A teenager’s alleged assassination attempt became the pretext for abolishing Italian democracy.

Evidence

On 31 October 1926, an alleged attempt was made on Mussolini’s life by a 15-year-old boy; it was taken as the pretext for a new wave of repression. The Council of Ministers met on 5 November and drafted a series of emergency laws, to be debated in parliament on the 9th, which were designed to eliminate the remaining vestiges of bourgeois democracy in Italy. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 222

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The pretext-of-repression mechanism — a marginal incident seized to liquidate democratic institutions — directly parallels the immodesty-panics dynamic in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ where moral panics get weaponized to consolidate class/political control.