In 1919 Benito Mussolini who already emerged in the Italian intervention campaign in World War I, founded the  "Fasci di combattimento" in Milan. They included everybody that was unhappy for the results of the war. According to the treaty of London, through which Italy signed its participation in the war on the side of France and England, Italy should have obtained Fiume(Rijeka) and Istria (Histrica). But when the war finished the collapse of the Turkish Empire and the birth of Jugoslavia imposed a revision of that agreement in the name of people self-determination. A lot of Italians considered the treaties as a treachery and began to talk about “mutilated victory” and outrage to the people who had died in war. These are the premises that brought to the birth of  “Fasci di Combattimento” that led to the raise of the fascist party that eventually merged with the nationalist party founded in 1904.  

Some famous intellectuals like D’Annunzio and Gentile supported the fascist movement, and D’Annunzio even guided the manifestation for the occupation of Fiume that failed. But in the first elections in 1919 the fascist were a minority group. However they were more and more becoming order troops against the socialist movement, red trade unions and the so called catholic white trade unionism. They began to vandalize workhouses and trade unions premises; these acts were endorsed by the govern, that saw in them an effective way of fighting the factory workers’ and farmers’ protests. In 1922, though the fascists did not get a sufficient number of seats in Parliament, they came from every region of Italy to do what they called the “March on Rome”. The king Vittorio Emanuele III could have easily suffocated this movement, but he assigned the role of  head of state to Benito Mussolini. Until 1924 Mussolini legally governed until the turning point determinded by the the assassination of the socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced the climate of intimidation in which the 1924 elections took place. After the retrieval of the body of Matteotti, Mussolini launched a sort of challenge in Parliament undertaking the moral and civil responsibilities of the murder. There was no popular reaction and this ratified the constitution of a dictatorship. The opposing parties left the Parliament in sign of disapprobation, except for the small group constituted by the communist party (led by Antonio Gramsci) that was, however, forced into silence.

Mussolini became Il Duce, getting full authority with a set of special laws. Inch by inch every form of freedom of expression was removed and the opponents underwent exile or imprisonment. Until the middle 30s Mussolini accomplished a cautious foreign policy because, despite his dreams of glory for Italy, he was aware of the weakness of the nation. In economy he switched from a first phase of free trade to protectionism, in agriculture with the “battle of wheat” that stopped imports to enlarge the national production and in the industrial field with a strict state intervention to support industries in crisis. He removed the right to strike, so getting rid of the syndicates which were replaced by corporations representing workers and entrepreneurs.

In 1935 the war of Ethiopia marked an important turning point. The United Nations Society in fact condemned this war and Italy was politically and economically isolated. From one side this led to the autarchic change in economy, on the other hand it determined the alliance with Germany (in the Spanish civil war Italy and Germany had supported Franco’s forces). The alliance caused the tragedy of the introduction of racial laws in 1938 and the participation in a war that Italy was not ready to face, whose sufferings and infamies naturally led Mussolini to his fall in 1943 when the Great Council of Fascism, supreme organ of Fascism, voted his distrust and the King arrested him.  It was the end of War and Fascist regime that, after the flee of il Duce, gave birth to the puppet regime of the Republic of Salò on the Garda Lake: this brought to a civil war (that lasted until ’45) between fascists allied with the nazi forces located in Italy and the forces of the Resistance, while the Anglo-American troops were moving forward through the peninsula rejecting the German troops. 

by Fabrizio Priori and Giacomo Cirillo