Benito Mussolini
Italian Fascist dictator 1922–1943
Also known as: Mussolini, Il Duce
Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) ruled Italy as Fascist dictator from the 1922 March on Rome until his deposition in 1943. Quigley uses him as the canonical example of the corporate-state response to the inter-war economic crisis, and stages him recurrently in the Hoare–Laval Pact, Ethiopia, and naval-rivalry chapters of Tragedy and Hope.
Rise and consolidation
Quigley traces Mussolini's transformation from "a rabid Socialist who had been a pacifist leader in the Tripolitan war of 1911" and editor of Avanti to interventionist agitator funded by Entente money in 1915, and finally to the head of a "counterrevolution" that "brought Mussolini to power in October 1922" (T&H 255, 555). The new regime "suppressed those government actions which hampered the normal economic tendency," with the result that "the toward greater disparity in distribution of the national income resumed" — a trend Quigley says "became more drastic after the creation of the dictatorship" (T&H 555). The biographical sketch is brief but pointed: Mussolini exemplifies the inter-war right-authoritarian solution to economic stagnation.
Foreign policy and the Milner Group
Mussolini's diplomatic role is consistently triangulated against the Milner Group's appeasement calculus. The plan to channel German expansion "southward rather than eastward… failed because Mussolini decided that he could get more out of England by threats from the side of Germany than from cooperation at the side of England" (AAE 227) — a fiasco that, Quigley adds, cost the The Milner Group "another important member, Arnold J. Toynbee, who separated himself from the policy of appeasement" (AAE 227). The 1935 attack on Ethiopia, justified by Mussolini in part by reference to disappointment over the Treaty of London of 1915 (T&H 285), produced the abortive Hoare–Laval Pact of Samuel Hoare, and the broader naval rivalry between Italy and France over Mediterranean equality (T&H 313–314).
Cited in
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 255 Quigley
By large money grants to Benito Mussolini, a rabid Socialist who had been a pacifist leader in the Tripolitan war of 1911. Mussolini was editor of the chief Socialist paper, Avanti.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 285 Quigley
This disappointment was given by Mussolini as one of the chief justifications for the Italian attack on Ethiopia in 1935.
- tragedy-and-hope · p. 555 Quigley
A counterrevolution brought Mussolini to power in October 1922. The new government suppressed those government actions which hampered the normal economic tendency.
- anglo-american-establishment · p. 227 Quigley
The plan failed because Mussolini decided that he could get more out of England by threats from the side of Germany than from cooperation at the side of England. As a result of this fiasco, the Milner Group lost another important member, Arnold J. Toynbee.
- evolution-of-civilizations · p. 391 Quigley
Culminated in the utterly irrational activism of Hitler, Mussolini, and many lesser persons. All the characteristics of an age of irrationality began to appear on all sides.
- book-reviews · p. 158 Quigley
Drove Mussolini into the Spanish adventure, and, above all, permitted Hitler to remilitarize the Rhineland.