Montanelli’s Mussolini justifies his choice to head the Republic of Salò with the same line of reasoning later used by Salò apologists: he made a personal sacrifice “to save what could be saved in occupied Italy.”4 He knew the vengeful fury of the Germans and the cruelty they could have unleashed after the monarchy embraced the Allies, and so he had positioned himself as a fender between the Nazis and the Italians. For six hundred interminably long days Il Duce had sought to soften the blows the Wehrmacht and the SS delivered to the nation’s body and soul. Like Pétain in Vichy France, Mussolini bowed to the moral law that obliges the true statesman to choose the most difficult option available. He elected to walk the path of death to spare countless fellow citizens the same fate. His decision was all the more tragic, says Montanelli’s Mussolini, because he expected to be finished off “by the people’s fury.” At the end of April 1945, he left Lake Garda for Milan so that the circle of Fascism would close where it had opened in 1919, so that the city of his defeat would be the same as the city of his victory.
In the concluding pages of Mussolini’s “last words,” Montanelli has Il Duce attack the same idol the journalist himself tirelessly attacked over the next decade—the idol of anti-Fascism. Postwar Italy, says Montanelli-Mussolini, can progress only by ending the “melancholy back and forth” of Fascism versus anti-Fascism.5 Rather than worship at the tattered images of Fascism’s political exiles, better to be wary of such heroes because “any choice was preferable to exile.”6 Italians had no reason to be ashamed of their history in the years before the Resistance. Above all, there was no reason to be ashamed of their past as Fascists; from the start, Fascism served to block the spread of Bolshevism in Europe. If Mussolini was guilty of any crime, Montanelli suggests, it was not that he deployed the Fascist terror but that he declined to deploy it. During the late 1930s, Il Duce had staged an “operetta” while Stalin’s henchmen in Italy were busy with full-blown tragedies. Anyone who thought that Italian democracy had begun with the Liberation was mistaken; they had been blinded by the Communists, who had been cleansed of their crimes by the Committee of National Liberation.
Thus the Fascist March on Rome became the logical reaction to the Bolshevik victory in St. Petersburg, the Resistance a cabal of turncoat Fascists, Mussolini at Salò a martyr with stigmata. That is how Montanelli, writing in 1947, outlined the strategy for future revisionists. From the point of view of those under attack, Montanelli’s revisionism was all the more insidious because he was no mere neo-Fascist but an influential journalist in the new republic—a top reporter for the Corriere della Sera, whose byline appeared frequently in the popular weeklies and the right-wing intellectual magazine Il Borghese. Montanelli’s widespread success owed much to his ability, as “Italy’s bad conscience,” to address the consciences of those Italians who had been Fascists but were no longer and did not want to be made to feel guilty for the past. So My Good Man Mussolini, read by a broad audience, probably did greater harm to the anti-Fascist cause than one other, more explicitly Fascist book, published a year later. Read mostly by neo-Fascists, Mussolini’s Political Testament arguably gave a better representation of Il Duce’s last will, had there been one.
Mussolini’s Political Testament had all the characteristics of a religious relic, being a photographic reproduction of the typed copy of Il Duce’s final interview, which he gave to a reporter for a small paper in Piedmont, the Popolo d’Alessandria. The text was “dictated, corrected, and signed by Him,” according to the book’s title page. Apart from anything else, the book reveals how vacuous an article from the Salò era might look in postwar republican Italy. The author, Gian Gaetano Cabella, a journalist possessed of dubious professional abilities, seems to have coped with the challenge of meeting Il Duce one on one by oscillating between Fascist clichés and homoerotic appreciation. Mussolini’s voice had the “metallic tones” of the human machine Italians had come to admire at Piazza Venezia. His “white hand, a little plump,” lay so close to Cabella’s that the journalist had to “exercise restraint not to caress it.”7 As for the interview itself, Mussolini embraces the role of ox of the nation, the leader who is ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the Italian people. Countering the infamous charges of the anti-Fascist press of the center-south—that Mussolini was a puppet of the Germans, that the only thing that moves Il Duce anymore is his mistress, that the dictator has his bags packed, ready to flee—the interviewer reveals a Mussolini who says he would never budge from his “place of work,” where whoever won the struggle would inevitably find him.
