Summary 6: The Rise of Mussolini

Description

Charts Mussolini’s rise, fascist consolidation in Italy, and the overseas adventures that left Rome overextended on the eve of World War II.

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Summary

This summary episode revisits the rise of Italian fascism and Benito Mussolini’s path to power during the tumultuous early 1920s. Born from Italy’s sense of betrayal after World War I—when promised territorial gains in the Mediterranean never materialized—the fascist movement gained momentum as a bulwark against the growing Communist threat. Led by military veterans discharged into a war-ravaged economy, fascist squads found support among industrialists and political elites who saw them as the only force capable of matching Communist passion and violence. Mussolini’s dramatic March on Rome in October 1922 proved to be a strategic masterstroke that, despite being poorly organized, succeeded when King Victor Emmanuel III chose not to declare martial law, instead appointing Mussolini as Prime Minister of Europe’s first fascist government. What followed was a gradual consolidation of power, marked by the rigged 1924 elections under the Acerbo Law and the pivotal Matteotti murder, after which Mussolini fully embraced fascist violence and began reshaping Italian society. The episode traces how Mussolini’s expansionist ambitions led to costly adventures in Ethiopia and the Spanish Civil War, ultimately leaving Italy militarily weakened and economically strained just as it prepared to enter World War II as Germany’s junior partner—setting the stage for an even greater disaster than the first world war.

Script

Hello everyone and welcome to another History of the Second World War summary episode, this time we are going to cover the Rise of Mussolini episodes that were released way back in 2020. These four episodes, the second series for the podcast, covered the rise of Italian fascism during the early 1920s, the creation of the Fascist government led by Mussolini, and then the path of interwar Italian societies. The events in Italian, and the contributions that Italy would make to the Second World War after joining the conflict in June 1940 can easily be forgotten. Almost more important to the war would be the role that Italy would play during the 1930s. Mussolini would manage to thread the needle by both being very militarily active in both Africa and Spain while also being seen as a source of reason and stability by the governments in Britain and France. This would remain true even after Mussolini entered into closer relations with Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, resulting in the so called Pact of Steel. The path to that alliance with Germany started at the negotiating tables at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Italy had been an ally of the Entente during the First World War, trading their support for the war against Germany for promises of territorial expansion in the Mediterranean when Germany and Austria-Hungary were defeated. That defeat occurred in 1918, and then the territorial expansion did not happen. The British, French, and newly arrived Americans agreed that the Italian territorial demands were not something that could be honored while also making the other changes they wanted to make in Eastern Europe. This meant that territory that Italy so greatly desired went to the newly created nations in the Balkans and to the new state of Turkey. This feeling of betrayal would be an important driving force in post-First World War Italy. Just as important to the rise of Italian fascism was the rise in power of the Italian Communist party during the early 1920s. The interwar years are full of governments around Europe being very concerned about the possibility of Communism spreading into their territories. Italy would be no different with the early Italian fascist groups primarily being made up of what were known as squads. The men who were parts of these squads, the squadristi were often military veterans that had been discharged after the war and were left a bit listless within Italian society. The fascist movement was a movement of young men, many of which had been conscripted into the Italian Army before they had married or established any kind of career. Then after 4 years of military service they were dumped out into an Italian economy that had been wrecked by the war. They were welcomed into the nascent fascist movement under Mussolini and other leaders, and they would be supported by the Italian industrialists. As with many Communist movements, the strongest support for Communism was among factory workers. In Italy the industrial heartland was in the north, and it was not coincidence that this would also be the area where the Fascists would grow their strongest support. Very rapidly, from 1920 to 1922 the fascists would gain the support of first the industrial, then the political, and finally the military leaders of Italy because they were seen as the bulwark against Communism. The Fascists were one of the few groups that could match the Communists in their passion and in their actions. The Italian Communists were marching, they were violent, and it was unclear to many how they could be dealt with unless they were met by similar passion and violence. This is one of the ways that the rise of Italian fascism was echoed by the rise of German Nazism, they both gained support from the elites due to their passionate anti-Communist views and actions.

At the center of all of these actions was Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had, like so many others, served in the Italian Army during the First World War. He had at one point been a member of the socialist party, and the early Italian fascists could be described as a left wing socialist party like many others at the time, although they were later shift their focus. Much like the choice of the name National Socialist for the Nazi party, Mussolini’s previous association with the socialists has fed into the myths that the Italian Fascists were in some way a leftist political group. Mussolini himself made a point to say that while he had been a Socialist, he no longer was by the time that he came to power. Saying: ‘in terms of economics, we are overtly anti-socialist. I do not regret having been a socialist. But I have cut my bridges with the past. I have no nostalgia. I don’t think about entering socialism but rather about leaving it. In economic matters we are liberals, because we believe that the national economy cannot be entrusted to collective entities or to the bureaucracy.’ During 1920 the links with the previous socialist ideologies were specifically severed by Mussolini and the other important fascist leaders. Mussolini would firmly establish himself as the leader of Italian fascism during a meeting in Rome in November 1921. At the meeting the fascist leaders decided that from that point forward greater central control would be exercised over all of the Italian fascists groups, which had previously enjoyed greater independence. They also decided that Mussolini would be the new singular leader of Italian fascism, setting him firmly on his course to becoming Il Duce a year later.

