21. The Rise of Fascism

Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

Benito Mussolini

In the previous section we have seen how the revolutionary application of Marxist theory in Russia resulted in Stalin’s totalitarian dictatorship. Totalitarianism, however, would not be limited to the Soviet Union nor would it be unique to communism. In Italy and Germany the political, economic, and social disruption at the end of World War One led to the emergence of extremist political parties of the far right that called for a forceful authoritarian response to the problems of the day. In Italy Benito Mussolini founded and led one such party. They were called the Fascists. In Germany Adolf Hitler founded and led the Nazi Party. Mussolini’s Fascists would win control of Italy in 1922. They would remain in power until 1943. In Germany Hitler’s Nazis came to power in 1933 and would remain in power until 1945. Both parties promised to solve the problems of economic recession, social malaise, parliamentary paralysis, and the threat of communism. They would do so by exercising a degree of totalitarian control over their respective peoples. Taking its name from Mussolini’s party, the ideology of both parties would become known as fascism.[1]

The name Mussolini brings to mind a very distinct mental image: that of a balding, heavy-set, uniformed and posturing dictator who, with chin thrust forward, stood on high balconies (to conceal his short stature) exhorting large crowds of admiring followers. He sought to emulate the great Roman Caesars as he called for Italians to follow him in the revitalization of a new Roman Empire. To enhance the impression of his power, he surrounded himself with martial pomp and circumstance. Behind the scenes, however, he was a mixture of charm and fury, seductive and bullying: a shrewd politician with a talent for political survival and manipulation.

Benito Mussolini was born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith and school teacher. Growing up, he was a difficult child, stubborn, troublesome, and a school yard bully. His education took him through high school but he never attended university. He was fascinated with the history of ancient Rome, an interest that would later dominate his political thinking. He married (the Mussolinis would have three sons and two daughters) and earned his living intermittently as a substitute elementary teacher. Fascinated by its scrappy nature, he became actively involved in Italian politics. He flirted with socialism and became editor of the Socialist Party newspaper in 1912. When the War broke out in 1914 his criticism of the Socialist policy calling for Italy’s neutrality led to his expulsion from the party. When Italy joined the war on the Allied side in 1915, he enlisted and served in the Italian army. He enjoyed soldiering and rose to the rank of sergeant. War suited Mussolini’s violent nature. It demonstrated that strength overcomes weakness. The command and obedience discipline of military life with its hierarchy of ordered ranks seemed to him a model for the restructuring of society.

Peace found Italy dissatisfied. It did not get all that it had wanted from the peace settlement. The Italian economy suffered a severe postwar economic recession resulting in the collapse of the currency and massive unemployment. Respect for parliamentary government declined. On the background of labor strikes, land seizures, and rioting, the Italian communists called for proletarian revolution. While of no significant size to seize power, the communists were seen by conservatives and nationalists as a very real threat.

It was on this background that Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919. The Fascists, as his group came to be known, initially had no fixed ideology or political program other than opposition to communism. Initially they were gangs of demobilized soldiers who, with police support, suppressed labor and communist agitation in northern Italy. Once in power, they would identify themselves as the champions of law and order, of property, the Church, and the crown. How would Italy be saved? Very simply, the state must have and exercise full power. “Everything within the State. Nothing outside the State. Nothing against the State” became Mussolini’s slogan. The Fascists had their own armed force (the Squadristi) of black-shirted uniformed enforcers who gave them “muscle” in street brawls with labor unionists and communists. In 1921 the Fascists officially registered as a political party and won 35 seats in the parliamentary elections of that year. By 1922 the Fascists numbered some 300,000 members. Fascist support came largely from the lower middle class, industrialists, large landowners, and Catholic clergy, all of whom feared the possibility of a communist revolution.

In 1922 a parliamentary crisis brought Mussolini to power. In October, Mussolini proclaimed a Fascist “March on Rome.” Starting from Milan (where Mussolini safely remained) his Fascist Blackshirts began moving towards the capital. Rather than declare martial law and call upon the army to suppress the march, the intimidated King Victor Emmanuel III named Mussolini premier! Mussolini’s government then secured a law granting him full emergency powers for one year in which to restore order. During that year Mussolini effectively built the foundations upon which he would, in time, assume full dictatorial power over Italy. Although in theory he held power at the will of the crown, he ultimately took the title Il Duce (“The Leader”).

In 1929 Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty with the Papacy that ended the 49-year “feud” between the Church and Italy. In return for the Pope’s recognition of the Italian government, the Pope received sovereignty over the Vatican. This won for the Fascist regime the active support of the Church, giving Mussolini’s dictatorship significant legitimacy.

Mussolini did make considerable reforms that restored Italian unity, a degree of prosperity, and a sense of national pride. Massive public works projects provided employment. Notable among them were the draining of the Pontine Marshes to prevent disease and increase farmland and the building of hydroelectric dams to reduce Italy’s dependence upon foreign coal. His reform of the Italian railroad system, notorious for its inefficiency, became symbolic of the Italian revival. An admiring world said of Mussolini, “He made the trains run on time.” American songwriter Cole Porter even included him in his 1934 hit song “You’re the Top.” Later, when fascism became increasingly associated with Hitler, the song’s lyrics were changed and Mussolini’s name was removed.

In making political and economic reforms, Mussolini sought to create the “Corporative State.” This attempted to combine under government supervision some 22 “corporations” representing various aspects of economic life (farming, banking, transportation, etc.) wherein business ownership and labor would cooperate with each other for the overall good of the country. The “corporations” would determine working conditions, wages, prices, and industrial policies. Ideally, the partnership of labor and management (compelled by the government) would replace old antagonisms and prevent strikes and other disruptions to economic growth. Independent labor unions were outlawed. In 1938 the “corporations” were reorganized in partnership with the Fascist Party as the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, a body that replaced the older Chamber of Deputies (parliament). Confusing? Yes. The bottom line? The Fascist government would direct the economy, although there would still be capitalist enterprise (private ownership of businesses). Palmer et al. write:

None of this was democratic, but this was an improvement on democracy, the Fascists asserted. A legislature in an advanced economic society, they said, should be an economic parliament; it should represent not political parties and geographical constituencies but economic occupations.

