Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: squadrista toscano, agonia del regime, regime totalitario, Victor Emmanuel, Fascist Italy, Second World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. With this insightful, comprehensive study, Bosworth secures his place as one of the two leading historians in the English-speaking world (the other being Paul Ginsborg) of 20th-century Italy. Bosworth begins with an admission that he has embarked on an "impossible project": "to unveil the lives of Italians" from all walks of life "under a generation of dictatorship." Impossible, indeed, but what a grand attempt at a synthesis of social and political history he produces. While Mussolini and the party officials are at the center of the story, Bosworth dips into the Fascist police files to see what ordinary Italians were up to during the dictatorship, in order to portray a "fascism of the everyday." A good-natured drunken night on the town, ending with the singing of antifascist songs in the streets disturbing the people's sleep could land you in some God-forsaken remote village as punishment; further, the dictatorship was a corrupt and compromising affair. Yet Fascism in Italy, Bosworth frequently shows, was tempered by the continuing influence of the family and other nonparty institutions such as the Church, the army, the diplomatic corps and the universities.Another important feature is Bosworth's refusal to let "Liberal Italy" (1860–1922) off the hook. From imperialism to racism, corruption to authoritarianism, liberal Italy, he says, laid the groundwork for the Fascist regime. And while he gives ample instances of the violent and at times murderous nature of the regime, Bosworth does exonerate the Italian people of falling for totalitarianism. If Italians come off well from 1922 to 1945, they look far less noble in the postwar period. Bosworth's last chapter, "The Fascist Heritage," is a disturbing account of the tenacious survival of fascism into contemporary Italy. While not as pessimistic as Ginsborg, Bosworth (Mussolini) still reminds us of the "eternal tendency toward fascism." 35 b&a mp;w illus. not seen by PW; 3 maps.
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From The Washington Post

In the middle of the 19th century, two national causes above all others excited the enthusiasm of European liberals: the unification of Italy and the unification of Germany. As if to illustrate the saying about the grief brought by answered prayers, these unions duly came to pass -- the one as a joke, the other a nightmare.

But maybe we should be careful about smiling too indulgently at Italy under the fascist regime run by Benito Mussolini from 1922 to 1943. Of course that despotism, even though it liked to call itself "totalitarian," was mild compared to its contemporaries in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany -- perhaps in part because of an Italian tendency not to take politics too seriously and a certain indifference to politicians, democratic or despotic. We should not exaggerate the Italians' lovable "national character" or simply think of them as a brava gente ("nice people"), R.J.B. Bosworth suggests, since plenty of meanness and brutality was brought out by il facscimo. But he acknowledges that it never turned as nasty as other versions elsewhere, and his book helps explain why this was so.

An Australian scholar and one of the outstanding historians of modern Italy, Bosworth is the author of a 2002 biography of Mussolini that was rightly acclaimed as perhaps the best yet written. As a companion to that life of the man who ruled the country, he has now written an absorbing book about the country Mussolini ruled. Bosworth begins with the political and intellectual roots of fascism, such as they were. Although fascism, with its glorification of the state and the leader, is meant to be right-wing, it had obvious features in common with supposedly left-wing forms of totalitarianism: Hitler called himself a National Socialist, and Mussolini indeed began as a socialist of the hard left. The new movement took its name from fascio, the Italian word for a group of people, and many organizations used the term before Mussolini came to power; the fasces was the ominous bundle of rods and axes representing the retributive authority of the Roman magistrates. (And the symbol resonated far beyond Italy: You can still see the fasces carved on official buildings in the United States.)

As in Russia, the crisis of war provided an opportunity for the rapid destruction of lawful government. Despite Italy's ostensible position as one of the winners of World War I, victory gave little sturdiness to Italian democracy, and the country's parliamentary government collapsed at the first sharp push from Mussolini in 1922. Much like Germans in 1933, Italians flooded to join what had now become the Partito Nazionale Fascista.

And yet Italian fascism was always more rhetoric than reality. It was no accident that Mussolini was a journalist, who had once commented volubly on international affairs and remained ever-ready "with an opinion on anything." (His collected works are published in 44 volumes -- imagine even dipping into them, let alone reading them through.) Italy was a backward country when Mussolini took power. One of the many fascinating details in which Bosworth's book abounds tells us that, in World War I, only one per thousand draftees in the German army was illiterate -- itself an astonishing fact -- as against 68 per thousand in the French army and 330 per thousand in the Italian one. And for all the sham and bluster, Italy remained backward under fascism. Even by 1940, there were only a million radios in Italy and half a million telephones, for a population of some 44 million.

A book of this kind relies on statistical and impressionistic descripition, and Bosworth's deep knowledge of Italy, based on wide archival and primary study, is continually illuminating. On the one hand, he gives numerous short biographical sketches of people drawn to fascism, many (though not all) of them worthless, marginal men for whom the party offered a career. On the other, he paints a broad canvas of ordinary Italian life in the 1920s and '30s and shows how it was affected -- or not -- by the regime.

