Il Duce and His Women Read online

  Yet it will be extremely difficult to prepare a proper edition of all the autograph papers in the Petacci archive, essential though that is as the basis for a proper account of Mussolini’s private life in his final years and an analysis of the political influence of the women who were close to him, in part because various Italian publishers tend to rush to exploit the success of newly published material on the Duce. Only professional historians should be allowed to examine the problem of Mussolini in modern Italy; on the contrary, as De Felice once pointed out, they appear to keep their distance almost as if they refuse to deal with the problem in an attempt to resolve it. If the interest in Mussolini’s private life is ever to get beyond the phase of sensationalist publishing, then new and wider research needs to be carried out both in public and private archives. That much documentary material remains to be studied has been demonstrated by scholars such as Mario Cereghino, whose indefatigable research has uncovered important evidence, such as the report sent to the Foreign Office at the end of 1938 by the British ambassador in Paris, Sir Eric Phipps: “Bonnet has informed me that for the last six months or so Mussolini has been infatuated with a young Italian woman… the daughter of a medical doctor in the Vatican and the wife of a naval officer.”11

  Petacci’s diaries have only recently become available in their entirety. Much of the autograph source material relating to Margherita Sarfatti (there are 1,272 letters alone) still has to be made available to researchers. Mussolini’s grandchildren own material which is important for an understanding of his private life, but the periodic waves of prurient curiosity in what they hold can only discourage them from releasing it. Furthermore, certain issues are in themselves extremely sensitive and difficult to handle – most notably, the question of Mussolini’s anti-Semitism. De Felice has tackled this question and, after examining Mussolini’s attitudes to Jews on the basis of much documentary evidence, posed a blunt question: “Can you imagine Hitler having a relationship with a Jewish woman?”12 Two of Mussolini’s mistresses were Jewish, both prominent intellectuals: Angelica Balabanoff and Margherita Sarfatti. He made use of them for what advantages they could bring to him and exploited them so long as he thought they were needed for his political career. The same cynicism can be seen in his relations to the Jews in general. His attitudes vacillated until the increasing rapprochement with Hitler enforced a change, at which point Mussolini found it expedient to introduce the Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti (Manifesto of Racial Scientists), a set of laws which discriminated against Italian Jews while waiting to see what future developments would mean for them. The persecution of Italian Jews carried out under Fascism can by no means be considered a minor phenomenon; it was no less cruel than the Nazi policy. In the years before the surrender to the Allied forces on 8th September 1943, Italian Jews were stripped of all their civil rights: the right to work, to move about freely, to human dignity. After the watershed of the Armistice, they began to be rounded up, frequently with the help of Fascists, and then were held in transit camps in Italy before being deported to the Nazi concentration camps. Yet, as De Felice shows, there are significant differences between Mussolini and Hitler, between Nazism and Fascism, which histories of the period, including popular histories, must take into account. For the last fifty years, on the other hand, German Nazism and Italian Fascism have been taught to new generations of schoolchildren and university students as a single phenomenon, so preventing a proper understanding of Fascism as part of the Italians’ national history. So-called “Nazi-Fascism” has become something of an unquestioned and unassailable truism especially among those who have grown up since the end of the Second World War. De Felice points out: “‘Nazi-Fascism’ might be meaningful as a political concept in the context of the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945, but as a historical concept it is completely unfounded.”13

