Totalitarian regimes

The rise of fascism in Italy

Background: the war experience.

  • Italy suffered half a million casualties in the war. But did not get Dalmatia, etc., as promised by Britain and France, after the war at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. So argument that Italy "won the war but lost the peace."
  • War losses led to economic downturn, political strife, and inflation.
  • Working class plight led to strikes: 1,881 industrial strikes and 189 agricultural strikes in 1920. 541,000 unemployed in 1921.
  • Armed confrontation between peasants and landlords in some regions.

Mussolini (1883-1945) and Fascism

Benito Mussolini, son of a socialist blacksmith who became school teacher and socialist journalist in northern Italy. Joined the war and was expelled from the Italian socialist party.

March 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci di Combattimento . Fasces was an ancient symbol of the Roman Empire. Sticks bound to an ax suggested civil unity and authority of Roman officials to punish wrong doers.

Mussolini’s initial supporters were of proletariat and middle class backgrounds.

The Fascist agenda

Unlike Nazism, Fascism did not have a systematic agenda. In a way, it articulated a popular grievance against the Versailles Peace Conference (1919)’s treatment of Italy, a popular desire for social order and strong leadership, and a restored economy.

Mussolini promised to restore order and asked not to favor one particular class, but to limit the functions of the state to creating conditions suitable for individual activity, benefiting the consumer, science, art, economic life, agriculture, industry, and commerce.

Mussolini also asked the Italian parliament to define some historical and political positions in national reconstruction in 1921.

Fascist Ideology

The reach of the Fascist state

In 1922, Mussolini marched onto Rome and forced himself on the king Victor Emmanuel III (r.1900-1946) to become the prime minister. By 1926, he had turned himself into a dictator, ruling for life.

Strikes fell considerably after Mussolini came to power. In 1923, industrial strikes fell to 200 and there was only one agricultural strike. Meanwhile, the deficit of Italian business doubled from 1924 to 1927. American loans were used to stabilize the Italian lira, which destroyed the export sector of Italy, making Italy the country with the largest number of bankruptcies in Europe.

Fascism in a way resembled a big corporation that assigned a place to every individual in society. It organized factory owners and workers into syndicates led by Fascist leaders, women and children into Fascist backed organizations, and literally governed every aspect of every one’s life. It barred strikes and trade unions, and any other voluntary political and social organizations not associated with the State.

    Evaluation

While it is true that the Fascists used much assassination and intimidation, not the least through the Black Shirts, Mussolini's secrete police, to coerce the people, Mussolini did try, as so many other European leaders were compelled to since late 19th century, to heed mass politics and cater to the Italians in several general ways: their desires for order; some degree of stability in their work and in their lives; their unhappiness over what they perceived as the humiliation of Italy at the Versailles Conference, their dream of glory that matched the historical place of Italy, their frustration with democratic politics that could not handle the hyperinflation and high level of unemployment.  Unlike the liberals who argued for minimum state intervention in society, Mussolini's state was a totalitarian one that controlled many aspects of Italian lives, although the control was not as far reaching as the German Nazi state under Hitler in the 1930s.  Mussolini tapped into those mass sentiments and manipulated them to his advantage: to facilitate the fulfillment of  Italian military conquests abroad and his personal ambition.