It is impossible not to read these words (from April 22, 1945, three days before the Liberation) against the reality of what happened the following week, when Mussolini, wearing a German greatcoat, took flight with Claretta Petacci at his side and Bank of Italy gold in his suitcase. But Cabella saw no reason, after the war, to let that embarrassment stop him from publishing the interview. Just three years after the events, when Mussolini’s Political Testament appeared in 1948, the memory of Il Duce’s shameful flight was too vivid for the book to appeal to any readers who were not neo-Fascists. The image of a leader who stood, irremovable, awaiting the arrival of the Allies and the Resistance forces, could only have seemed a lie to the great majority of Italians. More convincing—especially in 1948, when the electoral campaign was marked by priestly interventions against the Communists and on behalf of the Catholic party, the Christian Democrats—was the story that Mussolini had converted to Catholicism in extremis. The rumor complemented the image of Il Duce in his final days as the victim of circumstance, a man dragged along by other high-ranking Fascists rather than a leader, resigned rather than resolute, peace-loving rather than bellicose—in short, a humble Christian rather than a pillar of Fascism.
Just two weeks before the elections, the legend of Mussolini’s conversion got a boost when it was recounted in the popular weekly Oggi. The article, written by Alberto Giovannini, a reporter who had worked in the Republic of Salò, depicted Il Duce in the edifying guise of a man preparing himself for baptism: “As the years passed, perhaps pressed by the blows of destiny, Mussolini had become a believer.” He held frequent talks, Giovannini said, with Father Eusebio, the Franciscan who headed the Black Brigades’ Spiritual Assistance Office, talks during which Mussolini “liked to discuss God at length.” Then, sometime around mid-April 1945, Mussolini asked Father Eusebio to absolve his sins, said Giovannini. Taken by surprise, the priest initially refused, but seeing Mussolini before him with his famous jaw humbly resting on his chest, Father Eusebio relented and raised his hand, repeating the words of the rite, “Ego te absolvo…”8 It was a scene of high repentance, conceded to Mussolini by an undistinguished journalist on the eve of an important election. Before long, Mussolini’s “return to God” was postdated by another priest to his imprisonment in 1943 on the island of Ponza. And some years later, in the 1950s, the legend of Mussolini’s conversion was revived with the publication of a purported spiritual last testament of Il Duce, dated April 27, 1945, Dongo, on Lake Como.
Even today, a visitor to the Mussolini family tomb in Predappio will be handed a brochure quoting this document in full—a text of some twenty lines. As early as 1946, brief excerpts were published in the Rome weekly Il Pubblico. In 1947, it appeared in a neo-Fascist paper in Buenos Aires, Il Risorgimento, and in 1951, the document made the rounds at a secret mass celebrated for Mussolini in the Sant’Agostino church in Rome. Then, two years later, Duilio Susmel, the editor of Mussolini’s complete works, prompted a public discussion about the veracity of the “spiritual will”; priests, graphologists, historians, and Salò veterans all leaped to the fore to express their opinions. In June 1953, the weekly Epoca declared the document an “absolute falsehood,” while Susmel, who also wrote for Epoca, maintained that Mussolini had “rejoined himself to God in the moment of his defeat,” quoting the “spiritual will” as evidence of Il Duce’s conversion.9 Since then, the document has generally been considered legitimate by amateur hist
orians while professionals believe it a fake.
In this “spiritual will” Mussolini declared that he could face death reassured by the supreme comfort of religious faith. “I believed in the victory of our military forces as I believe in God, our Lord,” the text reads. Il Duce’s faith in the other world had been bolstered by Italy’s military losses, because it was in defeat, he thought, that the Italian strength of character and moral grandeur became most visible. “So if today is therefore the last day of my life,” the will says, “I give my forgiveness even to those who abandoned me and have betrayed me.”10 Thus, from one phony testament to another, the vigorous, living Mussolini had been transformed into the ethereal, dead Mussolini. The good man of Montanelli’s title had instead become Mussolini, dear departed.
