Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  The office boy tried to excuse himself, stammering that he’d lit the stove because he knew the editor always felt the cold since he had fought in the trenches – and after all he hadn’t known about the police inspection which had taken place the evening before and where they’d had to hide the grenades. The journalist continued to shout what a crazy fool he was – he could have set off an explosion which might have wrecked the building and half of Milan along with it. Eventually he calmed down and the cries could be heard again from the street. The day had begun badly: he’d come in early hoping for some quiet in which to take another look at an article he’d drafted, but there was no hope of that now. He opened the window and looked down into the street: there she was again, that half-crazed woman from Trento who kept shouting for Mussolini and calling him a corrupt traitor and a coward. He ran down the stairs and approached her, but she pushed him away. He tried to tell her that she was wasting her time standing there and shouting because the editor was not in the office – and no, he told her repeatedly, he didn’t know when or even if he’d come in today. From the building opposite the newspaper offices someone leant out and shouted angrily at the woman; Ida Irene Dalser calmed down a bit and decided to talk to the journalist. She promised him she wouldn’t keep shouting. She had brought a letter to give to Mussolini. He said he would give it to the editor-in-chief in person. He also agreed to persuade Mussolini to call her. When would she like him to call her? As soon as possible, as soon as he had a free moment.

  Dalser was removed from Milan by police order in May 1917, because of her continual harassment and threatening behaviour towards Rachele, who was by now Mussolini’s legal wife. She was not supposed to leave Florence, where she went to live, but Mussolini’s abandonment of her continued to torment her, and once more she returned to Milan and started to attack her former lover in public, denouncing him, laying siege to him. One Sunday evening, towards supper time, she stationed herself once again outside the newspaper offices, holding her small son Benito Albino in her arms. The street was quiet. “You coward, you pig, murderer, traitor,” she screamed out. Some of the customers in a local bar came out; two policemen also arrived. “Trying to hide, are you, you coward? Come out if you dare!” Some journalists came running out to try and calm her down. Then Mussolini leant out of the window and shouted: “That’s it! I’ve had enough! I’m going to deal with you once and for all!”1 He raced down the stairs holding a revolver. Dalser went on screaming, but the journalists who were trying to restrain her now had to deal with their enraged boss as well. It took some time to calm them both down. Mussolini was infuriated a woman could call him a coward and also that his journalists were trying to defend him from her in a public street. He only agreed to go back to the office when he saw the two police officers escorting her away.

  Rachele got to hear about this episode. Cesare Rossi wrote long afterwards that “once all the fury aroused by Fascism and its leader has died down, and an objective historical account can emerge of all the political and personal events which occurred in Mussolini’s life and career, then it won’t be hard, I think, to find someone who will put in a word of praise for Rachele and for all she had to put up with.”2 Rachele indeed tried to react to her husband’s excesses with good sense and restraint. No one has ever sung her praises because the fury aroused by Fascism has never abated. The years following the First World War were full of violence, while after 1945 Italy was riven by fierce political conflict and by both left- and right-wing terrorism. Fascism is still a current political term today, although it is often used loosely and inappropriately. No one bothers to examine the figure of Rachele Mussolini, what kind of person she was and what she did. What would be the point? Margherita Sarfatti also gets overlooked, or when she is mentioned at all it’s only as Mussolini’s mistress, with the fact of her Jewishness occasionally being added.

  “There was a heart-warming bohemian atmosphere at Il Popolo d’Italia in those years,” Sarfatti wrote, “where we all lived like one big family of comrades and brothers; the offices were in a wretched street in one of the most run-down areas of old Milan, but our high spirits and enthusiasm and laughter kept us going in the midst of so much work and so many worries!”3

  The atmosphere at the newspaper must indeed have been fairly anarchic: Sarfatti must have smiled as she read the notice pinned to the office doors: “Colleagues are kindly reminded not to leave for the day before they have arrived”. In Mussolini’s eyes, Sarfatti was his prize capture. He even believed that it was the force of his intellect which had led her to abandon her socialist beliefs, which was not at all the case. She was beautiful, blonde, wealthy, intelligent, without inhibition and, at the outset of their affair at least, not intrusive; on the contrary, she was somewhat reserved. It was she who was convinced that in Mussolini she’d found the embodiment of her ideal man. She could respond gratifyingly to his fiery sexuality, making him believe his prowess was irresistible. In 2009 several of her letters to him were sold at auction in London for 25,000 euros. They were written in 1922 and give us an insight into their personal and sexual relationship on the eve of the March on Rome. She tells him that she thinks of herself as a Fascist, fighting in one of the Fascist squads, “part of Mussolini’s army – the public one and the secret one. And I vowed myself to you, and confirmed my vows, as your friend, your woman, your bride: I vowed myself to you, my lord and husband, my chief, my lover. With the unwavering faith and loyalty of a firm follower of the cause, as an Italian woman, citizen, mother and lover… I am proud of you for all this, but for what you are, not for what you appear to be. My pride in you is fanatical, it borders on frenzy, but not with the fetishism of the masses, but because of the value of what you inwardly are.”

