by Roberto Olla
After all the letters he’d sent off applying for positions, a reply finally arrived in March 1908 from the Socialist Party-controlled council of Oneglia, in Liguria. The Catholic college Ulisse Calvi offered him the post of French teacher in the private technical school which was attached to the institution. On his arrival in the town, he turned once more to Giacinto Menotti Serrati for help: Serrati had two brothers in Oneglia, Manlio and Lucio, who were both prominent socialists and he introduced Mussolini to them. Thanks to his name and the people who backed him, he started to write for the local Socialist Party weekly newspaper La lima (The File). Articles brimming with a fierce anticlericalism started to appear, once more signed “Vero Eretico” (“A True Heretic”). Everyone knew who the real author was; the local Church authorities put pressure on the college to have Mussolini removed from the staff, but their request was always refused. He was an excellent teacher, and to dismiss him without notice was out of the question. Apart from anything else, it wouldn’t be easy to find a replacement so near to the end of the school year. Mussolini started to feel at home: “I took a liking to the people of Oneglia. A young girl, Giovannina A., had also fallen in love with me.”21
His period in Oneglia was his last as a teacher and it closed a chapter in his life. Cesare Rossi, who was a friend of Mussolini’s and his aide-de-camp until the assassination of Matteotti, sums up his time there in these words: “A small-time socialist primary-school teacher from Romagna who came not so much to impart crumbs of knowledge to the little working-class children in a rural school as to devote his time to the pursuits of drinking and dancing in the local inns and dance halls. […] Mussolini the teacher, Mussolini the part-time journalist, Mussolini the orator in his shirtsleeves, and from time to time, as necessity dictated, Mussolini the proletarian.”22
In the summer of 1908, a time of greater than usual social unrest in the country, Mussolini returned to Dovia. That year had begun badly for the Italian Socialist Party. One of their deputies in parliament had presented a motion for the abolition of catechism classes in state schools, provoking a large wave of opposition, so large that the motion was defeated by 347 votes to sixty. But this crushing parliamentary defeat had other serious repercussions. Those members of parliament who were Freemasons had been instructed by the organization, whatever lodge they belonged to, to vote in favour of Leonida Bissolati’s motion, but many of them angrily refused to toe the line, arguing that precisely because they were Freemasons they were free to vote as they decided. The Grand Master was furious and demanded an internal disciplinary hearing before which the rebels should appear. The deputies who had disobeyed the instruction were however for the most part very high-ranking in the organization and could be judged only by their peers. They were absolved – or rather their peers decided not to proceed against them. This led to a split in Italian Freemasonry into two schools or so-called “obediences” – a rift which, far from healing over the course of the last century, has deepened.
1908 should also have been a significant year for Italian women, who had kept up with the international suffragette movement (almost all Italian newspapers had adopted the English term as a mark of their scorn for the idea). A Women’s Congress had been called with delegates attending from all over the country. The Queen herself, Elena, had agreed to be present. Socialist women were warier, however, and Anna Kuliscioff refused to attend – a prudent decision as it turned out since the congress was doomed: from the discussion on teaching religion in schools, it was clear that it was deeply divided. At the end of the conference the Catholic women leaders chose to set up their own independent organization. The presence of the Queen was significant: Elena wanted to encourage the emergence of new roles for Italian women and later in the year played an important part in the aftermath of the Messina earthquake. She went straight to the earthquake zone, worked as a nurse, providing a model of how women could make a contribution in disasters to the care of the wounded.
