Quando Mussolini non era il duce
\’History, the work of man, sometimes takes sudden, unpredictable and catastrophic leaps.\’
In March 1912, 29-year-old Benito Mussolini was just a small-town Marxist. Just four months later he burst onto the national scene, heading a revolutionary movement that would take the leadership of the Socialist Party. In the following months, as the editor of Avanti!, he was idolised by the masses. But then, in autumn 1914, he backed Italy’s intervention in World War I; within a few days, he lost all his supporters and was branded a traitor. When he founded the Italian Fasci of Combat in March 1919, he managed to gather a few hundred affiliates. It was a clamorous but marginal form of fascism. In the November elections, Mussolini fell short of five thousand votes and contemplated abandoning politics.
Emilio Gentile confirms that he knows how to combine accurate documentary research with a great narrative and shows us a practically unknown Mussolini. – Corrado Augias, La Repubblica
Emilio Gentile, the most accurate historian of fascism, gives us the image, full of contradictions and ambiguities, of the first phase of the future dictator. – Marcello Flores, Corriere della Sera
Emilio Gentile (1946) is an Italian historian specializing in the ideology and culture of fascism and a professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. He is considered Italy’s most established cultural historian of fascist ideology. Among his books: E fu subito regime. Il fascismo e la marcia su Roma (2012) and Due colpi di pistola, dieci milioni di morti, la fine di un mondo. Storia illustrata della grande guerra (2014).
