Il Duce and His Women

by Roberto Olla

  In the meantime, the Comte de Chambrun had fallen under the spell of this “exceptional charming woman” and, breaking the fundamental rule in intelligence that all personal involvement should be avoided, tried to become her (supplementary) lover. The matter started to go badly: at the Quai d’Orsay station in Paris, Fontanges tried to shoot the ambassador, but failed to kill him. The crisis continued, and shortly afterwards she attempted suicide by taking twelve tablets of Nembutal – the same sleeping pills which Marilyn Monroe used to kill herself thirty years later – but she was taken to hospital and her stomach pumped. She published, in French and in English, the story of her sexual encounter with the Duce, to huge success. She became a spy for the Nazis, and during the German occupation the mistress of the head of the Gestapo in France; after the war she was arrested as a collaborator. In 1960 she took another overdose of sleeping tablets, and this time succeeded in taking her own life. One of Mussolini’s closest associates, the diplomat Giuseppe Bastianini, commented on the affair shortly after it had finished: “Fontanges was simply another instalment of the usual story – more exciting – and more annoying – than the others because she was a foreigner and capable of kicking up a fuss to attract attention. Nowadays, alongside – and above – all the one-night stands and brief escapades, the favourite dominates – Claretta Petacci. To my mind there’s nothing remarkable about her, but she knows very well what she’s doing and she’s also got the backing and encouragement of her family, who are on the make and don’t mind how. A nice state of affairs, no? The Duce can do whatever he wants to, let him sow his wild oats till he’s got no more left, but then he should face the music, by God, and pay up the debts in love he’s incurred.”23

  The pattern of Mussolini’s relationships with women only rarely followed the rhythms of his political career. A long time might pass before the beginning of a new affair or the development of an older one would have an impact on his public life. But the reverse is also true: times of intense political activity can be mirrored by small events and recurrent situations occurring in his private life – one example would be what now appears as the long uniform phase of furious sexual activity in Palazzo Venezia, organized by his staff, against the backdrop of the decline of his relationship with Sarfatti and the final removal, in an all too physical sense, of Dalser. Important events in his public life could coincide with significant developments in his sexual career – a case in point would be the victorious Ethiopian campaign and his concurrent affair with Fontanges and Petacci’s arrival on the scene. And it was a sudden intensification of the relationship with Petacci which marked the end of one phase and the beginning of another. On 6th May 1936 Mussolini announced the new Italian Empire from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia; on 31st May Petacci recorded in her diary that she had had sex with the Duce. She was married, and while this naturally presented no problem from Mussolini’s point of view, it was an insurmountable obstacle for her. It is difficult to say whether she was prompted by her own instincts or by someone else’s advice, but she knew that in such cases the woman’s will was paramount, and she showed what she wanted in terms that left no room for compromise: in June she declared that she regarded her husband with physical loathing and could not even bear to be near him. In July they were legally separated: the road was clear for her to become Mussolini’s official mistress.

  “Allow me to love your daughter,” Mussolini is supposed to have said to Petacci’s mother, Giuseppina Persichetti, in the belief that such a quasi-official – and quasi-gallant – declaration of interest in the young brunette who had cast a spell over him showed he was in control of the situation, whereas in actual fact it was she who was taking the initiative. Her rapacious family, headed by her father, the medical doctor Francesco Saverio Petacci, had devised a plan in which the key element was their daughter giving birth to a child by Mussolini. Petacci manoeuvred – or was manoeuvred – skilfully. She wisely never asked Mussolini to separate from his wife Rachele. She identified the other women he frequented and began to get rid of them one by one. In 1937, one year after his escapade with Fontanges, Mussolini was practically in Petacci’s hands. She began to transcribe the confidential talk she would have with him during their sessions together. “I don’t know how many women have really been in love with me. A handful, none of them perhaps. Now that I come to look back, in hindsight, I can see that no one – or very few – really loved me. Take Countess Magda de Fontanges, for example. She asked me ‘When will you let me go to bed with you?’ ‘You’re not ready yet, we need to wait a bit.’ I lost some important papers because of this woman. I trusted her, but she turned out to be a spy. She took notes – my opinions of the King, of the House of Savoy, on certain leading politicians. And she published them. Nothing to be done about that now. […] She used to talk about things with no shame at all, typically French. She once said her pants made a curious ripping sound when I threw her on the bed.”24

