ng communist partisans on April 15, 1944.
According to Gregor, "Mussolini's fascism was a . . . reactive, antidemocratic, developmental nationalism [that] featured a . . . political ideology committed to the redemption of a humiliated and retrograde people." Gregor said the essential pre-condition for its appearance was "an intense period of real or perceived collective humiliation . . . associated with retarded economic and industrial development in a world increasingly dominated by the technologically advanced democratic 'plutocracies.'" All these factors were prevalent during the period which followed Italy's unification in the 1860s and were greatly aggravated by Italy's circumstances during the period of civil disorder, economic distress and nationalist frustration which followed World War I and ushered in Mussolini's rise to power in 1922.
According to Gregor, Italy was "a late developing nation, recently reunited after centuries of dismemberment." The new state which emerged from the complex maneuverings of Camillo Cavour, the conservative Prime Minister of Piedmont with the aid of the republican forces of Giuseppe Garibaldi in the south, fell far short of the expectations aroused by the spirit of Risorgimento or national rebirth which inspired the hopes of many Italians. Romantic nationalist Giuseppi Mazzini portrayed a reunified Italy which would become a 'third Rome' with a civilizing mission and restored national grandeur and respect abroad and democracy, liberty and social justice at home. Italians were to achieve all this through "a fraternity of faith [and] consciousness of a common ideal" and common devotion to "duty to the fatherland" which would evoke the "virtue of self-sacrifice" by all Italians.
By the turn of the century, De Grand said it was clear that the political class which ruled Italy after unification through the constitutional monarchy and liberal parliamentary system
"represented t...