Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  “In the whole of history there has never been a problem which has not been resolved either by force or by patience or by wisdom, and this is true also for the ‘Roman Question’. The Fascist Regime, which has the whole of the twentieth century ahead of it, has the capacity to succeed, without renouncing any of the fundamental rights which pertain to the state, where liberal democracy has repeatedly failed. The conclusion is this: the task will be arduous, but it is not impossible.” With these words Mussolini ended his text in the official despatch of the Fascist Party on 20th October 1927. They were a signal for the secret negotiations to resume. But the factions opposed to a successful outcome, who were working with equal security as far as their membership was concerned, had no intention of giving up. Father Tacchi Venturi, who could boast he had ministered the Communion to Mussolini during the Easter Mass, was one of the principal negotiators for the Vatican. Venturi was a colourful figure, worthy of some of the other tales of intrigue and espionage associated with the Vatican. An attempt was made on his life on 27th February 1928. He escaped with wounds, and Mussolini ordered a police investigation. The motives for the attack were clear enough, but it was more difficult to identify who had planned and carried it out. The only strong response to the incident was to speed ahead with the negotiations. An agreement was reached on the flat-rate sum the state would pay to the Vatican by way of compensation, and the clauses of the concordat and the financial agreement were duly drawn up.

  On 11th February 1929, Cardinal Pietro Gasparri representing the Vatican and Mussolini for the Italian state signed the final version of the agreement in the great hall of the papal palace in the complex of the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano. On the same day, in what was a gift for the regime’s propaganda, the Pope paid tribute to Mussolini as a “man of destiny”. The event sent the press wild with enthusiasm; the myth of the Duce seemed unassailable. The Lateran Pacts – the official name for the concordat – spelt an end to the People’s Party, but at the same time reassured Catholics in general. The regime had solved the main outstanding problem left over from the unification of the country, nearly sixty years after Bersaglieri troops had breached the Porta Pia gate into the city and put an end to the Papacy’s temporal rule.

  Mussolini also had a gift for the Pope: he outlawed Freemasonry, the historical enemy of the Church, removed the archives belonging to the lodges, had their symbols destroyed and burnt. While the secret negotiations with the Vatican were going on, the Obedience of Piazza del Gesù had sought to bring Arnaldo Mussolini over to their side by offering him the highest position in the order, the “33rd”. He had turned them down, and it seems curious that the masters of that branch of the Freemasons didn’t in their wisdom have the foresight to check before exposing themselves to such a public refusal. Shortly after the signing of the concordat, Mussolini was gratified to read an article by his brother in which Arnaldo had written: “The unreasonable objections coming from a small part of the Freemasons in hock to the interests and conditions of foreign fraternities needed to be overcome. Benito Mussolini, famed as a condottiere, statesman and inspiring leader, has brought clarity to the political and spiritual state of affairs in Italy, has gone beyond mere rhetoric, has followed his instinct and his presentiment of what a great achievement such a reconciliation would represent.”28

  Now the Duce was ready to go to the country with his plebiscite. It was held the month after the signing of the concordat, on 24th March 1929, and in the wake of the agreement the Azione Cattolica (Catholic Action) movement, the Catholic press, the parishes and other religious associations urged the faithful to vote and to vote in favour. The regime obtained 98.4 per cent of the votes. The four hundred men on the list that had been the sole object of the vote duly took their seats in a perfectly useless parliament.

  But while the signing of the Lateran Pacts had put relations between Church and state on a new footing, it had not put a stop to the polemics over certain issues. The basic problem remained the country’s younger generation. Mussolini saw the Fascist movement as a faith of which he was the supreme interpreter, a view which inevitably came into conflict with the faith represented by the vicar of Christ on earth. For the Duce, with the signing of the concordat, Catholicism had been integrated into the Fascist state. “Other regimes,” he declared in a long speech to parliament on 13th May 1929, “another regime, not ours, a liberal democratic regime, a regime run by the kind of men we despise, may think it beneficial to ignore the need to educate the younger generations. That is not Fascism’s way. On this question we are implacable. Education is ours. These children must be educated in our religious faith.” The Pope responded to Mussolini the following day when speaking to the pupils of a Jesuit college. In his speech, which appeared in the press, the Pope called on the state to complete the work begun by the family and by the Church. “The state does not exist to absorb, to swallow up, to annihilate the individual and the family. This would be an absurdity, it would be against nature, since the family exists before society and the state come into being.”

