1
All within the state, nothing outside the state,
nothing against the state

• Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) and Fascism in Italy

2
The seizure of power.

• In the early 19th Italy
• - liberal state with civil rights and
  constitutional monarchy
• On the eve of First World War
• the universal male suffrage were given and Italy
  appeared to be moving toward democracy
• Problems
• Much of the population poor
• peasants were attached to their villages and
  local interests
• relation between the state and church were often
  tense
• Class differences were extreme

3

• The war worsened the political situation.

Government disappointed .
thus by 1921
Workers and peasants
Italian nationalists
didnt deliver social and land reform
Italy modest gains at Versailles

• The Russian revolution inspired Italys
  revolutionary social movement
  workers and peasant began occupying factories and
  seizing land in 1920
• pope lifted his ban on participation by Catholics
  in Italian politics a strong
  Catholic party quickly emerged

4

• Benito Musssolini
• born on 29th July 1883 Predappio in northern
  central Italy
• the son of a village schoolteacher and a poor
  blacksmith
• 1902 Mussolini moved to Switzerlan, where he
  became involved in socialist politics
• 1904 returned to Italy and worked as a radical
  journalist in the socialist press
• 1915 broke with the pacifism of the socialists
  (editorialized for Italy's involvement in the war
  on the side of the Allies, claiming that France's
  defeat would end liberty in Europe)
• The Socialist Party responded by expelling him
• started his own newspaper, The People of Italy
• September 1915 he was drafted into the Italian
  army , sent to front
•  February 1917 - wounded during hand grenade
  practice.
• Returning home, he began organizing bitter war
  veterans into a band of fascists from the
  Italian word for a union of forces. He
  organized them into armed squads known as Black
  Shirts
• Mussolini advanced himself by publishing
  his Diary of the War

5

• - February 1918, Mussolini joined those who spoke
  with disgust about parliamentary squabbling.
  described parliamentary democracy as "effete." 
  Italy, he claimed, should set things right by
  making a clean sweep. Italy, he said, needed a
  dictator.
• - In addition, he proclaimed his opposition to
  the monarchy to the Catholic Church and his
  favor of a minimum wage, an eight-hour day,
  worker participation in management, confiscation
  of excessive war profits, and giving the vote to
  women.
• Mussolini presented himself as a progressive
  nationalist or as a national socialist.

6
The regime in action.

• Mussolini's coalition government lasted through
  the whole of 1923 and beyond.
• 1) He was committed to an ambitious
  modernization program draining swamps,
  developing hydroelectricity and
  improving the railways.
• 2) The Fascists continued to be a minority in
  Parliament, holding only forty seats. Then, in
  the elections in April 1924, with the
  Fascists employing terror and illegalities,
  they won a parliamentary majority 374 seats.
• 3) had a secret police force led by a clique of
  high-ranking fascist officials, a force he
  affectionately called the Cheka, a force that was
  in the habit of attacking anyone who made
  themselves obnoxious to Mussolini's interests.
• 4) Mussolini then strengthened his regime by
  signing an agreement with the industrialists,
  assuring
  them control over their own industries.
  He made a
  similar agreement with the
  large employers in
  agriculture commerce.
• 5) Mussolini found it opportune to make an
  agreement with the
  Catholic Church.

7
Mussolini's Italy was described as a corporate
state, and the declared objective of the
corporate state was both social revolution and
national cohesion -- as opposed to the class
warfare of Marxism and the Bolshevik Revolution.

• were supposed to play a role in
  strengthening state power. And it was everyone's
  duty to contribute to the strength and
  glorification of the state.

• the monarchy, the army, government
  bureaucracy,
• the Church
• the middle class

8
Mussolini, however, didnt complete the
establishment of a modern totalitarian state. Why?

• Fascist party never became all-powerful. It never
  destroyed the old power structure, or succeeded
  in dominated it.
• There was no land reform.
• Mussolinis government didnt pass radical laws
  until 1938 and didnt persuade Jews
  savagery until late in the
  2 World War when Italy
  were under Nazi control.
• Didnt established a truly ruthless
  police state.

9

• Although Mussolini began as a revolutionary
  socialist, like Stalin, he turned against the
  working class and successfully sought the support
  of conservatives. At the same time Mussolini and
  his supporters were the first to call themselves
  fascists - revolutionaries determined to
  create a certain kind of totalitarian state. Yet
  few scholars today would argue that Mussolini
  succeeded. His dictatorship was brutal and
  theatrical, but it remained a halfway house
  between conservative authoritarianism and dynamic
  totalitarianism.

10

• Many in Italy were inclined to the old habit
  of devotion to figures of authority, and
  Mussolini was becoming an object of adulation.
  Many admired Mussolini for having saved Italy
  from Bolshevism. In many households across Italy,
  people pasted his picture, cut out of newspapers,
  on their wall. His birthplace became a place of
  pilgrimage. Given their belief in miracles, it
  became rumored that the blind could see again
  after Mussolini embraced them. And it was
  believed that those who kissed his hands would
  die in peace.

11

• On 24 July 1943 Mussolini was defeated in the
  vote at the Grand Council of Fascism, and the day
  after the King let him arrest.
• On 12 September 1943, Mussolini was rescued from
  prison. Following his rescue, Mussolini headed
  the Italian Social Republic in parts of Italy
  that were not occupied by Allied forces.
• In late April 1945, with total defeat looming,
  Mussolini attempted to escape north, only to be
  quickly captured and summarily executed. His body
  
• was then taken
  to Milan where it was
• hung upside down
  at a petrol station
• for public
  viewing and to provide
• confirmation of
  his demise.