One of Mussolini’s problems in ruling Italy was the bad feeling which had existed between the Vatican and the government of the united Italian state founded in 1870. Swallowing his early Marxist contempt for the Church Mussolini recognised that Italy’s Catholics would approve of him more if he patched up the quarrel. The Lateran Treaties of 1929 achieved this goal: the Vatican was recognised and subsidised by the Italian state, which was recognised in turn by the Pope. Mussolini made an honest (Catholic) woman of Rachele by marrying her in church, and Religion was placed first on the Italian school report, but the Pope criticised his race laws, and the stringing up of dead Claretta alongside dead Benito in 1945 revealed to those who had not already guessed that Il Duce was not quite the good Catholic family man that the picture postcards had portrayed.
The cost of World War I equalled the entire revenues of the Italian state since its inception in 1870. Mussolini would have liked to adopt the industrial priorities of Stalin, since any pretensions to great power status would need to be underpinned by a modern industrial economy. Unfortunately Italy had hardly anything to compare with the Ruhr or the North of England, either in terms of infrastructure or raw materials. Mussolini did build the first motorways, but his ‘Empire’ cost more than it ever made. In default of the real thing, therefore, Mussolini fell back upon the appearance of development. His Battles for Land, for Grain and for the lira produced photo-opportunities, but put up the price of grain and hindered exports. The level of Italian wages remained very low in relation to wages in France, Britain and the USA, and Mussolini lost popularity as the superficial nature of his economic policy was revealed.
Mussolini inherited a country riven by disorder and in the grip of a general strike. He successfully ordered the workers back to work and set the OVRA and the Blackshirts on his former friends on the left. There was not a great deal of opposition to overcome, and by removing some to offshore detention camps and forcing other to eat live toads, dissent was successfully driven underground. Education was turned over to the Catholics, and a great effort was made to mobilise Italian youth into a prototype of the Hitler Youth. Beggars disappeared from the streets whenever foreign diplomats were expected, and the trains ran on time. Mussolini was admired and even revered by many during the years before the war, but dissent, though hidden, was not turned into consent or assent, and he and Claretta eventually paid the price.
Mussolini inherited a democratic office but not a majority. His original coalition cabinet contained only 4 fascists. His solution was the Acerbo Act, which could be presented as a measure to remove a chronic weakness of Italian governments which was the constant succession of coalition governments unable to take any kind of decisive action. Under this act the party obtaining the largest vote would get two thirds of the parliamentary seats. As it turned out Mussolini won two thirds of the vote in 1924 anyway, so that he had a democratic mandate for the destruction of democracy. Political parties were banned, the press censored and finally parliament itself sidelined. Unfortunately for him the idea that Italy’s problems could be solved by the concentration of power into fewer and fewer hands led him into a situation where he was running several ministries by himself. The result was paralysis as decisions were put off until he was able to give matters his attention. This provided the unscrupulous with opportunities such as the military plan to fly the few Italian fighters from base to base as Il Duce drove round counting the same aeroplanes over and over again. The classic problem of autocracy is the management of the succession; Mussolini solved this by piloting his regime to such total disaster that there was no succession. He was the first and last Duce.
The most strident challenge to Mussolini’s regime came from Matteotti. The problem certainly went away, though Mussolini was somehow reluctant to claim the credit. The problem posed by his would-be assassins was solved by their poor marksmanship, and in one case by his thrusting chin which, appearing before the rest of his face, caused Violet Gibson to let fly prematurely. Mussolini had identified Italy’s needs as ‘peace and quiet, work and calm’. He would ‘give these things with love if possible and with force if necessary.’ What he actually achieved was war, disturbance, unemployment and stress, given with gratuitous vindictiveness but not backed up with sufficient force to ensure his own survival.
