Britannica

Benito Mussolini, in full Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, byname Il Duce (Italian: “The Leader”) (born July 29, 1883, Predappio, Italy—died April 28, 1945, near Dongo), Italian prime minister (1922–43) and the first of 20th-century Europe’s fascist dictators.

Early life

Mussolini was the first child of the local blacksmith. In later years he expressed pride in his humble origins and often spoke of himself as a “man of the people.” The Mussolini family was, in fact, less humble than he claimed—his father, a part-time socialist journalist as well as a blacksmith, was the son of a lieutenant in the National Guard, and his mother was a schoolteacher—but the Mussolinis were certainly poor. They lived in two crowded rooms on the second floor of a small, decrepit palazzo; and, because Mussolini’s father spent much of his time discussing politics in taverns and most of his money on his mistress, the meals that his three children ate were often meagre.

A restless child, Mussolini was disobedient, unruly, and aggressive. He was a bully at school and moody at home. Because the teachers at the village school could not control him, he was sent to board with the strict Salesian order at Faenza, where he proved himself more troublesome than ever, stabbing a fellow pupil with a penknife and attacking one of the Salesians who had attempted to beat him. He was expelled and sent to the Giosuè Carducci School at Forlimpopoli, from which he was also expelled after assaulting yet another pupil with his penknife.

He was also intelligent, and he passed his final examinations without difficulty. He obtained a teaching diploma and for a time worked as a schoolmaster but soon realized that he was totally unsuited for such work. At the age of 19, a short, pale young man with a powerful jaw and enormous, dark, piercing eyes, he left Italy for Switzerland with a nickel medallion of Karl Marx in his otherwise empty pockets. For the next few months, according to his own account, he lived from day to day, jumping from job to job.

At the same time, however, he was gaining a reputation as a young man of strange magnetism and remarkable rhetorical talents. He read widely and voraciously, if not deeply, plunging into the philosophers and theorists Immanuel Kant, Benedict de Spinoza, Peter Kropotkin, Friedrich Nietzsche, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Kautsky, and Georges Sorel, picking out what appealed to him and discarding the rest, forming no coherent political philosophy of his own yet impressing his companions as a potential revolutionary of uncommon personality and striking presence. While earning a reputation as a political journalist and public speaker, he produced propaganda for a trade union, proposing a strike and advocating violence as a means of enforcing demands. Repeatedly, he called for a day of vengeance. More than once he was arrested and imprisoned. When he returned to Italy in 1904, even the Roman newspapers had started to mention his name.

For some time after his return little was heard of him. He once more became a schoolmaster, this time in the Venetian Alps, north of Udine, where he lived, so he confessed, a life of “moral deterioration.” But soon tiring of so wasteful a life, he returned to trade-union work, to journalism, and to extreme politics, which led yet again to arrest and imprisonment.

During a period of freedom in 1909, he fell in love with 16-year-old Rachele Guidi, the younger of the two daughters of his father’s widowed mistress; she went to live with him in a damp, cramped apartment in Forlì and later married him. Soon after the marriage, Mussolini was imprisoned for the fifth time; but by then Comrade Mussolini had become recognized as one of the most gifted and dangerous of Italy’s younger socialists. After writing in a wide variety of socialist papers, he founded a newspaper of his own, La Lotta di Classe (“The Class Struggle”). So successful was this paper that in 1912 he was appointed editor of the official Socialist newspaper, Avanti! (“Forward!”), whose circulation he soon doubled; and as its antimilitarist, antinationalist, and anti-imperialist editor, he thunderously opposed Italy’s intervention in World War I.

