À mon père

The signing of the pact on 7 January 1935 between Benito Mussolini, leader of the Italian government, and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval led directly to Italy's invasion of Ethiopia later that year. On the diplomatic level, Il Duce had kept the door open to negotiations with France but his principal goal was a ‘far-reaching, violent solution’ which he had long envisioned in East Africa. It is within this context, and in spite of the initial lack of military progress and the increasingly heavy economic sanctions which followed, that Mussolini's hostility towards the Hoare–Laval compromise and his almost total collusion in seeing it fail can be explained. Meanwhile, on the European front, Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland facilitated Mussolini's unchallenged efforts in Ethiopia, since the attention of France and England had moved considerably away from the Abyssinian conflict. In fact, the Italian aggression against Ethiopia on 3 October 1935 did not represent a simple colonial enterprise. Despite the Fascist regime's attempts to characterise the war in Ethiopia as a domestic matter, in reality it shifted the already precarious European balance of power, creating international tension that was rife with cruel consequences.

In an effort to convince Italians of the merits of the enterprise, Mussolini's regime employed an insistent campaign of propaganda promoting the war in East Africa as the only possible solution to clashes between the Italian colonial troops and Ethiopian forces. Domestically, the simultaneous use of the media to disseminate both information as well as propaganda on the war contributed to creating a consensus in favour of the Italian action, overriding any feelings of agitation or perplexity on the part of the Italian people.

Even in neighbouring Tunisia, home to a large Italian community, the war did not go unnoticed in assiduous press campaigns in the main newspapers and magazines, but they did not have the same positive impact on the domestic level given the mistrust of Mussolini that surfaced after the 1935 agreements in which Il Duce seemed to abandon the Italian promise regarding Tunisia. For the Italians, the political claim had already run its course seeing that the policy of the regime regarding Italians in Tunisia was based primarily on the assertion of an identity between Fascism and ‘italianità’.