Mussolini In The Making

History has an awkward habit of making yesterday’s serious political biographies look like slightly overconfident weather forecasts. Mussolini in the Making (1938) by Gaudens Megaro arrives from precisely that fascinating moment in time when the future had not yet fully revealed its intentions. Published by George Allen and Unwin on the eve of a world war that nobody could quite imagine in its final form, this book attempts the noble task of explaining how an ambitious Italian journalist named Benito Mussolini managed to transform himself into one of Europe’s most formidable political figures.

Megaro approaches the subject with the earnest curiosity of a man watching history unfold in real time rather than from the comfortable distance of hindsight. The Mussolini presented here is still in the process of becoming the legend, the strongman, and eventually the cautionary tale that later historians would dissect at great length. In 1938 the story had not yet reached its final act. To readers at the time, Mussolini appeared less like a doomed dictator and more like a dramatic political experiment whose ultimate consequences were still being debated in cafés and editorial offices across Europe.

The book traces Mussolini’s early life with the steady patience of a biographer trying to understand the ingredients that produce a revolutionary personality. There are the formative years as a fiery socialist journalist, the transformation into a nationalist firebrand, and the improbable ascent from street politics to the commanding heights of the Italian state. The narrative reads almost like a political origin story, complete with ideological twists, newspaper offices filled with argument, and the theatrical energy of a man who clearly believed history had reserved a rather large role for him.

Reading it today carries a slightly surreal charm. The reader knows how the next chapters of the story will unfold, while the author does not. That gap between expectation and hindsight gives the book its peculiar fascination. It captures a moment when fascism still looked to some observers like a bold political experiment rather than the grim warning sign it would later become. The result is not merely a biography but a historical snapshot of how Mussolini was understood before the Second World War rearranged the moral furniture of Europe.

Megaro’s writing reflects the journalistic tone of the period, brisk and analytical but occasionally tinged with the sense that Mussolini’s rise was part of a larger continental drama. The book is interested in the forces that produced him: the instability of post–First World War Italy, the fear of revolution, and the restless search for authority in a country trying to define its place in the modern world. In this sense the work is as much about the political climate of the 1920s and 1930s as it is about the man himself.

For modern readers the book offers an intriguing exercise in historical perspective. It reminds us that people living through events rarely know which chapters will later appear in bold type. What seems like the consolidation of power in one decade can become the prelude to catastrophe in the next. Mussolini in the Making therefore reads not only as a biography but also as a reminder that history is written first in uncertainty and only later in judgement.

This particular copy, offered by Crappy Old Books in good condition, has survived the decades with admirable resilience. One imagines it passing through several generations of curious readers, each approaching it with a slightly different sense of what the title really means. After all, Mussolini was certainly “in the making” in 1938. The world simply had not yet discovered what the finished product would look like.

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