A Fascist power broker who helped bring down Mussolini
At 2 a.m. on 25 July 1943, the Grandi motion passed 19–8 and shattered Mussolini’s grip on power.
Dino Grandi was a leading Italian Fascist and diplomat who exercised power at the centre of the regime. As foreign minister and ambassador in London, he pursued a cautious diplomatic line toward war, but he also bore responsibility for administering the Fascist state and its policies. After the Allied invasion of Sicily, he drafted and organized the vote on the July 1943 motion calling on the king to resume constitutional command of the armed forces, helping bring about Benito Mussolini’s removal. He went into exile and was later sentenced to death in absentia by the Italian Social Republic’s Fascist tribunal.
Also known as: Dino Antonio Giuseppe Grandi · Count of Mordano
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1915–1919Served in World War I, studied law and economics, and began legal practice
- 1920–1922Leader in the Bologna Fascist movement and the National Fascist Party leadership
- 1924–1929Undersecretary of the Interior and Foreign Affairs
- 1929–1932Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs
- 1932–1939Italian ambassador to the United Kingdom
- 1939–1943Minister of Justice and president of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations
- 1943Drafted and organized the Grand Council motion that removed Mussolini
- 1944Sentenced to death in absentia by the Italian Social Republic tribunal
Related historical events
Wartime Minister of Justice and Speaker of the Fascist Chamber
On 12 July 1939 Grandi returned to the government as Minister of Justice (Guardasigilli), and on 30 November of that year he also became President of the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, holding both posts until February 1943. Mussolini's decision to bring him back was meant as a message of moderation to foreign interlocutors, but at the Justice Ministry Grandi tried to block interference by the Fascist Party in the courts. He completed the codification of the civil code, the code of civil procedure and the navigation code, which took effect on 21 April 1942, enlisting anti-fascist and Jewish jurists such as Piero Calamandrei and Corrado Vivante, and argued that Fascist law and Nazi law reflected irreconcilable national identities. He also presented himself as a defender of the state's continuity and of the Crown's constitutional prerogatives rather than of integral totalitarianism.
This period's legislation cannot, however, be separated from the regime's racial policy. The 1941 reform of the judicial order that he oversaw, known as the Ordinamento Grandi, barred Italians of the Jewish religion from sitting the magistracy examination and drove Jewish magistrates out of the judiciary. Accounts differ on his stance toward the 1938 racial laws: an English reference describes him as having opposed them, while legal-historical studies stress that the 1941 reform institutionalized racial exclusion. These two claims are in tension and the record does not fully resolve them.
After Italy entered the war in June 1940 he served on the Greek front; he refused the post of civil governor of occupied Greece, which had been conquered only with German help. As the war turned, he advocated a separate peace to avoid Italy's satellization by Germany and criticized Mussolini's conduct, and he was dismissed as minister in the February 1943 government reshuffle. Between 1939 and 1943 he therefore operated the machinery through which the Fascist state carried out both its codified racial discrimination and its war effort, and he shares responsibility for that administration.