Italo Balbo: A Fascist Life

by Claudio G. G. Segre

Pioneering aviator, blackshirt leader, colonial governor, confidante and heir-apparent to Benito Mussolini, the dashing and charismatic Italo Balbo exemplified the ideals of Fascist Italy during the 1920s and 30s. He earned national notoriety after World War I as a ruthless squadrista whose blackshirt forces crushed socialist and trade union organizations. As Minister of Aviation from 1926 to 1933, he led two internationally heralded mass trans-Atlantic flights. When his aerial armada reached the U. S., Chicago honored him with a Balbo Avenue, New York staged a ticker-tape parade, and President Roosevelt invited him to lunch. As colonial governor from 1933 to 1940, Balbo transformed Libya from backward colony to model Italian province. To many, Italo Balbo seemed to embody a noble vision of Fascism and the New Italy.

Genres: Biography

484 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Katherine Addison · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italo Balbo was a contradictory man, although probably best summed up by the word "swashbuckler." I swung back and forth between admiring and loathing him--although at that, he fared better than Mussolini, whom I despise more intensely with every new thing I learn about him. Segre is very upfront about the flaws in Balbo's character; he spends a lot of time assessing Balbo against (a.) Balbo's own valuation, (b.) his contemporaries' valuations, (c.) the opinions of historians. Mostly, Segre concludes that Balbo wasn't as grand and glorious as he believed himself to be, but he was by and large a better and more competent man than his detractors claim--although still a corrupt cog in a corrupt machine, a tyrant who saw nothing wrong in social inequality so long as he was at the top of the heap and who delighted in using violence to get his own way.

(Italian fascism, short version: what a horrible mess.)

[Francesco Izzo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uomo solare ed esuberante dalla forte personalità, nato mazziniano, repubblicano ed anticlericale ed avvicinatosi successivamente, oltre che al Fascismo, alla Casa Reale ed alla Chiesa fondamentalmente in funzione frondista, fu forse il gerarca più temuto da Mussolini. Senza peli sulla lingua nelle critiche che gli rivolgeva (si indignò ad esempio per le leggi razziali), fedele nella sua formazione militare soprattutto alla Patria, capì chiaramente che la guerra avrebbe portato tutti alla rovina, ma non si tirò indietro. Anzi eseguì gioiosamente il suo dovere fino alla fine.
Prima tenente degli Alpini durante il primo conflitto mondiale, poi squadrista, Ras di Ferrara, Quadrumviro e comandante della Milizia, poi grande trasvolatore atlantico e ministro dell'Aeronautica, Maresciallo dell'Aria, infine Vicerè della Libia: in lui la nobiltà
d'animo, le contraddizioni, la vitalità, l'entusiasmo, l'onestà, la lealtà, a volte l’impulsività di un grande italiano.
Una biografia molto ben realizzata, approfondita, documentata, attendibile, che solo molto raramente si inoltra in giudizi scientificamente non ineccepibili.

[Paul Cornelius · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was in Claudio Segre's graduate seminar at the University of Texas when he had just started researching the Balbo book in detail. Twenty years later, I actually got to read it. Segre was fascinated with Balbo, and it comes through in this volume, which depicts the Italian aviator's often contradictory motivations in clear prose and exacting history. The story of fascism itself is also partly told through Balbo's experiences, and Segre makes clear the complexity and twists in its development that are far from the cartoonish version of history mostly made available on the subject these days. Segre died far too young. His voice was an important and serious one on this matter.