Speech in Bologna, October 24, 1936

By Benito Mussolini

Blackshirts of the Tenth Legion! Blackshirts of my own land!

Ten years have passed since our last meeting (the crown roars: "Too many years!"). In this moment our hearts beat a little faster and our eyes are piercing. Has anything changed between us? (the crowd responds with a formidable shout: "No!"). No, nothing has changed!

In this piazza I find the same ardent faith, the same vibrant enthusiasm, the same spirit of the Tenth Legion favoured by Julius Caesar, founder of the first Roman Empire. (Cheers).

Ten years have passed, but we can look back with good conscience and with legitimate pride. We worked, we solved some big problems, we approached the people. Retracing this period of time, it can be divided into three periods: the first period from 1926 to 1929 which can be called the Conciliation period: the grand event was that of February 11, 1929 which solidified the peace between Church and State. It was a problem that weighed on the conscience of the Nation for sixty years. Fascism solved it. All those who cast dark omens about the future have been mortified and humiliated.

It is of exceptional importance in the life of a people that the State and the Church are reconciled in the individual conscience and in the collective conscience of the entire Nation.

The period from 1929 to 1934 is the period of construction of the Corporative State. For us Fascists, the people are not an abstraction of politics but are a living and concrete reality. I suffer the pain of the people. Our love for the people—armed and severe love—is completely vibrant with a profound and conscious humanity. During this period the whole of Libya was conquered and pacified and the tricolor was hoisted over Cufra, one thousand kilometers from the sea.

The 12th, 13th and 14th years of the Fascist Era represent the period of the Empire.

A people without space cannot live; a people bearing an ancient and magnificent civilization, like the Italian people, has rights over the earth.

Fourteen years of spiritual preparation produced fruitful results. The fighting people lived up to the historical hour they were given to live. We conquered an Empire in seven months, in five battles.

We conquered it not only by defeating the enemy forces and the traitors of European civilization who trained and armed them, we conquered it against an entire coalition that had established its headquarters on the shores of Lake Geneva where a congregation of lay fanatics would claim to kill the spirit through the letter and to suffocate, through the quibbling interpretations of a thousand paragraphs, the powerful and overwhelming impulse of peoples' lives!

In seven months we have conquered the Empire, but it will take much less to occupy and pacify it entirely.

As I speak to you, our columns are marching in large stages in the fertile region of the Great Lakes, in the heart of Equatorial Africa.

Another column is marching westward in search of the elusive government of Gore.

Once the territories are pacified—which are six times the size of the Fatherland—there will be work and a place for everyone.

While European horizons darken under the mists of uncertainty and disorder, Italy offers the world an admirable spectacle of composure, discipline, civic and Roman virtue.

Well then! The peoples who do not know us or who know us only through literary descriptions, today are amazed at our economic, political and military reality.

From this Bologna, which has been a beacon of human intelligence over the centuries, from this Bologna which has given the greatest sacrifice to the Cause of the Revolution, I wish to send a message that must go beyond the mountains and beyond the seas.

It is a message of peace, peace in work and work in peace.

Since 1929 millions upon millions of men, women and children have suffered the consequences of a crisis that by now no one can deny is due to the system.

I am therefore extending a large olive branch at the end of Year XIV and the beginning of Year XV of the Fascist Era. Attention! This olive branch sprouts from an immense forest: it is a forest of eight million bayonets, well sharpened and held by young intrepid hearts!

Blackshirts of the Tenth Legion!

Your warm welcome has touched my heart, and I grasped your mood: it is the mood of the first year of the Empire. The whole nation today is on a different and higher plane: the plane of the Empire.

Very serious responsibilities and formidable problems arise before our spirit, but we will face them and we will win

Blackshirts!

It is the spirit that tames and bends matter, it is the spirit that stands behind bayonets and cannons, it is the spirit that creates holiness and heroism, which gives the people who deserve it—like ours—victory and glory!