by Roberto Olla
Several veteran Socialists who were active in the party have confirmed to me that in 1919, especially in Milan, there were rumours that Mussolini was making cautious approaches about rejoining the party. Pietro Nenni has also confirmed the rumours, adding that Mussolini had approached [Bruno] Buozzi; Buozzi had mentioned this on several occasions to more than one socialist comrade during their years in exile. […] It wasn’t at all a question of Mussolini simply rejoining the Socialist Party; in my opinion, he was angling to rejoin in agreement with the reformist and federal wings of the party – it is not by chance that his initial contacts were with Buozzi – in the hope of creating together with them a breakaway movement.16
Whatever Mussolini’s vague intentions of rejoining the Socialist Party might have been, an abrupt stop was put to them on 15th April 1919, when a Milanese Fascist squad made up of former Arditi (together with various Futurists), attacked and burnt down the main offices of the Socialist Party newspaper Avanti!. It was the day the Chamber of Labour had declared a general strike. One of the nine women who had been present at Piazza San Sepolcro – Luisa Rosalia Dentici – also took part in the attack. In reaction, several Socialist Party activists swore undying hatred towards Mussolini and threatened to kill him. But Margherita Sarfatti was full of enthusiasm for the attack, which she saw as a just revenge for the death of her son. In the attack the Fascists had killed four people, but Sarfatti openly defended their actions, while Mussolini’s response was more guarded, saying that the attack had been carried out spontaneously. In interviews at the time he declared that even if the Fasci were not responsible for the assault on the offices of the Socialist Party newspaper he would still accept the moral responsibility for what had happened. As we have seen, the attack went against the tactics he was secretly pursuing, but nevertheless he was obliged to brazen it out, as he had to so often on later occasions. But there was one immediate tangible result: everyone was talking about Mussolini and the Combatants’ Leagues. The nature of the struggle in politics was changing: it was no longer merely a question of meetings and rallies, of speech-making, of manifestos and newspapers. Now military considerations prevailed: the organization of attacks needed physical strength and careful planning just as if you were going over into enemy trenches. The destruction of the offices of Avanti! worried Pietro Nenni – who would go on to become the leader of the Socialist Party after the Second World War – but it didn’t make him change his position at the time: only a week before the attack took place, on 9th April, he had proposed himself as a candidate to be one of the leaders of the Combatants’ League in Bologna. A summary of his speech on the occasion was printed in Il Popolo d’Italia: Nenni wanted the “fascio” to be anti-Bolshevik, anti-monarchist and strongly republican.
A noteworthy point in these years when Mussolini’s politics were changing and developing is the support he gave, as early as June 1919, to the anti-Semitic view on the hidden manoeuvres of Jewish international finance and the alliance between Bolshevism and Zionism. Seeing the Jews as a “lobby” intent on damaging the country’s interests was an attitude which would emerge at several points over the course of the twentieth century (and indeed beyond).
