Mussolini's Italy

With Mussolini ’s Italy, R.J.B. Bosworth—the foremost scholar on the subject writing in English—vividly brings to life the period in which Italians participated in one of the twentieth century’s most notorious political experiments. Il Duce’s Fascists were the original totalitarians, espousing a cult of violence and obedience that inspired many other dictatorships, Hitler’s first among them. But as Bosworth reveals, many Italians resisted its ideology, finding ways, ingenious and varied, to keep Fascism from taking hold as deeply as it did in Germany. A sweeping chronicle of struggle in terrible times, this is the definitive account of Italy’s darkest hour.Mussolini's ItalyList of illustrations
List of abbreviations
Note on further reading
Maps
Preface

Introduction
1. One Italy or another before 1914
2. Liberal and dynastic war
3. Popular and national war
4. 1919
5. Becoming a Fascist
6. Learning to rule in the provinces
7. Learning to rule from Rome
8. Building a totalitarian dictatorship
9. Forging Fascist society
10. Placing Italy in Europe
11. Going to the people
12. Dictating full-time
13. Becoming imperialists
14. Embracing Nazi Germany
15. Lurching into war
16. The wages of Fascist war
17. Losing all the wars
18. The Fascist heritage

Conclusion
Notes
Index

Shrewd, lucid, exhaustively documented and totally unsentimental. (David Schoenbaum, The New York Times)

With this insightful, comprehensive study, Bosworth secures his place as one of the two leading historians in the English-speaking world . . . of twentieth-century Italy. (Publishers Weekly, starred and boxed review)

A powerful work of scholarship, beautifully written, which should be read by anyone interested in twentieth-century Europe. (The Economist)R. J. B. Bosworth is an Australian historian and author and a recognized expert on Fascist Italy. He taught history at the University of Sydney and the University of Western Australia, and was a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. A fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Bosworth is the author of Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915–1945 and The Oxford Handbook of Fascism.