Benito Mussolini

While working for various labour organizations in Switzerland, Benito Mussolini made a name for himself as a charismatic personality and a consummate rhetorician. After returning to Italy, he amassed a large following while working as an editor for the socialist magazine Avanti!. His political beliefs took a hairpin turn to the right midway through World War I, when he stopped decrying the war effort and began advocating for it. After World War I he began organizing fasci di combattimento—nationalist paramilitary forces known for wearing black shirts. These groups began waging campaigns of terrorism and intimidation against Italy’s leftist institutions at his behest. In 1922 Mussolini and other fascist leaders organized a march on Rome with the intention of forcing the king to yield the government to Mussolini. It worked, and Mussolini was appointed prime minister that same year. By 1925 Mussolini had dismantled Italy’s democratic institutions and assumed his role as dictator, adopting the title Il Duce (“The Leader”).

Benito Mussolini was Europe’s first 20th-century fascist dictator. But Mussolini’s political orientation didn’t always lean that way. His father was an ardent socialist who worked part-time as a journalist for leftist publications. In his initial overtures into politics, Mussolini’s beliefs took after his father’s: he spent time organizing with trade unions and writing for socialist publications in both Switzerland and Italy. Mussolini’s politics took a turn to the right midway through World War I, when he became a proponent for the war effort. It was during this period, and after, that the nationalist and anti-Bolshevik strands of thought that would characterize his later politics began to emerge. These politics included the themes of racial superiority, xenophobia, and imperialism that defined his actions as a dictator.

Benito Mussolini was Europe’s first 20th-century fascist dictator, and the word fascism comes from the far-right movement he led in Italy. Mussolini named the fasci di combattimento—paramilitary groups which were largely under his control and from which his movement derived its own name, fascismo—after the Latin word fasces, which was the bundle of wooden sticks topped with an axe-head that ancient Roman authority figures’ attendants would carry to distinguish their rank.

Benito Mussolini was the less dominant half of the Rome-Berlin axis, formalized by the 1939 Pact of Steel between Adolf Hitler and himself. World War II broke out between Germany and the rest of Europe later that year, but Italy—its resources already stretched thin by preexisting economic issues and Mussolini’s Ethiopian conquest in 1935—was hesitant to join. Anxious that he would lose claim to conquered European lands as Hitler advanced, Mussolini entered the war in 1940. Italy fared poorly from the outset, with ignominious defeats in North Africa, Greece, and the Soviet Union. When the Allies touched down in Sicily in 1943, Mussolini’s own government arrested him.

Benito Mussolini was born to a poor family in Predappio, a town in northeastern Italy. His father was a blacksmith who wrote part-time as a socialist journalist, and his mother was a staunchly Catholic schoolteacher. As an adult, Benito Mussolini would have two wives and many mistresses. He had one child with his first wife, Ida Dalser, but would eventually abandon them and seek to hide them from the public eye. He would have five children—three boys and two girls—by another wife, Rachele Guidi. It was alongside his longtime mistress, Clara Petacci, that he died, however. The two were executed in 1943 by Italian partisans as they tried to escape to Switzerland, and their bodies were hung upside down in Milan.