2. CHILDHOOD & ADOLESCENSE
• Mussolini was born in Dovia di Predappio, a small town in the province
of Forlì in Emilia-Romagna on 29 July 1883.
• Birthplace of Benito Mussolini in Predappio, now used as a
museum
3. • His father Alessandro Mussolini was a blacksmith and a socialist, while his mother Rosa
Mussolini (née Maltoni) was a devoutly Catholic schoolteacher.
• Benito was the eldest of his parents' three children. His siblings Arnaldo and Edvige followed.
4. • Owing to his father's political
leanings, Mussolini was
named Benito after Mexican
reformist President Benito
Juárez, while his middle names
Andrea and Amilcare were
from Italian socialists Andrea
Costa and Amilcare Cipriani.
• 29 July 1883, Italy
5. • Mussolini's early political
views were heavily
influenced by his father,
Alessandro Mussolini, a
revolutionary socialist who
idolized 19th century Italian
nationalist figures with
humanist tendencies
• His father's political
outlook combined views
of anarchist figures like
Carlo Cafiero and
Mikhail Bakunin, the
military authoritarianism
of Garibaldi, and the
nationalism of Mazzini.
6. • In 1902, Mussolini emigrated to
Switzerland, partly to avoid
military service. He worked
briefly as a stonemason in
Geneva, Fribourg and Bern, but
was unable to find a permanent
job.
• Mussolini became active in the Italian
socialist movement in Switzerland,
working for the paper L'Avvenire del
Lavoratore, organizing meetings, giving
speeches to workers and serving as
secretary of the Italian workers' union in
Lausanne.
7. • Mussolini became an ally with the
irredentist politician and
journalist Cesare Battisti, and like
him he entered the Army and
served in the war. "He was sent to
the zone of operations where he
was seriously injured by the
explosion of a grenade."
• Mussolini continued to promote
the need of a revolutionary
vanguard elite to lead society. He
no longer advocated a proletarian
vanguard, but instead a vanguard
led by dynamic and revolutionary
people of any social class.
8. Career
Mussolini was born in
Verano di Costa at
2:45 pm on Sunday,
29 July 1883
Benito was a difficult child
but bright. He learned late
to speak and was often
uncontrollable in his
temperament.
His parents sent him to a
religious boarding school at
Faenza in 1892
In the summer of 1894,
shortly before the end of
the second year, Benito
was dismissed because he
had wounded another boy
with a knife
His father then sent him
to the Collegio Giosue
Carducci in
Forlimpopoli.
After graduation Mussolini
became a temporary
elementary school teacher
in Gualtieri near Parma in
the Po valley.
9. CAREER
The school was run by
lay teachers and
Benito stayed here
until the age of 18.
There were two more
incidents of stabbing his
classmates with a knife but it
was due to his brilliant
academic records
During his last two years at
school he became
interested in sex. He
pursued the pretty girls he
met in the street, and
frequented the brothels in
Forlimpopoli.
After graduation Mussolini
became a temporary
elementary school teacher
in Gualtieri near Parma in
the Po valley.
He died on 28 April 1945,
two days before Hitler shot
himself in the head.
10. • In 1917, Mussolini got
his start in politics with
the help of a £100
weekly wage from MI5
(The equivalent of
6000 pounds today), to
keep anti war
protestors at home and
publish pro war
propaganda.• This help was
authorized by Sir
Samuel Hoare.
11. • Mussolini pretended to incarnate the new fascist Übermensch,
promoting an aestethics of exasperated machism and a cult of
personality that attributed to him quasi-divine capacities.
12. • The basic underlying idea behind
Mussolini's foreign policy was
that of spazio vitale (vital space), a
concept in Fascism that was
analogous to lebensraum in
German National Socialism.
• Though biological racism was less
prominent in Fascism than
National Socialism, right from
the start there was a strong racist
undercurrent to the spazio vitale
concept, in which Mussolini
asserted there was a "natural law"
for stronger peoples to subject
and dominate "inferior" peoples
13. • He was also head of the all-
powerful Fascist Party and the
armed local fascist militia, the
MVSN or "Blackshirts", who
terrorized incipient resistances in
the cities and provinces.
• He would later form the OVRA,
an institutionalized secret police
that carried official state support.
In this way he succeeded in
keeping power in his own hands
and preventing the emergence of
any rival.
