Mussolini's March on Rome
Some 25,000 poorly armed blackshirts converged on Rome in October 1922 and the king gave Mussolini the government rather than stop them. The Fascist movement had grown out of the postwar crisis: strikes and factory occupations in 1919 and 1920, a liberal state that could not form a stable majority, and squads financed by landowners and industrialists to break unions in the countryside. By 1922 the squads had taken over the administration of several provincial cities by force. The march was announced in advance and was militarily negligible. Four columns assembled in the rain, badly equipped and short of food, and the army commander told the government that his troops would disperse them without difficulty. The cabinet drafted a decree of martial law and Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign it. His reasons have been argued about ever since — fear of civil war, doubt about the army's loyalty, the presence of a Fascist-sympathising cousin as an alternative king — and the effect was to hand power to a movement that had not won an election. Mussolini was in Milan and travelled to Rome by overnight train in a sleeping car, arriving to be appointed prime minister on 30 October. The blackshirts paraded afterwards for the photographs. He governed constitutionally for two years, and the murder of Matteotti in 1924 pushed him into abolishing the opposition entirely. The king's refusal to sign is the decision that historians return to, since the army could have dispersed the march in an afternoon and everyone including the Fascist leadership knew it. He kept the throne for twenty-three more years and lost it by referendum in 1946.
- Year: 1922 CE
- Category: Political
