Victor Emmanuel III

Victor Emmanuel III was king of Italy from 1900 until his abdication in 1946, and his reign is defined by one decision he did not take. He came to the throne at thirty after his father Umberto I was assassinated by an anarchist. The first fourteen years were dominated by the prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, who industrialised the north, introduced universal male suffrage and took Libya from the Ottomans. The king brought Italy into the First World War in 1915 on the Allied side against the terms of its own Triple Alliance, and spent the war near the front, which earned him real popularity. In October 1922, with the Fascist squads marching on Rome, his government asked him to sign a decree of martial law that the army was ready to enforce. He refused, and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. He never explained the refusal; fear of civil war, doubt about the army's loyalty and the rival claim of his Fascist-sympathising cousin the Duke of Aosta have all been argued. He then signed away the constitutional state piece by piece, including the racial laws of 1938 that stripped Italian Jews of civil rights, and accepted the crowns of Ethiopia and Albania that conquest brought him. Only in July 1943, with Sicily lost, did he dismiss and arrest Mussolini — then fled Rome for Brindisi as the Germans occupied the country, leaving the army without orders. He handed power to his son in 1944, abdicated in 1946 weeks before the referendum that abolished the monarchy, and died in exile in Alexandria.

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