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1915 and Italy has just joined the First World War. It sided with the Entente powers despite previously having made a defensive pact with the Central Powers. Because it was Austria-Hungary that invaded Serbia in 1914 that meant that it wasn't a defensive war and thus Italy could sit it out. Both sides had tried to convince Italy to join them and it was the Entente who won out in the end when Italy signed the Treaty of London which promised them all of this territory from Austria-Hungary as well as a mountain of cash. On May the 23rd Italy declared war on the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Italy was all in.

Italy didn't exactly perform very well during the war, but fortunately their main opponent was Austria-Hungary, who also didn't perform very well. In late 1917 came Italy's greatest defeat during the war, the Battle of Caporetto. This saw the Central Powers push this far into Italy, thus threatening Venice and also seeing 300, 000 Italian casualties. In order to raise morale, the Liberal government promised soldiers loads of things like the vote and free land. Anyway, Austro-Hungarian successes in the war, just like in everything else, didn't last.

In November 1918, the Battle of Vittoria-Vinito began which saw the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian army in the end of the war on the Italian front. A week after this victory, the First World War was over and Italy was free to celebrate and gain the lands the Allies had promised them, or at least they'd hoped. During the Paris Peace Conference, the Italians demanded what they had been promised plus a little bit more. The Allies said no and instead gave these areas to Italy and the rest of the promised territories to the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Many Italians felt that this was a gross betrayal by the rest of the Entente and this became known as the Vittoria Mutilata, the mutilated victory.

The displeasure at the post-war settlement came to a head when Gabriele D'Annunzio led a group of armed Italian nationalists to the city of Fiume and occupied it. They wanted Italy to annex it but the government refused. As such it was declared to be a free state but after the Italian navy blockaded the city D'Annunzio surrendered. To make matters worse the post war economy was in ruins and since all of the soldiers had been demobilised and many of the wartime factories were closed, unemployment skyrocketed. Also the promise of land to the soldiers wasn't honoured, but they did get the vote.

All of this disappointment surrounding the outcome of the war combined with the economic downturn meant that people became much more extreme in their demands. This led to what's known as the Red Biennium, which saw 2 years of increased support for socialist parties, greater industrial action, some of which was quite violent, and even calls for a revolution like that in Russia. These more radical socialists were quite frightening to many Italians, and to prevent them from gaining power, some turned to a new group, the fascists, led by a certain Benito Mussolini. Mussolini had previously himself been a socialist, but he was kicked out of the party when he supported Italian entry into World War I. After the war, many unemployed veterans joined the Blackshirts, a fascist militia who went up and down the country making life pretty miserable for any and all socialists they could find.

Mussolini wasn't in complete control of the blackshirts though. Regional leaders like Italo Balbo held immense sway but did largely accept Mussolini's leadership. The current Prime Minister of Italy at this point was a man called Giovanni Giolitti who was a conservative and disliked the growing power of the socialists but also was concerned about the fascists. He decided to call a new election to Italy's parliament, the House of Deputies, where he would form a broad coalition which would include Mussolini and his fascists. The idea was that giving Mussolini a legitimate position in government would make him act in a more respectable manner and kill off the fascist movement.

The idea was a bad 1. Giolitti actually lost seats during this election, and the socialists gained them, sort of. Some of the seats were gained by the newly formed Communist Party, created by a certain Antonio Gramsci. As a result, passing legislation was much more difficult and the fascists now had friends in high places. In late 1921, the fascists decided to become a formal political party, the National Fascist Party, the PNF.

Mussolini wanted to enter government via peaceful means, but the party's members wanted him to take power now. On October 28th 1922, the fascists conducted their infamous March on Rome, whereby tens of thousands of blackshirts marched on Rome. Mussolini wasn't there himself though, he was in Milan ready to flee to Switzerland if it all went wrong. Victor Emmanuel III was asked to sign an order allowing the army to open fire on the Blackshires. The King, for reasons unknown, did not and the next day he made Mussolini the Prime Minister.

So the proportional representation system used in Italian elections meant that no party ever won a majority. Mussolini, along with many others, sought to change this and a man called Giacomo Acerbo put forward a law known as the Acerbo Law which meant that the winning party in any future elections would get a clear majority of seats. This law was supported by most parties for 2 reasons. The first was that everyone hated the current electoral system since it made weak governments. The second and arguably main reason they supported the law, was the armed blackshirts who were in the room with them.

Another election was held in 1924, with Mussolini and the fascist party standing for the first time at the head of a right-wing coalition. They won about 65% of the vote and there's a lot of debate as to how clean the elections were. There was certainly violence against Mussolini's opponents but he was also very popular and many Italians were hoping he would fix the country's problems. The head of the socialist opposition, Giacomo Mattiotti, spoke out against Mussolini's victory, saying it was tainted by the violence inflicted by his followers. Shortly after this, Mattiotti was kidnapped and murdered by fascist blackshirts.

