Benito Mussolini

• 1. Introduction

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  Benito Mussolini was named after a Mexican president. His father, a blacksmith and a socialist, chose the name Benito for the liberal Mexican leader Benito Juárez. The middle names, Andrea and Amilcare, honored the Italian socialists Andrea Costa and Amilcare Cipriani. In return, his devout Catholic mother, a schoolteacher, insisted the boy be baptised at birth. He was born on the 29th of July 1883 in Dovia di Predappio, a small town in the province of Forlì in Romagna.

  That child grew into the man Italy would call Il Duce. He led the country from 1922 until his overthrow in 1943, and he was the man who founded fascism. He began his life as a socialist journalist and ended it executed by communist partisans on the 28th of April 1945. How does a militant socialist, expelled from his own party, become the dictator who builds a one-party state? How does a man jailed for denouncing an "imperialist war" go on to conquer an empire? And how does a leader at the height of his popularity gamble it all on a war his own officials warned he could not fight? This is the story of how Benito Mussolini rose, ruled, and fell.

• 2. The Socialist Heretic

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  At Avanti!, the newspaper of the Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini found his platform. Under his editorship, its circulation rose from 20,000 to 100,000. He had become one of Italy's most prominent socialists. In 1912 he joined the National Directorate of the party, and during this period he called Karl Marx "the greatest of all theorists of socialism". He sometimes signed his work with the pen name "Vero Eretico", meaning "sincere heretic".

  His path to that prominence ran through poverty and prison. In July 1902 he emigrated to Switzerland, partly to avoid compulsory military service, settling in Lausanne with no work, no connections, and no money. He was arrested for vagrancy and kept behind bars for three days. There he studied the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vilfredo Pareto, and the syndicalist Georges Sorel. Sorel's emphasis on overthrowing liberal democracy through violence, direct action, and the general strike impressed him deeply.

  Mussolini thought of himself as an intellectual and read avidly. He taught himself French and German and translated excerpts from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Kant. He wrote essays, stories, and one novel, L'amante del Cardinale, a bitterly anticlerical work later withdrawn after he made a truce with the Vatican. In September 1911 he joined a riot against the Italian war in Libya, denounced the "imperialist war", and earned a five-month jail term.

  Nietzsche unsettled his Marxism. Mussolini came to reject egalitarianism, a core doctrine of socialism, and his writings turned toward Nietzsche's übermensch concept. He felt socialism had faltered, and believed Nietzsche's ideas would strengthen it. The split that would end his socialist life was already taking shape.

• 3. Class And Nation

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  "Down with the War. We remain neutral," Mussolini wrote in an August 1914 article, holding the official line of the Italian Socialist Party. The party had decided to oppose the First World War after anti-militarist protestors were killed during a general strike known as Red Week. But Mussolini saw the war as an opportunity, for himself, for socialists, and for Italians under Habsburg rule.

  He reversed himself. He argued the war could complete the Risorgimento by uniting the Italians of Austria-Hungary into Italy. He claimed that pacifist proletarians were out of step with an interventionist vanguard preparing Italy for a revolutionary war. For this he was accused of moral and political unworthiness and expelled from the party.

  The nation, he now declared, was real. On the 5th of December 1914 he denounced orthodox socialism, saying the war had made national identity more significant than class. "Class cannot destroy the nation," he said. "Class reveals itself as a collection of interests, but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race." He founded a newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, funded by sources including the engineering giants Fiat and Ansaldo and the governments of France and Britain.

  When the war started, Mussolini volunteered but was turned down for his radical Socialism. Called up to his old unit, the Bersaglieri, he reached the Isonzo front and was promoted to corporal "for merit in war". He totalled about nine months of front-line trench warfare and contracted paratyphoid fever. In February 1917 a mortar bomb explosion during an exercise near Lake Doberdò left him with at least 40 shards of metal in his body. Invalided out, he returned to his editor's desk and to a new political idea.

