"Was Mussolini's alliance with Hitler foreordained? Could Italy have been kept out of the Second World War? Did the policy of England's Anthony Eden really push Mussolini into Hitler's arms instead of luring him back to his former policy of friendship with Great Britain? These are some of the intriguing questions which historian Richard Lamb asks about the Italian dictator's foreign policy toward Germany, on the one hand, and Britain and France on the other before he plunged his country into the disastrous alliance with Hitler." "Lamb's revisionist assessment of Mussolini's diplomatic blunders in his relations to the other European powers is based on British and Italian documents finally released after more than half a century."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

In October 1922 Mussolini became the constitutional head of the Italian government; by late 1926 he had imposed a Fascist dictatorship on Italy. Professor Cassels, who argues that Mussolini's policies in the 1930s, the era of the Rome- Berlin axis, were foreshadowed by those of the 1920s, traces the stages by which Mussolini took control of Italy's foreign relations. Within the period 1922-1927, Mussolini, biased against democratic states, moved away from Italy's wartime alliance with Britain and France to a policy in favor of authoritarian force. France became the "moral rival"; and the Anglo-Italian entente, calculated to insure British good will, soon cooled as Mussolini sought to realize an Italian empire in the Mediterranean basin. Italy's career diplomats, who at first had tried to restrain Mussolini's adventurism, by 1927 were totally in the background. Mussolini emerges, therefore, as a more radical and far less conventional Italian statesman than he is usually depicted in other historical studies. Originally published in 1970. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Through the prism of the rise and fall of Galeazzo Ciano (1903-1944), this biography is a comprehensive study of a leading member of the fascist regime other than Benito Mussolini.