Fascism rises in Italy

Although Italy fought on the winning Allied side in World War I, many Italians felt cheated by the peace settlement, which denied them territory they believed they had been promised -- a resentment historians call Italy's "mutilated victory." Combined with serious postwar economic trouble and genuine fear among property owners of a socialist or communist revolution (workers had occupied factories across northern Italy in 1920), Italy's weak parliamentary government struggled to maintain order or public confidence, leaving an opening for a dramatic alternative.

Benito Mussolini founded the Fascist Party in 1919 and built a paramilitary force of "Blackshirts" who intimidated and attacked political opponents in the streets. In October 1922, Mussolini organized the March on Rome, a show of force that persuaded King Victor Emmanuel III -- fearing civil war more than he feared Mussolini -- to appoint him prime minister rather than resist. Once in office, Mussolini steadily dismantled Italy's democracy: he suppressed opposition parties, took the title "Il Duce" ("the leader"), and built a corporatist economy in which the state directly controlled the relationship between business and labor rather than leaving it to free markets or worker-led unions. In 1929, his Lateran Treaty with the Catholic Church resolved decades of tension by establishing Vatican City as an independent state, cementing his regime's legitimacy in the eyes of many ordinary Italians.