Best biography of mussolini

The career of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime that became almost indistinguishable from it seem at last to be emerging from undeserved obscurity. For nearly two decades after his death, Mussolini’s role in contemporary history was blurred, overshadowed by the memory of an inglorious end. The Italian dictator’s gradual eclipse by Hitler, his repudiation in at the hands of his own people, his unworthy reincarnation as a puppet ruler in the North—the whole sequence epitomized by the final macabre scene of a horribly swollen corpse hanging upside down in a Milan square—all this so reduced Mussolini’s historical dimensions that he remained in our minds as little more than a figure of folly, of farce, of small-scale tyranny, or, at the best, of pathos. We forgot that the Italian Duce had ruled nearly twice as long as Hitler, that his had been the original Fascist system which gave the subsequent European movement its name and character, and that in the decade between Lenin’s death and Hitler’s accession Mussolini had ranked as the most dynamic of European leaders to whom the great of England and America were only too glad to pay their respects. Such is the full record which three recent books by British and American authors have tried to rescue from oblivion.

A large-scale analytical and critical study of Mussolini’s life has long been needed: neither Italian nor foreign historians have seemed up to the job. Only the beginning and end of his career have received detailed treatment. For the early years, there is Gaudens Megaro’s admirable Mussolini in the Making, a task of research carried out under the most difficult circumstances while the Duce was still in power, and for the bitter aftermath, F. W. Deakin’s recent volume, The Brutal Friendship, which reads more like a dossier than a finished book, but is irreproachable from the standpoint of scholarship. In the last half decade t

On October 31, , he entered office as the Prime Minister of Italy. He was 39 years of age. In the general election, his party, then known as the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, had received 29, votes out of million cast. How, then, did this ex-soldier, a corporal in the Italian Army in World War I, rise to head the government of one of Europe&#;s largest nations a single year after that election? Therein lies the extraordinary tale Antonio Scurati tells in M: Son of the Century. The book, half-journalism, half-fiction, is tantamount to a biography of Benito Mussolini.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

A fictionalized biography of Benito Mussolini

Mussolini was a veteran of nine months in the trenches on his country&#;s northern border in its war against its erstwhile ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was a journalist, the combative editor of the revolutionary Socialist newspaper, Avanti. But when he advocated Italy&#;s entry into the war in , the Socialist Party had expelled him. And when the war ended four years later, Mussolini began building a base among the arditi—former front-line assault troops—and other &#;interventionists&#; in opposition to the Left. With funding from a wealthy industrialist, he established a new, Right-Wing newspaper, Il Popolo d&#;Italia, and used it to expound the confused and often contradictory political program he called fascism.

M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati () pages ★★★★☆

Mussolini&#;s fist six years in the public eye

M: Son of the Century devotes nearly pages to the first six years of Mussolini&#;s rise to power. The novel opens in , when he launched the fascist movement with a tiny coterie of bitter ex-soldiers. It draws to a close in the middle of , when Mussolini brilliantly outmaneuvered his parliamentary opposition as they were on the verge of deposing him. From then on, we&#;re led to believe, Mussolini was unchallenged as &#;the only man who mattered&#; in Italy. In fact, Scurat