Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  In the same month he also returned to Milan for the first time since coming to power, on a private visit. The purpose of the visit was, so Ercole Boratto assumed, to see his family. The chauffeur had been given orders to follow on with the official car so it was available for Mussolini’s use while he was in the city; Mussolini himself travelled on the royal train that the House of Savoy had put at his disposal for the occasion. He arrived after nightfall and ordered his chauffeur to pick him up and take him to Corso Venezia. He indicated the house, got out of the car and, telling Boratto to wait for him – official drivers had to know how to wait as well as how to drive – slipped through the main entrance. Boratto whiled away the time trying to work out who Mussolini could be visiting in the apartment block. It was clearly someone important, if he was paying a call on this person first, as soon as he had arrived in the city, rather than going direct to his own family whom he hadn’t seen for several months. While he was trying to work it out, Margherita Sarfatti’s maid appeared. “She was German, very talkative and, I soon realized, very indiscreet. She willingly started to tell me about all the visits Mussolini had made to the house; in fact, she maintained that this was his real home, not where his family lived in Foro Bonaparte.”7

  On the following day, after meetings in the city’s prefecture, Mussolini again summoned his chauffeur, but this time wanted to drive the car himself. He drove to Sarfatti’s villa on Lake Como. There were several such excursions during the visit to Milan, and Boratto, silent and attentive, had always to be ready with the car. “With Mussolini and ‘S.’, there was also the latter’s fourteen- or fifteen-year-old daughter, who was already shapely and pretty. I only realized later why she was so often with them.”8 The long periods the two lovers spent together Boratto whiled away in the company of the gossipy maid. She worked in all her mistress’s various houses and knew about her private life in intimate detail. “She even told me about what went on behind their bedroom doors – all I’ll say is that, if her stories were true, which I rather doubt, then what they got up to was worthy of a brothel.”9 Boratto’s testimony is not entirely to be trusted: he was writing after the fall of Fascism and wanted to ingratiate himself with some new employer so he could save up and buy his lorry. Sarfatti’s maid too could have exaggerated the stories about her mistress’s sexual practices to build up her own importance, making herself out to have been privy to significant secrets. Yet it’s worth remembering that Claretta Petacci in her diary also records some of Mussolini’s unconventional sexual activities; for example, she writes that he admitted to her on several occasions that some of his mistresses – such as Romilda Ruspi – watched while he had sex with other women: “I was attracted [to Ruspi] only in a physical, sexual way, but even so not excessively. That explains why I had other mistresses, it was a kind of rota, every now and then when I felt like it I slept with her. And when I felt like it, I had sex with other women while she watched…”10

  But we also need to treat Petacci’s diaries with a certain caution. She filled the pages with accounts of her conversations with Mussolini filtered through a sentimental girlish crush; only when she copies down unflattering comments on her rivals, past and present, for his affections, does a dry matter-of-factness enter her tone, as for example when she transcribes his remarks, made in 1937, on Sarfatti: “She was an unpleasant woman. She was four years older than me. She had a kind of Jewish intelligence. I put up with her, she bored me. Just think that I had sex with women right under her nose. With Ester Lombardo and also Tessa, I had them out in the open while Sarfatti was there. She saw me doing it and she just threw a handful of pebbles against the balcony. I kept going with her only because it suited me…”11

  In the pages of Petacci’s diary Mussolini emerges as the typical figure of a mature man beginning to feel the onset of age, who enjoys embroidering the stories of his exploits with details to impress his mistress, perhaps because he fears he can’t impress her in other nonverbal ways. She is clearly struck and perhaps attracted by his sexual exhibitionism, since she never fails to speak about it. She’s more vague about their own lovemaking, tending to describe it through rose-tinted glasses: “His face is tense, his eyes are burning. I am sitting on the floor; quite suddenly he slides off his armchair onto me, curved over me. I can feel his body strain to unleash itself. I pull him close and kiss him. We make love with a kind of fury; he cries out like a wounded animal. Then he falls exhausted onto the bed; even in repose he looks strong.”12

  But his last mistress shows her real untrustworthiness and ruthlessness when she writes about the sexuality of his earlier lovers, beginning with Margherita Sarfatti, for whom she pretends to feel a kind of female solidarity. She was perhaps not aware of it, but the Mussolini she describes in the pages of her diary emerges as the classic kind of Latin male, like something out of a cartoon or soap opera, ready to swear undying faith, ready to say anything so long as he gets what he wants. Petacci reports that Mussolini told her he had failed to have sex the first few times he slept with Sarfatti. She omits the details almost out of some kind of empathy: “I’m leaving out the intimate details because they upset me too much.”13 A few months later, however, Mussolini returned to the topic and this time she transcribes what he tells her:

  Do you know what happened to me the first time [I slept with Sarfatti] in that hotel room [in Milan] from which you could hear the bell in the San Gottardo church striking every quarter of an hour? It sounded like some tinkling carriage clock. Seven o’clock, ding ding; quarter-past seven, ding ding; and there I was tossing and turning and not able to do a thing. In the end I had to give up. I invented an excuse, something about suddenly feeling unwell, so we got up and left. The second time was the same. 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. There was no love involved – [Sarfatti] was a fanatic, like all Jews. She used to say: “It’s better to be the mistress of the prime minister than some ordinary fool’s.”14