  At the same time as he was seeing Fontanges, ordering gas attacks and arranging a final extermination of the remaining Ethiopian troops, Mussolini continued to pursue the utopia of ruralization which, even though by now an evident failure in Italy itself, he hoped to export to the newly occupied Ethiopia: “The Italians are a race of brave pioneers and clever farmers who in the very first year of the empire have started to transform the agricultural fortunes of Ethiopia. Few other peoples would have the energy to confront the immensely laborious tasks of building thousands of kilometres of roads under the tropical sun or tilling barbarian lands nearly 5,000 kilometres away from their homeland.”25

  While Mussolini was at the height of his popularity in the triumphal spring days of 1936, his ambassador in London, Dino Grandi, had an audience with the new king, Edward VIII, to provide reassurances in the wake of the recent crisis between the two countries. Grandi was in direct contact with Mussolini; his instructions were to put Italy’s relations with the British Empire on the best possible footing.

  Among British politicians he admired Churchill above all – the man who later led the resistance to Hitler and who, in planning with the backing of the United States the landings in north Africa and southern Europe, dealt a death blow to Mussolini’s regime. “Churchill has the best brain in Britain. He’s the embodiment of the country’s three-hundred-year-old – yes three centuries! – sense of its imperial destiny.” […] His judgement of Lloyd George varied according to the Welsh politician’s own changing attitudes towards Italy. He feared his cunning and quick-wittedness and admired him for his humble social origins. His confidence in MacDonald was limited. He used to say: “It’ll be a hard job to get people like this to appreciate the new Italy under the Fascists.”26

  The celebrations for the victory in Ethiopia reached a climax in Mussolini’s speech to the nation on 9th May 1936, which was broadcast to the nation. When, to wild enthusiasm, he announced the birth – or rather the rebirth – of the Italian Empire, it seemed only logical that the King, Victor Emmanuel III, should assume the title of Emperor, but Rachele, who’d been caught in a taxi in the midst of the crowds, later told her husband how surprised and disappointed people had been at his announcement that the King was now emperor. For once, Petacci was in agreement with her lover’s wife: “He puts his hand over my mouth and smiles as I say again that he’s the emperor. ‘Let’s leave it, I detest courtiers. Let’s not talk any more about it, the subject’s over and done with.’”27

  Mussolini’s personal valet, Quinto Navarra, was skilful at handling the simultaneous and unexpected arrivals, as occasionally occurred, of Petacci and Sarfatti in Palazzo Venezia; he would send them up and down different staircases within the vast building, and the merit was his if their paths never crossed and unseemly cat fights were avoided in what was the seat of government. He even managed to organize two different waiting rooms. But one day the Duce gave him an abrupt and deeply disagreeable command: Navarra was to tell Margherita Sarfatti, after she had already been kept waiting for over two hours, that she would not be all
owed to see him. Sarfatti had also been forbidden to come to Villa Torlonia, Mussolini’s private residence, which – as we have seen – she herself had originally procured for him through her contacts with Prince Torlonia; the arrival of his wife and children to live with him had provided him with the justification. “As his wife, Rachele was protected by the laws of common morality, while Sarfatti had enjoyed the typical unauthorized power of a mistress. She was seen as despotic and had acquired many enemies who longed to see her fall from favour. Her aura of fascination, which had once won so much praise, had been replaced by a peremptory air of command; she had been spoilt by the adulation of those around her and had lost her supreme poise as an accomplished woman of the world.”28

