The literature of intimate confessions about Mussolini’s life and death passed first through the illustrated weeklies and then appeared in book form, expanding the audience. Edda, Mussolini’s daughter, was not the only woman in her family to publish her memoirs and keep Mussolini’s memory warm; so did her mother, Rachele, and her aunt Edvige. Mussolini’s ghost was also revived by the popular history writers of the period. Two small classics of cheap popular literature—Giovanni Artieri’s book on the failed attempts on Mussolini’s life, and Franco Bandini’s book tracing the background of Walter Audisio’s mission—got their starts in the illustrated weeklies. A former big name in Fascist journalism, Paolo Monelli, published a short version of his postwar book Mussolini, Petit Bourgeois, in the weekly Europeo. The sum total of all this recollection, reportage, and storytelling was to sketch an indulgent version of Il Duce’s last days, in which the crimes he committed were transmuted into venial sins, to be duly pardoned.
The figure of Mussolini fleeing in a German greatcoat was therefore transformed by a chorus of voices that tended to downplay his cowardice and dismiss his act of treason. Mussolini, it seemed, had always intended to die a good death. In his final days, his Fascist co-conspirators had forced a man who had become “inert … still thinking but inert” to run away, the apologists argued.39 He might have been inert, but when he donned the German coat, Il Duce nonetheless revealed his tortured soul, readers of the weeklies were told; and besides, there was no incontrovertible proof that he ever actually wore the Luftwaffe coat. As for concealing himself in a German transport truck, Il Duce had only acceded to Claretta Petacci’s insistence. Should Mussolini have committed suicide as Hitler had done in his bunker? No, it would have been unseemly for the earthy boss from Predappio to end his days in chilly Wagnerian abstraction. In any case, “more than a man’s death, what counts is his life,” as contemporary writers claimed.40 This seemed all the more true in the twentieth century, when the Romantic concept of a hero had been mostly expunged by World War II. Had Mussolini betrayed his country? “We are all betrayers,” explained one journalist.41 Italians had to stop punishing themselves for offenses both real and imagined. It was time to stop worrying about pacts with the Germans and civil wars; the histories of many other countries were “rife with Piazzale Loretos and Fosse Ardeatine,”42 the latter a brutal reprisal in 1944, in which the Germans murdered 335 civilians on the outskirts of Rome.
To counter the shameless picture of Il Duce with his hand in the till, the journalists pulled out an old chestnut of Fascist propaganda, the image of a Mussolini so indifferent to money as to constantly forget his wallet. Mussolini was captured “without a lira in his pocket,” the apologists were still—incredibly—writing in 1950.43 Even the terrible events of Piazzale Loreto were proof of Il Duce’s perfect honesty, for not one lira fell from his pocket when the partisans strung him up. Mussolini’s hands were also made to look clean after it was learned that some of the money he was carrying, which was seized by the partisans, ended up in the accounts (or in the pockets) of Communist functionaries. Thus, for more than a decade after the fact, the centrist press was writing about the “gold of Dongo” in an anti-Communist, not an anti-Fascist, vein. Among the petty thieves in action on the shores of Lake Como, wrote the weeklies, was a future representative for the Communist Party, Dante Gorreri, charged in the theft of Mussolini’s traveling alarm clock and in the murder of a woman, a partisan comrade. Perhaps there was also Walter Audisio, suspected of having taken a wristwatch and a gold cigarette case. In the opinion of a journalist for Corriere della Sera, the “double game” of the Resistance had allowed the Communists to pocket in twenty days what the Fascists had taken twenty years to accumulate—meaning the Fascist leadership, not Mussolini. According to one weekly, Il Duce’s only material concern before his death was for two of his dressing gowns, “the black one and the velvet one with the fur,” which he asked his wife to look after.44
The fact that Claretta Petacci shared Mussolini’s last hours at Lake Como was corrected in the weeklies after the war with a barrage of stories about Rachele Mussolini. While Il Duce’s widow was living in Forio, on the island of Ischia, the weeklies vied with one another to recount the most minute details of her compulsory residence there. The stories were illustrated in high neorealist style with black-and-white pictures of the good housewife living in honest poverty, her neighbors eager to be of help and the whole island admiring her. When she finally got permission to move to Rome, the coverage did not let up during the long wait to reclaim Benito’s body. How could they resist publishing a picture of Rachele embroidering the shroud to wrap her husband’s body, like a modern Penelope awaiting the day her Ulysses would return as a corpse? Rachele was by no means silent; in addition to making herself available to the photographers, she gave interviews and offered assorted memoirs to the weeklies. Whenever given the chance, she replicated the feat she had accomplished with her 1948 memoir, My Life with Benito, which canonized Il Duce in a perfect apologia for the regime. She was helped in this enterprise by her ghostwriter, Giorgio Pini, Mussolini’s biographer and the chief repository of Fascist historical memory.
