The catastrophe of fascism as seen by its creator

Since 2018, Antonio Scurati published in Italy the first volume on the rise and fall of Mussolini, The son of the century (Alfaguara, 2020), millions of readers in Europe and around the world have eagerly awaited the appearance of the next one. Not only to return to a crucial period in history, but also to understand the current political moment. Therefore, along with pure literary enjoyment, it's impossible not to read this great fresco of the first half of the 20th century with a knot in your stomach. Because you only have to read or listen to the news in any format to see a multitude of parallels and feel completely alarmed.

Above all because once Scurati has already explained to us the genesis of fascism and the political use it made of violence to achieve power, what reaches it The hour of destiny (Alfaguara, 2025) is the absolute catastrophe that led to this deadly social experiment. In its pages, we witness, astonished, the macabre spectacle of two figures, Mussolini himself and Adolf Hitler, leading their own people—and many others, but they don't care—to the slaughter. Because this is the end of the history of fascism: the physical and moral destruction of the very people who, to one degree or another, supported them.

Mussolini's delirium of returning Italy to the days of the Roman Empire and turning Italians into a race of warriors clashes with a reality that, at times, takes on a comical quality. Mussolini entered the war alongside Hitler hoping to divide the spoils and sent his soldiers to the front without adequate weapons or training, with a vision of political opportunism and ignoring the purely military aspects. The defeats are spectacular, but he assumes no responsibility. Read through Italian eyes, and given his disregard for human life, the book should foster an absolute anti-fascist consensus. But today in Italy an admirer of fascism governsIs it possible that we haven't learned our lesson?

The Mussolini-Hitler meetings

That said, Scurati's exercise in historical immersion is exceptional. The reader can almost hear the Italian dictator's abdominal pains and get a fairly accurate idea of what a meeting with Hitler must have been like. Mussolini hates the Germans and considers Hitler a madman, but he is unable to stand up to him. His final portrait, that of the finished dictator, abandoned even by his closest friends, oscillates between ridicule and stupefaction, the same as that experienced by one of his collaborators when he senses that "the Duce speaks of his people as a flock of frightened sheep, slaughterhouse fodder for the p... contempt that Hitler and the Germans usually reserve for us." Scurati recounts the meeting in which the fascist leaders, to save themselves personally, intend to sacrifice their leader. "The old fascination with absolute power lasts, in the end, only a few moments. By now it has evaporated, the king is naked, naked and bleeding."

The end of fascism is not only a tragic spectacle but also a pathetic one. Scurati reveals the treacherous and cowardly nature of its leaders, just as it will happen shortly after with the Nazis.