Benito Mussolini

Emigration to Switzerland and military service

Without work, connections or money, he settled down on July 20 in Lausanne. Living in abject poverty, he was arrested for vagrancy by the police on 24 July under the arches of the Grand-Pont where he spent the night and was kept behind bars for three days.

During this time, he studied the ideas of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, sociologist Vilfredo Pareto, and syndicalist Georges Sorel. Mussolini also later credited Charles Péguy and Hubert Lagardelle as influences. Sorel's emphasis on the need for overthrowing decadent liberal democracy and capitalism by the use of violence, direct action, the general strike, and the use of neo-Machiavellian appeals to emotion, impressed Mussolini.

Mussolini became active in the Italian socialist movement in Switzerland, working for the paper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore (The Future of the Worker), organising meetings, giving speeches to workers, and serving as secretary of the Italian workers' union in Lausanne. John Gunther alleged that Angelica Balabanov introduced Mussolini, then a bricklayer, to Vladimir Lenin. In 1903, he was arrested by Bernese police because of his advocacy of a violent general strike, spent two weeks in jail, and was handed over to Italian police in Chiasso. After he was released in Italy, he returned to Switzerland. He was arrested again in Geneva, in April 1904, for falsifying his passport expiration date, and expelled from the canton of Geneva. He was released in Bellinzona following protests from Genevan socialists. Mussolini then returned to Lausanne, where he entered the University of Lausanne's Department of Social Science on 7 May, attending the lectures of Vilfredo Pareto. In 1937, when he was prime minister of Italy, the University of Lausanne awarded Mussolini an honorary doctorate.

In December 1904, Mussolini returned to Italy to take advantage of an amnesty for desertion from the military. He had been convicted for this in absentia. Since a condition for being pardoned was serving in the army, he joined the corps of the Bersaglieri in Forlì on 30 December 1904. After serving for two years in the military (January 1905 until September 1906), he returned to teaching.

Expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party

When World War I began in August 1914, many socialist parties worldwide followed the rising nationalist current and supported their country's intervention in the war. In Italy, the war created a surge of Italian nationalism and intervention was supported by a variety of political factions. The most popular Italian nationalist supporter of the war was Gabriele d'Annunzio who promoted Italian irredentism and helped sway the Italian public to support intervention. The Italian Liberal Party under the leadership of Paolo Boselli promoted intervention on the side of the Allies and utilised the Società Dante Alighieri to promote Italian nationalism. Italian socialists were divided on whether to support the war. Prior to Mussolini taking a position, several revolutionary syndicalists had announced their support, including Alceste De Ambris, Filippo Corridoni, and Angelo Oliviero Olivetti. The Italian Socialist Party decided to oppose the war after anti-militarist protestors had been killed, resulting in a general strike called Red Week. Mussolini initially held official support for the party's decision and, in an August 1914 article, Mussolini wrote: "Down with the War. We remain neutral."

However, he saw the war as an opportunity for his ambitions, as well as those of socialists and Italians. He was influenced by anti-Austrian Italian nationalist sentiments, believing that the war offered Italians in Austria-Hungary the chance to liberate themselves from rule of the Habsburgs. He eventually decided to declare support for the war by appealing to the need for socialists to overthrow the Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies in Germany and Austria-Hungary who he said had consistently repressed socialism. Mussolini further justified his position by denouncing the Central Powers for being reactionary powers; for pursuing imperialist designs against Belgium and Serbia as well as historically against Denmark, France, and against Italians, since hundreds of thousands of Italians were under Habsburg rule. He argued that the fall of Hohenzollern and Habsburg monarchies and repression of "reactionary" Turkey would create conditions beneficial for the working class, and that the mobilisation required would undermine Russia's reactionary authoritarianism and bring Russia to social revolution. He said that for Italy the war would complete the process of Risorgimento by uniting the Italians in Austria-Hungary into Italy, and allowing the common people of Italy to be participating members in what would be Italy's first national war. Thus he claimed that the vast social changes that the war could offer meant that it should be supported as a revolutionary war.

As Mussolini's support for the intervention solidified, he came into conflict with socialists who opposed the war. He attacked them and claimed those proletarians who supported pacifism were out of step with the proletarians who had joined the rising interventionist vanguard that was preparing Italy for a revolutionary war. He began to criticise the Italian Socialist Party and socialism itself for having failed to recognise the national problems that had led to the outbreak of the war. He was then accused of moral and political unworthiness and was subsequently expelled from the party. Shortly thereafter, he resigned from the Milan city council and the Commissione Centrale di Beneficenza.