Mussolini and the writer and poet Gabriele D’Annunzio had exchanged letters between December 1918 and January 1919 on what had been described as the “truncated victory” in the war. Both men were intent on sounding each other out. When, under the leadership of D’Annunzio, volunteers started to flock to add their support to a military action aimed at ensuring the city of Fiume became part of Italy, Mussolini wrote to the warrior-poet that he was ready to fight under him. On 12th September D’Annunzio, at the head of an army consisting of about 2,500 men, occupied Fiume. Sarfatti described the event: “With a bard’s intuition, D’Annunzio saw that the redemption of Fiume would in its turn redeem Italy. Fiume was the Holy Grail, the mystical chalice filled with the blood of the martyrs, round which this High Priest, ardent keeper of the sacred mysteries, gathered the flower of Italian military prowess. Fortune and victory smiled on this Holy Grail by the shores of the Adriatic Sea.”17
Mussolini had assured D’Annunzio that Il Popolo d’Italia would lend its active support to the occupation of Fiume. Many Arditi from local Combatants’ Leagues went to join D’Annunzio’s forces, among them the revolutionary syndicalist and renowned war hero Alceste De Ambris. All of them saw D’Annunzio as their real leader or “duce”, to Mussolini’s discomfiture: he described his rival as a man of letters playing at politics, trapped in his own world of high-sounding words. Nevertheless, D’Annunzio’s high-sounding words, the distinctive way he harangued the crowds, made political meetings into spectacular, emotionally overwhelming occasions and introduced a new style of political communication. Mussolini couldn’t counter the powerful effects of D’Annunzio’s spellbinding oratory, but he knew that in the long run they would fade and real politics – where D’Annunzio was a clumsy tactician (he wanted to lead a march on Rome on condition the Socialist Party gave him a guarantee they would remain neutral) – would resume its rightful place. D’Annunzio was a poet who wanted to turn his life into a work of art – he was above all concerned with the figure he struck, with the exaltation of his own successes, with becoming the “duce” of “his greatest poem”, the one he was writing with his actions, in seizing hold of Fiume; Mussolini was a politician, without, for the moment, a plausible strategy, but attempting to construct one by any means which suggested themselves, such as an electoral alliance with those on the left who had been in favour of intervention. D’Annunzio wrote to him criticizing him for his hesitations and wavering; Mussolini responded by launching an appeal in the newspaper for funds to support the attack on Fiume. However, when D’Annunzio first floated the vague idea of a march on Rome from occupied Fiume, Mussolini realized that the poet was overtaking him and that he risked being left behind. He replied endorsing the idea, but also trying to gain time by arguing that they needed to secure the support of the army before they made a move. Mussolini’s response irritated D’Annunzio, who saw it as more the product of indecision and incapacity than political foresight. Mussolini tried to reassure him by sending one of his most loyal journalists, Michele Bianchi, to let him know that as soon as the weather was good Mussolini himself would fly to Fiume and join him. His aim was to persuade D’Annunzio to draw back from doing anything hasty and to evaluate the changing political situation in the country: parliament had been dissolved, the march could not go ahead unless other events intervened first, it would be better to wait until after the general election on 16th November.
The election took place in an extremely troubled period for the country. Reports of D’Annunzio’s government in Fiume spoke of an idiosyncratic social experiment, a city-state ruled by an artist whose approach mixed right-wing militarism with avant-garde and for the time outlandish social policies. The whole of the continent was in ferment. The alliance of victorious European powers had turned their attention on Communist Russia and attacked it; international socialism attempted, without success, to organize protest strikes in various countries to force their governments to withdraw their troops. In Italy the Dalmine factories were occupied and there was a series of demonstrations in the leading industrial cities which heralded the so-called “biennio rosso” (“two red years”), the period from 1920 to 1921, when the left seemed to be in the ascendant. Sarfatti sums up what this period felt like to her, describing how Mussolini would shout angrily he wouldn’t “join the race, no, in God’s name, he wouldn’t, to become redder than red! […] But the race to be redder than red was happening all around us: the socialists, the Third Internationalists, the communists and all the supporters of the Moscow soviets… The priests were red – the reverend Don Sturzo – the conservatives blushed pink, making the democrats turn beetroot and the republicans deep-dyed crimson. It was like walking along a street lined with bars, each one claiming they sold the best wine.”18
Mussolini would have liked to forge a single alliance from
his Fascist squads and the various forces on the left who’d been in favour of Italy’s intervention in the war, but the attempt failed. When we look more closely at his own development in the context of the overall picture of Italian politics in this period, we can see that he remained an isolated figure, while his armed squads, although violent, were no more than small minority groups. When Mussolini stood as a candidate in the general elections of 1919, he was on his own: he was supported only by Marinetti’s Futurists and by the ex-Arditi. “Their electoral campaign was more like a carnival than a political movement: gunfire, war songs, torches flaming in the breeze, trucks disguised to look like assault tanks. The Milanese electorate remained unimpressed by this Futurist war show on wheels.”19