* * *
AMONG THE SURVIVORS of Fascism’s defeat, there was at least one who genuinely converted to Catholicism—the intellectual and ex-minister Giuseppe Bottai. He converted without waiting until the very last minute, having found consolation in the Christian faith in the early 1940s, during intense conversations with a priest, Don Giuseppe De Luca, who was accustomed to dealing with nonbelievers. After Mussolini’s unexpected resurrection as head of the Republic of Salò, Bottai, who had withdrawn his support for the dictator in July 1943, risked serious repercussions for his disloyalty. Only the intervention of the Holy See protected him from Mussolini’s revenge. But Bottai had no desire to remain hidden in the shadow of Vatican power. In the fall of 1944 he undertook to expiate his sins by enrolling in the French Foreign Legion and going off to fight in France and Germany. For three years after the end of the war, Bottai served as a legionnaire in North Africa, waiting for the right conditions—both judicial and political—to return to Italy. He did not want to go to prison for his past as a high-ranking Fascist, nor did he consider his public career necessarily closed, perhaps the only leading ex-Fascist in that position.
Bottai’s diary from his period as a legionnaire suggests the conflicts of a post-Fascist. He expresses pride at having been a Fascist and having consciously obeyed history’s command. Yet he registers disapproval of neo-Fascism, which he sees as a sterile imitation of the original model. From his African exile, Bottai reads the news about cemetery plundering and Domenico Leccisi with great indifference. “This neo-Fascism, scratching around between tombs and epitaphs,… it smacks of cadavers and tarnished crowns,” he writes.11 The ex-Fascist has no intention of repudiating Mussolini, who had been the guiding influence of his youth, his compass in maturity, even the inspiration for his betrayal in 1943, with him playing the role of disillusioned lover. But he refuses to follow the Italian Social Movement in its absurd cult of “Il Duce resurrected,” and few developments on the political scene seem to him more pernicious than the reborn Mussolini.
At the heart of the diary entries lay a criticism Bottai had voiced from the earliest days of the March on Rome and repeated through two decades of Fascism. He believed that the regime was too closely tied to the figure—and thus the mortal existence—of Il Duce. As the cult of Mussolini grew, Bottai had warned of the danger that Fascism would become a theatrical display. In private, Bottai conceded the time-honored anti-Fascist cliché that Il Duce was above all a great actor: in notes from 1940, he wrote that the multiple Mussolinis on offer to the people had turned Il Duce into a politician “of the stage.” Playing the farmer, miner, athlete, soldier, man of the world, or worker, Mussolini was “the great universalist … in the style of an actor.”12 At the same time, the regime’s collapse after Mussolini’s ouster in 1943 was yet more proof of the man’s charisma. How to imagine, then, a Fascism that did not depend so much on Mussolini? In the monasteries outside Rome where he hid in 1943 and 1944, on the battlefields of Alsace and Lorraine where he fought in 1944–45, in the Maghreb battalions where he took refuge between 1945 and 1948, Bottai mulled over the problem that intense charisma did not translate into stability of power.
Playing the farmer, miner, athlete, soldier, man of the world, or worker, Mussolini was “the great universalist.” (Istituto Luce)
Some of the most telling pages of Bottai’s diaries were written in Algeria in 1946 and published in 1949 as Twenty Years and a Day, a memoir. Bottai thought of the book as notes toward the phenomenology of Fascism “in corpore Mussolini.”13 Bottai praised that body, “not too large,” that nonetheless conveyed an impression of enormousness; he praised the inexplicable grandeur, “a grandeur beyond the physical, of those limbs,” the eyes “normally sized” that still projected an “immense, limitless” gaze. The voice was “not so powerful” yet vibrant with “infinite echoes.”14 In more ways than one, the legionnaire Bottai’s declaration of love for the deceased Mussolini formed the first chapter in his phenomenology of Fascism. While early anti-Fascist historians of Fascism ignored the extraordinary qualities of the body of Il Duce, Bottai understood perfectly the corporal nature of the Fascist regime.
