Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  On 7th April 1926 in the Campidoglio in Rome, Mussolini stopped to greet a group of students. As he raised his arm in the Fascist salute, he moved his head back slightly, which was enough to save him from the bullet fired at him at that instant by Violet Gibson, which merely grazed his nose. Gibson, of Irish nationality, turned out to be mentally unbalanced; she was also planning to shoot the Pope. As it turned out, of all his would-be assassins, Gibson was the one who came nearest to succeeding. Mussolini had his nose bandaged and continued on his way. The best propaganda coup was to be seen to go about his business as if nothing had happened. Later that day, after the failed assassination attempt, he coined a new Fascist slogan: “If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I die, avenge me.” The slogan was not in fact original; the words had resurfaced, who knows how, from one of the history books he liked to read. They had originally been spoken by a leader of the Vendée revolt during the French Revolution, the Catholic general Henri du Vergier, comte de la Rochejaquelein, on 13th April 1793, after the victory over the revolutionary republican army at the battle of Les Aubiers. Gibson was certified insane and sent back to Britain in a gesture of clemency, which was favourably reported in the international press.

  At eight in the morning on 11th September 1926, Mussolini was being driven to Palazzo Chigi. The street was lined with the usual plain-clothes policemen standing around pretending to read the newspaper. It was hot, and the car windows had been lowered. As they reached Porta Pia, Boratto heard something bang against the car door. He turned and saw an object rolling away in the road. Like any former soldier, he knew immediately what it was – a hand grenade of the SIPE type, in the shape of a lemon, its case like a tortoise shell. Mussolini was reading in the back seat and asked if someone had thrown a stone at the car. “No, Duce, it’s a bomb,” replied Boratto pressing the accelerator down. The grenade exploded, but the car was already thirty metres away. Eight passers-by were wounded, and the windows in nearby apartment blocks broken; the grenade had missed entering the car by only a few centimetres. Mussolini thanked Boratto and praised his quick thinking, adding that he was certain his lucky star would have protected him in any case. One of his visitors that day was Duchess Hélène of Aosta. As she made her way among the crowd of gerarchi and other officials, the Duchess, who was extremely tall, identified Boratto and went over to congratulate him. The chauffeur modestly thanked her, but Mussolini, disliking the idea Boratto might be seen as a hero, interjected: “It was nothing to worry about. Even if the grenade had entered the car I’d have been able to throw it out – after all I served with the Bersaglieri.”10

  The grenade attack, the third attempt to assassinate Mussolini, had been organized by Gino Lucetti, a stonemason and an independent anarchist who had emigrated to France. Lucetti had a second grenade, but didn’t have time to throw it before the security police seized hold of him. Four days later, Mussolini received a letter from his brother Arnaldo. Arnaldo looked after Mussolini’s business affairs, and the letter was enclosed with the tax files for Il Popolo d’Italia, of which Mussolini had remained the proprietor. His brother urged him not to encourage extremist reactions to the attack, but rather to eliminate the extremists: “May God give you his help and may he make the security forces who protect your precious life always on the alert and aware. […] If I might be allowed to express my opinion on the current political situation, I would advise you to take over the running of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the next few days. I like and respect Federzoni, and regard him as a loyal and devoted follower. But your authority is needed to put all those detestable rebel Fascists with their factiousness and refusal to compromise in their proper place…”11

  Arnaldo had also become responsible for keeping the still-furious Ida Dalser under control. He had had to deal with her in January 1925 while his brother was in the middle of the Matteotti crisis. With a notary in Trento he had an agreement drawn up which transferred the considerable – for the time – sum of 100,000 lire to the young Benito Albino Mussolini, to be made available to him when he reached the age of majority. Until then the money was to be held in the safekeeping of the Paichers, the couple who were the little boy’s legal guardians. No one has ever been able to discover what happened to the money.

  The assassination attempts on Mussolini’s life, the consequent abolition of some basic civil freedoms and the constant state of alert in which the regime’s forces of repression were kept made their effects felt also on the unfortunate Dalser. She was compulsorily sectioned in the psychiatric hospital in Pergine on the night of 19th June 1926. She was forty-three years old. Alfredo Pieroni in his research into her story discovered a letter from her in which she recounts what happened to her: “When they saw me, I was seized, beaten, tied up, drugged, insulted and bundled into a car with my mouth gagged until we got to the police station. After coarsely searching and tormenting me, they threw me on the floor in a straitjacket and tied me to a couple of filthy boards by my hands, feet and waist, hurting my teeth and covering me with extremely painful bruises.”12 This was the beginning of the end for her. Psychiatric asylums at the time were certainly not places where the mentally ill went to get better; on the contrary, they reduced them definitively to a state of madness. Nonetheless, Dalser was able to recover some of her calm and determination after her forced internment. She was able to speak to the hospital medical staff. They saw the bruises resulting from her capture, but no one was concerned about them, since the use of force on “an uncontrollably mad person” was considered standard procedure. The psychiatrist who visited her in the hospital a few days after her arrival, a certain Dr Satta, was convinced she was telling the truth about the manner in which she had been seized, and wrote in his case notes: “These people have tried to use the methods of the Viminale on her, they wanted to kill her as they killed Matteotti, but they didn’t take account of her or of Mussolini, who’s too good-hearted to think that evildoers might betray him. She knew what these thugs were really like and what they were getting up to, and she never stopped warning her Benito about what was happening, to try to advise him, to get him to see what the outcome would be.”13 Satta was clearly one of the millions of Italians who were naive enough to fall for Mussolini’s confidence trickery and believe that he was the great mediator and peacemaker who could alone bring the thugs and the extremists under control.

