RISULTATI RICERCA

The brutalization of politics in Europe after the First World War, and specifi-cally during the Republican period in Spain, manifests the important role played by symbols in increasing political tension, through subversive projects and violent discourse. In this climate, the onset of the Spanish Civil War produced a shift in the violent political discourse of the right and of the Monarchist and Falangist far right of the Republican period. This discourse emerged as a new circumstance, a violence exerted in the new political situation following the initial failure of the coup d’état of 18 July 1936, as evidenced by the creation of an official political dis-course legitimising the authority of Nationalist Spain.

This article investigates the relationship between physical and verbal violent prac-tices in the political struggle in interwar Greece. First, it tries to establish a typol-ogy of violent modes of behaviour adopted by political actors; according to this typology, in interwar Greece one can sketch two distinct ideal types of political violence, each one having its own characteristics and corresponding to the two dif-ferent, but parallel, historical processes that marked the social and political history of the country during the above-mentioned period: a) what is called the National Schism and b) the emergence of the labour movement, that provoked a strong and constant reaction to the other socio-political forces. Upon this typology, it is further examined how, within each of these two forms of political conflict, physi-cal and verbal violent practices are articulated. The main argument is that, contrary to the violence of the National Schism, the main characteristics of which are a ro-tation to the roles of the performer and the victim by the members of the two opposed political camps, its manifestation in waves, among which a period of détente intervenes, as well as its complex relationship with verbal violence, the vio-lence of anticommunism is characterized, on the one hand, by a consolidation at the roles of the performer and the victim and, on the other, by a tendency of continuity and evolution. Moreover, in this case the relationship between physical and verbal violence is constantly affirmative while the latter either prepares the ground for the manifestation of the former or it tries to legitimize it a posteriori.

The article deals with the use of verbal as well as physical violence in the days of the march on Rome. The hypothesis presented here is that there is an indirect rela-tionship between the two, even though they are strongly linked. In particular, ver-bal violence is shown not only as either an impetus or a legitimation for physical violence, but also as the means for removing its memory in the political debate, as it is shown by the example of Mussolini’s speech at the Chamber of the Deputies of the 16th of November, 1922. Morover, great emphasis is put on the reconstruc-tion of the episodes of physical violence, in order to show the importance of the use of physical violence in the political process of the march on Rome, especially in the local theatres of fascist seizure of power.