Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
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Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (November 1914 to August 1923)

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Content note: Speeches and an editor's introduction that praise Fascism and its leader, describe violence against Socialists and Communists as necessary, use hostile wartime terms such as "Huns" for Germans, and make nationalist claims to territory. Shown as printed. This object is shown as it was published. Why

A selection of Mussolini's speeches in English, in six parts that follow his career: the Socialist (one speech, at Milan on 25 November 1914, to the meeting of the Milan section that voted his expulsion), the supporter of Italy's entry into the First World War, the post-war Fascist organiser, the Fascist deputy, and the Prime Minister he became after the March on Rome of October 1922. It was printed in London and New York in 1923. The archive hosts it because its regime page on Fascist Italy quotes from it, and because it shows the movement's own account of itself at the point of taking power, in the leader's words as one sympathetic translator chose them.

Read it with its standpoint in view. The editor and translator, Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino, was a supporter of the movement, and his introduction (A Note on Italian Fascismo, dated October 1923) says so in its content: it presents Fascism as national self-defence against a "Communist peril", calls Lenin's teaching a "nefarious gospel", treats Fascist violence as unavoidable, and praises Mussolini in personal terms. The short note before each speech is the editor's, and he says in the introduction that most of those notes came from someone closely associated with Mussolini; they are set here as indented quotations so they can be told apart from the speeches. The selection is the editor's and is not a complete run of the speeches; some of its 69 items are sections of a single speech. It ends in August 1923, before the Matteotti crisis of 1924 and the one-party state that followed, which the book does not cover. Only the English is given; the Italian originals are not in this edition.

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Provenance and rights

Edition
Mussolini as Revealed in His Political Speeches (November 1914-August 1923), selected, translated and edited by Barone Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino. London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons; New York: E. P. Dutton, 1923 ("Only authorised edition"). Text from Project Gutenberg ebook 62754, proofread by Distributed Proofreaders from Internet Archive page images; the Internet Archive scan mussoliniasrevea00mussuoft (University of Toronto copy) was used to check it.
Text source
Project Gutenberg, ebook #62754 (checked against Internet Archive item mussoliniasrevea00mussuoft)
Text basis
Human-proofread transcription by Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. Gutenberg states that the book's errata were applied and typographical errors corrected without marking.
Rights
Published in 1923, more than 95 years ago, so in the public domain in the United States (works published in 1930 or earlier); Project Gutenberg marks the ebook public domain in the USA. The translator and editor, Bernardo Quaranta di San Severino, died in 1934 and Mussolini in 1945, so the term of life plus 70 years has also run out in Italy and the United Kingdom. The editor's introduction and prefatory notes are part of the 1923 book and are included. Checked October 2, 2026.
Changes made
Project Gutenberg's licence header and footer, the title page, dedication, errata list, contents list, index, and the book's illustrations and their captions are not included (the errata, which Gutenberg applied to the text, are not shown). Line wraps rejoined; the centred headings and part titles set in title case, and the two-line heading of the Bologna speech joined with a colon; italics kept as Gutenberg marks them (_like this_). The editor's prefatory note and place-and-date line before each speech, and the footnotes, are set as indented quotations; footnotes are numbered as in the book and follow the paragraph in which their number appears. The wording, spelling and punctuation are Gutenberg's transcription of the 1923 book, checked against a scan at eight places across the text.
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