Sir Samuel Hoare and Mussolini: When London Funded the Man Who Would Become the Duce

From the money paid to Il Popolo d’Italia in 1917 to the Hoare-Laval Pact of 1935: the little-known story of the British intelligence figure who met Mussolini before Fascism existed and, almost twenty years later, tried to reach a new compromise with him.

When Benito Mussolini came to power in October 1922, Sir Samuel Hoare was not an unfamiliar observer watching from London as a new protagonist appeared on the European stage.

He already knew him.

In fact, only a few years earlier, he had personally helped finance him.

This is not a retrospective hypothesis, nor one of the many legends surrounding the origins of Italian Fascism. Documentation held by Cambridge University Library confirms that during the First World War the British apparatus financed Mussolini’s propaganda activities and his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. One of the central figures in this operation was Samuel Hoare himself.

The most interesting part of the story, however, begins precisely here.

Why did London decide to invest in Mussolini? What did Hoare see in this former socialist leader who had become an interventionist? And above all, to what extent did that support contribute to Mussolini’s later transformation into the leader of Fascism?

The answer is more complicated than the simple claim that “the British created Mussolini.”

But it is also far more interesting.

Sir Samuel Hoare: Politician, Diplomat and Intelligence Officer

Samuel John Gurney Hoare was born in 1880 into a family belonging to the British establishment. A Conservative and a member of the House of Commons from 1910, during the First World War he became directly involved in the world of intelligence.

In 1916 he was sent to Russia and operated in Petrograd at the head of a mission connected with British intelligence. Cambridge still holds correspondence between Hoare and Mansfield Cumming, the legendary first chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, the famous “C” who would later help inspire the figure of “M” in Ian Fleming’s novels.

In 1917 Hoare was transferred to Italy.

There, the institutional structure of British intelligence was particularly complex. According to Cambridge University Library, Hoare took command of the British Military Mission, an organisation at the time connected with MI5 for wartime military intelligence purposes. The mission reportedly included around one hundred British officers and a much wider network of Italian collaborators and informants.

Its essential task was simple to express and extremely difficult to accomplish:

prevent Italy from leaving the war.

1917: When London Feared Losing Italy

The autumn of 1917 was one of the most dangerous moments of the entire conflict for the Entente.

Revolutionary Russia was gradually abandoning the war. In Italy, the disaster at Caporetto produced an enormous military, political and social shock. Inflation, food shortages, war fatigue, labour unrest and pacifist propaganda fuelled fears in London that Rome might seek a separate peace with the Central Powers.

If Italy had left the conflict, Austro-German divisions could have been redeployed to other fronts.

For the British government, preventing such an outcome was worth considerably more than the money needed to organise propaganda, demonstrations and political operations inside Italy.

Cambridge University Library explicitly describes how the mission headed by Hoare was not limited to intelligence gathering. It also financed propaganda and supported initiatives designed to exert pressure on the Italian government itself.

It was within this context that Benito Mussolini entered the picture.

The Right Man at the Right Time

The Mussolini of 1917 was not yet the Duce.

He was, however, already a highly unusual political figure.

He had been one of the best-known socialists in Italy and editor of Avanti!, but his interventionist position had led to a break with the Italian Socialist Party. In November 1914 he founded Il Popolo d’Italia, the newspaper that would become the principal instrument of his political campaign.

For Hoare, Mussolini’s socialist past was not necessarily a disadvantage.

Quite the opposite.

A former socialist capable of speaking to workers, ordinary people and veterans could be far more useful than propaganda openly originating from the ruling classes or foreign embassies.

Mussolini was interventionist, fiercely opposed to neutralism and determined to prevent Italy from abandoning the war.

For a time, the interests of the two men coincided.

And this is where British money enters the story.

One Hundred Pounds a Week

Cambridge University Library states that the British government financed Mussolini’s propaganda with £100 a week. The same figure emerges from documentation examined by historian Peter Martland in Hoare’s personal papers.

At the time, this was a considerable sum.

The money was used primarily to support Il Popolo d’Italia, keeping alive an influential voice in favour of continuing the war.

London, of course, was not financing a Fascist dictatorship in 1917. Such a regime did not yet exist.

It was purchasing political influence.

This distinction is crucial.

Hoare’s immediate objective was not to place Mussolini in charge of Italy, but to use his journalistic and organisational abilities to prevent the Italian home front from collapsing.

