Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  On the night of 27th July, barely two weeks after his arrival in the country, the local policemen found him sleeping in a cardboard box under the Grand Pont in Lausanne. They were kind: they gave him a meal and a bed to sleep on – but in a cell in the local station where they’d taken him on a charge of vagrancy. After three days they released him. This was the first of eleven arrests he underwent during his lifetime. In Lausanne there was the Swiss headquarters of the Federazione Socialista Italiana (Italian Socialist Federation) as well as of the Sindacato Italiano Muratori e Manovali (Union of Italian Building Labourers and Bricklayers). He introduced himself there; once more his father’s well-known name proved useful. The secretary of the Socialist Federation, Gaetano Zannini, welcomed him with open arms, and introduced him to Emilio Marzetto, the editor of the newspaper Avvenire del lavoratore. On 1st August 1902 his first article appeared in it. It was striking for its brilliant style and its unexpected subject: it was an attack on the public indifference to the first of the massacres of Armenians that after the First World War would become known as “Metz Yeghern” or the “Great Calamity”. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century, the one which Hitler referred to in his frosty reply to a woman who asked him if he was bothered by public reaction to the persecution of the Jews: “Why should I be? After all, who remembers the Armenians?”

  Various socialists helped Mussolini out financially as far as they could while he was in Switzerland. He was able to supplement his small earnings from his journalism by giving Italian and French lessons, by working a few days as a shop assistant or a bricklayer; his mother sent him whatever she managed to save. Even though he had worked on a building site for no more than a handful of days, he thought it was his right to belong to the Union of Building Labourers and Bricklayers; by the end of the summer, in September 1902, he’d become their general secretary, with a monthly salary of five lire, to add to the rest of his income.

  His other newspaper articles in this period are notable for their extreme revolutionary views and their contempt for reformist measures, but he maintained the support of the Socialist Federation. He started to speak at meetings all over Switzerland, with his expenses paid. By now the police were keeping a file on him and watching his movements. Gaetano Zannini also recommended him to Giacinto Menotti Serrati as the Swiss correspondent for the Italian-emigrant newspaper in New York Il proletario, and also to Arturo Labriola for Avanguardia socialista in Milan. Mussolini moved to Bern, where his activities as a political agitator among the Italian immigrant population increased, ending in his arrest by the Swiss police on 18th June 1903. He was given the number 1751, and his photograph was circulated to all the Swiss cantons so that his movements could be tracked more easily. After holding him for ten days in a cell they sent him back to Italy via Chiasso; nobody, however, stopped him buying another train ticket as soon as he arrived and returning to Switzerland the same day. There was another reason he wanted to return to the country: “Over the course of that summer I’d made various acquaintances among the community of Russians living in Switzerland. With some of the women I’d struck up warm friendships. I remember Miss Alness from St Petersburg and Eleonora H. with whom a friendship quickly turned into a love affair.”4

  Eleonora H. was a fascinating medical student whom Mussolini was interested in for a long time; however, she wasn’t the only woman in his life at the time, since he himself mentions taking frequent walks in the public park in Bern in order to “meet as often as possible a German blonde who’d caught my attention”. He and his friend Salvatore Donatini planned a double sexual conquest while they were working on an abortive project to start a new journal, I tempi nuovi (The New Times). Donatini had become enamoured of a woman from Paris, Rosa Dauvergne, while Mussolini’s eye had fallen on her neighbour Emilia C. She was older than he was, but that didn’t matter; as he wrote, “love conquers all”, although it’s clear from what he goes on to say that in this case the woman in question’s extensive sexual experience brought their relationship to a head: “That love affair was one of the strangest episodes in my youth. She was over thirty and had five children, yet her behaviour was completely reckless in the period I knew her.”

  In the town of Annemasse he wasn’t around long enough to cultivate his relationship with the “charming, pale-complexioned” Giulietta F.; during the few days at his disposal they didn’t get further than “a sentimental, platonic interlude”, but the episode shows us how he was always ready to seize every opportunity, every possibility in the hope that such initial contacts might lead on to his real goal.

  Towards the end of 1903 he returned to Dovia, where his mother Rosa had fallen seriously ill. By Christmas she had recovered and on 27th December Benito left again for Switzerland, this time with his brother Arnaldo, whom he left in Bern, while he continued on to Geneva, where Eleonora H., the beautiful medical student whose wealthy Russian family was paying for her studies, was waiting for him. By now Mussolini was a well-known figure among the expatriate communities in Switzerland; his arrests had also contributed to his fame.

