Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Alessandro Mussolini also followed the course of those faraway uprisings which brought together peasants, sharecroppers, artisans, miners and even small landowners, all fighting courageously for progress under the leadership of socialist-leaning men like Nicola Barbato and Giuseppe De Felice-Giuffrida. But in the eyes of Italian socialists in general this vast protest movement of agricultural labourers had one shortcoming: these men were not “workers” in the socialists’ accepted sense of the term. Their revolt did not belong to the political plan. They were dreamers, pursuing confused ideas, making demands which were contaminated by “bourgeois” interests. “When we examine their demands, we find some which genuinely spring from the people, which chime with socialism. But you can also see the influence of the interests of the relatively well-off sections of the peasantry…”3

  Only the great mass of industrial factory workers – the working class in the classic sense of the term – were fit to pursue the aims of revolution and create socialism on earth. It mattered little that the Fasci in Sicily were the largest popular uprising in Europe since the Paris Commune: the movement didn’t have a political programme which could form part of the socialist approach; they were abandoned to their defeat at the hands of the army, sent in to suppress the revolts, in a series of massacres which provoked no mass demonstrations of protest and solidarity among the working class in northern Italy. With their uncomfortable name, their struggle was erased from the collective political memory. Yet, however confused their aspirations might have been, however much the organization was influenced by outside interests, the Sicilian Fasci were an authentic popular uprising, an important episode in the history of the people’s movement, and the word “fascio” (meaning literally “bundle” or “sheaf”), at least until the advent of Mussolini’s party, did not have negative connotations in socialist eyes. Andrea Costa himself – the first Socialist parliamentary deputy in Italy, Alessandro Mussolini’s mentor and guiding light – spoke of building a “fascio” for democracy, a grouping of democratic forces.

  Acclaimed as their “duce” on release from prison, Mussolini threw himself with renewed energy into an attack on the reformist wing of the Socialist Party, the deputies, the parliamentarians, the proponents of mediation who in his view had infected the party. With a dramatic flourish he declared in one article that for the next ten years the party should pay no attention to social legislation or the trade-union movement, but commit itself to bringing about the revolution – only to realize he risked antagonizing the trade-unionists in the party, and so he changed tack.

  The young Mussolini is often described as a “teacher in Predappio”. As we’ve seen, he did teach in schools, but it was during his time as a journalist that his political career really began and started to develop. He learnt to apply the fundamental rules of journalism to political activity: one piece of news can be swiftly cancelled out by a subsequent more colourful story, a clever attacking style can mask a lack of truth and confer authority. The fact that his policies had led to the Forlì Federation becoming isolated from the national party was forgotten in the enthusiasm his release from prison had generated.

  On 14th March 1912, a bricklayer and anarchist by the name of Antonio D’Alba made an assassination attempt on the King, Victor Emanuel III. He fired a revolver but missed. Mussolini had just come out of jail. Nenni was released on 29th May, but was almost immediately rearrested for writing that the Republican Party would not have been sorry if the King had died. The reformists in the Socialist Party, such as Leonida Bissolati and Ivanoe Bonomi, on the other hand, had gone to the palace to pay their respects to the King and congratulate him on his escape. Shortly after the assassination attempt, on 23rd March, Mussolini wrote in La lotta di classe:

  The King may happen to be the head of state, but we socialists are only the constrained subjects of such a state. The King may be the symbol of the nation, but we socialists are only the constrained citizens of such a nation. The King’s personal qualities are not in discussion. In our eyes he is a man like any other, subject as we all are to the ridiculous and tragic caprices of human destinies. Why should the socialists be more concerned about the King than about any other man? On the contrary! If we introduce an objective principle – the value of the individual as a producer – into our subjective responses, then we see that, between the misfortune which befalls a king and one which befalls a worker, the first leaves us indifferent while the second grieves us. The King is by definition a “useless” citizen.4

