On
31 October 1922, following the
March on Rome (28–30 October), Mussolini was
appointed prime minister by King Victor Emmanuel III, becoming the youngest individual to hold the office up to that time. After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a
one-party dictatorship. Within five years, Mussolini had established dictatorial authority by both legal and illegal means and aspired to create a
totalitarian state. In 1929, Mussolini signed the
Lateran Treaty with the Holy See to establish
Vatican City.
Mussolini's foreign policy aimed to restore the ancient glory of the
Roman Empire by expanding Italian colonial possessions and the fascist sphere of influence. In the 1920s, he ordered the
reconquest of Libya, instructed the bombing of Corfu
over an incident with Greece, established
a protectorate over Albania, and incorporated the city of
Fiume into the Italian state via agreements with Yugoslavia. In 1936,
Ethiopia was conquered following the
Second Italo–Ethiopian War and merged into
Italian East Africa (AOI) with
Eritrea and
Somalia. In 1939, Italian forces
annexed Albania. Between 1936 and 1939, Mussolini ordered the successful
Italian military intervention in Spain in favor of
Francisco Franco during the
Spanish civil war. Mussolini's Italy initially tried to avoid the outbreak of a second global war, sending troops at the
Brenner Pass to delay
Anschluss and taking part in the
Stresa front, the
Lytton Report, the
Treaty of Lausanne, the
Four-Power Pact and the
Munich Agreement. However, Italy then alienated itself from Britain and France by
aligning with Germany and Japan. Germany
invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, resulting in declarations of war by France and the UK and the start of
WW2.
On
10 June 1940, Mussolini decided to enter the war on the Axis side. Despite initial success, the subsequent
Axis collapse on multiple fronts and eventual
Allied invasion of Sicily made Mussolini lose the support of the population and members of the Fascist Party. As a consequence, early on
25 July 1943, the
Grand Council of Fascism passed a
motion of no confidence in Mussolini; later that day King Victor Emmanuel III
dismissed him as head of government and had him
placed in custody, appointing
Pietro Badoglio to succeed him as Prime Minister. After the king agreed to an armistice with the Allies, on
12 September 1943 Mussolini was
rescued from captivity in the Gran Sasso raid by
German paratroopers and
Waffen-SS commandos led by Major
Otto-Harald Mors. Hitler, after meeting with the rescued former dictator, then put Mussolini in charge of a
puppet regime in northern Italy, the
Italian Social Republic (
Repubblica Sociale Italiana, RSI), informally known as the
Salò Republic, causing a
civil war. In
late April 1945, in the wake of near total defeat, Mussolini and his mistress
Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland, but both were
captured by Italian communist
partisans and
summarily executed by firing squad on
28 April 1945 near
Lake Como. The bodies of Mussolini and his mistress were then taken to
Milan, where they were
hung upside down at a
service station to publicly confirm their demise.