Mussolini did pull off one coup: he managed to get the world-famous orchestral conductor Arturo Toscanini to agree to add his name to his list of proposed candidates. During the war Toscanini had organized an orchestra to play for the troops, on the front, often in inaccessible mountainous places where fierce battles had only just been fought. During the debacle at Caporetto he had insisted on continuing to rehearse with his musicians (despite the wartime conditions, he demanded flawless performances from them), and it was only at the last moment that the army generals persuaded him to pack up and retreat before he and the orchestra fell into the hands of the advancing Austrians. Mussolini admired Toscanini’s energies in conducting and the way he exercised an absolute authority over his musicians which seemed to meld their individual qualities into one compact unity. In exile Toscanini would become one of the most intransigent and outspoken opponents of Mussolini’s regime, but his agreeing to stand as a candidate alongside Mussolini in 1919 should not unduly take us aback. We are now able to see Fascism clearly for what it was: a violent right-wing reaction, anti-unions, anti-socialist, anti-democratic. But in 1919, at least from the outside, the “Combatants’ League” looked like a progressive movement – dynamic, energetic, intent on modernizing Italian political life and opening it up to the masses.
The first name on the list of candidates for the Combatants’ League was Mussolini himself, who was described as “combatant, wounded in action”; the second name was Toscanini’s, followed by the simple description “orchestral conductor”; while Emilio Filippo Tommaso Marinetti appeared in the seventh position, “volunteer recruit, wounded in action, awarded a War Cross and recommended for two silver medals”. The fourteenth place was occupied by Giacomo Macchi, an “aviation captain from Gallarate, deputy commander of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Squadron, three times silver-medallist, twice wounded in action, and awarded military honours on a total of twelve occasions”.20
The political isolation of the Combatants’ League was evident during the election campaign. Their hustings were poorly attended, while those who spoke at them and the main offices of Il Popolo d’Italia itself had to be protected by ex-Arditi and other former servicemen from over Italy, including Fiume. On one occasion, because of the usual pressures of his private life, Mussolini was unable to attend a meeting of the Fasci in the main hall of the Institute for the Blind. At a meeting which was held three days later he spoke about the need for the League to differentiate itself from the old political parties and their traditional constituencies:
He didn’t manage to carry his audience, who kept interrupting him, until a brusque interjection from one of the combatants annoyed him and managed to turn the situation to his advantage: “Why didn’t you come and tell us all this the other evening?” The question provoked Mussolini, and he replied violently: “Because one of my sons was dying!…” Bruno, still only a baby at the time, had had an attack of croup and had almost died. Mussolini’s reply revealed the anguish he was feeling as a father and moved the audience to the point they rose as one to their feet to acclaim him. After which at least half of the people present didn’t feel up to voting against his proposals…21
Bruno had caught diphtheria and recovered from it, only to fall ill again immediately with bronchial pneumonia or “croup”, an extreme form of laryngitis. Rachele wrote that “Bruno’s illnesses had exhausted the two of us – Benito especially, and not only because he couldn’t bear illness, either his own or when others fell sick, but because the sight of children who were ill disturbed him profoundly.”22
Mussolini’s list of candidates in the 1919 elections in Milan obtained just 4,657 votes; other constituencies returned equally dismal figures. Only in Liguria did a single candidate from the Combatants’ League manage to get elected. “We have neither won a victory nor suffered a defeat: we have made a political statement,” Mussolini wrote in Il Popolo d’Italia, obeying as if by instinct one of the golden rules of political communication, which is that you must continue to defend your image and that of your movement come what may. When he called home on election night, however, his assessment was a lot bleaker: “Benito telephoned that evening about eleven o’clock. ‘It’s a complete fiasco,’ he announced. ‘We haven’t won a single seat. People are demonstrating against us in the centre of town – especially the Socialists.’”23
Two days after the election, Avanti! was full of comment on the Socialist Party’s remarkable success, but also found time to dent Mussolini’s image by publishing an insultingly brief notice: “A corpse in a state of putrefaction has been found in the Naviglio canal. It is believed to be Benito Mussolini.” The author of what reads like malignant wishful thinking was a Socialist Party city councillor, Ippolito Bastiani, who later, as Cesare Rossi reminds us, would become an enthusiastic Fascist journalist, just as so many Italian Socialists did in many different walks of life.