Yet this intervention had consequences that deserve attention.

British support was not strengthening an ordinary journalist. It was strengthening a man who was building around his newspaper an independent political network, by then increasingly detached from traditional socialism.

Propaganda, the Streets and Political Violence

There is another, even more disturbing element.

According to Peter Martland’s reconstruction based on the Hoare papers, Mussolini did not merely promise articles in favour of the war. He also reportedly offered to mobilise veterans and wounded former soldiers against pacifist demonstrations in Milan.

It is difficult not to notice what would happen only a few years later.

Veterans.

Political organisation.

Control of the streets.

Violence against opponents.

Nationalist mobilisation.

These ingredients would reappear within the culture of Fascist squadristi violence.

This does not mean that Hoare invented Fascist paramilitarism.

The roots of Fascist violence were much broader: the brutalising effects of the First World War, the crisis of the liberal state, the Biennio Rosso, rural conflict, support from sections of the agricultural and industrial elites, institutional weakness and the enormous population of returning veterans all contributed to the phenomenon.

But it does mean that as early as 1917 British intelligence considered it acceptable to make political use of Mussolini and his capacity for mobilisation against Italian pacifism.

The seed was not necessarily planted by London.

But London decided to water it.

From Interventionist Mussolini to Fascist Mussolini

The war ended in November 1918.

Only a few months later, on 23 March 1919, Mussolini founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in Milan.

At this point an inevitable question arises: was there financial continuity between British money in 1917-18 and the Fascist movement of 1919-22?

Here the documentary evidence becomes far less clear.

And it is precisely at this point that two opposite errors must be avoided.

The first is to erase British funding from the story, reducing it to a minor curiosity.

The second is to transform it automatically into proof that London planned the March on Rome.

The available sources allow us to state with confidence that Mussolini received British money during the war.

They also demonstrate that the British regarded him as a politically useful interlocutor.

It is far more difficult to demonstrate a continuous financial chain leading directly from the pounds of 1917 to the Fasci di Combattimento and subsequently to the March on Rome.

The Controversial Question: Did the British Support the March on Rome?

In recent years this interpretation has returned to public attention, particularly through studies of British documents held in the National Archives and Hoare’s personal papers.

In 2022, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, discussing research by Giovanni Fasanella and Mario José Cereghino, reported the thesis that sections of the British establishment actively supported Mussolini’s political rise all the way to the conquest of power.

However, the same article included an important qualification.

British intelligence reports from 1922 present a more ambiguous picture: considerable attention towards Mussolini, relatively little hostility to him and a serious underestimation of the nature of the Fascist movement, but no unequivocal evidence of a British order to support the March on Rome. The reports do not contain any explicit endorsement of the Fascist operation.

This may appear to be a subtle distinction, but historically it is enormous.

London may not have “organised” Mussolini’s rise while still helping to create an international environment in which that rise was regarded as tolerable and, in certain circles, even useful.

The Fear of Bolshevism

To understand this willingness to accommodate Mussolini, we must look at the new enemy that emerged in 1917.

Imperial Germany disappeared in 1918.

Bolshevik Russia remained.

Cambridge documentation shows that by the end of the war Bolshevism had rapidly replaced German militarism as one of the principal concerns of British intelligence.

From this perspective, Mussolini possessed several attractive characteristics.

He was a nationalist.

He was anti-socialist.

He was capable of mobilising veterans.

He understood the language and culture of the revolutionary left because he came directly from that world.

Above all, he could be interpreted as a barrier against a possible socialist revolution in Italy.

This helps explain why sections of the British and wider European elite initially viewed Fascism with a degree of tolerance that may now appear extraordinary.

They did not necessarily need to share Fascist ideology.

It was enough to regard the movement as useful in containing revolution.

1922: Mussolini Comes to Power

On 28 October 1922 the March on Rome took place.

King Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign the decree declaring a state of siege and subsequently asked Mussolini to form a government.

The British press understood perfectly well that this was not an ordinary parliamentary transition. Contemporary articles in The Guardian described the events as a revolution carried out through the threat of force.

Yet Fascist Italy was soon recognised as a legitimate international interlocutor.

The British ambassador, Sir Ronald Graham, met Mussolini after the March on Rome and sent relatively optimistic assessments of the new Italian prime minister back to London.

