Benito Mussolini Click to enlarge

• Born: 29 July 1883
• Birthplace: Predappio, Italy
• Died: 28 April 1945 (Shot to death)
• Best Known As: Italy's dictator during World War II

Known as "Il Duce" -- the Leader -- Mussolini was the Fascist dictator of Italy during World War II. Mussolini grew active in Italian politics in the first decade of the 1900s. He then spent time in exile in Switzerland and Austria, where he worked writing and editing socialist newspapers. He returned to Italy after serving in World War I and gained power and notoriety as a revolutionary nationalist. He founded the Fascist Party in 1919, used force and intimidation against political opponents and took power in 1922. Nicknamed Il Duce, Mussolini created a dictatorship and dissolved the parliament. Yet for many years he was popular as he expanded government services and public works. In the 1930s Italy invaded Ethiopia and Albania and in 1939 Mussolini promised an alliance with Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany. Italy's failures in the war led to Mussolini being removed from government, and when the war ended he was arrested, tried and executed.

(b. 29 July 1883; d. Dovia di Predappio, 28 Apr. 1945) Italian; head of government 1922 – 43 Mussolini's father was a blacksmith, his mother a teacher, and his wider family small landowners in the foothills of the Apennines in Emilia-Romagna. His father was active in the revolutionary socialist movement, and Benito Mussolini grew up in the fervid atmosphere of the international socialist movement of the late nineteenth century. He was educated locally, and apparently distinguished himself both by his intelligence and by his ungovernable temper. He qualified as a teacher, but after a brief period in this profession he emigrated to Switzerland, where he was active in the socialist movement as a writer and self-procalaimed intellectual. He was expelled from the cantons of Berne and Geneva, and eventually in 1909 found work in Trento as a journalist and trade union organizer. When eventually he was expelled from the region by the Austrian authorities, he returned to Romagna, where he spent a period in prison for organizing a general strike.

He came to national prominence when in 1912 he was appointed editor of the Socialist party newspaper Avanti! His combination of revolutionary intransigence and ideological flexibility soon brought him into conflict with the reformist leaders of the Socialist Party. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was firmly neutralist and internationalist (unusually, since this was the official party line), but the breakup of international socialism led him quickly to support intervention, the ideological justification of which he found in the idea of the nation as an independent actor above the notion of class. After military service (1915 – 17) he became increasingly active in support of the economic demands of returning veterans and argued (as did others) that Italy's victory had been "mutilated".

His "fasci di combattimento", one of several such groups from which the Fascist movement takes its name, were founded in Milan in March 1919. In the climate of revolutionary socialist fervour following the factory occupations in Turin, Fascists with their anti-parliamentary methods and radical nationalist demands increasingly appeared as protagonists in a potential civil war. After Mussolini's success in the elections of May 1921 and the formation of the National Fascist Party in October 1921, he moderated his rhetoric and sought to reassure the Court and the business community, both of his own moderation and of his capacity to control the Fascist squads. When the constitutional parties failed repeatedly to find a stable formula for government, Mussolini was asked by the King on 28 October 1922 to form a government. He marked the event several days later with his famous though unnecessary "March on Rome" (10 November 1922).

His majority depended initially on the Liberals and on the Catholics, whose parliamentary leader was De Gasperi. The support of the Catholics was particularly uncertain, and, to remedy this, Mussolini secured the acceptance in 1923 of a new electoral law giving the majority grouping two-thirds of the seats. Though controversial, this proved formally unnecessary, since in the elections of April 1924 Mussolini's "big list" of approved candidates won 66 per cent of the votes. There is little doubt that the Italian establishment including the Court, the army, and the major industrialists expected Mussolini to content himself with this minimum of constitutional reform and to provide stable parliamentary government until a new Liberal leader emerged. In fact the pace of change accelerated. In June 1924, the Socialist leader Matteotti was murdered by a Fascist squad. In protest, the opposition parties left parliament, there by granting Mussolini freedom from opposition and ensuring the collapse of liberal-democratic procedures. From this point on, both his formal authority and his effective power were unchallenged until his downfall in 1943.

