<em>Mussolini: Son of the Century</em> - Benito Mussolini and the rise of Italian fascism

6 October 2026facebook iconJoe Wright’s eight-part limited series Mussolini: Son of the Century (original title: M. Il figlio del secolo), adapted from Antonio Scurati’s Premio Strega-winning novel, chronicles Benito Mussolini’s rise to fascist dictator of Italy.

First released at the Venice Film Festival in fall 2024, the series has won wide praise and been watched by millions in Italy and elsewhere in Europe since it aired streaming early last year. The series is an ambitious, technically accomplished production, though not without shortcomings. Luca Marinelli’s performance as Mussolini is its centerpiece.

Mussolini: Son of the Century begins on March 23, 1919, when Mussolini gathers war veterans, demobilized arditi (Italian special forces) and nationalists in Milan to found the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. This marks the birth of fascismo, an ideology that has carried its Italian name all over the world.

The series ends with his January 3, 1925 parliamentary speech, in which Mussolini assumed “moral, political and historical responsibility” for the killing of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti and buried what remained of parliamentary democracy. Wright charts the transformation of a marginal movement into a state apparatus: from the electoral disaster of 1919, when the Fascists won virtually no votes while the Socialist Party swept the polls, through Mussolini’s alliance with the liberal politician Giovanni Giolitti, to the fraudulent elections of 1924 and the collapse of ruling-class opposition.

What the series does well it does quite well. Viewers feel the ferociously anti-working-class, anti-socialist and anti-communist nature of fascism. They encounter the human scum Mussolini mobilized. They see the impotence of official Italian socialism’s feckless, reformist leaders in the face of a gathering nightmare. They witness Italian capitalism—its owners, its monarch, its church and its military—ensure that a weak and politically isolated force would come to rule.

The similarities between Mussolini and Donald Trump—corpulent bodies and jutted-out chins spewing the same vomit—are intentional. At one point in the drama, Mussolini turns directly to the viewer and declares, “Make Italy great again.”

Son of the Century arrives amid the far right’s rapid growth. Giorgia Meloni and Fratelli d’Italia, a party that descends directly from Mussolini, govern Italy. Nazism’s heirs are winning elections in Germany. In the US, Trump wages war against the international working class, deporting immigrants, destroying democratic institutions and promising to annihilate entire civilizations. He aspires to be the 21st century Mussolini.

Artistic efforts that help people grasp, even if only partially—and feel—what fascism is and what it did are a contribution.

Wright’s work has particular value for an American audience, where fascism is generally presented as “totalitarianism” no different than communism. The miseducated will at least walk away from Mussolini: Son of the Century with a new, and unsettling, impression. They will have questions and look for serious answers.

The series is particularly effective in demolishing the mythology surrounding the October 1922 March on Rome. Mussolini was not leading a triumphant revolutionary army. He remained in Milan having a near-breakdown, cowering in a room, anticipating his imminent demise and preparing to flee to Switzerland if King Victor Emmanuel III authorized the army to disperse the Blackshirts. The Fascist columns outside Rome were—as the film depicts well—a few thousand poorly equipped, hungry men struggling through rain and mud. The Italian army could easily have swept aside the fascist bands. It stood down.

Power, we see, was not “seized” by Mussolini. It was handed to him. The Italian king–so short his feet did not reach the floor when seated on the throne–made him head of government. The liberal politicians facilitated his rise. Industrial interests provided enormous sums to his movement, with money passing directly from businessmen to the fascist squads. The Catholic Church played an instrumental role.

Italy’s reformist Socialists, to whom the working class turned for leadership, refused to call for Italy’s oppressed masses to defend themselves, much less take power and crush fascism. In Mussolini: Son of the Century, we see them sitting in parliament with drawn faces and red roses pinned to their lapels while workers are beaten and their homes torched. Socialist leader Matteotti, soon to be murdered, gives ferocious speeches that conclude with a lot of yelling about the defense of parliament—the institution in the process of handing the state to Mussolini. After exhausting himself with exhortations, Matteotti sits down, satisfied that he said what he wanted to.