  The debate dragged on, with occasional sudden moments of tension, but neither side had any wish to exacerbate the crisis. On 7th June, in another solemn ceremony, the two parties to the concordat exchanged their respective ratifications of the agreement they had signed four months previously. On 25th July the Pope came out into St Peter’s Square, the first time since 1870 a pontiff had ventured outside the Vatican; on 5th December a solemn procession, preceded by a cameraman and photographers and followed by a long line of noblemen and other dignitaries, went in the opposite direction: the King and Queen of Italy, who for the first time were received by the Pope on an official visit.

  In this atmosphere of general triumph, one of Mussolini’s mistresses in the past, Angela Curti, got in touch again with the “man of destiny” and started to visit him in Rome. “For my mother it was the beginning of a golden period: taking up again her love story with Benito Mussolini. […] She started what was to be a long series of visits to Rome, gradually immersing herself each time in the fascinating and complex world which surrounded him and the power he wielded. Our home was always bustling with her comings and goings, and the packing and unpacking of suitcases. The cases used to fascinate me as a little girl, perhaps because I used to see the happy dreamy expression in my mother’s eyes as she packed them, as if she’d slipped something else in them more precious than the beautiful dresses she’d sewn herself.”29

  Gaily humming the songs of her youth – “I like the fragrance of Coty / you bring with you” – Angela Curti, with her elegant underwear and fashionable clothes, made her trips to Rome and back across an Italy which had now been transformed into an entirely Fascist country. The emblem of the fasces (a bundle of sticks combined with an axe blade, an ancient Roman symbol of power) now appeared everywhere, displayed in every conceivable activity, to the point that Mussolini himself intervened to have it removed from dustmen’s lorries and demand that it shouldn’t be sported by singers or hunters. He made no objection, however, when a law was passed making it obligatory to write the word DUCE in block capitals. The regime and the dictatorship was his; the Fascist movement belonged to him alone. The “mystique of Fascism” became an obligatory subject of study in schools, with its basic principle that the Duce knew what needed to be done in all spheres of human endeavour and was always in the right. Italian schoolchildren had to meditate on his pronouncements, increasingly found painted in large capital letters on walls in cities, towns and even along country roads. Every pupil spent hours writing compositions on the Duce’s sayings such as “The plough cuts the furrow and the sword defends it”.

  “The mystique is a mistake” someone might have dared to pun while making very sure they were out of earshot. The regime listened everywhere and to everything. In 1927 a reorganization of the police forces took place, and the body known as OVRA was created specifically for this function. What the initials stood for was meant to be slightly mysterious; they gave off an aur
a of violence and intimidation. OVRA was a development on a grand scale of the Fascist Cheka of which Mussolini had always denied the existence. There existed one sure interpretation of the “R” and the “A”, the last two letters: “repressione” (“repression”) and “antifascismo” (“anti-Fascism”). What this meant in practice and in detail was a constant activity of searches, surveillance, arrests, beatings, murders and an obsessive keeping of records on all so-called subversives, whatever their political beliefs. OVRA could track each and every individual suspected of opposing the regime, and its officials knew at any given moment who they needed to keep under observation, how many stonecutters were facing charges of anti-Fascist activity, how many had succeeded in clearing their names, how many had been sent for trial, how many were under special surveillance – and so on for printers, mechanics, station porters, barbers, nurses, tram drivers, chauffeurs, housewives, watchmakers, glaziers, bakers, administrators, clerks, accountants.