And on the same day as Bastiani’s announcement, 18th November, Mussolini suffered a further setback: the police raided the headquarters of the Combatants’ Leagues and the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia, confiscating pistols, bombs and knives and putting him and Marinetti under arrest. That same evening the senator Luigi Albertini called the Prime Minister Nitti advising him to release Mussolini speedily. The Corriere della Sera reported the news the following day:
The editor-in-chief of Il Popolo d’Italia got into a car along with his brother and followed the officers. He arrived at San Fedele unobserved and was led into the office of the deputy chief commissioner Stivala for preliminary questioning. The editor of Il Popolo d’Italia was calm and unmoved. He said with a smile that his arrest would certainly give the Socialists further cause to celebrate their success. He added that if his temporary detention put a stop to civic unrest and allowed the re-establishment of law and order, then he was pleased to have been put under arrest.
The Corriere condemned Mussolini’s arrest, declaring that it would seem like “an act of submission to the victorious Socialist Party”, “a concession to Mussolini’s worst enemies at the moment he appeared to be most vulnerable”, and that his continuing detention represented “a persecution out of proportion to the actual reasons for his arrest”. The magistrates took the view that the twenty revolvers found on the premises of Mussolini’s offices were not sufficient cause to warrant his arrest, and the police failed to find any compromising documents: Mussolini spent a total of twenty-two hours in a police cell. On the 19th he was released, and on the 20th he was writing in Il Popolo d’Italia: “A whirlwind has been unleashed on the Fascist movement, but it won’t succeed in uprooting it.” He wrote another letter to D’Annunzio, sent to Fiume via his friend De Ambris, in which once more he temporized, by telling him they needed to take into account the fact that hundreds of Fascists had been arrested, those who were left would have to be reorganized, they should wait until the members of the Leagues could all take up their posts again. If D’Annunzio thought this painted too discouraging a picture of their situation, then too bad – it was the truth. It was a difficult juncture in Mussolini’s career: even Margherita Sarfatti began to think that the man to whom she had committed herself completely might not succeed. Both physically and intellectually their relationship had grown more intense since their days together at the office
s of Avanti!. “The curves of her body, her blonde hair, her sense of herself as a woman were ever present to him. Both Margherita Sarfatti’s body and intellect challenged him.”24 But Sarfatti grew more jealous as their intimacy increased: the problem was that the man she loved continued to have eyes for the curves of other women’s bodies besides her own.
Chapter 11
A Military Encampment
The important guests had all arrived. The drawing rooms of Margherita Sarfatti’s apartment were thronged with artists, painters, writers, celebrated academics, wealthy entrepreneurs and ambitious journalists. Among them were the poet Ada Negri, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Guido Da Verona, but one guest, surrounded by a court of elegantly dressed women, stood out: the great conductor Arturo Toscanini. Normally at an event like this the celebrated musician would have picked out the most beautiful and fascinating woman among the female guests and spent the rest of the time with her, but on this evening at the end of 1919 he’d come with other intentions. He wanted to give his hostess and her guests a surprise, one which filled him with pride. He had brought along to the party a nineteenyear-old violinist from Bohemia, Váša Príhoda. The young man had ended up in Milan after a series of misadventures and was playing in a small café orchestra in order to earn a living; one evening, in the room packed with customers, Toscanini had spotted his quality immediately.