Soon, however, he changed his mind about intervention. Swayed by Karl Marx’s aphorism that social revolution usually follows war and persuaded that “the defeat of France would be a deathblow to liberty in Europe,” he began writing articles and making speeches as violently in favour of war as those in which he previously had condemned it. He resigned from Avanti! and was expelled from the Socialist Party. Financed by the French government and Italian industrialists, both of whom favoured war against Austria, he assumed the editorship of Il Popolo d’Italia (“The People of Italy”), in which he unequivocally stated his new philosophy: “From today onward we are all Italians and nothing but Italians. Now that steel has met steel, one single cry comes from our hearts—Viva l’Italia! [Long live Italy!]” It was the birth cry of fascism. Mussolini went to fight in the war.

Rise to power

Wounded while serving with the bersaglieri (a corps of sharpshooters), he returned home a convinced antisocialist and a man with a sense of destiny. As early as February 1918, he advocated the emergence of a dictator—“a man who is ruthless and energetic enough to make a clean sweep”—to confront the economic and political crisis then gripping Italy. Three months later, in a widely reported speech in Bologna, he hinted that he himself might prove to be such a man. The following year the nucleus of a party prepared to support his ambitious idea was formed in Milan. In an office in Piazza San Sepolcro, about 200 assorted republicans, anarchists, syndicalists, discontented socialists, restless revolutionaries, and discharged soldiers met to discuss the establishment of a new force in Italian politics. Mussolini called this force the fasci di combattimento (“fighting bands”), groups of fighters bound together by ties as close as those that secured the fasces of the lictors—the symbols of ancient Roman authority. So fascism was created and its symbol devised.

At rallies—surrounded by supporters wearing black shirts—Mussolini caught the imagination of the crowds. His physique was impressive, and his style of oratory, staccato and repetitive, was superb. His attitudes were highly theatrical, his opinions were contradictory, his facts were often wrong, and his attacks were frequently malicious and misdirected; but his words were so dramatic, his metaphors so apt and striking, his vigorous, repetitive gestures so extraordinarily effective, that he rarely failed to impose his mood.

Fascist squads, militias inspired by Mussolini but often created by local leaders, swept through the countryside of the Po Valley and the Puglian plains, rounded up Socialists, burned down union and party offices, and terrorized the local population. Hundreds of radicals were humiliated, beaten, or killed. In late 1920, the Blackshirt squads, often with the direct help of landowners, began to attack local government institutions and prevent left-wing administrations from taking power. Mussolini encouraged the squads—although he soon tried to control them—and organized similar raids in and around Milan. By late 1921, the Fascists controlled large parts of Italy, and the left, in part because of its failures during the postwar years, had all but collapsed. The government, dominated by middle-class Liberals, did little to combat this lawlessness, both through weak political will and a desire to see the mainly working-class left defeated. As the Fascist movement built a broad base of support around the powerful ideas of nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, Mussolini began planning to seize power at the national level.

In the summer of 1922, Mussolini’s opportunity presented itself. The remnants of the trade-union movement called a general strike. Mussolini declared that unless the government prevented the strike, the Fascists would. Fascist volunteers, in fact, helped to defeat the strike and thus advanced the Fascist claim to power. At a gathering of 40,000 Fascists in Naples on October 24, Mussolini threatened, “Either the government will be given to us, or we will seize it by marching on Rome.” Responding to his oratory the assembled Fascists excitedly took up the cry, shouting in unison “Roma! Roma! Roma!” All appeared eager to march.

Later that day, Mussolini and other leading Fascists decided that four days later the Fascist militia would advance on Rome in converging columns led by four leading party members later to be known as the Quadrumviri. Mussolini himself was not one of the four.

He was still hoping for a political compromise, and he refused to move before King Victor Emmanuel III summoned him in writing. Meanwhile, all over Italy the Fascists prepared for action, and the March on Rome began. Although it was far less orderly than Fascist propaganda later suggested, it was sufficiently threatening to bring down the government. And the king, prepared to accept the Fascist alternative, dispatched the telegram for which Mussolini had been waiting.

Mussolini was hailed as a genius and a superman by public figures worldwide. His achievements were considered little less than miraculous. He had transformed and reinvigorated his divided and demoralized country; he had carried out his social reforms and public works without losing the support of the industrialists and landowners; he had even succeeded in coming to terms with the papacy. The reality, however, was far less rosy than the propaganda made it appear. Social divisions remained enormous, and little was done to address the deep-rooted structural problems of the Italian state and economy.

