Mussolini and the Rise of Fascism - Donald Sassoon

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but they all owed their accession to their military positions. Like the first Napoleon and Oliver Cromwell, they were men on horseback. Louis Napoleon (who eventually crowned himself Napoleon III) did achieve office, like Mussolini, by exploiting a paralysis among the leading political forces, but unlike Mussolini he obtained power by winning a genuine presidential election – in 1848, with an overwhelming popular mandate, to the surprise of the political establishment. Only then did he proceed, on 2 December 1851, to stage a coup d’etat. Unlike Mussolini he had no organised party to back him, nor did he need to compromise with an existing monarchy.

      The nearest European predecessor of Mussolini was his contemporary Primo de Rivera, who in September 1923 was appointed dictator by the King of Spain, Alfonso XIII; but his dictatorship was short–lived. In Poland Józef Pilsudski was, like Mussolini, a former socialist leader, but unlike him he became a national hero in the course of the Soviet–Polish war of 1919–21, at the end of which he proclaimed an independent Polish republic and became the first head of state of the newly resurgent Poland. Having resigned this position in 1922 he returned to power in 1926, when the country, like Italy, was in the throes of parliamentary paralysis, and controlled the destiny of Poland until his death in 1935. Thus there were few if any historical precedents for Mussolini. This explains, at least in part, both his rapid rise and the difficulties even his contemporaries faced in trying to explain the phenomenon.

      Mussolini was systematically underestimated by both allies and opponents. The initial reaction of the Italian Communist Party was muted. The Theses of Rome (March 1922) – the communists’ founding document – do not mention fascism at all. Even an astute thinker like Antonio Gramsci, at the time of the seizure of power, dismissed the possibility that Mussolini might hold the fascist movement together, and like many commentators assumed that eventually it would split between an intransigent wing and a legalistic one. Writing in August 1921, Gramsci had suggested that by concentrating on Bologna instead of Milan, fascism was ‘in fact freeing itself from elements like Mussolini – always uncertain, always hesitating as a result of their taste for intellectualist adventures and their irrepressible need for general ideologies – and becoming a homogeneous organisation supporting the agrarian bourgeoisie, without ideological weaknesses or uncertainties in action’.36

      Even in 1924, when the construction of the regime was well under way, Gramsci’s writings on Mussolini stressed the importance of the image of the dictator, rather than his policies:

       He was then, as today, the quintessential model of the Italian petty bourgeois: a rabid, ferocious mixture of all the detritus left on the national soil by the centuries of domination by foreigners and priests. He could not be the leader of the proletariat; he became the dictator of the bourgeoisie, which loves ferocious faces when it becomes Bourbon again, and which hoped to see the same terror in the working class which it itself had felt before those rolling eyes and that clenched fist raised in menace? 37

      This is not to say that the image or the personality of the new leader was unimportant. While it is true that the seizure of power would not have taken place without a favourable conjuncture, personalities do matter. Mussolini was in the right place at the right time, but he was also the right man. Marx, who tended to overestimate impersonal forces in history at the expense of personalities, perceptively pointed out, in the second paragraph of his famous 1852 essay on Louis Bonaparte, that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self–selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’

      In this book I will follow this suggestion and seek to reconstruct the ‘circumstances given and transmitted from the past’ – the conjuncture – that enabled Mussolini to reach power. But no inevitability or determinism is assumed here. Matters could have gone differently. Circumstances made it possible for Mussolini to become Prime Minister of Italy, and further factors made possible the subsequent itinerary of the regime; but there is a world of difference between the possibility of an event and that event occurring.

      Mussolini did not just appear as a new leader. He was a new, modern leader, one who possessed, to use a word now abused but then recently given a new meaning, ‘charisma’, a magnetic personality exuding power not because power had been foisted upon him by established political rules, but by virtue of some God–given, unfathomable qualities. Max Weber had defined charismatic authority – contrasting it with more usual forms of authority (traditional and legal–rational) – as a quality of ‘an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.38

      Mussolini’s merit was to have exploited to the full the cards that fate (history) had handed him. There was, of course, an element of luck – a concept seldom deployed by historians – for even the ablest of men cannot be aware of all the possibilities. In the end, one has a ‘good’ hunch and acts accordingly. After all, Mussolini’s demise came about, at least in part, because of a ‘bad’ hunch: a miscalculation regarding the probable outcome of the Second World War. His initial (correct) instinct had been to keep out of it, just as his instinct almost twenty five years earlier had been to enter a war. Of course, in 1940 it was not unreasonable to assume that Hitler would win the war, and that it would be more advantageous to be in than out. But Nazism was defeated, dragging along with it into the maelstrom fascism and its man of destiny. Another dictator, Francisco Franco, had tried to join in Hitler’s war, but, luckily for him, he was rebuffed by the Germans.39 He thus ruled Spain until his dying days, allowing his apologists to celebrate his cunning in staying out of the war.

      Italian fascism was wiped out by a world war, but it was also born out of war. Of all the factors that made fascism possible, the First World War was the most important. The war accelerated changes in Italian society, destabilised the country’s parliamentary system and realigned its politics, thus contributing decisively to the conjuncture which enabled Mussolini to become Prime Minister in 1922. But it was far from being the sole factor. The changes brought about by the war made it difficult to return to the unstable system which had preceded it. Without the war, Italy may have had the opportunity to evolve otherwise and to follow a different, liberal, path towards modernity. Equally, it would have been possible to resolve the post–war crisis without creating the conditions for a fascist takeover of the state. As Paul Corner has argued, ‘The identification of possible origins of fascism in the decades before 1922 is a very different matter from suggesting that these origins had a necessary and inevitable outcome in the March on Rome.’40

       TWO A Divisive War – a Lost Victory

      The war that erupted in 1914 had been widely expected. In many countries it had even been welcomed. Imperialist rivalries, an arms race, the inexorable crumbling of the Ottoman Empire which opened a new political vacuum in the eastern Mediterranean, the growth of nationalism – particularly disruptive for the Austro–Hungarian Empire – the visible weakness of Russia (defeated by Japan in 1905), and a complex and unstable system of alliances all contributed to the outbreak of war after Gavrilo Princip’s bullet pierced Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s jugular vein at Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

      Seldom was the start of a war so popular – at least in cities; peasants remained indifferent, and women were probably more dubious than men.1 It was widely held that the war would be short, and crowds in Paris, St Petersburg, Vienna and London cheered the beginning of the conflict. In Berlin crowds of between 2,000 and 10,000 people joined in patriotic demonstrations.2 Outside Buckingham Palace there were people shouting ‘We want war!’3 The citizens

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