Il Duce and His Women Read online

  The lengthy (and unsigned) introduction to the recently published edition of the diaries in Italy surveys all the expert opinions on their authenticity; the exceptions to the belief they are fakes are Sullivan and Mack Smith. It mentions that in subsequent interviews Mack Smith has somewhat “softened” his opinion; in fact Mack Smith has merely stressed that he wasn’t given the opportunity to study the diaries properly. The introduction slides over the fact that Mack Smith said right at the outset he had only been able to examine the diaries for a few hours seated at a café table. The question of the diaries’ authenticity could be solved by expert examination. The technical analysis of handwriting is accepted as evidence in the courts as well as testified to and included in the documentation relating to a trial: a defendant’s fate can depend on accurate graphological identification. No such test has been carried out on the presumed diaries before they were published. An expert in handwriting, Nicolas Barker, carried out an analysis back in 1995, which was by his own admission an incomplete one: for comparison he only had photocopies and very few originals to work from. He omits to mention whether the originals were compatible as terms of comparison – in other words, dating from the same year as the diary and written in similar psychological circumstances. He drew the following conclusion, however: “I find it impossible to believe that so detailed an account could have been produced as a forgery”, which is tantamount to saying that the diaries must be genuine because they cannot be false. An academic criminologist from the University of Lausanne, Beatrice Züger Antognoli, has also carried out an analysis of the handwriting by comparing photocopies; she states that in the absence of original documents of the same type for comparison she cannot pronounce on their authenticity with any certainty. She adds, however, a statement which the publishers have used as a justification for issuing the diaries as “presumed to be authentic”: “Nevertheless, from the comparisons carried out, the present writer believes that it is certainly possible that the diaries in question were written by a single individual and by the same individual – i.e. Benito Mussolini – who wrote the other examples of handwriting which have been used for the comparison.”23

  The introduction also includes the interesting view expressed by Roberto Travaglino, the president of the Professional Graphologists’ Association in Italy, who suggests that while the diaries may have been written by a single individual, that individual could have been an exceptionally inventive fantasist: “The possibility cannot be ruled out that the two diaries were written by an individual who in terms of character closely resembled Mussolini, came from a similar cultural, social and ideological background, and had the same kind of psychosomatic make-up, to the point of imitating in many ways Mussolini’s actual behaviour and coming to identify with him…”

  It has been necessary to spend a large part of this introduction explaining why the book concludes in 1937 and to point to the need for more research before the question of the connections between Mussolini’s public and private life in the years which followed can be properly tackled. Publishing “coups” like bringing out the false diaries make the prospects of such research more problematic, but in certain ways more fascinating. The volume of the diaries sells for a retail price of 21.50 euros, not exactly “bargain-basement wares” in De Felice’s scornful expression, then, but sufficiently economical to ensure a wide readership. The publisher claims that purchasers of the book will have all the information they need to form their own judgement of the diaries’ authenticity, as if such a thing were possible without having the necessary historical knowledge as background. It is probable therefore that some of those who read the book will persuade themselves they are reading the genuine diaries kept by Mussolini – if, that is, the dullness of the experience doesn’t convince them otherwise. For there is nothing of striking interest in them in terms of either his public or private lives. The Mussolini who is supposed to have written these diaries describes how happy he is to return to the family home at the end of the day and also has a fondness for cloyingly sentimental expressions: “I shall probably die poor – though only in terms of money, because whenever I can gaze at the sea, smell the fragrance of my native region, watch the sun come up and set, the anxieties which afflict me all gone – then I shall be the richest man on earth, desiring nothing else – except the undying greatness of the Italian nation.”24

  The publication of the false diaries is only the latest in a series of such publishing ventures in the years since the end of the Second World War, all intended to present Mussolini in a positive light, as “a good sort”, who didn’t hate Jews, “only” punished his opponents with internment, made the trains run on time and kept the country in working order, who certainly had his faults but shared them with his fellow Italians. The only real interest in the diaries for historians would be to find out who really wrote them and when, as well as what political motives and publishing interests lay behind the operation. For the rest, all those concerned with researching and writing serious history must take up the challenge, go back to the sources and reconstruct the story on that basis.