  The fourth attempt on Mussolini’s life took place little over a month later, on 31st October, in mysterious circumstances in Bologna. While Mussolini was returning to the railway station, someone in the crowds lining the streets shot a pistol at him, which again grazed him, or rather the ribbon of an order medal he was wearing round his neck. In the confusion which followed, a fifteen-year-old boy, Anteo Zamboni, was identified as the perpetrator. He was lynched on the spot by a gang of Fascists. Once again, Mussolini immediately announced that he would stick to the prearranged schedule of his appointments. “Continuing the Bologna visit as if nothing had happened became, from the point of view of psychological propaganda, another fundamental building block in the construction of his public persona: nothing could disturb the imperturbable Duce, nothing could make him deviate from the path he had chosen, not even an attempt to kill him.”14

  Mussolini was far ahead of his opponents and rivals in his use of the new means of mass communication. As a former journalist, he was already familiar with the traditional press. Radio was born with him, so to speak, and he immediately used it to propagate his myth. In 1924 he had granted a monopoly of radio broadcasting to URI, which three years later was transformed into EIAR or the Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiofoniche (Italian Radio Broadcasting Corporation). The number of programmes increased rapidly while radios started to appear in Italian homes; on important occasions, they were also installed in the squares of towns and villages. The radio became a megaphone for the regime, its master’s voice. The cinema, in the meantime, was emerging from its beginnings; Mussolini saw its potential and took control of the industry. When he
transferred his residence to Villa Torlonia, he had a private cinema installed where he watched all the films issued by the national film institute, the Istituto Luce, before they were released. It was better than looking in the mirror; he gave orders to cut out of the newsreels all the expressions and movements of his own that he didn’t like. At the same time the projections gave him an opportunity to perfect, obsessively, the ones he thought were successful. His attention to the photographs of himself taken for public display was equally obsessive. Early on in the regime he preferred the photographs in which he appeared hard, rigid, his shoulders squared and his jaw jutting; after the invasion of Ethiopia he started to modify his stern and truculent image by choosing photos in which he was portrayed smiling. Newspapers and magazines, the cinema and the radio – all the means of mass communication were put to propaganda uses: “If we understand this, the construction of his myth can be seen as a rational strategy, on a par with all the other political strategies he followed during these years.”15

  Once he had the means of communication under his complete control, Mussolini could go on to eradicate what vestiges still remained of the now superseded liberal democratic state. Nothing must be allowed to disturb the tranquillity of “his” people. The opposition parties were suppressed, and their newspapers closed down; the death penalty was introduced for opponents of the regime; a special court was set up to try anti-Fascists together with police internment; all passports were restricted and made subject to inspection before they could be renewed. The King gave his approval to all these measures, without the slightest protest, even when all the opposition deputies in parliament were dismissed. The dictatorship at this point became a reality. The talk at court and among the nobility was that the King had become a “prisoner” of the Duce’s.

  Yet if the King was Mussolini’s prisoner, then Mussolini was in his turn a prisoner of the diarchy which formed the Italian state. In his path to dictatorship, he had in a certain sense underestimated several of the possible consequences of the legal organization of the new state – or, at least, had assumed too easily that the primacy of politics, of his own political abilities, would always prevail in the control of real power. He delegated the task of constructing the new state to a conservative politician who did not come from inside the Fascist ranks, Alfredo Rocco, and continued to support him even when the party criticized his choice. Naturally Mussolini saw that the legal architecture of the emerging new state was not ideal for the exercise of his absolute power, but he was confident that he could continue to act as he’d done so far, modifying the laws whenever it suited him to do so, and that he could always influence events to his own advantage. This was how Rocco, as the Minister for Justice, was able to get parliamentary approval for his law of 24th December 1925, which redefined the role and the prerogatives of the head of the Italian government. On the one hand, Mussolini became a head of government in the true sense of the word, given, in another sudden raft of new laws, quite enormous powers; on the other, a clause in Rocco’s bill emphasized that “the government of the sovereign is an emanation of the power of the sovereign and not of parliament, and as such must therefore have the confidence of the sovereign” – a few words which would come to have a determining impact on the future course of events. At the time, as people acclaimed Mussolini’s dizzying rise to power, they seemed trivial, a mere restating of what had always been the case. The Duce’s authority was not affected in any way by the clause, while it served to reassure the circles close to the House of Savoy that the monarchy would be left untouched. This was indeed how things functioned for the next eighteen years, until 25th July 1943, when Victor Emmanuel III decided to use “the power of the sovereign” which the Rocco law had confirmed was his and withdrew his confidence from the head of what was, again by the terms of the 1925 law, his – the King’s – government. But back in December 1925, according to Mussolini himself, no tensions between Fascism and the monarchy existed, and the diarchy was absorbed silently into the regime.

