The blacksmith's son and socialist editor who broke with his party to demand war, founded fascism in a Milan hall in 1919, and ruled Italy for twenty years from a balcony, making a style of the black shirt, the salute and the cult of the leader that Hitler copied.
The fork
November 1914. Out of the editor's chair at the Socialist paper for calling for Italy to join the war, he starts his own, with money from industrialists and the French, and within a fortnight the party expels him. The war makes him a nationalist; the disappointing peace gives him an audience.
What they wanted
A new Italy, hard and feared, with an empire on the Mediterranean and in Africa, and a state that is everything. He changes the details whenever they get in the way.
What it cost
The squads' violence and the murder of Matteotti; poison gas in Ethiopia; the race laws of 1938 against Italy's Jews; and a war joined in 1940 for the spoils. Partisans shoot him by Lake Como in April 1945 and hang his body in a Milan square.
The fight
Renzo De Felice argued the regime won real consent from Italians in the early 1930s, and was attacked for saying so. Others see a dictatorship that ran on violence and propaganda from the first squad to the last.