Mussolini’s Four Would-be Assassins: Emergency Politics and the Consolidation of Fascist Power

Abstract

Between 4 November 1925 and 31 October 1926, Tito Zaniboni, Violet Gibson, Gino Lucetti, and Anteo Zamboni all tried and failed to kill Benito Mussolini. The significance of these attempts on Mussolini’s life and their relationship to the establishment of Fascism has gone overlooked as much scholarship focuses almost exclusively on the consequences of socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti’s murder in June 1924. In this article, I analyse the impact that these assassination attempts had on Mussolini’s construction of the Fascist state. The article asks two main questions: What role did these assassins, and the state of emergency that their acts generated, play in the establishment of Fascist control? And how did they contribute to Mussolini’s cult status and his consecration as a ‘man of providence’? I argue that the failed assassination attempts were instrumental in allowing the Fascist regime to create a state of emergency and to capitalize on a fabricated demand for crisis management. These attempts fundamentally structured the conditions for the regime’s consolidation of power, including a vast expansion of laws that dismantled the liberal state and established the Fascist dictatorship.