  Mussolini’s aggressive style was unsettling his opponents within the party. On 15th June, demanding the release of Nenni, his rebuke was aimed at many in the party beyond Forlì; he wrote ironically in La lotta di classe how dangerous it was in Italy to remain unmoved by what had happened to the King, since “some imbecile would come and arrest you on a charge of being an apologist for regicide”. On 21st June Nenni was released on bail. Shortly afterwards the National Socialist Congress, held on 7th July 1912, turned, like all such occasions, on factions, on who and how many sided with whom. Mussolini couldn’t count on many votes – the Forlì Federation was small – and he had no allies. Yet the congress was an outstanding personal triumph for him. Tactically he was careful not to arouse the suspicions of the majority bloc in the party, while at the same time he wanted to inflame the delegates with a powerful speech. In the account his sister Edvige gave of the event, Mussolini entered the congress like “someone from genuine peasant stock”, a “provincial revolutionary” – which in effect he was. She paints a picture of him as awkward and clumsy compared to the sophisticated intellectuals who frequented the Turati-Kuliscioff circle, and conveys a sense of his solitariness, due in part to the essential mediocrity of the others in the revolutionary wing of the party. She admits her brother did not have the knowledge of Marxism possessed by other prominent delegates, but finds it natural that he should still have emerged “suddenly from nowhere as a miraculous leader”, thanks to his words, his fiery oratory which he had learnt at his father’s knee, and with which he blew on the embers of socialism in order to make them blaze.

  The congress ended in victory for the revolutionaries and the expulsion of the reformist right wing of the party led by Bissolati. In the heat of his triumph, Mussolini published his analysis of the events of the congress in Avanti! on 18th July: “The Socialist Congress in Reggio Emilia should be seen as an attempted rebirth of idealism. […] What does it matter to the proletariat to ‘understand’ socialism as a theory? Is it after all just a theory? We need to believe in it, we must believe in it, mankind needs something to believe in. Faith moves mountains, because it enables us to believe that mountains can move: in the end, illusion is perhaps the only reality in life.”

  Anna Kuliscioff, back in her elegant drawing room in Milan, began to ask herself and her guests what kind of socialism Mussolini could possibly be advocating. But the newspapers charted the rapid rise of this new member of the party’s national committee: this “bold young man” cast in the mould of “the classic revolutionary” as Amilcare Cipriani wrote in L’Humanité on 26th August. A fifty-year-old lawyer from Milan, Cesare Sarfatti, who had just been elected as a Socialist deputy in parliament thanks to internal party arrangements, returned from the congress full of what he had heard and seen there; he described to his wife Margherita the forcefulness and energy with which Mussolini had addressed the delegates, the passion which stirred him and the sense of optimism he managed to convey. A leader like that communicated the sense that something could be done, that violence could be used to transform socialism into rigorous hard realities. “‘Remember his name – he’s the man of the future,’ he told his wife. Sarfatti had been filled with enthusiasm listening to Mussolini’s speeches to the congress, by what he praised to Margherita as his ‘explosive seriousness of purpose’. Although he and his wife led largely separate lives, they shared a hunger for power.”5

  Margherita Sarfatti, née Grassini, decided she would like to get to know this young man �
� and ended up going to bed with him out of pure sexual curiosity, on a mere erotic impulse. She was very beautiful, very rich and very liberated. She only needed to invite him to her house and in he came, with his customary air of truculence and brusqueness of manner and arrogant conviction that yet another woman was ready to succumb to him. And yet, in his meeting with Margherita Sarfatti, something more complicated had begun: for the first time Mussolini found himself dealing with a woman driven by a desire for power. He didn’t realize, at least at the outset, the cultural and financial resources his new mistress could call upon in her pursuit of power.

