Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  One of Mussolini’s projects was to enrol at the University of Geneva, perhaps in order to be nearer to Eleonora or because his new relationship with Angelica Balabanoff had encouraged him in this direction; it’s also possible he had nursed the ambition for a long while. But his passport had expired in 1903, and without a current one he wasn’t allowed to register; the Italian Embassy wouldn’t renew his passport because he had been called up to do his compulsory military service back in Italy. He decided to take a risk by falsifying his passport, overwriting the date 1903 with 1905, but the device was too crude to deceive the Swiss police. He was arrested for the third time on 9th April 1904 and sent first to prison in Geneva and then to Lucerne, followed by a new order for his expulsion from the country. This time if he had been taken back to the Italian border under police escort he wouldn’t have found it so easy to turn round and come back in, since a military tribunal in Bologna had condemned him to a year’s imprisonment as a deserter for not responding to the call-up; he would go straight from a Swiss prison to an Italian one. But the fact he was now a well-known figure started to impede the Swiss bureaucratic process. The Swiss socialists rallied to his cause; the press started to follow his case; a radical member of parliament presented a petition in his favour to the cantonal council in Ticino. Some ingenious lawyer found the right loophole: technically Mussolini’s expulsion was from the canton of Geneva. The decree just had to be followed to the letter and the case would be solved. After holding him twelve days in prison, guards accompanied him to the station of Bellinzona in Ticino and left him there, a free man. Despite being banned from the city, he managed to get back to Geneva on a secret visit to see Eleonora H., who was preparing to return to Russia: “She left at the beginning of August, accompanied by her faithful servant Sirotonina. She stopped one night in Lausanne and we left Lausanne together. We said goodbye to each other in Zurich. I never saw her again.”13

  But, under Balabanoff’s guidance, Mussolini’s life and political career had taken off in such a way that Eleonora’s departure meant little to him. His arrest, far from leading to a crisis, had been personally advantageous for him. Once freed from prison, he enrolled at the faculty of social sciences on 9th May. He followed the course given by Vilfredo Pareto, the professor of political economy; it was Pareto who introduced him to the works of Georges Sorel. Together with Balabanoff he translated a book by Karl Kautsky for the Avanguardia socialista, for which he wrote from time to time. Much later, when he was Duce, in his interview with Ludwig, he said that his period in Switzerland had coincided with that time of life when, despite the ups and downs of enthusiasm and discouragement, a man remains a rebel at heart. However, when Ludwig sent him the proofs of the interview to correct, the last phrase – about being a rebel – was deleted; Ludwig only managed to publish the full text of his interview in a critical edition that appeared after the war. “My years in the Salesian boarding school had depressed me; I’d grown up feeling disinherited, longing for revolution. What else could I have become if not a radical socialist, a disciple of Blanqui, almost a communist? I carried a portrait medallion of Marx around with me like some kind of talisman.” “What would your reaction be today on seeing such a portrait?” Ludwig asked. “Marx was a great spirit of enlightenment, even in part a prophet,” came the reply. “But in Switzerland I didn’t have much opportunity to talk about these things. Among my fellow labourers I was the most educated, but I had to work the whole day, carrying hods of bricks from one storey to another a hundred times a day in building the chocolate factory in Orbe.”14

