Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Mussolini’s extreme sensitivity to smell could on occasion induce an uncharacteristic faint-heartedness in him: an example is his seduction of Cornelia Tanzi when he was already installed as Duce. Tanzi was a bewitchingly beautiful brunette; her mother ran a brothel in Rome, and there were rumours that her daughter every now and then helped out. After her affair with Mussolini had ended, various leading Fascist Party officials enjoyed her favours; she boasted of her conquests. After the war she was sentenced to thirty years in prison by the special tribunal set up to weed out ex-Fascists and the regime’s collaborators: providing sex free for Fascists was obviously seen as a more serious offence than shooting Partisans or deporting Jews, given that most of the men responsible for these crimes were given lighter sentences than Tanzi. But Mussolini had problems with Cornelia Tanzi’s smell, as he confided to Claretta Petacci:

  She’s got long legs, she’s slender, light, tall, dark-haired. Yet she’s frigid beyond belief. She never feels any pleasure, not even with me. She arrived, undressed, took her slip off, showing her long legs, then lay down on the bed to begin, without a flicker of interest. She would lie there showing complete indifference and then would get up, dress and leave. It took less than half an hour. Let me tell you something else: the last time with her was really an effort, I couldn’t manage to do anything, I wasn’t in the mood. And then she’d put on a particular perfume which smelt disgusting… I’m sorry, you know how sensitive I am to these things. No, I never loved her; whenever I went with her, I always felt like a poor wretch, I shouldn’t have done it. I can’t think why on earth I did, I’m an animal. […] Afterwards, I felt nothing but disgust. I wanted to beat her up, throw her on the floor.10

  Having seen off the challenges to his editorship and taken control of the workings of the newspaper, Mussolini threw himself into a violent political campaign, without forgetting the need to attack the enemy reformist wing within the party itself. Treves and Turati countered with brilliant articles on the theory of socialism, but they lacked Mussolini’s energy and impetus. On 3rd February the revolutionary wing of the Socialist Party in Naples declared a strike against the government; even Giacinto Menotti Serrati distanced himself from Mussolini on this occasion, criticizing him. In April the car workers of Milan went on strike. The General Confederation of Labour refused to support the initiative which they thought was counter-productive at a time of national crisis, but Mussolini and Avanti! sided with them. The strike started to spread: there was an atmosphere of unrest, violent clashes, and after a few days the city’s transport workers decided to join their fellow strikers from the car factories. There was a fear of harsh reprisals from the government. An editorial in Avanti! warned the government not to intervene with armed force, since if they did “the sympathy we feel for every class struggle, even when it doesn’t conform to the strategy we have proposed, would become full solidarity with the strikers, at which point… the entire working class would take up arms.”

  Mussolini began to seem to many, including Salvemini himself, to be the man who was needed to lead the Italian revolutionary movement. The reformist camp within the Socialist Party now openly spoke of his populist aims and accused him of ill-defined nationalist-socialist positions which exalted the disorganized and directionless masses who had turned out to celebrate Italy’s invasion of Libya. To no avail, just as their attempt to spread the view that Mussolini was not really a socialist came to nothing. It is true he was an autodidact in political matters, his theoretical grounding was full of lacunae, his uncertainties were manifold, but in terms of his general cultural background he was certainly not inferior to the vast majority of his local comrades in the party, a state of affairs which reflected the general backwardness of Italian socialism. As De Felice has remarked: “How many real socialists were there in Italy at the time, taking socialism to mean something more than the commonly accepted definition of the time, i.e. more than someone with a basic belief in social determinism and class struggle?”11

  Kuliscioff, Treves and Turati made another attempt to ambush Mussolini at a meeting of the party’s national executive on 13th July 1913, but his editorial policy was approved by seven votes to (their) three. But Mussolini wanted an outright victory, and he got it by resigning, at which point the whole executive, including the minority who opposed him, were forced to reject his resignation and confirm their support of his editorship. He had the party firmly behind him and felt free to change tactics. He suddenly withdrew the newspaper’s support for the Milan strikers, declaring there was no point in continuing the struggle; he turned his attention instead to the coming general election and launched a fierce campaign in support of the Socialist Party candidates. On election day, 2nd November, the party had nearly a million votes and won fifty-seven seats in parliament. The campaign waged by Mussolini allowed him to claim responsibility for the success and present it as proof that the intransigent line followed by the party’s revolutionary tendency was the winning strategy, because it was supported by the country’s proletariat.

