Volume 2, Number 11 · July 9, 1964
Mussolini
By H. Stuart Hughes
The Day of the Lion: The Life and Death of Fascist Italy 1922-1945
by Roy MacGregor-Hastie
Coward-McCann, 395 pp., $6.95
Mussolini and Italian Fascism
by S. William Halperin
Van Nostrand (Anvil paperback), 191 pp., $1.45
Mussolini: A Study in Power
by Ivone Kirkpatrick
Hawhorne Books, 726 pp., $10.00
The career of Benito Mussolini and the Fascist regime that became almost indistinguishable from it seem at last to be emerging from undeserved obscurity. For nearly two decades after his death, Mussolini's role in contemporary history was blurred, overshadowed by the memory of an inglorious end. The Italian dictator's gradual eclipse by Hitler, his repudiation in 1943 at the hands of his own people, his unworthy reincarnation as a puppet ruler in the North—the whole sequence epitomized by the final macabre scene of a horribly swollen corpse hanging upside down in a Milan square—all this so reduced Mussolini's historical dimensions that he remained in our minds as little more than a figure of folly, of farce, of small-scale tyranny, or, at the best, of pathos. We forgot that the Italian Duce had ruled nearly twice as long as Hitler, that his had been the original Fascist system which gave the subsequent European movement its name and character, and that in the decade between Lenin's death and Hitler's accession Mussolini had ranked as the most dynamic of European leaders to whom the great of England and America were only too glad to pay their respects. Such is the full record which three recent books by British and American authors have tried to rescue from oblivion.
Review, 2569 words
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