Mussolini

Of the four great European dictators of the 20th century, Mussolini remains the most unknown. This biography addresses that enigma and uses much new material to produce a revisionist view of the man.

This major biography of Mussolini draws on a vast range of fresh research to challenge the standard versions of Italy's fascist dictator as either grotesque buffoon or bourgeois stooge. How did Mussolini, a brilliant journalist, charismatic orator, and revolutionary socialist who founded fascism as an alternative left wing revolutionary movement, gain power? And how, through two decades did he hold it, by and large bloodlessly, until his disastrous alliance with Hitler, whom he despised?

Nicholas Farrell, who has studied Mussolini for close to ten years, shows how the alliance with Hitler was far from inevitable, the result more of British snobbery and incompetence and Mussolini's fear of Germany, than any wild desire on his part for world domination, let alone the extermination of the Jews. Indeed, once the holocaust had begun, he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps thus saving thousands of Jewish lives.

Although Mussolini did away with democracy, he did not use mass murder to stay in power. Support for him in Italy was such, Farrell argues, that the only honest verdict, however unpalatable, must be that he ruled with the consent of the Italian people. Farrell identifies the key ingredients of this consent as the spiritual appeal of fascism which made it a civic religion and the magnetism of Mussolini and his ideas, which made him the most admired politician in the world for much of the inter-war period.

Described by Churchill as 'the Roman genius', and Pope Pius XI as 'sent by Providence' to save Italy, Mussolini also, according to best estimates, had 169 extra-marital affairs. Whatever the post-war myth would have us believe about a heroic resistance to Mussolini from inside Italy, the truth, as Farrell shows, is that the role of the resistance was marginal to the very end because support for him was so strong.

This new biography also forces us to wonder whether Mussolini had better vision than Marx. For whereas today communist economic ideas are terminally ill, the fascist idea of the third way between capitalism and communism lives on championed by the modern left such as New Labour. To assume that fascism was a phenomenon of the extreme right is to deny Mussolini's vision: he despised the bourgeois way of life - 'la vita comoda' - above all else, and remained at heart a socialist to his dying day.