  One final note for the reader of this book. The Appendix, entitled ‘Mussolini and the Crowd’, explores Mussolini’s skills as a public speaker, but the analysis can be used as a key for a broader understanding of his political activity in general. In this way, the Appendix may also serve as a kind of preface to the book, a preliminary approach to the subject; or, if the reader prefers, left to the end of the book, containing some concluding reflections.

  Chapter 1

  The Blacksmith’s Strength

  He wasn’t just one of the voices shouting in a meeting, one of the hands raising a banner aloft, one of the heads kicked in when fighting broke out in the streets – he wasn’t just anyone. He was an agitator, an extremist, a leader, a socialist. This was – and remains – the problem.

  When Benito Mussolini came into the world, at a quarter-past two on a sunny Sunday afternoon at the end of July 1883, his blacksmith father was banging away with his hammer at an anvil, producing showers of fiery sparks with every blow of the bellows, and shifting crates of old iron around in the sultry summer heat. In the morning the church bells had rung out long and loud to welcome in the local patron saint’s feast day. To his ears the infernal noises of his work were like the first notes of the approaching revolution. He was nearly twenty-nine; he thought his youthful vigour inexhaustible. A son had just been born to him, and all his companions, supporters of the socialism of the International, in the old village of Varano dei Costa, above Dovia, a locality of Predappio, were hurrying to greet him. Among the clouds of smoke and gusts of air from the bellows, against the sizzling of the iron in the water and the deafening hammer blows, they recalled the names they had suggested for the boy: Giuseppe, after Mazzini, or Garibaldi, who had died on the island of Caprera a few months previously. Guglielmo, after the nationalist Guglielmo Oberdan, who had been executed by hanging in Trieste on 20th December of the previous year. Carlo, like Karl Marx or the anarchist Carlo Cafiero, Michele like Mikhail Bakunin, Filippo, after the great Buonarroti, or Augusto after the theorist of revolution Louis Auguste Blanqui.

  Alessandro Mussolini waited while the names were bandied back and forth in the afternoon heat and went on hammering and blowing until he could start to bend the bits of iron into the hinges he was making for the gate the local school needed urgently. Suddenly he stopped. Their banner was hidden away in a secret hiding place, so secret that only three of the local leaders of the Partito Socialista Rivoluzionario di Romagna (Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna) knew where it was kept. Alessandro was one of them. He went over to get it, and his companions started to go with him across the smithy, but suddenly stopped dead without a word. A look from the blacksmith was enough. None of them were allowed to see where it was hidden. His Majesty’s police had never been able to discover the hiding place, and nor would they. He came back holding a soiled, rusty metal box, so tarnished and battered that even the hardest-up old
-iron merchant wouldn’t have dared to try to sell it. Out of it emerged a red flag, silkily gleaming. They all stood round in a group as if they were still trying to conceal it. They commented in low voices on its miraculous state of preservation; it was specially protected in all their demonstrations, raised aloft during strikes, kept safe during police raids and round-ups, venerated like a relic. One of them asked the blacksmith to speak, and the rest readily agreed since he was regarded as a skilful orator. He started off in unusually restrained tones. He explained what he had already decided long before: his son would be a socialist, no doubt about it. And in order that he would never stray from this path he would be called Andrea, after Andrea Costa, their leader, the first socialist to win a seat in the Italian parliament. They themselves had helped to elect Costa just a year ago – weren’t their votes among the thousand or so which Alessandro Mussolini had secured for the founder of the Revolutionary Socialist Party of Romagna? It might be just coincidence but his son had been conceived in 1882, the very year Andrea Costa had spoken out on behalf of the proletariat in the national Chamber of Deputies. So the boy’s name would be Andrea, like the socialist member of parliament who was now getting ready to form the Fascio della Democrazia (League of Democracy). It was only a matter of days now, the declaration would be made before August was out.