During this nineteen-year period, Mussolini oscillated in domestic politics between economic innovation and social conservatism. His control of the media was complete, and was crucial to the social support of his regime. He promoted intervention in public works, particularly in the south, and pursued the development of the Corporatist state. He also achieved a settlement with the Vatican in the Lateran Pacts in 1929. In foreign affairs, his initial concern to avoid alienating the great powers gradually gave way to a more opportunistic line. After the success of the Abyssinian War (1935 – 6) he became more overtly pro-German, though this could be interpreted as a more noisy continuation of the traditional Italian foreign policy of manœuvring for advantage among unstable alliances. Mistrust of Hitler and concern over Italy's lack of preparedness kept Italy out of the war until May 1940. The short triumphant campaign for which Mussolini hoped became a long series of fruitless military entanglements and defeats, in North Africa, Greece, and Russia. Northern Italy suffered mass aerial bombing from late 1942 on, and the first real stirrings of popular opposition began to show themselves in the northern factories. Mussolini sacked some of his senior Cabinet ministers in February 1943, thereby creating an internal opposition, which began to conspire against him. In May 1943 the Axis forces surrendered in North Africa, and on 9 July 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily. After secret negotiations between the Allies and the Court (via the Vatican), and after a damaging and dramatic air-raid on Rome, the Fascist Grand Council ousted Mussolini on 25 July 1943.

In September 1943, Mussolini was freed from his house arrest by a German raid, and was established by Hitler as the puppet head of the Italian Social Republic, based at Salo' on Lake Garda. Without the power to implement his decisions, Mussolini re-discovered the taste for verbal radicalism and nationalist republican rhetoric. When in April 1945 the German forces in Italy surrendered, Mussolini tried to escape into Switzerland. He was captured by Communist partisans and was executed by them. As a politician and national leader, Mussolini is remembered by almost all except the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement as a symbol of what post-war Italy wanted to turn its back on.

Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea (1883-1945), also known as ‘Il Duce’ (the Leader) and founder of fascism who as PM (1922-43) created the modern Italian state. A thug from childhood, he was also a brilliant organizer and a spellbinding orator who came late to the idea of creating the sense of nationhood not achieved by the Italian independence wars. Before the outbreak of WW I he was the violently anti-war and anti-nationalist editor of the main newspaper of the Socialist Party, but soon became the foremost advocate of Italian participation as a unifying struggle. Expelled from the party, he was set up with his own newspaper, Il popolo d'Italia, by pro-war interests. After being wounded on active service with the élite Bersaglieri on the Italian front, he returned home to promote the theme that Italian soldiers had been stabbed in the back by his erstwhile comrades, and to advocate the need for a dictator to clean up Italian politics.

With financial backing from employers weary of being squeezed by violent trade unions and rapacious politicians, he developed a strong following among disenchanted leftists and, especially, veterans of the war whom he organized into a black-shirted militia called the Fasci di Combattimento after the symbols of office (fasces) of the Roman lictors. In the summer of 1922 the communists and socialists called for a general strike and in an elaborate political bluff he threatened a converging march on Rome by his followers unless the king summoned him to form a plenipotentiary government. In the face of mass popular revulsion against rampant political disorder, incompetence, and corruption, the traditional political parties caved in.

Until he invaded Abyssinia in 1935, he enjoyed almost unqualified approval at home and abroad as ‘the man who made the trains run on time’. Among his admirers was Hitler, who introduced the ‘Roman Salute’ among his own followers and dressed his bodyguard in black shirts. Nazi Germany alone supported Italy when the League of Nations imposed irritating but not disabling economic sanctions, and from this emerged the double entendre Pact of Steel (Italy lacked the raw materials and the infrastructure to sustain a modern war). Half in thrall to and half in rivalry with his German counterpart, Mussolini dragged his unenthusiastic country into WW II by declaring war on France after she was defeated, which led to military humiliation at the hands of Commonwealth forces during the campaigns in Abyssinia and the Western Desert. Both in North Africa and after he invaded Albania and Greece in 1941 without consulting Hitler, his hapless armed forces had to be rescued by the Germans, and he became an ever more junior partner in the Axis.

When the Allies invaded Sicily his own fascist grand council declared him deposed and thus precipitated a German counter-invasion and the long-drawn-out and deeply destructive Italy campaign. Rescued from imprisonment by German special forces he was the head of a puppet government in northern Italy until captured by communist partisans while trying to escape to Germany, shot, and hung by his ankles in a public square in Milan.