Organizations along such lines would do away with anarchy and class conflict engendered by free capitalism, which can only sap the strength of the national state. Real authority in any event rested with the government – the Head of the Government, who settled most matters by decree. In point of fact, social unrest and class conflict were “ended,” not by the corporative system as such, but by the prohibition of strikes and lockouts and the abolition of independent labor unions. The corporative system represented the most extreme form of state control over economic life within a framework of private enterprise and a relatively capitalistic society. It was the Fascist answer to Western-style democracy and to Soviet proletarian dictatorship. Fascism, said Mussolini, is the “dictatorship of the State over many classes cooperating.” (Palmer et al., 789)

Under Fascism, Italy seemed to weather the Great Depression of the 1930s with less discomfort than did the other capitalist industrial states (Germany, Britain, France, the United States, and Japan). Fascism, consequently, seemed to be an answer to the general economic collapse and right-wing extremist parties or factions came into existence elsewhere, most evidently in Germany and Japan.

In 1932 Mussolini wrote an article for the Enciclopedia Italiana outlining the basic principles of fascism. Fascism, he wrote, repudiates pacifism and glorifies war. It believes in holiness and heroism. It rejects Marxist Socialism and the idea that economic “happiness” could be achieved through socialism. It repudiates democracy and denies majority rule. It affirms the inequality of mankind and that such inequality can never be “leveled” though a “mechanical process such as universal suffrage.” It rejects completely economic and political liberalism. It sees political equality as “collective irresponsibility.” Fascism considers itself “an organized, centralized, and authoritative democracy”. The twentieth century is a century of collectivism, the “century of the State.” The State is absolute. Individuals and groups are conceived of only in their relation to the State. The Fascist State is “itself conscious” with its own will and personality. Fascism is the characteristic doctrine of the present: a living faith. It is the sum of all doctrines that have represented “a stage in the history of the human spirit.” Fascism is imperialist, “the expansion of the nation is an essential manifestation of vitality” demanding “discipline, the coordination of all forces, and a deeply felt sense of duty and sacrifice” (Eisen and Filler 139 – 142).

Under Mussolini’s rule Italy was a dictatorship but it was not as thoroughly totalitarian as were the later regimes in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. The press and other media were censored. The State assumed control of education and culture. A Fascist youth movement called the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) in which membership was voluntary, included children of all classes between the ages of six and eighteen. Unlike the later Hitler Youth or Soviet Komsomol, the ONB was more a uniformed athletic organization than a political body. While a secret police force was established in 1926, it was not as pervasive or as terrifying as were the Soviet and Nazi security systems. It was only after 1938 that the Fascist government passed a series of anti-Semitic laws affecting the status of Italy’s some 60,000 Jews. Jews in the professions and education were removed from public life. Other laws related to Jewish land ownership and marriage. As there did not exist a tradition of anti-Semitism in Italy, these laws were not received with enthusiasm by the general population. Despite this rejection, Italians overall were satisfied with Mussolini’s programs and policies.

Fascist propaganda portrayed Mussolini as the “savior” of Italy; the great Leader who was always right and would always prevail no matter what obstacles confronted him. His cult of personality was as strong as Stalin’s, who, incidentally and ironically (Stalin being a Communist), admired Mussolini as a fellow dictator.

Mussolini became the model for other fascist dictatorships, namely those of Hitler and Spain’s Francisco Franco. Hitler admired and copied Mussolini’s methods: effective propaganda that viciously attacked all enemies of the Fascist movement; the use of uniformed and armed paramilitary forces; the pageantry of uniforms, martial music, parades, and symbols; the mass rallies; the psychological and emotional appeal to nationalist sentiments and aspirations.

In the 1930s Mussolini’s government undertook an increasingly aggressive foreign policy. Seeking to build a new Roman Empire, Mussolini cast covetous eyes eastward across the Adriatic towards Albania and Greece. In 1935 Italy avenged its 1896 humiliation by invading and conquering Ethiopia. In 1936 Italy (as later did Germany) actively intervened in the Spanish Civil War in support of the fascist Falangist Party led by Franco. In 1936 Italy joined in alliance with Hitler’s Germany forming what Mussolini called the Rome-Berlin Axis. In 1938 Mussolini became the arbiter of peace as he persuaded Hitler to call for the international conference that met in Munich to settle the Sudeten Crisis. In April 1939 Mussolini ordered the military occupation of Albania, which was later annexed to Italy.

By 1939, however, Mussolini was well under the influence of his disciple. Having won control of Germany, Hitler would build a totalitarian regime that would, in its scope and power, outshine the Fascist accomplishment and transform Mussolini from a philosophical mentor to a junior partner.

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Image is from the Wikipedia site Mussolini.

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Sources for Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism

Eisen, Sydney and Maurice Filler, editors, The Human Adventure: Readings in World History, vol. 2. New York: Harcourt, 1964.

Palmer, Robert et al. A History of the Modern World. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Pauley, Bruce. Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini: Totalitarianism in the Twentieth Century. Wheeling, Il: Harlan Davidson, 2003.

[1] Fascism as the name of Mussolini’s party is identified with an upper case F. The term fascism as designating an ideology or political system begins with a lower case f. The word fascism comes from the Latin Fasces, the name for the axe bundled in rods carried by the ancient Roman Lictors as a symbol of the power of the state.