  Mussolini’s daily life had never been quiet, but now it became frenetic: he wrote all day and every day articles, notes for lectures, political briefings for party colleagues. He was also writing letters, especially to Leda Rafanelli, with whom he continued a complicated relationship. He tripped up in one of them by writing hastily that he was off to take his “domestic tribe” to the seaside. Rafanelli seized on the phrase: “So he had a family? What kind of family? His mother was dead. Perhaps there was a sister? Two people… A wife and a son? So he had lied to me when he told me he was ‘as free as a bird’?”12 It can be difficult for a liar to keep track of his lies. Rafanelli’s sudden coldness towards him made Mussolini realize he had made a mistake, and he tried to recover ground in his next letter:

  Monday evening, nine o’clock. My darling Leda, you haven’t written to me for three days. Why ever not? But I can guess the reason. I thought you were stronger, more “human” than that. So we’re finished? Our love which promised to be so marvellous is over? And all because of a stupid involuntary mistake? You cannot know how much your silence hurts me. Write to me, even if you only want to curse me, but write to me I beg you. Tell me everything. It’s ridiculous for lovers to keep secrets from each other. I’m waiting for you today, Tuesday. Your grief-stricken and passionate Benito kisses you.13

  But she kept him dangling for a long while. The passage of time, however, didn’t help to calm her down. After three days she wanted to end their relationship, if possible, conclusively. She could never have a relationship with a man who had a wife, even if he wasn’t legally married to her, and a daughter waiting for him at home. As a Muslim, she thought this was the typical subterfuge adopted in the West’s approach to relationships: “In the West a man swears he’ll be monogamous and wants to be loved exclusively and for ever… we should accept the wise law of the East: a man may take, freely, publicly, two or even three wives, and this produces order and peace within the family, because men are polygamous by nature.”14

  Yet Mussolini’s simple ploy was proving effective. It was “just” a matter of getting Rafanelli to interrupt her stand-off. Whatever she said or wrote, even if it were a stream of abuse, could be used to put things back together between them and start again. However, when he finally got to meet her, outside the protective perfumed refuge of her house, this strategy came up against his more urgent desire to get her into bed as quickly as possible. He stammered a series of excuses and then tried to kiss her; she pushed him away. He started to justify himself again and made another attempt. Writing in her memoirs many years after the event, Rafanelli describes how their conversation continued, in a dark Milan street. Mussolini said to her:

  “All right, let’s speak about us. Now that we’re alone together… how long can you stay with me?”

  “Half an hour at the most.”

  “That’s not much, hardly any time at all. Listen… why stay here in the dark? I want to look at you. Let’s go to the Diana, it’
s near here.”

  “To a hotel? Out of the question! Anyway, you owe me an explanation, that’s the important thing… Your ‘domestic tribe’, who does it consist of exactly?”

  He suddenly started and let go of my hand.

  “My what?…”

  “Your ‘domestic tribe… the two of them’. That’s what you wrote, remember? I should know you by now. Who are these two people?”

  He stayed silent for a moment or two. Then he said in a low voice:

  “My wife and my daughter.”

  There was an even longer pause. I said:

  “Why have you always lied to me?”

  “You always told me you knew anyway…”

  “But you always denied it… You told me that if I knew you had a wife or you were living with another woman I would break off our friendship.”