— Hugh Bicheno

Mussolini, Benito (1883-1945) Italian Fascist statesman, Prime Minister (1922-43); known as Il Duce ('the leader'). He founded the Italian Fascist Party in 1919. He annexed Abyssinia in 1936 and entered World War II on Germany's side in 1940. Forced to resign after the Allied invasion of Sicily (1943), he was rescued from imprisonment by German paratroopers, but was captured and executed by Italian communist partisans.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was head of the Italian government from 1922 to 1943. A Fascist dictator, he led Italy into three sucessive wars, the last of which overturned his regime.

Benito Mussolini was born at Dovia di Predappio in Forlì province on July 29, 1883. His father was a blacksmith and an ardent Socialist; his mother taught elementary school. His family belonged to the impoverished middle classes. Benito, with a sharp and lively intelligence, early demonstrated a powerful ego. Violent and undisciplined, he learned little at school. In 1901, at the age of 18, he took his diploma di maestro and then taught secondary school briefly. Voluntarily exiling himself to Switzerland (1902-1904), he formed a dilettante's culture notable only for its philistinism. Not surprisingly, Mussolini based it on Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Sorel, and Max Stirner, on the advocates of force, will, and the superego. Culturally armed, Mussolini returned to Italy in 1904, rendered military service, and engaged in politics full time thereafter.

Early Career and Politics

Mussolini became a member of the Socialist party in 1900, and his politics, like his culture, were exquisitely bohemian. He crossed anarchism with syndicalism, matched Peter Kropotkin and Louis Blanqui with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. More Nietzschean than Marxist, Mussolini's socialism was sui generis, a concoction created entirely by himself. In Socialist circles, nonetheless, he first attracted attention, then applause, and soon widespread admiration. He "specialized" in attacking clericalism, militarism, and reformism. Mussolini urged revolution at any cost. In each attack he was extremist and violent. But he was also eloquent and forceful.

Mussolini occupied several provincial posts as editor and labor leader until he suddenly emerged in the 1912 Socialist Party Congress. Shattering all precedent, he became editor of the party's daily paper, Avanti, at a youthful 29. His editorial tenure during 1913-1914 abundantly confirmed his promise. He wrote a new journalism, pungent and polemical, hammered his readership, and injected a new excitement into Socialist ranks. On the Socialist platform, he spoke sharply and well, deft in phrase and savage in irony.

The young Mussolini proved a formidable opponent. In a party long inert, bureaucratic, and burdened with mediocrity, he capitalized on his youth, offered modernity with dynamism, and decried the need for revolution in a moment when revolutionary ferment was sweeping the country. An opportunist to his bones, Mussolini early mastered the direction of the winds and learned quickly to turn full sail into them.

From Socialist to Fascist

This much-envied talent led Mussolini to desert the Socialist party in 1914 and to cross over to the enemy camp, the Italian bourgeoisie. He rightly understood that World War I would bury the old Europe. Upheaval would follow its wake. He determined to prepare for "the unknown." In late 1914 he founded an independent newspaper, Popolo d'Italia, and backed it up with his own independent movement (Autonomous Fascists). He drew close to the new forces in Italian politics, the radicalized middle-class youth, and made himself their national spokesman.

Mussolini developed a new program, substituting nationalism for internationalism, militarism for antimilitarism, and the aggressive restoration of the bourgeois state instead of its revolutionary destruction. He had thus completely reversed himself. The Italian working classes called him "Judas" and "traitor." Drafted into the trenches in 1915, Mussolini was wounded during training exercises in 1917, but he managed to return to active politics that same year. His newspaper, which he now reinforced with a second political movement (Revolutionary Fascists), was his main card; his talents and his reputation guaranteed him a hand in the game.

After the end of the war, Mussolini's career, so promising at the outset, slumped badly. He organized his third movement (Constituent Fascists) in 1918, but it was stillborn. Mussolini ran for office in the 1919 parliamentary elections but was defeated. Nonetheless, he persisted.

