MUSSOLINI, BENITO. – Italian politician, the "Duce of Fascism," born in Predappio (Forlì) on 29 July 1883, killed in Giulino di Mezzegra (Como) on 28 April 1945. Son of Alessandro, a blacksmith, and Rosa Maltoni, a primary school teacher, he studied at the Salesian College in Faenza and earned a teaching diploma (at the Normal School in Forlimpopoli). After teaching in elementary schools in Gualtieri Emilia and Tolmezzo, he emigrated to Switzerland in search of work.
An independent spirit, in his youth he inherited from his familiarity with his father and reinforced through personal experience a pessimistic view of contemporary society and enthusiastically embraced, to its extreme consequences, the most advanced doctrines of revolutionary socialism. In Switzerland, he had the opportunity to meet many other Italian socialists in exile and refugees from other countries. Restless in character, he soon returned to Italy, obtained certification to teach French in secondary schools (hence the title of "professor," by which he was later known within socialist circles), and briefly taught the language in 1908 at a private technical school in Oneglia. However, the following year he abandoned teaching again and went to Trent as secretary of the Trentino Labor Secretariat. There he directed *L'Avenir* of *Il Lavoratore*, the organ of the Socialist Party, and was editor-in-chief of *Il Popolo*, the newspaper of Cesare Battisti; he also engaged in controversy with the Catholic newspaper *Il Trentino*, edited by Alcide De Gasperi. Expelled by the Austrian authorities, he returned to Romagna, to Forlì, and became one of the leading socialist figures in the region. He then took part in the 11th National Socialist Congress in Milan, where he criticized the Party’s deputies for their weak opposition to military spending, and at the Reggio Emilia Congress of 1912 he led the revolutionary faction, arguing for the necessity of expelling from the Party those deputies (Bissolati, Cabrini, Bonomi, and Podrecca) who had not voted against military spending. One can already see the dictatorial tendency of the future Fascist leader in his assertion that it was necessary to suppress the autonomy of the parliamentary group and require that deputies depend on the sections of the Party that had proposed them and obey the leadership. The motion he presented, which declared the four deputies expelled from the Party, obtained an absolute majority, and M. was elected to the Party’s leadership. A few months later, on 10 December 1912, he also took over the direction of *Avanti!* with the intention of demonstrating to the philosophers of reactionary bourgeoisie, the bloc of opposing parties, and the petty rulers of the Savoy monarchy that the vitality of Italian socialism was eternal. Alongside his condemnation of the bourgeoisie, which exploited the working class, M. harbored no less fervent an anticlerical spirit that led him to view the Catholic Church, in essence, as another tool of capitalist oppression. A systematic expression of this view was a pamphlet published in 1913 entitled *Giovanni Huss il veridico*, issued with the intention, as M. himself wrote in the preface, of arousing in the minds of readers "hatred for any form of spiritual and worldly tyranny: whether it be theocratic or Jacobin." The faith in socialist internationalism that had hitherto always accompanied M. suffered a severe blow with the outbreak of the First World War. The stance of socialists in other countries convinced M. of the futility of Italian neutrality and led him to advocate intervention against the Central Powers, to realize national aspirations regarding Trentino and Trieste, in the hope that, after victory, he would be able to bring about a national revolution. Such a stance, however, did not meet with the approval of the Party leadership, which, meeting on 20 October 1914 in Bologna, rejected the motion in which the director of *Avanti!*, while reaffirming the Party’s principled opposition to war, nevertheless considered the formula of absolute neutrality to have become too rigid and dogmatic and envisaged the possibility of determining and coordinating, in the event of Italian intervention, the Party’s future action according to events. M. then resigned as director of *Avanti!*, and on 15 November began publishing his own newspaper (*Il Popolo d’Italia*), openly interventionist, for which he had to leave the Party. He then took part in the war as a rifleman, was wounded in an artillery accident, and, upon his return to journalism, on 23 March 1919 founded in Milan, together with other ex-combatants, the Fascist movement (v. FASCISM; ITALY, *20th Century*) with the program of establishing in Italy, in his words, an economic democracy in favor of the working classes, antibourgeois and anticapitalist, with the election of a constituent assembly to decide the institutional form of the nation—republican or monarchical—adopting universal suffrage and a unicameral parliament.
