by Roberto Olla
(Son): Mother, why do you spit on a corpse hanging head down, with its feet tied to a beam?
Don’t the other bodies hanging alongside disgust you?
That woman, with her stockinged legs in a macabre cancan
And her throat and mouth like flowers which have been trodden on!
Stop, mother, shout to the crowd to go away.
They’re not weeping, they’re leering,
They’re happy. Already the veins heave with flies.
You’ve shot at that face now: oh mother, mother, mother!
(Mother): We’ve always spat on corpses, my son:
On bodies hung from window gratings,
From ships’ masts, burnt to ashes in the name of the Cross,
Torn apart by dogs for a handful of grass at the edge of the master’s estate.
After two thousand years of Communion,
Whether alone or amid the crowd, it’s an eye for an eye,
And a tooth for a tooth.
Our heart wants to rip open the heart which ripped open yours, my son.
They gouged out your eyes, they crushed your hands to bits so you would betray a name.
Show me your eyes, stretch out your hands: you are dead, my son!
And it’s because you are dead you can forgive: my son, my son, my son!
(Son): This oppressive heat, these smoking ruins,
The fat green flies clustered round the hooks:
Anger and blood rightly flow. But not for you and not for me, mother,
Tomorrow they’ll pierce my eyes and hands again.
Pity is the centuries-old cry of the murdered man.
Mussolini knew he might one day fall into an abyss as deep as the crowd which gathered round his corpse in Piazzale Loreto. While it is difficult to know for certain how much Nietzsche or Marx he had actually read, whether he really attended Pareto’s university courses while he was in Switzerland or to what extent he was influenced by the books of Georges Sorel during his time in prison, his knowledge of the work of Gustave Le Bon is not in doubt – of one text in particular, which he kept with him as an inseparable companion, a kind of livre de chevet, La Psychologie des foules (published in English as The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind): “One of the books that interested me most was Gustave Le Bon’s work on the psychology of the crowd.”1
Gustave Le Bon was known for his intellectual eclecticism: he dabbled in archaeology, anthropology, physics, sociology and psychology and was capable of writing perceptively on all of these different subjects. He was famed for his eccentric behaviour and his extravagant way of dressing, while dinners at his house had a reputation for turning into theatrical performances. He was excluded from the world of academia, but his writings were keenly followed by men who worked in the nascent advertising industry – and by aspiring dictators. Theorists of mass communication have studied his insights into crowd psychology, while the propaganda machines of various kinds of political regimes have also drawn on them. “Is it possible to love a dictator?” Emil Ludwig asked Mussolini in one of his interviews. Mussolini’s reply was unhesitating: “Yes it is. When the masses fear him. The masses love strong men. The masses are female.” (In the proofs Mussolini corrected the last phrase and substituted “like a woman” instead.)2
But Le Bon’s analysis has been useful in democracies too – take this passage for example (and remember it was written in 1895): “The candidate who hits upon a new verbal formula which has no precise meaning and can be adapted to any number of different sets of aspirations is bound to succeed.”3 These words are still true today, over a hundred years after Le Bon wrote them, for all election candidates everywhere, including those running for the presidency of the United States. Le Bon’s book La Psychologie des foules – so full of telling insights it could be said to border on prophecy and written in a fluent, unacademic style – could easily be used as a manual – to be read and reread – by the man who wanted to learn how to dominate a crowd.
Mussolini must have known the following passage from Le Bon’s book, written fifty years before the events in Piazzale Loreto: “All crowds, therefore, are female, but this aspect is characteristic above all of crowds in Mediterranean countries. The man who depends on their support for his career will have a speedy and vertiginous rise to power, but he risks falling over the Tarpeian precipice at every moment, and the day will certainly come when he plunges into the abyss.”4 The crowds who gathered in Piazzale Loreto were the same as those who lynched a man in Louisiana merely because they thought he had committed a crime or those who enjoyed watching the blood flow from the guillotines in the Place de la Bastille or who stormed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg despite the soldiers armed with bayonets directed at them. On 29th April 1945, crowded round the petrol station, there were poets and artists, doctors and intellectuals, journalists and men who worked in the film industry, clergy and housewives – a vast range of people from different social backgrounds and of differing levels of attainment, not all of them speaking the same language and certainly drawn to the spectacle for a variety of reasons – but whatever they thought and wanted as individuals had, in those circumstances, no possibility at all of making itself felt.