  De Felice’s monumental biography of Mussolini can itself almost be regarded as a primary source, so wide-ranging and so detailed is the supporting documentary evidence the author incorporates into the work. The first volume was going to be entitled Mussolini il socialista (Mussolini the Socialist), but was published instead as Mussolini il rivoluzionario (Mussolini the Revolutionary). It is a detailed and closely argued analysis of Mussolini’s early socialism, the first of its kind, and it came out under the auspices of Italy’s leading left-wing publisher, Einaudi, in 1965. Two years earlier, on 17th December 1963, a new government headed by Aldo Moro, which for the first time included the Socialists, had won a parliamentary vote of confidence: the centre-left was born in Italy. On 28th December 1964 a Socialist, Giuseppe Saragat, was elected president of the Republic – the first head of the Italian state who had been an anti-Fascist and had fought in the Resistance (he also spent time in prison with Sandro Pertini, a fellow Socialist who was later among the first to collaborate politically with Democrazia Cristiana, the Christian Democrats). A new political chapter appeared to have been opened in the country’s history, with the left no longer in perennial opposition but a party of government; the winds of change were also felt within the Partito Comunista Italiano, the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union. Shortly after Saragat’s election, the first signs appeared of what were to become worldwide student disturbances, which in Italy soon took on a politically radical character. At such a time and in such a context a book on Mussolini as a socialist and revolutionary seemed like a wilful provocation. No one then could foresee how De Felice’s work would continue or the vast scale it would assume; here instead was a new history book which, counter-culturally, dared to examine an almost taboo period and subject: the years in which Mussolini rose to become in effect the unofficial leader of the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party). Moreover, the book’s author treated his subject objectively and dispassionately, as if it were a historical phase like any other to be reconstructed on the basis of the available documentary evidence. The worldwide student uprisings in 1968 lasted far longer in Italy than elsewhere. They gave rise to a kind of ideological straitjacket, in which one of the fixed beliefs was that Fascism remained an imminent danger because it was rooted in bourgeois capitalism, indeed emerged as a direct consequence of it, with the result that all politicians and all political programmes seen as opposed to the student radicals were automatically branded as “Fascist”. In the 1970s, left-wing groups waged an “anti-Fascist” campaign against De Felice and his books in complete disregard of the principles of intellectual freedom: he needed police protection at some of the lectures he gave, and even as late as 1996 his home was attacked with incendiary devices. Every now and then the newspapers and weekly current-affairs magazines would dedicate some pages to a debate which always focused on the same question: has De Felice made Fascism respectable again? “In a certain sense I think he has,” replied the British historian of Italian Fascism Denis Mack Smith, “but I don’t think he set out to do it intentionally, and I don’t believe it matters.”14 De Felice was at pains to point out that Mussolini the man was different from the images both Fascists and anti-Fascists had constructed of him. In his opinion the only reliable way to arrive at a critical understanding of the regime over the twenty years it held power and to bring some kind of resolution to the national psycho-drama of the Mussolini myth was to study the available documentary evidence objectively: “Mussolini was less coarse and more cultivated than he appeared to be. He had psychological problems. He was present among the people, but by no stretch of the imagination was he a man of the people. If writing this makes me appear to be a sympathizer, a supporter, then the belief is wrong. My study is a kind of radiography, designed to penetrate as deeply as it possibly can.”15

  De Felice wanted historians of Fascism to leave their ideological preconceptions behind, to write history with no sense of parti pris or hidden political agenda; he defended his approach which was based on ascertaining the facts, on patiently finding and gathering the documentary evidence, on what, in short, he called scientific method. But authoritative vo
ices contested this view, among them Norberto Bobbio’s:

  Does scientific method exist in historical research? What kind of a science is history? If we adopt De Felice’s radical distinction between scientific method in historical research and standard approaches to the subject, history almost seems to become one of the exact sciences […] because it’s based exclusively on known facts and excludes all value judgements. […] Naturally historians must base their work on the ascertained facts. But not all the facts are equally relevant, and the criterion we apply in selecting those which are and ignoring those which are not is not itself a fact. It derives from the historian’s purpose or goal in carrying out the research, and that purpose, whether the historian is conscious of it or not, in turn derives from a value judgement.16