The Fascist experiment was therefore not immediately treated as a threat to be isolated.

It was observed, evaluated and progressively incorporated into the European diplomatic system.

Hoare and Mussolini Meet Again

History occasionally produces symmetries almost too neat to believe.

Eighteen years after the funding of 1917, Samuel Hoare and Benito Mussolini once again found themselves at the highest levels of European politics.

Mussolini was now the Duce.

Hoare had become British Foreign Secretary.

In 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, a member of the League of Nations.

Officially, London condemned the aggression.

Privately, however, Britain and France were desperately attempting to avoid a definitive break with Mussolini.

The reason was Hitler’s Germany.

The result was the famous Hoare-Laval Plan.

The Agreement That Would Have Given Mussolini Much of Ethiopia

In December 1935 Hoare and French prime minister Pierre Laval devised a proposal intended to end the Ethiopian war.

The plan involved major territorial and economic concessions to Italy. Contemporary diplomatic records show that it would have transferred large Ethiopian territories under Italian control and created an extensive zone for Italian economic exploitation.

In other words, after publicly condemning the invasion, two major European powers were considering a diplomatic settlement that would have allowed Mussolini to obtain much of what he had sought through war.

When the plan became public, a political storm erupted in Britain.

Hoare was forced to resign on 18 December 1935.

Symbolically, the circle had closed.

In 1917 Hoare had regarded Mussolini as useful for keeping Italy in the war.

In 1935 he was once again seeking an arrangement with him, this time to prevent Italy from moving permanently away from Britain and France and into Hitler’s orbit.

In both cases the underlying logic was essentially the same:

Mussolini not as an end in himself, but as an instrument within a wider geopolitical balance.

Did London “Create” Mussolini?

The formula is tempting.

But it is too simple.

Benito Mussolini was not an artificial creation manufactured by British intelligence.

Fascism emerged from profoundly Italian conditions: the post-war crisis, the weakness of the liberal state, social radicalisation, the conflict between socialists and landowners, the role of agricultural elites, support from sections of industry, squadrist violence, the attitude of the monarchy and the failures of Italy’s traditional political forces.

Without those factors Mussolini would not have reached power.

But the opposite claim, that Fascism was an exclusively Italian phenomenon with no significant international connections, is increasingly difficult to reconcile with the archival record.

The documents demonstrate that in 1917 British intelligence identified Mussolini, financed him and used his newspaper as a propaganda instrument.

They demonstrate that Hoare played a central role in this operation.

They also demonstrate that Britain had an interest in directly influencing the Italian political and social environment for strategic reasons. Cambridge documentation even records the financing of demonstrations and initiatives designed to put pressure on the Italian government.

What cannot be turned into certainty is the existence of a single British operation beginning in 1917 and ending five years later with Mussolini in Palazzo Chigi.

History rarely operates through plans of such perfect continuity.

Far more often, it works through temporary interests that produce unforeseen consequences.

The Man London Thought It Could Use

This is perhaps the most revealing aspect of the story of Samuel Hoare.

British intelligence did not need to foresee Fascism in order to contribute indirectly to the political growth of the man who would later found it.

In 1917 it saw Mussolini as an effective journalist, an organiser, an interventionist and, above all, someone willing to fight the political adversary London feared at that particular moment.

It financed him because he was useful.

Five years later, that man became prime minister of Italy.

Thirteen years after that, he had become powerful enough for London and Paris to contemplate the partition of Ethiopia rather than lose him as a potential counterweight to Hitler.

Then that calculation failed as well.

In June 1940 Mussolini declared war on Britain.

The relationship between Hoare and Mussolini therefore tells us something that goes beyond the biographies of the two men.

It illustrates a recurring mechanism in great-power politics: supporting a political actor because he appears useful during a present emergency, without being able to know what role he will occupy in the future balance of power.

The paradox is striking.

The man who in 1917 received British money to prevent Italy from abandoning a war fought alongside Britain would, twenty-three years later, become the head of the government that declared war on Britain.

Perhaps this is where the Hoare affair acquires its deepest historical significance.

It does not necessarily prove that London designed Fascism.

It demonstrates something more concrete and perhaps more instructive:

long before Fascism seized power, elements of the British establishment had already identified Benito Mussolini as a man worth investing in.

And when the money trail is followed through the archives, certain traces of history suddenly become much harder to erase.

FZ