From ‘divine Caesar’ to Hitler’s lapdog – the rise and fall of Benito Mussolini

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist Party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff-armed Roman salute after the handshake was considered fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras.

For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him. He was on amiable terms with King George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated the dictator on his ‘wise leadership’. Mussolini was seen by many British politicians as a potential ally against Hitler’s Germany. To anyone disgruntled at all by parliamentary democracy, leftist poets, Jazz Age flappers and imagined Judeo-Bolshevik threats, fascism offered a ‘virile’ political alternative.

As the cult of ducismo strengthened, the high priests of fascism hailed Mussolini as a ‘divine Caesar’ figure, and adopted the passo romano, the Latin goosestep, for military parades. A mood of jingoist triumphalism swept Italy after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and incorporated Haile Selassie’s vanquished kingdom into a vast new East African empire, along with Eritrea and Somaliland.

With his rapid African conquests, Mussolini won the hypnotised consent of the majority. To his legion of female admirers he radiated a manful potency and near-animal allure. He had relations with literally hundreds of women, perhaps ‘as many as 400’ according to one Italian historian. They were brusquely mauled by him under a large ministerial desk or on mattress-like cushions installed for the purpose.