• 4. Squads And Power

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  On the 23rd of March 1919, in the San Sepolcro Square in Milan, Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento with 200 members. The movement's first program was startling in its breadth: a decentralized republic, universal suffrage including women, abolition of the Senate and nobility, the eight-hour day, and confiscation of Church property, alongside attacks on socialism. Most early Fascists were young men of the urban lower middle class, joined by ex-socialists, anarchists, and disgruntled war veterans, especially from the Arditi.

  The attempt to win on the left failed badly. In the November 1919 elections, the Fascist list obtained 4,795 votes and a single seat, while the Socialists won 170,000 votes and 156 seats. Mussolini seriously considered retiring from politics and emigrating. By the Florence Congress in October there were only 56 fasces with around 17,000 members.

  Violence revived his fortunes. Local leaders called Ras, a term Mussolini borrowed from the Ethiopian aristocracy, organized armed squads of blackshirts. Backed by landowners and tolerated by the government of Giovanni Giolitti, they attacked socialist institutions with beatings, arson, and killings. Membership surged in 1921, the year Mussolini first won election to the Chamber of Deputies. He reorganized the movement into the National Fascist Party with a disciplined structure and a formal militia.

  Then came the march. On the 24th of October 1922, before 60,000 people at the Fascist Congress in Naples, Mussolini declared: "Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy." Days later, fascists gathered outside Rome. Prime Minister Luigi Facta ordered a state of siege, certain the King would agree. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the order. On the 30th of October he handed power to Mussolini, who formed his cabinet on the 31st as some 25,000 Blackshirts paraded in Rome.

• 5. Building The Dictatorship

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  On the 16th of November 1922, appearing before Parliament for the first time as Prime Minister, Mussolini threatened to turn the House into "a bivouac for my squadre" and demanded emergency powers to rule by decree. His first cabinet was a coalition of the Italian right, and he was the only leading Fascist with ministerial rank. Many business leaders believed they could manipulate him, drawn by his early talk of free markets.

  A murder nearly ended him. The socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had demanded the 1924 elections be annulled for irregularities, was assassinated on the 10th of June 1924. Mussolini ordered a cover-up, but witnesses linked the fascist Amerigo Dumini to the killing. The opposition parties withdrew from Parliament in the Aventino Secession, hoping to pressure the King to dismiss him. Victor Emmanuel III refused to act. On the 31st of December 1924, militia consuls gave Mussolini an ultimatum: crush the opposition or they would. On the 3rd of January 1925 he took responsibility for squadristi violence before the Chamber.

  From that speech the regime hardened. Opposition deputies were barred from the Chamber, press censorship tightened, and elected mayors were replaced by appointed podestàs. In 1925 Mussolini began to accept the word "totalitarian", defining fascism as a system in which "nothing is outside the state, nothing and no one is against the state". An electoral law in 1928 abolished parliamentary elections, leaving the Grand Council of Fascism to select a single list approved by plebiscite.

  The cult grew alongside the dictatorship. The phrase "Mussolini is always right" became common. Millions of photographs showed him in characteristic poses, often bare-chested while swimming or harvesting, distributed in a country accustomed to collecting images of saints. He moved his office to the Palazzo Venezia, into the Hall of the World Map, furnished only with a four-meter desk and two Savonarola armchairs for visitors.

• 6. Church, Colony, Crisis

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  Pope Pius XI called Mussolini "the Man of Providence". The praise followed the Lateran Treaty of 1929, a concordat that ended decades of struggle between the Italian state and the papacy dating back to the 1870 takeover of the Papal States. The treaty recognized the independence of Vatican City and included a provision to prosecute those who offended the honour of the Pope. Mussolini, once bitterly anticlerical, had his children baptised in 1923 and was himself re-baptised by a Catholic priest in 1927.

  In Libya the regime was murderous. In November 1929 Mussolini ordered the Pacification of Libya against resistance led by Omar Mukhtar. Well over half the population of Cyrenaica was confined to 15 concentration camps while the air force staged chemical warfare attacks against the Bedouin. Angelo Del Boca estimated between 40,000 and 70,000 Libyans died from forced deportations, starvation, disease, and executions.