  As a fifteen-year-old girl back in her native Venice, Sarfatti had been named “the Red Virgin” after she published an article in Avanti!. Her father, Amedeo Grassini, was a wealthy member of the city’s middle class, with right-wing views; his Jewish roots meant nothing to him and he was a close associate of the city’s archbishop. He had started life in the ghetto, but had bought Palazzo Bembo, where he had had a lift installed, the first in a private residence in the city. Margherita was taught by a Swiss governess at home. Every now and then she would escape from the house to go and find out about the poverty in which the working class had to live, and she picked up the rudiments of socialist teachings from pamphlets sold on the streets. She sent her article to Avanti! under a pseudonym, but her identity was discovered and caused a scandal at home: her father’s business interests could be threatened by having a militant socialist for a daughter. Margherita was still a young girl. She realized she had one way out of her situation and pursued it with cynical determination. She picked out a man, a Jewish lawyer aged twenty-nine, fourteen years older than she was (he seemed even older with his old-fashioned moustache and heavy build), made him fall for her and then told him she would marry him only on the condition that he became a socialist. So she escaped from her father. The couple had three children in quick succession; when her father died in 1908 she inherited a vast fortune, enough to allow her to live as freely and as independently as was possible for a woman to do at the time. She and her husband moved to Milan, where they found the city’s political life was dominated by another Jewish woman.

  Anna Mikhailovna Kuliscioff, née Rosenstein, was the éminence grise of Italian socialism. In her apartment on the fourth floor of a palazzo in the heart of Milan, in Piazza Duomo, she held a salon which was frequented by intellectuals, artists, philosophers, writers and young men hoping to make a career in politics. She resembled a little the high-ranking women who ran influential salons in Enlightenment France. Meetings, debates, cultural exchange, intelligence and talent filled the rooms – and she oversaw it all, making sure that the rules of good behaviour and courtesy were respected and harmony prevailed. In this refined atmosphere no references to money or to violence were allowed. Political careers were made or broken here; strategies and tactics were planned and advanced. The Kuliscioff salon certainly helped to lend polish and urbanity to Socialist Party politics and enable the party’s leaders to acquire knowledge of art and culture, but at the same time it was a closed circle. The attraction which Italian socialism felt for the elitism and snobbery of such ambiences has been a perennial failing of the party throughout its long history.

  In the early twentieth century, the Kuliscioff salon in Milan was the epicentre of the left; its influence extended far beyond Milan. Kuliscioff was always dressed in a black skirt and gleaming white blouse, and smoked continually; you only needed to take one look at her to appreciate her determination and willpower. “The blonde Russian” was a figure of irresistible fascination for all prominent socialists. She and Andrea Costa had been lovers, and she had borne him a daughter, Andreina. From Costa she had learnt Italian and acquired an understanding of the politics of her adopted country; for him she became a source of inspiration.

  On 6th May 1898 street rioting broke out in Milan because of a rise in the price of bread. The army general Beccaris ordered the demonstrators in the city to be surrounded and shot: eighty-four people died, according to the government, but the Socialists, who had not organized the demonstrations, estimated the number to be more than three hundred. Anna Kuliscioff was among the people arrested. Since she wasn’t an Italian citizen she risked expulsion: the leading Socialist Filippo Turati, who was her lover at the time, offered to marry her in order to enable her to stay in the country, but Kuliscioff turned him down scornfully – marriage was a bourgeois arrangement. Their relationship had to stay true to the socialist principles of free love.

  Sarfatti has left us a malicious portrait of Kuliscioff, though one which also reveals how much she was in awe of her:

  She had once been blonde and beautiful and now was faded; her face was wrinkled and her hair dull. She was crippled with arthritis, but her sheer strength of will enabled her to radiate a magnetic fascination. Inside her tortured body, which had suffered in the prisons of Russia, France and Italy, her pure and cold intelligence shone out like a multifaceted diamond. […] She was idealistic and stoical; free of weakness but also of human warmth; only sensuality and the life of the mind moved her; there was a mystical strain in her Russian soul and a Russian harshness in the exercise of her intellect. She was full of proud ambition, yet without any personal vanity. It was so natural to her to get where and what she wanted by tortuous routes, she was quite incapable of acting straightforwardly. With her natural superiority she dominated the masses from the shadows, through parliament and the press, leaving the glory of action to the men who surrounded her…6

  At the time Margherita Sarfatti and her husband moved to Milan, Kuliscioff was in a relationship with Filippo Turati and shared his pursuit of political power. The pair of them were in effect the leaders of Italy’s first modern political party. And in her salon Kuliscioff could extend her influence over many other men.

