Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  At first there were only his innocuous love letters to his first love, one Elena Giunchi, the cousin of one of his classmates, who had spoken about her; she was evidently pretty enough to gain the attention of these two schoolboys. In the college at Forlimpopoli, a lay institution where the boys were older and had more freedom, whoever had sisters or cousins easily made friends. “In this period I fell in love with a beautiful young girl called Vittorina F., who was the sister of one of my schoolmates. I declared my feelings for her and she replied, putting me off. So I decided to stop her in the street.”9 The expulsion from the school in Forlimpopoli was also in part due to Mussolini’s nocturnal truancies. The headmaster Valfredo Carducci, who ran the institution on enlightened lay principles, nevertheless couldn’t overlook such disobedience. When as a consequence of his expulsion he became an external student, the nature of his escapades changed: a dalliance with a girl called Caterina might have started off with billets-doux and gifts of roses, but it moved on to kissing. As an external student Mussolini prepared for his exams with his friend Eugenio Nanni; the school had allowed him to follow classes even though he was no longer allowed to board. He realized that getting a diploma was necessary if he wanted to earn his own living and make his own way, so he concentrated hard on his studies. But both he and Eugenio were disturbed by impulses which were too insistent to ignore:

  One Sunday we both went over to Forlì to visit one of those places. As soon as I entered, I could feel myself blushing. I hadn’t a clue what to say or do but one of the whores took me on her knee and started to excite me by kissing and stroking me. She was well on in years and fat. I lost my virginity with her, for just fifty cents. […] The sudden revelation of what sexual pleasure meant disturbed me. Naked women started to haunt my daily thoughts and dreams and desires, I would undress the young girls I passed in the street with my eyes, and lust after them. During the carnival season, I used to go to public dances. The music, the rhythm of the movements, the physical contact with girls, their perfumed hair and the tang of their sweaty skin excited my desires, which I would relieve every Sunday in one of the brothels in Forlì.10

  Once he’d obtained his school diploma, Mussolini went back to live with his family in Dovia. He turned eighteen that summer, still below the legal age of majority at that time; his diploma allowed him to work as a trainee primary-school teacher but, even with this qualification, he couldn’t find a job.

  That summer saw many strikes and clashes in the factories and in the countryside. On 27th June, in the countryside round Ferrara, the forces of order had fired on a group of agricultural labourers, killing three and wounding twenty-three. A month earlier the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, who had come to epitomize the disturbances affecting the whole country, died in prison. Just eleven months before, on 29th July 1900, the King of Italy Umberto I had been assassinated. The newly established official body set up to examine the question of emigration could do nothing to prevent the constant flow of Italians in search of a better life in a new country, a flow which now came increasingly from the south rather than the north of the country. A determining factor in this reversal of the pattern had been the defeat and brutal suppression at the hands of the police and army of the so-called “Fasci Siciliani dei Lavoratori” or Sicilian Workers’ Leagues, in 1894, when Mussolini was just ten years old. The defeat spelt the end to the hopes and ideals of social reform on the island and the creation of a new economic system to replace the large landowners and the Mafia. Many labourers and peasants lost their lives in the shootings, while the movement’s socialist leaders were sent to prison. The ships filled with a flood of famished and despairing emigrants. The defeat thus suffered had serious repercussions on the Italian Socialist Party. In the years that followed the party’s leaders began to be criticized for failing to pay heed to the needs of workers in the south, while the working-class movement in the north of Italy was accused of turning a blind eye to the fate of the agricultural labourers, from the establishment of the Fasci onwards. In the Po Valley, in Emilia and Romagna, the political climate was different: the disturbances there had led to an improvement in wages and the setting up in 1901 of a Federazione Nazionale dei Lavoratori della Terra (National Federation of Agricultural Workers). Yet the political and social tension meant that it was hard for a young primary-school teacher, just qualified and already known as a revolutionary-socialist firebrand, to find a post. Mussolini went in for several jobs, including posts as a supply teacher, to no avail. But his personal life went on its now accustomed way; as we’ve seen, to all intents and purposes he raped the girl he calls Virginia B. and for three months in the summer of 1901 they were together “though more in body than in soul”. His father Alessandro stepped in to help with the problem of finding a job. As an acknowledged Socialist Party leader and a skilful manipulator of votes, he used the classic method of pulling strings. The small town of Gualtieri – just beyond Bologna in the province of Reggio Emilia and quite a long way from Dovia, especially at that time when transport was so limited – had become the first Socialist Party-controlled local council in the region. Alessandro Mussolini’s political influence extended even as far as Gualtieri, and the Socialist mayor owed him a favour. So the eighteen-year-old Mussolini obtained his first job, as a supply teacher. The local Socialists organized an official welcome for him at the station, perhaps slightly taken aback when they saw him get off the train dressed from top to toe in black, a habit he had acquired while at school in Forlimpopoli and had maintained, either because he thought it distinguished him from his Socialist Party contemporaries, who frequently wore a red tie, or for simple convenience. The mayor presented him at a party meeting: this was the son of Alessandro Mussolini, his arrival in the town would be very important for the local Socialists. But Benito attended their meetings very infrequently; his fellow Socialists were more likely to come across him sprawled drunk on the pavement outside the shop of a local cobbler with whom he’d become friends. His job consisted in keeping forty young boys in class for the entire morning; for this he was paid fifty-six lire a month, of which forty went towards his rent, so he didn’t have much left to squander on having a good time. But there were dances every Sunday, in the open air or inside depending on the season – those dances which opened the way to sex and free love. And, apart from staying at home or going for a walk in the fields, there wasn’t much else for young men to do in their spare time in Romagna. At one of the dances Mussolini came across Giulia, a strikingly beautiful woman of twenty, married with a young husband, away on military service, and a little boy. In Socialist free-thinking Gualtieri her going to a public dance on her own wasn’t seen as scandalous. Each Sunday Mussolini observed her; it took some time, but eventually the goal was reached:

  On the evening of 20th March, at No. 9 in Vicolo di Massa, second floor. I remember. Giulia F. was waiting for me in the doorway, she was wearing a pink blouse which stood out in the darkness. We went up the stairs and once inside she gave herself to me for two hours. […] Our relationship lasted for a few weeks until we were found out. Her husband heard about it and ordered his wife to be driven away from the house. She took her little boy with her and joined me in the room where we’d first come together. We felt more free. […] Our love affair was violent and full of jealousy, with quarrels and short-lived outbursts of anger.11

  The Socialist Party in Gualtieri didn’t know what to make of Alessandro Mussolini’s son and his behaviour. He almost never came to their meetings, but never missed a dance. And now he was involved with a married woman, giving the town’s conservatives fuel for scandal and criticism. They had found out about his secret relationship with the soldier’s wife after they had invited him to speak at the dinner to celebrate May Day in 1902, in front of an audience of four hundred guests. Mussolini did give the speech, and as they listened to it they saw the son of the far-famed blacksmith from Dovia: when he finished he was wildly applauded and acclaimed. A month later on 2nd June the local council organized a commemoratio
n of the twentieth anniversary of Garibaldi’s death. The man who was supposed to give the address had fallen ill, so the crowd went off to fetch Mussolini. They found him in his shirtsleeves and, just as he was, he was carried off to the platform and asked to give a speech, which he improvised on the spot. When the ceremony was over and the clapping had died down, they were certain that a new leader had emerged. But Mussolini had other ideas: his monthly pay was too low and he had come to realize that primary-school teaching was not for him. He had become fixed on the thought of emigrating to Switzerland and trying his luck there. It was also true that his affair with Giulia, her husband’s violent reaction at her betrayal and the bitterness of the family who had turned her out were causing problems for the local council. Each day that passed made it clearer that his contract as a supply teacher in the local school would not be renewed; with all the esteem due to his father, they felt they could not offer his son the post. Yet in the end this merely confirmed his desire to look elsewhere; he was content to let things develop as they had. As soon as the school year had finished, he quickly arranged his departure for Switzerland. “I spent my last days in the town almost entirely in Giulia’s house. I remember very well our last night together, Giulia was crying and kissed me. I too was moved.”12 Many years later, in the Roman prison cell where he jotted his autobiographical notes down in an exercise book, he seems once again to have been moved by what he calls “my heart’s sweetest memory”; he hopes that Giulia remembers him and his love for her and will continue to do so “until she is very old”. He never changed his judgement on Giulia Fontanesi, not even in the comments made to Claretta Petacci and transcribed by her: “Yes, Giulia was the woman for me – she was a beauty, poetical, romantic, all flowers, stars, moon and sunset – she was even too romantic. Our lovemaking too – not so much afterwards. Poetry above all: ‘You haven’t brought me violets or a poem.’ I sometimes gazed at her in amazement: she was so fine, so delicate and beautiful. I loved her, our relationship lasted four months. She was supposed to come with me to Switzerland, but in the end she didn’t.”13 As it turned out, the beautiful twenty-year-old Giulia did not remain on her own: her husband forgave her and took her back when he returned from military service. Meanwhile Benito Mussolini’s attention had turned to the new opportunities which Switzerland offered him.