Head of the Government

In March 1919 Mussolini founded another movement (Fighting Fascists), courted the militant Italian youth, and waited for events to favor him. The tide turned in 1921. The elections that year sent him victoriously to Parliament at the head of 35 Fascist deputies; the third assembly of his fledgling movement gave birth to a national party, the National Fascist party (PNF), with more than 250,000 followers and Mussolini as its uncontested leader, its duce.

The following year, in October 1922, Mussolini successfully "marched" on Rome. But, in fact, the back door to power had been opened by key ruling groups (industry try and agriculture, military, monarchy, and Church), whose support Mussolini now enjoyed. These groups, economically desperate and politically threatened, accepted Mussolini's solution to their crisis: mobilize middle-class youth, repress the workers violently, and set up a tough central government to restore "law and order." Accordingly, with the youth as his "flying wedge," Mussolini attacked the workers, spilled their blood liberally over the Italian peninsula, and completed triumphantly the betrayal of his early socialism. Without scruple or remorse, Mussolini now showed the extent to which ambition, opportunism, and utter amorality constituted his very core. He was in fact eminently a product of a particular crisis, World War I, and a special social class, the petty bourgeoisie. Mussolini's capture of power was classic: he was the right national leader at the right historical moment.

Fascist State

Once in power, Mussolini attacked the problem of survival. With accomplished tact, he set general elections, violated their constitutional norms freely, and concluded them in 1924 with an absolute majority in Parliament. But the assassination immediately thereafter of the Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, a noted opponent, by Fascist hirelings suddenly reversed his fortunes, threw his regime into crisis, and nearly toppled him. Mussolini, however, recouped and with his pivotal speech of Jan. 3, 1925, took the offensive. He suppressed civil liberties, annihilated the opposition, and imposed open dictatorship. Between 1926 and 1929 Mussolini moved to consolidate his regime through the enactment of "the most Fascist laws" (le leggi fascistissime). He concluded the decade on a high note: his Concordat with the Vatican in 1929 settled the historic differences between the Italian state and the Roman Catholic Church. Awed by a generosity that multiplied his annual income fourfold, Pope Pius XI confirmed to the world that Mussolini had been sent "by Divine Providence."

As the 1930s opened, Mussolini, seated safely in power and enjoying wide support from the middle classes, undertook to shape his regime and fix its image. Italy, he announced, had commenced the epoch of the "Third Rome." The "Fascist Revolution," after the French original, would itself date civilized progress anew: 1922 became "Year I of the New Era"; 1932, Year X. The regime called itself the "Corporate State" and offered Italy a bewildering brood of institutions, all splendidly titled but sparsely endowed. For if the rhetoric impressed, the reality denied.

The strongest economic groups remained entrenched. They had put Mussolini into power, and they now reaped their fruits. While they accumulated unprecedented economic control and vast personal fortunes, while a class of nouveau riche attached itself to the regime and parasitically sucked the nation's blood, the living standard of the working majority fell to subsistence. The daily consumption of calories per capita placed Italy near the bottom among European nations; the average Italian worker's income amounted to onehalf his French counterpart's, one-third his English, and one-fourth his American. As national leader, Mussolini offered neither solutions nor analyses for Italy's fundamental problems, preferring slogans to facts and propaganda to hard results. The face of the state he indeed refashioned; its substance he left intact. The "new order" was coating only.

Il Duce ruled from the top of this hollow pyramid. A consummate poseur, he approached government as a drama to be enacted, every scene an opportunity to display ample but superficial talents. Cynical and arrogant, he despised men in the same measure that he manipulated them. Without inspired or noble sentiments himself, he instinctively sought the defects in others, their weaknesses, and mastered the craft of corrupting them. He surrounded himself with ambitious opportunists and allowed full rein to their greed and to their other, unnameable vices while his secret agents compiled incriminating dossiers. Count Galeatto Ciano, his son-in-law and successor-designate, defined Mussolini's entourage as "that coterie of old prostitutes." Such was Mussolini's "new governing class."

Mussolini's Three Wars

In 1930 the worldwide economic depression arrived in Italy. The middle classes succumbed to discontent; the working people suffered aggravated misery. Mussolini initially reacted with a public works program but soon shifted to foreign adventure. The 1935 Ethiopian War, a classic diversionary exercise, was planned to direct attention away from internal discontent and to the myth of imperial grandeur. The "Italian Empire," Mussolini's creation, was announced in 1936. It pushed his star to new heights. But it also exacted its price. The man of destiny lost his balance, and with it that elementary talent that measures real against acclaimed success. No ruler confuses the two and remains in power long. Mussolini thus began his precipitous slide.

