In terms of its historical reputation, the best thing that ever happened to fascist Italy was Nazi Germany. Next to the incomprehensible evil of Hitler and Nazism, the merely grotesque evil of Mussolini and fascism can seem quaint, or at least recognizably human. Mussolini had his political opponents beaten up or exiled; Hitler had his murdered in concentration camps. Mussolini speechified about the fascist state; Hitler brought every facet of public and private life under Nazi control. Mussolini praised war; Hitler conquered Europe. Finally, Mussolini encouraged Italian nationalism, while Hitler put in practice a savage biological racism that took millions of lives. On every count, Mussolini seems almost negligible by comparison, a paper dictator who never rivaled Hitler’s (or Stalin’s) transformation of reality.

As Australian historian R.J.B. Bosworth shows in his encyclopedic new history, “Mussolini’s Italy” (Penguin Press, 720 pages, $35), however, Mussolini’s mildness was strictly relative. Between its domestic oppression, its support of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and its brutally racist imperialism in East Africa, the Italian fascist regime was responsible for the deaths of 1 million people. Even before Mussolini took power in 1922, the true face of fascism was shown by the squadristi, armed gangs who roamed the streets beating and killing their political opponents. Once anointed as Duce, or leader, Mussolini dismantled every structure of free society, censoring the press, emasculating the unions, and replacing free elections with meaningless plebiscites. Criticism of the regime, even a few idle or drunken words, could be punished by prison or exile.

Such brutality flowed from the very definition of fascism, which placed a premium on will and hardness. Mussolini’s speeches – the shaven-headed Duce haranguing from his balcony remains the iconic image of fascist Italy – constantly glorified violence. Here, as in many other areas, he set the tone for other European dictators of the interwar period, above all Hitler. Mussolini was the first tyrant to encourage of a cult of personality, to ordain a special fascist salute (the regime tried, and failed, to abolish handshakes), and to enforce obedience through a party militia with a menacing uniform (the Italian blackshirt was inspiration for Hitler’s brownshirts and others). Finally, there were racism and anti-Semitism. A minor part of the fascist message at first, these became increasingly central as Nazism gained influence; in Mussolini’s last years in power, under German patronage, 7,500 Italian Jews were deported to Nazi concentration camps.

If the regime that gave the world the words “fascist” and “totalitarian” (“all is for the state, nothing is outside the state, nothing and no one are against the state,” Mussolini declared) failed to equal its Nazi spawn in barbarity, it was largely because of fascism’s own corruption and confusion. To illustrate the wide range of ways Italians adapted to fascism, and adapted fascism to their own ends, Mr. Bosworth offers the reader a blizzard of case histories. The sheer number of examples can make it hard to keep all of Mr. Bosworth’s dramatis personae straight, but they allow him to show the real workings of the regime in remarkable detail.

Take, for instance, the tragicomic story of Edgardo Sulis, a minor but prolific scribbler in the fascist cause. Judging by his work, Sulis seems like that rare thing, a genuinely committed fascist ideologue. He wrote a book called “Imitation of Mussolini,” on the model of the “Imitation of Christ,” which proclaimed that “Fascism does not originate in an idea but rather in The Man who is the vessel of the idea. … The people need Him as they need air and bread.” Yet as Mr. Bosworth shows, in a fascinating piece of historical detective work, Sulis’s real story is more complex.

Before turning to writing, Sulis had been arrested for starting a riot in his hometown, as part of a long drawn-out campaign against the enemies of his late father, a party functionary who killed himself after being exposed as an embezzler. The manuscript of “Imitation of Mussolini,” with its proof of fascist ardor, was Sulis’s ticket out of jail. After it was published, he happily went on the government’s propaganda payroll, helping to wipe out the blot on the family name. For the rest of his life, Sulis bombarded the Duce with requests for favors, jobs, and gifts: “Help me,” he wrote to the dictator, “and You will never regret having done so.” In short, Mr. Bosworth writes, Sulis was “doing well from doing good for the dictatorship.”

This kind of equivocal commitment, combining true belief with conformity and self-interest, was standard in fascist Italy. Many of the party’s local bosses, whose careers Mr. Bosworth examines in detail, were indistinguishable from Mafia dons, doling out favors to friends and ordering attacks on enemies. In fact, thanks to the country’s severe economic and regional inequalities, many Italians had almost no interaction with the central government, and had only the faintest notion of what fascism meant.

The party boss of Milan wryly admitted in 1938 that, after 16 years of dictatorship, the city’s “totalitarianness was very relative.” Enthusiasm for the alliance with Germany, Italy’s foe in World War I, was always muted, and World War II proved deeply unpopular, once the incompetence and unpreparedness of the government was revealed. Italy’s economy and society remained largely untransformed, and until his desperate last years, Mussolini never went so far as to suggest abolishing Italy’s monarchy. In short, Mr. Bosworth concludes, “Throughout its history … Fascism both was and was not.”

In telling the many stories of “Mussolini’s Italy,” from party bosses down to apolitical peasants, Mr. Bosworth seems alternately shocked and amused at the failure of the regime to remake the people in its own image. The tone of the book is sometimes at odds with the gravity of the material; Mr. Bosworth can seldom resist a witticism at the expense of his subjects, and finally his jokes, as much as his arguments, create the impression that fascism was not a phenomenon of real historical substance. “Lacking the power and the purpose to wipe clean the minds of its subjects,” Mr. Bosworth concludes, “the dictatorship left a thousand histories still blooming in Italy.” Its own sordid history is well told in this magisterial book.

akirsch@nysun.com