How to Be a Dictator

by Frank Dikotter

  Mussolini received not only thousands of letters and visitors, but also gifts from people from every walk of life. As early as November 1927 Augusto Turati had ordered party members to cease sending donations to their leader, but he could do little to stop admirers from outside the ranks. Henrietta Tower, one of the wealthiest women in the United States and a lifelong resident of Rome, bequeathed a villa with an art collection of 3,000 items including ceramics, tapestries, textiles and paintings when she died in 1933. She was far from exceptional, as three castles and seven large estates were gifted to the Duce between 1925 to 1939 (he accepted on behalf of the state). Writers, photographers, painters and sculptors put their talents to work and sent items celebrating the Duce, including pastel portraits and embroidered busts. Some were displayed in Villa Torlonia. From ordinary people came a daily homage in the form of fresh produce, despite the best efforts of the state to persuade them to desist. On 2 August 1934 alone, dozens of kilos of fruit, sweets, biscuits, pasta and tomatoes were earmarked for destruction.53

  The large boulevard leading from the Colosseum to the Palazzo Venezia turned Mussolini’s balcony into the symbolic centre of fascist power. But by cutting a straight line through the city’s most prominent excavations, the Via dei Fori Imperiale, flanked by large bronze statues of Roman generals, also connected the Duce directly to ancient Rome.

  The emblem of fascism, a bundle of rods called fasces (fasci in Italian) tied around an axe, originated from ancient Rome. It stood not only for strength through unity but also for a resurgence of the lost grandeur of the Roman empire. Like the swastika in Germany, it was carved into buildings, lamps, fountains, doorsteps and even manhole covers. The fascist squads with their ranks and formations were organised on the Roman model. There was the Roman salute, and after 1935 the Roman step. Mussolini even kept a Roman wolf in a cage displayed in the Capitol. Labour Day was no longer celebrated on 1 May but on 21 April, the founding day of Rome. As Mussolini explained, ‘The Roman greeting, songs and formulas, anniversary commemorations and the like are all essential to fan the flames of the enthusiasm that keeps a movement in being. It was just the same in ancient Rome.’54

  Mussolini not only stamped his mark on the capital, he set out to build the ‘Rome of Mussolini’, a vast metropolis harking back to the days of imperial glory. ‘Rome must appear as a marvel to the nations of the world,’ he proclaimed in 1926, ‘vast, orderly, powerful, as it was in the times of the Augustan Empire.’ The centuries that had followed Emperor Augustus he considered ‘decadent’. Entire medieval neighbourhoods in the old capital were to be pulled down to make place for modern fascist buildings worthy of a new imperial centre. Mussolini wanted to be remembered as ‘the greatest destroyer’, the one who rebuilt Rome. His threat was never carried out, although fifteen churches and hundreds of structures were flattened in various parts of the city.55

  In order to radiate power and prestige Mussolini’s Rome was required to double in size. Some 600 square kilometres of marshes south of the capital were drained, the area turned into agricultural land and handed over to the poor. Roads were built. Littoria, named after the lictors who carried the fasces in Roman times, was inaugurated by the Duce in 1931, followed by other model cities, all boasting a town hall, a church, a post office and Fascist Party headquarters built along streets radiating out from a piazza.

  As in the time of Augustus, Rome would reach to the sea. A Roma al Mare, ‘the new resort of imperial Rome’, was planned, linked to the Esposizione Universale Roma, projected to be held in 1942. At the heart of EUR was a neoclassical building standing sixty-eight metres high, clad in white stone, called the Square Colosseum in homage to the older Roman landmark.

  But how could the new empire reach beyond the sea? It already, of course, enjoyed the colonial possessions of Libya, Tripoli and Somaliland, but these had been conquered by previous regimes, denounced by Mussolini as weak and corrupt. To be a true emperor, the modern Caesar who founded a new imperial Rome had to expand the empire. There were other reasons. Like Adolf Hitler, who came to power in 1933, Mussolini sought to rival France and Britain, and like his German counterpart he believed that colonial powers alone had access to the necessary raw materials to wage war.

