Fasci Siciliani - Characteristics

Characteristics

The Fasci movement was made up of a federation of scores of associations that developed among farm workers, tenant farmers, and small sharecroppers as well as artisans, intellectuals, and industrial workers. The immediate demands of the movement were fair land rents, higher wages, lower local taxes and distribution of misappropriated common land. Between 1889 and 1893 some 170 Fasci were established in Sicily. According to some sources the movement reached a membership of more than 300,000 by the end of 1893. The Fasci constituted autonomous organizations with their own insignia (red rosettes), uniforms and sometimes even musical bands, and their own local halls for reunions and congresses.

While many of the leaders were of socialist or anarchist leanings, few of their supporters were true revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the peasants who assembled into the Fasci were eager for social justice and convinced that a new world was about to be born. A crucifix hung beside the red flag in many of their meeting-places, and portraits of the King beside those of the revolutionaries Garibaldi, Mazzini and Marx. Cheers for the King were often heard in their marches that almost resembled quasi-religious processions. Many of the Fasci were part of the Party of Italian Workers (Partito dei Lavoratori Italiani, the initial name of the Italian Socialist Party) that had been founded at a conference in Genoa on August 14, 1892.

The rural Fasci in particular were a curious phenomenon: both ancient and modern. They combined millenarian aspirations with urban intellectual leadership often in contact with workers’ organizations and ideas in the more industrialized Northern Italy. According to the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, the Fasci were millenarian insofar as the socialism preached by the movement was seen by the Sicilian peasantry as a new religion, the true religion of Christ – betrayed by the priests, who were on the side of the rich – that foretold the dawn of a new world, without poverty, hunger and cold, in accordance with God’s will. The Fasci, which included many women, were encouraged by the messianic belief that the start of a new reign of justice was looming and the movement spread like an epidemic.