  Chapter 4

  Exiles in Switzerland

  Small, deformed, obsessive, a fetishist, spinsterly, self-flagellatory, irrational, prone to bouts of hysterical mysticism, unbalanced and fanatical, insidious like some infectious disease and, to cap it all, with a wretched little greyish face, watery eyes and a squeaky rasping voice – Margherita Sarfatti’s portrait of her hated rival Angelica Balabanoff seems almost literally to tear her to pieces. Yet the two women had much in common. They were both committed socialists, both elegant, cultivated and refined; both were widely read and both were rich, extremely rich: Angelica Balabanoff had inherited wealth from her Ukrainian family while Sarfatti’s Venetian family had been successful in trade. Both were Jewish and both, in succession, dedicated more than ten years of their lives to Benito Mussolini. Balabanoff first met him in Switzerland and, with her superior knowledge, took the young man – rough-edged and much the worse for wear – in hand and transformed him into a socialist leader. Sarfatti met him when he was already a socialist and applied herself to building his new image as the leader or “duce” of the Fascist movement. In the course of his life Mussolini had relations with hundreds of women, perhaps as many as four hundred – Renzo De Felice thought this a plausible estimate – but Margherita Sarfatti was not much troubled by his womanizing. Nor for that matter was the only woman he ever married, Rachele, though her investigations were not as far-reaching as those of her rival: “He didn’t care for thin women. It didn’t matter if they were blonde or brunette, short or tall. Too much perfume was bad. Obviously I’m referring to my husband’s successes with women. […] Looking back now I can say that he had a long list of conquests, but not much more so than any other Italian man who liked women and who in turn was attractive to them.”1 Rachele Mussolini admitted her husband was no saint; she believed she knew all about his extramarital adventures. But how many or how few she was really aware of is immaterial: it is obvious that none of them had any importance for her, they were nearly all based “merely” on physical attraction: these women ran after her husband because he was attractive to them. The relationships were more troubling when there were indications that the other woman had developed a strong influence over him. Unlike Sarfatti, Rachele Mussolini wasn’t interested in politics and was not bothered about Balabanoff: “Yet it’s true to say that his relations with three women caused me much suffering, and I fought hard against them, to save my marriage and my love for him: Ida Dalser, Margherita Sarfatti and Clara Petacci.”2 But Margherita Sarfatti knew without a shadow of a doubt that Angelica Balabanoff was no mere infatuation: the talents and resources and means at her disposal made her a dangerous rival. And even though she was no longer present on the scene and hadn’t been for some time (Balabanoff returned to Russia after the Revolution), the woman had still initiated a relationship with Mussolini during his period in Switzerland and therefore had to be eliminated:

  In Italy women – even the revolutionaries – are usually shy or retiring, but Comrade Balabanoff’s boldness was positively flirtatious. As ugly as she was, thanks to her electrifying oratory, or her famous name, or simply the engagingly direct way she propositioned men who were too polite to turn her down – the fact is that the spinsterly Angelica used to boast she was never without a companion as she spread the socialist gospel through the length and breadth of Italy. Let’s hope – at least for the sake of the aesthetic judgements of young socialist males – she was exaggerating. […] She had no sense of humour, and no sense of beauty – just as well, really, since if she had, she would have drowned herself in the nearest well – or perhaps not, she was never very fond of personal hygiene.3

  Sarfatti’s pen is dipped in poison: it had to be if she was to humiliate Balabanoff both as a woman – painting a picture of someone who used political meetings to pick up men – and as a socialist – a dreary fanatic who when she took a walk in the country and came to a crossroads would say in all seriousness, “We must turn to the left – the road to take is always on the left.”

  Moving between Geneva, Bern and Zurich, the young man who had hitherto been known as the son of the famous blacksmith of Dovia began to gain positions for himself as an emerging socialist. The image he presented to the world started to change, his political personality started to mature – behind both changes lay the influence of Angelica Balabanoff: hence Sarfatti’s malicious attack on her.

  While Benito Mussolini was on his way to Switzerland, on 9th July 1902, his father was arrested for the episode of the wrecked polling stations. His son read the news in Il secolo and wondered whether he should break his journey and return, but in the end decided to continue. On the train there were many Italians; one of them, a kind of itinerant salesman from Pontremoli, seemed to want to strike up a friendship with him. He spoke confidentially of a relative he had in Switzerland who would be able to find work for them both, but the relative turned out to be an emigrant who was in no position to find jobs for the pair of them. However, he invited them back to eat at his home; after the meal, before leaving, Mussolini sold him his knife, the one he had used on his mistress Giulia during one of their rows. The money he got for it enabled him to survive until he found a job as a building labourer in Orbe, for a chocolate factory which the Bertoglio company was constructing. His work was back-breaking, at night he slept under a bridge, he lived in abysmal poverty: all these things he would recall later in various interviews, while isolating and framing them as elements in the development of his myth; he tried to cast a bohemian light on his existence in Switzerland, with himself at centre stage, a famished vagabond and anarchist. As a labourer on the building site he earned twice as much as he had as a teacher
, but he worked eleven hours a day continually climbing up and down carrying a hod with building materials. He lasted a week, with a total pay of twenty lire and a few cents.