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By Root 1115 0

his early years. Moving into left-wing politics and journalism, he was for a time before the war the editor of the Socialist newspaper Avanti. He broke with socialism over the war which, as did so many others, he supported wholeheartedly as a national purging. After serving in the army—it failed to cure him—he began to edit a rightist paper, Popolo d’Italia, and he gravitated from there to fascism. His veterans met the Communists with their own medicine—violence—and he formed groups of toughs who joined in the riots, wearing their distinctive black shirts. Their opportunity lay in disruption and unrest, and they often fomented riots so that they could then put them down. Gradually, it appeared that only the Fascists could save Italy from complete disaster. In 1922, in Naples at a Fascist conference, Mussolini demanded full political power and began the famous “March on Rome.” The march itself went only from the Fascists’ meeting hall to the railway station; they actually went on trains the rest of the way, and Mussolini ended up as the premier of Italy.

Italy became a one-party state. Opposition was driven underground, or imprisoned, sometimes tortured, occasionally murdered. It was, according to Mussolini, a necessary price for efficiency and stability. There were rewards: marshes were drained, malarial swamps cleaned out, industry fostered. As well-disposed English tourists never tired of remarking, the trains ran on time. In the general climate of interwar Europe, many people thought Mussolini was “a good thing.”

It was in foreign affairs that he began to make himself a nuisance. His weakest spot was a grandiose vision of Italy’s power, potential, and rightful place in the world, a vision he was determined to realize. Part of it was harmless; Italian planes made long-distance flights and world records, Italian ships were fast, well designed, and a visible reminder of the new Italy. When he referred to the Mediterranean as “mare nostrum,” “our sea,” he could either be forgiven for pardonable pride or ignored as a comic-opera heavy. But then he began trying to make it work.

In 1923, Italian officers engaged in settling a boundary dispute between Greece and Albania were assassinated. Mussolini responded by sending in troops, bombarding and occupying the island of Corfu, on the Greek side of the mouth of the Adriatic. Greece appealed to the League of Nations, which settled the issue, largely in favor of Italy, and the Italian forces evacuated the island a bit sheepishly, looking as if they had barked before they were kicked.

The policies of internal reorganization and external assertion went on simultaneously. Yugoslavia ceded Fiume to Italy, the Socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti was murdered, there was tension with Germany over a policy of Italianization of the Tyrol, an Irish lady named Violet Gibson tried to assassinate Mussolini, but succeeded only in shooting him in the nose. It was still difficult to know if he should be taken seriously.

Yet gradually, by the mid-twenties, it became obvious that Mussolini was setting out on a policy of allying with and dominating all the revisionist states, those dissatisfied with the conditions after Versailles and wanting to do something about them. In 1925, there was a treaty of friendship with Spain and a virtual takeover of Albania. In 1927, there was a treaty with Hungary, in 1930, with Austria.

The Depression slowed Mussolini down a bit, as it did everything else. It brought Hitler to power too, and gave Mussolini a potential right-wing bedfellow. Mussolini was not initially impressed with Hitler. Hitler admired Mussolini; Mussolini regarded Hitler as an upstart, a flattering but not too successful imitator. In those early years of fascism, Mussolini was definitely the senior. It was largely his intervention that thwarted Hitler’s first attempt to take over Austria. Only slowly did the demonic power of Hitler and the real potential of Germany overtake the perhaps illusory power of Italy.

Meanwhile, there were foreign adventures, which had the effect of sounding the death