Person1883 – 1945

Benito Mussolini

Also called: Il Duce

Founder of Italian Fascism who became prime minister (1922–1943) after the March on Rome; dictator who invaded Ethiopia and allied with Hitler

The son of a blacksmith, he rose to edit the Socialist Party newspaper but was expelled for urging Italy to enter the First World War. After the war he launched the nationalist, anti-communist Fascist movement and took the title Duce (leader). In power he built a corporate state binding employers and workers to the state and made peace with the papacy in the Lateran Treaty. Allied with Hitler, he entered the war in 1940, was overthrown in 1943 after repeated defeats, and in April 1945 was caught by partisans while fleeing and shot.

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6 related events

1
1922March on Romeleader
As Mussolini’s Fascists (the Blackshirts) converged on Rome, the king made Mussolini prime minister. Italy had the first Fascist government.
2
1925Locarno Treatiesdiplomat
Germany, France and Belgium agreed to respect each other’s borders, with Britain and Italy as guarantors. Germany joined the League of Nations the next year as a spirit of international cooperation took hold.
3
1935 – 1936Italian Invasion of Ethiopialeader
Mussolini’s Italy invaded and annexed Ethiopia, an independent African state. The League of Nations’ sanctions ended in failure.
4
1936 – 1939Spanish Civil Warrelated figure
Army officers led by Franco rose against the Popular Front government, starting a civil war of almost three years. With Germany and Italy backing the rebels and the Soviet Union and the International Brigades aiding the Republic, it became a prelude to the Second World War.
5
1936 – 1937Formation of the Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pactleader
Germany and Italy formed the Rome–Berlin Axis, and Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact against communism. Italy joined the following year, binding the three powers together.
6
1938Munich Agreementdiplomat
The leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Germany met in Munich and, without Czechoslovakia, agreed to hand the Sudetenland to Germany — the high point of appeasement.

People who appear alongside

Adolf Hitler1889 – 1945
Nazi leader and Führer of Germany (1934–1945) who started the Second World War and perpetrated the Holocaust; he killed himself as Berlin fell
Gustav Stresemann1878 – 1929
Weimar chancellor (1923) and foreign minister (1923–1929) who ended the hyperinflation and brought Germany back into the international community through Locarno
Aristide Briand1862 – 1932
French statesman, many times prime minister, who as foreign minister championed the Locarno Treaties and the Kellogg–Briand Pact
Haile Selassie I1892 – 1975
Last emperor of Ethiopia (1930–1974), who appealed to the League of Nations against the Italian invasion and regained his throne in 1941
Francisco Franco1892 – 1975
General who led the Nationalist rebels to victory in the Spanish Civil War and ruled Spain as dictator from 1939 until his death
Joachim von Ribbentrop1893 – 1946
Nazi Germany’s foreign minister (1938–1945) who concluded the Anti-Comintern Pact and the Nazi–Soviet Pact; executed after the Nuremberg trials
Neville Chamberlain1869 – 1940
British prime minister (1937–1940) who pursued appeasement of Hitler and signed the Munich Agreement, then declared war after the invasion of Poland
Édouard Daladier1884 – 1970
French Radical politician who signed the Munich Agreement as prime minister (1938–1940)

Themes this person appears in

The Great Depression and Totalitarianism1919 – 1939
From the Washington Conference to the invasion of Poland — two decades in which the age of international cooperation collapsed in the Depression, fascism, Nazism and Stalinism rose, and the world slid into war again