In the fourth volume of his encyclopaedic life-and-times biography of Mussolini, Renzo de Felice caused considerable controversy by arguing for the apparently unlikely proposition that the Italian Fascist regime enjoyed its broadest level of ‘consent’ in the period from 1929 to 1934. It was precisely during the years of the Great Depression, he asserts, that the regime was most popular and stable, attracting wide-ranging support even among the working classes of town and country. This was ‘more extensive and … more totalitarian’ than the enthusiastic, yet shallower and ephemeral ‘consent’ of 1935–6, during and immediately after the invasion of Ethiopia, which is where historians have conventionally located the peakof fascism's popularity.

This interpretation is already a long way from the prevalently anti-Fascist historiography of the 1950s and 1960s, where the only relationship portrayed between the working classes and the regime was one of hostility and antagonism. De Felice was quite deliberately and provocatively challenging what he regarded as the ‘establishment’ left-wing view in his allegedly neutral and value-free history of Mussolini and fascism. He returned to the anatomy of ‘consent’ in the fifth volume of the biography, asserting that widespread discontent was emerging among all social classes and groups in the period between 1936 and 1940, but never at any point became active anti-Fascist opposition.