Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Who was responsible for putting up all this money? A group of Italian and French backers. Among the former, there was Alceste De Ambris, Manlio Morgagni, Ugo Clerici and others, who’d all been in Paris recently. […] And in Paris itself, who was financing the initiative? In effect, there was only one man, Georges Sembat, the Socialist member of parliament for Clignancourt and a minister without portfolio in the “Union Sacrée” government, with a responsibility for “the press and propaganda”. His private secretary, a certain Dumat, had the job of providing support for the newspapers – especially the left-wing ones – in various countries which were advocating military intervention in the war.28

  One final step remained: a general meeting of the Milan Socialist Party was called for on 24th November. In accordance with party rules, only they could decide whether to expel Mussolini from the membership. Insults and chairs were thrown around; amid all the yelling, some hurled coins at Mussolini, shouting at him that he’d sold out. His oratorical skills failed to save him on this occasion, although certain passages of his speech, shouted out over the audience’s heckling, have remained famous: “You think you are losing me. But you are wrong. You hate me because you still love me.” More menacing, in the light of his subsequent political career, was the following declaration: “Let me tell you that from this moment onwards I’ll show no pity or forgiveness for anyone who refuses to commit himself, for the hypocrites and the cowards.” And he ended the speech, now that it was obvious he would be expelled from the party, with a rhetorical flourish: “You can tear up my membership card, but don’t think I’m pleased to lose it. You won’t stop me fighting in the front line for the cause of socialism. Long live socialism! Long live the revolution!”29

  Two days after Mussolini had been expelled from the party, three hundred of the Gioventù Socialista (Socialist Youth) movement in Milan had defected. Over the next few months there was a gradual reduction in the number of members in all sections of the party. Small groups would leave, sometimes following some local leader. Il Popolo d’Italia continued to sell well. The paper’s header always carried two quotations. One was by Napoleon: “Revolution is an idea which comes armed with bayonets”. As Duce, Mussolini cancelled his reference to Napoleon in the proofs of his interview with Ludwig, but the journalist reinstated his words in the edition he published after the war: “I learnt something extremely important from Napoleon. He destroyed in advance whatever illusions I might have cherished about men’s capacity for loyalty. Nothing has ever subsequently changed my mind about this.”30 The second quotation that appeared every day underneath the title of Il Popolo d’Italia was from Blanqui: “The man with a weapon in his hand gets to eat”. And underneath the title and the quotations, still in large enough type to be visible: “Socialist daily newspaper”.

  Chapter 9

  More Weapons, More Mistresses

  Killing your rival in a duel was out of the question; better to leave him alive, with a scar to mark his defeat. Dead, he was a victim and a hero at the same time. Think what happened to Felice Cavallotti, the founder of the radical left in Italy, a former camicia rossa (“redshirt”) who’d fought in Garibaldi’s troops, a prominent Freemason, the man responsible for getting the statue of Giordano Bruno put up in Campo de’ Fiori in Rome – there was even a popular song about it.

  Poor old Cavallotti

  His first name meant “Happy”,

  but he didn’t die happy;

  he shouldn’t have followed you […]

  A precious life

  cut off in a duel

  by evil chance

  it shouldn’t have turned out like this…

  Cavallotti fought many duels, and his last one proved fatal. His opponent was Count Ferruccio Macola, a right-wing member of parliament, who’d been one of Cavallotti’s admirers at the outset of his career. It was perhaps Cavallotti’s twentieth duel, so he was experienced, but Macola was twenty years younger. On 6th March 1898, in the garden of the villa belonging to the Countess Cellere in Rome, Cavallotti was struck in the face during the third round of the sword fight. The sabre cut across the face and the throat, slitting it open. The line of mourners who followed his coffin when he was buried by Lake Maggiore stretched for over a mile. The newspapers were full of articles in his memory; Giosuè Carducci wrote the funeral oration. The fact that Macola had won their duel didn’t bring him any advantage. In striking the blow that killed Cavallotti, his honour had certainly not been vindicated. He had to flee to escape arrest; an object of hatred and a fugitive, he ended up shooting himself in 1910.