The 1936 Spanish intervention, in which Mussolini aided Francisco Franco in the Civil War, followed hard on Ethiopia but returned none of its anticipated gains. Mussolini compounded this error with a headlong rush into Adolf Hitler's embrace. The Rome-Berlin Axis in 1936 and the Tripartite Pact in 1937 were succeeded by the ill-fated Steel Pact in 1939. Meanwhile, Mussolini's pro-Hitlerism struck internally. Having declared earlier that the racial problem did not exist for Italy, Mussolini in 1938 unleashed his own anti-Semitic blows against Italian Jewry. As the 1930s closed, Mussolini had nearly exhausted all toleration for himself and his regime within Italy.

World War II's surprise outbreak in 1939 left Mussolini standing on the margins of world politics, and he saw Hitler redrawing the map of Europe without him. Impelled by the prospect of easy victory, Mussolini determined "to make war at any cost." The cost was clear: modern industry, modern armies, and popular support. Mussolini unfortunately lacked all of these. Nonetheless, in 1940 he pushed a reluctant Italy into war on Hitler's side. He thus ignored the only meaningful lesson of World War I: the United States alone had decided that conflict, and consequently America, not Germany, was the key hegemonic power.

Disaster and Death

In 1940-1941 Mussolini's armies, badly supplied and impossibly led, strung their defeats from Europe across the Mediterranean to the African continent. These defeats constituted the full measure of Mussolini's bankruptcy. Italy lost its war in 1942; Mussolini collapsed 6 months later. Restored as Hitler's puppet in northern Italy in 1943, he drove Italy deeper into the tragedy of invasion, occupation, and civil war during 1944-1945. The end approached, but Mussolini struggled vainly to survive, unwilling to pay the price for folly. The debt was discharged by a partisan firing squad on April 28, 1945, at Dongo in Como province.

In the end Mussolini failed where he had believed himself most successful: he was not a modern statesman. His politics and culture had been formed before World War I, and they had remained rooted there. After that war, though land empire had become ossified and increasingly superfluous, Mussolini had embarked on territorial expansion in the grand manner. In a moment when the European nation-state had passed its apogee and entered decline (the economic depression had underscored it), Mussolini had pursued ultranationalism abroad and an iron state within. He had never grasped the lines of the new world already emerging. He had gone to war for more territory and greater influence when he needed new markets and more capital. Tied to a decaying world about to disappear forever, Mussolini was anachronistic, a man of the past, not the future. His Fascist slogan served as his own epitaph: Non si torna indietro (There is no turning back). A 19th-century statesman could not survive long in the 20th-century world, and history swept him brutally but rightly aside.

Further Reading

Mussolini wrote My Autobiography (1928; rev. ed. 1939) and The Fall of Mussolini: His Own Story, edited with a preface by Max Ascoli (trans. 1948). Most of the studies of Mussolini in English are either archaic and sterile or anecdotal and useless. A comprehensive, objective, and well-written biography is lvone Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: A Study in Power (1964). Frederick W. Deakin, The Brutal Friendship (1962; rev. ed. 1966), offers valid, original scholarship but unfortunately treats only Mussolini's last years. Alan Cassels, Mussolini's Early Diplomacy (1970), is a well-documented study of Mussolini during the 1920s. Works on the history of fascism in Italy include Frederico Chabod, A History of Italian Fascism (1961; trans. 1963), and Elizabeth Wiskemann, Fascism in Italy: Its Development and Influence (1969). Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism (1963; trans. 1965), discusses the theory and the history of the movement in Italy, France, and Germany. For pertinent documents of the Fascist era in Italy and a brief study of the period see S. William Halperin, Mussolini and Italian Fascism (1964). For general background see Denis Mack Smith, Italy: A Modern History (1959).

For more information on Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, visit Britannica.com.

(bānē'tō mūs-sōlē'nē) , 1883–1945, Italian dictator and leader of the Fascist movement.

