Benito Mussolini
Benito Mussolini invented fascism, ruled Italy for twenty-one years, and was hanged upside down from a petrol station in Milan. Born in 1883 in Romagna to a blacksmith who was a socialist agitator and a schoolteacher, he was named after a Mexican liberal, was expelled from two schools for stabbing fellow pupils, and became a schoolteacher and then a journalist. He was a revolutionary socialist of the most militant kind, edited the party newspaper Avanti!, and was expelled in 1914 for arguing that Italy should enter the war — a break that supplied the mixture he built on afterwards: syndicalism, nationalism and the cult of action. He founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan in 1919 with a radical programme, won no seats, and then found his constituency among landowners and industrialists who paid his squads to break strikes and burn union halls in the countryside. The March on Rome in October 1922 was a bluff. The army could have stopped a few thousand poorly armed blackshirts, and the king declined to sign the decree for martial law and appointed him prime minister instead; Mussolini arrived by train from Milan. The murder of the socialist deputy Matteotti in 1924 nearly finished him and instead pushed him to abolish the opposition entirely. He invaded Ethiopia with gas in 1935, intervened in Spain, and entered the war in June 1940 believing it was nearly over. He was voted out by his own Grand Council in 1943, rescued by German paratroopers, installed over a puppet republic, and shot by partisans in April 1945. He is worth understanding as an inventor rather than an imitator. Hitler took the salute, the march and the party militia from him and admired him for a decade, and by 1943 Italy was a German satellite and Mussolini was a prisoner of the movement he had started.
- Lived: 1883 CE – 1945 CE
- Nationality: Italian
- Roles: dictator, head_of_state, founder_of_fascism