  In the early months of 1904 an Italian evangelical pastor, Alfredo Tagliatela, was travelling on a mission among the Italian emigrants. When he was told by some of them how good a speaker Mussolini was as a socialist, Tagliatela decided to invite him to take part in a public debate. For a while – it was one of the most confused and troubled periods of his stay in Switzerland – Mussolini didn’t respond, but eventually on 25th March he decided to take up Tagliatela’s challenge. Five hundred people crowded into the hall to hear them; the debate became one of the most exploited episodes in the subsequent construction of the myth of Mussolini in his youth. In reality it’s a banal and even foolish story; the most charitable interpretation is that Mussolini was taking his revenge for all the sufferings inflicted on him in the Salesian fathers’ boarding school. When the chairman of the discussion asked him to speak, Mussolini got to his feet, asked someone to lend him a watch, and then issued an ultimatum: if at the end of five minutes he had not been struck down by the hand of God, this was a proof the deity didn’t exist. No one seems to have remarked on the idiocy of the challenge; on the contrary Mussolini was warmly applauded. The contents of Mussolini and Tagliatela’s debate were published in a pamphlet in Lugano in 1904: De Felice describes the former’s arguments as printed there as “far from original, they merely piece together rationalist and anti-religious ‘texts’ which were modish at the time. It should also be pointed out, however, that the pamphlet is marginally more worthwhile than most literature of this kind. It shows Mussolini’s wildly disorganized learning, typical of an autodidact but – at least in the socialist context of the time (think of Serrati and others like him) – fairly wide-ranging, and on occasion not entirely superficial.”5

  The most significant conference held in Switzerland while Mussolini was living in the country was the commemoration to mark the thirty-third anniversary of the Paris Commune on 18th March 1904, with the participation of many of the exiles in Switzerland, including the Russians. It was on this occasion that Angelica Balabanoff first met Mussolini: she was struck by how unhappy he seemed. She describes him as restless and very shabbily dressed, so much so that, even among a crowd of impoverished emigrants, he stood out. She added as a final touch to her picture of him that he also seemed very dirty. But before accepting her account at face value we should remember that Balabanoff was writing in 1945, with the encouragement of Maria Giudice, in order to provide a detailed and convincing explanation for a wide international socialist and communist readership as to why she had been connected to Mussolini for so long. Among her readers there would have been many who fought on the winning side in the Second World War, who had defeated Nazism and Fascism with a huge cost in human lives. There were false rumours, tactically circulated, that Balabanoff was the real mother of Mussolini’s first daughter, Edda, whom Rachele subsequently adopted as her own, showing an admirable willingness to accept the consequences of the revolutionary c
redo of free love. Another version in an anti-Fascist pamphlet published in Rome just after the liberation in 1944 declared that Edda was the daughter of Anna Kuliscioff, the muse of the socialist movement in Milan, in whose drawing room a socially ill-at-ease and awkward Mussolini had been among the guests.6

  Shabby, dirty, touchy and morose, obsessed with himself and his own problems, telling people he had syphilis as though it were some kind of visiting card: Balabanoff’s picture of Mussolini shows someone who resembles a street vagrant rather than an esteemed orator called on to represent his fellow Italians. He was probably not well dressed, possibly even shabby, but he can’t have been dirty or smelly, since if he were it would be hard to understand his success with women, especially someone like the wealthy and attractive Eleonora H.

  Lenin was also at the conference, and it’s probable that he and Mussolini met. In the interview held with Ludwig, the latter insists that Lenin certainly knew him, since he criticized an Italian socialist delegation for not keeping hold of Mussolini, the man whom Lenin judged capable of bringing the revolution to Italy. In reply Mussolini admitted that he knew about Lenin’s remark but went on to say: “I’m not sure if I met him with the others in Zurich. They were always changing their names.”7 His sister Edvige also maintained that Lenin had said that Mussolini was the only Italian socialist who was intellectually and temperamentally suitable to lead the revolution. Vittorio, Mussolini’s second son, also wrote that his father might have met the Russian: he was probably introduced to him by the Bulgarian exile Boris Tomoff, who, however, didn’t know Lenin’s real identity. Changes of names and identities were normal for these people at this time, in order for them to remain safe. In the interminable monologues transcribed by the German doctor Georg Zachariae, a now isolated and weary Mussolini admits he knew Lenin:

  When I was living in Switzerland as a political exile I spent some time with the circle of people around Lenin. He was undoubtedly a man of quite extraordinary intelligence, but I immediately saw that all the others were merely brainless chatterboxes – indeed some of them should have been locked up in asylums. I tried to find a way out of having to mix with these people; I wanted my usual freedom of manoeuvre back. After I’d left them, I heard that Lenin had said to them: “How could you have let that man go?” […] But I was glad to escape from Lenin’s tyrannical control of the group.8

  When we read this, it’s worth remembering that in this final phase of his life and career Mussolini was trying to find ways of reorienting himself to the left: a memory of his meeting with Lenin could come in useful.

  At occasions like this conference for the anniversary of the Paris Commune, it was normal for militant socialists, especially if they were called upon to speak, to pay special attention to all the other speakers and to try to control the various balances and shifts of power which occurred in the course of the meeting. It is hard to believe that Mussolini would not have taken note of Lenin’s address to the assembly. He also mixed regularly with the expatriate community in Switzerland, one of its attractions being the women, among whom he made several friendships, including the Miss Alness from St Petersburg and the woman who became his main mistress at the time, Eleonora H. Others who have tried to compile a list of Mussolini’s relationships with women, such as Giorgio Melli, indicate another Russian exile, Hélène M., who took to calling him “Benitusha” and following him round his various political engagements in the country.