Early Career

His father, an ardent Socialist, was a blacksmith; his mother was a teacher. Mussolini taught briefly and lived (1902–4) in Switzerland to avoid military service. He achieved national prominence for his opposition to the Libyan War (1911–12) and, as leader of the revolutionary left of the Socialist party, became editor of the Socialist daily Avanti (1913). Soon after World War I began, Mussolini abruptly turned nationalist and joined the pro-Allied interventionists. The Socialist party, which opposed all participation in nationalist wars, expelled him. He then founded his own daily, the Popolo d'Italia, which was subsidized by the French to encourage Italy's entry into the war on the side of the Allies. He joined (1915) the army and attained the rank of corporal.

The Fascist Leader

In the troubled postwar period Mussolini organized his followers, mostly war veterans, in the Fasci di combattimento, which advocated aggressive nationalism, violently opposed the Communists and Socialists, and dressed in black shirts like the followers of D'Annunzio. Amid strikes, social unrest, and parliamentary breakdown, Mussolini preached forcible restoration of order and practiced terrorism with armed groups. In 1921 he was elected to parliament and the National Fascist party (see fascism) was officially organized. Backed by nationalists and propertied interests, in Oct., 1922, Mussolini sent the Fascists to march on Rome. King Victor Emmanuel III permitted them to enter the city and called on Mussolini, who had remained in Milan, to form a cabinet.

As the new premier, he gradually transformed the government into a dictatorship. In 1924 the Socialist deputy Matteotti was murdered. Opposition was put down by an efficient secret police and the Fascist party militia, and the press was regimented. Parliamentary government ended in 1928, and the state economy was reorganized along the lines of the Fascist corporative state. Conflict between church and state was ended by the Lateran Treaty (1929).

Mussolini was called Duce [leader] by his followers; his official title was “head of the government,” and he held, besides the premiership, as many portfolios as he saw fit. His ambition to restore ancient greatness found expression in grandiloquent slogans and speeches and in the erection of monumental buildings. The encouragement he gave to the already high Italian birth rate, his imperialistic designs, and his incitement of extreme nationalist groups created an explosive situation.

Fateful Alliance with Germany

Mussolini was at first cool to Adolf Hitler and opposed his designs on Austria. However, Mussolini's diplomatic isolation after his attack (1935) on Ethiopia led to a rapprochement with Germany. In 1936, Hitler and Mussolini aided Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War; the Rome-Berlin Axis was strengthened by a formal alliance (1939), which Mussolini's son-in-law and foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, helped to create.

In 1938, Mussolini allowed Hitler to annex Austria and helped bring about the Munich Pact; in Apr., 1939, he ordered the Italian occupation of Albania. Under German pressure, he inaugurated an anti-Semitic policy in Italy, which found little popular response. The Ethiopian and Spanish wars had diminished the Duce's popularity, and he did not enter World War II until France was falling in June, 1940.

The failure of Italian arms in Greece and Africa and the imminent invasion by the Allies of the Italian mainland at last caused a rebellion within the Fascist party. In July, 1943, the Fascist grand council refused to support his policy—dictated by Hitler—and the king dismissed him and had him placed under arrest. He was freed two months later by a daring German rescue party and became head of the Fascist puppet government set up in N Italy by Hitler.

On the German collapse (Apr., 1945) Mussolini was captured, tried in a summary court-martial, and shot with his mistress, Clara Petacci. Their bodies, brought to Milan, were hanged in a public square and buried in an unmarked grave. Mussolini's body was later removed, and in 1957 it was placed in his family's vault.

Bibliography

Many of Mussolini's political speeches and pamphlets have been translated into English. Mussolini's literary productions include The Cardinal's Mistress (tr. 1928) and John Huss (tr. 1929). My Autobiography (Eng. ed. 1939) is supplemented by The Fall of Mussolini: His Own Story (tr. ed. by M. Ascoli, 1948). See also biographies by L. C. Fermi (1961), R. Collier (1971), M. Gallo (tr. 1973), by his widow, Rachele Mussolini (tr. 1974), and R. J. B. Bosworth (2002); study by A. Cassels (1970).

This entry contains information applicable to United States law only.