  The marriage of Mussolini’s favourite daughter to Galeazzo Ciano had brought Sarfatti another implacable enemy. Edda had emerged from an irresponsible and troubled adolescence to become an elegant and unconventional young woman; she loved sport and driving fast cars, and often wore trousers. She wanted to exercise influence over her father and came to detest his former mistress as her rival. Mussolini was not overly concerned with the age of the women he slept with, but Sarfatti, now nearly sixty, must have seemed to him truly old, a vestige from an earlier period in his life, now definitively over, and in the way. Besides, seeing her reminded him that he too was no longer young. Speaking of her to Petacci, he punned on her name calling her “rifatti” (“redone”, “done over”) instead of Sarfatti – “that old witch Rifatti”. His brother Arnaldo had protected her, but after he died Mussolini had removed her from the editorial board of Il Popolo d’Italia. By now he had appropriated the ideas she had produced, without deigning to acknowledge his debt. He couldn’t even be bothered to tell her in person their relationship was over; he got his valet to slam the door in her face instead.

  Sarfatti played her hand, such as it was, as best she could. She organized the wedding of her daughter Fiammetta in the same church, San Giuseppe on the Via Nomentana, where all the members of the Mussolini clan had been married. The ceremony was Catholic – Fiammetta had recently been converted – and splendid – like Edda, she was marrying a count, Livio Gaetani dell’Aquila d’Aragona, a Fascist parliamentary deputy and, as a member of the Consiglio Nazionale delle Corporazioni (National Council of Corporations), a rising figure in the regime. The wedding took place on 15th October 1933, and the reception which followed it was one of the last of the great events Sarfatti stage-managed. She did her utmost to ensure it was an important political gathering with the presence of Fascist gerarchi and foreign diplomats, including the German ambassador Ulrich von Hassell. She still hoped there might be a space for her and a role she might play in the increasingly rigid organization of the regime. In reality although her old friends and allies – such as Dino Alfieri, who started his career as a young lawyer in her husband’s legal practice and was now a member of the Grand Council and Undersecretary to the Corporations, where her new son-in-law also worked – were happy to accept her invitations to her daughter’s wedding, they were already distancing themselves from her. Edda saw the wedding as a vulgar invasion of the territory she now regarded as her own and prepared a trap for her rival. She paid a strapping young man to make approaches to Sarfatti; he succeeded in getting the older woman to accompany him to a club with a shady reputation. The police, duly tipped off, raided the place and found Sarfatti without identity documents and took her to the police station where she was held overnight. The next morning Edda made sure her father heard the news.

  There came a moment when Margherita Sarfatti realized that she was no longer involved in any committee or occupied any formal position in the regime. She had been the editor of the journal Gerarchia, but there was no longer any role for her in the actual hierarchy of power. Under Fascism women were considered appropriate only for the lower grades. The country’s artists and their production had now been absorbed into the Fascist Corporations, part of Mussolini’s totalitarian system of power which Sarfatti alone obstinately refused to understand. The art movement she had founded – Novecento – had broken up; some of the artists who had belonged to it denied publicly that it had originated as Sarfatti’s idea. The painter Mario Sironi accused her of creating Jewish art. One of the few remaining artists who still defended her was Pietro Maria Bardi, but more perhaps because of his personal circumstances than out of conviction. He ran an art gallery on the Via Veneto in Rome together with yet another of Mussolini’s mistresses, Anna Normandia. In order to stay open their gallery needed the protection of the Sindacato Nazionale Fascista delle Belle Arti, the Fascist organization dealing with the fine arts. For Anna Normandia, Sarfatti was merely a defeated rival mistress; when her turn arrived to make way for the entry of Petacci onto the scene, she asked Mussolini for money, got what she wanted, and promptly disappeared from his life.

  But Sarfatti didn’t need money, and she was not prepared to disappear so ignominiously. She decided to travel to the United States. On 15th April 1934 she was received with ceremony at the White House, almost as if she were Italy’s “First Lady” (there was no other woman in Italy capable of occupying such a role at international diplomatic meetings). She had a long conversation over tea with President Roosevelt, along with his wife Eleanor, son James and daughter-in-law, and was fascinated by the Roosevelts’ personalities. As her journey across the US continued, she became convinced that America would have an important future role to play in world affairs. However, no news of the enthusiastic reception which greeted her on her travels in North America ever reached Italy; the newspapers avoided all mention of the visit. All her efforts to reacquire some of the prestige she had once enjoyed in Italy seemed destined to fail.

