Pact of Pacification
The Pact of Pacification or Pacification Pact was a peace agreement officially signed by Benito Mussolini, who would later become dictator of Italy, and other leaders of the Fasci with the Italian Socialist Party and the General Confederation of Labor in Rome on August 2 or 3, 1921. The Pact called for “immediate action to put an end to the threats, assaults, reprisals, acts of vengeance, and personal violence of any description,” by either side for the “mutual respect” of “all economic organizations.” The Italian Futurists, Syndicalists and others favored Mussolini’s peace pact as an attempt at “reconciliation with the Socialists.” Others saw it as a means to form a "grand coalition of new mass parties" to "overthrow the liberal systems" via Parliament or civil society.
In the accord, Mussolini clearly voiced his opposition and contempt for the provincial paramilitary squads and their landowning allies, declaring that they were "the dullest, deafest, most miserable cast that exists in Italy". The agreement was short-lived since many of the action squads leaders denounced the pacification pact with the socialists, along with Mussolini’s leadership, arguing that the Duce "had not created the movement" and that they could "get along without him".
History
The violence between the action squads and socialists and communist activists continued to escalate from 1919 to 1921. Revolutionary socialists were engaged in political assassinations, strikes, physical possession of factories, seizures of private land, and riots who often “coerced smallholders” “as well as laborers into Socialist unions,” causing rural landowners to launch retaliatory assaults against socialist targets. Across the Italian landscape “trains and barracks, banks and public buildings were attacked by mobs,” while many areas were draped in red banners and were declared to have “passed wholly into the hands of the Communists.” The rural paramilitary leaders took the position that “violence could only be met by greater violence” in a situation that was almost comparable to a civil war. Mussolini found himself under increasing pressure to reduce the anti-socialist violence, finding it difficult to be put in a position to take a “categorically antileftist position,” since he had raised the possibility of forming a sort of “nationalist-leftist coalition government.”By 1921, the fasci movement had expanded to the point where almost every political position in Italy was represented, which was encouraged by Mussolini’s denials that he had “any programme” whatsoever, pointing out that fascism would “appeal simultaneously to ‘aristocrats and democrats, revolutionaries and reactionaries, proletarians and anti-proletarians, pacifists and anti-pacifists.’”
Willing to court almost any populist movement, Mussolini found it politically advantageous at first to identify with the nationalistic movement of independent and loosely organized anti-socialist militias, although at the time he “did not want to lose his position on the left,” since he was considering the possibility of a “Fascist Labor Party” or “National Labor Party.” Mussolini envisioned a “coalition of labor syndicalists,” but the increasing violence between socialist and anti-socialist squads was harming his chances to amass a wider political constituency.
Caught in the middle
During the 1919 elections, the Fascists had attempted to court the socialist-left while publicly dubbing himself the “Lenin of Italy”, attempting to “out-socialist the socialists”, which resulted in an election where the socialists garnished “forty times as many votes.” This devastating and humiliating election defeat pushed Mussolini towards finding other populist movements that could catapult him into a powerful seat of authority, even though he “briefly reconsidered emigrating” in the belief that his movement was finished. The poor state of affairs of the fasci movement was reported by Fascists themselves at their Third Fascist Congress, who calculated that they had “only 100 fasci and 30,000 supporters” in 1920, as compared to “2,200 fasci and 320,000 members by late 1921. In an attempt to expand his minuscule party, Mussolini seemed to have employed the political strategy of entryism in which a smaller political movement aspires to capture a larger one under a degree of subterfuge and subversion.In a sense, as historian Stanley G. Payne explained, the “new mass Fascism” of the agrarian squadrists “had not been created by Mussolini,” but had instead “sprung up around him.” As Mussolini proceeded to ensnare the mostly self-organizing militias under his fascist banner, his movement began to experience a fast-expanding “influx of middle-class people” who were relatively conservative. Generally, the ras leaders supported nationalism, not socialism, and were upset over the socialists and communist involvement in political violence against landowners and the middle class.
This put Mussolini, the former leader of the Italian Socialist Party and a former Marxist who had supported Lenin’s October Revolution in 1917, into an almost impossible position to achieve consensus among his diverse followers.