Victor Emmanuel III (11 November 1869 – 28 December 1947), born Vittorio Emanuele Ferdinando Maria Gennaro di Savoia, was King of Italy from 29 July 1900 until his abdication on 9 May 1946.

The first fourteen years of Victor Emmanuel's reign were dominated by prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, who focused on industrialization and passed several democratic reforms, such as the introduction of universal male suffrage.

The First World War brought about Italian victory over the Habsburg Empire and the annexation of the Italian-speaking provinces of Trento and Trieste, completing the national unity of Italy, and the southern part of German-speaking Tirol (Sued-Tirol).

However, a part of Italian nationalists protested against the partial violation of the 1915 Treaty of London and what they defined as a "mutilated victory", demanding the annexation of Croatian-speaking territories in Dalmatia and temporarily occupying the town of Fiume without royal assent.

Strengthened by the economic downturn facing the country, the National Fascist Party led the March on Rome, and Victor Emmanuel appointed Benito Mussolini as prime minister.

He remained silent on the domestic political abuses of Fascist Italy, and he accepted the additional crowns of the Emperor of Ethiopia in 1936 and the King of Albania in 1939 as a result of Italian imperialism under fascism.

Unlike his paternal first cousin's son, the 1.98 m (6 ft 6 in) tall Amedeo, 3rd Duke of Aosta, Victor Emmanuel was short of stature even by 19th-century standards, to the point that today he would appear diminutive.

[6] The troops were loyal to the King; even Cesare Maria De Vecchi, commander of the Blackshirts, and one of the organisers of the March on Rome, told Mussolini that he would not act against the wishes of the monarch.

[9] Though the King claimed in his memoirs that it was the fear of a civil war that motivated his actions, it would seem that he received some 'alternative' advice, possibly from the arch-conservative Antonio Salandra as well as General Armando Diaz, that it would be better to do a deal with Mussolini.

[12] Many Fascist gerarchi, most notably Italo Balbo, regarded as the number two-man in Fascism, remained republicans, and the king greatly appreciated Mussolini's conversion to monarchism.

During the Matteotti affair of 1924, Sir Ronald Graham, the British ambassador, reported: "His Majesty once told me that he had never had a premier with whom he found it so satisfactory to deal as with Signor Mussolini, and I know from private sources that recent events have not changed his opinion".

[16] The newspaper Corriere della Sera in an editorial stated the abuses of the Fascist government such as the murder of Matteotti had now reached such a point that the king had both a legal and moral duty to dismiss Mussolini at once and restore the rule of law.

In many ways, the events from 1922 to 1943 demonstrated that the monarchy and the moneyed class, for different reasons, felt Mussolini and his regime offered an option that, after years of political chaos, was more appealing than what they perceived as the alternative: socialism and anarchism.

[22] Victor Emmanuel was disgusted by what he regarded as the superficiality and frivolity of what he called the "so-called elegant society" of Rome, and as such, the king preferred to spend his time out in the countryside where he went hunting, fishing and reading military history books outside.

[25] In private Victor Emmanuel regarded the Catholic Church with a jaundiced eye, making remarks about senior clerics as being greedy, cynical and oversexed hypocrites who took advantage of the devout faith of ordinary Italians.

The League of Nations condemned Italy's participation in this war and the Italian claim by right of conquest to Ethiopia was rejected by some major powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union, but was accepted by Great Britain and France in 1938.

[37] On 31 March 1940, Mussolini submitted to Victor Emmanuel a long memorandum arguing that Italy to achieve its long-sought spazio vitale had to enter the war on the Axis side sometime that year.

[40] Victor Emmanuel was a cautious man, and he always consulted all of the available advisors before making a decision, in this case, the senior officers of the armed forces who informed him of Italy's military deficiencies.

[43] On 10 June 1940, ignoring advice that the country was unprepared, Mussolini made the fatal decision to have Italy enter World War II on the side of Nazi Germany.

[46] Through the carabinieri (para-military police), Victor Emmanuel was kept well informed of the state of public opinion and from the autumn of 1940 onward received reports that the war together with the Fascist regime were becoming extremely unpopular with the Italian people.

[50] The British historian Denis Mack Smith wrote that Victor Emmanuel tended to procrastinate when faced with very difficult choices, and his unwillingness to dismiss Mussolini despite mounting pressure from within the Italian elite was his way of trying to avoid making a decision.

[53] In a conversation with the papal nuncio, the king explained that he could not sign an armistice because he hated the United States as a democracy whose leaders were accountable to the American people; because Britain was "rotten to the core" and would soon cease to be a great power; and because everything he kept hearing about the massive losses sustained by the Red Army convinced him that Germany would win on the Eastern Front at least.

[56] In the summer of 1942, Grandi had a private audience with Victor Emmanuel, where he asked him to dismiss Mussolini and sign an armistice with the Allies before the Fascist regime was destroyed only to be told to "trust your king" and "stop speaking like a mere journalist".

During Operation Anton on 9 November 1942, the unoccupied part of France was occupied by the Axis forces, which allowed Victor Emmanuel to proclaim in a speech at long last Corsica and Nice had been "liberated".

When the King visited the bombed areas of Rome, he was loudly booed by his subjects who blamed him for the war, which caused Victor Emmanuel to become worried about the possibility of a revolution which might bring in a republic.

[59] On 15 July 1943, in a secret meeting Victor Emmanuel told Badoglio that he would soon be sworn in as Italy's new prime minister and the king wanted no "ghosts" (i.e. liberal politicians from the pre-fascist era) in his cabinet.

[59] On the night of 25 July 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism voted to adopt an Ordine del Giorno (order of the day) proposed by Count Dino Grandi to ask Victor Emmanuel to resume his full constitutional powers under Article 5 of the Statuto.

Relations with the Allied Control Commission were very strained as the king remained obsessed with protocol, screaming with fury when General Noel Mason-Macfarlane met him wearing shirt sleeves and shorts, a choice of attire he considered very disrespectful.

At a 10 April meeting, under pressure from ACC officials Robert Murphy and Harold Macmillan, Victor Emmanuel transferred most of his constitutional powers to his son, Crown Prince Umberto.

Victor Emmanuel III was one of the most prolific coin collectors of all time, having amassed approximately 100,000 specimens dating from the fall of the Roman Empire up to the Unification of Italy and in 1897 becoming honorary president of the new Italian Numismatic Society, of which he was a founding member.