Before founding fascism, Mussolini was jailed as an anti-war socialist
In September 1911 Benito Mussolini joined a socialist riot against Italy's war in Libya, denounced it as imperialist, and served five months in jail. Within a decade the same man had turned against socialism, founded the fascist movement and made himself dictator of Italy.
His politics came from home. His father was a blacksmith and socialist who named him after the Mexican liberal president Benito Juárez, with middle names honouring two Italian socialists; his mother, a devout Catholic schoolteacher, insisted on baptism. Born on 29 July 1883 in Dovia di Predappio in Romagna, he was a clever but unruly pupil, expelled from boarding school more than once. After qualifying as a teacher he moved to Switzerland in 1902 to escape military service, was briefly jailed for vagrancy after sleeping under a Lausanne bridge, and read Nietzsche, Pareto and Georges Sorel, whose praise of direct action and violence impressed him.
Through the 1900s he built a name as a socialist organiser and journalist, editing papers in Trento, then part of Austria-Hungary, and in his home region, and even co-writing a serialised novel called The Cardinal's Mistress. By 1912 he sat on the national leadership of the Italian Socialist Party and edited its newspaper Avanti!.
The break came with the First World War. The party expelled him for arguing that Italy should join the fighting, and in 1914 he launched his own paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, then served in the army until wounded in 1917. Turning to nationalism, he founded the fascist movement in 1919, which rejected class struggle in favour of what it called revolutionary nationalism. After the March on Rome in 1922 he became prime minister and built a totalitarian dictatorship.
The invasion of Ethiopia isolated Italy and pushed him toward Hitler, forming the Rome–Berlin Axis in 1936. He entered the Second World War in June 1940, expecting quick German victory. After Allied landings in Sicily, the Grand Council of Fascism voted against him in July 1943 and the king had him arrested. German troops freed him to head a puppet state in the north, and on 28 April 1945, fleeing toward Switzerland, he was captured and executed by partisans.
Source: Benito Mussolini