From 1922, Bottai said, the entire plan for the future society had rested on the shoulders of Mussolini—strong shoulders, but human nonetheless; unlike Atlas, Il Duce was subject to fatigue. The Fascist state had been incarnated in the body of Il Duce, turning the political order upside down. “No longer is the state man writ large,” argued Bottai. “Man is now the state writ small.” But Fascism did not fail because of this; the regime faltered when its theatricality overtook its corporeality, less because Mussolini wanted it so than because the Italian people did. Italians saw Il Duce as a character more than a person and pressed the reluctant regime to take to the stage. The Fascist crowds, said Bottai, had transformed the puppeteer into the puppet. “Alone before the mirror,” Il Duce was “forced to admire himself, to contemplate himself, and to posture.”15 Mussolini had merely followed a script written by forty million faithful followers. This conclusion that Bottai reached in exile emerges from his diary as hard-earned and sincere. But it is also lenient, for it exonerates both Mussolini and the Italian people from any moral responsibility for Fascism’s failure. If everyone was guilty, then no one was guilty.
Formed during his lonely years as a legionnaire, Bottai’s interpretation nevertheless mirrored the many other memoirs by ex-Fascists—part autobiography, part amateur history—that crowded the bookstores after the war. One of them was Roma 1943, by the journalist Paolo Monelli, a book that, despite its narrative and historical merit, ultimately lacked intellectual honesty. Like Bottai, Monelli blamed Italians for Fascism’s focus on the person of Mussolini, for the atrophy of the founding ideals, and for the excessive growth of the physical cult of Il Duce—in sum, for the Fascist revolution’s degeneration. He considered “theatricality” a distinctive characteristic not only of Mussolini but of Italians in general and believed Il Duce was a “typical representative of a large part of us.”16 The love of uniforms, medals, and honorary titles; the tendency to change one’s behavior when observed, particularly by a woman; the need to let others know immediately who one was and what one did; the desire to be at the center of things—these were all characteristics Mussolini shared with legions of his followers.
This revised version of what Fascism had been—pantomime—was tempting to many in the first years after the war. But again, the idea that Il Duce had been “sent by destiny to act as our mirror” served as much to absolve Italians of responsibility as to incriminate them.17 In Three Unconquered Empires, a book published in 1946, Aldo Palazzeschi sought to indict all Italians:
“Il Duce” does not exist and never existed; there is only an image that is a mirror in which we must study ourselves. We are the ones who, day after day, gave him those hands and that voice, those eyes and that jaw; “Il Duce” is our creation, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. We created him at a moment of vanity, vacuity, and ecstasy. So you must look as carefully at this image as into a mirror; otherwise you will create not a new society but only a new image, vain and foolish. Not a society but the mystification of one.18
One reviewer, Vittore Branca, certainly no Fasc
ist sympathizer, responded to Palazzeschi’s book with unease, asking several tough questions. Could Fascism really be reduced to a play acted by Mussolini and written by the people, his playwright? Was Italian support for Fascism really motivated exclusively by the body of Il Duce—the “massive chest rising above short, spindly legs, the criminal tilt of the eye, the outsize jaw”?19 Writing in 1946, Branca responded as a veteran of the Resistance, his career as a literature professor still ahead of him. His questions implied another, more subtle, more burning problem: was there really a difference between collective incrimination and general absolution?
“If you read Monelli’s Roma 1943 or Palazzeschi’s Three Unconquered Empires, you may find them interesting, even amusing,” wrote the novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of twentieth-century Italy’s most original writers, to a friend in 1946. Gadda, a thoroughgoing misogynist, certainly enjoyed Monelli’s allusions to a state of imperial decline in the waning days of Fascism, when Mussolini, at the mercy of Claretta Petacci, permitted national policy to be dictated by the moods and caprices of the “busty, curly-haired brunette (just his type).”20 And Gadda surely appreciated Palazzeschi’s discussion of the “strange itch” that afflicted Italian women in the presence of Il Duce’s powerful virility. “Normal” men and women held little interest for these writers, whose sensibility made them scathing toward the presumed greatness of those considered “grand” and gentle toward the “fools,” people who had somehow failed to make the grade or had fallen by the wayside.21 Unless this mercy for the victims of history is taken into account, it is difficult to understand why Gadda, in his own writing, treated Mussolini as he did.
The Body of Il Duce Page 12