictatorship.

The speech of 30 May

Matteotti had been documenting Fascist violence for years. In 1921 he published a Socialist report on the squads’ attacks, and at the beginning of 1924 a book, A Year of Fascist Domination, in which he picked apart the government’s propaganda successes point by point and listed acts of violence against its opponents. In the spring of 1924 he travelled secretly to London and Brussels to seek the support of European socialists. He had been attacked several times and had received death threats.

In the election of 6 April 1924 the government list, amid widespread violence and abuses, won two-thirds of the seats. On 30 May, as the Chamber was validating the election of its members, Matteotti moved that the mandates of the government list should not be confirmed, and in a long speech, interrupted by the shouts and threats of Fascist deputies, he set out the evidence of voter intimidation, broken-up meetings and fraud. He called on a government so fond of talking about restoring the authority of the state to start by obeying the law itself. The motion was defeated, but the speech caused a great stir. According to his colleagues, Matteotti said as he finished: “I have made my speech. Now you can prepare the speech for my funeral.”

Mussolini was furious. Several witnesses recalled, in different versions, what he said that evening: that this man “should no longer be walking the earth”, and that Fascism was cowardly if it still let him speak. On 1 June an unsigned article appeared in his newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia which, as was later established, Mussolini had written himself. It called Matteotti’s speech a “monstrous provocation” that deserved something more than a verbal reply. On 4 June Matteotti clashed with the prime minister in the Chamber once more. He was announcing another speech, this time on the state budget.

The abduction

According to the findings of the investigation, preparations began immediately after 30 May. They were in the hands of an informal special-operations group attached to the Fascist Party leadership, which its own members and the press called the “Cheka”, after the Soviet political police. Its operational chief was the Florentine squadrista Amerigo Dumini, and behind him, according to testimony, stood the head of the prime minister’s press office, Cesare Rossi, and the party’s administrative secretary, Giovanni Marinelli.

On the afternoon of 10 June Matteotti left his home on Via Pisanelli in the Flaminio district on foot and set off for the Palazzo Montecitorio, seat of the Chamber of Deputies, along the Lungotevere Arnaldo da Brescia. A black Lancia was parked there with five men waiting inside: Dumini, Albino Volpi, Giuseppe Viola, Augusto Malacria and Amleto Poveromo. Two of them threw themselves on the deputy. Matteotti broke free and knocked one of them down, but a third stunned him with a blow to the face and together they bundled him into the car. Two boys playing by the river saw the whole thing. The car drove off at speed.

Inside, the struggle continued. Matteotti managed to throw his parliamentary pass out of the window; it was later found by peasants. Finally one of the abductors – most probably Volpi, though some accounts point to Viola – stabbed him several times under the arm and in the chest. Matteotti died in the car some time later. The killers drove around the outskirts of Rome until in the evening they reached the Quartarella copse in the municipality of Riano, about 25 kilometres north of the city. There, digging with a car jack, they buried the body in a shallow grave. That evening Dumini reported to the prime minister’s entourage. Whether Mussolini knew that same night remains disputed. He himself claimed that he learned of the deputy’s disappearance only on 11 June.

Investigation and crisis

Matteotti did not come home. On the morning of 11 June his wife Velia alerted her husband’s colleagues, among them Filippo Turati, and they informed the police. On 12 June the news spread across the country. A couple living nearby, uneasy about a car that had been loitering suspiciously in the area the day before, had noted its registration number. The car belonged to Filippo Filippelli, publisher of the pro-government daily Corriere Italiano. The police quickly traced it, and bloodstains were found inside. On 12 June Dumini was arrested at Termini station as he boarded a train for the north, and the others were arrested over the following days. The examining magistrate, Mauro Del Giudice, pursued the case energetically and secured Marinelli’s arrest.

On 12 and 13 June Mussolini assured the Chamber that he was shaken, that he regarded the crime as aimed at the government too, and that the guilty would be punished. Nobody believed him. On 17 June he forced the resignations of Rossi and of the under-secretary of the interior, Aldo Finzi, and removed the chief of police, General Emilio De Bono; on 18 June he handed the Ministry of the Interior to the Nationalist Luigi Federzoni. Rossi, who had been in hiding for a week, gave himself up on 22 June, but not before writing a memorandum that incriminated Mussolini.

For several weeks Fascism seemed to be tottering. Thousands of people took off their party badges, spontaneous strikes broke out across the country, and the independent press, including the liberal Corriere della Sera, accused the government. Abroad, socialists of every country protested. The British Labour Party, which had been in government under Ramsay MacDonald since January, declared the leaders of Fascism morally responsible for Matteotti’s death, which the prime minister then had to explain in the House of Commons as the party’s position rather than the government’s. The exception was Soviet diplomacy: the Soviet ambassador in Rome did not cancel a planned reception for Mussolini and entertained him at the embassy on 11 July, to the indignation of the Italian Communists.