  In the autobiography he published for an English-speaking readership – which was written in reality by his brother Arnaldo – Mussolini tries to present himself as a kind of student worker for whom the intellectual exercise of Pareto’s lessons was “refreshment after manual labour”. According to this version of his life – serialized in instalments in the Philadelphia Saturday Evening Post – the pleasure he took in this “refreshment” soon transformed itself into a passion for the social sciences. And it is true that although he started off life in Switzerland as a manual labourer working on building sites, he ended up spending much time in the university library, working on his not inconsiderable intellectual contributions as a writer for various journals and newspapers, but above all engaged in intense and at times almost chaotic political activity with his participation in many conferences and meetings. There are also obscure periods which elude us: one of these is worth mentioning, a hypothetical clandestine visit to Paris, undertaken when he was living in Annemasse. No documentary evidence exists for such a trip; De Felice believes it was just one of the many projects Mussolini had in mind and never carried out. Yet that very curious personality Maria Rygier fiercely accused Mussolini more than once of having become a spy for the French police during his secret visit to Paris. Rygier was the daughter of a devoutly Catholic Polish sculptor. She’d been born in Cracow but after the death of her mother moved to Rome, where she was educated in a convent school. She broke off relations with her father and started to frequent socialist circles; when in Switzerland she had come to know both Angelica Balabanoff and Mussolini. Fiery in temperament, a brilliant speaker and indefatigable organizer, she spoke several languages fluently, contributed to various journals and newspapers, and, naturally enough, was recorded in police dossiers all over Europe. Her personal career is hard to trace; however, it’s known that she managed to join the Freemasons and helped to establish a lodge – the Gran Loggia Mista d’Italia – of which the Grand Master was one Enrico Cesarò of Caserta. The admission of a woman to a Freemasons’ lodge in Italy at that time can’t have led to many opportunities for her: she moved to France and became a member of the Epopis Lodge in Paris. An essay in French by her was published with an introduction by Lucien Le Foyer, the Honorary Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of France. “She was given documents by a fellow Freemason Maurice Monier from the Sûreté Générale, which are supposed to have shown that the young Mussolini worked as a spy in 1903–4 in the pay of the French police, reporting back to them on several of his socialist comrades.”15 Unlikely as it seems that a Freemason – and a Grand Master to boot – would speak of secret police files with a woman who had only just joined the lodge and had a background of revolutionary militancy in the socialist cause, one cannot exclude the possibility that Rygier had got caught up in some complex network of espionage. The various circles of political exiles at the beginning of the twentieth century lived surrounded by informers, infiltrators and traitors; it was an atmosphere which can even today still make the news. In February 2009 several press agencies carried the news of the publication of a book by a former officer in Soviet intelligence, Colonel Igor Atamanenko, called What the Lubyanka Never Revealed. Atamanenko’s books provide no documentary evidence and are controversial, but it is worth noting that, in an interview with the author in the Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda, he asserts that Mussolini worked as a secret agent for the Tsar. An agent working for the Tsarist secret services – the homosexual Ivan Manasevich-Manuilov – was said to be working undercover as a journalist in Paris in 1902; he later moved to Rome as the ostensible head of Russian religious affairs in the Vatican. Behind this new identity and spending freely the funds the Tsarist police provided him with, Manasevich-Manuilov became friends with many Italian socialists, including Mussolini, who is said to have written reports for the Tsarist intelligence services – reports which later fell into the hands of the Communists. As it stands, there are far too many “ifs” in Atamanenko’s story; without documentary evidence it is worthless. But it is interesting to see how, even a hundred years after the purported events, such story can still make the news (and earn money for opportunistic publishers). There is on the other hand much official evidence of the surveillance carried out by the police in several European countries: the Swiss kept dossiers on all the leading personalities among the expatriate communities, the French recorded every movement or period of residence on their territories,
while the Italians too checked up on not only their own political agitators but also foreigners, as the official reports on the journeys in Italy of Lenin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries show.

  Mussolini tells us that, with his inner restlessness, he was planning a new departure. He had in fact decided to leave Switzerland for the United States, when an event occurred which made him change his plans and go in the opposite direction, back to Italy rather than across the Atlantic. On 15th September 1904 a son – his first – was born to Victor Emanuel III at Racconigi: Umberto Nicola Tommaso Giovanni Maria di Savoia. The birth of an heir to the Italian throne was celebrated all over the country. As was the custom, an amnesty was declared to mark the event, which also included those who had been found guilty of desertion. Mussolini’s sentence had been annulled: all he had to do was complete his military service. He decided to go back to Italy.

  Chapter 5

  Teacher, Soldier and Journalist

  The blow was completely unexpected, out of the blue, while she was daydreaming at her desk in the classroom of the primary school in Dovia. The ruler hit her hand, the fingers; she gave a start and felt an intolerable stinging. The teacher was staring at her intensely, as if he wanted to turn her to dust, and he still had the ruler raised menacingly. Rachele couldn’t think why she had been punished – or indeed even what she’d been thinking of just a moment before. In her childish daydreaming she’d not been aware she was scratching the wooden desk with an old nail she’d found on the pavement. Her angelic appearance – golden curls and blue eyes – was misleading: she loved running through the fields and climbing trees – she was always on the move or wanting to be, wanting to do something, anything except sit and attend to the lesson. She led a little gang of girls; she was more beautiful than her sisters, even Augusta and Pina. She lifted her hand to her mouth without looking at the teacher; she knew that if she raised her face to look at him it would have seemed like a challenge. Actually he was not her real teacher and not even a real supply teacher. Their usual teacher – Mrs Rosa – was ill, and since it didn’t look as if she’d be able to come back soon, her son, Benito, just qualified, had been appointed to replace her. All the children feared him, particularly his furious eyes, which seemed to make the blows of his ruler even more painful. This was how Rachele met her future husband, the man who was to become the Duce: “Eighty years on, I don’t feel the pain, but I remember how painful it was. I was crying and was angry and brought my hand to my mouth, and at that moment was struck dumb by his eyes, large, black, penetrating, so that I suddenly calmed down without even hearing what the teacher was saying to me. […] Later I thought that only one word could describe those eyes of his: phosphorescent.”1

  Mussolini hadn’t especially noticed the little fair-haired girl and he didn’t remember smacking her with the ruler. She was just one of his pupils, and he often handed out blows. Once the unexpected period of supply-teaching was over. Rachele too lost sight of him, even though she admitted she heard the name Mussolini mentioned frequently, and always as if there were something special about it – but this was Alessandro, renowned in the region for his political battles as a socialist.

