Benito Mussolini
The Italian socialist turned nationalist who invented fascism, ruled for twenty-one years, and destroyed his country by joining Hitler's war.
He was a blacksmith's son from Romagna, named after a Mexican revolutionary, and for the first thirty years of his life he was a socialist agitator good enough at it to be made editor of the Italian Socialist Party's national newspaper in 1912. Two years later he broke with the party over its opposition to the First World War, was expelled as a traitor, and started his own paper. The man who would define the political right of the interwar period learned his trade entirely on the left, and it shows in everything from his mass rallies to his contempt for parliaments.
Taking power
Italy came out of the war on the winning side and felt like a loser. It had taken over six hundred thousand dead and received less territory than nationalists had been promised, a grievance summed up in the phrase the mutilated victory. Factory occupations and land seizures in 1919 and 1920 terrified landowners and industrialists. Mussolini's blackshirt squads offered a service: they beat up socialists, burned union offices, and broke strikes, and local elites paid for it.
In October 1922 he staged the March on Rome, which was less a march than a threat, and King Victor Emmanuel III refused his own prime minister's request to declare martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. He was thirty-nine, the youngest prime minister in Italian history, and he arrived by overnight train from Milan wearing a bowler hat.
Dictatorship followed in stages. The 1923 Acerbo law gave two-thirds of parliamentary seats to whichever list won a quarter of the vote. When the socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti denounced the resulting election as fraudulent and was abducted and murdered in June 1924, the scandal nearly finished Mussolini. In January 1925 he chose to escalate instead, telling parliament he assumed full responsibility for everything that had happened. Opposition parties were banned within a year.
The record
He drained the Pontine Marshes, built roads, and made a settlement with the papacy in the 1929 Lateran Treaty that ended sixty years of hostility between church and state and remains his most durable achievement. The trains-ran-on-time claim was largely propaganda. The corporate state, in which employers and state-run unions were supposed to harmonize the interests of production, mostly delivered wage suppression and cartels.
Foreign policy was where he destroyed himself. He invaded Ethiopia in 1935, using aerial bombing and mustard gas against a fellow League of Nations member, which won him popularity at home and isolated Italy abroad. He intervened in Spain, annexed Albania, and adopted antisemitic race laws in 1938 that had no significant Italian constituency behind them and existed to please Berlin. He stayed out of the war in 1939 because Italy was not ready, then declared war in June 1940 to grab a share of a French defeat he thought was already complete.
The end
Italy lost everywhere: Greece, North Africa, the Soviet Union. In July 1943, after the Allies landed in Sicily, his own Fascist Grand Council voted him out and the king had him arrested. German commandos sprang him from a mountain hotel and installed him as ruler of a puppet republic in the north. In April 1945 partisans caught him near Lake Como as he tried to reach Switzerland, shot him, and hung his body upside down at a petrol station in Milan.
The verdict
Mussolini is often filed as Hitler's clownish precursor, which underrates how much was borrowed from him: the paramilitary party, the leader cult, the theatrical use of ancient imperial imagery, the fusion of party and state. Hitler openly regarded him as a model in the 1920s. The invention was Italian. The catastrophe was mostly German.