  In another of the letters she writes that there is no limit to her passion for him, aside from her feelings as a mother: “My thrice-adored man, I will do whatever you want me to. I am yours. You will not ask me to do anything which is incompatible with my dignity and my duty, and with the sacred and inviolable rights which my offspring, whom I also adore, claim from me.” There can be no doubting, it seems, the intensity of the physical, erotic attraction which, in addition to their shared intellectual interests, brought the two of them together and kept them together as a couple for many years. Shortly after the March on Rome, Sarfatti writes to him: “May God allow me to serve you silently, by your side, hidden in the shadow cast by your light; so you may taste some repose and some sweetness, and rest in the certitude of my boundless love. Anchor yourself in me, my great and glorious ship; from my harbour set out to cross the oceans; you will be safe even in the midst of tempests since, if God so pleases, a tenuous but unbreakable bond will keep you rooted to firm land. May God bless you. I love you. Amen.”

  There is a curious remark in another letter – No. 10 in the lot in the 2009 auction catalogue – which might allude to their use of drugs: “Your divine bewitchments make my blood burn with strange ferments”. Cocaine and morphine were widely used among assault troops and warplane pilots in order to overcome the extreme dangers they had to face, as well as cold, tiredness, hunger and fear. Compare Sarfatti’s reference to cocaine in her memoirs written after the war, when all her ties to Mussolini had ended:

  I still have a packet of cocaine which I managed to seize from him – we wrestled over it – in Milan in 1930. He had turned up at my house, his face pale and his eyes bloodshot, and swaying as though he were drunk. I thought he was tired or ill or indeed that he’d had too much to drink, and I made him a cup of very strong coffee. He gradually told me what had happened. He had started to frequent a place he called the “house of the three witches”, some lowlife den run by women who obligingly supplied him and other clients with cocaine.4

  Sarfatti must be wrong about the date here: it stretches belief too far to think that in 1930 Mussolini as Duce paid clandestine visits to squalid dives in Milan in order to procure drugs. Getting hold of cocaine was fairly straightforward, especially for the powerful. M
afia godfathers like Vito Genovese kept the upper echelons of the Italian “market”, including the regime’s leading authorities known as gerarchi or “gerarchs” and other prominent officials, well supplied; they didn’t have to run any risks. As we have seen, after a certain period Mussolini was careful not to touch a drop of alcohol, and it therefore seems improbable that Sarfatti would have assumed he was intoxicated. If the episode is true, then it must have taken place over a decade earlier, in the immediate post-war years and during the early stages of the relationship between the elegant and cultivated Venetian and the raw, uncouth ex-soldier and newspaper editor.

  But when Mussolini returned from the war and from active service, after his long convalescence, it wasn’t Sarfatti who helped him up and down the stairs with his crutches, but rather another blonde: the reassuring and familiar figure of Rachele. Although his health was still precarious, he took over again the running of the newspaper, looking for financial backing so as to improve its prospects. The war was still being fought; he had often written that it would be a long-drawn-out affair, and events were proving him right. Nothing much happened at the fronts, then all of a sudden there was a burst of fighting, followed once more by a lull. The crisis arrived unannounced on 24th October 1917. The news at first was confused, but it soon became clear that Italy was facing defeat. For two whole weeks it seemed as if the entire country would collapse, that the army would be routed and the enemy would arrive in Venice and even reach as far as Milan. The government fell, and for over a month it proved impossible to form a new one. A “Fascio Parlamentare per la Difesa Nazionale” (“Parliamentary League for National Defence”) was set up within parliament, which had the aim of bringing together all those people who were willing to fight for the defence of the fatherland. The two chambers held secret meetings to minimize the risk of any information reaching the enemy’s ears. The Socialist Party retreated even further into isolation, refusing to join the Parliamentary League. Mussolini swung between moments of depression at the thought of the impending catastrophe and writing enthusiastic articles in praise of the valour of the Italian troops. His sister Edvige wrote that he would return in the evening completely downcast after a day at the newspaper: “His face was grey and drawn; in his talk he would switch suddenly from anger and defiance to the utmost gloominess.”5

  Mussolini’s drawn face also reflected what was happening to his mistress. A grief-stricken Margherita Sarfatti had watched her eldest son Roberto leave for the front; he was just seventeen. Seeing him off on the train she tried to be cheerful while all around them the mothers and fiancées of the departing men were weeping. She had tried to persuade him not to volunteer for the special assault troops known as the Arditi, but to no avail. How could she have succeeded in persuading him anyway – a woman who had been expelled from the Socialist Party for claiming that her sex had a vital role to play in the war, who had written that the nurses in the trenches tending wounded soldiers were a honour to all women? She had travelled through wartime France and had been impressed by the patriotism she had found among the country’s women. Serving one’s country – this was the new message which was coming from the feminists in England and in France: by serving their country they drew nearer to their goal of emancipation, to the acquisition of their full rights as citizens, starting with the right to vote. In this way patriotism was an important factor in the international women’s movement: the right to vote would eventually be achieved, but only for some – British women were granted it after the war, while those in France and Italy still had a long time to wait.