  On his journey back from Switzerland, on 14th November 1904, Mussolini met his brother Arnaldo in Bern. On the 15th and 16th he stopped in Lugano, where he made contact with Angelica Balabanoff and Maria Giudice. During his stay in Switzerland he also worked on some translations, including Pyotr Kropotkin’s Words of a Rebel and On the Day after the Social Revolution by Karl Kautsky. He finally reached Dovia where he found his parents considerably aged and oppressed. His mother’s health was once again failing. His father was no longer the sturdy oak of revolutionary Internationalism: his spell in prison had broken him, and the pardon when it eventually came after months in the cells hadn’t restored his former energy. Mussolini tried to help him out in the smithy, as well as doing the things his mother used to do, but his military service was about to begin. The officers of the regiment to which he had been drafted were alerted: a militant socialist was about to arrive, for the next two years among their ranks they would have the son of a notorious and dangerous rabble-rouser. Their instructions were to keep a close eye on this potential subversive, whom the King of Italy in his goodness had seen fit to pardon, even though he was guilty of desertion.

  The political situation in the country remained tense, with troops sent by the government to put down demonstrations and strikes. The soldiers didn’t hesitate to use gunfire. At Buggerru, in Sardinia, three striking miners had been killed and twenty wounded on 4th September 1904, while in Castelluzzo, near Trapani in Sicily, there were two dead and ten wounded on 14th September. In this kind of civil war, no officer wanted a subversive among his men who might seize the opportunity to support the strikers.

  Revolutionary syndicalists, followers of Georges Sorel and his theories, were in a majority in the Italian Socialist Party. They believed in action. On 16th September the Chamber of Labour in Milan had announced the first great general strike in Italian history, which in less than a week had spread from Turin to Parma, and then down to Rome and the remote countryside of Apulia. The success of the strike – with its mass support from agricultural labourers and factory workers all over the country – was still vivid when Benito Mussolini reported to the military district of Forlì on 31st December 1904 as a conscript (class 1). “Postponed call-up of conscripts born 1883” was the category invented in the amnesty to get round the condemnation for desertion. On 8th January 1905 Mussolini joined the 10th Regiment of Bersaglieri in Verona, to which he had been assigned. Thus he found himself on the other side of the barricades, serving the powers he had been opposing every day, among those soldiers who were sent out more often to fight labourers in the countryside than foreign enemies on the border. The officers kept a close eye on the revolutionaries among the conscripts, wishing to prevent any attempt on their part to preach to their fellows and recruit them to their cause. Mussolini was just one among many revolutionaries being forced to do their military service. He was known to be anti-military, like all the other local socialist leaders in his district. The physical energy he had displayed in his political battles didn’t distinguish him in the army, where such energy was to be found in many of his companions. The officers of the 10th Regiment noted with surprise that the new arrival turned out to be calm, thoughtful and self-disciplined; there was no sign that he intended to pursue his subversive politics in the midst of the Bersaglieri. Mussolini discovered he enjoyed military life, as he himself tells us in his letters and other writings:

  …and then I joined the regiment – a Bersaglieri regiment at the historic city of Verona. The Bersaglieri wear green cock feathers in their hats; they are famous for their fast pace, a kind of monotonous and ground-covering dog trot, and for their discipline and spirit. I liked the life of a soldier. The sense of willing subordination suited my temperament. I was preceded by a reputation of being restless, a fire-eater, a radical, a revolutionist. Consider then the astonishment of the captain, the major and my colonels who were compelled to speak of me with praise!2

  Here is the first image to contrast with that of the fiery and wholly committed revolutionary which Mussolini had constructed for himself before. But when we analyse his period of military service, we must remember that it opened with a family bereavement just a month after he had started it. “Mother extremely ill. Come immediately.” When he received this telegram from his brother, Mussolini asked for permission to take leave. His mother had been seriously ill the year before but she had recovered, apparently cured. The return of the illness was rapid: she died within a week, at the age of forty-six, on 19th February 1905. The event cast a shadow over the entire year, as Mussolini records in Vita di Arnaldo: “I was a soldier in Verona: I returned just in time to see her, but perhaps she did not recognize me.”3

  His mourning for his mother did not stop his womanizing; his return home for the event even presented him with a new opportunity. A young primary-scho
ol teacher from Forlì, a friend of Edvige, came over to share the family’s mourning; her name was Paolina Danti. “We gradually became friends and then our friendship turned into love. Our intense love affair continued when I returned to Verona to continue my military service.”4

  Edvige in her memoirs conceals the surname of another woman who became involved with her brother: a certain Giovanna P., the daughter of wealthy landowners who lived near Predappio. She wrote that both Paolina and Giovanna “were charming and intelligent. They confided in me, sometimes they cried, sometimes they complained about my brother and the hand fate had dealt them. Contrasts of social class and ideas embittered Benito Mussolini’s early love affairs, but this also shows how politics even then was shaping his character.”5

  On occasion the parents of the young women he had seduced stepped in, with brisk determination; they would carry their daughter back home, putting a firm stop to any hopes of marriage with an unruly and notorious young man. But even as they departed, Mussolini’s attention would be attracted elsewhere. Many times Edvige had to break the family piggy bank to fund her brother so he could buy soft drinks for the girlfriend of the moment; he had a passionate need, she wrote, “to have some young woman – or several – next to him, to look in their eyes, to see those eyes fill with tenderness for him, to hold them in his arms at country barn dances, to show off, when carnival time with its parties came round, with the most beautiful girls who’d come eagerly to enjoy the dancing and in the hope of finding a lover”.6