The director wishes us to identify with Matteotti’s moral courage. But the viewer senses that if the Socialist parliamentarian’s voice volume had been matched by any form of revolutionary theory and action, history would have been different.

Mussolini: Son of the Century is particularly effective at exposing Mussolini’s political cynicism and the baseness of his appeals. He maneuvers. He operates. He exploits. He is vain, sexually predatory, physically unimpressive and without principle. Those he surrounds himself with are sly, but not intelligent. Their moral bankruptcy shows itself on the outside. They revel in death and excrement.

Mussolini’s mistress, played by Barbara Chichiarelli, is grotesque. The wealthy Jewish patron of the arts, eyelids covered in near-black makeup and lips painted blood red, crows about the future dictator’s greatness and weeps over his indifference to her.

But what the series does badly, it does rather badly.

Mussolini: Son of the Century’s focus on Mussolini’s opportunistic cunning and psychological pathology creates the conception that fascism was, to a significant extent, the product of this man’s diseased mind. Fascist violence was an extension of his personal magnetism. Wright’s intentionally kinetic editing and strobe-heavy visuals and Tom Rowlands’ industrial soundtrack—jarringly at odds with the period setting—warp the drama and intensify this effect.

The focus on Mussolini’s personality veers towards engendering a perverse sympathy for the butcher. Using fourth-wall monologues in which Mussolini speaks directly to the audience, the filmmaker places us inside the dictator’s calculations. We are invited to admire his cynicism, marvel at his ability to escape political traps, be fascinated by his penchant for violent sex and even sympathize with his distaste for the behavior of his fascist thugs. He did not like the way they behaved at the dinner table.

Many scenes focus on such themes. At times the approach is so caricatured and myopic, we are inclined to stop watching.

In describing his artistic aims, filmmaker Joe Wright declared of Mussolini, “I want the audience to be seduced.” The dictator, he has said, should be seen as a “deeply flawed human being,” and fascism as “a politicization of toxic masculinity” that “exists everywhere.”

Seduction, according to Wright, is the explanation for Mussolini’s rise.

This follows directly from novelist Scurati’s conceptions. A self-declared anti-fascist, Scurati stated in a Sky interview last year that “It was necessary to acknowledge that the fascists were not always ‘they’ but that ‘we’ were the fascists, we’ve been fascists. We needed to look deeply at the fascist inside us. When fear prevails over hope, democracy is in danger. That can happen again.”

This is the moral philosophy of liberalism in concentrated form. The class divide disappears into the pronoun “we.” The capitalists are absolved, and fascism is the product of something universal and innate.

But the workers murdered by fascist squads were not “the fascists.” The socialist organizers whose offices were destroyed were not “the fascists.” The laborers in the factories and peasants on the land were not “the fascists.” Nor were the capitalists and landed elites who embraced fascism interchangeable with their victims.

The central question—why the Italian ruling class needed fascism, of what was it so afraid—is largely absent from Son of the Century.

Following the First World War, Italy was shaken by mass strikes, factory occupations and land seizures. In the summer of 1919, cost-of-living riots swept the country. The socialist landworkers’ union grew to more than a million members. In 1920, factory councils modeled on soviets emerged in Turin, and in August and September more than 500,000 occupied their factories in Milan, Turin, Genoa and beyond. Workers raised red and black flags over Fiat, Pirelli and Alfa Romeo. At Fiat, workers answered the phone, “Fiat Soviet.” Troops in Ancona mutinied, sparking a revolt across central Italy.

Speaking of Italy during the Biennio Rosso—Two Red Years—Leon Trotsky observed, “The dictatorship of the proletariat was an actual fact.”

Can you explain how the reformist leadership of the General Confederation of Labor ended the 1920 factory occupations, and why that decision mattered so much?How does the historical pattern of a ruling class turning to fascism when faced with revolutionary working-class upsurge connect to the growth of far-right parties internationally today?Ask more questions at SocialismAI.comIt was part of a revolutionary upsurge spearheaded by the 1917 Russian Revolution, which saw the workers and peasants of the world’s largest country beat back the capitalists, feudalists and imperialists and proclaim a socialist republic. Over the subsequent decade, massive class conflicts erupted across Europe and Asia, as global capitalism careened from crisis to crisis. In 1919, the Communist International was formed. In 1921, the Italian Communist Party was founded.