The Aventine

On 26 June the Senate gave the government a vote of confidence by 225 votes out of 252. The next day most of the opposition deputies – Socialists, Popolari, Republicans and the liberal democrats of Giovanni Amendola – gathered in a separate room at Montecitorio, honoured Matteotti’s memory and resolved to take no part in the Chamber’s proceedings until the rule of law was restored. This became known as the Aventine Secession, after the plebeians of antiquity who withdrew to the Aventine Hill in their quarrels with the patricians. That day the General Confederation of Labour called a ten-minute general strike. The opposition decided against calling for an uprising or a general strike. It counted on public outrage and the evidence of guilt to persuade King Victor Emmanuel III to dismiss Mussolini. The Communists proposed setting up an “anti-parliament”, and when the others refused, they returned to the Chamber in November.

The government waited it out. On 8 July it issued decrees allowing prefects to warn and suspend newspapers that spread “false news”. On 16 August a carabinieri brigadiere on leave found Matteotti’s remains in the Quartarella copse, so badly decomposed that they were identified with the help of a dentist. The funeral took place on 21 August in his home town of Fratta Polesine. The government had the coffin carried by night train to prevent demonstrations along the route. On 12 September the Communist Giovanni Corvi, in revenge, shot dead the Fascist deputy Armando Casalini on a Rome tram, which radical Fascists exploited to call for a “second wave” of violence.

In the autumn the affair came to a head again. The opposition obtained the memoranda of Rossi and Filippelli, which pointed to Mussolini as the man who had ordered the crime, and the former prime minister Ivanoe Bonomi passed the documents to the king. The monarch made no use of them. According to accounts, he replied that he was a constitutional king and could not act without a vote of parliament – and parliament, elected in April, was Fascist. On 27 December Amendola’s daily Il Mondo published Rossi’s memorandum, in which he wrote that everything that had happened had been done by the will, with the consent or with the complicity of the leader. Giolitti’s and Salandra’s Liberals began to distance themselves from the government.

The speech of 3 January 1925

The turning point came from the other side. On 31 December 1924 several dozen commanders of the Fascist militia came to Mussolini and demanded that he stop worrying about legality, or they would act themselves. On 3 January 1925 Mussolini addressed the Chamber. He challenged the opposition to impeach him, as the Statuto Albertino allowed, and then declared: “I declare here, before this assembly and before the whole Italian people, that I alone assume the political, moral and historical responsibility for all that has happened. (…) If Fascism has been a criminal association, then I am the chief of that criminal association!” He announced that within 48 hours the situation would be cleared up.

That same night Federzoni sent telegrams to the prefects ordering them to close opposition premises, confiscate newspapers and detain suspects. This was not an admission of having ordered the crime but a declaration of war on the opposition. In 1925–1926 the so-called “most Fascist” laws (leggi fascistissime) made the prime minister answerable only to the king, placed the press under control, dissolved opposition parties and unions, restored the death penalty and set up the Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State. On 9 November 1926 the Chamber stripped 123 opposition deputies of their seats. Italy had become a one-party state.

Trial and the question of guilt

The killers were tried in March 1926 in Chieti, a town chosen as “safely Fascist”, far from Rome. The defendants were represented by the secretary of the Fascist Party, Roberto Farinacci. The court ruled the killing to be manslaughter. Dumini, Volpi and Poveromo were each sentenced to just under six years in prison, most of which was remitted by an amnesty, while Viola and Malacria were acquitted. The case against De Bono before the Senate was dropped, and the line of inquiry leading to Mussolini never came to court. For years afterwards Dumini blackmailed the regime and received money from it. After the war the Court of Cassation declared the Chieti verdict legally non-existent, and in 1947 a court of assizes in Rome sentenced Dumini, Viola and Poveromo to life imprisonment, later commuted to 30 years.

Historians still disagree over whether Mussolini ordered Matteotti’s killing. Some, such as Mauro Canali, believe the crime was a premeditated murder carried out on his orders. Others, following Renzo De Felice, think that his outburst of rage was taken by subordinates as an order, or that an abduction meant to teach a “lesson” got out of hand. There has also been a hypothesis that Matteotti was gathering evidence of bribes connected with an oil concession for the American firm Sinclair Oil, but it has not been proved. On Mussolini’s political responsibility everyone agrees – including Mussolini himself.

Significance

The crime against Matteotti was a moment of truth for Italian Fascism. It showed that violence was not a distortion of the movement but its method, and that the liberal state, with the king at its head, was unable to stand up to it. The opposition chose moral protest and waited for a monarch who preferred a self-assured prime minister to an uncertain change. Mussolini emerged from the crisis stronger and within two years built a dictatorship, with the OVRA secret police, internal exile and a special court. Many anti-Fascists were killed or forced to flee: Amendola died in 1926 after a beating by a squad, Turati fled to France, and Antonio Gramsci spent years in prison.

The dictatorship born of the crisis of 1924 became a model and an ally for Adolf Hitler, and, free of parliamentary control, Mussolini alone led Italy into wars in Ethiopia and Spain, into the Axis with Germany and finally into the Second World War. He declared war on France and Britain on 10 June 1940, sixteen years to the day after Matteotti’s abduction. The murdered deputy’s name was later borne by the Socialist units of the Italian Resistance, which fought the Germans and Mussolini’s Fascists in 1943–1945.