The pivotal event that would see Mussolini transition from the leader of the Italian fascists to the leader of the Italian government was the March on Rome. During 1921 and 1922 the fascists had continued to in strength and over that time they had used marches as a display of strength and intimidation. The basic idea was the simplest possible action, fascists would collect a group of people and then they would all just walk somewhere. It was the type of action that threatened violence against anybody who tried to stop them, but put the onus for starting the violence on the other party so that the fascists would not be blamed. In the areas where these marches were often conducted the only group that might try to stop them were the Communists, as the fascists had the support of the local governments and law enforcement. The March on Rome was simply the largest of this type of action up to that point. It would begin at the Fascist Congress which would occur on 24 October 1922. The plan was to launch a March not directly into Rome but instead for fascist groups to meet at Perugia, which is about 160 kilometers north of Rome. From the moment that the March started there are two important facts about the March that must be considered, first of all it was not well organized and the 5,000 individuals who arrived in Perugia were poorly equipped for the journey ahead, and they were also very short on food. The second important fact was that the true state of the marchers was not known to the officials in Rome, they believed they could be a serious threat to public order. Mussolini and the other leaders of the Italian fascist movement had spent the proceeding months and years building up their political contacts among the Italian political parties. They had been able to exert their influence before the march began, and then as the March on Rome was occurring the one person who could have definitively ended the March simply decided not to. That person was King Victor Emmanuel III who could have, with a single order, declared martial law and then sent in the Italian military to break up the March. The soldiers required were in position, their leader was one known to be loyal to the government and the King, it could have happened. But he did not give the order, due to fears that it would cause even greater violence and perhaps even an Italian civil war. In fact, instead of breaking up the March the King contacted Mussolini to bring him into a new government with the position of Prime Minister. And so, while the March was something of a shambles it was also completely and totally successful, and suddenly Mussolini was at the head of the Italian government, the first fascist lead government in Europe.

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The shocking path that Mussolini used to reach the position of Prime Minister resulted not in revolution but more just business as usual for the Italian government, at least in the early years. Mussolini was only in power because he was the head of a coalition government of Italian conservative parties and he would prove to be willing to work with them to stick largely to their policies. This was the reason that those same conservative political leaders had supported Mussolini, under the belief that once he was in the government they would be able to control him, as it would happen, Mussolini was more just biding his time. The core uniting feature for all of these groups was their disdain for any of the socialist groups within Italy. Mussolini’s close cooperation with the other leaders caused him one problem that was perhaps a bit unexpected, his old fascist supporters. They had been pursuing a true revolution of Italian society based around the idea of unity and strong nationalist values. Now they had achieved their goals of a fascist led government and they considered the result to be far too normal. Even those that did not think that Mussolini had betrayed them at the very least believed that his cautious approach would cause Italian fascism to lose its momentum. Or as Roger Griffin would say in The Nature of Fascism “The regime in practice did nothing to undermine the privileges and prestige enjoyed by the monarchy, the nobility, the traditional landowning aristocracy, the army, industrialists or the Church, nor did it even attempt to bridge the acute divides between popular and high culture or wipe out the snobbery associated with class distinctions, education and wealth.” But things would begin to change when in April 1924 a new set of elections were held, the first under Mussolini’s government. The elections that were held were not as skewed as other such elections in, for example, Germany after 1933, but there was one very important change that had been made to Italian law. This was the Acerbo Law which stated that the list, or coalition of parties, that gained the most of the votes in the election was immediately given two thirds of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The right wing party coalition that was already leading the government was almost assured to get the majority of the votes, basically destroying the future for all of the other opposition parties without outright outlawing them. The results of the election were basically a foregone conclusion, and the coalition led by the Fascists received 66.3% of the votes.

Even the favorable election did not cause an immediate shift in government policies, and instead the general path for Mussolini remained until he was pushed to finally make a decision in late 1924. In June of that year Giacomo Matteotti, a prominent critic of the regime, would be kidnapped and killed by a fascist squad. The following six months would then see an increase in the amount of fascist violence around Italy, which left Mussolini in a position where he either had to side with the fascists and take control of that violence by leading it, or go the other direction and suppress it. In early January 1935 he made his decision and took responsibility for Matteotti’s murder and all of the violence that followed, this gave essentially government sanction for all that had happened, and proved that Mussolini was in an unassailable position. Over the following months Mussolini would move to reassert control over the Italian fascists, by either removing other leaders or promoting them into the government with the goal of separating the leaders from their followers which allowed for the status quo to continue. Early 1925 would also be the period where the fascist changes to Italian society really started to take hold, with for example the newspapers coming under greater governmental control, and a rollback of Women’s rights which the fascists blamed for the falling Italian birthrate. They would also begin moving towards making the long term changes to Italian society that they desired, with educational programs altered to glorify the fascist party and fascist ideals. One of the interesting side effects of these changes, which would impact the Italian war effort, was that many of the students that had been hearing this propaganda all of their young lives would begin to enter into society as adults in the late 1930s, and they found that none of the promises and ideas that they said would be present actually were. The promises that had been made, the benefits of a fascist society were unfulfilled, which caused an erosion of support for the regime just at the time when that support was needed most.