Unlike too many neglectful historians, Bosworth pays due attention to the subject of sports, which played an important role in fascism. Italy was more successful on the sporting field than the battlefield, winning soccer's World Cup in 1934 and 1938 (something not likely to be repeated this summer) -- although when the Italian heavyweight Primo Carnera met Joe Louis in New York in June 1935, the result sent a thrill through Harlem rather than Rome. Still, Bosworth has his own blind spots here: Although I take my hat off to a professor who has published a learned paper on "Golf and Italian Fascism," he should surely have mentioned the great Italian cyclists of the age, including Ottavio Bottecchia, winner of the Tour de France in 1924 and 1925, an anti-fascist whose mysterious death just before the 1927 Tour was widely believed to be political murder.

A lighter touch would have been welcome elsewhere. There is no point in complaining any more about the political correction of academic history, but Bosworth's attempts to pay his dues are sometimes risible. We learn that the remote village of Oschiri was "a place of gender and political contest," which proves to mean the astounding fact that simple peasant women followed the lead of their priest. And Bosworth solemnly tells us "that most enlisted men preferred a masculine interpretation of the gender order." You don't say, professore.

What now seems to us the most unlikely part of the story is the part played by many Jews in the fascist regime, at least until Mussolini began his contemptible groveling to Germany in the late 1930s. But then the small, prosperous Jewish community was more integrated in Italy than in any other European country, producing before 1914 prime ministers, senators and generals. Mussolini insisted early on that fascism was not anti-Semitic, and even toward the dismal end of his life, he had no enthusiasm for the murderous terror visited on the European Jews.

Much of the story told in this book is not as grim as the fate of the Italian Jews. "The lighter side of fascism" sounds a subject for P.J. O'Rourke, but one has to admit that there is comic relief to be found here -- and not just from the anti-regime jokes that hearteningly persisted throughout. Even the story of Italian imperialism in Africa, though replete with shocking cruelty, was part opera buffa, as shown by the life of Italo Balbo, a fascist leader who began as a saber-rattling patriot and ended -- in more senses than one -- as governor of Libya. This had been Italy's first African acquisition, in 1912, fully 10 years before Mussolini came to power, and Italian rule was a farce throughout. Fascism boasted of how its empire would enrich the patria, but the Italians managed to rule Libya for decades without ever noticing that it contained a vast oil field. Then in 1940, Mussolini cynically and opportunistically declared war on France and England and began his doom. Shortly afterward, Balbo became one of his country's first victims of the war when his plane was shot down -- by an Italian anti-aircraft battery whose gunnery was better than its aircraft recognition. Sometimes you do have to see the funny side of things.

In the end, the failures of Mussolini's regime were an indirect credit to the Italian people, and maybe brava gente isn't so wrong after all. While Hitler succeeded all too well in making many Germans into a nation of conquerors and killers, the Italians quite ignored Mussolini's attempt to do the same thing to them. Indeed, maybe Hitler should have the last word: The "decadent Italians" had never had their hearts in fascism, and they lacked the hardness necessary for conquest, the Führer fumed, since "the excessive warmth of family relations there overwhelms all the rest." Has a greater compliment ever been paid to any people?

Reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Press HC, The; First American Edition edition (February 2, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594200785
• ISBN-13: 978-1594200786
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.5 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #676,375 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, September 24, 2006

By	R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is an ambitious and successful attempt to write the social history of Fascism. Italian Fascism, Bosworth reminds us, controlled Italy for almost a generation, a considerably longer period than the disastrous experiment of Nazi rule of Germany. How was Fascism experienced by Italians? To what extent did Fascism change Italy? What were the essential features of Fascist rule? What were the well springs of Fascism? Bosworth treats all these issues and more in this carefully documented and well written volume. Rather than pursuing these issues topically, Bosworth has organized this book chronologically. He begins with the nature of Liberal Italy and the experience of WWI, moves through the interwar period and the grim events of WWII, concluding with a concise but revealing chapter on postwar fascist movements. He weaves his topical themes into the narrative very well, providing considerable analysis and showing the historically dynamic nature of the Fascist experience. This combination of narrative and analysis is excellent.
Bosworth is particularly concerned with providing a balanced view of Fascist Italy. The Fascist state is often viewed popularly as a comic opera dicatorship. Bosworth shows well that Fascist Italy appears to be relatively benign only by comparison with Nazi Germany or the Stalinist Soviet Union. This oppressive dictatorship destroyed democracy and human rights in Italy, and by Bosworth's reckoning, was ultimately responsible for about 1 million deaths in Italy, the Balkans, and Africa. It was a police state in which millions of Italians were informing on each other, corrupting the quality of public life. At the same time, Bosworth addresses the "totalitarian" nature of the regime, a claim made by the Fascists themselves that they were remaking the Italian people. Due in large part to the actions of Fascist leaders themselves, this claim is shown to be a fraud. Fascist government itself exemplified the reliance on chains of patronage and clientage with its associated corruption typical of Italian society. Mussolini was quite content to compromise with powerful existing institutions like the Monarchy, the Papacy, and the Army. Bosworth shows very well the continuity the Fascist state had with the Liberal state it replaced and indeed, many of the crucial features of Italian Fascism appear to be extensions of some of the worst features of pre-WWI Italy.
Bosworth's work is careful, thoughtful, and presented extremely well.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Italian Nightmare, June 22, 2006

