MUSSOLINI, BENITO. — Italian political figure, “duce of fascism,” born at Predappio (Forlì) on 29 July 1883, killed at Giulino di Mezzegra (Como) on 28 April 1945. Son of Alessandro, a blacksmith, and Rosa Maltoni, an elementary-school teacher, he studied at the Salesian College in Faenza and obtained a teaching diploma (from the teacher-training school at Forlimpopoli). After teaching in the elementary schools of 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 strengthened through personal experience a pessimistic view of contemporary society, and he enthusiastically embraced, pursuing them to their extreme consequences, the most advanced doctrines of revolutionary socialism. In the Swiss Confederation he had the opportunity to meet many other socialists who had emigrated from Italy and refugees from other countries. Restless by nature, he soon returned to Italy, obtained a qualification to teach French in secondary schools (from which he acquired the title of professor, by which he was identified in subsequent years within socialist circles), and taught the language briefly in 1908 at a private technical school in Oneglia; but the following year he again abandoned teaching and went to Trento as secretary of the Trentino Labour Secretariat. There he directed L'Acvenire del lavoratore, the organ of the Socialist Party, and was editor-in-chief of Popolo, Cesare Battisti’s newspaper; he also engaged in controversy 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 region’s leading socialist figures. He then took part in the XI National Socialist Congress at Milan, where he criticized the Party’s deputies for their weak opposition to military expenditure, and at the 1912 congress in Reggio Emilia he led the revolutionary faction, arguing for the expulsion from the Party of those deputies (Bissolati, Cabrini, Bonomi, and Podrecca) who had not voted against military expenditure. One can already discern the dictatorial tendency of the future leader of fascism when he stated there that it was necessary to suppress 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 leadership. The motion he presented, declaring the four deputies expelled from the Party, obtained an absolute majority, and M. was elected a member of the Party leadership. A few months later, on 1 December 1912, he also assumed the direction of Avanti with the intention 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 his condemnation of the bourgeoisie, exploiters of the working class, there lived in M. an equally ardent anticlerical spirit, which led him to regard the Catholic Church, essentially, as another instrument of capitalist oppression. An organic testimony to this view was provided by a 1913 booklet entitled Giovanni Huss il veridico, published with the intention, as M. himself wrote in the preface, of arousing “in the minds of readers hatred for every form of spiritual and profane tyranny, whether theocratic or Jacobin.” His faith in the Socialist International, which until then had always accompanied M., suffered a severe blow with the outbreak of the First World War. The attitude of the socialists in other countries convinced M. of the uselessness of Italian neutrality and led him to advocate intervention against the Central Empires, in order to realize the national aspirations concerning Trentino and Trieste, in the hope that, after victory, he would succeed in bringing about a national revolution. Such an attitude, however, did not receive 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 his principled opposition to the war, nevertheless maintained that the formula of absolute neutrality had become too demanding and dogmatic, and envisaged the possibility of determining and coordinating the Party’s future action, in the event of Italian intervention, according to developments. M. then resigned as director of Avanti, and on 15 November began publishing his own newspaper (Il Popolo d'Italia), openly interventionist, as a result of which he had to leave the Party. He subsequently took part in the war as a bersagliere, was wounded in an artillery accident, and, having returned to the newspaper, on 23 March 1919 founded in Milan, together with other former combatants, the fasci movement (v. FASCISMO; ITALIA, Il sec. XX) with the programme of establishing in Italy, in his own words, an economic democracy in favour of the working classes, anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist,
and a political democracy, with the election of a constituent assembly that would decide on the nation’s institutional form, republican or monarchical, while adopting universal suffrage and a unicameral parliament.
