ABSTRACT
During the early years of fascist rule, Confindustria, (Confederazione Generale dell’Industria Italiana, the General Confederation of Italian Industry), wavered in its relationship with the new regime. A number of leading employers had financially supported Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922, and Confindustria itself had collaborated with his government in the first years of its existence.1 In 1924, however, during the Matteotti crisis, Confindustria kept its distance from Mussolini’s shaken government.2 When the fascist regime overcame that crisis and reinforced its policies Confindustria fell into line. But in 1926-7 it campaigned against Mussolini’s revaluation of the lira, which created an economic crisis in Italy despite world-wide prosperity and expansion, and proved fatal for many small firms.3 Confindustria likewise firmly, and finally victoriously, opposed the proposals put forward by Edmondo Rossoni, the fascist trade unionist, with the support of a few small and medium-sized firms, for ‘integral corporativism’, a single trade union of workers and employers.4 But the fluctuating attitude of Confindustria towards fascism cannot erase the basic fact that Italian industrialists bowed and conformed to the regime, while from 1925 onwards, the organization itself was integrated into the fascist state, as a result of the Palazzo Vidoni Pact which established the representational monopoly of the new corporations.
