MUSSOLINI, BENITO. - Italian politician, "duce of Fascism," b. at Predappio (Forlì) on 29 July 1883, killed at Giulino di Mezzegra (Como) on 28 Apr. 1945. Son of Alessandro, a blacksmith, and of Rosa Maltoni, an elementary-school teacher, he studied at the College of the Salesians in Faenza and took his teacher's diploma (at the Normal School of Forlimpopoli). After teaching in the elementary schools of Gualtieri Emilia and of 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 he embraced with enthusiasm and to their ultimate consequences the most advanced doctrines of revolutionary socialism. In the Swiss Confederation he had occasion to meet many other socialists who had emigrated from Italy and refugees from other countries. A restless character, he returned shortly thereafter to Italy, obtained his qualification for teaching French in secondary schools (whence came the title of professor, by which he was described in subsequent years in socialist ranks), taught that language for a short time in 1908 at a private technical school in Oneglia, but the following year he again abandoned teaching and went to Trent as secretary of the Trentino Labor Secretariat. There he directed L'Avvenire del lavoratore, the organ of the Socialist Party, and was editor-in-chief of Il Popolo, Cesare Battisti's newspaper; he was also engaged in polemics with the Catholic newspaper Il Trentino, directed by Alcide De Gasperi. Expelled by the Austrian authorities, he returned to Romagna, to Forlì, and became one of the leading socialist figures of the region. He then took part in the 11th National Socialist Congress of 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 current, maintaining 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 leader of Fascism, when he there affirmed that it was necessary to abolish the autonomy of the parliamentary group and demanded that the deputies be dependent on the Party sections that had proposed them, and that they obey the directorate. The motion he presented, which declared the four deputies expelled from the Party, obtained an absolute majority, and M. was elected a member of the Party directorate. A few months later, on 1 Dec. 1912, he also assumed the editorship of Avanti with the aim of "demonstrating to the philosophers of the reactionary bourgeoisie, to the bloc of opposing parties, to the petty rulers of the Savoy monarchy, that the vitality of Italian socialism is everlasting." Alongside the condemnation of the bourgeoisie, exploiter of the working class, there was alive in M. a no less ardent anticlerical spirit that led him to see in the Catholic Church, in substance, another instrument of capitalist oppression. An organic testimony of this vision of his was a booklet of 1913 entitled Giovanni Huss il veridico, published with the aim, as M. himself wrote in the preface, of arousing "in the souls of readers hatred for every form of spiritual and profane tyranny: whether it be theocratic or Jacobin." The faith in the Socialist International that until then had always accompanied M. suffered a hard blow at the outbreak of the First World War. The attitude of the socialists in other countries convinced M. of the futility of Italian neutrality and led him to advocate intervention against the Central Empires, in order to realize the national aspirations over Trentino and Trieste, in the confidence, after victory, of succeeding in bringing about a national revolution. Such an attitude, however, did not meet with the approval of the Party directorate which, having met on 20 Oct. 1914 at Bologna, did not accept the motion in which the editor of Avanti, while reaffirming opposition in principle to the war, nevertheless held that the formula of absolute neutrality had become too binding and dogmatic and envisaged the possibility of determining and coordinating, in the event of an Italian intervention, the future action of the Party according to events. M. then resigned as editor of Avanti, began on 15 Nov. the publication of 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 bersagliere, was wounded by an artillery accident and, having returned to his newspaper, on 23 March 1919 founded in Milan, together with other former combatants, the movement of the fasci (v. FASCISMO; ITALIA, Il sec. XX) with the program of establishing in Italy, in his own words, an economic democracy in favor of the working classes, antibourgeois and anticapitalist, and political, with the election of a constituent assembly that would pronounce on the institutional form, republican or monarchical, of the nation, adopting at the same time universal suffrage and a unicameral parliament.
