a di Predappio in the Northeastern Italian province of Forli. He had one sister and one brother. They always fought and argued over little petty things with each other.
His sister name was Edvige and his brother’s name was Armaldo. His mother Rosa Malteni was a well respect and appreciated schoolteacher. His father Allesandro Mussolini was both a blacksmith and a committee socialist. He received his name “Benito” from the Mexican Revolutionary Juarez. Benito grew up as a delinquent, disobedient, and did not have any manners.
He was a bully to the other children around him. He would get into numerous of fights with other children. Benito Mussolini was brought up in one the poorest regions in Northeastern Italy. When he was in school, he always kept to himself and very quiet. He wasn’t a class clown, never cried or rarely laughed.
He always sat in the back of the classroom and read a book. He rather do that than play with the other children in his class. He got kicked out his first boarding school. When he was growing up he was surrounded by many political philosophies.
There was anarchism, socialism, and others. Both Benito and his father Allesandro had very bad violent tempers. When Benito grew up, he became a teacher in an elementary school in his nearby town; he spread the party of doctrine. He was an editor, Fascist leader, laborer, soldier, politician, and revolutionary. He also became a socialist.
He graduated at a teacher training school in Forli, Italy. Then he moved to Switzerland to find a better place to work. When he was in Switzerland, he got in trouble with the law for fighting and vagrancy. So he decided to move back to Italy but in Trent. When he returned he worked for a Social Newspaper Company and wrote several literacy works.
The newspaper was called “La Lotta di Classe (The Class Struggle). The towns’ people loved his newspaper. He made the editor of “Avanti” (forward); it was published in Milan. When Benito wrote some ignorant and cruel suggestions and ideas in the newspaper. So the he was fired. He then decided to created his own newspaper.
He called it, “Li Popolo d’ Italia” (The People of Italy). He hoped the war between Italy and Turkey might lead to collapse of society that might bring him to power. He wrote violent news articles trying to get an Italian war. When Benito was promoted to the officer of the police force (the commander).
He was told to calm down on what he was writing in the newspaper articles. When World War I broke out, Mussolini was against the war. Two months after the war began; he was in favor of Italy entering the conflict and was expelled from the Socialist Party. In 1915, Italy entered the war. Mussolini was drafted into the army. In World War I, he fought in the trenches on the Italian-Austria front.
Soon right after his draft, he was injured and discharged when a grenade launcher over-heated and blew up. During the chaos that was going down in Italy after the war, Mussolini influenced many more Italians and his power grew stronger and wiser. He was a reformer and than came a believer in power. Benito wanted to have power over all Italy.
He wanted Italy to enter a war, immediately against Germany, but they never did. In 1919, the fascist attacked a socialist rally in Milan. Mussolini and over a hundred of his own men were thrown in prison for possession of illegal arms. All the men and including Mussolini were released the next day.
Soon afterwards the police didn’t even bother to interfere with fascist violence. Mussolini entered parliament in 1921 as a right wing member. Mussolini told some of his members of the Fascists to terrorize some of his colleagues. The government seldom interfered. In return for the support of a group of industrialists and agrarians, Mussolini gave his approval to strikebreaking, and he disowned revolutionary agitation. His Fascists marched on Rome, and King Victor Emmanuel III called on Mussolini to form a perfect government.
Mussolini took over his realm and he created dictatorship. He took control over everything. After the law codes were written and signed, everyone and everything he ruled. Schools and universities had to take an oath to defend the Fascist Government. Mussolini personally chose all newspaper editors himself, and no one could practice journalism that did not possess a certificate of approval from the Fascist Government.
The trade systems were deprived of any independence and were integrated into what was called the “cooperative system. ” The aim was to place all Italians in various professional organizations or corporations, all of them under government control. When dictatorship came into place a lot of things ended, parliamentary government was ended. Conflict and ambition gave Mussolini the desire for power.
The power brought him to Fascism and became a dictator in Italy. The same conflict and ambition brought him to violence and deaths of the hands of his men. As a dictator, Mussolini’s title was “Il Duce” a. k. a.
The Leader. Mussolini had all the power; he made all the decisions. He told the people to build new roads, new houses, harnessed rivers, increased production, and run the trains on time. He reduced unemployment and improved the railway survive. Mussolini thought he had enough power to split Eritreand and Libya apart. The price of his reform was the enslavement of the Italians.
Mussolini kept control in his own hands, by murder, exile, and prison camps. Mussolini became the Prime Minister of Italy in 1922. He brought back old statues and built new ones. He also rebuilt some old building and homes that have been ruined during some of the war and battles.
Mussolini’s dream was to change the name of the Mediterranean into “Mare Nostrum. ” Which means “Our Sea. ” In 1935, Mussolini helped create an anti-Hitler front to defend the independence of Austria. His successful war against Abyssinia with Nazi Germany, which had withdrawn from the League of Nations. Mussolini and Hitler both were forced to seek an alliance on the side of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War ended any possibility to consist with France and Britain. As World War II came about, Mussolini announced his intention to cooperate Malta, Corsica, and Tunis.
In 1939, after a brief war, he occupied Albania. Failing to realize that he had more to gain by trying to hold the balance of power in Europe. He preferred to rely on a policy of bluff and bluster to induce the Western democracies to give way to his increasing territorial demands. Although Mussolini had preached for fifteen years about the virtues of the war and the military readiness of Italy to fight, his armed forces were completely unprepared when Hitler’s invasion of Poland led to World War II. He didn’t did not want to join with Hitler but he was forced.
Mussolini met Hitler in Venice. He decided to remain still until he was quite curtain which side would win. Only after the fall of France did he declare war, hoping that the war had only a few weeks more to run. Mussolini’s attack on Greece revealed to everyone that he had done nothing to prepare an effective military machine. He had no option but to follow Hitler in declaring war on Russia and the United States.
Following the Italian defeats on all fronts and the Anglo-American landing in Sicily, most of Mussolini’s colleagues turned against him at a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council. This enabled the king to dismiss and arrest him. Several months later Mussolini was rescued by the Germans and set up a Republican Fascist state in northern Italy. He was little more than a puppet under the protection of the German Army. In this “Republic of Salo,” Mussolini returned to his earlier ideas of socialism and collectivization. He also executed some of the Fascist leaders who had abandoned him, including his son-in-law, Galeazzo Ciano.
Just before the allied armies reached Milan, the Italians partisans caught Mussolini, along with his mistress Clara Petacci, as he tried to take refuge in Switzerland. On April 28, 1945, the German forces collapsed. Mussolini and Clara try to flee towards the border but the Italian underground discovered them at Lake Como and shot him and Clara. They took the bodies to Milan and they hung Mussolini and Clara by their ankles.
