A geography of repression: The first years of the fascist Special Tribunal in Italy, 1926–1928

Highlights

• Examination of the work of the Special Tribunal during fascist regime in Italy.

• Use Agamben's “state of exception” to investigate carceral practices.

• HGIS spatial and temporal analysis of political arrests show patterns.

• Arrests were used as a sophisticated system of control of territory and population.

Abstract

This article analyzes the spatial and temporal patterning of political arrests during the initial years of the fascist regime in Italy, specifically from 1926 to 1928. During these crucial years, Italy's fascists acted rapidly to consolidate their power and to suppress their opponents. A key element of this takeover was the creation of a political court, the Special Tribunal. I examine the work of the Special Tribunal in two ways. First, I analyze the spatial patterning of political arrests on different scales, ranging from local to national. Second, using Agamben's concept of ‘states of exception’, I investigate how the fascists used political crises to further their activities of political suppression. I argue that while the Special Tribunal did target political enemies, it was also used as a sophisticated system of control of territory and population. Drawing on the techniques of the emerging field of historical geographic information systems (GIS), I use the Knox Index and hotspot analysis to focus on the role played by space and place in the fascist system of political oppression. This article contributes to a growing body of historical research focusing on the spatial dynamics of authoritarian regimes in interwar and wartime Europe and the geographies of their carceral practices.

Introduction

The rise of authoritarianism, in particular of totalitarian and fascist states in twentieth-century Europe, has been the focus of much interdisciplinary research. Geographers have contributed to this research by focusing especially on the spatial dimensions of these political systems, arguing that the control of the state also involves the control of space.¹ Recent research has supported this idea through careful spatial and cartographic analysis of historical data and archival records. These analyses have yielded new insights into important research issues such as the rise of National Socialism in Germany and the geographical dynamics of the Holocaust.² Here, I focus on how space is intertwined with the rise of fascism and the geographies of oppression in the interwar period.

This study also draws upon the work of Foucault and Agamben, theorists who have argued that the politics of space extends from the scale of state to the scale of the human body.³ This theoretical background is particularly interesting because it illustrates how state power is linked to the policing and disciplining of the body through systems of carceral power.⁴ Whether by seizing control of existing civil institutions — such as the gendarmerie, police, and courts — or by creating entirely new bureaucracies and institutions, states enforce their power on many different scales. In extreme cases, extrajudicial terror and violence are used to force allegiance to authoritarian regimes.⁵

This article contributes to this field of research by focusing on the first years of Italy's Fascist dictatorship. How did the fascists exert and then enforce their control of the state institutions and the population? This is an important question because from the 1920s onward the Italian fascists set precedents for some of the other right-wing, authoritarian governments arising in the same period. To crush their opponents, Italy's fascists chose not to alter the constitution or to reorganize the existing criminal justice system. Instead, they created a new Special Tribunal with jurisdiction over political crimes and with its own bureaucracy. I examine the work of the Special Tribunal in its first years, analyzing information about the individuals who were arrested and the spatial and temporal patterning of the arrests, including urban-rural differences, arrests along the country's borders, and spatial and temporal clustering of arrests. Of the approximately 30,000 individuals processed by the Special Tribunal, this study focuses on 2,400 people who were arrested between 1925 and 1927 and follows them through the tribunal system until 1928, by which time the legal proceedings had been completed in most cases. This provides a snapshot of how the fascist system of justice was first implemented.

Many of the arrests were carried out in areas hostile to the fascists, but many others occurred in peripheral areas that had never expressed particular hostility to the regime. At the same time, the majority of the charges were dismissed after the preliminary investigation, or the accused were absolved in court. For these reasons, I argue that the Special Tribunal was not just a tool used to attack opponents but also a sophisticated system of control of the Italian territory and population.