I | INTRODUCTION |
Benito
Mussolini (1883-1945), founder of Fascism and prime minister and dictator
of Italy (1922-1943). Known as Il Duce (Italian for “the leader”),
Mussolini centralized political power in Italy and bound the nation to him with
his charisma. His vast personal power, strong-arm methods, and extreme
nationalism made him a model for leaders of like-minded authoritarian movements
in the 1920s and 1930s. German dictator Adolf Hitler saw Mussolini as a
precursor, and many similarities existed between the Fascist and German Nazi
movements. Allied with Hitler from 1938 to 1943, Mussolini helped plunge Europe
into World War II (1939-1945).
II | EARLY LIFE |
Mussolini was born in Predappio, a small town
in north central Italy, near the city of Forlì. He was the first son of a
striving lower-class couple. His father was a blacksmith and his mother was a
schoolteacher. Like many other families of this time and region, Mussolini’s
family held socialist convictions and was opposed to the influence of the Roman
Catholic Church. The couple named their first son after Mexican revolutionary
hero Benito Juárez, and his younger brother after medieval Catholic heretic
Arnold of Brescia.
As a youth, Mussolini was known for his quick
temper and arrogance. Educated in local schools, he earned a diploma in 1901
that qualified him to teach elementary school. Employment prospects in the area
were scarce, however, and in 1902 he moved to Switzerland.
III | POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT |
While abroad, Mussolini studied the works
of socialist thinkers such as Karl Marx and became involved with socialist
groups. Returning to Italy in 1904, he drew on his exposure to leftist ideas,
his quick intelligence, and his growing talent as a journalist and speechmaker
to advance in local socialist circles. In 1910 he married Rachele Guidi, with
whom he would have five children.
A | Newspaper Editor |
In 1911 Mussolini was jailed for leading
protests against Italy’s invasion of Libya. Upon his release in 1912, he was
lionized by the left for his attack on imperialism and the Italian Socialist
Party appointed him editor of the party’s prestigious official newspaper,
Avanti! (Forward!). Now living in Milan, he acquired notoriety and a
loyal personal following for his explosive editorials. His pieces generally took
the form of scathing polemics against both the Italian liberal government and
its main opposition, moderate socialist reformists. Meanwhile, his impatience
with democratic procedure and his indifference to the harsh day-to-day
experience of the poor distanced him from the traditional Italian socialist
tenets of majority rule and humanitarianism. Despite his actions against Italy’s
imperial conquest of Libya, Mussolini was at heart more a nationalist than a
socialist.
The outbreak of World War I (1914-1918)
occasioned Mussolini’s official break with socialism. At first Italy stayed out
of the war. Most socialists, including Mussolini at the time, wanted the country
to remain neutral on the grounds that the war was imperialistic and contrary to
workers’ interests. However, in 1915 the Italian government decided to enter the
war after the Allied Powers of Britain, France, and Russia promised Italy
significant territorial gains in the Treaty of London. As Italy prepared for
war, Mussolini also shifted his position, and began to support Italy’s entrance
into the war. He justified his reversal by contending that wartime chaos would
bring about revolution and that inaction would only isolate the socialists.
Mussolini also foresaw that war would raise nationalistic passions in
Italy—passions on which he could capitalize. To socialist party leaders, this
turnaround smacked of pure opportunism, and they dismissed him from
Avanti! He subsequently founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo
d'Italia (The People of Italy), which later became the organ of the Fascist
movement. When the socialists learned that the newspaper was financed by the
French, who wanted Italy to enter the war, and by industrialists, who wanted to
split the socialist movement, they expelled him from the Italian Socialist
Party.
Italy entered the war in May 1915 and
Mussolini was drafted into the army in September. He was severely wounded in
February 1917 when a grenade launcher he was firing exploded, and he was
released from the army in June. The time he spent under arms only made him a
more convinced nationalist, completing his break with the socialist
movement.
B | Birth of Fascism |
When the war ended in November 1918,
Mussolini was at loose ends politically. His sympathies lay with the nation’s
hundreds of thousands of war veterans, many unemployed and, most of all,
disaffected with the liberal Italian state. With an eye on galvanizing their
support, in March 1919 he founded a political movement called the Fasci Italiani
di Combattimento (Italian Combat Leagues), whose members became known as
Fascists. At first Mussolini organized young Fascists into armed squads in order
to defend Fascist rallies. But soon these black-shirted squads were to attack
and disrupt the rallies of rival political factions, especially the socialists.