  Mussolini believed that opposition would stir back into life at the slightest sign he was releasing his grip – but, characteristically, he did not want to use “only” the methods of informers and thugs. To achieve a real security which would allow him the amplest possible margin for manoeuvre he wanted political control over the situation. He thus allowed rumours to circulate of a partial liberalization of the regime, a lessening of pressure on public life, even the repeal of some of the laws which limited personal liberties. Rather like an amateur fisherman throwing out bait round his boat to attract fish, so Mussolini threw out these apparent concessions to see how much of the opposition would be attracted. The possibility of founding a semi-reformist party was held out to some war veterans. The most concrete proposals were made to the socialist trade-union leader Bruno Buozzi, who was living in exile in Paris. The regime invited him to return to work to bridge the economic gaps which still divided Italians and instil new confidence into the workers. The philosopher Benedetto Croce, who had remained an implacable and untouchable opponent of the regime, was tempted with the proposal of a nomination to the prestigious Reale Accademia d’Italia, and other opposition intellectuals were also contacted, always with the utmost discretion. All refused, “and with this refusal democratic anti-Fascism, represented by men like Buozzi and Croce, not only saved its soul and vindicated its right to claim to govern the country after the fall of Fascism, but also demonstrated that its attachment to freedom was sincere and concrete, not open to political bargaining, and so prevented the regime from claiming that communism was its only enemy.”30

  Recent historical accounts of Fascism have begun to bring out how much the left-wing roots of Fascism tried to survive within the later ideology. It is not simply a question of Mussolini’s change of allegiance, which has in any case been seen too simplistically as a betrayal: as we have seen, he pursued power for its own sake, without reference to any moral, ethical or ideological principle. Yet he also managed to carry across into Fascism various left-wing ideas. “Fascism starts as a heterodox movement which takes its inspiration from several political radical tendencies. It is often seen as taking the form of a right-wing – even extreme right-wing – dictatorship, but it was in fact a collage of various ideas, with those coming from the left probably more prevalent. […] Fascism was more concerned with invoking left-wing ideas, often radical ones, cast in a nationalist mould, than attacking the internationalist and pacifist left. We only need to think of the trends which were absorbed into its ideology: revolutionary syndicalism, socialist irredentism, radical republicanism. The reactionary component within Fascism did its best to neutralize these trends, yet they succeeded in persisting, however fluctuatingly, throughout the twenty years the regime was in power.”31

  It is enough to recall that it was Mussolini’s regime which introduced the concepts of a national labour contract based on collective bargaining as well as employment tribunals. These were supposed to advance corporatist aims and resolve any conflicts among “producers” – in other words, between owners and workers – as well as preventing strikes and lockouts, and they were kept under strict central control, but nevertheless they represent innovative thinking in the field of labour relations. In the declining days of the Italian Social Republic, under Nazi power, Mussolini once more tried to adjust the – by now useless – political compass of the regime to the left. And the change of political direction was not merely a question of emphasizing the “social” in the regime’s new name, or confined to Mussolini’s musings on how to “socialize” private enterprise by introducing policies such as so-called “free” elections to the executive boards of firms like Fiat or Marelli, or by getting representatives from the shop floor to work alongside managing directors. Junio Valerio Borghese, the commander of the famous assault troops the Decima Flottiglia Mezzi d’Assalto (Tenth Assault Vehicle Flotilla), known as the Decima Mas, which remained in the north of the country after the Armistice on 8th September 1943, explicitly attempted to distance himself from reactionary Fascism and make independent contact with the Allies. In a television interview with the author of this book, his assistant Paska Piredda, the only woman with officer ranking in the Decima Mas, responsible for the regiment’s external relations and its paperwork, has described the progress of contacts with Partisans from the so-called “Matteotti brigade” and the formation of various “mixed” squadrons made up of Partisans and men from the Decima Mas. She has also confirmed that frogmen paratroopers were sent with amphibious vehicles behind the Allied lines to make contact with that part of the Decima Mas which had gone to the south of the country following the orders of the King. Another of Piredda’s memories is the surprise attack launched by a squadron of men from the Decima Mas to rescue Borghese, their commander, who’d been arrested by Mussolini on charges of plotting against him.