  The subsequent volumes of De Felice’s biography continued to appear over the next twenty years; when it was finished, the entire work consisted of nearly seven thousand pages, but it has never got free of the shadow cast by the furore that greeted the first volume in 1965, almost as if De Felice had committed an unpardonable sin in deciding to examine objectively – as a historian – a subject which is essentially a political and moral one. It didn’t count that one of the most prominent – and, by the time he spoke, most overlooked – figures in the Italian Communist Party, Giorgio Amendola, spoke in his defence: “You can’t accuse De Felice of being an apologist for Fascism simply because he describes certain methods adopted by the Fascist police or by Mussolini in person. […] The Fascist police had a whole repertoire of methods and were skilful in choosing which ones to use. […] It was a particular kind of regime and it needs to be studied for what it was. […] If thirty years on we’re not yet capable of understanding the tangled complexities of the phenomenon then we’ll never succeed in understanding the disease of Fascism and how deep its roots go.”17

  De Felice’s work has been more criticized than it has been read; it is generally thought to be extremely difficult to read, requiring an enormous expenditure of time on the part of its readers. Lucio Colletti is one of the author’s defenders, but even he admits that “De Felice’s style is on occasion muddled and hard to follow, at least partly as a result of the exhaustive mass of source material he has deemed it necessary to digest before writing”.18 Nevertheless, as the historian Giovanni Sabbatucci has pointed out,19 De Felice’s work has become an indispensable point of reference for anyone working on Mussolini and Fascism; moreover, all serious readers of his great biography will acknowledge that in its pages De Felice subjects the figure of Mussolini to penetrating criticism, while the myth of the Duce is gradually dismantled precisely because it is analysed in the light of all the available documentary evidence.

  On 27th May 2010, during a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris, the Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi remarked:

  I’m not powerful – perhaps I was powerful when I was an entrepreneur, but now I’m a politician I haven’t got any power. Heads of government have practically no power. Allow me to quote from someone who was regarded as a great dictator – Benito Mussolini. I read his diaries recently and came across this remark: “People say I have power but it isn’t true. Perhaps some of the party officials are powerful – I wouldn’t know. All I can manage to do is to order my horse to turn right or left and I’m happy with that.” That shows you’ll never find a head of government anywhere who has power – perhaps it doesn’t exist.20

  Italy is a curious country, dissimilar to other nations; its past remains always present, because that suits the politicians. Even the partial renewal of the country’s political system in the wake of the corruption scandals in the “Clean Hands” investigations in the early 1990s hasn’t altered the situation much. Italy’s anomalous condition doesn’t seem to excite much attention any more, even from its fellow members in the European Union: a prime minister who quotes a dictator to explain his position as head of government doesn’t get more than a brief mention in the daily newspapers. But the quotation is in fact the most interesting thing about Berlusconi’s remarks, for the diaries he says he’s recently been reading are false. Many historians, including De Felice, have declared they are a forgery – with the exception, as we shall shortly see, of two, and then only in part. And yet in November 2010 a volume of selections from the diaries was published by one of the country’s most important and prestigious publishing houses, Bompiani, directed by a well-known historian (and former student of De Felice), Paolo Mieli. Even he agrees that the diaries are patently false.