  Ercole Boratto wondered why his boss, the head of the Italian government, spent so much time with Margherita Sarfatti, but he wasn’t capable by himself of searching out the complex reasons for the relationship. All he had to go on was her chambermaid’s saucy tales of Boccaccio-like romps. Among the women in Mussolini’s harem, Sarfatti was undoubtedly the one with least sexual inhibitions. She was familiar with the style and cunning of the great mistresses of the past: they realized that their men, their lords and masters, wanted female flesh, as much as they could handle. If their mistresses were to keep their positions of power in his private life – power which could also extend its influence into the public sphere – then they needed to keep him plentifully supplied with young girls. The most famous mistress of them all, Madame de Pompadour, had done this. As she got older, she realized she no longer had the physical attractions which had enabled her to conquer the King, so she started, on the one hand, to soothe him by providing cultivated pursuits – art, music, theatre – while, on the other, satisfying his continuing sexual needs by subcontracting out the services which she herself could no longer supply. She set up a small and exclusive brothel on the outskirts of Versailles, called Le Parc aux Cerfs, where a handful of girls in the first bloom of youth, taken out of the slums and given a good wash, were kept ready to service the King’s desires.

  Edvige Mussolini writes that after he became prime minister her brother, “wrapped in an aura of mystery and legend”, was literally besieged by aristocratic women, but whatever amorous adventures took place, they were insignificant and “uninvolving”. Besides, Mussolini hated the rigid formalities and the ostentatious “good breeding” found in aristocratic circles. According to his sister, real involvement was to be found in his relationship with Sarfatti: “Benito’s love for this woman writer was – in my opinion – profound and new, as it enabled him to suppress the real inclinations of his mind and soul, because, in this relationship, he loved those female qual
ities and faults which previously – and again subsequently – he treated with indifference or scorn. Simple-hearted Rachele sensed that Margherita Sarfatti represented a special kind of danger, and for that reason perhaps hated her alone among all the other women who troubled her existence.”15

  Boratto was aware that Sarfatti was somehow “useful” to Mussolini, and also came to realize that she in some sense advised him. But he could not have appreciated her real importance, as the most cultivated and sophisticated member of the army of supporters with whom he had climbed to power. Sarfatti was the primary theorist in Mussolini’s circle, who provided Fascism with its inner content or ideas. Her influence in this sense can be seen as early as 1913, in the magazine Utopia, in which Mussolini tried to sketch an outline of his own socialist beliefs. It continued with the founding of the Fascist review Gerarchia and culminated in her biography of Mussolini, Dux. She financed Gerarchia and was its editor for ten years, from 1924 to 1934. Its main purpose was clear from the title: to create a Fascist ideology based on a scale or hierarchy of values. The foremost value was the restoration of a social order in which the Fascist mission would find its justification. When Mussolini went to Milan in December 1922, accompanied by Boratto, to see her, she was not merely his sexually uninhibited and willing mistress: she had already set to work on writing the biography that would become the principal building block in the myth of Mussolini and in the Fascist state’s quest for public legitimacy, its need to develop its own visible rituals so that it could enthuse the masses. As she made love, apparently without shame or inhibition, to the “Duce’s” body in various bedrooms, she was theorizing that that same body would need to be seen as the personification of the new state, the indispensable symbol of the new regime. Mussolini had spoken in general terms about the need to instil in the masses a sense of faith in the political actions of their leader, but it was Sarfatti who created the religion of Fascism and centred its ideology on Mussolini. She even came to realize that there could be such a thing as a Fascist “type”, which people would imitate and which would inaugurate a trend or fashion: “It occurred to me one day, quite out of the blue, that a certain way men had of combing their hair, straight back from the forehead, was known as the ‘Fascist style’ and was indeed typical of Fascists; a certain type of gaze, of walking, a certain facial expression, distinguished and still mark out a Fascist, even if he isn’t wearing the party badge in his buttonhole. A style or fashion had grown up – a whole physical type.”16

  Sarfatti worked on Dux until 1925, publishing the book only when she was certain she had succeeded in bringing off the minor miracle she was attempting: to paint a portrait of Mussolini in which there was a consistency and ideological substance in him which he’d never had in real life.