  The Great Depression tested the state. After the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange on the 24th of October 1929, Italian unemployment rose from 304,000 in 1929 to 1,200,000 in 1933. The government intervened directly in banking and industry. On the 23rd of January 1933 it established the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale, the IRI, which by 1934 controlled Italy's three major banks and 21.5 percent of Italian joint-stock companies. It managed all of the war and coal industries and most of shipbuilding.

  Mussolini built a doctrine around this control. In "The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote that "the so-called crisis can only be settled by State action and within the orbit of the State." He launched a "Gold for the Fatherland" drive, asking citizens to donate gold jewellery in exchange for steel wristbands, the metal melted into bars for the national banks. By 1935 he claimed three-quarters of Italian businesses were under state control.

• 7. The German Turn

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  At the height of his popularity in May 1936, Mussolini proclaimed the birth of the Italian Empire from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. "The Italian people created the empire with their blood," he declared. His biographer Renzo De Felice called the invasion of Ethiopia "Mussolini's masterpiece" for making the regime widely popular. Mussolini had announced the declaration of war on Ethiopia from that same balcony on the 2nd of October 1935, then directed operations himself, including decisions on the use of chemical weapons.

  The conquest came at a ruinous price. The war was run with an "open" budget, and military expenses grew out of all proportion. The Minister of Trade and Currencies, Felice Guarneri, warned Mussolini that "the empire is swallowing Italy". The League of Nations had condemned Italy and imposed economic sanctions, which Mussolini saw as hypocrisy by older imperial powers. The sanctions, though inconsistently applied, pushed him toward Germany.

  Before the rupture he had tried the other path. The Anschluss crisis of 1934 drew Italy closer to France and Britain. Mussolini had supported the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, assassinated by Austrian Nazis while his family vacationed with Mussolini in Riccione. In January 1935 Mussolini and the French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval signed agreements, and that April the Stresa Front formed against Germany.

  Ethiopia broke that alignment. On the 24th of July 1936 Mussolini agreed to send military contingents to Spain to support Francisco Franco, whose coup had triggered the Spanish Civil War. On the 1st of November he announced the Rome-Berlin Axis. In September 1937 he visited Germany, fascinated by Nazi military power, telling a crowd of 800,000 that "Italian fascism has finally found a friend". Starting on the 22nd of September 1938 he promulgated the Racial Laws against Italian Jews, which many Italians saw as an imposition of German influence.

• 8. The Reluctant Belligerent

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  "So long as the Duce lives, one can rest assured that Italy will seize every opportunity to achieve its imperialistic aims," Adolf Hitler declared in late November 1939. Yet Italy stayed out of the war at first. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September 1939, Italy remained uninvolved, held back by economic and military unpreparedness and by King Victor Emmanuel III's demand for neutrality.

  His own officials told him the country was not ready. Carlo Favagrossa, Mussolini's Under-Secretary for War Production, estimated that Italy could not be prepared for major military operations until 1942, given its weak industrial sector. Mussolini himself, when signing the Pact of Steel with Germany in May 1939, had assumed a major European war would not begin before 1942. The wars of the 1930s had cost Italy enormous resources, and the Spanish intervention had drained funds meant for military modernization.

  A German victory looked likely, so he gambled. Convinced the war would soon be over, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France on the 10th of June 1940. At six in the evening, from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia, he told Italy it would be at war within six hours. "People of Italy: take up your weapons and show your tenacity, your courage and your valor," he concluded. He regarded the war as a struggle between fascism and "the plutocratic and reactionary democracies of the west". But he had no real long-term plans of any kind prepared.

  Franklin D. Roosevelt answered with a famous line. "On this tenth day of June 1940, the hand that held the dagger has struck it into the back of its neighbor." Mussolini planned a "parallel war" against the British Empire in Africa and the Middle East, expecting Britain to collapse. The Italians invaded Egypt and attacked British colonies, conquering British Somaliland on the 3rd of August 1940. Then, at Sidi Barrani, the Italian Tenth Army stopped and waited for supplies that would decide its fate.