  The title of the volume, which relates to the year 1939, involves a linguistic sleight of hand: I diari di Mussolini. Veri o presunti, in English Mussolini’s Diaries, Authentic or Presumed so. The diaries are false, but nowhere on the cover or title page can this word be found, presumably on the grounds that potential buyers of the book might find it off-putting. The publication represents a reckless commercial gamble, merely the most recent development in the long history of the hunt for Mussolini’s diaries, an untiring pursuit which no doubt has yet more surprises in store for us. Historians have found firm evidence that Mussolini kept a diary; he used leather-bound ones produced by the Red Cross. According to Duilio Susmel (known for his scrupulously accurate knowledge of Mussolini’s papers), the dictator did not keep a diary for the years 1933, 1934, 1939, 1941 or 1942. He gave the volumes for the years when he did write a diary to his sister Edvige as he finished them year by year, for safekeeping. Leaving aside its potential as a remarkable publishing coup, the discovery of the diaries would undoubtedly be of great significance – but, as De Felice has cautioned, the process of authenticating them would almost certainly not be straightforward after so many false discoveries and the resulting creation of distrust and scepticism among professional historians. Edvige kept the diaries with her until 1944, when, with the help of the Japanese ambassador in Rome, Shinrokuro Hidaka, they were transferred to the Japanese legation in Bern in Switzerland for greater security. Hidaka was later tried as a war criminal, but he was acquitted and went on to hold several important diplomatic postings in the United States. On the surrender of Japan, all the papers in the Bern legation were burnt, in accordance with Japanese diplomatic protocol, and with them Mussolini’s diaries. There exists a possibility, as De Felice has suggested, that Hidaka had copies made of the diaries and used them as a trade-off to save his political skin after the war. But if he did, then all traces of these genuine diaries have been lost, despite the host of interested people who have hunted for them over the years. One of these is Marcello Dell’Utri, a close collaborator of Silvio Berlusconi, sentenced for his connections to the Mafia, but also a passionate bibliophile. Dell’Utri obtained from a Swiss lawyer the late “diaries” kept by Mussolini, which had come onto the market in London in 1994; they had previously been offered to various Italian publishers, who had all turned them down.

  Readers of the present book need to be told that it does not take these diaries into account, for the simple reason that they are forgeries. Nevertheless it is worth knowing the story of how they came to be published in Italy. One of the only two professional opinions which differ from the otherwise unanimous belief they are counterfeit comes from Brian R. Sullivan:

  My personal opinion, arrived at after much investigation, is that these are indeed Mussolini’s diaries, but in a fake version which he himself created. They were certainly written between 1935 and 1939, when Mussolini is said to have written them, but there are too many details in them which would be beyond the capacity of any forger to know or even invent, details confirmed by other research. […] The text of them is very strange: there are details which only Mussolini could have known about, but also quite extraordinary blunders which even a forger would never have made.21

  Thus Sullivan creates a third category: the diaries are neither authentic nor false; instead they were forged by their own author. According to this version, Mussolini would have refashioned the diaries as documentary evidence he could offer
up to mitigate his guilt, changing his view of the war (he didn’t want one), of the invasion of Ethiopia (he tried to avoid it), of the racial laws (they were imposed on him). “I am not Hitler,” we read on page 239 of the false diary for the year 1939, “I don’t get obsessed with hatred of Jews. On the contrary I admit that I have had worthwhile colleagues and true friends who have come from the tribes of Israel. In my youth I was in love with a Jewish woman – no one could hold a candle to her intelligence, her grace, her immense good nature.”

  But the whole thing doesn’t add up: it isn’t clear why Mussolini would send his real diaries to Switzerland while at the same time settle down to the laborious job of falsifying new ones.

  It might not have been an interminable task, but this image of Mussolini busy rewriting just doesn’t convince me. There’s absolutely nothing in any of the papers which come out of his office to suggest that he could possibly have undertaken a job of this kind. […] As for the time in Salò, Mussolini couldn’t even think without the Germans knowing about it. There’s nothing from him – no remark or comment, not a single document which, even straining interpretation, could give rise to the idea that Mussolini was deeply absorbed in rewriting his diaries.22

  When these so-called diaries first surfaced in public, the leading historian of Italian Fascism Denis Mack Smith was consulted for his opinion. He told Corriere della Sera in 1994:

  In Zurich we were met by a car and driven for a long time through places I wouldn’t recognize now. […] We reached a small town which I guessed was very near the border with Italy. The gentleman known as Mr X was waiting for me at a small table in a café. […] He had the diaries with him and showed them to me. I told him I would need to examine them properly, that I would like to take them back with me to my hotel to study them overnight. But he refused, so I read them there with him for a long time. […] I’m no expert on the authenticity of paper or ink. As far as the contents were concerned, it seemed to me that they couldn’t have been forged – there were too many details, too many precise descriptions.