In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was executed by his captors, joining those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his tyranny, at least one million people. He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditonal male family life, including both wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was cruel (though not the cruellest); his racism existed, but never without the consistency and vigor that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire; but, in the most part, his was of the old-fashioned, costly, nineteenth century variety, not a racial or ideological imperium. And, self-evidently Italian society was not German or Russian: the particular patterns of that society shaped his dictatorship. Bosworth's Mussolini allows us to come closer than ever before to an appreciation of the life and actions of the man and of the political world and society within which he operated. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, this biography paints a picture of brutality and failure, yet one tempered with an understanding of Mussolini as a human being, not so different from many of his contemporaries. 'The definitive study of the Italian dictator.' - Library Journal

Eighty years after the fall of Benito Mussolini, controversy remains about what his dictatorship represented. This reflects the different sides to the Duce's leadership: while adept at nurturing and enforcing his personal political power, Mussolini's lack of insight into the requirements of governance prevented him from converting this power into influence to achieve his goals. His efforts to maintain the support of Italy's conservative elites--economic, social and political--also created tensions with his radical Fascist ambitions, diminishing the momentum behind his regime. Mussolini is frequently portrayed as a charismatic leader, but his rule was secured principally by coercion, violence and a 'spoils system'. Nonetheless, his personality cult had significant popular appeal, even if based upon a political myth. This enabled him to consolidate his position and to dominate his Fascist colleagues--but at a price of over-centralized, dysfunctional decision-making. In this book, the first comprehensive English-language study of Mussolini in nearly two decades, Peter J. Williamson brings to life the contradictions within the Duce's leadership. Using a wide range of sources, Williamson reveals how these conflicts impeded the dictator's ambitions, leaving him increasingly frustrated, all while most Italians endured the severe privations of both failure and Fascism.

This is the first book on Italian Fascism to analyse the rich historiography written in Italian for the benefit of the English-speaking students. Claudia Baldoli clarifies the most important research and debates from the origins of Fascism to the ways in which it is remembered today.

The Italian Fascist Party in Power was first published in 1959. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Although much significant material on the Italian Fascist party became available when the regime collapsed, scholars have not made extensive use of it until now. In this study, which is based on all the available sources, Professor Germino describes the functions of the party, ,explains how it was organized to perform tasks, and discusses conflicts between the party and other power elements in the dictatorship. He reaches a conclusion contrary to that of most other scholars -- that Fascist Italy was a full-fledged totalitarian state resembling Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in political structure and ideological content. Professor Carl J. Riedrich of Harvard University writes: "I consider this a major contribution to our knowledge of totalitarian dictatorship. There is nothing in the existing literature that can be compared to it either in terms of depth or analysis, range of documentation or breadth of treatment." Professor Taylor Cole of Duke University comments: "Professor Germino has presented an excellent case study of the Italian Fascist Party. He has made use of more materials on the Party than any previous writer in English, and has marshalled them effectively to support his contention that the Fascist Party did not differ 'in kind' from [the Nazi and Soviet Communist parties] on the eve of World War II. His conclusion that on most (though not all) basic counts the Italian Fascist system was to be classified as 'totalitarian' is controversial, but it merits the careful attention of all students who are interested in the Italian Fascist period and in totalitarianism."

In the 1930s translation became a key issue in the cultural politics of the Fascist regime due to the fact that Italy was publishing more translations than any other country in the world. Making use of extensive archival research, the author of this new study examines this 'invasion of translations' through a detailed statistical analysis of the translation market. The book shows how translations appeared to challenge official claims about the birth of a Fascist culture and cast Italy in a receptive role that did not tally with Fascist notions of a dominant culture extending its influence abroad. The author shows further that the commercial impact of this invasion provoked a sustained reaction against translated popular literature on the part of those writers and intellectuals who felt threatened by its success. He examines the aggressive campaign that was conducted against the Italian Publishers Federation by the Authors and Writers Union (led by the Futurist poet F. T. Marinetti), accusing them of favouring their private profit over the national interest. Finally, the author traces the evolution of Fascist censorship, showing how the regime developed a gradually more repressive policy towards translations as notions of cultural purity began to influence the perception of imported literature.

An incisive account of how Mussolini pioneered populism in reaction to Hitler's rise--and thereby reinforced his role as a model for later authoritarian leaders On the tenth anniversary of his rise to power in 1932, Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) seemed to many the "good dictator." He was the first totalitarian and the first fascist in modern Europe. But a year later Hitler's entrance onto the political stage signaled a German takeover of the fascist ideology. In this definitive account, eminent historian R.J.B. Bosworth charts Mussolini's leadership in reaction to Hitler. Bosworth shows how Italy's decline in ideological pre-eminence, as well as in military and diplomatic power, led Mussolini to pursue a more populist approach: angry and bellicose words at home, violent aggression abroad, and a more extreme emphasis on charisma. In his embittered efforts to bolster an increasingly hollow and ruthless regime, it was Mussolini, rather than Hitler, who offered the model for all subsequent authoritarians.