  “But it’s an obsession! It doesn’t matter whether I’ve got a wife or not. She’s used to my infidelities. She’s a good woman…”15

  The good woman Rachele, who knew nothing of what was going on but was guided by some kind of survival instinct, hurried to Milan. There, with the little Edda in tow, she unexpectedly turned up in front of Mussolini and demanded they resume a normal family life. Subsequently, in her memoirs, she romanticized the episode, describing how Mussolini went to Forlì to take her back with him and also mentioned how he’d taken a reduced salary – five hundred lire a month in contrast to the seven hundred which his predecessor Treves had earned – in order to help the party’s coffers. The news angered her: she reminded him who had to do the shopping, look after their daughter, what her own requirements were. “Benito had a job calming me down, but in the end we set off hopefully for Milan, having sold some possessions to pay for the journey and for a few days’ stay in a cheap pensione once we arrived. As the months passed, our situation improved. We could afford to rent an apartment in Via Castel Morrone in a working-class suburb of the city; I could start to believe that our hard times were over and done with for ever…”16

  Mussolini’s rediscovered family life in Milan didn’t stop his adventures. Relations with Rafanelli remained tense, but he managed to heal the rift to the point where he could write to her in a letter from his office: “My dear friend, just a moment ago, completely exhausted after a long detailed discussion, the strong perfume I know so well told me a letter from you had arrived, and I shouted for joy. That’s right, I shouted for joy. […] You know what a strange magical power a perfume has over me – your perfume, so intense and intriguing, so strange and so remote.”17

  Apart from the few women who managed to exercise a fascination over him or who impressed him with their intellectual superiority, Mussolini’s general attitude to the female sex is soon summed up. Silvio Bertoldi described it thus: he never wasted time, even with women he’d just met. They didn’t need to be beautiful. His approach was basic: “If he succeeded, all well and good; if it failed, too bad. This was his method and this was what women were for. Hadn’t he once remarked to an acquaintance: ‘All you need to do with women, old chap, is beat them and give them babies’?”18

  Maria Giudice tells the story of a provincial schoolmistress who made a trip to Milan in order to deliver an article she had written to the offices of Avanti! and to see Mussolini. Giudice felt sorry for the shy young woman and decided to accompany her into the editor’s office. She writes that Mussolini’s frowning expression was even grumpier than usual: he was in one of his black moods. He showed no politeness towards the poor young woman and didn’t stand as she came in. He hardly looked at her but planted his fists on the desk and leant towards her, as if about to devour her alive, and said fiercely: “‘Do you know what I think about women? I think they should stay at home to do the housework, obey their husbands and, every now and then, be given a good beating.’ It’s easy to imagine how the unfortunate woman reacted, what she did and what she said, but it’s immaterial since we’ve told the story simply to show what kind of man Mussolini really was.”19

  The women he encountered for short-lived adventures left no trace, but the strong decisive women in Mussolini’s life – like Sarfatti, Balabanoff and Rachele herself – must have had some effect on him to judge from remarks he wrote – in Pensieri Pontini e Sardi (Thoughts from Ponza and Sardinia) – much later, on 16th August 1943, when he had been imprisoned and was tired and demoralized: “Chercher la femme – people will try to do this when they interpret my destiny. But women have never had the slightest influence on my political life. Perhaps that was a disadvantage. Women’s sensibilities are more finely tuned than men’s, and that sometimes makes them more far-seeing.”20

  Under Mussolini’s editorship and the aggressive style of journalism he adopted, Avanti!’s daily circulation soared from the 34,000 it had been under Treves to an average of 60,000, on occasion reaching 100,000. At the National Socialist Congress, held in Ancona from 26th to 29th April 1914, the increase in the paper’s circulation and the success of its campaigning in the elections attracted much attention, as did the man responsible for them, Benito Mussolini. He became in effect the real leader of the party. The socialist press reporting the congress described his speeches as fascinating and compelling; the man who gave them seemed like “an ascetic”, his voice like a forest murmur, his gestures like someone haunted by a nightmare. If there had been a vote, the party’s militants would have chosen him as their leader, but congresses depend on the votes of the delegates, not of the members, and it was the delegates who voted in the new executive committee. According to Pietro Nenni, Mussolini was received with thunderous applause at the congress; he couldn’t recall anyone who had achieved such prestige and power within the party. He reported from the congress in the journal Lucifero on 3rd May: “The party has the good fortune to be led by a man who is upright and honest. Benito Mussolini is neither a great intellect nor a great speaker, but he has incomparable moral force, driven, like all such moral forces, by ruthless logic.” Nenni adjusted his view in the years after the First World War: in Russia Lenin had emerged to put into practice the revolutionary will of the working masses, while Italy had Mussolini, revolutionary in temperament but unprincipled, someone who pursued action for action’s sake, whose burning ambition impelled him forward in the effort to ensure his own personal success at all costs.

