Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  Mussolini had managed to bring the People’s Party on board his government, bypassing Don Sturzo and reaching an agreement even with the hated De Gasperi. He had toyed with the idea of giving a couple of ministries to Socialist Party trade-unionists from the General Confederation of Labour, perhaps including their well-known leader Bruno Buozzi. But the Socialist Party didn’t even have time to consider the possibility of their members participating in the new government, albeit under the condition that their acceptance would be their own individual responsibility, before the intransigence of representatives from the squads, who threatened to stir up rebellion among the rank and file, and of the nationalists, who said they would withdraw their support, scuppered the idea. Mussolini, without putting up much resistance, beat a rapid retreat. But when the full list of the new government appointments was published, a sense of disappointment spread through the Fascist camp. Out of all the posts – ministers, deputy ministers, commissioners, etc. – only a few of them had achieved their ambitions. And when the heads of the various prefectures of the cities and towns throughout the country were chosen, Mussolini preferred to appoint army generals and senior civil servants with solid careers behind them rather than Blackshirts from the squads. He knew his choices would lead to insubordination on the part of the local ras, whose only option now was to nurse their resentment against the state, but he also calculated, correctly, that the conflict would wear them down and lead to their eventual defeat.

  On the evening of 12th January 1923, at a meeting held in his private suite in the Grand Hotel in Rome, Mussolini founded the “Gran Consiglio Nazionale del Fascismo” (“Grand National Council of Fascism”). “The idea must have come to him out of the blue. He had not spoken of the idea beforehand with anyone, unlike all the other plans he’d come up with. He summoned us all to the very large and ornate sitting room of his apartment, without saying what the meeting would be about.”21

  Mussolini must last have come across the expression “Gran Consiglio” during his time in Switzerland, where the term – “Gran Consiglio” in the Ticino, “Grand Conseil” in the French-speaking part – is used to mean the parliaments, the legislative bodies of the individual cantons. For the meeting at the Grand Hotel he also hired a photographer: the occasion was to be recorded for posterity. Then he had it put into the school history books as one of the milestones in the history of Fascism. The Grand Council became an official organ of state in 1928. In January 1923 it was still merely a private meeting of party members, but Mussolini used his rhetorical skills to present it as the founding act of what would be the party’s most important executive body. It was always he who opened its meetings. He would listen in silence to the sometimes lengthy discussions and at a certain point intervene in person again, by summing up the points which had been raised and then gathering them together in a proposal which was put to a formal vote. The Grand Council was another tool in Mussolini’s hands, and it was clear from the outset, when his proposal to set it up was voted through unanimously, that he would use it to quell the rebel ras. “The Grand Council, in accordance with government directives requiring the disbanding of all political-military groupings of whatsoever kind by the end of the current month, declares the disbandment of all squads within the Fascist Party and their incorporation into the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Voluntary National Security Militia) according to the regulations to be issued by General Headquarters.”22

  The disbanding of the squads spelt defeat for the ras. Any resistance would have been a rebellion against the Duce and against the party. Whoever tried to prevent the disbandment of the local squads and their incorporation into the centralized Militia would have found himself automatically against the government, the party and, above all, the state. Mussolini’s aim was to identify Fascism with the state – the Fascist state – and transform himself into its symbol. He would no longer be the leader of a political party, but the “duce” of a totalizing national identity, of a patriotic faith capable of including the entire life of the country in its grasp. Since he was the state, it followed logically that the armed forces of the state should stand over all, including the Fascist Party. When Mussolini ordered the publication of an account of the first five years of the Grand Council and its decrees, he called it nothing less than Il libro della fede (The Book of Faith) and wrote in the introduction: “All the great institutions of the Regime have emerged from the Grand Council – above all, the Militia. The creation of the Militia was the fundamental, inexorable act which placed the Government on an utterly different level to all previous governments and transformed it into a Regime.”23

  In inventing the Grand Council, Mussolini thought he would achieve two things simultaneously: the progressive marginalization and eventual elimination of all the local ras, as we have seen, but also the creation of an outlet for the ambitions of the more prominent members of the party that conceded no real space for autonomous political manoeuvre, but instead parcelled up power into small portions which could be handed out. The new executive body took the most important and wide-ranging decisions. It was inconceivable it would ever vote against what the Duce wanted, at least until 25th July 1943, when it was the Grand Council which forced Mussolini to stand down in an internal coup d’état.

  In another passage from his introduction to Il libro della fede, Mussolini summed up the other move which laid the foundation for the creation of his personal dictatorship, over the Fascist Party itself: “There is a decree of 13th October 1923 which establishes – four years before the noted circular issued on 6th January 1927 – the position of the city prefects under the Fascist Regime: ‘The functions of the representatives of the Government – the prefects – and of the representatives of the National Fascist Party are clearly distinct and differentiated. The prefect’s sole responsibility is towards the Government, and he therefore has to act with complete autonomy within the limits of the law.”24 In other words, the party was free to occupy itself with organizing Fascist parades, Fascist dances, Fascist festivals, etc. The business of governing was up to Mussolini, working through the prefects he appointed.