Over the course of the morning many drifted away to be replaced by others. It was a textbook example of a shifting crowd formed of very different kinds of people, yet capable of infecting or cancelling out each single individual who came to form part of it.
Just by joining a crowd, men abase themselves, they drop down the scale of civilized behaviour. Taken by himself, an individual may be a person of cultivation; as part of the crowd, he’s led by his instincts, he becomes a barbarian. He acquires the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity – as well as the capacity for enthusiastic acts of daring and heroism – which characterize primitive peoples. He also becomes like them in his tendency, as part of a crowd, to let himself be swept along in doing things which quite clearly undermine his own self-interest as an individual. In a crowd individuals become like mere grains of sand driven on by the wind just as it pleases.5
The influence of Le Bon can already be found in the early Mussolini who embraced a fideistic vision of socialism, in the political agitator who was more concerned to give the masses something to believe in than helping them to reason, whose impassioned diatribes from the dais at political meetings would incite workers and labourers to go and face the soldiers’ platoons sent to suppress their protests. The idea is already implicit in Le Bon’s La Psychologie des foules, and the agitator can profit from the lesson: “The crowds of men who go on strike do so much more in obedient response to a command than out of any wish to obtain an increase in their pay packets.”6
Yet it is improbable that Mussolini’s reading of Le Bon played a direct part in his transition from socialism to Fascism. Le Bon’s formulas are too simple to have effected such a complex process, made up as it was of numerous intermediate shifts in position as Mussolini acted and reacted to the changing political circumstances and the emergence of new personalities. But Mussolini’s familiarity with the book and his reflections on its message may well have served to undermine his idea of socialism – Anna Kuliscioff had already had her doubts about how firm Mussolini’s commitment was and had communicated her misgivings to other members of the Socialist Party. “The obvious weakness of socialist beliefs will not prevent them taking root among the masses. The real drawback of the socialist credo in comparison with the religious faiths lies only in this: that whereas they place the prospect of future happiness entirely in the afterlife, with the result that no one’s in a position to complain if it’s not achieved, the promise of happiness which socialism holds out is intended for the here-and-now, so when it’s revealed as empty people abandon their faith in it.”7
Le Bon’s judgement here turned out to be over-hasty and simplistic, although his insight into the consequences of the conflict between socialist and religious credos is striking. Mussolini’s unexpected enthusiasm for military service whe
n he was called up in 1905 has puzzled many of his biographers: some just record it, while others, like Sarfatti, try to explain it by seeing it as the key event in the transformation of the “new man” into the “Duce”; another approach is Cesare Rossi’s, who views it as an act of characteristic political cynicism, of the need to adapt to one’s circumstances in order to come out on top. It is not known if Mussolini had already come across Le Bon’s book when he was first called up for military service, but if he had, the following passage might well have struck him and given him pause for thought, even more so because it quotes Napoleon:
The great statesmen of every age and in every country, including absolutist despots, have always regarded their popular image as the basis of their power. They have never sought to govern without it. “I brought the war of the Vendée to a close by making myself a Catholic,” Napoleon declared to the Council of State. “I made myself a Muslim to conquer Egypt and by becoming an Ultramontanist I brought the Italian clergy over to my side. If I were to rule over the Jews, I’d offer to rebuild the Temple of Solomon.”8