Along with a remaking of Italian society to try and purge it of what were seen as socialist and un-Italian ideas, one of the core policies of Italian fascism was violence, and the glorification of violence. In the early days of the fascist movement this violence generally took the form of small scale political violence in the streets of Italy, then when Mussolini became Prime Minister it shifted into large scale internal violence against those that did not support the fascist government, but then after Mussolini had full control of Italian society he reverted back to an earlier promise for how violence would be used, Italian expansion. Since the very beginning of modern Italy, the Italian unification of 1871, there were certain territories that were outside of the borders that were seen as a part of Italy. Recapturing some of these territories had been the primary reason that Italy had joined the First World War. After the Paris Peace Conference many of those territorial ambitions remained unresolved, and Mussolini was already thinking bigger. His eyes turned to Africa and the territory that could be gained through the expansion of Italy’s colonial holdings. The goals were both just straight up square kilometers of control, but there were also important economic issues that Italy had that Mussolini hoped to resolve with more territory under Italian control. High on the list was access to more natural resources, of course, but there was also the idea that Italians needed space to go, and in fact one of the major reasons for their expansion into North Africa was in the hopes of large numbers of Italians moving to those territories in search of a better life and more lucrative jobs.

The expansionist goals of Mussolini would lead to violence in 1935 with the start of the Italo-Ethiopian war. Ethiopia was one of the Africa’s few fully independent nations during the mid-1930s, and the Italians sought to take advantage of this fact with an invasion to extend the pre-existing Italian territories in North Africa. While the war would be far more difficult than the Italians expected, they would eventually take control of Ethiopia, at least for a few years. The Second World War would see war begin in Ethiopia once again, with the British and their allies working to once again push Italy out of Ethiopia. While the war in Ethiopia did allow for a brief expansion of Italian controlled territory it would also greatly increase the tension between Italy and other nations, particularly Britain. Due to the threats posed to the British imperial interests in Africa the two nations actually came very close to war, with the Royal Navy briefly being put on a war footing to answer any Italian threat. Such a conflict certainly would have altered the course of history, but it did not happen, but it was the first time that the relations between Italy and Britain had been truly tested after the First World War. The tensions between Italy and Britain were just one example of the rising tensions around Europe during the mid 1930s, and those tensions would come even closer to boiling over due to events in Spain. The Spanish Civil War is a major topic that will require its own summary episode, which will be the next summary released here on the feed, but the Italian involvement is worth discussing. When Franco and his Spanish Nationalist supporters began their attacks against the Spanish Republican government Mussolini and the Italian leaders saw an opportunity to expand their control of the Mediterranean by installing a friendly government in Spain. To this end they would provide military support that included military equipment as well as the dispatch of several units of Italian infantry to fight with the nationalists. Franco would be victorious during the Civil War, defeating the Republican forces that had been supported by the Soviet Union. However, that victory did not immediately show any real benefit for the Italians. Spain was absolutely wrecked by the long and devastating war, which prevented Franco from being involved in any of the events that would follow. Spanish neutrality in the future World War meant that any possibility of using Spain to close off the western Mediterranean would not materialize. This also meant that Spain was a terrible investment for the Italian military. There was a point in the mid 1930s, before other nations began rearmament efforts, during which the Italian military was seen as one of the strongest in the world, particularly the Italian Air Force. However, the years of fighting in Africa and then in Spain would exact a toll on Italian equipment and supplies that it could not rectify before it entered into the war in June 1940. More importantly, once other nations began rearming it became apparent very quickly that the Italian economy could not come close to keeping up with the demands of modern war, which would be a theme for the Italian military throughout its entire participation in the Second World War.

Overall, the interwar years would see Italy transition into the world’s first fascist state, it would reorient its foreign policy away from France and Britain and towards Germany, it would build up its military to support its expansionist goals, and then it would enter the war in the hopes of great territorial gains and a boost to its prestige, and then none of that would happen. Instead Italy would find itself in another World War in which its military was shown to be ill prepared for the war that it would be called upon to fight, Italian industry poorly equipped to meet the demands placed up on it, and in an alliance where it was clearly viewed as a second class military power. The only real difference is that the Second World War would be even more disastrous for the Italians than the first.