There was no cliché about Mussolini that did not make it into Rachele’s version, whether in her two books or in the popular press. There was Mussolini the elementary school teacher who had mesmerized her with his flashing black eyes; Mussolini the young man of integrity, taking on the humblest jobs if it meant keeping his intellectual independence; Mussolini the Socialist bohemian, touring Europe in tattered clothes but always with a stack of books and newspapers; Mussolini the natural-born journalist who could write any article in fifteen minutes. There was Mussolini the true believer, ready to take a 50 percent pay cut as editor of Avanti!; Mussolini the lover of culture, so passionate about the theater he would take the maid along when Rachele couldn’t attend; Mussolini man of courage, imperturbable when attempts were made on his life; Mussolini man of honor, who wouldn’t hesitate to challenge his most vicious political adversaries to a duel. Then there was Mussolini tireless worker, a prime minister so hardworking as to wreak havoc on the placid routines of the Roman bureaucracy; Mussolini the natural athlete, who, kicking the ball around with his children, was capable of breaking the windows at his Villa Torlonia residence; Mussolini the kindhearted Duce, quick to wriggle out of the grasp of his bodyguards and get close to the people. There was Mussolini the leader, whose charisma was such that one or two visitors to Palazzo Venezia would invariably faint; Mussolini the lover of nature, who like a trained gardener pruned the old almond tree near Rocca delle Caminate, his property near Predappio; Mussolini the polyglot, able to converse with world leaders in English, French, Spanish, or German; Mussolini the good father, as much involved in his children’s upbringing as in affairs of state.
Above all, Rachele made a point of insisting on the cliché of Mussolini the perfect husband. Il Duce, whose eye never wandered, “fulfilled his conjugal duties right up to the end,” she told her readers.45 It wasn’t enough for Rachele to reassure Italians about the frequency of her sexual relations with Benito. She also published a highly edifying letter that she claimed had been written by Il Duce (“with a red pencil”) on the eve of his death:
Dear Rachele,
I have now arrived at the last stage of my life, at the last page of my book. We may not ever see each other again, and so I wanted to write you this letter. I ask your forgiveness for any wrongs that I have involuntarily done you. You know that you were the only woman that I ever really loved. I swear that to you before God and our dear departed son Bruno in this moment of supreme sacrifice. You know that I and the others must go to the Valtellina. You, with the children, should try to reach the Swiss border. Up there you can begin a new life.46
As a document attesting to Mussolini’s marital, Christian, and patriotic virtues, this letter became a monument to Il Duce’s glorious memory. The weeklies printed and reprinted it for a good half century, always ready to accept Rachele Mus
solini’s explanation for why she no longer had the red-penciled original, which was that she had memorized the words and destroyed it to prevent it from falling into partisan hands. But a few years before she died, Rachele Mussolini finally admitted that the letter was completely invented. She had written it herself, she said, to gain sympathy at a moment when she thought the public favored Claretta Petacci.