Benito Mussolini ruled as dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. His political philosophy, which he called fascism, was based on the total domination of the government in all spheres of political, social, economic, and cultural life. Initially seen by the Italian people as a hero, Mussolini was driven from government before the end of World War II.

Mussolini was born in Dovia di Predappio, Italy, on July 29, 1883, the son of a socialist blacksmith. He embraced socialism as a teenager and as a young man became a schoolteacher and socialist journalist in northern Italy. In 1902 he moved to Switzerland and earned a living as a laborer. He returned to Italy in 1904 to perform his required military service and then resumed his teaching.

His wanderlust, however, resumed. He went to Trent, Austria, in 1909 and worked for a socialist newspaper. He was expelled from Austria after he publicly urged the return of Trent to Italy. In 1912 he became editor of Avanti!, the most important Italian socialist newspaper, with headquarters in Milan. When World War I broke out in August 1914, Mussolini proved unwilling to toe the socialist line. Socialists argued that disputes between nations were not their concern and that Italy should stay out of the conflict. Mussolini disagreed, whereupon the socialists expelled him from the party.

This expulsion radically changed Mussolini's political outlook. He founded Il Popol d'Italia (The People of Italy), a strident newspaper that argued that Italy should enter the war against Germany. When Italy did join the war, Mussolini enlisted in the army and served from 1915 to 1917, when he was wounded.

After the war Mussolini started his own political movement. In 1919 he formed the Fascist party, called the Fasci di Combattimento. The name fascism is derived from the Latin fascis, meaning bundle. The fasces is a bundle of rods strapped together around an axe. A symbol of authority in ancient Rome, it represented absolute, unbreakable power. Mussolini promised to recreate the glories of the Roman Empire in a movement that was nationalistic, antiliberal, and antisocialist.

Mussolini's movement struck a chord with lower-middle-class people. Supporters wore black shirts and formed private militias. In 1922 Mussolini threatened a march on Rome to take over the government. King Victor Emmanuel capitulated to this threat and asked Mussolini to form a government. Once in power Mussolini abolished all other political parties and set out to transform Italy into a fascist state.

Initially Italians and foreign observers saw Mussolini as a strong leader who brought needed discipline to the economy and social structure of Italy. He poured money into building the infrastructure of a modern country. In a country known for disorganization, it was said that Mussolini made the trains run on time. He also, however, abolished trade unions and closed newspapers that did not follow the party line. He used the police to enforce his rule and imprisoned thousands of people for their political views.

In the 1930s Mussolini sought to make Italy an international power. In 1935 Italy invaded the East African country of Ethiopia. Mussolini ignored the League of Nations' demand that he withdraw and proceeded to conquer the country. In 1936 he sent Italian troops to support General Francisco Franco's Loyalist Army in the Spanish Civil War. By the end of the 1930s, Mussolini also moved closer to Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. In 1939 he invaded nearby Albania.

Mussolini did not enter World War II until June 1940, when he invaded the south of France. At first his alliance with Hitler appeared propitious. However, the Italian army suffered defeat in North Africa, and the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943. Mussolini's regime crumbled. King Victor Emmanuel dismissed Mussolini as the head of state on July 25, 1943. Mussolini was briefly imprisoned, but German troops rescued him. Hitler directed Mussolini to head an Italian puppet state in northern Italy, then under the control of German forces. As the Allies moved north in 1945, Mussolini tried to escape to Switzerland. He was captured by Italian partisans and shot on April 28, 1945. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were displayed to jeering crowds on the streets of Milan.

(mooh-suh-lee-nee, moos-uh-lee-nee)

An Italian dictator (see dictatorship) of the twentieth century. Mussolini formed a fascist (see fascism) government in Italy in the 1920s and allied Italy with Germany as one of the Axis powers of World War II. Mussolini, known as il Duce (“the leader”), was shot by his Italian opponents near the end of the war.

Quotes:

"Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism."

"Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity, quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace."

"It is humiliating to remain with our hands folded while others write history. It matters little who wins. To make a people great it is necessary to send them to battle even if you have to kick them in the pants. That is what I shall do."

"The Liberal State is a mask behind which there is no face; it is a scaffolding behind which there is no building."

"Blood alone moves the wheels of history."

"War alone brings up to their highest tension all human energies and imposes the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to make it."

See more famous quotes by Benito Mussolini