The Rise and Fall of Benito Mussolini
A factual summary of the first fascist state in Europe: how Benito Mussolini took power in Italy, how the regime functioned, and how it ended. This entry is written straight.
Why it was classified
Mussolini was born in Predappio in 1883 and began as a socialist journalist, editing 'Avanti!' before breaking with the party in 1914 over Italian intervention in the First World War. He founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan in 1919, drawing on veterans' grievances and fear of socialist agitation; blackshirt squads attacked unions and left-wing organisations with limited interference from the state. After the March on Rome in October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed him Prime Minister rather than authorise force against the marchers. The murder of the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in 1924, after he denounced electoral violence, precipitated a crisis Mussolini survived; from January 1925 he openly assumed dictatorial authority, and the Rocco laws of 1925–26 abolished opposition parties, free press and independent unions.
Why it matters
The regime invaded Ethiopia in 1935 using chemical weapons, intervened in the Spanish Civil War, passed antisemitic racial laws in 1938, and entered the Second World War alongside Germany in June 1940. Italian military failures in Greece and North Africa and the Allied landings in Sicily in July 1943 led the Fascist Grand Council to vote against him; the King dismissed and arrested him on 25 July 1943. German forces freed him in September and installed him as head of the Italian Social Republic at Salò, a client state in the German-occupied north, while Italy fell into civil war. He was captured by partisans while attempting to reach Switzerland and executed on 28 April 1945 near Lake Como, with his body displayed in Milan. Italy's fascist period is the reference case for how a parliamentary monarchy can legitimise a movement it believes it can use, and then be governed by it for two decades.
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