The Italian Police And The Rise Of Fascism

Based on original research using official documents, this illuminating account of the role of the police in the rise to power of Mussolini reveals the internal workings of the Italian Liberal policing system, the tensions between its different branches, and problems related to the shifting demands of its wheeler-dealer political masters. Explanations of the support that the Italian police gave to the fascist movement are to be found not only in the profound social, economic, and political transformations characterizing the years immediately following the First World War, but also in Italy's post-unification administrative system. Police support for the Fascists was often morally, if not physically, coerced by the Fascists themselves, while administrative ambiguities and weaknesses hampered any police attempts to repress the movement. The rise of fascism and its support from the police was the logical end result of a tradition of private solutions to problems of law and order. To illustrate this, the book examines the policing of the socialist movement between 1897 and 1918 before analyzing in detail the relationship between the police and the facist movement after the First World War, with a view to comparing behavioral trends emerging during both periods.

How successful was Mussolini in creating a force of loyal and committed policemen to defend his regime and assist in the creation of a new fascist civilization? How far were the Italian police transformed under Mussolini, and how did policemen experience the dictatorship? This book examines Italy’s regular police in the context of fascism’s efforts to modernise and establish ideological control over the state. Contrasting the regime’s idealised representations with the more humdrum realities of everyday practice, the book considers the impact of the dictatorship on the Italian police and their personnel. Presenting an inside perspective on fascist repression, it focuses particularly on recruitment, training and professionalism in the Interior Ministry Police, as well as officers' ideological orientation, working conditions and quality of life. This book will appeal to students and researchers in police history, Italian fascism and, more generally, conflict and oppression in the twentieth century.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE From National Book Award finalist David I. Kertzer comes the gripping story of Pope Pius XI’s secret relations with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. This groundbreaking work, based on seven years of research in the Vatican and Fascist archives, including reports from Mussolini’s spies inside the highest levels of the Church, will forever change our understanding of the Vatican’s role in the rise of Fascism in Europe. The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. (“We have many interests to protect,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals. In a challenge to the conventional history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had lost and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last years of his life—as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler—the pontiff’s faith in this treacherous bargain started to waver. With his health failing, he began to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Horrified by the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle, including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had served both the Church and the dictator for many years. The Pope and Mussolini brims with memorable portraits of the men who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of widespread derision who lacked the stature—literally and figuratively—to stand up to the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, whose political skills and ambition made him Mussolini’s most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose actions during World War II would be subject for debate for decades to come. With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the full story of the Pope’s complex relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every turn, The Pope and Mussolini is history writ large and with the lightning hand of truth.

One hundred years after the rise to power of Fascism in Italy, John Foot's bracing and bold Blood and Power vividly recreates the on-the-ground experience of life under the regime. - Robert S C Gordon, Serena Professor of Italian, University of Cambridge A major history of the rise and fall of Italian fascism: a dark tale of violence, ideals and a country at war. In the aftermath of the First World War, the seeds of fascism were sown in Italy. While the country reeled in shock, a new movement emerged from the chaos: one that preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland; one that promised to build a 'New Roman Empire', and make Italy a great power again. Wearing black shirts and wielding guns, knives and truncheons, the proponents of fascism embraced a climate of violence and rampant masculinity. Led by Mussolini, they would systematically destroy the organisations of the left, murdering and torturing anyone who got in their way. In Blood and Power, historian John Foot draws on decades of research to chart the turbulent years between 1915 and 1945, and beyond. Using the accounts of real people – fascists, anti-fascists, communists, anarchists, victims, perpetrators and bystanders – he tells the story of fascism and its legacy, which still, disturbingly, reverberates to this day.

Hoyt shows how these gifts, wedded to ruthless ambition and a life-long conviction that he was born to lead the masses, were to account for Mussolini's successes, first as a brilliant young newspaper editor and charismatic leader of the Italian Socialists, and finally as the creator of the Italian Fascist Empire.

Following a historically chronological approach, and with a clear focus on the marked regional diversity characterising Italy, this volume analyses the impact of social, economic, cultural and political transformation on the lives of Italians. It assesses their living standards, their health and education, their working conditions and their leisure activities. The final part of the book examines contemporary Italian society in the light of the political and moral crisis of the early 1990s.

In 1920 Italy was on the verge of a socialist,revolution. Just two years later Benito,Mussolini's fascists took power and ushered in an,era of repression, war and, ultimately, genocide.,In this enthralling book Tom Behan shows how a,group of militant anti-fascists came close to,stopping Mussolini and changing the course of,history. Tragically, their bravery was undermined,by a combination of the left's sectarianism and,naive faith in the impartiality of the police.,""An important and detailed analysis of a period of,Italian history which is often ignored"" - WSF

Ordinary Violence in Mussolini's Italy reveals the centrality of violence to Fascist rule, arguing that the Mussolini regime projected its coercive power deeply and diffusely into society through confinement, imprisonment, low-level physical assaults, economic deprivations, intimidation, discrimination, and other everyday forms of coercion. Fascist repression was thus more intense and ideological than previously thought and even shared some important similarities with Nazi and Soviet terror.