Rhuff's Reviews > Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945

An incomparable history from one of the most fascinating of modern historians, Richard James Boon Bosworth. His Australian origin brings out the sniffingtons but is likely the reason his works outshine the cliched mainstream. In this redux of Il Duce and L'Era Fascismo. It is not an "easy read" (how I loathe that term!) but it is a lucid one, rewarding in depth, not afraid to step beyond dry academic fact into flesh and blood. Even so every i is dotted and t crossed in his notes, though this book would benefit greatly from a bibliography. (This lack, I suspect, comes from publisher cost-cutting.)

What was totalitarianism in Fascist Italy? Though Mussolini coined the phrase, it always left room for deals with the Catholic Church, the Italian monarchy, the aristocracy and the rich, the bureaucracy and the army. It was never the total state Hitler's Germany tried to be and almost became. Nor was it as bloodthirsty as modern Latin American "fledgling democracies," for all its heated rhetoric. It was, first of all, Mussolini's personal platform, resting on a national foundation dug by his Liberal predecessors. The "Fascist conquest" of Ethiopia, for instance, was no different than other European empire-building; not even consistently racist as South Africa (per "Facetta nera" on p. 368.

Mussolini's rise and fall is unsentimentally and thoughtfully scrutinized. All the leading personalities of Fascism receive their due dissection, as does the inspiration of and alliance with Hitler. Il Duce's double-dealing with the Fuehrer was of a piece with his finessing of Church and Monarchy. Ditto with his own betrayal by his Fascist Council in the middle of the war. Fascist rule over a people so cynical and mocking could not end up as anything but a parody of itself, even as it took itself seriously with blackjack and castor oil.

There is no "definitive" work on Mussolini's Italy. But Bosworth's come as close as any, and is indispensable to anyone wishing to understand this regime, its place, and time.