On April 7, 1926, Fascist leader Benito Mussolini gave a speech to a conference of surgeons, and then began walking with his aides through the streets of Rome. When he reached Piazza del Campidoglio, an Irish-born British pacifist named Violet Gibson stepped out of the crowd and shot him.
The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose and Gibson tried to shoot him again, but her gun malfunctioned, and police quickly detained her. Mussolini was whisked to safety, but a few hours later he appeared in public to reassure his fans — and posed for a photograph with a big white bandage on his nose.
Assassination attempts are an effort to change a political order in one fell swoop. But history shows that they often backfire, and more often serve not to eliminate a strongman, but to strengthen him and his cult of personality. Mussolini showed how that’s done.
After serving as prime minister of a coalition government, Mussolini had declared a dictatorship in January 1925. The Gibson shooting was the third attempt on Mussolini’s life after that. The earlier attacks were by Italian anti-Fascists: Tito Zamboni, a Socialist member of Parliament, was arrested before he could fire a bazooka at Il Duce from a hotel room he had rented, and the anarchist Gino Luccetti threw a bomb at Mussolini’s motorcade that failed to explode.
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