National Fascist Party
국가파시스트당
The party of Italian fascism, created in November 1921 when Benito Mussolini turned the Italian Fasces of Combat into a party. It took power through the March on Rome in 1922 and from the mid-to-late 1920s was the only party of the Kingdom of Italy. After the Grand Council of Fascism deposed Mussolini in July 1943, the Badoglio government dissolved it.
In depth
Mussolini founded the Italian Fasces of Combat in Milan's Piazza San Sepolcro on 23 March 1919. At the Third Congress in Rome on 7–10 November 1921 the movement, which already had 312,000 members, was dissolved and the National Fascist Party was founded, with Michele Bianchi as its first secretary. In the early years the Blackshirts (squadristi) won the support of landowners by violently attacking socialists and their institutions in the Po Valley. The party dropped the republicanism of the Fasces and turned to the right, calling for nationalism, territorial expansion and a corporatist economy of class collaboration.
At the Fascist congress in Naples on 24 October 1922 Mussolini declared: 'Our program is simple: we want to rule Italy.' On 28 October fewer than 30,000 Fascists took part in the March on Rome; after King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the order for a state of siege, he asked Mussolini to form a cabinet on 31 October. On 15 December the Grand Council of Fascism was founded as the party's supreme organ. In 1923 the party absorbed the Italian Nationalist Association. Having changed the electoral law through the Acerbo Law, it won the elections of April 1924, and the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, who denounced them, was murdered.
The Italian-language source says the party became the only legal party after the so-called 'leggi fascistissime' of 1926, while the English-language source says it was effectively the only permitted party from early 1925 and that a law of 1928 formalised this. Party membership became a basic requirement for public office in 1933 and for employment in 1938, and in 1939 parliament was replaced by the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, filled only with party members. After the Grand Council passed Dino Grandi's motion on 24–25 July 1943, Mussolini was arrested; Pietro Badoglio's government dissolved the party de facto on 27 July and definitively by decree-law on 2 August. Rescued by the Germans in September, Mussolini revived it as the Republican Fascist Party of the Salò Republic. The Italian Constitution forbids the reorganisation of the dissolved Fascist party.