  In his search for prestige Mussolini had already presided over a savage war against insurgents in Libya in 1929. In Cyrenaica, the coastal region of their north African colony, the military sowed terror with chemical weapons and mass executions, exterminating close to a quarter of the local population. Some 100,000 Bedouins were expelled, their land given to Italian settlers. The horrors of the war were concealed from the public at home by an obedient press, which hailed Mussolini for bringing Libya into the fold of civilisation after centuries of barbarism.56

  Mussolini began preparing for war in 1931, telling his generals to be ready by 1935. The following year, he fired Dino Grandi, taking over the reins of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. After Hitler withdrew from the League of Nations in October 1933, the Duce accelerated efforts to rearm his country. He removed Italo Balbo and assumed control first over the Ministry of War, then over the Ministries of Marine and Air. With the exception of the Ministry of Finance, the levers of government were now entirely in his hands. Mussolini had convinced himself that he was a man of destiny, a Napoleon and Caesar rolled into one, a providential leader whose hand would reshape the modern world. He had come to believe the regime’s motto: ‘Mussolini is Always Right’. The sycophants around him encouraged his delusions.57

  In order to be ready for war Mussolini sought a self-sufficient economy. Endless campaigns were launched to whip the population into action. There was a Battle for Grain to reduce imports, with photographs of Mussolini at the threshing machine. There was a Battle for Rice, a Battle for Land, a Battle of Births and a War on Flies, all fronted by the Duce.58

  Italy already had two colonies in the Horn of Africa. The conquest of Ethiopia would join together the territories of Eritrea and Somalia. Mussolini had visions of a unified Italian East Africa where millions of settlers would extract gold, diamonds, copper, iron, coal and oil, allowing him to build up his empire and dominate the continent. He also wished to wipe out a stain that had left an indelible mark on the country’s reputation. In 1896 Emperor Menelik had inflicted a humiliating military defeat on the Italian army at Adwa. The failure still rankled.

  Mussolini did not consult anyone except the king before deciding on war. On 2 October 1935, after a year of border skirmishes with Ethiopia, church bells and sirens summoned the population into the town squares, where they listened to their leader declare war over the loudspeakers. The summons had been carefully prepared by Starace. By one estimate some twenty-seven million people took part in the largest staged event in human history.59

  The financial and military preparations for war, however, were woefully inadequate. The strategy pursued by the Duce, who sidelined his generals to assume overall command, was murderous. Mussolini ordered the use of hundreds of tonnes of mustard gas, sprayed on combatants and civilians alike. In a dark harbinger of the horrors to come under Hitler and Stalin, industrial killing was combined with full-on atrocities, as Ethiopians were decapitated or executed in front of open graves. After a failed attempt on the life of General Rodolfo Graziani, the occupying forces retaliated by killing some 20,000 people in a mere three days in the capital Addis Ababa. Babies were crushed, pregnant women disembowelled and entire families shot, burned, bludgeoned or stabbed to death. When one newspaper compared the conqueror Graziani to Hannibal, Mussolini was furious: he alone could be invoked in the same breath as the giants of ancient Rome. Between late 1935 and 1938 at least a quarter of a million people perished in Ethiopia as a result of the war.60

  The atrocities were carefully hidden from the public, as the propaganda machine depicted the war as a liberation for Ethiopians, bringing freedom and civilisation to the victims of a feudal caste system. Secret subsidies, once again, helped propagate this vision at home and abroad, with even foreign
journalists paid the equivalent of thousands of dollars to visit Addis Ababa and report favourably on their trip.61

  The kingdom of Italy was now an empire, the diminutive King Victor Emmanuel III promoted to Emperor. Mussolini was granted the title of Founder of the Empire. As in Roman times, spoils of war were brought back from the newly conquered territories. The huge obelisk of Axum, weighing some 160 tonnes and dating from the fourth century, was carted back to Rome and unveiled near the Circus Maximus on 28 October 1937 to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the March on Rome. Like an emperor, Mussolini was given his own forum. Called Foro Mussolini, it was built to celebrate the conquest of Ethiopia, with mosaic friezes depicting tanks and warplanes. Other markers appeared across the empire. In order to ‘record for future generations the foundation of the empire’, a 150-metre profile of the Duce was sculpted into the rocks of a mountain overlooking the Furlo Gorge in central Italy.62