By the time Mussolini had achieved power, he knew Le Bon’s “manual” by heart; he had worked with it, and now its lessons were second nature to him; he could follow the instinct developed over decades of political activity. It is pointless – and was so even at the time – to criticize the content of his speeches, since this had almost no relevance to the goals of his political actions; what counted was the sense of ritual and of theatre, the ability continually to sense and “play” the audience whatever the circumstances were. Gestures were important – they needed to be visible even from a great distance – as well as the power of the voice, its tones, its pauses, its sudden accelerations. “A logical sequence of reasoning would be completely incomprehensible to a crowd; it is in this sense we can say a crowd is incapable of reasoning or using reason with a purpose and similarly of being influenced by reasoned argument. […] In the intimacy of his connection with the crowd, the orator is able to evoke the images which bring it under his spell.”9
Establishing an intimate rapport with the crowds who came to listen to him became second nature for Mussolini, like an experienced and consummate actor who, as soon as he enters on stage, is capable of holding the audience’s attention. Mussolini’s techniques can be identified in all his most famous speeches, such as the one proclaiming the Italian victory in Ethiopia or the declaration of war in 1940, but they are perhaps most easily seen in what we might call his “routine” appearances during his visits to small towns and villages throughout Italy, when there was no “great event” to enthuse the crowds who turned out to hear him and with whom he needed to make contact. In these cases, of course, the “great event” was the man himself, his presence in flesh and blood: Mussolini enacted and embodied – literally – absolute power. Sarfatti described his technique as an orator in an article published in Il Popolo d’Italia on 22nd February 1923:
Benito Mussolini’s speeches should not be regarded as merely calls for revolution; they are themselves acts of revolution. When he speaks, Mussolini takes no pleasure in forming rotund phrases just as he doesn’t gesture pompously with his arms; he shuns all such obviousness. With a warrior’s masculine sobriety and succinctness, Mussolini sums up a situation, issues a command, evokes an emotion. His style of eloquence is sui generis: it is simple and direct and adheres to the facts. It consists in a series of prosaic expressions, which seem unpoetical to the point of brutality, but on occasion attain a kind of lyricism in the way he can move from the essential to the non-essential, without any ornamentation, “strangling the neck of rhetoric”, as a great lyric poet once urged us to do.
A good example of Mussolini’s oratorical style can be seen in the speech he gave during a visit to Cremona on 7th October 1934. He had been in power for twelve years, and was now the supremely popular Duce; he’d seen off all his opponents, both the once democratically elected parties and the internal opposition to him among the Fascists. Cremona had in fact been home to his most dangerous enemy within the party, Roberto Farinacci, who had been the city’s local ras. Rumours had reached Mussolini that Farinacci might have been involved in the assassination attempt in Bologna some years previously. In 1929 Mussolini had succeeded in getting Farinacci removed from the Grand Council and in stripping him of all his power. But now, once more in Farinacci’s home town, he had no need to go on the attack: for the Cremonese who gathered to listen to him the Duce was a legendary figure and as such untouchable. The dictatorship he had established was strong and firm. In that same year he had sent troops to the Austrian border in an attempt to curb Hitler’s ambitions for annexation. The United States press had just included him in a list of the twelve leading Christian defenders of the Jewish race. Thus Mussolini arrived in Cremona sure of himself and unconcerned about having to prepare what he was going to say; he knew that it would be sufficient to put himself on display and follow a tried-and-tested rhetorical routine he could now perform by heart. It was enough to be himself. “In human crowds, the leader has an important role to play. It is the sheer force of his will which provides the focus round which all the rest form their opinions and from which they take their lead. The crowd is like a flock of sheep; they need a master to guide them.”10