Following Rachele’s lead, others also sought to minimize Claretta’s role in Mussolini’s life as a way to lessen the gravity of the crime of adultery. “On the verge of death,” wrote Il Duce’s sister, Edvige, Benito found himself with Clara at his side, but before his eyes “were the faces of Rachele and his children.” The supposed love between Il Duce and Clara was a one-sided passion, asserted another writer. Mussolini had long tried to free himself from his mistress and was constantly unfaithful to her; the only thing he loved about her was her “enormous bosom.”47 Thus Il Duce was supposed to have behaved like a typical middle-class Italian: he had a wife to look after the house and children and a lover so he could feel successful, and he betrayed his lover as frequently as possible. What was the point of dwelling on the liaison between Mussolini and Petacci? For an Italian male there was nothing more routine than accumulating lovers. Committing a few sins was a salutary way to keep evil at bay. The books and weeklies maintained that Il Duce was a libertine, thereby dismissing the scandal about his death beside Claretta.
Unlike the daily papers, subsidized by the state, the weeklies depended on the market. Perhaps, therefore, they can be considered more indicative of postwar Italian taste and orientation. The people who flocked to buy the illustrated weeklies seemed to like their benevolence toward Mussolini. Obviously, readers didn’t buy the weeklies solely for their pictures of Il Duce and Rachele Mussolini’s memoirs; the magazines also contained photos of film stars and gossipy details about various sordid crime stories. If the black-and-white images from the Fascist period contributed to their popularity, it was for sentimental, not ideological, reasons. Photographs win us over with their aura of time gone by, and even the pictures of Mussolini, images that a whole generation of Italians had been poring over since childhood, partook of that aura. In the 1950s, in a country that was undergoing vast social changes, it was possible to be nostalgic without regretting the demise of Fascism.
The fact that Mussolini’s big jaw could appear in the weeklies alongside pictures of “naughty” Brigitte Bardot and the Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano was a sign of the times. That the roles of Il Duce, the pinup girl, and the gunman were interchangeable pointed to the decline of a certain postwar morality, one that the partisans had hoped to impose. If ever it had risen over postwar Italy, the star of the Resistance had set in a hurry.
There was no room for Jacobin grief in the illustrated weeklies—mourning for the victors’ dead, as the Resistance veterans would have preferred. When the popular magazines depicted Il Duce as a family man led astray by corrupt Fascist leaders and hunted down by Communist agents, they bolstered an image of Mussolini, dear departed, and popularized the Thermidor version of mercy, offering sorrow for the losers. They also created a climate in which the government could finally decide to return the “restless corpse” to the family. But the mood of forgiveness was at least as useful to the living as it was to the dead. It allowed Italians to measure themselves against Il Duce’s memory without feeling uneasy. Absolving Mussolini of the crimes of Dongo—the greatcoat, the money, the lover girl—meant absolving him of the crimes of the regime. And to forgive the crimes of the regime—the political opportunism, the economic corruption, the duplicitous morality—meant forgiving Italians their past as Fascists.
7
THE RETURN OF THE REMAINS
In the days of Piazzale Loreto, Il Duce’s remains were the civil war incarnate—a trophy for the partisans, a sacrifice for the Fascists. During the first decade of the Italian republic, the remains generated two competing forms of mercy: the anti-Fascists’ harsh brand and the saccharine variety of the anti-anti-Fascists. When, in 1957, Il Duce’s body was transferred to the San Casciano cemetery at Predappio, there was yet another occasion for these sentiments to clash. Inside the walls of San Casciano—and elsewhere in Italy—the two souls of the postwar period went to war.