  Yet this does not mean that Mussolini was ready to delegate the organization of the various Fascist ceremonies and rituals to the gerarchi; on the contrary, “he occupied himself with the smallest details of such ceremonies, down to the uniforms which were to be worn and other such petty matters. Even in doing this kind of work he was indefatigable. The first Fascists who joined the movement early on, in its rabble-rousing and unrestrained years, were highly resistant to these external rules of military discipline; he had an uphill fight to impose them.”25

  But when it was a question not of the organization of Fascist parades but the ceremonies controlled by the rigid protocol of the state and the Royal House of Savoy, Mussolini found himself up against that constitutional impediment which dogged him throughout his dictatorship. In the early summer of 1923 George V and his wife Queen Mary paid an official visit to Italy. Ceremonial protocol stipulated a precise order of precedence: after the royal families came the personages of the state, the President of the Senate, the President of the Lower Chamber, then the holders of the Order of the Annunciation, who, by virtue of their office, were regarded as the King’s unofficial cousins, and it was only after all these that Mussolini was placed. By the terms of the Albertine Statute, the fundamental law of the Italian monarchy, the position of head of government did not exist. By the rigid rules of ceremonial protocol, Mussolini was merely primus inter pares among the other ministers, who each swore an individual oath of loyalty to the King and were answerable to him, again as individuals, for their actions. Mussolini’s dictatorship began with this institutional flaw unresolved and it continued like this for years until he succeeded in finding a – partial – solution.

  To make up for the humiliation of having to process behind the presidents of the Senate and the Lower Chamber and obscure army generals, Mussolini spent the rest of the summer on a tour of central and northern
Italy. The courtiers responsible for applying ceremonial protocol might have snubbed him, but the cities and towns he visited on his tour were keen to make him an honorary citizen. “The women in the Abruzzi region, when he was travelling there, wanted to ‘touch’ him, especially the widows and mothers of men who had died in the Great War, in a replica of the local custom of touching fetishistic objects or relics.”26

  Of apparently less concern to Mussolini was another institutional defect: the ideological weakness of a regime that had no principles to guide it and no precise moral and ethical points of reference. He himself, on his road to power, had progressively discarded one ideal after another, until the resulting blankness itself became the goal, since it meant he was completely free to act as he chose: “Fascism did not have a ready-made programme for implementation. If it had, by now Fascism would have failed completely, like other political parties who neatly pack their suitcases with their doctrines and think that with this they can face the complex and ever-changing reality of human life. So the National Fascist Party did not have a manifesto of fine phrases but an overriding desire for action.”27

  The Fascist “desire for action” soon manifested itself in a series of violent attacks on all the opponents of the new regime: leading Socialist, Republican and Catholic politicians were beaten up and sometimes killed even in broad daylight. The more intransigent members of the squads hated democracy and refused to accept the idea that Fascism had become “parliamentary”, and that it had formed a government by allying itself with the old political parties they loathed. Mussolini’s attempts to transform some of his old adversaries into supporters by offering them posts in the new government were anathema to them. Margherita Sarfatti used all her skills as a writer to try to justify the violence on ideological grounds, to minimize its effects, to present it as a merely transitional phase:

  Groups of young lads would suddenly climb on a lorry or pile into two or three cars and drive to a nearby town, taking the Chamber of Labour by surprise or the shop in the left-wing cooperative which wouldn’t sell bread to non-party members, or the local Socialist association whose members had betrayed a local Fascist to the authorities or had had him beaten up; the young men would break up some furniture and smash windows, tear up registers, let fly with the occasional punch or thump… […] It was like a practical joke or an adventure story, played out with no sense of menace, with the lads’ faces uncovered for all to see, in an open-hearted crusade against petty local tyrants, who’d be “kidnapped and put in prison” briefly, as a prank, or made to drink a glass of castor oil. It was just a way of puncturing the self-importance of these local bigwigs who thought themselves omnipotent.28

  The reality was very different. The squads who had got used to overrunning towns and rural areas more or less with impunity, since the police forces rarely intervened, now saw Mussolini’s takeover of power as the signal to unleash a final reckoning. The thugs thought they’d been given the right to break into the homes of their political opponents – university professors, intellectuals, journalists and trade-union activists – where they would beat up and force their victims, as a minimum punishment, to drink a glass or a whole jug of castor oil, as, so it was thought, a purgative for the turpitude of their anti-Fascist ideas. Administering the oil was nothing less than a form of torture; castor oil is a powerful laxative, no longer used today precisely because its effects are so drastic. It also makes people vomit. The victims were not allowed to empty their bowels normally, but frequently had their trousers tied so they couldn’t take them off. When they returned home – if they returned home – they would arrive in front of their family in a pitiful and humiliating state.

