How Mussolini Came to Power

The standard image of fascist takeover is tanks in the streets, a general at the head of an army, democracy dissolved by force overnight. Mussolini's rise to power in Italy was not like that. It was slower, stranger, and in some ways more disturbing, because the people who handed him power were not defeated by him. Many of them thought they were using him.

By the time Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister of Italy in October 1922, he had been building toward this moment for four years. He had created a political movement, built a paramilitary force, intimidated his opponents, and convinced enough of the Italian establishment that he was the acceptable face of order in a country that felt like it was falling apart. The King of Italy invited him to form a government. Parliament gave him emergency powers. No one stopped him because many of the people who could have did not want to.

Italy After the First World War

Understanding Mussolini requires understanding what Italy looked like in 1919. The country had entered the First World War in 1915 on the Allied side, after the Treaty of London promised substantial territorial gains. The war cost Italy 700,000 dead and more than a million wounded. The promised gains did not materialize at the Paris Peace Conference. Italy received some territory but not what it had been promised, and the sense of a "mutilated victory" (vittoria mutilata) was widespread and intense.

The economy was in crisis. Inflation had eroded wages. Unemployment was high. Returning soldiers found a country that did not welcome them. The Socialist Party was strong and growing, and there were genuine fears among landowners, industrialists, and the middle class that Italy might follow Russia into communist revolution. The existing liberal parliamentary system seemed incapable of managing any of this. Governments formed and collapsed in rapid succession.

Into this landscape came Benito Mussolini, a former socialist who had broken with the party over Italian entry into the war and had since become a nationalist agitator. In March 1919, he founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan, a movement that drew on war veterans, nationalists, futurists, and anti-socialists, and that had no coherent ideology beyond action, violence, and national strength.

The Squadrismo

The Fascist movement's political tool was organized violence. The squadrismo were armed squads of Blackshirts who traveled the Italian countryside attacking Socialist and Communist organizations, burning their offices, beating and killing their members, and destroying their newspapers and meeting halls. The targets included trade union offices, cooperative societies, and the headquarters of left-wing political parties.

This violence was not clandestine. It happened in public, in broad daylight. Its victims reported it to police and to courts. What made it distinctive, and what distinguished it from ordinary political violence, was the response of state institutions. Local police frequently did nothing. Prefects looked away. Army officers sympathized with the Blackshirts and sometimes provided logistical support. Prosecutors declined to charge attackers. Courts acquitted those who were charged.

The explanation was partly ideological sympathy: many in the Italian establishment preferred the Fascists to the left. It was also practical: the Fascists were useful. They were breaking the power of the labor movement in the countryside, which was exactly what landowners wanted. The squadrismo served an economic function for Italian agrarian capitalism, and the people who benefited from that function were not going to prosecute the people providing it.

Between 1920 and 1922, the Fascist squads killed hundreds of socialists and trade unionists. Mussolini's movement grew rapidly. In the May 1921 elections, the Fascists won 35 seats in parliament, entering the democratic system from which they would eventually expel everyone else.

The March on Rome

In October 1922, Mussolini orchestrated what he called the March on Rome, a mobilization of Fascist Blackshirt columns on the Italian capital that was presented as a revolutionary seizure of power. The historical reality was more complicated.

The march itself was militarily unimpressive. The columns that converged on Rome were not a disciplined army. They were poorly armed, poorly organized, and would have been stopped easily by the Italian military if orders to resist had been given. The government of Prime Minister Luigi Facta declared martial law and prepared to use the army. King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the martial law decree.

This refusal was the decisive moment. Without royal backing for martial law, the military could not legally act. The government collapsed. The King asked Mussolini, who was in Milan, to come to Rome and form a government. Mussolini traveled to Rome by sleeper train. He arrived, was appointed Prime Minister, and the March on Rome, such as it was, became unnecessary. The columns were allowed to parade through the city as a celebration rather than a military operation.

Why did the King refuse to sign the martial law decree? Partly he feared civil war. Partly he underestimated Mussolini. Partly he was receiving incorrect information about the military situation. Partly he was persuaded by advisors who thought Mussolini could be managed. The historian Emilio Gentile has argued that the King's decision reflected both cowardice and a fundamental misreading of what Mussolini represented.

The Legal Path to Dictatorship

Mussolini did not immediately abolish parliament or establish a formal dictatorship. He was initially constrained by coalition politics. His first government included ministers from the Liberal and Catholic Popolari parties. He won a vote of confidence in parliament with a large majority. He was, formally, a legitimate prime minister of a parliamentary government.

Over the next three years, he systematically dismantled the constraints. The Acerbo Law, passed by parliament in 1923, changed the electoral system so that the party winning the largest share of votes (provided they won at least 25%) received two-thirds of the seats in parliament. In the 1924 elections, conducted under widespread Fascist intimidation and fraud, the Fascist list won a majority and received the bonus seats.

The socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti gave a speech in parliament in June 1924 documenting the fraud and violence of the election. He was kidnapped and murdered by Fascist thugs within days. The killing created a political crisis. Opposition deputies walked out of parliament in what became known as the Aventine Secession, refusing to participate in a corrupted institution.

Mussolini survived. The King did not act. The military did not act. The Church issued no condemnation. In January 1925, Mussolini gave a speech in parliament taking personal responsibility for everything the Fascists had done, including the Matteotti murder, and daring anyone to stop him. No one did. Over the following year, he issued decrees banning opposition parties, closing non-Fascist newspapers, and abolishing local elected government. Italy was a dictatorship by 1926.

The Role of the Establishment

The story of Mussolini's rise is inseparable from the story of an establishment that enabled him. Italian industrialists provided funding to the Fascist movement. Landowners used the Blackshirts as a private army against their workers. The military sympathized and often cooperated. The judiciary failed to prosecute Fascist violence. The Church maintained silence or approval. The King refused to use his constitutional powers to stop the process.

Each of these actors had their own reasons. Each thought, at some stage, that Mussolini could be controlled or that his rise served their interests. The industrialists wanted to break the labor movement. The landowners wanted to suppress the peasant leagues. The military wanted national strength. The Church wanted protection against secularism and communism. The King wanted stability and perhaps underestimated the threat.

What they collectively produced was a dictatorship that ultimately served none of their long-term interests, that led Italy into a catastrophic war, and that ended with the King fleeing Rome and Italy in ruins. The lesson, if there is one, is that movements which use violence to achieve political ends do not become manageable once they have achieved power. They become more dangerous.

What Fascism Actually Was

Italian Fascism was not a coherent ideology in the way that Marxism was. Mussolini was explicit about this: the Fascist doctrine, he wrote, was not a prior theory but an action that created its theory in the act of pursuing it. What held the movement together was not a program but a set of attitudes: contempt for parliamentary democracy, cult of violence and action, nationalism, and the glorification of the leader.

This vagueness was actually a political asset. It allowed the movement to attract people with very different specific goals: syndicalists, nationalists, veterans, anti-communists, futurists. It allowed Mussolini to reposition on policy questions without undermining the movement's core identity. The core identity was not about specific policies; it was about a style of politics that valued strength, decisiveness, and the rejection of liberal constraints.

The March on Rome is now remembered as a founding myth of the Fascist movement, a revolutionary seizure of power. The historical reality is that it was a negotiated installation, enabled by people who thought they were getting a manageable nationalist politician and got something else. That gap between expectation and reality is worth keeping in mind whenever a political movement that uses violence and contempt for norms is described as a useful check on the left.