  She made an attempt to vindicate herself by reminding people that she had been a Fascist from the very beginning, supporting the regime with her cultural activity. She once more played the role of the grieving mother of a war hero killed in action. She commissioned one of the leading Italian architects of the day, Giuseppe Terragni, to design a monument for his tomb; Terragni came up with a striking piece of work, situated at the top of a hill in the high plateaus near the town of Asiago. But the gesture came too late. The monument was unveiled in 1935; it was raining heavily. Mussolini – whose political fortunes had begun with the ex-Arditi who had flocked to the ceremonies he and his mistress had organized in commemoration of her fallen son – refused to attend. The times were changing: it was no longer advisable to be seen paying homage to a Jew. But Sarfatti refused to face the truth of the situation. She believed that art and culture could serve the cause of Fascist education and couldn’t see that systematic propaganda had replaced them. She still believed in the myth she had created, but the regime had transformed it into a cult.

  Now even so recent a time as 1933, when Sarfatti was one of the hidden movers behind the negotiations which led to the formation of the “Pact of Four” between Italy, France, Great Britain and Germany, seemed suddenly remote. The very fact that a woman could claim her right to a leading role in the regime was a source of irritation, and Sarfatti’s pretensions that she and the Duce had shared a heroic past became intolerable. Last – but certainly not least – was the most serious problem, her Jewishness: “Long before the racial laws were introduced [in 1938], anti-Semitism was rife in Italy; Sarfatti, despite her conversion to Catholicism (and baptism) and her exalted vision of the Catholic Church as some kind of sacred manifestation of ‘Romanness’, an exclusive emanation of the Italian ‘race’, became once more, in the eyes of the regime, merely a Jew, just as she had always feared.”29

  By the time the so-called Manifesto degli scienziati razzisti (Manifesto of Racial Scientists) was published in 1938, representing a toxic injection of anti-Semitism into Italian society and culture, Sarfatti had already made her plans to leave the country. Until the day of her departure she tried to behave as normal: “In October 1938, just before going abroad, I went to take my leave of the Queen, in a private and informal audience. I inwardly knew that I was l
eaving for a long and possibly permanent exile from Italy, the country which had changed so much from the Italy I had loved.”30

  On 4th November 1938 she attended the usual public ceremony for the anniversary of the victory in the First World War. Petacci noted in her diary: “I went to the ceremony in Piazza Venezia. Sarfatti was there. I didn’t care, but the thought troubled me that that old ruin had once been his lover.”31 Ten days later Sarfatti crossed the border into Switzerland; her idea was to start a new life somewhere else, in one of the Americas. But she didn’t prosper; many were suspicious of this Fascist Jew. Her sister Nella stayed in Italy and, together with her husband, was deported and died while in one of the cattle trucks travelling to Auschwitz.

  Sarfatti came back to Italy after the war, in 1947, to live in her villa at Cavallasca on Lake Como. She died on 30th October 1961 at the age of eighty-one. She wrote nothing more on Mussolini and Fascism, and refused to be interviewed on the subject. The historian and biographer of Mussolini Renzo De Felice did manage to meet her, but gained no new historical information from the visit:

  I had the good fortune – in terms of ordinary curiosity, more than anything else – to have a long conversation – lasting an entire winter afternoon – with Margherita Sarfatti, shortly before she died, in a hotel suite on the Via Veneto in Rome. Our conversation revealed no new facts or evidence but, on the other hand, it helped me considerably to understand who she was, to understand – and here we’re touching on the psychological complexities of human beings, as well as on the psychological insight historians need if they’re going to understand what really occurred – the type of influence she must have had over several years. After my conversation with her, for example, I started to wonder how much the myth of ‘Romanità’ came from Mussolini and how much was instead more the result of Sarfatti’s influence over him. Certainly I have never known anyone like her so pathologically obsessed with the myth of Rome.32