  The chivalric code for duelling didn’t provide for one of the duellists getting killed. But it was always a possibility, even in the early years of the twentieth century. Adrenalin filled the veins of the two contenders at the thought that one of them might die; it excited them, brought the anger they had nursed for days to boiling point, to a ferocity which sought to appease the insults and humiliations which had passed between the two men by trying to inflict physical wounds on each other. A report published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 23rd February 1915 gives an example of the events which could lead up to a duel. A trial was under way in the law courts in Milan. Between Benito Mussolini and the socialist lawyer Libero Merlino there had been a tense relationship for some time:

  As soon as he entered the courtroom where the case against our newspaper and against Il secolo was being heard, Benito Mussolini found himself by complete chance facing the lawyer Merlino…

  “Are you the author of the letter which appeared today in Avanti!?” Mussolini asked. And the other replied: “Yes, I wrote it.”

  “So when you speak about the ‘Duce’, you mean me?”

  “That’s right…”

  At which Mussolini exclaimed: “Then you’re a real bastard! You’re scum!” letting fly with his hand and slapping the dapper little anarchist lawyer in the face.

  Merlino tried to react, more out of an instinct for self-defence than from bravery, but didn’t have the time to land a blow before Mussolini unleashed a series of punches which drove the lawyer up against the radiator, pinning him there under a continuous volley for several minutes, until the policemen, lawyers and journalists who were in the room rushed up to separate the two men.”1

  It was decided to resolve the men’s argument with a duel, but when Mussolini, along with his seconds, the editor-in-chief Alessandro Giuliani and his friend Manlio Morgagni, turned up at the chosen place they found several plain-clothes policemen waiting for them. Their sabres were confiscated and a report filed, but this setback didn’t deter them. They arranged to meet again shortly afterwards on the outskirts of Milan, under the supervision of the lawyer Vittorio Gallarati. The duel was stopped after the second bout, because the doctors who were in attendance judged the wounds the two men had given each other to be too severe to allow the duel to continue according to the traditional rules of chivalry.

  A deserter and a coward, untrustworthy, malicious, coarse, a sordid money-grubbing opportunist, the thought of whom made one want to throw up: Mussolini lambasted the former editor of the Avanti!, Claudio Treves, with all the insults in his vocabulary. “He used to be known as Claudio Tremens, but from now on we’ll call him ‘threepenny bit’, because that’s all he’s worth,” he wrote in the paper on 24th March. Once more he targeted what was presumed to be Treves’s avarice and greed. Margherita Sarfatti had a hand in the attack on Treves; it was she who’d suggested to Mussolini that Treves had married the Venetian heiress Olga Levi for her money. All Venice knew how rich Levi was, and Sarfatti kept her ear close to the ground in her native city. Mussolini didn’t let up his attack, writing that Treves disliked taking risks and only cared about his salary and acquiring more money. Treves responded in kind, calling Mussolini a louse, and went on to describe him as:

  Bitter, sterile, empty, meretriciously avid for praise, ready to flatter the masses only to betray them, intent on climbing the ladder of power at any cost – being a turncoat just seemed to him
the quickest way to achieve his ambitions. But he was mistaken; his vanity betrayed him. Far from carrying the party with him, the party threw him out, like a piece of old rubbish. […] And to think I have to reply to this envious toerag, this dog’s turd, who sets himself up to judge the way I carried out my responsibilities for the Socialist Party, even as far back as 1898, when he hadn’t even started his career!2