  Just as man, according to the Catholic Church, is redeemed from original sin by holy water, so the anti-Fascist, according to the Fascist religion, is washed from the crime of anti-Fascism – harming his own country – by being administered castor oil. If the neophyte was responsive to the initial reprimands and drank the oil without resistance, the ceremony was soon over. If there was a show of resistance, the procedure was more complex. Because of this, many anti-Fascists were killed, since the man who resists redemption is more useful dead than alive to the faith and to the country. In the Romagna region there are many such martyrs. But in most cases such extreme measures were avoided. The rebel was rendered powerless and then his mouth was opened, often by using a special device which had been invented and patented by veteran members of the squads. The Florentine squad was celebrated, among other achievements, also for this invention. In the case of persistent recalcitrance, a tube was used, as in hospitals. The dose of castor oil was carefully measured out in proportion to the degree of the heretic’s obstinacy and the extent of his heresy. In complex cases, paraffin or petrol, and on occasion iodine tincture, was added to the castor oil.29

  After 1945, the various gerarchi and local Fascist chiefs did all they could to deny their responsibility for this wave of terror, deliberately trying in their memoirs and testimonies to minimize and gloss over the events. It is not by chance that Mussolini’s right-hand man, Cesare Rossi, recalls only one isolated incident from the period – the attack of Tuscan squads on the distinguished and well-known liberal senator, Olindo Malagodi. In his version, Mussolini was furious when he was informed that Malagodi had been forced to drink castor oil: “He immediately sent me to visit Malagodi at home with his apologies and regret for what had occurred. I found the late senator still suffering from the after-effects of the castor oil. When he recovered he came to the Viminale to thank me, after which our relations were always friendly.”30

  Rachele Mussolini is also one of those who have tried to make light of the severity of the acts of aggression committed by the Fascist squads, which frequently left the victims half-dead and on occasion killed them outright. If we are to believe her, we must assume that Mussolini’s wife never saw an attack or knew someone who was a victim of one, since she found herself able to write that castor oil was used on only “a few occasions” and was in any case a punishment restricted “to opponents of a certain social class”. Unbelievably, she writes that this form of torture was considered an “honour for lawyers and public servants” and comments:

  They took their victim and forced him to swallow a certain quantity of castor oil, not in amounts which could kill him, of course, but enough to keep him at home for a while with all the usual after-effects. These methods are certainly blameworthy, but, all things considered, it was better to have to remain in the lavatory for several hours than in a hospital bed with a fractured skull or, worse, in the mortuary with a bullet in the chest, as happens with the more “progressive” methods they use nowadays.31

  But the mortuaries were frequently used, since the punishments meted out by the Fascist squads were not restricted to inflicting degradation and humiliation on their victims. The so-called “punishment” was carried out in public, frequently in front of the victim’s family, after making sure they couldn’t intervene to stop it going ahead. The chosen victims were dragged from their homes just as they were, with no time to dress or cover themselves. If they thought they could soon escape the wrath of their attackers by drinking a pint of castor oil, they were usually deceiving themselves. Many were forced to acclaim Mussolini and make public recantation of their own ideas and political beliefs. If they refused, they were beaten up. “The aim was the same whether they used castor oil or the method which became a favourite in Ferrara and Rovigo, in which the victim was kidnapped in the middle of the night and then stripped naked and abandoned by the side of a road or tied to a tree. […] The opponent was infantilized; sometimes his body hair was shaved in order to ‘feminize’ him.”32

  In this climate of extreme violence, many newspapers and some of the most prominent figures from the democratic parties took the view that Mussolini was a kind of “transitional cure”, a necessary evil to resolve the problems of the country. Others retreated into an ineffectual silence and, despite the increasing authoritarianism and violence
in political and social life, refused to speak out on the developments which were taking place after the March on Rome. Then there was the increasing number of those who flocked to support the winning side, loud in their effusive praise of Fascism and Mussolini. In their view, the man had finally arrived who could sweep away the dinosaurs and scoundrels of the old order. After that, they fantasized, it would be up to a new generation to sweep away in their turn the Fascists and their leader. Circumstances such as these offered Mussolini new possibilities for manoeuvre. “If Fascism as a movement gave cause for concern and was responsible for many things which were seen as inexcusable, Mussolini was viewed in a quite different light. The myth of Mussolini the man was emerging. Many Italians who were critical of Fascism or even opposed it outright put their trust in him. The sensational course of his political career, his contradictions, his excessive reactions, tended to be seen positively or at least were regarded – more or less absurdly – as giving cause for hope.”33

  But perhaps the political insight which was most beneficial to Mussolini was his realization that the country was desperately tired after the long travails of the war years, the outbreak of the Spanish flu epidemic, the aftermath of two major earthquakes (Messina in 1908 and Avezzano in 1915) and the violent civil conflict during which his own Fascist squads had sown mayhem and bloodshed through the length and breadth of Italy. The weariness in the country had resulted in a moral and economic crisis. Public opinion was becoming increasingly passive; several massacres perpetrated by the Fascists had taken place without incurring any display of public indignation.