Rarely has a book on Fascist memory been so timely. Three days after the publication of Paul Corner's latest book, Mussolini in Myth and Memory: The First Totalitarian Dictator, Giorgia Meloni's far-right party Fratelli d'Italia won the Italian general election. The New York Times immediately diagnosed the ‘deliberate amnesia’ of the postwar process, positioning Meloni's victory as the outcome of Italy's failure to work through its Fascist past. Thirty-three days after Meloni's victory, on the centenary of the March on Rome, antifascists gathered in Mussolini's hometown of Predappio to mark the 78th anniversary of the town's liberation by partisans in a demonstration designed to upstage the one organised by neofascists who uphold and revere Mussolini's myth each year.

In Mussolini in Myth and Memory, historian Paul Corner interrogates the myth of a leader and a regime directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of its own citizens that endures in the constitutionally antifascist Republic today. The book examines the power of this far-right nostalgia – a longing to return to a simpler past as expressed in rose-tinted recollections of the regime – a phenomenon Corner describes as ‘an illusion about the past [that] offers solace in the present and hope for the future’ (p. 156). In Chapter 1, Corner declares ‘dictatorships and dictators seem to be making a comeback in public perception’ (p. 2), identifying the myth of the benevolent dictator that has played a part in the rehabilitation of authoritarians the world over, from Mussolini to Ceaușescu. Here, he tackles the self-serving ‘engineered amnesia’ (p. 14) of the antifascist Republic that created a binary between Italians and Fascists – victims versus perpetrators – and celebrated an antifascist Resistance with little reference to what it resisted. In the chapters that follow, Corner meticulously debunks myths spanning the politics, economics and social structures of Fascist Italy. For example, the second chapter deconstructs the idea of ‘good-natured Fascism’, identifying violence – its physical manifestation and its latent threat – as ‘one of the defining and structural characteristics of the regime’ (p. 36). In the run-up to the centenary of the March on Rome the question of Fascist violence attracted increased scholarly interest, resulting in new research from Giulia Albanese (2019), John Foot (2022) and Matteo Millan (2022) that documents the regime's systemic use of violence. What these books make clear is the role that the simple threat of violence played in the establishment of the regime and throughout the ventennio. As Corner writes in Chapter 3, ‘it was consensus within coercion’ in Fascist Italy (p. 50).

‘Things were better when HE was in charge’ – a refrain often heard in neofascist circles today – is the title of the fourth chapter, in which Corner argues that not everything that happened under Fascism was down to Fascism alone. In this, the longest of the seven chapters, Corner presents Fascism as a class regime and shows that the benefits still lauded by Fascist sympathisers (many credit Mussolini for the introduction of pensions) were highly hierarchical in their application. Corruption, falling wages in industry, and the low consumption of calories in the families of labourers left the poorest poorer than they had been before il Duce took power. Chapter 5 argues that the racial laws, antisemitism and colonial atrocities were not, as some far-right sympathisers have argued, some of ‘Mussolini's mistakes’ in pursuit of an alliance with Hitler or down to his desire to compete with European colonialism, but consequences of an ‘inevitably expansionist’ (p. 117) and racist regime. The final two chapters address the myth of Mussolini as a modernising force, showing among other things the failure of land reclamation (‘a good idea done badly’, p. 136), reflect on the lure of the past amidst recent uncertainties, and point us towards the threat of Fascism online today.

Corner's work shows that the normalisation of previously damned dictators takes place in the space left open when history and memory diverge. His book is an effort to realign the two, exposing these myths for what they are. Reflecting on how myths created by the regime have taken on a life of their own since its demise, Corner remarks (p. 144) in characteristically elegant fashion: ‘We still hear the cheers; we no longer suffer the strait-jacket of social control.’ One can only hope the more people read this book, the quieter those cheers will become.