  When Mussolini proclaimed the annexation of Ethiopia from his balcony on 9 May 1936, the crowds went delirious. As one astute observer pointed out, ‘He knew that, possibly for the first time, he was enjoying the unqualified admiration and support of the whole Italian nation.’ It was his last day of glory, as his star would begin to wane.63

  Empire may have been popular at home, but it poisoned relationships with France and Great Britain. The League of Nations condemned Italy, further isolating Mussolini and prompting him to seek a rapprochement with Germany. Mussolini had initially viewed Hitler with suspicion, feeling threatened by a rival. When the German chancellor travelled to Venice in June 1934 for a first meeting, the Duce upstaged him, addressing a cheering crowd on the Piazza San Marco in full military regalia. A pale, insecure Hitler, in a baggy yellow coat and patent-leather shoes, had watched from a balcony in a neighbouring palace, mesmerised by a man so adored by his people. ‘He thought that the enthusiasm for Mussolini was genuine,’ noted Alfred Rosenberg, the party’s ideologue. It was Hitler’s first trip abroad, and he realised that he had made a poor impression.64

  In September 1937, after widespread international condemnation of the war in Ethiopia, the Duce travelled to Berlin. Now he, in turn, was awed by the Führer, who spared no expense to accord his guest the honours due to an esteemed ally. Close to a million people, brought in by special trains from the provinces, dutifully filled the streets of the capital to cheer Mussolini. Large numbers of undercover police moved among the crowd with dogs lurking in the background. The Duce fell under the spell of his host, ‘manifestly intoxicated by the spectacle of so much power and fascinated by the man who was plainly resolved to wield it’. Mussolini was no longer the vigorous, sprightly figure who had impressed the Führer in Venice. As the First Secretary of the British Embassy in Berlin observed, his features had coarsened. ‘He was fat and bald, and presented the visage of a dissolute Roman emperor of the decadence.’65

  Mussolini and his blackshirt revolution had been a source of inspiration for Hitler, but now the master began to emulate the pupil. A few months after he returned from Berlin he joined Germany and Japan in a tripartite pact against communism without even consulting the Grand Council. The pact forced Mussolini to betray Austria, invaded by Hitler in March 1938. Having assured everyone, including the Duce, that not a single Czech would be annexed, Hitler then sent his troops into Czechoslovakia, inflicting a blow on the prestige of Mussolini, who had confidently told his ministers there would be no annexation. ‘Every time Hitler invades a country, he sends me a message,’ he fulminated, fully aware of the hostile reaction of his own people, and bitterly resenting mocking taunts that labelled him the Gauleiter of Italy, a mere subordinate of the Führer.66

  Mussolini soon regained his poise, deciding to invade Albania in order to keep up with his ally, whose Reich now stretched all the way south to the Italian border. This, too, he managed to botch, even though Albania was a mere enclave already nominally controlled by Italy. Believing that the secret of Hitler’s success was that he, not his generals, dictated strategy, Mussolini barely bothered to brief the commander of the expeditionary force. Instead of a lightning strike inspired by the Führer, a confused invasion revealed just how ill prepared and poorly equipped his army was.67

  As both powers secretly agreed to prepare for a future war in Europe, the alliance with Germany was further expanded into a Pact of Steel, signed in May 1939. Hitler had promised to avoid hostilities for three years to give Mussolini time to prepare for the battles to come. Three months later, Germany invaded Poland. Galeazzo Ciano, now foreign minister, was one of many who realised that Mussolini was dragging his country into the abyss. ‘I must fight to the end. Otherwise it will mean the ruin of the country, the ruin of Fascism, and the ruin of the Duce himself.’68

  Mussolini was now in dire straits. He had failed to prepare his country for an all-out war, but had simultaneously thrown in his lot with Hitler. He boasted to his counterpart in Berlin that he had 150 divisions backed by reserves of twelve million soldiers, but in reality only ten divisions with antiquated equipment were ready to fight. A surprisingly indecisive character hiding behind a façade of limitless self-belief and willpower, Mussolini agonised, experiencing bouts of depression, changing his mind, even confessing that he secretly hoped the Germans would be defeated. But in early 1940 he became convinced that Hitler would win. ‘Recently he has felt more and more the fascination of the Führer. His military successes – the only successes that Mussolini really values and desires – are the cause of this,’ observed Ciano in his diary. On 10 June 1940 he declared war on the Allied powers.69

