Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea (1883–1945)

Fascist leaders Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini inspect damage to Hitler's headquarters after an assassination attempt in 1944. Mussolini had hoped to limit Italy's participation in World War II to the Mediterranean area, but was forced by the more powerful Hitler to send his armies to defeat in Russia.

Italian dictator 1925–43. As founder of the Fascist Movement (see fascism) in 1919 and prime minister from 1922, he became known as Il Duce (‘the leader’). He invaded Ethiopia 1935–36, intervened in the Spanish Civil War 1936–39 in support of Franco, and conquered Albania in 1939. In June 1940 Italy entered World War II supporting Hitler. Forced by military and domestic setbacks to resign in 1943, Mussolini established a breakaway government in northern Italy 1944–45, but was killed trying to flee the country.

Mussolini was born in the Romagna, the son of a blacksmith, and worked in early life as a teacher and journalist. He became active in the socialist movement, notably as editor of the party newspaper Avanti 1912–14. He was expelled in 1914 for advocating Italian intervention in World War I. He served in the army 1915–17, and in 1919 founded the Fascist Movement, whose programme combined violent nationalism with demagogic republican and anti-capitalist slogans, and launched a campaign of terrorism against the socialists. Though anti-capitalist in origin, the movement was backed by agrarian and industrial elites in the context of post-war popular unrest. In October 1922 Mussolini came to power by semi-constitutional means as prime minister at the head of a coalition government. In 1925 he assumed dictatorial powers, and in 1926 all opposition parties were banned. During the years that followed, the political, legal, and education systems were remodelled on fascist lines. Fascism prefigured other ‘totalitarian’ regimes, in that it aspired to be an all-embracing ideology, but Mussolini faced constraints on his power – from monarch, church, and industrial elites – which had no real parallel in Hitler's Germany.

Mussolini's Blackshirt followers were the forerunners of Hitler's Brownshirts, and his career of conquest drew him into close cooperation with Nazi Germany. Italy and Germany formed the Axis alliance in 1936. During World War II Italian defeats in North Africa and Greece, the Allied invasion of Sicily, and discontent at home destroyed Mussolini's prestige, and in July 1943 he was compelled to resign by his own Fascist Grand Council. He was released from prison by German parachutists in September 1943 and set up a ‘Republican Fascist’ government in northern Italy. In April 1945 he and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were captured by partisans at Lake Como while heading for the Swiss border, and shot. Their bodies were taken to Milan and hung upside down in a public square.