Mussolini might have remained a hero until his death had not his callous xenophobia and arrogance, his misapprehension of Italy’s fundamental necessities, and his dreams of empire led him to seek foreign conquests. His eye rested first upon Ethiopia, which, after 10 months of preparations, rumours, threats, and hesitations, Italy invaded in October 1935. A brutal campaign of colonial conquest followed, in which the Italians dropped tons of gas bombs upon the Ethiopian people. Europe expressed its horror; but, having done so, did no more. The League of Nations imposed sanctions but ensured that the list of prohibited exports did not include any, such as oil, that might provoke a European war. If the League had imposed oil sanctions, Mussolini said, he would have had to withdraw from Ethiopia within a week. But he faced no such problem, and on the night of May 9, 1936, he announced to an enormous, expectant crowd of about 400,000 people standing shoulder to shoulder around Piazza Venezia in Rome that “in the 14th year of the Fascist era” a great event had been accomplished: Italy had its empire. This moment probably marked the peak of public support for the regime.

Italy had also found a new ally. Intent upon his own imperial ambitions in Austria, Adolf Hitler had actively encouraged Mussolini’s African adventure, and under Hitler’s guidance Germany had been the one powerful country in western Europe that had not turned against Mussolini. The way was now open for the Pact of Steel—a Rome-Berlin Axis and a brutal alliance between Hitler and Mussolini that was to ruin them both. In 1938, following the German example, Mussolini’s government passed anti-Semitic laws in Italy that discriminated against Jews in all sectors of public and private life and prepared the way for the deportation of some 20 percent of Italy’s Jews to German death camps during the war.

Role in World War II

While Mussolini understood that peace was essential to Italy’s well-being, that a long war might prove disastrous, and that he must not “march blindly with the Germans,” he was beset by concerns that the Germans “might do good business cheaply” and that by not intervening on their side in World War II he would lose his “part of the booty.” His foreign secretary and son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano, recorded that during a long, inconclusive discussion at the Palazzo Venezia, Mussolini at first agreed that Italy must not go to war, “then he said that honour compelled him to march with Germany.”

Mussolini watched the progress of Hitler’s war with bitterness and alarm, becoming more and more bellicose with each fresh German victory, while frequently expressing hope that the Germans would be slowed down or would meet with some reverse that would satisfy his personal envy and give Italy breathing space. When Germany advanced westward, however, and France seemed on the verge of collapse, Mussolini felt he could delay no longer. So, on June 10, 1940, the fateful declaration of war was made.

From the beginning the war went badly for Italy, and Mussolini’s opportunistic hopes for a quick victory soon dissolved. France surrendered before there was an opportunity for even a token Italian victory, and Mussolini left for a meeting with Hitler, sadly aware, as Ciano put it, that his opinion had “only a consultative value.” Indeed, from then on Mussolini was obliged to face the fact that he was the junior partner in the Axis alliance. The Germans kept the details of most of their military plans concealed, presenting their allies with a fait accompli for fear that prior discussion would destroy surprise. And thus the Germans made such moves as the occupation of Romania and the later invasion of the Soviet Union without any advance notice to Mussolini.

It was to “pay back Hitler in his own coin,” as Mussolini openly admitted, that he decided to attack Greece through Albania in 1940 without informing the Germans. The result was an extensive and ignominious defeat, and the Germans were forced unwillingly to extricate him from its consequences. The 1941 campaign to support the German invasion of the Soviet Union also failed disastrously and condemned thousands of ill-equipped Italian troops to a nightmarish winter retreat. Hitler had to come to his ally’s help once again in North Africa. After the Italian surrender in North Africa in 1943, the Germans began to take precautions against a likely Italian collapse. Mussolini had grossly exaggerated the extent of public support for his regime and for the war. When the Western Allies successfully invaded Sicily in July 1943, it was obvious that collapse was imminent.