Mussolini thus introduced wartime tactics into peacetime politics.
In speeches and rallies Mussolini
denounced inept politicians and incited nationalist fervor, hoping to seize the
initiative from traditional opposition parties, notably the socialists. However,
when Mussolini ran for parliament later that year—promising to replace the
parliamentary monarchy with a republic, tax war profits, divide up the large
estates for landless farmers, and grant women the vote—he failed miserably.
IV | RISE TO POWER |
In 1920 and 1921 widespread labor strikes,
riots over high food prices, and peasant land occupations and tax revolts
swept the nation. Taking advantage of the chaos, Mussolini offered eager
industrialists and landlords the services of his armed squads of Black Shirts as
strikebreakers. Acting sometimes with the complicity of the government, the
Fascist gangs also set about destroying left-wing and Catholic trade unions and
socialist groups.
Over the course of 1921 Mussolini skillfully
played a duplicitous political game. On one hand, he operated within
parliamentary channels, transforming his movement into the National Fascist
Party and muting or eliminating the more radical Fascist aims in order to
attract support from the influential Nationalist movement and business
interests. On the other hand, he openly threatened to overthrow the
parliamentary government if it sought to suppress Fascist groups.
Far from condemning him, the weakening
liberal government sought to enlist Mussolini’s support. In preparation for the
1921 elections, the government brought the Fascist party into an electoral
coalition, and 35 Fascists, including Mussolini, were elected to parliament. The
Italian government believed Mussolini would abandon his violent tactics once he
entered parliament, and that, in the meantime, his gangs were useful in cracking
down on socialist activity.
However, Mussolini’s overriding ambition was
to seize power, and the opportunity came in the form of the Italian political
crises of 1922. Over the course of that year several successive parliamentary
governments collapsed, while Mussolini’s Fascist rallies grew more popular and
vocal. In October, as another cabinet fell apart, Mussolini threatened to order
his tens of thousands of armed Black Shirts to occupy Rome if he were not asked
to form the new government. Bands of Fascists began moving towards the capital
in what would become known as the March on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III at
first leaned towards declaring a state of emergency and sending the army against
the Fascists, but powerful interest groups, state officials, and army leaders
convinced him that Mussolini should be given the chance to end what they
considered the growing disorder of parliamentary rule. Consequently, at the end
of October the king formally invited Mussolini to create a new governing
coalition as prime minister. Mussolini thus began his rule as the legal head of
government even though the Fascist party had never obtained more than 15 percent
of the national vote.
V | MUSSOLINI’S RULE |
In power but not yet dictator, Mussolini
continued to exploit conservative fears that he was the only alternative to
political chaos or, even worse, a socialist revolution. He pushed through a new
electoral law that virtually guaranteed the Fascists a two-thirds majority in
parliament following the 1924 elections. When opponents protested, he
intimidated them with violence. After a high-placed gang of Black Shirts
kidnapped and murdered outspoken socialist member of parliament Giacomo
Matteotti in June 1924, widespread outrage almost toppled Mussolini from power.
However, the opposition was in disarray and the king was unwilling to remove
him. Faced with the choice between standing behind his Black Shirts or losing
their loyalty, Mussolini acted decisively. Speaking before parliament in January
1925, he took full, personal responsibility for the actions of the Black
Shirts—including all violence and murders committed in the name of Fascism—and
affirmed that he alone could bring order to Italy. Over the next two years he
disbanded parliament, dissolved all political parties except for his National
Fascist Party, stiffened police measures against dissenters, set up the Special
Tribunal for the Defense of the State to try political opponents, established
complete censorship of the press, and otherwise curtailed civil liberties.
Mussolini, Il Duce, was now the dictator of Italy.
From 1925 to 1940 Mussolini’s major ambition
was to reestablish Italy as a great European power. He stabilized the national
currency, revamped government services such as the railroads, passed social
legislation, and launched campaigns for economic self-sufficiency to reduce
Italy’s dependency on imports. He established national corporations or councils
representing employers and workers to arbitrate labor disputes, ostensibly in
the national interest, but mainly favoring business. He also made Italy a
decisive player in international diplomacy. All of this was possible, Mussolini
claimed, because he had overcome the class conflicts and ideological schisms of
the liberal era, and had unified the Italian people behind him.