Menaced and terrified, the ruling classes turned towards the fascist solution. Little of this class war makes it into Mussolini: Son of the Century, or if it does, only in disjointed fragments. The series makes virtually no reference to anything happening outside Italy; fascism appears as a national disease. The name Lenin is stated offhand once. Hitler, who modeled his failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch on the March on Rome, goes unmentioned.

Workers make it on screen only as helpless victims, getting their skulls cracked or suffering violent humiliation. The viewer is left to believe that the Italian working class never had a chance. They stupidly gathered at their socialist meetings and printed their newspapers, neither anticipating nor doing anything to stop being mowed down by history. They were the object of history, but never its subject.

In one scene in Mussolini: Son of the Century, Mussolini boasts that the moment the Socialists failed to seize power during the Biennio Rosso, the advantage passed into Fascist hands. This is an important insight. But the question is not why Mussolini was clever enough to recognize an opportunity. It is why the working class failed to act beforehand.

Fascism did not develop because the Italian masses were passive dupes, but because their leadership betrayed them, thinking that if they could hold back the working class, the Italian bourgeoisie would hold back the fascists.

The Italian Socialist Party’s Maximalist leadership, headed by Giacinto Serrati, was formally committed to the “maximum program” of abolishing capitalism, but its revolutionary language was never matched by a strategy for taking power. When the decisive moment came in September 1920, the Maximalists deferred to the reformist leadership of the General Confederation of Labor, which ended the factory occupations, negotiating limited concessions with Italy’s government in exchange for evacuating the plants.

As Trotsky explained in Fascism: What It Is and How to Fight It, “The [Italian] social democracy took fright and sprang back. After its bold and heroic exertions, the proletariat was left facing the void.”

The social democracy hoped that the docile conduct of the workers would restore the ‘public opinion’ of the bourgeoisie against the fascists. Moreover, the reformists even banked strongly upon the help of King Victor Emmanuel. To the last hour, they restrained the workers with might and main from giving battle to Mussolini’s bands. It availed them nothing. The crown, along with the upper crust of the bourgeoisie, swung over to the side of fascism. Convinced at the last moment that fascism was not to be checked by obedience, the social democrats issued a call to the workers for a general strike. But their proclamation suffered a fiasco.

The Fascist squads then performed the work of counter-revolution. More than 3,000 socialists and trade unionists were killed in 1921 and 1922. Squadristi used terror, mass beatings, kidnappings, torture, forced doses of castor oil, arson and murder.

But even after this terrible defeat, the Italian working class was not wiped off the historical stage. Opposition to Mussolini was violently suppressed, but not extinguished. When Italy entered World War II, the civil war between the working class and the capitalist state erupted again. Mussolini ended his life hanging upside down from a bombed-out gas station pole adjacent to a Milan square, having been shot the day before by anti-fascists and his body desecrated.

While Mussolini: Son of the Century shows us Mussolini’s fate in its opening sequence, because it ends in 1925, the audience views Mussolini’s rise, not his fall.

The series pushes the working class offstage because its presence would destroy the premise that fascism lives in all of us. The class struggle, not Mussolini, would become the protagonist, and “toxic masculinity” would collapse as an explanation.

In the 1920s, the working class made its first experience with fascism in Italy. At that time, it had little historical framework to understand the depths the ruling class would plumb to preserve its power. As Trotsky noted in his 1932 essay warning the German working class what awaited them, “The [Italian] reformists had dampened the powder so long, in their fear lest it should explode, that when they finally with a trembling hand did apply a burning fuse to it, the powder did not catch.” The Italian masses and even these leaders paid a terrible price.

But now a century has passed, and the lessons of history must be assimilated. That requires seeing fascism not as the product of one man’s charisma or of a “fascist inside us,” but as a weapon of the capitalist class, one that the working class can disarm only by taking power itself.