On the same day that the congress ended, revolutionary syndicalists in Parma organized a strike of agricultural labourers which rapidly spread. The government sent the army in to restore order, but the landowners decided to respond independently by recruiting teams of thugs, arming them and unleashing them on the strikers. When Mussolini arrived back home on 2nd July 1908, clashes were still taking place in the countryside round Predappio. The labourers had resisted and the strike continued, even though the strikers, under attack from the landowners’ vigilante troops and the army, were gradually giving way. After weeks of violence, the landowners’ victory was complete; the squads they had organized to defeat the strike went on to become the nuclei of the first Fascist squads. At this time Mussolini still supported the strikers in their cause. “That summer the whole of Romagna was in turmoil largely due to the fierce conflict between the share-croppers and the labourers. Naturally my brother sided immediately and with his usual vehemence with the workers; he attacked the whole system of land ownership in Romagna as feudal…”23
Mussolini took part in the clashes on the side of the labourers and wrote reports which also got published in the Socialist Party daily Avanti!. This is from an article in the issue for 14th July: “Once they were on the road your correspondent managed to gather together the crowd with a few words. The government representative declared he was contravening the law and threatened to arrest him. While the labourers prepared to return to their homes, the cavalry violently charged and routed them.” He described a similar incident which took place on 16th July, once again from the stance of a journalist-cum-agitator who doesn’t want to observe the facts from the outside but live the experience alongside the striking labourers, frequently becoming their leader. The clash centred on the new threshing machines, loathed by the vast majority of the labourers. On 18th July there was a further incident: Mussolini threatened the owner of some of the new machines, a certain Emilio Rolli, by waving a stick in the air and shouting “I’ll whack your head off”, and Rolli denounced Mussolini to the police. There was an immediate trial with a severe sentence of three months’ imprisonment, which was later reduced to twelve days. The whole episode worked to Mussolini’s advantage, since his name was bandied about among socialist groups everywhere, although this didn’t advance his political career. “Once out of prison, I took up again with Giovannina P. from Fiumana. After a few weeks I ended our relationship.”24
In the summer of that year Alessandro Mussolini decided to open a restaurant in Forlì, in an outlying part of the town. He entered into a kind of business partnership with a widow called Annina Lombardi, who happened to be the mother of Rachele, the Duce’s future wife. She was now an attractive young woman. Accounts at this time often describe her as a servant in Alessandro Mussolini’s restaurant: “His father, tired of being a blacksmith, had opened a squalid tavern. Serving among the tables in this smoky eating hole out in the country was an attractive wench, coarse-mannered but inviting: Rachele. Skimming the pages of a book by Stirner, Marx or Max Nordau – the authors popular at the time – Mussolini threw lustful glances at the skivvy working for his father, and the night came when, among the stale kitchen smells, he had his domineering way with her and satisfied his insatiable lust.”25 This is the description found in a pamphlet entitled Mussolini’s Secret Life and no doubt intended to start demolishing the myth of the dictator, especially among his working-class supporters, which circulated in Rome in the days immediately after the city’s liberation, with half the country occupied by Nazis and the war still raging. It is true that Rachele had to do the lowliest and most exhausting jobs in the establishment, but while her role may have been to work as a servant her social status was somewhat different:
Business in the first weeks after the restaurant opened was good, so good that one of the daughters of Annina Lombardi – Rachele – left the family where she was employed as a domestic to come and live with us. She was no longer the little girl I had taught so many times when my mother couldn’t take the class. She was a young woman in
the first flush of youth and from the first moment I set eyes on her I liked her and decided to make her my wife, which I proceeded to do.26