  The only serious clash occurred when a further law made the Grand Council the supreme institution in the state and gave it the power to intervene in the question of who could succeed to the throne. During the period of the Social Republic in Salò, Mussolini still recalled this confrontation with the Royal House. “From this time on Victor Emmanuel began to detest Mussolini and to nurse a hatred of Fascism. ‘The regime’, he said, ‘cannot intervene in an area which a basic law has defined. If a political party in a monarchic system wants to decide who can succeed to the throne, then the monarchy is no longer a monarchy. The only rule of monarchic succession is the cry ‘The King is dead! Long live the King!’”16 In the face of the King’s hostile reaction, Mussolini hastened to explain that the proposal was only intended to enable the Grand Council to intervene in the eventuality that there were no successors to the throne – a feeble attempt at justification, made even more so by the fact there were numerous princes in the House of Savoy who by the terms of Salic law were in line for the throne. To avoid a crisis over the issue, Mussolini was obliged to confirm that the King’s son Umberto, Prince of Piedmont, was the official heir.

  In reality the insertion of the Fascist Grand Council into the constitutional architecture of the state represented a potential risk to the Duce’s power, but this did not concern Mussolini, who thought it inconceivable that any form of internal opposition could emerge from an institution which he himself had created. As his dictatorship grew in strength he took to snubbing its decisions, and its meetings took place less and less frequently.

  Despite errors and vacillations, despite the division of constitutional power with the King, the regime, now without any official opposition, embedded itself among the Italian masses thanks to the particular relationship – personal and direct – which the Duce strove to create with them. It was an insubstantial construction, not destined to resist the harsh events which put it to the test, like the bombardments and the rationing which came with the Second World War – yet, so long as it stood in place, it provided the extensive but precarious scaffolding for the Fascist system and the myth of Mussolini. “I consider the nation to be in a permanent state of war,” Mussolini declared in a speech to the country’s industrialists in 1926, which he concluded with the assertion that “this political regime and the current climate are, as far as we humans can foresee the future, unchangeable”.

  In Mussolini’s Italy strikes and lockouts became crimes punishable by law. No one objected – because it was no longer possible to object – that if there were no strikes there would be no lockouts or pointed out the absurdity of treating both as if they were the same phenomenon. The country’s economy had to be run according to the principle “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”.

  Mussolini was aware that the factory workers in the industrial heartlands of northern Italy, faced by the unfolding spectacle of Fascism, were unenthusiastic, if not downright hostile to the regime. “In early 1924, the elections which were held in the factories in Turin produced a clear victory of the Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici [Federation of Metal Industry Workers] which obtained eighty-one per cent of the votes against the mere fifteen per cent which went to the [Fascist-led] Corporations. The employers themselves were unfavourably disposed towards the Fascist trade unions, well aware that they were hardly representative of the mass of workers and also of their organizational limitations.”17 Mussolini took immediate practical measures to bring this situation under control, but knew that the problem could only be resolved completely over time. The regime had to maintain its grip on power and wait. A new generation would gradually replace the old working class; the new workers who would emerge would all have been born and brought up under Fascism. The fact that as children they had had to wear the uniforms prescribed by the two Fascist youth movements, the Balilla and the Avanguardisti, meant that, when the time came for them to do so, they would put on the blue overalls of the factory worker in a very d
ifferent spirit from their predecessors.

  Yet beneath the slogans, the violence and the parades, Fascism had no original content: there was nothing new in the regime to justify Mussolini’s belief or hope that it would prove enduring. Its underlying themes were the familiar ones of patriotism and nationalism; the only “serious” part of its whole ideological framework was the idea that the class struggle preached by revolutionary socialism had been superseded, and this was “serious” only in the sense that the historical justification for Mussolini’s dictatorship resided in his capacity to supersede what he himself had been in the past. As he followed his political instincts, taking all power into his own hands, he increasingly thought of himself as an artist. On 24th February 1926 he declared in a speech: “There is no doubt that politics is an art. It is certainly not a science. Nor is it merely empirical. It is therefore an art, also because it requires a high degree of intuition. ‘Political’ creation resembles artistic creation in being a combination of slow elaboration with lightning flashes of divination. The moment comes when the artist creates by inspiration, the politician by decision. Both the artist and the politician work with and upon matter and spirit.”18

  One outcome of the measures Mussolini took to resolve the problems with trade unions was to close down the General Confederation of Labour, the main Socialist union. On 4th January 1927 it issued a brief statement: “The National Council of the General Confederation of Labour… declares its functions have terminated and asks the Executive Committee to proceed to the liquidation and settlement of the Confederation’s remaining interests.” Bruno Buozzi and other exiles re-established the union in France, while several Communist trade unionists worked to support a clandestine organization in Italy. After making some concessions to the industrialists, Mussolini drew up a formal Fascist Workers Charter, which won some favourable recognition from European socialist leaders, causing problems for the anti-Fascist cause.