Mussolini Launches Fascism: Italy's Dark Shift Begins

Benito Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan on March 23, 1919, at a meeting in the Piazza San Sepolcro attended by approximately 200 people. The gathering included war veterans, nationalists, futurists, former socialists, and disaffected members of various radical movements. Within three years, this fringe organization would seize control of Italy and establish the first fascist regime in European history. Born in Predappio, Romagna on July 29, 1883, Mussolini was the son of a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. He was a socialist journalist and agitator before World War I, editing the socialist newspaper Avanti! He was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party in 1914 for supporting Italy's entry into the war. He served in the Italian army and was wounded. The movement he founded in 1919 was initially eclectic and contradictory: anti-capitalist and anti-communist, nationalist and revolutionary, modernist and violent. Its early members wore black shirts and formed squads (squadristi) that attacked socialist and communist organizations, trade unions, and cooperative societies, particularly in the agricultural regions of the Po Valley. Local landowners and industrialists tolerated or funded the violence because it targeted their political enemies. The March on Rome in October 1922 was less a military conquest than a political performance. Mussolini's Blackshirts gathered outside the capital while Mussolini himself waited in Milan. King Victor Emmanuel III, fearing civil war and doubting the army's willingness to resist, refused to sign a declaration of martial law and instead invited Mussolini to form a government. Mussolini arrived by train. He spent the next three years consolidating power, converting Italy from a parliamentary democracy into a one-party dictatorship. He abolished opposition parties, controlled the press, and built a cult of personality around himself as Il Duce (The Leader). The regime he created became the template for authoritarian movements worldwide. Hitler admired and studied Mussolini's methods. Franco, Salazar, and Peron adapted elements of the fascist model to their own countries.