  The two men’s respective circumstances had changed a lot since they clashed over the severance money which Mussolini had refused to pay to his predecessor as editor of Avanti!. Now he too had moved on; he had changed his policy to one of advocating Italian intervention in the war; and he was in charge of a new paper with substantial financial backing and a mass circulation. Both men called themselves socialists, but now viewed each other with implacable hatred. The Socialist Party was officially against the fighting of duels but, after receiving yet another insult from Mussolini, Treves sent his seconds to him to issue a challenge. Just one month after the encounter with Libero Merlino, at 3.30 p.m. on 29th March 1915, Mussolini once more took up his sabre. The person chosen to arbitrate the duel, Leonardo Pracchi, an accountant by profession, got the two men to walk towards each other; when they’d got to within a sword’s length, without waiting for the traditional cry of “Have at you!” which began the duel, they threw themselves at each other. In a burst of excitement and trepidation, fury and fear, the two men’s blades clashed swiftly together, now held high, now low. The situation had to be brought under control so that the rules could be respected, otherwise the duel would have no formal value – on the contrary it would be a scandal involving all the men who were present. Leonardo Pracchi had been chosen by the seconds of the two contenders because he knew a lot about weapons, he was cool-headed and sharp-eyed, and finally because he had arbitrated at many duels always with rigorous impartiality and a fierce adherence to the rules. Even Pracchi found it hard to separate the two men; when he did, he reiterated his instructions and warned that they should be obeyed to the letter. In the meantime, Treves’s seconds, Giovanni Allevi, a doctor, and Angelo Lanza, a journalist from Avanti!, took a look outside the room to check everything was under control, while Mussolini’s – Manlio Morgagni and the editor-in-chief of Il Popolo d’Italia Giuseppe De Falco – did the same on the other side. The lookouts who had been posted outside the Villa Bicocca in Milan gave the all-clear – there were no police or inquisitive members of the public to be seen. The doctors who had been called to the duel to operate on either Treves or Mussolini if need arose had not wished to be present at the fight and were seated in another room.

  The milky-white light of the cloudy sky filtered through the tall Gothic windows of the room, weakly illuminating the duellists’ white shirts. The shining sabres pointed downwards; the seconds withdrew to the sides of the room; when Pracchi called out “Have at you”, the two men flung themselves anew into the fight as if they hadn’t been interrupted for a sermon on the rules of duelling. Treves was tall and technically adroit; Mussolini was agile and experienced. The seconds had assessed the two contenders and had agreed that it was a well-balanced match. As such, they had deemed it possible for the two men to fight “without exclusion of blows”, which meant that the duel did not have to be stopped as soon as the first blood was drawn, as was the usual practice, especially after the Cavallotti affair. Pracchi’s main instruction had been that the two men should drop their swords as soon as he called out for them to stop. There was a first round of violent sword blows, after which Mussolini and Treves disengaged and stood apart to take stock. Then there was a second bout followed by a second stand-off. The third round began; by now it was clear that it would only take a single maladroit sword blow and one of them could lose his life. Pracchi yelled out “Stop!”. Mussolini’s sword had been bent by the clashes. He was panting, out of breath, like Treves. A cold sweat soaked their shirts. Pracchi ordered new swords and a minute’s rest. Mussolini took advantage of the pause to slip his hand inside his pocket, where he kept a piece of sticky resin which enabled him to keep a firm grip on the sword handle. The fourth bout began, even more violent than the preceding ones; the duellists’ swords suddenly slipped, wounding both of them in the right forearm. Pracchi again called out for them to stop, but had to repeat his command before they did. He took a look at their wounds and decided there was no need to call the doctors. The fifth round began; Mussolini struck Treves under the right armpit. Pracchi called the doctors in to see, but they all said it wasn’t serious and the duel could continue. A new attack, with thrusts and parries; Mussolini’s blade grazed Treves’s forehead. The doctors were again called in; they needed to bandage the wound to stop the bleeding, but said the two men could continue fighting. A sixth, seventh, eighth round was fought; Treves struck Mussolini’s right ear. The two men’s shirts were now stained with blood; this time the doctors’ opinion was negative; the seconds consulted among themselves and declared the duel could not continue. Under the rules of duelling, the authority of the seconds is absolute – they can decide whether a duel takes place or not in the first place; for instance, when Pio Schinetti, an elderly journalist on Il secolo called Mussolini a “cheapskate adventurer”, and Mussolini formally challenged him, Schinetti’s seconds forbade him from fighting on account of his age – and the duellists were duty-bound to respect their decisions.

