Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  The Duce was supposed to be present in the minds and in the houses of each and every Italian – but their homes could also be a place where they could take refuge from the regime and its intrusions, so it was better that these new citizens – or rather subjects of the new state – should be brought out from their houses as often and for as long as possible. Mussolini was intent on organizing the collective life of the nation in such a way that it worked and fought for the priorities set by the regime. His aim was to take children away from their families when they were six, hand them over to the state – in other words, the Duce – and then after six decades of mass existence hand them back, so to speak, for a final period of secluded rest – very secluded in order not to spoil the perennially youthful image of Italy under Fascism. In Mussolini’s eyes, this kind of collective life spent under the shadow of gigantic Ms seemed an intrinsically appealing vision.

  Yet the vision clearly risked coming into conflict with the Church’s youth movement, Azione Cattolica; neither Mussolini nor the Pope had any intention of giving ground on the subject of who was to educate the country’s younger generations. What was at stake was the influence and control either side could acquire over the formation of Italy’s future political, administrative and managerial classes; whichever side lost in the effort to establish their version of the connections between moral and political behaviour risked being left behind as time went by.

  On 29th May 1931 – now without the restraining advice of his brother to guide him – Mussolini ordered all the prefectures in the country to close down any youth associations and movements which did not belong to the party. The Vatican, however, was determined to resist: it opened hard-fought negotiations with the regime with the result that it succeeded in keeping many young people away from direct Fascist influence. It was from among this generation that many of the future founders of the Christian Democrats would come after the war, going on to establish its fifty years of political success. The Church’s ability to withstand Mussolini’s pressure lay in a hierarchy of men who were the beneficiaries of a centuries-old tradition, while Mussolini was surrounded by figures like Starace. (After eight years as party secretary he too was dismissed, to his enduring bewilderment; he was caught and shot – on the spot – by Partisans who recognized him among the crowds who had gone to see Mussolini’s corpse strung up in Piazzale Loreto in Milan on 29th April 1945; he too had not been able to resist going to see one final time his adored leader.) The men who surrounded the Duce normally didn’t last long; he would force them to perform almost impossible tasks and then suddenly dump them without ado, stripping them of their office and status. The technique was deliberate and intended to prevent them from gaining time and space in which to construct their private fiefdoms; if he had not constantly kept them in check, they would have turned into new ras, like the provincial leaders he had to defeat earlier, but potentially more dangerous, since they had grown up in the shadow of his power. Mussolini’s treatment of Dino Grandi is an example: he appointed him Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1929, only to remove him from the post three years later to take over the running of the ministry himself.

  It was in these years that Hitler had started to woo Mussolini, declaring that he regarded the Italian dictator as one of his models, and that Nazism took its inspiration from what he had done. He had even tried to obtain a signed photograph of the Duce, without success. After he came to power, on 5th March 1933, he stubbornly continued to seek out Mussolini as a potential and obvious ally, given the ideological similarities between the two regimes.

  On 25th March 1934, on the orders of Mussolini, a second plebiscite was held in the country, in a parody of the free elections which had previously taken place. As in the earlier one, “voters” were only able to respond with a “yes” or “no” to a list of four hundred candidates proposed by the regime. The 1934 plebiscite is accorded hardly any attention in the history books, and yet it was a significant episode, since the result represented the high-water mark of consensus achieved by the regime, even after the pressure to conform, the lack of free choice and the threat of violence have been taken into account: there were fewer than fifteen thousand “no” votes, just 0.15 per cent of all those cast.

  Following the plebiscite, Mussolini once again showed a renewed interest in opening towards the left wing. A group of Socialists led by a former mayor of Milan, Emilio Caldara, got in touch with him, and Mussolini agreed to meet them on 18th April, just three weeks after his overwhelming victory in the plebiscite. As usual, he made no firm commitments or undertakings and seemed to remain open to any suggestion. In this particular case the proposal was that a number of Socialist trade-unionists should join the Fascist trade unions declaring their loyalty not to Fascism but to the corporative state. Caldara set about finding supporters for the scheme, but he had failed to understand Mussolini’s position – or rather, his lack of one: the proposal came to nothing, although it caused widespread dismay and outrage throughout the anti-Fascists exiles abroad.