The murder of Mattiotti forced many of Mussolini's coalition partners to abandon him and it looked like his grip on power was slipping. The fascist membership wanted Mussolini to be more extreme and hostile to his coalition partners, whereas Mussolini didn't want to lose more support in the Chamber of Deputies, which was becoming more and more difficult since he was directly implicated in Mattiotti's murder. As such, he took a major risk. On January 3rd 1925, Mussolini walked into the Chamber of Deputies and dared anyone to remove him. Nobody did.

This is seen as the end of liberal Italy and the beginnings of fascist Italy, but the difference wasn't immediate and in many ways there was little difference at all. Conservatives and liberals were still being appointed to positions of authority. That said, Mussolini did become a dictator. In late 1925 he went from being the Prime Minister of Italy to being the head of the government, although he's better known by his other title, Il Duce, the leader. The next year, after a few assassination attempts, he banned all opposition parties, had Gramsci arrested and enacted strict press censorship.

The new regime began a fierce propaganda campaign and sought to present Mussolini as an unassailable leader in the same vein as the old Roman emperors. Mussolini's first goal was to fix Italy's ailing economy. He sought to increase the levels of industrialization across Italy which were far behind the other great powers. Mussolini also sought to win several economic battles to secure Italy's position as a leading nation, the 2 most important being the Battle for Grain and the Battle for the Lira. The Battle for Grain was designed to make Italy self-sufficient in grain production.

The Battle for the Lira was meant to make the Lira more valuable as an international currency, which would make importing certain resources on which Italy lacked more feasible. Mussolini also made an agreement with Pope Pius XI to settle the Roman question. The Pope didn't recognise Italian sovereignty over him and Mussolini cut him a deal. We'll give you some money, you'll stop openly criticising fascism and the Vatican will gain its independence. They agreed and in 1929 the Vatican City became the world's smallest independent country.

Furthermore, Mussolini's government encouraged people to take up sports and also urged women to have more children. All of the aforementioned changes largely didn't work and made life worse for many Italians but it was seen as their duty to endure for the sake of Italy. Their endurance would ideally see Italy recapture its old glory from the days of the Roman Empire. Mussolini had promised the Italian people that he would rebuild the Roman Empire for them, which is why he had ambitions on all of these countries. To the north lay Austria, who everyone knew that Germany under a certain Adolf Hitler wanted to annex.

In 1935 Mussolini signed a treaty with France and Britain known as the Stresa Front which guaranteed Austrian independence. You see Mussolini didn't really like the Nazi regime in Germany and the whole German master race thing made him uncomfortable because he, you know, wasn't a German. The Stresa front fell apart when Italy invaded Abyssinia, nowadays called Ethiopia, which was conquered by 1937. Mussolini also sent volunteers to fight in the Spanish Civil War, and in this conflict and the previous, Hitler had given Italy-Germany support and relations between the 2 countries improved. Mussolini now felt that Britain and France's time had come and gone and that Europe would now revolve around the Rhone-Berlin Axis, hence where the Axis powers get their name.

Italy and Germany continued their united front over the coming years. In 1938, Italy sided with Germany over the annexation of Austria and its later dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. Germany sided with Italy in 1939 when it sent an ultimatum to King Zog of Albania to accept Italian overlordship. He refused but there was nothing that Albania could do and so, annexation. In May of 1939, Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel, an alliance in which both countries promised to help the other out in the event of war.

On September 1st 1939 Germany invaded Poland and suddenly, World War 2. Mussolini wouldn't bring Italy into the war until mid 1940 after the fall of Paris. In the October of 1940 Mussolini came up with a brilliant idea. Let's invade Greece. This was, to put it mildly, a complete disaster and Italian troops were trounced by the Greeks which forced the Germans to come down and bail them out.

And over the next couple of years things got much worse. The tide of The war turned against the Axis powers. Italy lost its colonies in East Africa, lost many troops aiding with the invasion of the Soviet Union and, after the Battle of El Alamein, lost its Libyan colony in mid-1943. Sicily, then Italy proper, was invaded shortly after this and in September 1943 Mussolini was deposed and arrested. Germany then occupied the north of Italy and set up a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, which was led by Mussolini because he managed to escape.

The rest of Italy, under Victor Emmanuel III, joined the Allies and declared war on Germany. The Italian Social Republic was plagued by issues of partisans, Italians who resisted Mussolini's rule and they did a great deal of damage to its war effort. By April 1945 the front lines looked like this and on the 25th of that month the republic collapsed. 2 days later Mussolini was captured by partisans and shot the next day. The war, and Fascist Italy, was over.

In the aftermath of Fascist Italy, not much changed. The same liberals and conservatives who had been given power by Mussolini retained it after the war. Of course, Italy did see a return to democracy and in 1946 it held a referendum on the monarchy's existence. Victor Emmanuel had abdicated on behalf of his son Umberto II to make the monarchy more appealing, but the Italian people voted to abolish the monarchy in 1946. And thus, the Republic of Italy was born.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and thank you for watching. And a special thanks to Winston Cawood, James Bissonnet, Azarka Flash, Adam Harvey, Henry Rabun, Rabun, I'm sorry if I mispronounced that, Thomas Gestrich and Skye Chappell. If you'd like to learn more about Fascist Italy and Mussolini, there are some book recommendations in the description below.