Rachele’s father had died leaving the family in poverty. In order to earn a living, the mother and her daughters looked for work as domestic servants or cleaners in Forlì. Rachele was taken on by a couple who ran a greengrocery. It turned out to be a terrible situation – they treated her harshly, there was little to eat, and she had to sleep on a lumpy straw mattress whose previous occupant had been a girl suffering from tuberculosis. Her circumstances improved slightly when she changed her job and moved to the family of a fencing teacher; she was able to play games – pretend duelling with wooden swords, trying to imitate the lessons she had observed – with the daughter when she wasn’t working. Her final move was to work for a prosperous family in the city, the Chiadinis, where the wife treated her kindly. As a result the sixteen-year-old girl began to see the future rather more optimistically. She attracted the attention of a local youth, who followed her one day when she had to go to her employers’ estate. He was on horseback, and speaking from this position – perhaps he thought it was the appropriate one in the circumstances – he declared that if the girl agreed to marry him, he would certainly be capable of making her happy. Rachele looked at him dumbfounded as he continued to speak, astride the saddle. She didn’t reply but always remembered that one of the arguments the young man used with her was that she was too beautiful to remain a domestic servant. One morning in 1908 she once more met the supply teacher with the penetrating eyes: “It was a Sunday morning – I was coming out of church together with my employers’ daughter when I heard someone calling my name. It was Benito Mussolini, sporting a moustache and goatee, wearing a worn black suit and a bow tie and a hat – also black – set square on his head. His pockets were bulging with rolled-up newspapers. But it was his eyes which struck me above all – they seemed even larger and more ablaze than the last time I’d seen them…”27
In the meantime her mother was helping to run the Bersagliere inn, where she’d become to all effects and purposes Alessandro Mussolini’s second wife. She was tall, thin and bony, with huge eyes – from Rachele’s description of her it’s clear who her granddaughter Edda took after in looks. Benito asked Rachele to come and visit them, in the hope he could meet her again. Rachele was still under the age of majority and needed permission from her employer’s wife to go out, but Signora Chiadini had expressly forbidden her to go near the inn, which she regarded as a den of radicals (Rachele had also overheard her mention Benito Mussolini’s various arrests with satisfaction). But she insisted and eventually, on Sunday, was given leave to go out on her own. She ran immediately to the tavern. “I spent the whole morning there and ate with them. I helped my mother serve the customers. In the afternoon Benito and I went dancing – like everyone from Romagna we loved dancing. To my surprise he turned out to be a very experienced dancer: he clasped me round the waist and spun me round in waltzes, mazurkas, polkas!”28
Mussolini’s version of his meeting with Rachele is very different. He was at first more interested in one of her sisters, Augusta, who turned him down because she wanted a respectable husband with a fixed job. Only then did his attentions turn to her younger sibling, Rachele. Many years later he spoke contemptuously of her to Claretta Petacci, though perhaps it was a way of introducing Petacci to his sexual ways:
When I finished my military service I went back to stay with my father, who was living with the woman who would be my future mother-in-law. It was four years since my poor mother had died, there’d been a lot of gossip and rumours about my father’s living arrangements, but it was all very simple. The daughter Rachele was also living with them: she was blooming, buxom, with nice breasts, attractive. I followed her around, paid court to her, she pleased me. One day I got her down on an armchair and, in my usual way, roughly took her virginity.29
His father Alessandro had definitively retired from politics to manage the tavern, but his son and his revolutionary companions were still suffering the effects of the defeat of the labourers’ strike in Parma. On the other hand, the metalworkers’ strike in Turin which started on 30th May was victorious. The Congresso Nazionale Socialista (National Socialist Congress) which opened in Florence assessed the two contrasting outcomes. The reformist wing of the party, led by Filippo Turati, regained control. They also successfully ignored Gaetano Salvemini’s plea that the party should take an interest in the situation in the south of the country. Shortly before the end of the year the earthquake hit Messina, and the south’s centuries-old problems re-emerged in all their force. Salvemini himself, a native of Messina, lost his entire family in the disaster and only survived because he managed to stand under a doorway arch which didn’t collapse. But the strange contradictions of the South came once again to the fore some months later, during the country’s general election in 1909, when the sitting government, led by Giolitti, who was not interested in the south and had never bothered to visit the earthquake zone, won an overwhelming majority in, of all places, Messina.
