Benito Mussolini

Benito Mussolini was the founder of Fascism and the dictator of Italy from 1922 to 1943. A former socialist journalist, he came to power at the head of a violent nationalist movement, turned Italy into a one-party police state, waged brutal colonial wars in Libya and Ethiopia, and allied his country with Nazi Germany in the Second World War. His regime became the model and the name for a type of politics that spread across Europe between the wars.

Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 in Dovia di Predappio, a village in the Romagna region of northern Italy. His father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and committed socialist who named him after the Mexican president Benito Juárez; his mother, Rosa Maltoni, was a Catholic schoolteacher. A violent and rebellious pupil, he was expelled from one boarding school for stabbing a classmate, but qualified as a teacher in 1901.

In 1902 he went to Switzerland, partly to avoid military service, where he worked odd jobs, read socialist and anarchist writers and was arrested several times for agitation. Back in Italy he became a socialist organiser and journalist. In 1911 he was jailed for five months for leading protests against Italy's war in Libya, and in 1912 he became editor of Avanti!, the Socialist Party's national newspaper, in Milan.

When the First World War broke out, the Socialist Party demanded neutrality. Mussolini changed his mind and called for Italy to join the war, and in late 1914 he was expelled from the party. He founded his own newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, served at the front from 1915 and was wounded in 1917 by the accidental explosion of a mortar.

After the war Italy was shaken by inflation, strikes, land occupations and anger at what nationalists called a "mutilated victory" at the peace conference. In March 1919 Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, usually considered the first fascist movement. Its armed squads, the Blackshirts, beat, humiliated and murdered socialists, trade unionists and Catholic peasant organisers, often with the tolerance of landowners, industrialists and the police. In 1921 the movement became the National Fascist Party.

In October 1922 Fascist columns gathered for a "March on Rome". The army could have stopped them, but King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign a decree of martial law, and on 30 October he appointed Mussolini prime minister. Mussolini, aged 39, at first led a coalition. The Acerbo Law of 1923 gave two thirds of the seats in parliament to the party that came first, and the 1924 election, won by Fascists, was marked by intimidation and fraud.

In June 1924 the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced the election, was kidnapped and killed by Fascist thugs. The scandal briefly threatened the government, but on 3 January 1925 Mussolini told parliament that he took responsibility for what had happened and began building a dictatorship. Over the next two years opposition parties and free trade unions were banned, the press was censored, and a secret police, the OVRA, and a special tribunal for political crimes were created. Opponents were imprisoned or sent into internal exile on islands and in remote villages; others, such as the liberal Piero Gobetti and the socialist Carlo Rosselli, died after beatings or were murdered abroad.

Mussolini styled himself the Duce, the leader, and built a cult of personality around his image as a tireless, virile man of the people. The regime promoted a corporate state, in which employers and workers were organised in state-controlled bodies, and after the Great Depression it took over failing banks and industries. Youth organisations, mass rallies and propaganda were meant to create a new Fascist Italian. In 1929 the Lateran Treaty with the papacy ended the dispute between the Italian state and the Church that had lasted since the unification of Italy, creating the Vatican City.

In the colonies the regime was ruthless. In Libya, to crush the resistance led by Omar al-Mukhtar, Italian forces from 1930 deported much of the population of Cyrenaica into concentration camps, where tens of thousands died of hunger and disease, and used poison gas against civilians; Mukhtar was captured and hanged in 1931. Some historians describe the campaign as genocide.

In October 1935 Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, one of the last independent African states. Italian forces used mustard gas against soldiers and civilians, on Mussolini's own orders, and in May 1936 they took Addis Ababa, forcing Emperor Haile Selassie into exile. After an attempt on the life of the viceroy, Rodolfo Graziani, in February 1937, Italians killed thousands of people in the capital over three days, and later that year well over a thousand monks, deacons and pilgrims were massacred at the monastery of Debre Libanos. The League of Nations imposed sanctions, which pushed Mussolini towards Adolf Hitler.

From 1936 Italy sent tens of thousands of troops and aircraft to help Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In the same year Mussolini announced the Rome–Berlin Axis, and in 1937 Italy joined the Anti-Comintern Pact. In 1938 the regime adopted racial laws modelled on Nazi legislation, which expelled Jews from schools, universities, the professions and the armed forces and banned marriages between Jews and other Italians. In April 1939 Italy invaded Albania, and in May it signed a military alliance with Germany, the Pact of Steel.

Italy was not ready when the Second World War began, and Mussolini stayed out until June 1940, when, believing France beaten, he declared war on France and Britain. His campaigns went badly. The invasion of Greece in October 1940 was driven back, and Italian armies in North Africa and East Africa were defeated by the British, so that Germany had to rescue its ally. Italian troops took part in the invasions of Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, and in occupied Yugoslavia they burned villages, shot hostages and interned tens of thousands of civilians in camps where many died.

After the loss of North Africa and the Allied landing in Sicily in July 1943, the Fascist Grand Council voted against Mussolini on 25 July, and the king dismissed and arrested him. In September German commandos freed him from a mountain hotel on the Gran Sasso, and Hitler installed him at the head of the Italian Social Republic, a puppet state in German-occupied northern Italy based at Salò. Its forces fought a bitter war against the Italian resistance and helped the Germans round up Jews; about 7,500 Jews from Italy were killed in the Holocaust, most of them at Auschwitz.

As the German front collapsed in April 1945, Mussolini tried to escape towards Switzerland with his mistress, Clara Petacci, disguised in a German uniform. Partisans captured them near Lake Como and shot them on 28 April 1945. Their bodies were hung upside down in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

Mussolini led Italy into a series of wars that ended in defeat, occupation and civil war, and his regime was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Africa, the Balkans and Italy itself. In 1946 Italians voted to abolish the monarchy that had brought him to power, and the post-war constitution banned the re-founding of the Fascist party. Historians still debate how far his rule was truly totalitarian and how far it compromised with the king, the Church and big business, but its methods, its symbols and its very name were copied by movements around the world.