Mussolini (1883–1945) was the son of a Turmoil between the Wars socialist blacksmith. His mother was a schoolteacher, and he deferentially followed in her footsteps. But he was restless and dissatisfied, soon leaving Italy for further study in Switzerland. There he gave part of his time to his books and the rest to writing articles for socialist newspapers. Expelled from the country for fomenting strikes, he returned to Italy, where he became a journalist and eventually the editor of Avanti, the leading socialist daily. Mussolini did not hold to any particular doctrine, and he reversed himself at several points. When war broke out in August 1914, Mussolini insisted that Italy should remain neutral. He had scarcely adopted this position when he began urging participation on the Allied side. Deprived of his position as the editor of Avanti, he founded a new paper, Il Popolo d'Italia, and dedicated its columns to arousing enthusiasm for war.
As early as October 1914, Mussolini had organized groups, called fasci, to help drum up support for the war. Members of the fasci were young idealists, fanatical nationalists. After the war, these groups formed the base of Mussolini's fascist movement. (The word fascism derives from the Latin fasces: an ax surrounded by a bundle of sticks that represented the authority of the Roman state. The Italian fascio means "group" or "band.") In 1919, Mussolini drafted the original platform of the Fascist party. It had several surprising elements, such as universal suffrage (including woman), an eight-hour workday, and a tax on inheritances. A new platform, adopted in 1920, abandoned all references to economic reforms. Neither platform earned the fascists much political success. What the fascists lacked in political support, they made up for in aggressive determination. They gained the respect of the middle class and landowners and intimidated many others by forcefully repressing radical movements of industrial workers and peasants.
