Dictating Demography

Drawing on archives, Carl Ipsen traces how Mussolini's government approached population as a matter of national concern. He looks closely at the official Italian statistics of the period and at the demographic ideas circulating among experts then. The Fascist regime, he shows, used figures both to shape public opinion through propaganda and to guide its policy choices.

The book focuses on the regime's drive to expand Italy's population and what that campaign reveals about Fascism. Ipsen argues that its population policy was at once forward-looking and backward-looking, and both revolutionary and reactionary, which he presents as a key to understanding the movement's internal contradictions.