Yahoo News On this day in 1919: Mussolini founds his radical Party and modern Facism is born
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was the first twentieth-century fascist dictator in Europe.
He was born on 29 July 1883 in Predappio, Emilia-Romagna. His early life was troubled, with expulsions from two schools for stabbing others with a penknife. After teaching for a while, he left for Switzerland aged 19, carrying little but a medallion of his hero, Karl Marx.
He read voraciously and spoke magnetically, although with no clear ideology. He got work as a journalist, and wrote propaganda for trade unions, whose strikes he believed should be violent. Following imprisonment, he returned to Italy in 1904.
After another failed attempt at school mastering, he carried on with political journalism, and was again imprisoned on several occasions.
In 1910 he founded his own radical socialist paper, La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle), before being appointed editor of the official socialist paper, Avanti!, in 1912. He doubled its circulation.
After initially opposing Italy’s entry into World War One, he changed tack and supported it, based on Marx’s statement that revolution often follows war. As a result of his new views, he soon lost his job, and was expelled from the socialist party. Taking over the helm of another paper, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy), his philosophy became Viva l’Italia!, and he soon enrolled to fight.
He was wounded in 1917, and came home again. His times away had changed his outlook radically. He was now firmly anti -socialism and in favour of the Italian role in the war. For a period, as a journalist, he drew a salary from MI5 to keep up Italian morale for the war. But he had bigger ambitions. He wanted to see Italy ruled by a dictator: a man who would be energetic and ruthless. At a speech in Bologna, he put himself forward.
The following year, in Milan, he assembled the nucleus of a party. Around 200 disenfranchised activists, ranging from disillusioned socialists to anarchists and revolutionaries, met near the Piazza San Sepolcro. Mussolini constituted them as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (The Italian Fighting Squad), a group which would be bound together as tightly as the ancient lictors’ fasces.
With their black shirts and ultra-nationalist message of Italia!, they struck a chord. As did Mussolini, who was physically imposing, charismatic, and a highly effective public speaker. Although his facts were often wrong, his views contradictory, his diatribes repetitive, and his tone malicious, the overall effect proved seductive in presenting him as the only man who could turn Italy’s fortunes around.
Twentieth-century Fascism was born.