For some time Italian Fascists and non-Fascists alike had been preparing Mussolini’s downfall. On July 24, at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council—the supreme constitutional authority of the state, which had not met once since the war began—an overwhelming majority passed a resolution that in effect dismissed Mussolini from office. Disregarding the vote as a matter of little concern and refusing to admit that his minions could harm him, Mussolini appeared at his office the next morning as though nothing had happened. That afternoon, however, he was arrested by royal command on the steps of the Villa Savoia after an audience with the king.

Imprisoned first on the island of Ponza, then on a remoter island off the coast of Sardinia, he was eventually transported to a hotel high on the Gran Sasso d’Italia in the mountains of Abruzzi, from which his rescue by the Germans was deemed impossible. Nevertheless, by crash-landing gliders on the slopes behind the hotel, German commandos on September 12, 1943, effected his escape by air to Munich.

Rather than allow the Germans to occupy and govern Italy entirely in their own interests, Mussolini agreed to Hitler’s suggestion that he establish a new Fascist government in the north and execute those members of the Grand Council, including his son-in-law, Ciano, who had dared to vote against him. But the Repubblica Sociale Italiana thus established at Salò was, as Mussolini himself grimly admitted to visitors, no more than a puppet government at the mercy of the German command. And there, living in dreams and “thinking only of history and how he would appear in it,” as one of his ministers said, Mussolini awaited the inevitable end. Meanwhile, Italian Fascists maintained their alliance with the Germans and participated in deportations, the torture of suspected partisans, and the war against the Allies.

As German defenses in Italy collapsed and the Allies advanced rapidly northward, the Italian Communists of the partisan leadership decided to execute Mussolini. Rejecting the advice of various advisers, including the elder of his two surviving sons—his second son had been killed in the war—Mussolini refused to consider flying out of the country, and he made for the Valtellina, intending perhaps to make a final stand in the mountains; but only a handful of men could be found to follow him. He tried to cross the frontier disguised as a German soldier in a convoy of trucks retreating toward Innsbruck, in Austria. But he was recognized and, together with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, who had insisted on remaining with him to the end, he was shot and killed on April 28, 1945. Their bodies were hung, head downward, in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. Huge jubilant crowds celebrated the fall of the dictator and the end of the war.

The great mass of the Italian people greeted Mussolini’s death without regret. He had lived beyond his time and had dragged his country into a disastrous war, which it was unwilling and unready to fight. Democracy was restored in the country after 20 years of dictatorship, and a neo-Fascist Party that carried on Mussolini’s ideals won only 2 percent of the vote in the 1948 elections.