Convened the Council of Trent, he delivered the inaugural address (13 December 1545) and played a notable role in its proceedings; Pallavicino called him the "right hand of the Council." He worked zealously in his dioceses as well, particularly in Bitonto, where he held a synod and instilled
The moment was particularly delicate, because a large part of public opinion, especially among the young, poorly tolerated the factional movements which, by denigrating the victory achieved, kept the nation agitated with strikes and street violence, ruinous for the economy, for national cohesion and for the fabric of the State. Meanwhile, the parties in government, out of hatred even for the Partito Popolare, whose competition they feared, discredited themselves by demonstrating their inability to provide public order and defend the prestige of the army. The programme, replaced by lively propaganda, aimed at the conquest of power, made easier by the fact that democrats, reformists, popolari and socialists, perhaps fearing to compromise their electoral base and fail to live up to their programmes, could not find a way to agree. The success of the ministerial crises strengthened M. in his decision to attempt a coup. Thus came the March on Rome (28 Oct. 1922), which earned M. the mandate, from the King, to form a new ministry, supported also by the popolari, the reformists and other eminent figures in the Chamber and Senate. By appealing to patriotism to rebuild the country after the wounds inflicted by the war, M. succeeded in winning the confidence of Parliament, which granted him full powers, and he immediately used them to establish his own dictatorship and that of his party. Within a few months the ministry he presided over became a one-party cabinet, from which were excluded even those who had confirmed him in office.
The Matteotti murder on 10 June 1924 put the power gained by fascism in serious danger; but once again M. knew how to take advantage of the uncertain stance of the democratic parties, which, instead of launching a decisive battle against the fascist regime in Parliament, deserted the chambers and withdrew in indignant isolation. M. further strengthened his powers, dissolved all parties in 1926, and two years later imposed a new electoral law that in advance guaranteed the fascists a majority of seats in the legislative assembly. By then no organised opposition was any longer possible.
With his advantageous political position, M. was induced to seek an accommodation with the sentiment that was in the aspirations of the best part of the nation. The opportunity to normalise relations with the Church M. had already expressed as a deputy, when in a speech on 21 June 1921 he had said: «I think that, if the Vatican were definitively to renounce its temporal dreams, Italy, whether secular or lay, should provide the Vatican with the material aid, the material facilities for schools, churches, hospitals or other institutions, which a secular power has at its disposal». In fact, as soon as he came to power, M. with a whole series of measures removed the anti-religious policies of previous governments, and this gave the Holy See the impression that with M.’s government an agreement might be reached. The negotiations in this sense, begun in Aug. 1926, culminated on 11 Feb. 1929 in the conclusion of a Treaty and a Concordat that finally resolved the Roman Question (v. PATTI LATERANENSIS).
M. sought to blunt anti-clerical reaction with unilateral interpretations in speeches to the Chambers, while the increasingly totalitarian policy of the fascist regime, particularly with regard to the militaristic education of youth, soon afterwards brought about a crisis in relations with the Holy See, a crisis concerning the character of the activity carried on by Catholic Action, which M. regarded as an anti-fascist movement (1931). The difficulties were then smoothed over, but others arose which seriously worsened relations, especially after the alliance with Germany, when racist theories also gained favour in Italy and were applied with antisemitism, to which M. had previously been opposed.
In foreign policy, M.’s attitude at the time of the assassination of E. Dollfuss, perpetrated on 25 July 1934 by Austrian Nazis, was perspicacious and straightforward: he sent Italian divisions to the Brenner Pass as a warning against political excesses across the border. The invasion of Austria was thus deferred. The victorious war in Ethiopia (1935–36) and the occupation of Albania provoked the jealousy of France, which feared for Tunisia and Corsica, and of England, which saw its interests threatened in East Africa, and showed M. the opportunity to yield to Hitler’s blandishments that ended in the «Pact of Steel». Thus Hitler gained a free hand against Austria and Czechoslovakia and involved M. in his aggressive policy. At the outbreak of the Second World War M. declared Italy’s non-belligerence, but a few months later, in June 1940, he thought the moment opportune to enter the war alongside Germany, believing the Axis victory now certain. It was a miscalculation in politics and war that sealed the fate of fascism. After three years, indeed, the Allies landed in Sicily. M., whose policy of flattery had brought the country to disaster, was arrested on 25 July 1943 by order of the King. After the armistice of 8 Sept. 1943, the Germans, learning the place of M.’s detention on the Gran Sasso, freed him and set him at the head of the fascist Italian Social Republic, established in northern and central Italy still under their direct military control. A few days before the end of the conflict (28 Apr. 1945) M. was killed by an armed band as he was perhaps preparing to leave Italy. His body, exposed to the mob’s derision in Milan together with those of other summarily executed leaders, in a gruesome scene repugnant to every sense of humanity, was buried in Milan cemetery and from there stolen away to an unknown place.
The popularity he had gained in the early years of his rule, thanks also to a suggestive eloquence supported by measures that were often excellent and timely, had now fallen, as much because of the evils of war as because of the unaccustomed servility of his collaborators, who, exploiting M.’s pretensions to dictatorship, managed gradually to cut him off from the best and most capable part of the nation, which remained unheard.
Works: Scritti e discorsi, 13 vols., Milan 1933–40; Storia di un anno, Milan 1944; Opera omnia, ed. E. and D. Susmel, Florence 1951 ff. (in course of publication; to be complete in 35 vols.).