ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
establishment of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations (Camera dei Fasci e delle
Corporazioni), and with it the corporatization of political representation. After two years of
discussion, the Solmi commission concluded its work. On 7 October 1938, the Grand Council
approved the bill on the establishment of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations and the
maintenance of a senate by royal appointment, a legacy of the liberal past. The creation of
this new chamber marked the end of the process of institutionalizing the corporatist regime.
Among other things, this endorsed the union between party and corporation, which was
subsequently approved by parliament in January 1939. The Chamber’s official opening took
place on 23 March 1939 with 682 ‘national councillors’ in attendance: 18 members of the
Fascist Grand Council, 139 from the National Council of the PNF, and 525 from the National
Council of Corporations.
An essential characteristic of the new chamber was that its members took their seats there by
virtue of their membership of other bodies within the regime, of which the most important
were the Party’s national council, provincial administrations and the National Council of
Corporations. The reform also implicitly heralded the end of the concept of a parliamentary
term, as the chamber was a permanent body: its members would only cease to be national
councillors if they were to lose their posts within one of the regime’s bodies. This chamber
then became the functional representation of the PNF’s national council and National Council
of Corporations, while members of the Fascist Grand Council became ex-officio members. A
survey of its members in 1939 allows us to note a difficult balance between counsellors of the
PNF and the corporations, with the latter being – at least formally – dominant. In practice, the
situation was different, since the PNF was also represented within the corporatist
structures Because he had to recognize all national counsellors by decree, Mussolini had
the last word.
Although the Italian Fascist model of corporatism has spread around the world before its
institutionalization, the Italian example was consecrated into a bicameral political system,
with an advisory corporatist chamber and a politically controlled senate, with a strong single
party and an omnipresent Grand Council.
Corporatism in the ‘longue durée’: The Iberian experiences
The more durable experiments in the institutionalization of social and political corporatism
were the Iberian dictatorships of Primo de Rivera and the Francisco Franco in Spain and
Oliveira Salazar in Portugal. Those of Franco and Salazar especially, because their longevity
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