Academic literature on the topic 'Public opinionmussolini, benito , 1883-1945'

Abstract None of the many activist Italian political groups of the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries that called themselves “fasci” (“bundles”) exploited the Roman device in their public messaging until 1919. In that year, the newspaper editor Benito Mussolini (1883–1945), as founder and leader of the “Italian Fasci of Combat,” embraced the (previously pejorative) tag “fascisti” for his supporters, and used a threatening representation of the fasces to identify his favored political candidates. Use of the historical Roman emblem served as branding for his rapidly growing party, and to a stunning degree also helped valorize its violent methods, which intensified especially from the spring of 1920. Soon after his movement’s largely bloodless “March on Rome” (October 28–30, 1922) that felled the elected government, Mussolini—now as prime minister—successfully forced the fasces into every crevice of Italian daily life, from coinage and postage stamps to cigarette packaging. What followed was a twenty-year program to make the fasces ubiquitous in Italy and the territories it colonized in Africa. Mussolini’s regime’s relentless focus on the fasces, and propagation of the image on a massive scale, had no close parallel in world history. And Mussolini seems to have been the first statesperson ever to interpret the fasces as an instrument for imposing political unity by means of authority. (Everyone else had it the other way around.) It also was a special innovation of Mussolini to idealize the humble lictor who lugged the fasces, and raise him to prominence.