Beginning of Fascism and service in World War I

After being ousted from the Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini made a sudden and radical transformation, ending his support for socialism and class conflict, and supporting revolutionary nationalism transcending class lines. He formed the interventionist newspaper Il Popolo d'Italia and the Fascio Rivoluzionario d'Azione Internazionalista ("Revolutionary Fasces of International Action") in October 1914. The funds to create Il Popolo d'Italia—funnelled through entrepreneur Filippo Naldi—came from many sources, including domestic industrial and agrarian interests, such as the engineering giants Fiat and Ansaldo, and the governments of France and Britain.

On 5 December 1914, Mussolini denounced orthodox socialism for failing to recognise that the war had made national identity and loyalty more significant than class distinction. He demonstrated his transformation in a speech that acknowledged the nation as an entity, a notion he had rejected prior to the war, saying:

The nation has not disappeared. We used to believe that the concept was totally without substance. Instead we see the nation arise as a palpitating reality before us!... Class cannot destroy the nation. Class reveals itself as a collection of interests—but the nation is a history of sentiments, traditions, language, culture, and race. Class can become an integral part of the nation, but the one cannot eclipse the other.

Mussolini continued to promote the need of a revolutionary vanguard elite to lead society. He no longer advocated a proletarian vanguard, but instead a vanguard led by dynamic and revolutionary people of any social class of unity through nationality. Though he denounced orthodox socialism and class conflict, he maintained at the time that he was a nationalist socialist and supporter of the legacy of nationalist socialists in Italy's history, such as Giuseppe Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Carlo Pisacane. As for the Italian Socialist Party and its support of orthodox socialism, he claimed that his failure as a member to revitalise and transform it to recognise contemporary reality revealed the hopelessness of orthodox socialism as outdated. This perception of the failure of orthodox socialism in the light of the outbreak of World War I was not solely held by Mussolini; other pro-interventionist Italian socialists such as Filippo Corridoni and Sergio Panunzio had denounced classical Marxism in favour of intervention.

These basic political views and principles formed the basis of Mussolini's newly formed political movement, the Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria in 1914, who called themselves Fascisti (Fascists). At this time, the Fascists did not have an integrated set of policies and the movement was small, ineffective in its attempts to hold mass meetings, and regularly harassed by government authorities and orthodox socialists. Antagonism between the interventionists versus the anti-interventionist orthodox socialists resulted in violence between the Fascists and socialists. These early hostilities shaped Mussolini's conception of the nature of Fascism in its support of political violence.

Mussolini became an ally with the irredentist politician and journalist Cesare Battisti. When World War I started, Mussolini, like many Italian nationalists, volunteered to fight. He was turned down because of his radical Socialism and told to wait for his reserve call up. He was called up on 31 August and reported for duty with his old unit, the Bersaglieri. After a refresher course he was sent to the Isonzo front where he took part in the Second Battle of the Isonzo, September 1915. His unit also took part in the Third Battle of the Isonzo, October 1915. On 1 March 1916, Mussolini was promoted to the rank of corporal "for merit in war". The promotion was recommended because of his exemplary conduct and fighting quality, his mental calmness and lack of concern for discomfort, his zeal and regularity in carrying out his assignments.

Mussolini's military experience is told in his work Diario di guerra. He totalled about nine months of active, front-line trench warfare, during which he contracted paratyphoid fever. His military exploits ended in February 1917 when he was wounded by the explosion of a mortar bomb during an exercise on the Karst Plateau near Lake Doberdò. He was left with 40 shards of metal in his body and had to be evacuated. He was invalided out of the army in June 1917 and resumed his editor-in-chief position at Il Popolo d'Italia. At this time he was provided each week with 100£ from British MI5 for providing support of Italian participation in the War.

On 25 December 1915, in Treviglio, he married his compatriot Rachele Guidi, who had already borne him a daughter, Edda, at Forlì in 1910. In 1915, he had a son with Ida Dalser, a woman born in Sopramonte, a village near Trento. He legally recognised this son on 11 January 1916.

Religious views

Atheism and anti-clericalism

Mussolini was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother and an anti-clerical father. His mother Rosa had him baptised into the Catholic Church, and took her children to Mass every Sunday. His father never attended. Mussolini regarded his time at a religious boarding school as punishment, compared the experience to hell, and "once refused to go to morning Mass and had to be dragged there by force".

