Fascist Italy

• 1. Introduction

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  Fascist Italy is the name given to the period from 1922 to 1943, when Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party ruled the Kingdom of Italy. The regime's own 1935 Doctrine of Fascism declared the Fascist State was "a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values." By then Mussolini had spent over a decade crushing political rivals and building a single-party police state. Historian Stanley G. Payne wrote that the Fascist government passed through several distinct phases, from a nominal parliamentary system to outright dictatorship and finally to military defeat. How did a movement built on rallies and Mussolini's personal charisma end up negotiating a treaty with the Pope? What led it to invade Ethiopia, embrace antisemitism after years of denying it existed, and ally with Adolf Hitler? And what pulled the whole structure apart within a few years of Italy entering the Second World War?

• 2. Engineering the Total State

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  Loyal Italians were expected to see themselves as a component of the Italian state, ready to sacrifice their lives for it, under what the regime called its "new man" ideal. Only Fascists could claim what the government termed "Complete Citizenship." Those who refused to swear allegiance to Fascism were banished from public life and denied employment. Mussolini's regime also courted Italians living abroad, urging them to identify with Italy over their countries of residence. Rome's Blackshirt rallies put Mussolini's oratory and personality cult on public display, and they later inspired Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany. Beginning in 1926, cinemas were required by law to show propaganda newsreels before every feature film. These newsreels shaped public opinion more than radio broadcasts, since few Italians owned a radio receiver at the time. Writers, artists and publishers were mostly left alone unless they openly opposed the state. Official propaganda pushed a constant image of masculinity, prizing aggression, virility, youth, speed and sport, while women were steered toward motherhood and away from public affairs. On the 24th of March 1929, a general election took the form of a referendum on a single Fascist candidate list, which voters approved by 98.43 percent. Universal male suffrage, legal since 1912, had by then been narrowed to trade union or association members, soldiers and clergy, leaving only 9.5 million people eligible to vote.

• 3. Policing Loyalty

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  Mussolini created the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale in 1923, a militia known as the Blackshirts for the color of their uniforms. Most of its members came from the earlier Fasci di Combattimento. A secret police force called the OVRA was formed in 1927 under Arturo Bocchini, tasked with crushing opponents after several near-miss assassination attempts on Mussolini. The OVRA killed far fewer people than Germany's SS or the Soviet NKVD, but it terrorized political opponents effectively. One of its favored methods forced dissidents to swallow castor oil, causing severe diarrhea and dehydration that occasionally proved fatal. In 1925, the government handed special powers to Cesare Mori, the prefect of Palermo, to fight the Cosa Nostra in Sicily and the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria. Mori's crackdown forced many Mafiosi to flee, often to the United States, or face jail. He was removed from his post in 1929 after he began investigating Mafia links inside the Fascist regime itself. The government then declared the Mafia threat eliminated and largely left it undisturbed through 1943.

• 4. The Vatican Bargain

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  In 1870 the new Kingdom of Italy had annexed the Papal States, stripping the Pope of his temporal power, and the two sides remained estranged for decades. Mussolini, though an atheist himself, allied with the Catholic Partito Popolare Italiano after 1922 and pursued warmer relations with Italy's Catholic majority. The Lateran Accord of 1929 recognized the Pope as sovereign of the new Vatican City state within Rome. A companion agreement, the Concordat, made Catholicism the state religion, paid clergy salaries, recognized religious marriage and brought religious instruction into public schools; bishops in turn swore allegiance to the Fascist regime. A third settlement paid the Vatican 1.75 billion lire, about $100 million, for church property seized since 1860. A nationwide plebiscite in March 1929 asked Italians to endorse the treaty. Nearly 9 million people voted, 90 percent of the registered electorate, and only 136,000 voted no. Friction still flared: in 1931 Pope Pius XI issued the encyclical Non abbiamo bisogno, denouncing the regime's persecution of the Church and its "pagan worship of the state." The Church later endorsed Fascist foreign policy, backing the Nationalists in Spain and the invasion of Ethiopia, even as it protested Mussolini's push to absorb the Catholic Action youth network into his own Fascist youth group.

• 5. Turning on the Jews

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  In the early 1920s Mussolini wrote that Fascism would never raise a "Jewish Question." Italy, he insisted, "knows no antisemitism and we believe that it will never know it." In 1932, in conversation with Emil Ludwig, he called antisemitism a "German vice." He denied any Jewish Question could exist in a country with "a healthy system of government." He dismissed Nazi race theory itself as "arrant nonsense, stupid and idiotic." Of the 117 founding members of the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in March 1919, five were Jewish. In the 1922 March on Rome, 230 Italian Jews took part. Mussolini's own mistress and propaganda director, Margherita Sarfatti, was Jewish. Prominent Fascist Italo Balbo lived in Ferrara, home to a large and widely accepted Jewish community. He rejected antisemitism outright, while Roberto Farinacci pushed for it from within the party. Hitler's rise strained that balance. In 1936 Mussolini published his first written attack on Jews, accusing them of seeking to "totally banish" Christians from public life. Under German pressure, the regime adopted the Manifesto of Race and the Racial Laws in 1938. The laws stripped Jews of citizenship, barred them from professional posts and outlawed marriage between Italians and Jews or Africans. The final vote came during a Grand Council meeting on the night of the 6th and the 7th of October 1938 in Rome's Palazzo Venezia. Balbo again opposed the laws; Sarfatti lost her post over her Jewish ancestry. Deportations did not begin until after the September 1943 armistice, when Germany occupied the north and Mussolini's collaborationist Italian Social Republic took hold. Roughly 6,000 Jews, Slovenians and members of the Italian Resistance were murdered at San Sabba Rice Mill in Trieste, Italy's only concentration camp. The same regime pursued LGBT people too, though no formal anti-homosexuality law was ever passed. Existing statutes were instead reinterpreted to justify confining them to psychiatric institutions.

