Conclusion

Abstract

Italian Fascism was not the conquering creed of the twentieth century, but led a political fashion for two decades. Outside Italy its influence was slight and within Italy short-lived. While it lasted it was a spectacular affair thanks to D’Annunzio’s inventiveness and to Mussolini’s exhibitionism. It had grown out of Mussolini’s personal vendetta, the rage of the renegade, with the Italian Marxists whom he had led for a year or so, but who, in 1914, rejected him. Although Mussolini was far from being fundamentally repelled by Communism, his quarrel with the Italian Socialists made him almost by chance into the voice of the contemporary reaction against Communism. The Communists replied by turning the word Fascist into one of their major terms of abuse and applying it to all their enemies. It has been seen that Hitler’s system was at least as different as his character was from that of Mussolini. Fundamentally Mussolini was all compromise — although he concealed this under the veneer created by his vanity and his pleasure in violence — whereas Hitler was totally uncompromising. This study is a study of Mussolini’s compromises which were linked, not with the clemency of a Caesar or an Henri IV, but with the inept administration of an impressionable second-rate journalist of superficial brilliance who succeeded in fascinating many of his contemporaries.