  It is my personal belief that if there were anyone besides Mussolini who was capable of giving the Fascist state – precisely in so far as it still needed to be “constructed” after Mussolini came to power – a symbolic context and meaning, that person was Sarfatti… […] In Sarfatti’s view, symbols generate politics, so it follows that only those individuals who know how to embody and give form to these symbols are capable of being political movers and shakers – in other words, the intellectual elite, herself above all. […] The state needs an officiating high priest, a “duce”; therefore Sarfatti applies herself to forging, with the Dux, another symbol, an image of Mussolini which is convincing not as the picture of a new man but as the priest of a new and hitherto unknown – and therefore completely modern – conception of how the state should be organized.17

  At first sight the careers of Sarfatti and Mussolini appear to develop in parallel, but on looking more closely it can be seen that she was always ahead of him. She always had the right intuitions and made the right choices before he did; above all, she supplied the ideological backing for Fascism which on his own he would never have been able to develop. While Mussolini was, in some sense, “overtaken” by the events in Fiume and struggled to contain and control D’Annunzio, Sarfatti never considered the episode as a serious milestone on the road to Fascism and refused to be swept up in the general enthusiasm for it. To her role as a woman who argued forcefully for Italy’s intervention in the war – a position and a right she argued closely for and justified on an ideological level – she added that of the mother whose young son had heroically sacrificed his life for his country. It came naturally to her to associate with the Arditi, to sympathize with their disorientation after the war, to work to make them part of the nascent Fascist movement until she became the ideological advocate of the violence the Fascist squads wreaked on the life of the nation. The acceptance of political violence seemed to her consistent with her developing beliefs. She became convinced that the new state could only come into being through violence; that violence was the necessary foundation for the state’s legitimacy and revealed its historical destiny.

  Once her lover had gained power, Sarfatti no longer limited herself to the role of theorist or of a prompter off-stage. She used her considerable wealth to back publishing ventures and public events in which she could present herself as the model of a Fascist woman, the embodiment of a femininity which was above and beyond political conflict. In taking on this role she was helped by the myth she assiduously created and promoted of her son who had fallen in war. She played the figure of the courageous mother and the grieving mother in public commemorations, as she built up round the figure of her son one of the earliest Fascist rituals, one centred on the cult and sacrifice of the hero, who represented the high spiritual ideal in contrast to the low materialism of the Socialists. Mussolini supported her, and his role as high priest in these rituals suited him perfectly; it took him a long time to realize that the real figure at the centre of the ceremonies celebrating the prowess of her brave son Roberto was his mother, the sophisticated and intellectual Sarfatti.

  The legitimization of Fascism through the experience of war, the mystical cult of heroic sacrifice, became the foundation on which Sarfatti built her justification of the new state as the only possible revival of the universal Roman Empire, while at the same time being the culmination of the political process of Italian unification begun in the nineteenth century. The transformative function of the symbolism of ancient Rome must be exploited in the construction of a new state which would embody the ideals of classicism and humanism and fulfil its mission as a national religion.18

  Sarfatti’s role in helping to destroy the claims of the women’s movement in Italy, especially as it had evolved in the years before the war should not lead us to diminish her importance as a theorist of Fascism under Mussolini. While he praised the tactical advantages of “emptiness” or “blankness” in exercising power and thought that the main goal was simply ensuring the continuity of the Fascist regime, she was busy filling in the blank canvas of its ideology. While on the one hand her approach crushed the prospects of women under the regime, forcing them to renounce every form of feminism, she also pursued the utopian idea of a new order, a Fascist city of the future, where the women who belonged to the cultural elite – of which of course she was the pre-eminent example – would have an important role to play. In her vision of this utopia, Fascism would have to use various cultural means to construct the new state based on order and hierarchy. In carrying out this task women would represent a point of contact between the past and the future, between tradition and modernity; in this way a new classical civilization would emerge which, in coming into existence, would demonstrate the historical necessity of Fascism.

  It was thus Margherita Sarfatti who lay behind Mussolini’s revival of classical Rome as a central element in Fascism and the fundamental precondition for its imperialism: “The names and the classifications which characterized the ancient Roman way of doing things were rediscovered: the legions, the squadrons, the maniples and chief maniples, centurions and consuls; the division into princeps and triarii; the rapid ordered marches, three abreast. How different from the old slow rambling and di
sordered processions – like those of the Socialists – which proved resistant to all attempts to give them an order and design!”19

  Completely absorbed in daily political activity, Mussolini had no time to spare on designing an outward face for the regime so that Italians would be able to see it and recognize it. Perhaps he thought the new state would take on its own form spontaneously, as Sarfatti wrote, and therefore had no need of further high-flown theorizing to help it do so. He must also have found it bizarre that a woman was so concerned with the ideological aspects of Fascism. It took him a long time to appropriate her ideas – and only after he had vulgarized them – and it is probable that he never realized how much his dictatorship and the myth surrounding it owed to her. “Women should be passive”, he exclaimed in his interview with Ludwig,

  they’re good at analysis, not at synthesis. In the whole history of architecture, show me a woman architect. Tell one to build a shed, let alone a temple! She can’t. Architecture is the synthesis of all the arts, but women are completely incapable of being architects – that sums up their destiny. My opinion of their role in the state is completely opposed to all forms of feminism. Of course they shouldn’t be treated as slaves, but if I gave them the right to vote I’d be derided. In the Fascist regime women don’t count.20

  In the proofs of the interview he corrected “should be passive” to “must obey”, but he was probably being sincere when he told Ludwig that he had never allowed a woman to influence him. In his conception of politics as a daily and ruthless deployment of tactics, a field of action unbounded by any preconceived programme, where he might choose either to assassinate an opponent or flatter him into compliance, there was no room for female influence, least of all of an intellectual kind.