  The young Mussolini – dishevelled, with his black clothes coming apart at the seams, the pockets of his coat out of shape because of the newspapers he kept stuffing into them, with his provincial manners and abrupt gestures – was also one of her guests. He was too raw a recruit to hold his own in the elaborately analytical conversations that filled the rooms of Kuliscioff’s apartment. Mussolini came from a background where he did without meals in order to buy newspapers. He was permanently short of money; he went about dressed in the same rather dirty outfit; he had the air of being out for a stroll on his travels about the province, but the truth was he had to walk from place to place, sometimes barefoot to save on shoe leather.

  But in Kuliscioff’s drawing room he needed to walk on tiptoe, and he couldn’t. Kuliscioff observed the awkward and uncouth young man attentively and was unable to make him out. “For Mussolini it would have been a great triumph to win the admiration of the circle round Kuliscioff, but he never succeeded. Only occasionally did he manage to make Kuliscioff look on him indulgently, as if she were benevolently waiting to find out what he would make of himself. […] Turati never budged in his implacable dislike and contempt for this agitateur who’d struck lucky and who in his view had nothing to do with genuine socialism…”7

  Margherita Sarfatti on the other hand could move with ease in Kuliscioff’s political circle: she was fascinated by her and tried to imitate her. From Kuliscioff she learnt that a woman’s path to power depended on men. As women, Sarfatti and Kuliscioff couldn’t stand for parliament or even vote, but they could still play a prominent political role, albeit from the sidelines, by influencing their husbands and lovers and helping them practically in their careers by gathering information and by writing speeches full of literary and historical quotations. Margherita felt the need to find such a man whose career would become her project, and it wasn’t going to be her husband Cesare. Like Kuliscioff, she herself couldn’t go into politics, but politics, like being in love, was a passionate activity. She already had beauty and wealth on her side; in order to obtain the power she lacked and wanted she could exploit the passion of a man in love with her, guiding him towards the right doors he had to force open in order
to make a political career.

  On inheriting her father’s vast wealth, she decided to start another political salon in Milan:

  She was beautiful, rich and young, and she knew how to exploit these qualities to the full. She admitted, with an air of scorn, that Anna Kuliscioff had certainly been a great beauty in the past. She observed the declining sex appeal of the older woman with the satisfied air of a younger one who knew her opportunities had still to come. The older woman herself was aware, with a pang, that the blonde Margherita was being praised for her winning beauty; she envied the new arrival’s attractiveness, her wealth, her carefree demeanour. Anna had tightly constrained her restless life; the sight of Margherita was a painful reminder of how immobile her existence had become.8

  In the new circle which formed round Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini found the woman who could inspire him, who understood his potential and dedicated herself to developing it. He took advantage of what she offered him to the full, and when the time came to discard her he took the decision with his usual cynicism, completely untroubled by any moral misgivings. Shortly before the racial laws against the Jews were declared, on 2nd September 1938, he had one of his usual long, rambling conversations with his young mistress Claretta Petacci, who had just pointed out to him, gleefully, that she had been born the year he started his relationship with Sarfatti. By this time Petacci was well aware of the rules of the game of sexual initiation Mussolini was playing with her; with her obsession for writing things down, she recorded everything he said to her. It is true that her diary needs to be read with a certain caution; nevertheless, significant details are mentioned in it which are confirmed by other sources, such as Mussolini’s sensitivity to smells and to women’s perfume. Strong disturbing odours could influence his behaviour. He tells Petacci that Jews (against whom his new racial laws were about to unleash a tide of anti-Semitism) “stink”. Because of her smell, he couldn’t manage to penetrate Sarfatti the first time they slept together: “I just couldn’t do it, because of this terrible smell they have. Perhaps it’s to do with their diet, I wouldn’t know. But I couldn’t manage to do anything.”9