Mussolini's March on Rome
On the night of 27-28 October 1922, Benito Mussolini's Blackshirt squads — the fasci di combattimento, paramilitary gangs that had been terrorising socialist organisations, trade unions, and left-wing municipalities across northern and central Italy since 1920 — converged on Rome from four staging areas. The march was as much theatre as military operation: the Blackshirts were poorly armed, and the Italian army could have dispersed them. Prime Minister Luigi Facta requested that King Victor Emmanuel III declare martial law; the king refused, influenced by conservative military and business advisers who saw fascism as a controllable bulwark against Bolshevism, and by doubts about army loyalty. Mussolini himself remained in Milan until summoned. He arrived in Rome by overnight sleeping car on 30 October and was appointed Prime Minister, giving the seizure a constitutional veneer. Over the following three years, through a combination of electoral fraud, political violence, the Acerbo Law (which guaranteed a majority to the largest vote-getter), the murder of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti in June 1924, and the Aventine Secession of opposition deputies, Mussolini dismantled liberal democracy and converted the coalition government into a one-party fascist dictatorship. Italy became the first European democracy to succumb to fascism; the March on Rome was studied and admired by Adolf Hitler, whose own Beer Hall Putsch the following year drew on it as both inspiration and cautionary lesson.
- Year: 1922 CE
- Category: Political
