28 October 1922. Some 25,000 Blackshirts converge on Rome. The army could stop them in an afternoon. The prime minister asks King Victor Emmanuel to sign a decree of martial law; the King refuses. Mussolini, waiting in Milan, is invited to form a government and arrives by sleeping car. The parade comes after he has the job.
Why then
Italy won the war and felt cheated by the peace, a 'mutilated victory'. Factory occupations and peasant leagues in 1919–20 frighten landowners and industrialists, who pay the fascist squads to burn union halls. By 1922 the squads already rule much of the north by violence.
What they wanted
Mussolini wants power and is flexible about the rest. The King fears civil war and his ambitious cousin. Liberals and the Vatican hope the fascists can be absorbed and tamed. The squads expect jobs, and more beatings.
What changed
In 1924 the socialist deputy Matteotti is murdered; by 1926 the opposition parties are banned and the press muzzled. Hitler tries a copy in Munich in 1923 and fails; ten years later he takes the legal road. In 1935 Mussolini goes looking in Ethiopia for the empire he promised.
Still argued
A coup, a bluff, or a negotiated handover? Most historians now say all three. Richard Bosworth argues Italians lived fascism with more compromise and less theatre than its posters claimed.