  The rules of duelling required a report to be drawn up immediately after the duel was concluded. Before sending the two men to have their wounds treated, Pracchi asked them, as was customary, if they were now reconciled. Both answered in the negative. The seconds and the referee then wrote their report:

  The Honourable Claudio Treves has suffered a wound to the right temple, with bleeding, a wound to the right armpit, a wound on the forearm and multiple bruising in the deltoid region. Professor Mussolini has suffered a graze to the right forearm, bruising and a wound to the right ear. Swords were changed at the end of the third round, since their blades had been bent in the fierceness of the fighting. The duellists separated after twenty-five minutes fighting with no reconciliation. The first to leave the villa was the Honourable Claudio Treves; the editor of Il Popolo d’Italia preferred to wait until the report had been written before leaving the villa with his friends.3

  All this too was part of the ritual and served to show the outside world how slight were the wounds which the antagonists had received. The day after his encounter with Treves, Mussolini sent a telegram to his sister Edvige reassuring her that his own wounds were nothing serious, while on the contrary those he had managed to inflict on Treves were. In Rachele’s account of the episode, her husband returned home holding a piece of his right ear and with his shirt soaked in blood. She let off steam by scolding him about the costs involved in duelling: each time he needed to buy a new shirt, he had to pay for lessons from a fencing master, the doctors received a fee for attending, and the seconds had to be given gifts; even the men who were posted on lookout so that there was no danger of arrest had to be tipped.

  On another occasion, the two duellists, in order not to be disturbed, had rented a room and locked themselves in. They pushed all the furniture to one side and started to fight. In the middle of the combat one of the lookouts told them the police were arriving. Still holding their swords, Benito and his adversary rushed out to find another place, but the police started to pursue them. Then, just like in a gangster film, the two of them jumped into a taxi to escape them and asked to be taken to the railway station. There they climbed on board a goods train and got off in a small village, where they finished the duel they had started in a room.4

  Up to 1922, Mussolini was frequently challenged by the men who were the object of his abuse. According to his wife, he fought duels on at least ten occasions. His flunkey, chauffeur, valet and general factotum Cirillo Tambara would be sent off to the drugstore to buy some resin and would make sure he had some ready for use in his trouser pockets. So the battles he fought on paper, with their floods of insulting invective, were tr
ansformed into physical combat in remote places well away from prying eyes, although everyone must have known about the encounters, even though they weren’t allowed to talk about them.

  The ritual was always the same. Each time Mussolini would prepare to face his new opponent by taking a fresh course of fencing lessons. His attack was full of energy, but his technical prowess left something to be desired. Missiroli, the editor of the newspaper Il secolo, challenged Mussolini to a duel after the latter had called him “a perfidious Jesuit and a rank coward” in an article he published on 10th May 1922. The duel was fixed for four o’clock in the afternoon; the blades broke in the ferocity of the first round. The referee called a halt to allow them to change swords; then the duel continued for a further forty minutes. Mario Missiroli said that Mussolini’s swordplay was not bad, but he held the weapon badly – this didn’t mean of course that he was less dangerous an opponent. Even for the army officer Cristoforo Baseggio, who was highly experienced in handling swords, fighting against such a fiery adversary must have been no easy task. “The night before his first duel, I couldn’t sleep a wink, I was so afraid; I had read many novels with terrible fights to the death, and I already saw my husband covered with blood… When I saw him leave at dawn, accompanied by the seconds, I was convinced it was the last time I would see him alive, especially because his opponent was an officer, Colonel Cristoforo Baseggio, a socialist who had split with the party and who was in all probability a much better swordsman than Benito. On the other hand, my husband was very calm and confident.”5

  Avanti! was against duelling on principle, but despite this still sneered at Mussolini’s abilities by describing him as a ridiculous counter-revolutionary d’Artagnan. After the March on Rome and the beginning of the establishment of Mussolini’s dictatorship, Claudio Treves repeatedly lamented to his son and his close friends how one day he had had Mussolini at the end of his sword and had wasted the opportunity.