The moment was particularly delicate, because a large part of public opinion, especially among the young, had little tolerance for the factional movements which, denigrating the victory that had been achieved, kept the nation agitated with strikes and street violence, ruinous to the economy, national concord, and the structure of the State, while the parties in government, also out of hostility toward the Partito Popolare, whose competition they feared, were disqualifying themselves through their demonstrated inability to provide public order and defend the prestige of the army. The programme, supported by vigorous propaganda, aimed at the conquest of power, made easier by the fact that the democrats, reformists, popular Catholics, and socialists, perhaps fearing that they would compromise their electoral base and fail to live up to their programmes, found no way to reach an agreement. The succession of ministerial crises strengthened M. in his decision to attempt a coup. Thus came the march on Rome (28 Oct. 1922), which earned M. the task, entrusted to him by the King, of forming a new ministry, to which the popolari, the reformists, and other eminent figures in the Chamber and the Senate also gave their support. Appealing to patriotism in order 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 assert his own dictatorship and that of his party. Within a few months, the ministry he headed became a single-party cabinet, from which even those who had confirmed his mandate were excluded. The Matteotti murder of 10 June 1924 seriously endangered the power won by fascism; but on this occasion too M. knew how to take advantage of the uncertain attitude of the democratic parties which, instead of beginning a decisive battle against the fascist regime in Parliament, deserted the chambers and withdrew into indignant isolation. M. further strengthened his powers, had all parties dissolved in 1926, and two years later imposed a new electoral law which guaranteed the fascists in advance a majority of the seats in the legislative assembly. By then, no organized opposition was any longer possible. With this advantageous political position, M. was induced to seek an accommodation with the papacy, which was among the aspirations of the better part of the nation. M. had already expressed the desirability of normalizing relations with the Church as a deputy, when, in a speech on 21 June 1921, he had said: «I think that, if the Vatican definitively renounces its temporalist dreams, Italy, whether profane or secular, ought to provide the Vatican with the material assistance and material facilities for schools, churches, hospitals, or anything else, which a profane power has at its disposal». In fact, as soon as he came to power, M., through a whole series of measures, departed from the religious policy of previous governments, and this gave the Holy See the impression that an agreement might be reached with the M. government. Negotiations to this end, 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. sought to blunt the anticlerical reaction through unilateral interpretations in speeches to the Chambers, while the increasingly totalitarian policy of the fascist regime, particularly with regard to the militaristic education of the young, soon thereafter brought about a crisis in relations with the Holy See. The crisis concerned the nature of the activity carried out by Catholic Action, which M. regarded as an anti-fascist movement (1931). The difficulties were then smoothed over, but others arose, seriously worsening relations when, especially after the alliance with Germany, racial theories gained favour in Italy as well and were applied through antisemitism, which M. had previously opposed.
In foreign policy, M.’s attitude was perceptive and unequivocal on the occasion of the assassination of E. Dollfuss, perpetrated on 25 July 1934 by Austrian Nazis, when he sent Italian divisions to the Brenner as a warning against political excesses beyond the Alps. The invasion of Austria was thereby postponed. The victorious war in Ethiopia (1935–36) and the occupation of Albania provoked the jealousy of France, which feared for Tunis and Corsica, and of England, which saw its interests in East Africa threatened; they also showed M. the expediency of yielding to Hitler’s blandishments, which culminated in the «Pact of Steel». Hitler 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 the opportune moment had arrived to enter the war on Germany’s side, since victory for the Axis now seemed certain to him. It was an error of political and military calculation that marked the end of fascism. In fact, after three years the Allies landed in Sicily; M., whose pro-German policy 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, having learned where M. was being held on the Gran Sasso, liberated him and placed 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 conflict ended (28 Apr. 1945), M. was killed by an armed band while perhaps preparing to leave Italy. The body, exposed to the jeers of the crowd in Milan, together with those of other summarily executed hierarchs, in a macabre scene repugnant to every sense of humanity, was buried in the cemetery of Milan and then stolen away to an unknown location.
The popularity he had acquired in the first years of his government, thanks also to a captivating eloquence supported by measures that were often bold and timely, had by then declined, not only because of the hardships of the war but also because of the ill-considered servility of collaborators who, exploiting M.’s dictatorial pretensions, gradually severed him from the best and most capable part of the nation, whose counsel remained unheard.
OPERE: 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 the course of publication; it will be complete in 35 vols.).