Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  In 1876, when he was only just twenty, Alessandro Mussolini was elected as a delegate to represent Predappio and Meldola at the socialist congress in Bologna, so becoming one of Costa’s leading supporters in the region. Socialists, like Catholics for that matter, still had no parliamentary representation. In October 1876 the third congress of the Federazione Italiana dell’Internazionale (Italian Federation of the International) was held in Florence. The guiding principles of the movement were drawn up: collective ownership of the products of labour, with all other private property regarded as theft. Organizing insurrections had its problems, however: Alessandro was immediately put under special surveillance and found himself in prison for several months. But he continued to support Costa’s progress, which culminated in the latter’s election to parliament in 1882 as the first socialist deputy: the world of socialist rebellion now entered the country’s parliamentary chambers. Political action started to become more defined.

  Alessandro Mussolini organized the first labourers’ cooperative in his neighbourhood. “Workers of the world, unite!” – so the call had gone out in 1864 in London; Alessandro set aside his early anarchism and dedicated himself actively to the ideal. He started to write for many of the periodicals which were then starting to be published, whose titles alone spell out their combative spirit: La rivendicazione (The Vindication), Il sole dell’avvenire (The Sun of Tomorrow), Il risveglio (The Awakening). On 29th March 1884, Andrea Costa, working in collaboration with the Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party), organized in Forlì the Congresso Operaio Romagnolo (Congress of Workers in Romagna): one of the leading delegates was the blacksmith from Predappio. Meanwhile the political scene, dominated by reform and uprisings, was changing rapidly. In December 1888, during a demonstration in memory of Oberdan, fights broke out with the police which led to Andrea Costa receiving a three-year prison sentence. In the same month, a new electoral law extended the franchise even further: the annual income tax threshold for voters was lowered to five lire, while they were required to have basic literacy.

  The new political climate offered an opening for Alessandro Mussolini. He formed an alliance with left-wing liberals and in 1889 won the local council elections in Predappio, becoming a councillor and subsequently deputy mayor for its population of four thousand. It was a slap in the face for the clerical factions which had up until then governed the place. Italy’s conservatives were beginning to emerge from the cloud of Church incense which had always accompanied them: on 9th June of the same year the unveiling of Giordano Bruno’s statue in Rome took place in the midst of a tumultuous anticlerical demonstration. Newspapers carried reports that engine drivers often stopped their trains if they realized a priest was among the passengers and wouldn’t set off again until he’d got off.

  Benito Mussolini was six years old at this time, when socialism both in Italy and in his home was rapidly evolving. His father began to take him along to committee meetings and political assemblies.

  But manual labour in my father’s blacksmith shop was not the only interest we shared. It was inevitable that I should find a clearer understanding of those political and social questions which in the midst of discussions with the neighbours had appeared to me as unfathomable, and hence a stupid world of words. I could not follow as a child the arguments of lengthy debates around the table, nor did I grasp the reason for the watchfulness and measures taken by the police. But now in an obscure way it all appeared as connected with the lives of strong men who not only dominate their own lives but also the lives of their fellow creatures. Slowly but fatally [sic] I was turning my spirit and my mind to new political ideals destined to flower for a time.6

  If an orator is someone who teaches others how to speak, how to develop effective techniques of persuasion, then Benito Mussolini’s father was the orator who taught him these skills. He absorbed the lessons on the field of action, in the midst of turbulent political assemblies when securing the attention of the public was merely the first step. You also had to learn how to lead this riotous and violent crowd to fight in the squares or vote in the polling stations. Unlike others, Benito Mussolini had the advantage of being able to follow the debates and further discussions which took place within the four “stone walls” – as he romantically characterized it in his English autobiography – of home.

  In the twilight days of the regime, in 1943, Hitler sent one of the best doctors in Germany, Georg Zachariae, to ensure that Mussolini was in good enough physical shape to lead the new Fascist state, the Italian Social Republic. The dictator spent much time chatting with Zachariae. His memory wandered back to his childhood, while the doctor, thinking perhaps that he was making a contribution to the grand narrative of history, transcribed what was said: “I came into life a socialist and I’ll leave it a socialist. My father was a committed socialist; I drank those ideas in with my mother’s milk. Later on, as I was growing up, I continued to be interested in them, to pursue them and develop my own thoughts on them. I owe a lot to my father. I found the road of socialism chalked out for me: all I had to do was follow it, which I did with real conviction.”7

  Even at that moment of darkness and bloodshed, when the war arrived in the homes of ordinary Italians, bombing their walls and roofs, the blacksmith’s son still thought of himself as a socialist, he still harked back to his parents’ two-roomed house with its walls of stone. There were in fact three rooms but the third was used as a classroom where Rosa, his mother, taught him to read and to do sums. When Benito was eighteen months old, in 1885, his brother was born. He too was given a name – Arnaldo – with revolutionary antecedents: Arnaldo of Brescia was a priest who preached a return to the poverty of the Gospels, only to be excommunicated, hanged and burnt by the Church authorities.

