ABSTRACT
The story of Mussolini's dictatorship can be read as his making himself indispensable to the broad forces of the right and then manufacturing support for this alliance among the rest of the Italian population. The dictatorship was therefore Mussolini's attempt to crush the subversives, remove them from Italian politics, and prevent any future alliance between them and his moderate supporters. The dictatorship was not a period of martial law but a real alternative to the liberal democratic state as it had developed in Europe since the nineteenth century. The Vittorio Veneters wanted national self-assertion, the glorification of the First World War dead and veterans, possibly a larger African empire and intolerance towards other ethnic groups on Italy's borderlands, but there was little here on which to base the actual running of a very large and complex European country.