There is some truth to this. Most landowners,
industrialists, and middle-class people saw Mussolini as Italy’s savior because
he brought social order and enacted pro-business policies. However, the majority
of working-class Italians saw their standard of living drop after the Fascist
government gave free rein to businesses, and many remained hostile. So did many
Catholics when Mussolini banned many of their organizations. The peasant
population, very numerous in this still rural country, was divided: Landowners
favored Mussolini, while the landless were indifferent, if not hostile to him,
especially after his government halted land reform measures in 1923.
A | Social Policies |
Mussolini wooed mass support with fresh
social policies and political propaganda. Under the slogan “Make Way for Youth,”
the dictatorship established an all-encompassing mass organization for
schoolchildren, young workers, and university students. In 1927 he drew up a
labor charter that promised workers new rights as well as new responsibilities
to the state. Though the Fascist state outlawed strikes, it recognized the right
of its official trade unions to bargain collectively and it barred employer
lockouts. It also set up a vast system of clubs for working people, called the
dopolavoro, which organized leisure-time activities. Slowly, the
dictatorship moved toward the goal of establishing what it called the
corporatist system of representation. In this system, all of the
different interests of the society, from big business to workers and shopkeepers
and artisans, would negotiate their differences in view of the paramount
interests of the state. Over the course of his rule, however, Mussolini allowed
no debate about his strong support for free enterprise and disregard for
workers’ rights.
Reaching out to the Catholic Church, in
February 1929 Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty with Pope Pius XI. Under
the treaty, Italy recognized the independent sovereignty of the Vatican, paid
reparations for the loss of autonomy the Vatican suffered in the 19th century,
and made Roman Catholicism the official state religion. The once-anticlerical
dictator thereby broke with the western liberal tendency to separate church and
state. In turn, the Catholic Church supported Mussolini’s regime more or less
officially. The Catholic hierarchy was especially enthusiastic about Mussolini’s
attempts to raise Italian birthrates and his antifeminist acts, including laws
that made abortion a heavily punished crime against the state and regulations
discouraging women from working.
B | Cult of Il Duce |
The glue that held the Fascist regime
together was Mussolini’s cult of personality. Fascism never developed into a
coherent doctrine, recognizing itself best by what it was against: Fascism meant
antiliberalism, antisocialism, antifeminism, and, after 1938, anti-Semitism. For
the general public, Fascism acquired real meaning in the larger-than-life figure
of Il Duce. A vast propaganda machine directed by the Ministry of Popular
Culture churned out newsreels, radio broadcasts, and newspaper stories
glorifying Mussolini. The Fascist Party choreographed huge rallies at
Mussolini’s Roman headquarters at Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini harangued the
crowds with rousing speeches. A common propaganda axiom held that “Il Duce is
always right,” and that youth should learn to “Believe, obey, fight.”
Mussolini’s posturing lent itself to a kaleidoscope of propagandist images: Il
Duce as family man, photographed with his five children; Renaissance talent
playing the violin; hero of the peasants, harvesting grain bare-chested; brave
commander in chief flying a fighter plane. Mussolini reached the peak of his
personal popularity when he led Italy to victory over the Ethiopian empire in
May 1936.
Starting in the mid-1930s Mussolini became
increasingly absorbed with the goal of establishing a new Roman Empire that
would reinstate Italian civilization around the Mediterranean Sea. To that end,
the Italian army invaded Ethiopia in October 1935. Although the League of
Nations condemned this egregious violation of international law and imposed
economic sanctions to stop it, the Italians waged a vicious, if brief, war.
Driving out Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Mussolini incorporated Ethiopia
into the Italian Empire in May 1936.
C | Alliance with Germany and World War II |
Although popular at home, Mussolini felt
increasingly isolated by international opinion, especially by the disapproval of
Italy’s former allies France and Britain. In reaction, starting in 1936 he moved
towards an alliance with Nazi Germany, under the leadership of dictator Adolf
Hitler, who greatly admired Mussolini. Emboldened, Mussolini intervened in the
Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) on the side of General Francisco Franco and his
right-wing revolutionaries. Italian troops performed poorly in Spain, however,
while Nazi Germany gave critical support that helped Franco win the civil war.