• 6. Building an Empire

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  Mussolini ordered Marshal Rodolfo Graziani to lead a pacification campaign against Arab nationalists in Italian North Africa during the 1920s. Omar al-Mukhtar led the resistance until a truce collapsed on the 3rd of January 1928, after which Fascist policy in Libya grew harsher. Colonial authorities strung a barbed wire fence from the Mediterranean coast to the oasis of Jaghbub to cut resistance supply lines. More than 100,000 people from the Jebel Akhdar region were forcibly deported into concentration camps at Suluq and El Agheila. An estimated 80,000 Libyans died there or in combat, including as much as half the Cyrenaican population. Omar al-Mukhtar was captured on the 15th of September 1931 and executed in Benghazi, ending organized resistance. In October 1935, Mussolini launched the Second Italo-Ethiopian War from the colonies of Eritrea and Somaliland, following a border clash at Wal-Wal. Italian forces used poison gas dropped from aircraft against Ethiopian soldiers, and the last regular Ethiopian units fell in 1937. Ethiopia was merged with Eritrea and Somaliland into Africa Orientale Italiana, and King Victor Emmanuel III was proclaimed emperor. The League of Nations condemned the invasion, prompting the Grand Council of Fascism to vote for withdrawal from the League on the 11th of December 1937; Mussolini dismissed the League as a "tottering temple." Diplomatic isolation followed, leaving only Hitler's Germany willing to align with Italy. British Commonwealth, Free French and Ethiopian forces overran the poorly defended Italian colony in May 1941, restoring Haile Selassie to the throne.

• 7. The Berlin Alliance

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  When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Mussolini publicly declared "the victory of Hitler is our victory," while privately distrusting Hitler's pan-German ambitions. Hitler had long idolized Mussolini's oratory and visual style, borrowing the straight-armed Roman salute and the use of mass rallies for the Nazi Party. In 1922, Hitler sought Mussolini's guidance on staging his own "March on Berlin," but Mussolini ignored him, considering Hitler "somewhat crazy." Mussolini tried reading Mein Kampf and called it "a boring tome that I have never been able to read," dismissing Hitler's ideas as "little more than commonplace clichés." The two leaders first met in June 1934 amid a crisis over Austrian independence; afterward, Mussolini privately called Hitler "a silly little monkey." He also opposed German efforts to annex Austria that year following the assassination of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, promising Vienna military backing that helped forestall annexation. During the Spanish Civil War, Italy sent the Nationalists 660 planes, 150 tanks, 800 artillery pieces, 10,000 machine guns and 240,747 rifles. Its Corpo Truppe Volontarie reached 50,000 men at its peak. After Italy's isolation over Ethiopia, Mussolini abandoned his defense of Austria and moved closer to Berlin. He visited Germany in September 1937, and on the 28th of October that year declared Italy's support for Germany regaining its lost colonies. Hitler annexed Austria in 1938 without Italian objection. Mussolini's own son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano, condemned the antisemitic laws Mussolini had enacted to please Berlin. In exchange, Hitler agreed that ethnic Germans in South Tyrol would leave Italy or accept Italianization. In May 1939 the two governments signed the Pact of Steel, binding Italy to fight alongside Germany in any war.

• 8. War, Defeat and Resistance

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  Italy entered the war as an Axis power in 1940, striking France just as the French Third Republic was collapsing to Germany. The Italian invasion of France gained only modest ground before French surrender ended that front quickly. Mussolini also opened what commanders called a "parallel war," bombing Mandatory Palestine, invading Egypt and occupying British Somaliland with early success. The 1940 Greco-Italian War went far worse: Italian forces made little headway against Greek defenses until German intervention in the Battle of Greece bailed them out. By late 1942, Italian control stretched across much of Greece, Corsica, Tunisia and a puppet regime in Croatia, but the entry of the Soviet Union and the United States into the war in 1941 doomed hopes of a negotiated peace. Following the Allied invasion of Sicily, King Victor Emmanuel III had Mussolini arrested in July 1943 and installed Badoglio as prime minister, who dissolved the Fascist Party. Italy signed an armistice with the Allies on the 3rd of September 1943, followed by a longer version signed at Malta on the 29th. Germany answered by occupying the north and installing Mussolini as head of a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, which raised more than 500,000 soldiers for the Axis. The south backed the Allied cause through the Italian Co-belligerent Army, which numbered more than 50,000 at its height, while roughly 350,000 partisans of the Italian resistance movement fought Germans and RSI forces across the country. That resistance had roots going back to 1921, when the Italian Socialist Party signed a pacification pact with Mussolini's Fasces of Combat, prompting dissenting workers to form the militia known as Arditi del Popolo. Liberal anti-fascists Benedetto Croce, Piero Gobetti and Carlo Rosselli kept up public opposition through the 1920s; Croce published his Manifesto of the Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in 1925. Rosselli went on to cofound Giustizia e Libertà in 1929 alongside Ferruccio Parri, who later became prime minister of Italy, and Sandro Pertini, who later became its president. Many of these anti-fascists later fought in the Spanish Civil War under the motto "Today in Spain, tomorrow in Italy." Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian partisans on the 28th of April 1945, two days before Hitler's own suicide, and hostilities in Italy ended the following day. A year later, the 1946 institutional referendum let Italians choose between monarchy and republic; they voted to abolish the monarchy and found the Italian Republic that stands today.