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Full Description
In 1945, disguised in German greatcoat and helmet, Mussolini attempted to escape from the advancing Allied armies. Unfortunately for him, the convoy of which he was part was stopped by partisans and his features, made so familiar by Fascist propaganda, gave him away. Within 24 hours he was executed by his captors, joining those he sent early to their graves as an outcome of his tyranny, at least one million people. He was one of the tyrant-killers who so scarred interwar Europe, but we cannot properly understand him or his regime by any simple equation with Hitler or Stalin. Like them, his life began modestly in the provinces; unlike them, he maintained a traditonal male family life, including both wife and mistresses, and sought in his way to be an intellectual. He was cruel (though not the cruellest); his racism existed, but never without the consistency and vigor that would have made him a good recruit for the SS. He sought an empire; but, in the most part, his was of the old-fashioned, costly, nineteenth century variety, not a racial or ideological imperium.
And, self-evidently Italian society was not German or Russian: the particular patterns of that society shaped his dictatorship. Bosworth's Mussolini allows us to come closer than ever before to an appreciation of the life and actions of the man and of the political world and society within which he operated. With extraordinary skill and vividness, drawing on a huge range of sources, this biography paints a picture of brutality and failure, yet one tempered with an understanding of Mussolini as a human being, not so different from many of his contemporaries. 'The definitive study of the Italian dictator.' - Library Journal
Contents
List of illustrations and maps Preface Introduction 1 The Furies and Benito Mussolini, 1944-1945 2 First of his class? The Mussolinis and the young Benito, 1883-1902 3 Emigrant and socialist, 1902-1910 4 The class struggle, 1910-1914 5 War and revolution, 1914-1919 6 The first months of Fascism, 1919-1920 7 The Fascist rise to power, 1920-1922 8 Government, 1922-1924 9 The imposition of dictatorship, 1924-1925 10 The Man of Providence, 1926-1929 11 Mussolini in his pomp, 1929-1932 12 The challenge of Adolf Hitler, 1932-1934 13 Empire in Ethiopia, 1935-1936 14 Crisis in Europe, 1936-1938 15 The approach of a Second World War, 1938-1939 16 Germany's ignoble second, 1939-1941 17 First fall and feeble resurrection, 1942-1943 18 The ghost of Benito Mussolini, 1945-2001 Notes Select bibliography Index
