When the Fascists came to power in 1922, the statistics institute was in a state of neglect; emigration was considerable, though not as high as it had been; and fertility decline was beginning to be a source of concern, though not yet in government circles. Lacking a preconceived program regarding population questions, Mussolini's government inherited the limited policies and institutions of its Liberal predecessors and only gradually came to revise them.

In the first few years of Fascist rule, questions of power and holding on to it generally took precedence over social policy, and it was only in the period between the resolution of the Matteotti crisis in January 1925 (generally regarded as signalling creation of the dictatorship) and the signing of the Lateran treaty in February 1929 (reconciliation with the Church and definitive consolidation of power) that Fascist policy moved from vague to more certain and authoritarian positions. In this, population policy was no exception.

It was, in fact, in the period 1925–9 that Mussolini adopted what had been the traditional Nationalist line on emigration and in general developed the populationist stance that would characterize the rest of the ventennio. The first emigration, anti-urban, and pronatalist measures date from this period as do the Fascist internal migration, infant and maternal care, and statistics institutes. In this chapter then I consider the creation of the policy's ideological, legislative, and institutional infrastructure, all basically in place (and untested) by 1929. In subsequent chapters I shall return to each of these areas and their developments in the mature years of Fascist rule during which the policy underwent revision, expansion, and attempted reinvigoration.