Mussolini’s arrival in the town had been trumpeted for months: the life of the entire community – its schools, barracks, farms, factories, local associations – had been involved in planning the success of the great day. The purpose of the visit was to inaugurate the town’s “Sacrario” or memorial to those who had given their lives in the Fascist revolution; after the ceremony, he was driven through the streets lined with festive crowds waving pennants and banners and then watched the long parade which had been organized in his honour – soldiers, Fascist militia, Blackshirts, labourers carrying hoes and rural housewives with wooden rakes passed by at a running march under his balcony, while the Fascist anthem ‘Giovinezza’, played by one of the local bands, blared out from the loudspeakers all over the town. At last Mussolini climbed onto the “Arengo”, the pulpit-like balcony at the front of the “Arengario”, the medieval town hall, from which for centuries speakers had harangued the local populace. The speech was regarded as so much a routine formality that Il Popolo d’Italia published only a short summary of what Mussolini said in its issue on the following day; a similar brief résumé can be found in the Opera Omnia. But the speech can be heard and also seen as part of the multimedia work Combat Film: the film of the event was shot by an amateur cameraman, and as a result has some technical shortcomings, but it is precisely because it is not the regime’s customary propaganda footage “touched up” by the Istituto Luce that we can observe Mussolini together with the behaviour and reactions of the crowds more closely.11
“Hail Duce! Hail Duce! Hail Duce!” – an impassive Mussolini, seen in half-length, waits as the crowd acclaims him. He is mentally preparing himself to launch his speech. The preliminaries are never a mere formulaic ritual for repetition on each and every occasion; they are an essential part of the process of making contact with the particular audience he’s addressing. “The laws of reason and logic have no effect on crowds. In order to conquer a crowd, one must first become aware of the emotions they are feeling, pretend to share them, and then attempt to shape them, by evoking powerful images based on simple associations of ideas.”12 The crowd in the Cremona piazza finally quietens down into an expectant hush; right from the outset, it seems that Mussolini wants to shape this silence; when he begins to speak, he stops for numerous pauses between words, making the adjectives and verbs stand out in isolation.
Blackshirts of Cremona [pause], when [pause] gathered together [pause] you were present [pause] in Piazza Venezia in Rome [pause] I promised you [pause] that I would come to your city [pause] for the opening [pause] of the Memorial [pause] for your fellow citizens who gave their lives for the Fascist cause [pause]. Today [pause] I am fulfilling [pause] my promise [a longer pause and an attentive silence] and it
is not without deep emotion [pause] that I crossed the threshold [pause] of the monument [pause] which will stand [pause – and now Mussolini stirs himself, raising his voice and tone, waving his right arm in the air as if to beat time] for ever and for every generation to come [pause] as a remembrance of the voluntary sacrifice [pause] offered up [pause] by the Blackshirts of Cremona [ovation and new chants of “Duce, Duce, Duce…”].
The sequence of sentences and concepts no longer has any importance; it is single words which convey an image to the listening crowds, who are not called upon to follow a line of reasoning or an analysis, but only to receive passively the speaker’s evocations. “Sacrifice”, “monument”, “remembrance”, “promise”, “inauguration”, even “today” – all are intended to carry a significance which is quite separate from the part they play in the sentence. The pauses Mussolini introduces are frequently so long and the emphatic intonation he places on certain words so marked that all sense of the overall syntactic structure of the sentences is lost and each word seems to stand alone.
The pennants of the squadrons [pause] which were worn [pause] by the bands [pause] of valiant [pause] and pioneering young men [pause] will be placed on the monument [pause – and then he suddenly unleashes a torrent of words without taking breath]. They will keep watch over the fallen, just as the fallen will keep watch over the glorious deeds which represent the heart of our passionate endeavours and the culmination of our ardent faith [“heart” and “faith” stand out in the sudden cascade of words; there are shouts of approval from the crowd; a pause while Mussolini looks round with an air of satisfaction]. This is the fifth time [pause] I have had the fortune [pause] to be able to speak to you [pause – he places his hands on his hips and puffs out his chest] in this magnificent piazza [pause]. Remembering [at this point the camera moves away from Mussolini and begins slowly to pan over the assembled crowds] my previous visits [pause] means reliving [said with great emphasis] fifteen glorious years in the life of Cremona and in the life of Italy.