  But, Alessandro continued, his son would have another name: Amilcare. Of course! Amilcare after Cipriani, the “prophet of revolution”, the hero of the Paris Commune, the friend of Marx and Engels, of Garibaldi and Mazzini, no man was more feared by the police, the bosses, the bourgeoisie. He had been condemned to death in France, had managed to escape to New Caledonia, was under threat of arrest if he ever came to Italy. Raise a cheer then! Andrea and Amilcare!

  But his son’s first name – the one everyone would use when they talked to him and when they talked about him – would be another. It was a name which signified the victory of socialism, that it wasn’t just a utopia, a cherished hope, a vision of the future. His first name was to be Benito – after Benito Juárez, the man who had defeated France, England and Spain, with all their capitalist wealth and with all their armies, the revolutionary who had brought down the puppet emperor Maximilian of Habsburg, who had abolished the clergy’s privileges and who had begun to apply socialist principles in Mexico. Benito Juárez was a lawyer and legislator, but he also belonged to the proletariat, having taken a job in a cigar factory to keep faith with his ideals.

  Benito Andrea Amilcare. Rosa, the boy’s mother, exhausted from the pain of giving birth, heard and obeyed, like the pious, docile wife she was. The red flag was put back in its hiding place, someone looked outside to check the road was clear, and the small meeting disbanded.

  The names of Georges Sorel, Vilfredo Pareto, Friedrich Nietzsche and Gustave Le Bon are usually cited in the biographies of Mussolini as the authors the future Duce imbibed while young, by himself, with no proper academic guidance. Out of the disordered heap of their theories emerged the path which took him all the way from revolutionary socialism – the socialism of the barricades – to the authoritarian and reactionary ideas of Fascism. Yet his sister Edvige Mussolini maintained it was impossible to understand him only by referring to these writers. She knew her memoirs would be seen as a fundamental source of information, but at the same time a partisan one, and she sought to pre-empt the severe judgements professional historians would pass on her work by defending herself in advance. They might talk ironically of her way of simplifying matters, but nevertheless she asserted that those writers are not the key to understanding Mussolini’s appearance on the political stage: that was to be found instead “in his father’s smithy and in the family home”. Edvige believed there was some kind of hidden force in her brother which “enabled him to appropriate and impersonate the most vital and significant trends of modern life while at the same time remaining independent of them, unaffected by them, even cancelling them out in the authentically tragic experience of his own career”.1 And this hidden force originated in the father’s smithy. No doubt her publisher had warned her in advance of the disdain and scorn such an idea would arouse.

  And yet implicit support for her theory can be found in the historian Renzo De Felice’s views. De Felice’s monumental biography of Mussolini offers a detailed analysis of national and international politics through the magnifying lens of the dictator’s life and career; his work has been hugely influential on a whole generation of contemporary historians. De Felice thought that it was important to find out more about Alessandro Mussolini, the socialist blacksmith. A thousand votes might not seem very many to those unfamiliar with the practices of tribal politics, yet even today that number of votes could decide who gets elected to the city council in Rome or is put in charge of a municipal department. The campaign office of any aspiring member of parliament would put out the flags for anyone who could guarantee them a thousand votes: even in modern-day politics they’re a good start-up for a political career. In January 1882 the Italian parliament had passed a law reforming the electoral system: so long as all those newly entitled to vote had completed the first two years of primary schooling, the voting age was lowered from twenty-five to twenty-one, and the level of income tax which was one of the conditions of the franchise under the old electoral law was halved. The result was an electorate of two million (male) voters, compared to the six hundred thousand under the previous system. Yet this was still only 6.9 per cent of the country’s population. Of these two million men entitled to vote, a mere sixty per cent went to the polling stations on 22nd October 1882, in other words little more than one million ballot papers. One hundred and thirty years ago, a thousand guaranteed votes – the number of votes Alessandro Mussolini secured for Andrea Costa’s election – represented significant political capital.