  For almost two decades Mussolini had encouraged the idea that he alone could be trusted and could do no wrong. He had used the cult of the leader to debase his competitors, ensuring every potential rival in the Fascist Party was edged out of the limelight. Those who remained were united in their devotion to the Duce, sycophants determined to outdo one another in praising his genius. They lied to him, much as he lied to them. But most of all, Mussolini lied to himself. He became enveloped in his own worldview, a ‘slave to his own myth’ in the words of his biographer Renzo de Felice. He knew that those around him were flatterers who withheld information that could provoke his ire. He trusted no one, having no true friends, no reliable companion to whom he could speak frankly. As the years passed Mussolini isolated himself from others, becoming a virtual prisoner within the walls of the Palazzo Venezia.70

  Not content with making all major decisions himself, Mussolini sought to control everything, apparently with no sense of priority. As his valet wrote, his was a dictatorship that extended to ‘fuel engines, borax, bicycle rims, translations from Latin, cameras, mirrors, electric lamps and mineral water’. His hand was everywhere. In the middle of the war he found time to change the colour of the cover for a women’s magazine from purple to brown. In January 1939, as Europe was heading towards war, his son-in-law observed units rehearsing for a parade in front of the Palazzo Venezia. ‘The Duce spends many a half-hour at the window of his office, concealed behind the blue curtains, looking at the movements of the various units. It was his order that the drums and trumpets be used at the same time. It was he who chose the band leader’s baton, and in person he teaches the movements to be made, and he changes the proportions and design of the baton. He is a strong believer that in the armed forces it is the form that determines the substance as well.’71

  As a result, Italy was woefully ill prepared for war. The campaign for economic self-sufficiency Mussolini spearheaded was a success on the propaganda front, but caused a decline in steel production even before war began, as the country had to import millions of tonnes of coal annually. The Battle for Grain likewise increased cereal output, but made the country more dependent on imported fertiliser. While Starace had ordered everyone into military attire, there were too few uniforms for the soldiers, many of whom were equipped with antiquated weapons. Starace himself was dismissed, as were countless other scapegoats, including senior officers in the army, to deflect blame from
Mussolini. The Duce, among the many positions he held, was air minister, but he did not know how many of his aircraft were obsolete. There was no military budget and no proper planning staff.72

  At the height of his glory, in the middle of the 1930s, Mussolini appeared genuinely popular. There were good reasons why foreign travellers – not to mention some historians later on – were impressed by the spell he seemed to have cast on the population. The cult of personality demanded loyalty to the leader rather than faith in a particular political programme. It was deliberately superficial, capable of encompassing the greatest possible number. People were required to appear periodically at the public square and applaud the Duce.73

  Many also hailed the leader as a way of criticising the abuses of local fascists. ‘If only the Duce knew’ (‘se lo sapesse il Duce!’) was a well-worn expression. The greater the sense of frustration and anger people felt towards the Fascist Party, the more they portrayed Mussolini as a blameless leader deliberately kept ignorant of the facts or badly advised by his underlings.74

  The cult was also tinged with superstition and magic. In a country steeped in religion, people projected onto Mussolini feelings of devotion and worship characteristic of Christian piety. There were holy sites, holy pictures, pilgrimages, even the hope of a healing touch from the leader. His photograph was sometimes used as a talisman, carried around to bring good luck. Most of all, there was faith in a providential figure rather than belief in fascist ideology.75

  Above all, people had no choice. As Emilio Lussu, a committed anti-fascist, noted in 1936, the regime demanded expressions of popular consent, and the blackshirts pursued these, bludgeon in hand. When the Duce gave speeches, people turned up on orders from the police and cheered on command, ‘like extras in a cast of thousands, so that papers could publish photographs of public sites full to the brim with exulting people’.76