568Chapter 28
formed Communist parties. The Indonesian Commu-
nist Party, organized in 1920, was typical; it drew more
members by linking poverty with opposition to the
Dutch than by linking poverty to Marxist-Leninist
analysis. In French Indochina, Ho Chi Minh (a pseudo-
nym meaning “He Who Enlightens”) likewise found
supporters for his Vietnamese Young League of Revolu-
tionaries by uniting nationalism and communism.
Mussolini and Fascist Italy, 1919–39
The Italian constitutional monarchy survived World War
I, although the king held little power. Victor Emmanuel
III (reigned 1900–47), the grandson of the monarch of
the Risorgimento,remained a figurehead monarch through-
out the Fascist era. Italians had been slowly creating a
parliamentary democracy, although they were accus-
tomed to fewer civil liberties than existed in Britain or
France. An electoral law of 1912 introduced universal
manhood suffrage and another gave proportional repre-
sentation (but not yet women’s suffrage) in 1919.
Italy had candidly fought World War I for territo-
rial compensation. It had quit the Triple Alliance and
joined the Allies for the deal they offered in the Treaty
of London: Italy would annex the frontier province of
the Tyrol, the Istrian Peninsula at the head of the Adri-
atic Sea, the Dalmatian coast opposite Italy, and an
African colony. When Premier Vittorio Orlando asked
for this territory at the peace conference, however,
President Wilson, who had not participated in the Lon-
don Treaty, insisted that those regions be distributed on
the basis of nationality. Consequently, Italy received
only the southern Tyrol and Istria; the town of Fiume
and the Adriatic coast became part of Yugoslavia. An-
gry Italian nationalists, the irredentists, continued to
demand the unredeemed territories.
Italy paid heavily for its new territory. In addition
to 500,000 combat deaths, 2.2 million military casual-
ties, and the devastation of Venetia, the war brought a
huge national debt, 400 percent inflation (see table
28.4), massive unemployment, and violent social un-
rest. The combination of embittered nationalism and
economic hardship produced many authoritarian move-
ments in Europe; in Italy, it led to the Fascist dictator-
ship. Benito Mussolini founded the Italian Fascist
movement at Milan in 1919. Mussolini, the son of a
radical blacksmith who had named him in honor of
Benito Juárez (the Mexican anticlerical), had been an
elementary school teacher, a trade union organizer, and
a socialist journalist before the war. At the start of the
fighting, he converted to vehement nationalism; he
served as a private until being wounded and discharged.
At the end of the war, he organized angry unemployed
veterans at Milan into the Fascio di Combattimento(“Com-
bat Group”). These black-uniformed street fighters em-
braced his program of strict discipline and authority.
They accepted an ancient Roman symbol of such au-
thority, the Fasces(a bundle of rods bound around an
axe), which led to their name Fascisti,or Fascists; they
accepted funding from large landowners and industrial-
ists to use violence to break up trade union meetings,
beat up striking workers, and terrorize peasants. During
the Italian “red scare” of the biennio rosso(1918–20),
Mussolini built Fascist popularity by a mixture of ex-
treme nationalism and violent anti-Bolshevism. Between
1919 and 1921 the Black Shirts progressed from bullies
into killers. They believed, as Mussolini put it, that “a
certain kind of violence is moral.”
In 1921 Mussolini organized Fascism as a political
party, and his doctrine (see document 28.3) provides
the model for understanding the varieties of European
fascism in the interwar years. The essential element of
Fascism was a political program vehemently opposed to
all other forms of government. It was a counterrevolu-
tionary revolution, opposed to the revolutionary tradi-
tion of 1789 (which encouraged liberal-democratic
forms of parliamentary government across Europe) and
equally opposed to the new revolutionary tradition of
1917 (which stimulated socialist or communist forms of
government)—yet it was not a reactionary demand toAnnual
Cost of living inflation rate
Year index (in percent)
1914 100.0 ——
1915 107.0 7.0
1916 133.9 25.1
1917 189.4 41.4
1918 264.1 39.4
1919 268.1 1.5
192 0352.3 31.4
1921 416.8 18.3
Source: Instituto centrale di statistica, Sommario di statistiche storiche
italiane, 1861–1955(Rome: 1955), p. 172.TABLE 28.4Inflation and the Cost of Living in Italy,
1914–21