Benito Mussolini


Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (July 29, 1883 - April 28, 1945) ruled
Italy as a dictator from 1922 to 1943. He created an anti-democratic,
fascist state through the use of propaganda; through total control of the
media, he disassembled the existing democratic government system.

Early years

Mussolini was born in Predappio, near Forli, in Romagna. His father,
Alessandro, was a blacksmith, and his mother, Rosa Maltoni, was a teacher.
Like his father, Benito became a socialist and later a Marxist. He qualified
as an elementary schoolmaster in 1901. In 1902 he emigrated to Switzerland.
Unable to find a permanent job there and arrested for vagrancy, he was
expelled and returned to Italy to do his military service. After further
trouble with the police, he joined the staff of a newspaper in the Austrian
town of Trento in 1908. At this time he wrote a novel, subsequently
translated into English as The Cardinal's Mistress. Mussolini had a brother,
Arnaldo, who became an important fascist theorist.

Birth of Fascism

Mussolini broke with the Socialists over the issue of Italy's entry into the
First World War. In November, 1914, he founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo
d'Italia, (The Italian People) and the prowar group Fasci d'Azione
Rivoluzionaria. He coined the term fascism from the fasci carried by Roman
magistrates. These were bundles of branches which when bound together were
stronger than when they were apart — reflecting the intellectual debt
that fascism owed to socialism. Mussolini claimed that it would help
strengthen a relatively new nation (which had been united only in the 1860s
in the Risorgimento), although some would say that, like Lenin, he wished
for a collapse of society that would bring him to power. Italy was a member
of the Triple Alliance, thereby allied with Imperial Germany and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire. It did not join the war in 1914 but did in 1915
— as Mussolini wished — on the side of Britain and France.

Called up for military service, Mussolini was wounded in grenade practice in
1917 and returned to edit his paper. Fascism became an organized political
movement following a meeting in Milan on March 23, 1919 (Mussolini founded
the Fasci di Combattimento on February 23, however). After failing in the
1919 elections, Mussolini at last entered parliament in 1921 as a right-wing
member. The Fascisti formed armed squads of war veterans to terrorize
socialists and communists. The government seldom interfered. In return for
the support of a group of industrialists and agrarians, Mussolini gave his
approval (often active) to strikebreaking, and he abandoned revolutionary
agitation. When the liberal governments of Giovanni Giolitti, Ivanoe Bonomi,
and Luigi Facta failed to stop the spread of anarchy, and after Fascists had
organised a demonstrative "Marcia su Roma" (October 28th 1922), Mussolini
was invited by the king to form a new government. He became the youngest
Premier in the history of Italy on October 31.

Mussolini's Fascist state, established nearly a decade before Hitler's rise
to power, would provide a model for Hitler's later economic and political
policies. Both a movement and a historical phenomenon, Italian Fascism was,
in many respects, an adverse reaction to both the apparent failure of
laissez-faire and fear of the left, although trends in intellectual history,
such as the breakdown of positivism and the general fatalism of postwar
Europe were also factors. Fascism was a product of a general feeling of
anxiety and fear among the middle-class of postwar Italy, arising out of a
convergence of interrelated economic, political, and cultural pressures.

Under the banner of this authoritarian and nationalistic ideology, Mussolini
was able to exploit fears regarding the survival of capitalism in an era in
which postwar depression, the rise of a more militant left, and a feeling of
national shame and humiliation stemming from its 'mutilated victory' at the
hands of the World War I peace treaties seemed to converge. Such unfulfilled
nationalistic aspirations tainted the reputation of liberalism and
constitutionalism among many sectors of the Italian population. In addition,
such democratic institutions had never grown to become firmly rooted in the
young nation-state. And as the same postwar depression heightened the allure
of Marxism among an urban proletariat even more disenfranchised than their
continental counterparts, fear regarding the growing strength of trade
unionism, communism, and socialism proliferated among the elite and the
middle class .

In a way, Benito Mussolini filled a vacuum. Fascism emerged as a "third way"
— as Italy's last hope to avoid imminent collapse of 'weak' Italian
liberalism or communist revolution. While failing to outline a coherent
program, it evolved into new political and economic system that combined
corporatism, totalitarianism, nationalism, and anti-communism in a state
designed to bind all classes together under a capitalist system, but a new
capitalist system in which the state seized control of the organization of
vital industries. The appeal of this movement, the promise of a more orderly
capitalism during an era of interwar depression, however, was not isolated
to Italy, or even Europe.

Fascist Dictatorship

At first he was supported by the Liberals in parliament. With their help, he
introduced strict censorship and altered the methods of election so that in
1925–1926 he was able to assume dictatorial powers and dissolve all
other political parties. Skillfully using his absolute control over the
press, he gradually built up the legend of the Il duce, a man who never
slept, was always right, and could solve all the problems of politics and
economics. Italy was soon a police state. With those who tried to resist
him, for example the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, he showed himself utterly
ruthless. But Mussolini's skill in propaganda was such that he had
surprisingly little opposition.

At various times after 1922, Mussolini personally took over the ministries
of the interior, of foreign affairs, of the colonies, of the corporations,
of the army and the other armed services, and of public works. Sometimes he
held as many as seven departments simultaneously, as well as the
premiership. He was also head of the all-powerful Fascist party (formed in
1921) and the armed Fascist militia. In this way he succeeded in keeping
power in his own hands and preventing the emergence of any rival. But it was
at the price of creating a regime that was overcentralized, inefficient, and corrupt.