  Tensions in Europe were high as Nazi Germany moved towards the annexation of Austria; Hitler once more made an attempt to bring Mussolini over to his side. After a series of delays and postponements, a meeting between the two men was finally arranged on 14th June 1934, in a country estate in Stra, near Venice. It was designed to be a strictly private encounter; as such, it was decided that no minutes would be taken of their discussion. Their conversation was in German; Hitler spoke only German, and given the almost informal nature of the meeting no interpreter was present. In the historian Renzo De Felice’s opinion, Mussolini knew German fairly well, although he could only speak it hesitatingly; Quinto Navarra’s judgement might not have the scholarly authority of De Felice’s, but since as Mussolini’s valet he must have heard his master speaking in German, his remarks deserve to be taken into account: “Mussolini always suffered from a certain inferiority complex as regards Hitler. During their diplomatic encounters, he never had the courage to admit to his famous interlocutor that he often failed to understand what the Führer said to him in German. The Duce’s knowledge of the language was fairly superficial, and he was frequently confronted by words he was unfamiliar with.”8

  Hitler had in any case brought two interpreters along with him, just in case they were needed. One was Eugenio Dollmann, an officer in the SS and a secret agent, who was a philosophy graduate and a specialist in Italian history and art; the other was the polyglot Paul Schmidt, who worked as an official translator for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Silvio Bertoldi interviewed Dollmann, who told him that “Mussolini spoke German, but never really mastered the language despite studying it. My impression was that he spoke it well enough for a casual social conversation or to travel round German without difficulty. But he certainly didn’t know the language well enough to have a conversation with Hitler on serious issues of international politics without an interpreter being present.”9

  However, De Felice’s assessment that Mussolini had a good enough knowledge of German remains a possibility. Yet we should remember that he was conversing with Hitler, a man who, from as early as the end of the First World War, had been identified and cultivated in right-wing circles as having the right oratorical gifts to fight against the threat of Bolshevik propaganda spreading among defeated German troops. The meeting of the two dictators was a kind of rhetorical duel between two versions of extreme and violent oratory, between two figures who trained themselves (and in the case of Hitler was trained by others) to produce the maximum effect on crowds. Mussolini was attempting to fight these rhetorical duels in a language which wasn’t his own, and which he understood and spoke with some difficulty.

  From their very first encounters, first at Stra and then at Venice, Mussolini was crushed by the torrent of words which poured out of Hitler. In German Mussolini would have been unable to contradict him, let alone win an argument; only when the conversation was more informal and relaxed – and less significant – might he have been able to assert hims
elf a little. The presence of an interpreter would certainly have made the two dictators’ discussion, largely dedicated to the Third Reich’s claims on Austria, easier. In order to understand what happened subsequently, it is important to bear in mind the exact sequence of events. Barely two weeks after Mussolini and Hitler met, the so-called “Night of the Long Knives” took place. It is probable that by the time of their talks Hitler had already planned to carry out this massacre. In her memoir My Fault – written, it will be remembered, only after the end of the Second World War – Margherita Sarfatti claims that she played a role in the events owing to her friendship with Hermann Göring and uses this to lend credence to her version of what was happening behind the scenes. “When Hitler returned to Germany [from Italy] he told Röhm that the Anschluss should be temporarily postponed until a better time and opportunity presented itself. This angered Röhm, who accused Hitler of cowardice in backing down before the Italians, whom he hated and opposed. On the other hand, Göring had a love for Italy as well as an intense admiration for Mussolini, with whom he had been in contact many years earlier. I too had got to know Göring well in the same period. Thus Göring took advantage of the turn of events to oppose Röhm’s position and to paint Röhm as the treacherous villain of the piece.”10

