Inventing fascism : Benito Mussolini and the Great War 1914-1919

Abstract

The thesis analyses the writings and speeches of Benito Mussolini in the First World War and in the winter and spring following the armistice. It seeks to locate Mussolini's position in relation to the State's reluctance to effect a broad political and cultural mobilisation of the population for the war, and explores the extent to which his responses to this failure represented the incubus of fascism. The thesis attempts to identify the social, political, military and cultural influences on Mussolini as he endeavoured, through his writings and speeches, to mythologize himself as the charismatic fulcrum of a new form of political legitimacy. The thesis challenges longstanding historiographical assumptions concerning Mussolini's political culture before, during and after the war. It argues that far from representing a means to bring on revolution, the war provided a catalyst for a clarification of deep-rooted nationalist, imperialist and anti-socialist tendencies to which Mussolini inclined even before 1914. The myth of the Great War as the founding event of fascism and the kernel of the regime’s cosmos of cultural representations is not to be viewed solely as an illicit exploitation of an experience to which fascism was extraneous. Rather, while fascism's ascension to government in the post-war period cannot be viewed as inevitable, neither can the significance of the chronological proximity between the war and the fascist seizure of power be ignored. Fascism could emerge as an option to the post-war crisis of State authority, and could come to government and consolidate power by using, amongst other things, a composite system of war myths — intervention, victory and the fallen soldier — combined with 'Mazzinianism', all of whose substantial meaning had been determined by Benito Mussolini during the conflict. The thesis argues that the future Duce achieved this in the conditions of a failed political and cultural mobilisation from above and, between February and October 1917, and more importantly again after Italy's defeat at Caporetto, of a middle class 'self-remobilization' from below.