  It was only with her third child, a baby girl, that Rosa succeeded in choosing a name that she wanted: Edvige, after the Polish saint who had built hospitals for the poor and sick among her countrymen.

  One day, when they were playing around unseen in some corner of the house, among piles of books and magazines and newspapers, Benito and his brother came across their father’s love letters to his wife before they were married. Rosa was spellbound by Alessandro, the way he held himself, the committee meetings he organized, the assemblies he could excite and the crowds he could dominate – and the letters he wrote to her. He was the right age for her – four years older – he was good-looking and he also owned his own smithy, so his financial standing was solid. Rosa had acquired a diploma as a primary-school teacher when she was just seventeen, spent a couple of years teaching in a village near Forlì, after which she was transferred to Predappio – where the two young people fell in love. She was the daughter of her father’s second marriage; her parents were elderly and found the idea of a socialist son-in-law deeply shocking. Rosa Maltoni might have had the air of a timid primary-school mistress, but she was determined: on 5th March 1882 she married Alessandro Mussolini. She was a devout Catholic, who went to church every Sunday, but she had no difficulty in reconciling her beliefs with her husband’s fiery anticlericalism. According to Edvige, her mother thought there was a continuous line linking the Gospels, St Paul, Marx and Bakunin; and then there was her conviction that a wife’s obedience to her husband was one of her religious duties.

  Rosa’s background, like Alessandro’s, was not impoverished. At a certain point she received an inheritance of ten thousand lire. As a primary-school teacher her monthly salary was fifty lire, so the inheritance was the equivalent of sixteen years’ pay – not bad for a young woman who had married against the will of her parents. Now she was the wife of the deputy mayor of Predappio with her own capital – not a word much liked by followers of the socialist International. Rosa and Alessandro’s small house served as a refuge for all those revolutionaries who found themselves in deep trouble in the various police crackdowns; they were always sure of finding a meal and a bed to sleep in. For Alessandro it was a way of showing socialist comradeship, for Rosa an
act of Christian charity. With their ten thousand lire – their “capital” – the couple had acquired a small estate. One day one of the local labourers had knocked at the door and, as is normal when one pays a visit to respectable folk, wiped his boots and took off his hat before entering. He looked round, abashed and hesitant, and asked to speak with the master of the house. If he’d thrown a bomb he couldn’t have caused more damage. Alessandro the blacksmith – the revolutionary who was fighting for a society in which there were no masters or servants, the socialist who was waging a war on private property, the sworn enemy of capitalism – had been addressed as a master by one of the labourers who worked in his vineyard… The local Revolutionary Socialist section – the one he himself had founded – expelled Alessandro for six months. He came back home in silence from the meeting where the decision had been taken and it remained difficult to get a word out of him for the duration of the six months. Despite the insulting setback, he returned to politics.

  Following on from Andrea Costa, at each parliamentary election more and more socialists became deputies. In 1892 Costa’s Revolutionary Socialist Party merged with the Partito Operaio Italiano (Italian Labour Party) to form the Italian Socialist Party. In 1902, when Benito Mussolini was nineteen years old and had obtained his diploma as an primary-school teacher, his father was still the leading figure among the local socialists. On 6th July local elections were held. The situation was tense: there was only a handful of votes between the right-wing clerical faction and the revolutionaries. But there were many in the small town who now knew a political trick or two. A trap was set to catch the leader of the local socialists; though Alessandro was forty-six, an experienced politician, he fell straight into it. The leaders of the opposing faction in the village waited for him to come along the road, then, as if it were an entirely chance encounter, greeted him with much bowing and doffing of hats. They knew without doubt – they said – that they were speaking to the representative of their political opponents who had “true moral authority”, to a person with a high sense of responsibility, but, nevertheless, they were extremely concerned about the threats to public order posed by the revolutionary excitement of the local socialists. Alessandro Mussolini declared in the hearing of all that there was no reason for concern; the election would pass off without disturbance, he himself would guarantee the security of the polling stations.

  Election day came and the polling stations were overrun with violent clashes. Alessandro returned home exhausted and went to bed without the faintest idea that he was being sought out as the instigator of the disturbances. His wife literally dragged him out of bed when she realized “they” were coming, “they” being the police and carabinieri. Alessandro escaped in haste across the fields, while Rosa told them her husband had had to go to Forlì. As a practising Catholic, she thought telling a lie was a sin, but in the circumstances it was a venial one. At dawn on the following day Alessandro emerged from his hiding place, but “they” were waiting for him – they hadn’t believed Rosa – and caught him on the road. This time he ended up in prison, enduring a long hard spell inside which broke his spirit and his health. Benito learnt about what had happened from a brief newspaper report, which mentioned the arrest of various socialist leaders, including his father. After this event, Alessandro Mussolini started to take on an air of legend for socialists in the region. His adventures were told in the local taverns, the legend got passed around, no doubt getting more colourful with each version – a small detail here, another circulated there – so that the fights started to resemble pitched battles and Alessandro finished up as a solitary Samson, pulling down the columns of the polling stations and overturning all the ballot boxes.

