•MUSSOLINI AND FASCIST ITALY

3rd Year Junior cert history

•Early career

• Socialist teacher.• Wounded in WW1.• Founded Fascio di Combattimento (blackshirts)• Fasces symbol.

•Why Fascism became popular.

• Weak governments. • 1 million dead. • Disappointed with Paris Peace deal.

• Inflation and Unemployment.

• Fear of Communism• Blackshirt violence.• March on Rome. • Victor Emmanuel III hands Mussolini power

•Becoming a Dictator

• 1923 biggest party gets 2/3 of

seats

• Opposition walked when

Matteotti was murdered

• Rule by decree

• OVRA secret police

• Il Duce. Cult of the Personality

• Brainwashing, Balila.

• Propaganda

•Successes at home

• Autostada and railways• Latern Treaty • Draining of Pontine Marshes• Employment increased.• ‘Battle for Grain’ ‘Battle for Births’

•Foreign Policy• Aims: to recreate the Roman Empire

and to make the Med an Italian lake.

• Took Libya, Abyssinia and Somalia.

• Friendship developed with Hitler = 1936

Rome-Berlin Axis (allowed anchluss if

Italy kept South Tyrol)

• 1939 Pact of Steel (full military alliance)

• Italy did not join WW2 (army not ready)

until Germany seemed to be winning in

1940.

• Hitler had to send Rommel to help Italy

in North Africa.

•The End

• Allies invaded• Mussolini arrested on king’s orders.• Nazis released him. Puppet government set up.• Partisans killed him