Christopher Hibbert
  La Rousse.fr
 

Benito Mussolini

Sapere.it
 

Mussolini, Benito

La formazione e le prime esperienze politiche

Uomo politico italiano (Dovia di Predappio, Forlì, 1883-Giulino di Mezzegra, Como, 1945) . Figlio di Alessandro, fabbro ferraio, e di Rosa Maltoni, maestra elementare, visse un'infanzia modesta. Studiò nel collegio salesiano di Faenza (1892-93) e poi nel collegio Carducci di Forlimpopoli, conseguendo nel 1901 il diploma di maestro elementare. Iscrittosi al Partito Socialista Italiano sin dal 1900, mostrò subito un acceso interesse per la politica attiva stimolato tra l'altro dall'esempio del padre, esponente di un certo rilievo del socialismo anarcoide e violentemente anticlericale di Romagna. Emigrato in Svizzera (1902) per sottrarsi al servizio militare, entrò in rapporto con G. M. Serrati, A. Balabanov e altri rivoluzionari, ponendo contemporaneamente le basi della propria cultura politica, in cui si mescolavano contraddittoriamente gli influssi di Marx, Proudhon e Blanqui insieme a quelli di Nietzsche e Pareto. Ripetutamente espulso da un cantone all'altro per il suo esasperato attivismo anticlericale e antimilitarista, rientrò in Italia nel 1904 approfittando di un'amnistia che gli permise di sottrarsi alla pena prevista per la renitenza alla leva e compì il servizio militare nel reggimento bersaglieri di stanza a Verona. Dopo aver insegnato qualche tempo a Tolmezzo e a Oneglia (1908), dove collaborò attivamente al periodico socialista La lima, tornò a Dovia. Imprigionato per 12 giorni per aver capeggiato uno sciopero di braccianti, ricoprì quindi la carica di segretario della Camera del Lavoro di Trento (1909) e diresse il quotidiano L'avventura del lavoratore. Presto in urto con gli ambienti moderati e cattolici, dopo sei mesi di frenetica attività propagandistica, non priva di successo, fu espulso anche da qui tra le proteste dei socialisti trentini, suscitando una vasta eco in tutta la sinistra italiana. Tornato a Forlì, Mussolini si unì, senza vincoli matrimoniali né civili né religiosi, con Rachele Guidi, la figlia della nuova compagna del padre e da essa ebbe, nel settembre 1910, la prima figlia Edda (Vittorio sarebbe nato nel 1916, Bruno nel 1918, Romano nel 1927, Anna Maria nel 1929, mentre nel 1915 sarebbe stato celebrato il matrimonio civile e nel 1925 quello religioso). Contemporaneamente la federazione socialista forlivese gli offriva la direzione del nuovo settimanale Lotta di classe e lo nominava proprio segretario. Nei tre anni in cui conservò tali incarichi, Mussolini dette al socialismo romagnolo una sua impronta precisa, fondata su istanze rivoluzionarie e volontaristiche, ben lontane dalla tradizione razionale e positivista del marxismo così come era interpretato dagli uomini più rappresentativi del PSI. Dopo il congresso socialista di Milano dell'ottobre 1910 ancora dominato dai riformisti, Mussolini pensò di scuotere la minoranza massimalista, anche a rischio di spaccare il partito, provocando l'uscita dal PSI della federazione socialista forlivese, ma nessun altro lo seguì nell'iniziativa.

L'impatto sulle grandi masse

Quando sopraggiunse la guerra di Libia a mutare i rapporti di forza tra le correnti del socialismo italiano, Mussolini (che del resto era stato condannato a un anno, poi ridotto a cinque mesi e mezzo, di reclusione per le manifestazioni organizzate in Romagna contro la guerra in Africa) apparve come l'uomo più adatto a impersonare il rinnovamento ideale e politico del partito. Protagonista del congresso di Reggio nell'Emilia, assunta la direzione dell'Avanti! alla fine del 1912, Mussolini diventò l'ascoltato portavoce di tutte le insoddisfazioni e le frustrazioni di una società caduta in una crisi economica e ideale, trascinando masse sempre più vaste verso esplosioni insurrezionali senza chiare prospettive, che culminarono nella “settimana rossa” del giugno 1914. Lo scoppio del conflitto mondiale trovò il direttore dell'Avanti! allineato sulle posizioni ufficiali del partito, di radicale neutralismo. Nel giro di qualche mese, tuttavia, in Mussolini maturò il convincimento – comune ad altri settori dell'“estremismo” di sinistra – che l'opposizione alla guerra avrebbe finito per trascinare il PSI a un ruolo sterile e marginale, mentre sarebbe stato opportuno sfruttare l'occasione offerta da questo sconvolgimento internazionale per far percorrere alle masse quella via verso il rinnovamento rivoluzionario dimostratasi altrimenti impossibile. Dimessosi perciò dalla direzione dell'organo socialista il 20 ottobre, due giorni dopo la pubblicazione di un articolo dal titolo chiaramente indicatore del suo mutato programma, Dalla neutralità assoluta alla neutralità attiva ed operante, Mussolini pensò di realizzare un suo quotidiano. Il 15 novembre pertanto, accettando disinvoltamente l'aiuto di un gruppo di finanziatori facenti capo a Filippo Naldi, pubblicò Il Popolo d'Italia, ultranazionalista, radicalmente schierato su posizioni interventiste a fianco dell'Intesa e in grado di conseguire immediatamente un clamoroso successo di vendite. Espulso di conseguenza dal PSI (24-29 novembre 1914) e richiamato alle armi (agosto 1915), dopo essere stato seriamente ferito durante un'esercitazione (febbraio 1917) Mussolini poté ritornare alla direzione del suo giornale, dalle colonne del quale, tra Caporetto e i primi mesi del 1918, ruppe gli ultimi legami ideologici con l'originaria matrice socialista, in nome di un superamento dei tradizionali antagonismi di classe, prospettando l'attuazione di una società produttivistico-capitalistica capace di soddisfare le legittime aspirazioni economiche di tutti i ceti. Con la fine della guerra, le fortune di Mussolini parvero però fatalmente destinate a tramontare.