  A proof of how well known the blacksmith from Predappio became can be found in Angelica Balabanoff’s story of the welcome given to his son Benito when the young man first became a newspaper editor. Before letting him speak to the assembled staff in his new role as editor-in-chief of the periodical La lotta di classe (The Class Struggle), the chairman introduced him: “I have the pleasure of presenting to you the young son and comrade of Alessandro Mussolini, a tried and tested revolutionary, whose name alone – like a banner, a sure guarantee – is sufficient for us to welcome his son.”8

  It would be useful to have a look inside the Mussolini family home in Dovia. Family and political life may have been intense, but the living space was narrow, especially when Rosa’s mother went to live with them. A presence in those two rooms – and the third used as a schoolroom – “tall, skinny, always on the move” as Mussolini later described her, Marianna Ghetti exerted a certain influence over her grandson. As a child, Benito was – naturally – the leader of a gang of local boys who patrolled large areas of the neighbourhood. It was to be expected that he looked up to his grandmother with admiration; he would meet her frequently walking along the exposed river bed gathering up pieces of driftwood brought on the currents, some of which he and his companions would carve into fantastically shaped weapons for use in their encounters. Marianna was careful not to disturb the household more than was necessary: she occupied little space and used up minimal resources.

  She had another habit of never wanting to sit with us at table when we ate our frugal meals, which during the week consisted in a bowl of vegetable soup at midday and in the evening one plate for all of us of radishes from the fields. On Sunday there was a small piece of mutton to make broth, which needed to be continually skimmed. My grandmother was very devout; her only expression of annoyance, in dialect, was “begone with the Devil”. She loved us very much; we in turn often drove her to distraction.9

  In the image of the Duce created by Fascist propaganda, the family diet was always seen as a sign of their poverty; even what he ate as a child had to suggest that Mussolini was a self-made man who rose from nothing. From today’s perspective, in a time of outlandish diets, the family meals look rather different to us. Healthy vegetable soups were then – as is no longer the case today – widely prepared and eaten: it was a perfectly normal dish in rural working households, for ordinary not impoverished families – real poverty at the end of the nineteenth century was much starker. But the normality of Mussolini’s family was not very useful in the construction of his myth; the story had to be made more dramatic by picking out and highlighting certain details. Over the years Mussolini selected from his family memories whatever was most useful to him at that particular moment: when he wanted to play the revolutionary, his atheist socialist father was invoked; when he needed to negotiate with the Vatican, it was the turn of his pious mother instead, who made him get down on his knees and say his prayers every night by his bed.

  Chapter 2

  Three Knives

  The first time he used a knife on someone, it happened out of the blue, just after he’d left the classroom. At first it seemed like the normal set-to of young lads hurling insults at each other for no real reason. Then it turned into a grimly silent scuffle – punching, kicking, scratching, all in a heap on the ground, trying to tear hair and jackets, to dig with their elbows and knees, with not a groan to be heard – they didn’t want to attract the attention of their teachers, the strict fathers of the Salesian order. One of their schoolmasters, a priest with large hard hands, would have come and broken up the fight with a few harsh-sounding blows of his fist. None of the others intervened; they looked on, watching what was for them a genuine fight or duel. Such fights didn’t often occur, but when they did you had to let them play out to the bitter end. In the fast-moving scrum of boys, led by some kind of instinct, he took the knife from his pocket and stabbed it through the hand of his schoolfellow, who started to scream, at first with pain and then at the sight of the blood squirting out everywhere.

  The second time he stabbed someone with a knife was in the maths room in a fit of cold rage at a classmate who had scribbled on his exercise book. His first reaction was to hurl abuse at the boy. He was always good with words and it was effective; the other lad was nonplussed and struck
out with his fist. Mussolini took hold of the blade with which he was trying to scratch away the ink from the sheet of paper and stuck it into the other’s buttock.

  And the third time: this came to light in retrospect when the twenty-eight-year-old was locked up in the prison in Forlì, cell thirty-nine. He’d asked his guard for a small notebook, and in it wrote what was to be his first autobiographical account of his life: La mia vita dal 29 luglio 1883 al 23 novembre 1911 (My Life from 29th July 1883 to 23rd November 1911). His thoughts took him back to his time in Switzerland when, on his arrival, he found himself this time really impoverished and without resources. “On the afternoon of 10th July I got off the train at the station of Yverdon. I had two lire and ten cents in my pocket. I managed to sell a good knife which I’d bought in Parma and had once used to stab Giulia in the arm during one of our frequent rows. I got five lire for it – enough to live on for a week.”1