  With the murder of Röhm and his entire staff on 30th June 1934 the SA, or Sturmabteilung, were eliminated. Less than a month later, the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated. His wife and children were on holiday at the time in Italy, at Riccione on the Adriatic coast, staying in a rented villa which Rachele Mussolini had found for them. Dollfuss had been due to join them on the very day he was murdered. “We went immediately to the villa. Signora Dollfuss was resting while the children were playing on the beach. Benito did not immediately tell her the truth about what had happened, but as soon as he began to speak the poor woman seemed completely overcome.”11

  Mussolini responded to the assassination of Dollfuss by moving four army regiments to the border with Austria and declaring he would defend its independence. He also published a series of unsigned articles in Il Popolo d’Italia criticizing and often mocking the racism of the Third Reich. On 6th September, in a speech delivered in Bari, he asserted that: “Thirty centuries of history enable us to regard with disdain and pity such doctrines believed in north of the Alps by people who are the descendants of a race which was still illiterate and unable to transmit written records of its past when at the same time in Rome Caesar, Virgil and Augustus were living.” Such an assertion was a mere smokescreen for his own increasing anti-Semitism; on the subject of racism he was prepared to say or deny anything so long as it served his political ends. Hitler must have known about what Mussolini was writing and saying, but didn’t change course; of the two men, it was he who recognized without a shadow of doubt how close the ties were between their two regimes. He continued to regard Mussolini as a model, especially for the way he used violence as a political tactic. He knew that Mussolini’s words were so much hot air; incontestable events and facts would eventually bring the Duce over to his side.

  It was hard for Mussolini to conceal what lay at the dark heart of his grip on power: violence, assassination, contempt for democracy, denial of basic freedoms, racism and anti-Semitism. Another significant date in the chain of events around this time was 9th October 1934, when Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille. His killers belonged to an Ustashe gang, the extremist Croatian nationalist movement led by Ante Pavelic, who had been trained and financed by Italy. These were the harsh and violent facts of the Fascist regime, however much Mussolini succeeded in covering them up with his rhetoric, however successfully he managed to fabricate a flattering international image of his rule. “When people compared the two regimes [Germany and Italy], Mussolini’s immediately appeared as more humane, ‘liberal’, peace-loving, and protective of the European balance of power than Hitler’s (at the end of 1933 the Jewish press in the United States carried out an opinion poll to find out who were considered to be the doughtiest defenders of the civil and political rights of Jews: Mussolini was among the twelve names chosen). […] Mussolini’s anti-German stance, and in particular his reaction to the Nazi putsch in Vienna, won many plaudits and led many to put their hopes in Italy…”12

  The European democracies wanted to believe that Mussolini’s dictatorship would serve to moderate and restrain the excesses of the Nazi regime in Germany. Such a misplaced hope is already indicative of the intrinsic weaknesses of democratic governments. It became fashionable to talk reasonably about dictatorships, just as in a certain sense the phenomenon itself of dictatorship became popular. There were those who maintained that dictatorship, even in the modern age, was useful as a solution to the problems of democracy. The world seemed to be full of dictators: Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin, Atatürk, Pilsudsky and Hitler (Franco was soon to join the group). And for a certain time Mussolini was skilful in presenting himself as “a man of peace” and a wise mediator who could ward off the storm which was gathering over the continent.

  The role brought him a huge amount of attention from the world’s press. Requests for interviews with him poured in: the Duce was a “hot topic” that attracted an increased readership. But the editors often had to put up with brief written answers rather than a live interview. One journalist in Egypt asked if Mussolini had Egyptian ancestors, since he bore a striking resemblance to a statue of one of the pharaoh Cheops’s court officials. Dino Grandi, when he was the Italian Ambassador to London, under pressure from British press interest pleaded with Mussolini to provide replies to certain questions on his personal life: what sports did he practise, what did he like to eat, how much did he eat and what did he think about women? Every editor was interested in publishing details of his private life, since this was guaranteed to sell more copies. Many journalists who managed to get an interview with him came away fascinated by the charisma he managed to convey. In Cole Porter’s 1934 song ‘You’re the Top’, the Duce’s name comes in the refrain: “You’re the top! You’re the Colosseum. You’re the top! […] You’re Mussolini!”