  The celebrated film director, screenwriter and librettist Piero Vivarelli – he wrote, among others, songs made popular by the singer Adriano Celentano, such as ‘24,000 baci’ and ‘Il tuo bacio è come un rock’ – was at the time of the war a very young – actually underage – volunteer serving in the Decima Mas in the north of Italy. In another television interview with the author of this book, Vivarelli has described how he was for a time undecided about whether to join the communist partisans active around Florence, who had been in contact with him, or the Decima Mas. After the war Vivarelli became a fervent communist, to the point of asking Fidel Castro if he could join the Cuban Communist Party (he was already a member of the Italian party and had also adhered to the various extreme left-wing movements which sprang up in later years). For a young person like Vivarelli living under the Italian Social Republic, what shape the political future might take was far from clear.

  Vivarelli also spoke about coming across a copy, at the end of March 1945, of a socialist newspaper, the Italia del popolo, which was being published with Mussolini’s consent. Even though the erstwhile Duce now ruled only half the country, which was in any case occupied by the Germans, he had allowed the formation of a new group to go ahead, the Raggruppamento Nazionale Repubblicano Socialista (National Republican Socialist Grouping), which later transformed itself into a fully fledged political party. It is noteworthy that the title of Italia del popolo is a deliberate reversal of that of the Fascist newspaper founded by Mussolini years before, Il Popolo d’Italia, almost as if to point out that the new paper was in dialectical opposition to its predecessor. The editor-in-chief was Edmondo Cione, a former student of Benedetto Croce’s, who joined the newly established Christian Democrat party after the war was over. He worked with a variety of associates on the paper, including Carlo Silvestri, a Socialist who had stayed close to Mussolini and who supported the idea of coming to a deal with the Partisans, and Concetto Pettinato, one of the proponents of the racial laws in the late 1930s and a Fascist who was profoundly disturbed by the thought of looming defeat. It was far from easy to produce a socialist newspaper in those twilight days of the regime: it was printed in fifty thousand copies, a notable print run in t
hat troubled period, but its circulation was severely limited, given that most of the copies were regularly destroyed by the black brigades made up of diehard Fascists. At the end of his life Mussolini’s thinking lacked sharpness and lucidity; the cloudiness of his ideas can be seen, for example, in the remarks made to Georg Zachariae: “The internal politics of Italy will be characterized by the methodical and equal-handed application of the law on socialization with all the social consequences and forms of provision which will follow on from it. No one will be able to stop me putting such laws into practice. I’m aware that I’ll be going against the whole social order as presently constituted; I can foresee I’ll be attacked on all sides. The whole of world capitalism and its forces will try to stop me putting my plans into practice.”32

  For the past fifty years historians have tried to erase, at least from general historical awareness, the approaches which Mussolini’s regime made towards the political left, and as a result it has been difficult to analyse and assess the recent leanings towards the left shown by various political leaders whose careers have emerged within a right-wing tradition which explicitly identifies itself as stemming from Mussolini’s Fascism. Having repudiated Fascism and its crimes, these politicians have surprised many commentators by welcoming – albeit still from a right-wing point of view – such developments as, for example, the enrolment of homosexuals in the armed forces, scientific experimentation with stem cells, the commemoration of the holocaust, the freedom of terminally ill individuals to choose assisted suicide. An unexpected flash of insight about what the future might hold can be found in the notes Mussolini jotted down while in prison after the fall of the regime on 25th July 1943. He wondered what effect the “trauma”, as he described it, of his fall would have on younger Italians, brought up under the regime: “What will they look to, these youngsters who’ve experienced this sudden upheaval? Either to the left, towards extremist positions, or else, in their disappointment and loss of faith, to a lack of belief in anything or anyone.”33