  Yet even if he never met Lenin, and he was certainly never involved with him politically, there was an important link between the two men: Angelica Balabanoff. Since as a woman in the Ukraine she was not allowed to pursue university studies, her wealthy family had sent her first to Brussels and then to Rome, where she had been taught by Antonio Labriola. She had joined the Italian Socialist Party and was familiar with its social ambience. She was also a member of the Soviet Communist Party; Lenin gave her several jobs to do, including a spell as secretary to the Comintern in 1919. She wrote two books on the two political leaders she’d known: Lenin visto da vicino (Impressions of Lenin) and Il traditore Mussolini (Mussolini the Traitor). But the book on Mussolini is steeped in self-justification, which on certain pages can hardly be ignored, and historians using the book as a source would do well to be aware of this. If we take Balabanoff’s account at face value, it becomes impossible to understand her long relationship with Mussolini, the fact she stayed with him until 1914, or why he asked her to collaborate in the editorial work on the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti!.

  A typical instance of her untrustworthiness is the anecdote of the stolen food, which was taken up by much of the polemical literature intent on demolishing the myth of the Duce. It was a fine day and Mussolini was walking in the park when he saw two refined ladies preparing a picnic for themselves; out of their elegant hamper came buttered rolls, meat, mandarin oranges and various cakes. Mussolini was unemployed; he usually ate at the home of a former workmate, a bricklayer, but that day his friend was away and he had gone without a meal. As he saw the rich foods being taken out of the hamper, the pangs of hunger increased; he wanted to attack the women and strangle them. He was overcome with fury, rushed up to them, snatched the bread and the meat from their hands and ran off. Mussolini afterwards said he had run off not to escape, but because he was scared that in his anger against the two women he might kill them. He told the story to an astonished Balabanoff, with a lot of local dialect swear words (according to her he always swore a lot in dialect), who reproved him: “What would have been the point of such a crime? You don’t solve social injustice by getting rid of people; you need to change the system so everyone’s rights are respected…”9

  Maria Giudice also inveighed against the wilder instincts of the young Mussolini. In her opinion, Balabanoff’s entire relationship with the young Italian after their first meeting in Switzerland would appear to have consisted in her attempts to bring a rough, uncouth, ignorant and undisciplined personality under some form of control. Such an account may have served its purpose in the years immediately following the fall of the Fascist regime, but it means that her memoir is written in such a way that it is hard to get at the real facts, above all at the reasons the two stayed together for so long. Mussolini seems like some alien who has landed by chance on the planet of the revolutionary left; as Balabanoff describes him he is an anomaly, an out-of-control fanatic, whereas in reality he became one of the most popular and successful protagonists in the Italian socialist movement. Furthermore, Balabanoff’s account carefully avoids any reference to their sexual relations. We’ve already seen that the fact that this intellectual from the Ukraine was no beauty and was five years older than him was not important for Mussolini; beauty was not an essential criterion in his choice of sexual partners. His wife Rachele writes: “He never denied that he was attracted to women, with one misgiving which one day he revealed to me: ‘You will always be the only beautiful woman in my life, because beauty is untrustworthy – it can make even the wisest man lose his head”10 – only an apparently kind remark, it shows considerable cynicism to have made it to the wife he betrayed so frequently. Yet while it’s true that beautiful women were ready to go to bed with him – or on occasion get down on the carpet in his office in Palazzo Venezia – throughout his life, it is also the case that he did not put much store on female beauty when he chose a woman. In Switzerland he was shabbily dressed, and Balabanoff got him to wear good clothes; his reading was disorganized, so she told him which books and journals to look at; he was without a guide, so she became the muse or mentor who inspired him. In her hands, this fiery political agitator, known for his revolutionary drive, started to learn the art of politics. Yet Balabanoff doesn’t make clear why, out of all the socialists she knew, she chose to follow and support Mussolini and why for over ten years she spent so much energy and time concentrating on a man she describes as shallow:

  Mussolini has never had a personality of his own, just as he’s never had an original idea. He was extremely skilfu
l at adopting the ideas of others and showing them off as if he’d thought of them first. He found it easy to do this, because he didn’t have any deep-rooted convictions, he never studied anything properly but only superficially in order to acquire a smattering, plagiarizing others; he was capable of changing principles from one side to the opposed one, at the drop of a hat, completely unbothered. When he associated with our group he always needed encouragement, control, some kind of brake if he was going to stick to the point.11

  Thus Balabanoff’s account, her historical testimony, is permeated with her scorn for the man, tantamount to a refusal to make the important contribution she could have provided to our critical understanding of Mussolini as a socialist. Edvige’s description of the numerous letters she received from her brother while he was in Switzerland reveal his accounts of the women he met while he was there – women full of political commitment, exiled and in flight from their native countries, all of whom his sister back in Dovia liked to imagine were beautiful, bold and intelligent. One phrase on Balabanoff stands out in this voluminous correspondence; it was probably written after one of the couple’s heated discussions, and contains a crude sexual reference as well as a severe judgement on his partner’s intellectual stature: “She knows and understands a lot of things; she’s read all the Marxist texts. But while her body is full of juice, her mind is full of dried-up ideas.”12