Mussolini became anti-clerical like his father. As a young man, he "proclaimed himself to be an atheist and several times tried to shock an audience by calling on God to strike him dead". He then believed that science had proven there was no God, and that the historical Jesus was ignorant and mad. He also considered religion a disease of the psyche, and accused Christianity of promoting resignation and cowardice.

Also while a young man, Mussolini made vitriolic attacks against Christianity and the Catholic Church, which he accompanied with provocative remarks about the consecrated host, and about a love affair between Christ and Mary Magdalene. He denounced socialists who were tolerant of religion, or who had their children baptised, and called for socialists who accepted religious marriage to be expelled from the party. He denounced the Catholic Church in 1904 for "its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought..." Mussolini's newspaper, La Lotta di Classe, reportedly had an anti-Christian editorial stance.

Mussolini was an admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche from his early professional years. According to Denis Mack Smith, "In Nietzsche he found justification for his crusade against the Christian virtues of humility, resignation, charity, and goodness." He valued Nietzsche's concept of the superman, "The supreme egoist who defied both God and the masses, who despised egalitarianism and democracy, who believed in the weakest going to the wall and pushing them if they did not go fast enough." On his 60th birthday, Hitler gave Mussolini a complete twenty-four volume set of the works of Nietzsche.

Mussolini is claimed to be superstitious, because after hearing of the curse of the Pharaohs around 1922, he ordered the immediate removal of an Egyptian mummy that he had been gifted from the Palazzo Chigi.

Lateran Treaty

After taking power, Mussolini tried to win popular support by appeasing the Catholic majority in Italy. Mussolini had had his children baptised in 1923. In 1924, Mussolini saw to it that three of his children were given Communion. In 1925, he had a priest perform a Catholic marriage for himself and his wife Rachele, whom he had married in a civil ceremony 10 years earlier. On 11 February 1929, he signed a concordat and treaty with the Catholic Church. Under the Lateran Pact, Vatican City was granted independent statehood and placed under Church law—rather than Italian law—and the Catholic religion was recognised as Italy's state religion. The Church also regained authority over marriage, Catholicism could be taught in all secondary schools, birth control and freemasonry were banned, and the clergy received subsidies from the state and was exempted from taxation. Pope Pius XI praised Mussolini, and the official Catholic newspaper pronounced "Italy has been given back to God and God to Italy."

After this conciliation, he claimed the Church was subordinate to the State, and "referred to Catholicism as, in origin, a minor sect that had spread beyond Palestine only because grafted onto the organization of the Roman empire". After the concordat, "he confiscated more issues of Catholic newspapers in the next three months than in the previous seven years". Mussolini reportedly came close to being excommunicated from the Catholic Church around this time.

Mussolini publicly reconciled with the Pope Pius XI in 1932, but "took care to exclude from the newspapers any photography of himself kneeling or showing deference to the Pope". He wanted to persuade Catholics that "fascism was Catholic and he himself a believer who spent some of each day in prayer..." The Pope began referring to Mussolini as "a man sent by Providence". Despite Mussolini's efforts to appear pious, by order of his party, pronouns referring to him "had to be capitalized like those referring to God..."

In 1938 Mussolini began reasserting his anti-clericalism. He would sometimes refer to himself as an "outright disbeliever", and once told his cabinet that "Islam was perhaps a more effective religion than Christianity" and that the "papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all', because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself". He publicly backed down from these anti-clerical statements, but continued making similar statements in private.

After his fall from power in 1943, Mussolini began speaking "more about God and the obligations of conscience", although "he still had little use for the priests and sacraments of the Church". He also began drawing parallels between himself and Jesus. Mussolini's widow, Rachele, stated that her husband had remained "basically irreligious until the later years of his life". Mussolini was given a secular funeral in 1957 when his remains were placed in the family crypt.

Family

Mussolini and his wife, Rachele Mussolini, had three sons (Vittorio, Romano, and Bruno) and two daughters, Edda (the widow of Count Ciano) and Anna Maria. Bruno was killed in an air accident on 7 August 1941.

Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of Mussolini, is politically active in Italian right-wing circles. She has been a member of the European Parliament for the far-right Social Alternative movement, a deputy in the Italian lower chamber and served in the Senate as a member of Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia party. Her half-sister Rachele Mussolini is also active in politics through Brothers of Italy, the main Italian right-wing party; she is the daughter of Romano and his second wife Carla Maria Puccini. Caio Giulio Cesare Mussolini, a great-grandson of Mussolini through Vittorio, is also active in politics in Brothers of Italy. Alessandra's son, Romano Floriani Mussolini, is a right-back for the Serie A team Lazio.