By	Retired Reader (New Mexico) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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This is a book that reflects R.J.B. Bosworth's remarkable skills as a researcher and his equally remarkable knowledge of Italy. It is a detailed and meticulous account of the rise and reign of the Fascist Party in Italy and its most internationally recognized figure, Benito Mussolini. The reader quickly learns that a number of figures, some admirable, some not, contributed a good deal to shape the course of Fascism both prior to and during Mussolini's dictatorship. Bosworth leaves no doubt about how corrupt and malevolent the Fascists were, but somehow he also leaves at least this reviewer with the impression that Fascist Italy was a cut the other major European totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia.

So is this a great book? Many informed people clearly think so, yet this reviewer has doubts. It is perhaps too concerned with the rise and contributions of individuals in the Italian Fascist movement and rather not concerned enough with the broader trends and currents that shaped or were shaped by that movement. Still it is worth anyone's time to read this book which is unflinching in its depiction of the Fascist Italy.

17 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, yet heavily flawed, and somewhat dishonest., July 2, 2007

By	Timothy Stoltzfus-jost - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 (Paperback)

I have had considerable interest in fascist Italy for about six years now, so finding this book was absolutely thrilling to me. I thought it would provide a balanced and unflinching look at fascist Italy, relying on factual reporting that was not influenced by opinions. In fact, there is some extent to which this is the case; massive amounts of fantastic research that demonstrates tremendous experience and knowledge, and the number of personal stories is simply staggering. Great gaps remain, however. In reading other books and sources, one comes across many of the same things Bosworth discusses, such as shoddy economic planning, meaningless projects, corruption, and shallow propaganda. On the other hand, one also encounters the fourth largest navy in the world, recreational camps that considerably bolstered national fitness and inspired Hitlers phenomenal Strength Through Joy program, armored corps that were innovative and, in fact, quite effective, and an air force that made unrecognized but significant contributions to the axis war effort. Other elements of Bosworth's book seem under emphasized. Progress against malaria, economic expansion into Libya and Ethiopia, and the extent to which Fascist Italy exhausted itself fighting in Spain are all mentioned, but, despite comprising a huge amount of attention for the regime, are not given more than a bit of documentation. Instead, we are treated to a book full of proofs that fascism was only skin deep, a fact that becomes evident in any ideology or government once the odds are clearly against it. That the odds would be against Italy is, of course, a foregone conclusion. Italy was a country that was, by comparison, little effected by the great depression , yet still had an eighth the radios and cars of great Britain, and no radar and other crucial technologies. Of course, Bosworth's comparisons to Liberal Italy are appreciated, but he still discusses Italy's inherent weaknesses far too little. Of course, Bosworth was not attempting to explain why Italy lost the Second World War so badly, but many of Fascist Italy's weaknesses were made manifest in those years, and simply would not have been had, for example, Italy's investment in Franco paid off with a Spanish ally, cutting off Egypt, Greece, and Yugoslavia thanks to Gibraltar and probably winning the Axis the war.

It is Bosworth's ignorance of and lack of attention to warfare that is the most serious flaw in my mind, especially given that this was by far the most emphasized point of the state that Bosworth studies. Bosworth simply briefly mentions that the Italian navy (which constituted a huge emphasis in fascist Italy) was shamefully defeated in several battles, his only comments about the Italian navy in the book, which of course go to suggest that Italy was outdated and a paper thin state. Perhaps Bosworth, the faithful student of Italian history, has not heard of the battles of First and Second Sirte, in which Italian naval forces and mine fields savaged their British opposition? Perhaps Bosworth has not heard of British operations Harpoon, Vigorous, Pedestal, and Agreement, all of which were allied supply or offensive attempts thwarted by either Italian or a combination of Italian and German forces, with Italians composing the entire fight at sea (with a handful of U-Boat exceptions) and a significant part of the aerial forces involved? It seems more likely that Bosworth has heard of them, and chose to omit them because they did not support his point. Considering the nature of the book as overwhelmingly disposed to personal stories, and the overwhelming majority of those being anti-fascist in nature, as well as other examples of pick-and-choose reporting (the Italian air force, Italian commercial interests, Italian international relations, Italy's economy) it is difficult for me to accept that Bosworth is in fact providing solid evidence for any solid argument at all. Of course, I would not question the accuracy of his reporting, simply it's bias and probable selectivity. I enjoyed the read, and am glad that it is being written on and remembered, because we should never forget the crimes of Mussolini and the horrors and lies of authoritarianism, but what I already know of Mussolini's Italy leads me to bring serious doubts to any analysis of this book. I would, nevertheless, encourage any interested reader to purchase this; it is enlightening on a number of things, and is a meaty tome, but I find it sad that in refuting the fascist state, an author feels compelled to skew the facts against it, when they should do it themselves.