In December 1908, Mussolini obtained his first significant political job, in Trento, which – although part of the Tyrol, on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and therefore outside Italy – was the focus of the Italian irredentist movement led by figures such as the socialist Cesare Battisti. Angelica Balabanoff and Giacinto Menotti Serrati used their considerable influence with the Socialist Party in the regional capital of Innsbruck, which was responsible for the appointments, to get him appointed to the secretaryship of the local Camera del Lavoro (Workers’ Association) as well as the editorship of the socialist weekly L’avvenire del lavoratore (The Worker’s Future). Shortly before he left, Mussolini called Rachele and told her the news: “‘Listen, my little Rachele, I’m leaving for Trento in a week’s time, I’m going to work for Cesare Battisti’s newspaper. I’d like you to take a permanent position in the tavern before I go.’ ‘I’ll see,’ I replied. I was hurt by the news of his imminent departure.”30
Business in the Bersagliere tavern was going well with lots of customers; extra help was needed, and instead of looking elsewhere Alessandro Mussolini decided to take Rachele and one of her sisters on – they were, after all, given his relationship with their mother, practically “family”. Rachele wrote of her role in what became the family management of the tavern: “Soon all the customers wanted to be served by ‘little blondie’.” Alessandro was convinced his son’s prestigious new job in Trento was the first step in a brilliant career in the Socialist Party which would see him become a revolutionary leader; they opened a bottle of sparkling Albano wine to celebrate and Benito played the violin, an instrument he had learnt to play passably well. He took Rachele aside towards the end of the evening and told her brusquely, not even expecting a reply, that when he came back from Trento he would marry her.
“Benito Mussolini is a committed socialist and revolutionary. I respectfully enclose a copy of the biographical details from his dossier and request that you would let me know how long he has been resident in Trento, how he comports himself and earns his living, and, if possible, his current address.” On 16th February 1909 the Italian police sent the Austrian authorities the information they had on Mussolini, the better to enable the latter to keep him under observation. Just ten days before, in the middle of a heavy snowstorm, Mussolini had crossed the Italian frontier for Trento. The authorities sent back an immediate response: “Please be informed that the said Benito Mussolini is resident in Trento in Via Ravina 20, as the secretary of the Workers’ Association. As for his comportment, apart from his being an active campaigner, nothing can be notified hitherto in the brief time he has been here.” But, as the new arrival took to stirring up the tranquil political life of the city, the imperial authorities found they very soon did have things to notify. Mussolini targeted in particular the Catholics, especially Alcide De Gasperi, with whom he formed an enduring enmity: when he became dictator, and after the signing of the conco
rdat with the Vatican, he made sure De Gasperi was kept under observation. He also wanted to manoeuvre himself into the circle close to Cesare Battisti, the leading socialist irredentist. He started to frequent Battisti’s friends, but it was far from easy to establish relations: many of the men round Battisti were Freemasons who were distrustful of outsiders and wanted to find out more about them before they were allowed to meet the charismatic figure of the leader himself. And Mussolini filled his leisure time with his usual pursuits: “I spent some unforgettable evenings, but I won’t talk about the women I knew. I had various relationships but I won’t name my partners because it’s all too recent.”31 He was already beginning to realize that he needed to protect himself. His excuse for not giving the women’s names is feeble, since in recounting his life he had up to this period always written their names; and while he had often omitted their surnames, this wouldn’t have prevented local people identifying soon enough from Mussolini’s descriptions who the women were.
The identity of one woman he was seeing in Trento and passed some of those unforgettable evenings with is known: this was Fernanda Oss Facchinelli, extremely beautiful but consumptive. She was very young, separated from her husband and a fiercely committed Marxist, heavily involved in propagandizing her socialist beliefs. But Mussolini didn’t meet her in some local party office or at a political meeting or demonstration; she served behind the bar of the café he usually patronized. A son was born from this relationship too, but, as before, Mussolini stuck to his principles of free love and completely ignored the existence of the child, who in any case died of consumption after only a few months. Very little is known about him but it appears he was called Benito Ribelle (“rebel”), which seems not improbable given his mother’s revolutionary inclinations. Fernanda eventually died too of consumption at the age of thirty-eight, disappearing from Mussolini’s life; she had never asked him for anything.