  Margherita Sarfatti’s husband, lover and now her son as well were all on active military service. On 30th January 1918 she “received in the post a lock of bloodstained hair. One of Roberto’s fellow soldiers had cut it before they buried his corpse. […] As night was falling, he had attempted to storm the hiding place of a rifleman armed with a machine gun. As he leapt onto the enemy soldier, a bullet hit him in the face. He died instantly.”6

  During the course of the war Sarfatti’s attitudes towards women’s emancipation grew increasingly distant. Women’s role in society was changing, even the way they dressed; they were dynamic, they began to have a collective voice. Though Italian women did not immediately achieve the right to vote, they were wooed more and more by political parties, all of which, including the early Fascist Party, put women’s suffrage as one of their aims. Sarfatti’s opinions started to move in the opposite direction, instead, and it was her views which would become characteristic of the regime when it came to power. For Sarfatti, both as a mother and as a supporter of Italy’s intervention in the war, although women had active roles to play both in their own families and in society more widely, they should keep away from the sphere of politics. In her view, women no longer had the right to claim equal treatment as citizens; their role lay at the roots of the new state, by providing children for their country:

  For Sarfatti the issue of women’s suffrage was not about their emancipation so much as enabling women to contribute a vote of confidence in the state, its decisions to go to war and while it was at war, and in the men who were responsible for the political sphere. The only women who had the right to express their opinion on the state and its future destiny were, just as in 1915, mothers, since they were the guardians of the species, of the family, of the primary cells of the state as it grew and developed.7

  The revolutions in Russia in February and October 1917 and the arrival of over a million American troops in Europe backed by American financial resources, altered the overall development of the war. Italy’s defeat at Caporetto led to a temporary swing to the right, while Mussolini changed position definitively. “Between the end of 1917 and the end of 1918, between Caporetto and the final victory, Mussolini’s political positions underwent what I would argue was an extremely important change, one which would determine the rest of his life. In the course of three years he moved from socialism to Fascism (in the full historical sense of the word as I am using it here): within another four years a Fascist dictatorship had been established in Italy.”8

  This process of change incubated over several months, up to the summer of 1918, during which Mussolini left behind him his position as a “sleeping” socialist, to use the term De Felice borrows from Freemasonry to describe his status. He took the first steps in December 1917 when, writing in Il Popolo d’Italia, he came out in support of the newly formed Parliamentary League, declaring that the old parties and their old leaders would soon belong to the past, since there were now only two great factions in Italian politics: “Those who went to war and those who didn’t; those who fought and those who didn’t fight; those who produce and the parasites who don’t.”

  Ansaldo, the important engineering and armaments firm in Genoa, started to show interest in Mussolini; they saw the potential usefulness of his newspaper as a barrier against “red” propaganda and its “subversive and defeatist” message. In the wake of the debacle at Caporetto there were increasing fears that revolutionaries had infiltrated the country’s armaments industry. According to an intelligence report on Mussolini drawn up at about this time by the chief of police in Milan Giovanni Gasti, Ansaldo signed a contract worth half a million lire to buy advertising space in the newspaper.

  Mussolini made several visits to Genoa, on occasion travelling there by aeroplane. He wrote an article praising Ansaldo and the Italy which fought, worked, produced; he also spoke enthusiastically of his experience of flying. He became a fanatic for this form of travel; when he heard that the author and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was organizing a long-distance flight from Rome to Tokyo, he did his utmost to try to join it. His trips were a source of concern to his wife, who writes that he was the first politician to use an official aeroplane for getting around. It was an old warplane which had been converted for civilian use and it enabled Mussolini to move around speedily and carry out many more public engagements. His enthusiasm for flying was later imitated by Hitler, who used aeroplanes to move from
town to town and hold several political meetings in the same day.

  Just over three years after the grenade explosion in the war which had almost killed him, Mussolini was involved in a flying accident. On 2nd March 1921 he had signed up for a low-altitude flying lesson; the instructor was an ace pilot, Cesare Redaelli. Mussolini took up his position at the controls.

  The first flight passed off smoothly, but on the second, while coming down to land, the engine suddenly cut out. The aeroplane immediately lost speed, and the steering went out of control; it winged forward and then suddenly lost altitude and dropped forty metres to crash. The whole right side was shattered. Redaelli sustained bruising on his forehead, while our editor-in-chief received several cuts to the face, which according to the doctors should heal over in two weeks’ time, barring complications, and several painful contusions to his legs and arms.9