Benito Mussolini, the quintessential fascist dictator, achieved power by legal means. He did not need a revolution like Lenin, or an army revolt like Franco, or the usual coups and murders that have cleared the way for other tyrants. He, the inexperienced leader of a small political party, became prime minister in 1922 on the invitation of Victor Emmanuel, the third king of united Italy.

Mussolini was a strange person. Just as he wanted people to think him more brutal than he actually was, so he liked to claim that he had seized power rather than received it, that the fascists’ so-called “march on Rome” had forced the Italian establishment to accept the inevitability of fascist government. But the claim was untrue. His motley squads of ill-armed fascists could easily have been disbanded by the army, just as their leader, who “marched” by train from Milan, could have been stopped by the police and sent home. As Donald Sassoon argues in this convincing and well-written book, the fascists came to power because it suited the Italian establishment at that moment.

The liberal philosopher Benedetto Croce claimed that fascism was merely a parenthesis in Italian history, an aberration in the country’s constitutional progress. But Giovanni Gentile, a rival intellectual, was closer to the mark when he described fascism as “the child of the Risorgimento”. It was the product of decades of political failure stretching back to the unification of Italy in 1859-60.

For half a century, united Italy had had politicians but no political parties, no groups defined and united by ideology and electoral programmes. Sassoon, a professor of comparative history, usefully points out that, while in Britain the “prime minister was powerful because he was the leader of the largest party”, in Italy he was powerful “only because he could distribute favours”. A new and narrow political class of nominal liberals was despised by its constituents, especially by Catholics and socialists, who felt excluded from the political process.

Italian politicians had no answers to the crisis of 1919-22. They had tried to build a nation by exalting patriotism and colonial conquest, and later by demanding large territories of the defeated Hapsburg empire. But they did not know how to deal with the postwar spread of socialism in northern Italy. As they dithered, landowners recruited bands of enthusiastic fascists who, aided by the police, went on the rampage, violently and systematically wrecking the offices, the cooperatives and the rest of the socialist-party apparatus in the Po valley.

The leaders of the left were also to blame. As the largest party in the 1919 parliament, the socialists should have tried to form a coalition with other forces, but they were too busy being intransigent to be responsible, preferring to guard their ideological purity and expel their own moderates. As the socialists divided into three separate parties, the right united against a revolutionary threat that appeared more dangerous than it was.

The crucial mistake was made by Giovanni Giolitti, the greatest figure of Italian liberalism since Cavour. Giolitti had traditionally tried to disarm his opponents by going halfway to meet them, trying to accommodate their views and sympathising with their anxieties. In 1921, during his fifth term as prime minister, he included Mussolini and the fascists in his electoral list, allowing them to win 35 of the 535 parliamentary seats. The party’s candidates, he believed, would be like “fireworks. They will make a lot of noise but will leave nothing behind except smoke”.

Giolitti got it wrong, but so did almost everyone else from the old political establishment. It suited Mussolini to claim later that he had made a clean break, just as it suited his successors to agree with him. (In fact, the real break in Italian politics came not in 1922 but in 1946, when the country became dominated by large, non-nationalist parties, Catholic and marxist.) When the king invited Mussolini to form a government in October 1922, few believed his action would result in a dictatorship. As the author perceptively points out, “Mussolini’s assigned role was to cleanse the country of the red menace and then turn himself into a figurehead. The old establishment would rule in the shadows, as it had always done.” In the event, the king became the figurehead, the establishment became powerless.

Sassoon limits himself to the issue of fascism’s rise to power, which he explains well, but another book might ask how Mussolini stayed in office, a puzzle which even his finest biographer, Denis Mack Smith, found difficult to explain. The fascist leader had got to the top largely by letting other people make mistakes, but afterwards the errors were almost invariably his own. For two decades he headed a regime that was an economic failure, a political absurdity and a military embarrassment, yet it took three years of consistent defeats in the second world war before he was removed.

MUSSOLINI AND THE RISE OF FASCISM by Donald Sassoon
Harper Press £14.99 pp187

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