Most of his time was spent on propaganda, whether at home or abroad, and
here his training as a journalist was invaluable. Press, radio, education,
films — all were carefully supervised to manufacture the illusion that
fascism was the doctrine of the 20th century, replacing liberalism and
democracy. The principles of this doctrine were laid down in the article on
fascism, reputedly written by himself, that appeared in 1932 in the
Enciclopedia Italiana. In 1929, a concordat with the Vatican was signed, by
which the Italian state was at last recognized by the Roman Catholic Church,
and the independence of Vatican City was recognized by the Italian state.

Under the dictatorship the parliamentary system was virtually abolished. The
law codes were rewritten. All teachers in schools and universities had to
swear an oath to defend the Fascist regime. Newspaper editors were all
personally chosen by Mussolini himself, and no one could practice journalism
who did not possess a certificate of approval from the Fascist party. The
trade unions were also deprived of any independence and were integrated into
what was called the "corporative" system. The aim (never completely
achieved) was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or
"corporations", all of them under governmental control.

Mussolini played up to his financial backers at first by transferring a
number of industries from public to private ownership. But by the 1930s he
had begun moving back to the opposite extreme of rigid governmental control
of industry. A great deal of money was spent on public works, but the
economy suffered from his strenous efforts to make Italy self-sufficient.
There was too much concentration on heavy industry, for which Italy lacked
the resources.

Military Aggression

In foreign policy, Mussolini soon shifted from pacifist anti-imperialism to
an extreme form of aggressive nationalism. An early example of this was his
bombardment of Corfu in 1923. Soon after this he succeeded in setting up a
puppet regime in Albania and in reconquering Libya. It was his dream to make
the Mediterranean "mare nostrum ("our sea). In 1935, at the Stresa
Conference, he helped create an anti-Hitler front in order to defend the
independence of Austria. But his successful war against Abyssinia (Ethiopia)
in 1935–1936 was opposed by the League of Nations, and he sought an
alliance with Nazi Germany, which had withdrawn from the League in 1933. His
active intervention in 1936–1939 on the side of Franco in the Spanish
Civil War ended any possibility of reconciliation with France and Britain.
As a result, he had to accept the German annexation of Austria in 1938 and
the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939. At the Munich Conference in
September 1938 he posed as a moderate working for European peace. But his
"axis with Germany was confirmed when he made the "Pact of Steel" with
Hitler in May 1939. Clearly the subordinate partner, Mussolini followed the
Nazis in adopting a racial policy that led to persecution of the Jews and
the creation of apartheid in the Italian empire. However, he refused to
allow Jews to be deported to concentration camps until Germany occupied
Italy during the war. Members of TIGR, a Slovene anti-fascist group, plotted
to kill Mussolini in Kobarid in 1938, but this was unsuccessful.

The Axis of Blood and Steel

The term "Axis Powers" was coined by Mussolini, in November 1936, when he
spoke of a Rome-Berlin axis in reference to the treaty of friendship signed
between Italy and Germany on October 25, 1936. Later, in May 1939, Mussolini
would describe the relationship with Germany as a "Pact of Steel", something
he had earlier referred to as a "Pact of Blood".

World War II

As World War II (WWII) approached, Mussolini announced his intention of
annexing Malta, Corsica, and Tunis. He spoke of creating a "New Roman
Empire" which would stretch from Libya to Palestine; and from Egypt to
Kenya. In April 1939, after a brief war, he annexed Albania, a campaign
which strained his military. His armed forces are generally considered to
have been unprepared for combat when the German invasion of Poland led to
World War II. Mussolini thus decided to remain "non-belligerent" until he
was quite certain which side would win.

On June 10, 1940, as the Germans under General Guderian reached the English
Channel, Mussolini declared war on Britain and France. In October, Italy
attacked Greece in what is generally seen as a failure. In June 1941, he
declared war on the Soviet Union and in December he declared war on the
United States.

Following Italian defeats on all fronts and the Anglo-American landing in
Sicily in 1943, most of Mussolini's colleagues (Count Galeazzo Ciano, the
foreign minister and also Mussolini's son-in-law, included) turned against
him at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council on July 25, 1943. This enabled
the king to dismiss and arrest him.

He was then sent to Gran Sasso, a mountain recovery in central Italy
(Abruzzo), in complete isolation.

Mussolini was substituted by the Maresciallo d'Italia Gen. Pietro Badoglio,
who immediately declared in a famous speech "La guerra continua a fianco
dell'Alleato Germanico" ("War continues at the side of our German allies"),
but was instead working to negotiate a surrender; in a few days (September
the 8th) Badoglio would sign an armistice with allied troops.

Rescued by the Germans several months later in a spectacular raid by Otto
Skorzeny, Mussolini set up a Republican Fascist state (RSI, Repubblica
Sociale Italiana) in northern Italy with him living in Gargnano. But he was
little more than a puppet under the protection of the German Army. In this
"Republic of Salo'", Mussolini returned to his earlier ideas of socialism
and collectivization. He also executed some of the Fascist leaders who had
abandoned him, including his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano.

During this period he wrote his memoirs entitled My Rise and Fall.

On April 28, 1945, just before the Allied armies reached Milan, Mussolini,
along with his mistress Claretta Petacci, was caught by Italian partisans as
he headed for Chiavenna to board a plane for escape to Switzerland. They
were both shot on the spot along with their sixteen-man escort. The next day
the bodies were hung in Piazzale Loreto (Milan) along with those of other
fascists to be abused by the crowds. Mussolini's body was then taken to
Predappio and the family chapel.

The Duce was survived by his wife, Donna Rachele, by two sons, Vittorio and
Romano Mussolini, and his daughter Edda, the widow of Count Ciano. A third
son, Bruno, had been killed in an air accident while testing a military plane.

Mussolini's granddaughter Alessandra, daughter of Romano Mussolini, is
currently a deputy in the Republican Chamber representing the Alleanza
Nazionale party for Naples.

Quotes

   * "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the
     merger of state and corporate power"