Before Benito Mussolini seized
control of Italy in 1922, most of the world had never
heard the word “fascist.” Of course over the next few decades, that changed. Fascistic thinking proved to
be unfortunately attractive, and before it was stamped out, Fascism became
the twentieth century’s 2nd most deadly ideology. So then, what caused the creation, and critically the acceptance, of
such a virulent movement in Italy? Well, it had to do with who
Benito Mussolini was as a person, and the traumatised state of
European societies after WW1. Still, nothing in history was inevitable. So, with other options being on the
table: why did Italy become fascist? Well, Mussolini and his National
Fascist Party came to power less because of any great triumph on their part, and more because of catastrophic failures
by the forces that could have stopped them. Italy was new to democracy when
Mussolini came onto the political scene. Before the vote was expanded to most men in 1912, Italian politics had been the domain of just
the aristocracy and the educated middle class. In fact, until just 1848, Italy’s
royal house of Savoy ruled their Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia as absolute monarchs. That year, Piedmont adopted a more
democratic constitution, and then, over the course of about two decades, it
incorporated most of the Italian peninsula. The Piedmontese Constitution
became the constitution of Italy: giving it an elected parliament,
a king, and a Prime Minister, who was responsible to both of them.
At least in theory… in practice, a majority in parliament was sometimes hard
to come by, giving the king the final say on who got to wield government power. Something
that Mussolini later took full advantage of. By 1914, the days of Italy being Europe’s
commercial heart were long since over, and its political unification decades earlier
hadn’t exactly brought about societal unification. From region to region, things as fundamental
as language differed drastically in Italy. Industry was sparse and the
South in particular was impoverished, almost feudal. Still, a few northern
cities did have living standards that more or less matched the rest of Western Europe, though with that came political problems.
Socialist representatives of the newly enfranchised working class fought amongst
themselves, and against established interests. Namely, Italy’s government led by the centrist
Liberal Union faction, as well as movements backed by the Catholic Church, but in 1914
the country wasn’t tearing itself apart. Then, Italy joined WW1 in 1915, and as is obvious
with hindsight, that didn’t go quite as they had hoped. The Italians were on the war’s winning
side… but looking at Italy afterwards, one could be forgiven for assuming otherwise; a nationalist
writer called Italy’s lot a “mutilated peace.” They had been promised land and an easy victory
to entice them to declare war. Those never came. Hundreds of thousands of Italians were lost to
three years of miserable trench or alpine warfare, and only a portion of Italy’s promised
territorial spoils were actually handed over. Worse, with the end of the war Italy’s
economy tanked: factories closed, the Lira dropped in value, and by 1919 some
two million Italians, many of them veterans, were unemployed. 1919 was also year that
Mussolini founded the National Fascist Party, which originally aimed to win the support
of the most nationalistic of those veterans. The effects of WW1 had weakened
the two main obstacles to Fascism. The Liberal coalition that ran Italy was
popularly perceived to have wasted the country’s war sacrifices, and after
being smashed in 1919’s elections, could only govern because no
one else had a majority either. Their Socialist opponents (who had
tripled their own seats in parliament) weren’t really any stronger though: the
left terrified those outside of their rank-and-file with unabashed revolutionary
rhetoric, and never got into government. Benito Mussolini had actually started off life
as a Socialist (in fact he was editor of their party newspaper), but in contrast to his former
colleagues’ one-third of parliamentary seats, his Fascists won none in 1919. The party
originally called itself the Italian Fasces of Combat, after the Fasces symbol. For himself,
Mussolini took the title Il Duce: the boss. He had split with the Socialists on the
issue of the war (of which he was an enthusiastic supporter) but it was still from
left-wing thinking that early Fascism arose. From it, the Fascists took their fiery,
populist style and anticapitalist, antimonarchist, and antireligious sentiments.
Not that Mussolini’s movement was consistent. Church and king were both embraced
by Fascism to get, and keep, power. What most clearly separated Socialism and Fascism, at the start, was Mussolini’s
embrace of Italian nationalism, and his ardent idealisation of violence. Not that Italian Socialism
was necessarily pacifistic, but Mussolini saw conflict not as an
evil or a necessary means to an end, but as an actively desirable force
for purity and societal strength. The idea of eradicating supposed weakness
from society by means of an all-encompassing state was Fascism’s founding tenet, and the
only one that really remained consistent. That certainly wasn’t a positive
for most ordinary Italians, but it just can’t be understated how much
Mussolini’s number one targets, the Socialists (and after 1921, also the Communist Party)
inspired real fear in the hearts of everyone else. The left wing wasn’t helping its image
either— supporting militant strikes, refusing to cooperate with other parties,
and failing to hide their admiration for the Bolsheviks in Russia, even
as they tore that country apart. Mussolini, on the other hand, seemed
to be moderating. To the middle class, intellectuals, and the political establishment
generally, he came to look a lot more reasonable by ditching much of the rhetoric he had
inherited from his own Socialist days. Italians felt that they were downtrodden,
Mussolini promised he could make it better, and unlike the centre or the left,
Fascism was new to the scene: untarnished by past failure in government, or association with unpleasant
activities at home and abroad. As living conditions in Italy worsened, Socialist backed strikes paralysed much
of the country in 1919, 20, and 21, while the Fascists earnt themselves a reputation as defenders of law and order by
suppressing industrial action. Mussolini’s militia, the Blackshirts, would
soon number some 20,000 men, and the National Fascist Party swelled to 300,000 members by
October 1922, with many more sympathisers. Devout Catholic Italians and the Vatican
were drawn to Fascism’s defence of the Church against the left, and to Mussolini’s
support for traditional family values, including preventing women’s
suffrage and reversing their gains in the workplace—again a u-turn
from Fascism’s Socialist roots. To the Liberals, Mussolini and
his ideology were distasteful, but they thought something drastic
had to be done to prevent, in Italy, the destruction that Marxism had, by
1922, already unleashed elsewhere. Was that an accurate assessment? Probably not, the Italian economy was already recovering by the
time Mussolini took over, and unlike in Russia, the Italian army was not about to join
in a revolution, but the fear was real. Of course, the Fascists themselves were
instrumental in spreading that fear far and wide. The former Liberal Prime Minister
Giovanni Giolitti had already helped the Fascists into parliament in the 1921 elections as part of a broad anti-socialist bloc, but if the old establishment thought they
could control Mussolini, they were very wrong. Liberal Italy miscalculated: it
overestimated the Socialist threat, and underestimated the danger posed by Fascism. By late 1922, the Blackshirts had
smashed Socialist opposition in much of northern Italy and established
a base in Milan. The actual government (led by Prime Minister Luigi Facta) had
done little to prevent the violence so the Fascists seized on the initiative,
and Mussolini ordered a March on Rome. The Blackshirts would have been no match
for the Italian army if it had fought back, which is probably why Mussolini himself
stayed safe in Milan during the coup. To his credit, Facta wanted to
order troops to defend the capital, but King Victor Emmanuel III refused
to use force against the Fascists. On October 30th, he completely legally, if
immorally, appointed Mussolini Prime Minister. Why? Well because he too overestimated the
left and underestimated the danger of the Duce. Mussolini would rule Italy for
another 20 years before meeting a rather ignominious end at the hands of
Italians who had come to despise him. Italian Fascism wasn’t the only consequence of
World War One. In Germany, the end of the war brought about the end of the Kaiser. To find out
how, you should check out the video to the left, or see how Yugoslavia united as Italy’s main war
enemy collapsed. Hopefully, I’ll see you there, and as always, I’ve been James, and
thanks for watching Look Back History.
