BENITO MUSSOLINI

By:• Carlos Herrera• Daniela Pérez Peña • Luis Garcés • Jaime Colín

TOTALITARISM

CHILDHOOD & ADOLESCENSE • Mussolini was born in Dovia di Predappio, a small town

in the province of Forlì in Emilia-Romagna on 29 July 1883.• Birthplace of Benito Mussolini in Predappio, now used as a museum

• His father Alessandro Mussolini was a blacksmith and a socialist, while his mother Rosa Mussolini (née Maltoni) was a devoutly Catholic schoolteacher.

• Benito was the eldest of his parents' three children. His siblings Arnaldo and Edvige followed.

• Owing to his father's political leanings, Mussolini was named Benito after Mexican reformist President Benito Juárez, while his middle names Andrea and Amilcare were from Italian socialists Andrea Costa and Amilcare Cipriani.

• 29 July 1883, Italy

• Mussolini's early political views were heavily influenced by his father, Alessandro Mussolini, a revolutionary socialist who idolized 19th century Italian nationalist figures with humanist tendencies

• His father's political outlook combined views of anarchist figures like Carlo Cafiero and Mikhail Bakunin, the military authoritarianism of Garibaldi, and the nationalism of Mazzini.

• In 1902, Mussolini emigrated to Switzerland, partly to avoid military service. He worked briefly as a stonemason in Geneva, Fribourg and Bern, but was unable to find a permanent job.

• Mussolini became active in the Italian socialist movement in Switzerland, working for the paper L'Avvenire del Lavoratore, organizing meetings, giving speeches to workers and serving as secretary of the Italian workers' union in Lausanne.

• Mussolini became an ally with the irredentist politician and journalist Cesare Battisti, and like him he entered the Army and served in the war. "He was sent to the zone of operations where he was seriously injured by the explosion of a grenade."

• Mussolini continued to promote the need of a revolutionary vanguard elite to lead society. He no longer advocated a proletarian vanguard, but instead a vanguard led by dynamic and revolutionary people of any social class.

Career

Mussolini was born in Verano di Costa at 2:45 pm on Sunday, 29 July 1883

Benito was a difficult child but

bright. He learned late to speak and

was often uncontrollable in his

temperament.

His parents sent him to a religious boarding school at

Faenza in 1892

In the summer of 1894, shortly

before the end of the second year,

Benito was dismissed because he had wounded

another boy with a knife

His father then sent him to the Collegio Giosue

Carducci in Forlimpopoli.

After graduation Mussolini became a

temporary elementary school teacher in Gualtieri near Parma in the

Po valley.

CAREERThe school was run by lay teachers and Benito stayed here until the age of 18.

There were two more incidents of stabbing his classmates with a knife but it was due to his brilliant academic records

During his last two years at school he became interested in sex. He pursued the pretty girls he met in the street, and frequented the brothels in Forlimpopoli.

After graduation Mussolini became a temporary elementary school teacher in Gualtieri near Parma in the Po valley.

He died on 28 April 1945, two days before Hitler shot himself in the head.

• In 1917, Mussolini got his start in politics with the help of a £100 weekly wage from MI5 (The equivalent of 6000 pounds today), to keep anti war protestors at home and publish pro war propaganda.

• This help was authorized by Sir Samuel Hoare.

GOVERNMENT

• Mussolini pretended to incarnate the new fascist Übermensch, promoting an aestethics of exasperated machism and a cult of personality that attributed to him quasi-divine capacities.

• The basic underlying idea behind Mussolini's foreign policy was that of spazio vitale (vital space), a concept in Fascism that was analogous to lebensraum in German National Socialism.• Though biological racism was less prominent in Fascism than National Socialism, right from the start there was a strong racist undercurrent to the spazio vitale concept, in which Mussolini asserted there was a "natural law" for stronger peoples to subject and dominate "inferior" peoples

• He was also head of the all-powerful Fascist Party and the armed local fascist militia, the MVSN or "Blackshirts", who terrorized incipient resistances in the cities and provinces.• He would later form the

OVRA, an institutionalized secret police that carried official state support. In this way he succeeded in keeping power in his own hands and preventing the emergence of any rival.

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