Il fascismo

La fondazione dei fasci di combattimento avvenuta a Milano il 23 marzo 1919, benché facesse appello alle simpatie di elementi quanto mai eterogenei e si basasse su un ambiguo programma mescolante in modo spregiudicato istanze radicali di sinistra e fermenti di acceso nazionalismo, non ebbe inizialmente successo. Tuttavia, man mano che la situazione italiana si andava deteriorando e il fascismo si caratterizzava come forza organizzata in funzione antisocialista e antisindacale, Mussolini otteneva crescenti adesioni e favori da agrari e industriali e quindi dai ceti medi. Ottenuto l'incarico di formare un governo dopo la cosiddetta “marcia su Roma” dell'ottobre 1922, costituì un gabinetto di larga coalizione che lasciò sperare a molti nell'avvento dell'attesa “normalizzazione”. Consolidato ulteriormente il potere dopo le elezioni del 1924, Mussolini fu messo per un momento in grave difficoltà dall'assassinio del deputato socialista G. Matteotti. Il discorso del 3 gennaio 1925 con cui egli rivendicò spavaldamente a sé ogni responsabilità politica e morale dell'accaduto segnò però la sua controffensiva e la pratica liquidazione del vecchio Stato liberale. Alla fine di quello stesso anno Mussolini fu fatto oggetto di una serie di attentati. Il primo fu ideato (novembre 1925) dal socialista e massone T. Zaniboni, ma le spie dell'OVRA (Opera di Vigilanza e di Repressione dell'Antifascismo) sventarono tempestivamente la minaccia. Il 7 aprile 1926 un'anziana signora irlandese, Violet Gibson, definita poi una squilibrata, sparò a Mussolini durante una cerimonia al Campidoglio, ma il proiettile gli sfiorò appena il volto. Nel settembre dello stesso anno l'anarchico G. Lucetti lanciò una bomba contro l'auto del capo del fascismo; l'ordigno scivolò sul tetto della vettura ed esplose a terra ferendo lievemente soltanto un passante. Sempre in quell'anno, nell'ottobre, un altro attentato fu attribuito a un giovane (Anteo Zamboni) che avrebbe sparato, senza successo, sfiorando appena il bersaglio, e che fu subito dopo pugnalato a morte dai legionari fascisti. Mussolini si salvò da altri due attentati progettati e non eseguiti per ingenuità o per mancanza di determinazione nel 1931 e nel 1932 rispettivamente dagli anarchici Schirru e Sbardellotto, che furono condannati a morte solo perché avevano avuto l'intenzione di commettere il reato. Nonostante l'affermazione d'un regime ostentatamente dittatoriale, Mussolini seppe però conservare e accrescere la sua popolarità sfruttando abilmente alcune iniziative genericamente populistiche e successi di rilievo come la composizione dell'annoso capitolo della cosiddetta questione romana e realizzando attraverso i Patti Lateranensi del 1929 la conciliazione fra lo Stato italiano e la Santa Sede. Un'incessante e soffocante propaganda cominciò così a esaltare in maniera spesso grottesca le doti di “genio” del “duce supremo” (il titolo dux fu attribuito a Mussolini dopo la marcia su Roma), trasfigurandone la personalità in una sorta di semidio “insonne” che aveva “sempre ragione” ed era l'unico in grado di interpretare i destini della patria. Perduta però in tal modo la dimensione del reale, ossia il contatto diretto con i