  Mussolini told Webb Miller, a journalist from the United Press, in an interview: “Don’t be amazed if I tell I have nothing against jazz. As dance music I enjoy it.” His youngest son, Romano, became a professional jazz musician after the war. Webb Miller had first met Mussolini in 1922, in Cannes; he interviewed him in 1931 and again in 1937. On the occasion of the second interview he wrote: “He greeted me warmly and explained to me, with a smile, that he had just got back from a three-hour skiing trip to the mountains. We then had a friendly conversation in English lasting a quarter of an hour. He asked me my opinion of the current European situation. Since our last interview five years before Mussolini’s facial expression appeared to have softened. He seemed altogether more genial and the air of authority he conveyed more natural.”13 Mussolini told Miller that he arranged his days to avoid any waste of time and energy. His meals were frugal; he didn’t drink or smoke, because they were damaging; he ate a lot of fruit, didn’t drink coffee or even tea, except on occasion a herbal tea like lime blossom, and every day for at least half an hour he did some physical exercise. Webb Miller explained to his readers that the Duce was an enthusiast for every kind of “mechanical” sport, from cycling to flying an aeroplane; he also mentioned that he slept on average seven or eight hours a night, never took a daytime nap, was a voracious reader of newspapers and magazines, got through an average of seventy books a year, both new and old publications, and liked to listen to Verdi, Wagner and Rossini.

  A more prosaic – and realistic – view of Mussolini’s lifestyle can be found in the memoirs of his personal valet, Quinto Navarra, who saw him every day. Navarra relates, for example, how the Duce took Magnesia San Pellegrino in an attempt to cure his constipation, hated perfumes and used toothpicks after meals, though only when he wasn’t eating in company. From his wife’s memoirs we learn that when he liked a pair of shoes he would wear them all the time (to
the point of getting them resoled four times in succession), he liked to wear gloves of deerskin or some other kind of soft leather, preferred to take a shower rather than a bath, had regular check-ups with his dentist (who was, at least until the introduction of the racial laws, a Jew named Piperno), had a manicure and pedicure once a week and every morning rubbed himself down with eau de cologne. He had taken the decision to shave his head – in what was then called alla romana (“in the Roman style”) – when he realized that no treatment was going to prevent the onset of baldness.

  In the early 1930s many events and individual success stories served to enhance, either directly or indirectly, Mussolini’s growing fame and prestige. The legendary boxer Primo Carnera won a match, and the victory redounded to Mussolini’s advantage; the national football team under the management of Vittorio Pozzo won the World Cup, and Mussolini was able to bask in its success; Italo Balbo completed the first transatlantic flight as leader of a formation – his victory parade down Fifth Avenue in New York, repeated in Rome on his return to Italy, became an opportunity to pay homage to the Duce. Every successful Italian – even Nobel prizewinners like Luigi Pirandello or Guglielmo Marconi – made Mussolini more famous.

  At the height of his international acclaim, Mussolini made his riskiest and, as it turned out, luckiest move. At the time he was not merely the formal head of government, but had also taken over the interim running of various ministries – for home and foreign affairs, for the Corporations, for the army, the navy and the airforce, and for the colonies. This last – the colonies – was the new field for Mussolini’s activities. He wanted to turn the regime into a colonial power to match Britain and France. A massacre of Italians at Wal-Wal and a series of increasingly bloody clashes on the border between Ethiopia and Somalia finally gave him the opportunity, which he’d been seeking for a long time, to initiate a war.