Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was the forerunner of European fascism, becoming prime minister of Italy in 1922, assuming dictatorial powers as Il Duce (‘the leader’—Hitler’s official title of Der Führer meant the same thing) from 1926. He died in 1945 when captured by the Italian partisans, though he had been out of power, except as a puppet ruler in German-occupied northern Italy, from 1943. Originally a socialist, indeed an influential agitator and left-wing journalist, he left the socialists in the First World War because he supported Italy’s joining the allied powers against Austria. From then on he created and led the Italian fascist movement which, like the German Nazi party (see national socialism), was a curious mixture of right and left attitudes, amounting, in theory at least, to a radical and populist movement. Like the German equivalent, however, very little in the way of redistribution of wealth, or any other socialist policies, was attempted, and the capitalist system functioned perfectly happily under him.
His fascist movement was even more corrupt, but considerably less violent, than Hitler’s, and the worst excrescences, such as anti-Semitism, were very much milder. He came to power largely because a civil war between communists and conservatives seemed imminent, the King, Victor Emanuel III, appointing him prime minister to avoid this. (Hitler’s first steps to power came in fairly similar circumstances, and were also more or less legitimate, being based on success in parliamentary elections.) His aggressive expansionist foreign policy, and the similarity of creed and practice made an alliance (the Axis) with Nazi Germany more or less inevitable. His fascist movement reconstructed Italian politics along corporatist lines, and produced a formal one-party state in which only members of the party could stand for office. At no stage, however, did the fascists very successfully permeate the basic culture of Italy, and they were never, for example, able to defy the Roman Catholic Church, with which, indeed, Mussolini signed the Lateran Treaty, giving to the papacy more security than it had enjoyed under the previous regime.
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