The moment was particularly delicate, because a good part of public opinion, especially among the young, ill tolerated the factious movements which, denigrating the achieved victory, kept the nation agitated with strikes and street violence, ruinous for the economy, for national concord and for the fabric of the State, while the parties in government, also out of hatred for the Popular Party, whose competition they feared, discredited themselves in their demonstrated inability to provide for public order and to defend the prestige of the army. The program, supported by lively propaganda, aimed at the conquest of power, made easier by the fact that democrats, reformists, populars and socialists, perhaps in fear of compromising their electoral base and of failing their programs, did not find the path to agreement. The succession of ministerial crises strengthened M. in his decision to attempt a coup. Thus came about the March on Rome (28 Oct. 1922), which earned M. the commission, from the King, to form a new ministry, to which the populars, the reformists and other eminent personalities of the Chamber and Senate also gave their support. Appealing to patriotism to rebuild the country, after the wounds inflicted by the war, M. succeeded in obtaining the confidence of Parliament, which granted him full powers, and he immediately used them to affirm his own dictatorship and that of his party. Within a few months the ministry he presided over became a one-color cabinet, from which were excluded those very men who had confirmed his commission. The Matteotti murder of 10 June 1924 placed in serious danger the power conquered by fascism; but even this time M. knew how to profit from the uncertain attitude of the democratic parties which, rather than beginning a decisive battle against the fascist regime in Parliament, deserted the chambers and withdrew into indignant isolation. M. strengthened his powers even further, had all parties dissolved in 1926, and two years later imposed a new electoral law that guaranteed the fascists a priori the majority of seats in the legislative assembly. By now no organized opposition was any longer possible. With his advantaged political position, M. was induced to seek a settlement with the papacy, which was among the aspirations of the best part of the nation. The opportunity to normalize relations with the Church M. had already expressed as a deputy, when in a speech of 21 June 1921 he had said: «I think that, if the Vatican definitively renounces its temporalist dreams, Italy, profane or lay, should provide the Vatican with the material aids, the material facilities for schools, churches, hospitals or other things, that a profane power has at its disposal». In effect, as soon as he came to power, M. with a whole series of measures departed from the religious policy of the previous governments, and this gave the Holy See the feeling that with the M. government an agreement could be reached. The negotiations in this sense, begun in Aug. 1926, led on 11 Feb. 1929 to the conclusion of a Treaty and a Concordat which finally resolved the Roman question (v. PATTI LATERANENSI). M. thought to blunt the anticlerical 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, determined, not long after, a crisis in relations with the Holy See, a crisis concerning the character of the activity carried out by Catholic Action, considered by M. on a par with an antifascist movement (1931). The difficulties were then smoothed over, but others arose, which noticeably worsened relations, when, especially after the alliance with Germany, racist theories found favor also in Italy and were applied with antisemitism, to which M. had previously been opposed.
In foreign policy, perspicacious and straightforward was the attitude taken by M. on the occasion of the assassination of E. Dollfuss, perpetrated on 25 July 1934 by the Austrian Nazis, when he sent the Italian divisions to the Brenner, as a warning against the political intemperances beyond the Alps. The invasion of Austria was thus deferred. The victorious war in Ethiopia (1935-36) and the occupation of Albania provoked the jealousies of France, which feared for Tunis and for Corsica, and of England, which saw its interests in East Africa threatened, and showed M. the opportunity to yield to Hitler's blandishments, which ended with the «Pact of Steel». The latter thus had 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 that the opportune moment had come to enter the war alongside Germany, since the victory of the Axis now seemed to him certain. It was an error of political and military calculation that marked the end of fascism. After three years, in fact, the Allies landed in Sicily, and M., whose pro-German policy had precisely 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, having learned of the place of M.'s custody on the Gran Sasso, freed him and placed him at the head of the fascist Italian Social Republic, constituted in northern and central Italy still under their direct military control. A few days before the conflict ended (28 Apr. 1945) M. was killed by an armed band while he was perhaps preparing to leave Italy. The body, exposed to the mockery of the crowd in Milan, together with those of other hierarchs summarily killed, in a macabre scene, repugnant to every sense of humanity, was buried in the cemetery of Milan and from there stolen away to an unknown place.
The popularity that he had acquired in the early years of his government, thanks also to a suggestive eloquence, sustained by measures, many times valid and timely, had by now fallen, both because of the misfortunes of the war and because of the ill-advised servility of collaborators who, speculating on M.'s dictatorial pretensions, if anything gradually detached him 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, edited by E. and D. Susmel, Florence 1951 ff. (in course of publication; will be complete in 35 vols.).