  The Ancona congress led officially to a kind of triumvirate leading the party, composed of the new secretary Costantino Lazzari, Mussolini as the editor of Avanti! and Oddino Morgari, the leader of the Socialist Party group in parliament. It was perfectly clear to everyone, however, that the real leader – the man who could make or break a strike, get a candidate elected, confront the police head on and mobilize the socialist masses – was Mussolini. It was merely a question of seeing where his political tactics would take him. Mussolini had in the meantime founded a magazine, Utopia, which was intended to contribute to the theoretical and ideological debate. Margherita Sarfatti was one of its leading contributors; she later emphasized the journal’s importance as a link between Mussolini’s socialism and his subsequent Fascism:

  A careful reader of Utopia can see, from the very first issue, that the orthodox line was being criticized. Some of its fundamental assertions were clearly heretical from the outset, however hedged about they were with sophistries and qualifications, such as: “A desperate enterprise. The socialists fell victim to a grave illusion. They believed that capitalism had reached the end of its historical development. But capitalism is capable of continuing. […] The socialist revolution is not an intellectual scheme or a political calculation; it is above all an act of faith. I believe in the socialist revolution.” […] In its convictions, methods, ideas, the Fascism of today is the fulfilment of the most vital part of the revolutionary socialism of the past. Many people see beyond the labels and realize this is the case and that is why they adhere to Fascism.21

  “Faith and revolution” – the verbal pairing became a standard slogan during the twenty years of the Fascist regime. In his intervie
w with Mussolini, the journalist Ludwig asked him about the phrase:

  “You’ve written that ‘if Fascism weren’t a faith, how could it inspire courage and ardour?’ But doesn’t communism do this?”

  “That’s no concern of mine.”

  “Then is it the element of faith – which both you and the Soviet leaders encourage and find in the masses – that distinguishes your systems from other political systems?”

  Mussolini agreed. “There’s an even greater resemblance between us – in all the things we’re opposed to. We and the Soviets are against liberals, democrats, the parliamentary system.”22

  Barely two months after the National Socialist Congress in Ancona, on 28th June 1914, the pistol shot fired by Gavrilo Princip changed European politics. In Sarajevo, the car that was carrying the heir to the Habsburg throne, Franz Ferdinand, took a wrong turning. As the driver was reversing to change direction, Princip found himself unexpectedly in front of the royal couple sitting in the open-topped car and fired. The first bullet hit Sophie, the wife of Franz Ferdinand. Her husband was wearing a bulletproof vest under his uniform, but the second bullet hit him in the neck. He remained upright on the back seat of the car as his life drained away. Two rapid shots, only apparently fired by chance. Archduke Franz Ferdinand was destined not to leave Sarajevo alive: only that morning he had narrowly escaped a bomb attack. The pretext was now in place for the long-threatened outbreak of a European war.

  At the meeting of the party’s executive committee, which had been delayed until 3rd August 1914, Mussolini advocated the hard line of the Socialist International in calling for a general strike and popular insurrection if the Italian government decided to bring the country into the war. He wrote in Avanti!: May the masses cry out with one voice and may their cry resound through the streets and squares of Italy: ‘Down with war!’ The day has come for the Italian proletariat to obey its vow of old – ‘We won’t send a single soldier, we won’t give a single penny – whatever it takes!’”