This event showed Italy’s growing dependence on the superior power and
unflinching purpose of Hitler’s Germany.
Race-consciousness in Italy had heightened
with the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, leading to the passage of laws preventing
interracial marriages. Now allied with the Nazis, Mussolini in 1938 adopted
anti-Jewish laws similar to those in Germany. Though the laws in Italy were less
strictly observed than those in Germany, Italian Jews were fired from
employment, deprived of property, and excluded from public schools. Worse,
Fascist lists of “non-Aryan” people eventually became available to the Gestapo,
the German secret police. After Italy fell under German occupation in September
1943, the Gestapo used these lists to round up thousands of Italian Jews for
execution in concentration camps.
Eventually, Mussolini’s war making proved
his undoing and his country’s as well. After the Fascists launched a costly
campaign in April 1939 to conquer Albania, Italy was depleted of war material.
Italians faced rationing of food and other supplies. In May Italy entered into
an alliance with Germany, in what was called the Pact of Steel, but it was
unprepared to fulfill the pact’s military obligations. When Hitler unexpectedly
invaded Poland in September 1939, Italy stayed neutral. Only after France
surrendered to German invaders in June 1940 (and Mussolini thought the
German-Italian conquest of Europe would soon be over) did Il Duce bring Italy
into World War II. Thereafter, Italy had to pay dearly for German supplies. The
army, its morale low and its leadership weak, performed badly. With rising
hardships at home and the Italian army suffering defeats in Greece, North
Africa, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Mussolini’s
popularity plummeted. However, living in an egocentric solitude with no checks
on his despotic politics, he was utterly blind to public and Fascist Party
opinion.
Allied forces landed in Sicily on July 10,
1943, provoking rebellion in the Fascist ranks. On July 25 the Fascist Party’s
governing body voted to hand executive power over to King Victor Emmanuel III,
and the king had Mussolini arrested. As the Italian government surrendered to
the Allies in early September, the German army began occupying the Italian
peninsula. Hitler ordered the rescue of his old ally, and on September 12, in a
daring aerial raid, German commandos successfully plucked Mussolini from his
mountain prison at Gran Sasso, high in the Apennines. In the northern
territories occupied by German forces, the Germans installed Mussolini as the
leader of a new government called the Italian Social Republic, headquartered at
Salò. From there, he boasted of reinvigorating Fascism and returning it to its
rightful position in power in Italy. In reality, however, the Italian Social
Republic was a mere puppet of the Nazis. In April 1945 as the ranks of Italian
partisans, or resistance fighters, swelled and the Allied armies advanced north,
Mussolini fled toward Switzerland hidden in a retreating German army convoy.
Near Lake Como, partisans captured him. The next day, April 28, 1945, at Giulino
di Mezzegra, Mussolini was executed with his mistress, Clara Petacci.
VI | EVALUATION |
Mussolini’s legacy is still disputed. Lasting
practically the entire period between the world wars, his dictatorship oversaw
Italy’s transformation from a respected, but second-tier country to a modernized
nation with great power pretensions. Apologists argue that Mussolini was an
effective leader given Italy’s legacy of class division, the inept liberal
government he replaced, and the hard times a relatively poor country faced
during the period between the wars. Had Mussolini not come under Hitler’s sway
and Italy stayed out of World War II, they argue, his regime might have lasted
decades, like Franco’s dictatorship in Spain.
However, whatever innovations that may have
occurred came at a high cost. Under Mussolini, democratic freedoms were lost,
corruption became rampant, and the division between the classes deepened.
Moreover, Mussolini’s overreaching and costly military misadventures started
well before his connection with Hitler. Like all modern despots, Mussolini
became increasingly blinded by his self-declared infallibility and the workings
of his totalitarian party apparatus. Pushed further and further into an
unwinnable war of conquest, Mussolini utterly subordinated his people’s
well-being to the interests of the Nazis. The ultimate result was catastrophic
in terms of loss of civilian lives, military casualties, resources, and cultural
pride. If Mussolini and his Fascist dictatorship appear more benign than Hitler
and his frightful Third Reich, it is only because of different circumstances in
the two countries. Ultimately, whatever positive may have occurred during
Mussolini’s regime likely could have developed just as well under a more
democratic form of government.
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