  In an interview he gave to the journalist Emil Ludwig, whose career spanned the first half of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini called hunger “a good teacher”. He probably liked the sound, the stage effect, of the phrase; perhaps he was remembering some of the bleak days he spent in Switzerland, for in his childhood he never went hungry. “My mother earned fifty lire a month as a primary-school teacher” – Ludwig transcribes Mussolini’s words – “while my father earned what any blacksmith earned. We had just two rooms. We almost never ate meat. But there were passionate discussions, a sense of struggling and hoping for something better. My father went to prison for spreading socialism. When he died, a thousand of his companions accompanied the hearse.”2 There they are again: like Garibaldi, Alessandro the blacksmith had his loyal companions, the “Thousand” who followed him. But take a closer look at them: under the new electoral law they all paid enough income tax to have acquired the right to vote, in other words their income put them among the 6.9 per cent of the population who were allowed to decide the political direction the country should take. They weren’t in rags then, and nor was Alessandro Mussolini, who “earned just what any blacksmith earned” in the still predominantly rural economy of nineteenth-century Italy, where everything depended on the metal implements and parts he and his like made and repaired: scythes and hoes, hinges for gates and shoes for horses. His income must have been quite substantial to gain the confidence of the austere bank officials – even more severely disposed towards revolutionary socialists – since he often signed as the guarantor for cheques presented by his socialist companions: his signature reassured the banks. And if someone defaulted on a payment he stepped in, even if it meant a bit of belt-tightening for him and his family: proletarian solidarity was paramount. He himself never defaulted on any of the financial commitments he took on. Mussolini once described his father for the benefit of English readers: “My father was a blacksmith, a heavy man with strong, large, fleshy hands. Alessandro, the neighbours called him. Heart and mind were always filled and pulsing with socialist theories. His intense sympathies mingled with doctrines and causes. He discussed them in the evening with his friends, and his eyes brightened up.”3

/>   Alessandro Mussolini was born in 1854 in Villa Montemaggiore, near Forlì, on an estate belonging to his family. His father Luigi, the grandfather of the future dictator, was somewhat misanthropic, with anarchist inclinations, an unrepentant womanizer, who liked a glass or two of Sangiovese or any other good wine. He certainly didn’t have socialist sympathies and nor was he hard up. His rebelliousness, if we can call it that, consisted in neglecting his family and other social connections and having scant regard for the rules of common morality and social life. His granddaughter Edvige describes him as the owner of a small property who nonetheless left nothing to his son: he sold off his land, including his house, bit by bit, to pay for a life of pleasure-seeking in the company of his beloved brother Tancredi. When he learnt that his son Alessandro had become a socialist, he merely remarked ironically: “Private property is theft, right? Then I’ve done him the favour of not turning him into a receiver of stolen goods.”4

  Alessandro was sent off, still little more than a boy, to serve as an apprentice to a blacksmith. He learnt the craft – and a good deal else. In his workshop in Dovia, books and magazines started to accumulate. He read a lot; he learnt to write well and also to speak persuasively. He was just eighteen when there was an uprising in the country between Imola and Bologna: revolutionaries were going round destroying the symbols of the modern era – telegraph poles, railway tracks – and attacking police. Among the leaders of the revolt there was Bakunin but above all Andrea Costa, the first star of Italian socialism. Costa had much support in Romagna, which had seen the first popular socialist uprisings, but he also had good connections among the socialist intellectual elite, close to the world of industry, such as the Milanese circle of Anna Mikhailovna Kuliscioff, with whom Costa had a child. According to Renzo De Felice, knowing who Alessandro Mussolini was is important for understanding his son: “There was very little Marxism in Alessandro Mussolini’s socialism – though we know he read the first volume of Das Kapital, probably in Cafiero’s abridgement; there was instead a marked strain in it of populist anarchism.”5