ABSTRACT
This final constraint on Mussolini's power makes it doubly difficult, for historians and biographers alike, to judge whether the so-called Verona Manifesto marked a real return to the radicalism of Mussolini's youth. The view taken in this chapter, purely on the basis of the actual implementation of the Manifesto, is that by then Mussolini was too wedded to the concept of personal dictatorship to be able to make real concessions to democracy or the idea of a redistribution of economic resources in Italy. A crucial line of continuity concerned Church-State relations, whom Mussolini had formalised in 1929 and given the emergence of a powerful Communist Party through the Partisan movement, might have been expected to have created severe tensions in the new Italian State. It is remarkable, as one historian has written, that Mussolini 'whose exaltation of faith, enthusiasm and obedience, intolerance of dissent and celebration of violence and war' damaged Italy so much can still hold such a position.