problemi quotidiani da affrontare con tattica spregiudicata – nella quale era maestro – ed erettosi a protagonista della scena internazionale, Mussolini rivelò drammaticamente i suoi limiti di capo di Stato incapace di lungimiranti e ferme decisioni, di una strategia a lungo termine non legata agli eventi contingenti. In politica estera, desiderando rinnovare la potenza e il prestigio della nazione in uno strano miscuglio di cauto realismo imperialistico e di letterario culto della romanità, tenne una condotta a lungo incerta e contraddittoria. Dopo lo sconcertante episodio di Corfù occupata dalle truppe italiane nel 1923 e la decisa presa di posizione contro la minaccia tedesca di annessione dell'Austria, cui fece seguito il Convegno di Stresa con Francia e Gran Bretagna (1935) che parve delineare un comune fronte antihitleriano, Mussolini si gettò nella conquista dell'Etiopia: il 3 ottobre 1935 le truppe italiane varcarono il confine con l'Abissinia e il 9 maggio 1936 Mussolini annunciò la fine della guerra e la nascita dell'Impero italiano d'Etiopia. L'impresa, se da un lato segnò il punto più alto della sua popolarità in patria, dall'altro lo inimicò con la Gran Bretagna, la Francia e la Società delle Nazioni, costringendolo a un lento ma fatale avvicinamento alla Germania, con la quale nel 1939 firmò il “patto d'acciaio” legandosi definitivamente a essa. Nel 1940 Mussolini scelse di entrare in guerra benché impreparato e contro le idee dei suoi più vicini collaboratori (Badoglio, Grandi, Ciano), assumendo il comando supremo delle truppe operanti nell'illusione di un veloce e facile trionfo. In realtà ottenne solo insuccessi che ridiedero spazio a tutte le energie contrarie al fascismo precedentemente represse: fino a che, dopo l'invasione anglo-americana della Sicilia e il suo ultimo colloquio con Hitler (19 luglio 1943), fu sconfessato da un voto del Gran Consiglio (24 luglio) e fatto arrestare dal re Vittorio Emanuele III (25 luglio). Trasferito a Ponza, poi alla Maddalena e infine a Campo Imperatore sul Gran Sasso, il 12 settembre fu liberato dai paracadutisti tedeschi di Otto Skorzeny e portato in Germania, da dove il 15 proclamò la ricostituzione del Partito Fascista Repubblicano. Ormai stanco e malato e in completa balia delle decisioni di Hitler, si insediò quindi a Salò, capitale della nuova Repubblica Sociale Italiana (fondata il 23 settembre 1943), inutilmente cercando di far rivivere le parole d'ordine del fascismo della “prima ora”. Sempre più isolato e privo di credibilità, quando le ultime resistenze tedesche in Italia furono fiaccate Mussolini, trasferitosi a Milano, propose ai capi del CLNAI (Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia) un assurdo passaggio di poteri, che fu respinto. Travestito da militare tedesco, tentò allora, insieme alla compagna Claretta Petacci, la fuga verso la Valtellina. Riconosciuto a Dongo dai partigiani, fu arrestato e il 28 aprile 1945 giustiziato per ordine del CLN presso Giulino di Mezzegra. Tra gli scritti di Mussolini figurano, nell'ordine di comparizione: La mia vita (1911-12), Giovanni Huss il veridico (1913), Vita di Arnaldo (1932), Scritti e discorsi (1934-40, 13 vol.), Parlo con Bruno (1941).