In early 1955, there was a rumor in Predappio that the government was about to return Mussolini’s body to his family. Like many other such rumors, this one proved untrue, but it gave the weekly Il Mondo, the bible of non-Communist anti-Fascists, a pretext to take up the problem of the wandering corpse. According to the magazine’s political editor, the way the government had handled the problem of Mussolini’s remains revealed its “inferiority complex” with respect to right- and left-wing oppositions alike. Christian Democratic leaders had never felt strong enough either to allow the remains to be dispersed or to restore the body to the dictator’s family without fuss or negotiations, as if the move were standard bureaucratic procedure. As Il Mondo saw it, the word that Prime Minister Mario Scelba was considering returning Mussolini’s body to Predappio reflected his desire to secure the backing of the extreme right. The prime minister’s deliberations also reflected the Christian Democrats’ highly ambivalent approach. Scelba wanted the body to be buried at San Casciano during the night; he feared that a daytime burial would be seen by the left as an intolerable provocation. Scelba wanted to “satisfy the neo-Fascists and at the same time avoid the protests of the anti-Fascists,” wrote Il Mondo; he wanted to take credit for a gesture of “pacification” and yet ward off scandal—“too many objectives at once, obviously, and we can be sure he won’t accomplish any of them.”1
Il Mondo’s characterization of Scelba’s motives apply as well to his Christian Democratic successor Adone Zoli, who became prime minister in May 1957. Zoli, too, saw the gesture of restoring Mussolini’s corpse to the family as a chance to satisfy neo-Fascists and thus expand the Christian Democrat hegemony over the extreme right. He, too, sought to evade anti-Fascist protests by keeping the decision to return the body quiet. But unlike Scelba, Zoli really did release Il Duce’s body. He did so at a highly thorny political moment: the formula the party had devised to rule from the center was failing; the Christian Democrats were unable to maintain a parliamentary majority in their coalition with several small moderate parties. The party was divided between those who favored an opening to the left, that is, the inclusion of the Socialists in the governing coalition, and those who were bargaining, more or less secretly, to embrace the neo-Fascists. Zoli had to seek a combination of support that would give his government a parliamentary majority. The challenge, which was fought out from the end of May to early July 1957, ended with Zoli calling on the body of Il Duce.
In return for supporting the Christian Democrats, the Italian Social Movement demanded the promise that Mussolini’s body would be quickly returned to Predappio. It was a charged request for Zoli personally, as his family had its origins in Predappio and the family tomb in the San Casciano cemetery stood only a few meters from the Mussolinis. In his inaugural address to Parliament, Zoli carefully refrained from mentioning Il Duce’s body. He presented his government as one of transition, in anticipation of national elections in 1958. Referring discreetly to his anti-Fascist views, Zoli made it clear that he would not deviate from Christian Democratic precedent and allow the Italian Social Movement to be part of the governing majority. “Our record, in the past and in the present,” said Zoli, “is too well known and too respected for there to be any doubt that we will depart from it.”2 But the smaller moderate parties and the left failed to endorse his government and Zoli was confirmed with the votes of the monarchist party and the Italian Social Movement. Domenico Leccisi, who had left the neo-Fascists to run as an independent, even spoke up to offer Zoli “the modest vote of a Fascist.”3 For the first time in the history of the republic, neo-Fascist votes become decisive in forming a government.
Right after Zoli’s parliamentary majority was confirmed, the Chamber of Deputies was
the stage for one of the most animated scenes in the tale of Mussolini’s afterlife. The neo-Fascists, arguing that Zoli governed only thanks to their votes, challenged him to step down, as he had said he would not accept the backing of the Italian Social Movement. However, the Christian Democrats calculated that even without the Italian Social Movement they had 281 votes, or one more vote than the bare majority necessary. Leccisi then insisted on being counted as a member of the Italian Social Movement and not as an independent, because, he said, he was a genuine Fascist: “How else can you define a warrior who has even gone so far as to steal the body of Il Duce to protect it from the depredations of the infidels?”4 Leccisi’s political message could not have been more pointed.
The Communist daily, l’Unità, echoed that message with a polemical headline: “Leccisi’s Vote … the Deciding One.” The paper offered a scathing description of Christian Democrat ministers trying to deny that Leccisi was a neo-Fascist. Even the Corriere della Sera, which usually hewed to a pro-government position, did not try to conceal the embarrassment of the previous day’s developments. After some hesitation, Zoli remained as prime minister despite his reliance on the Italian Social Movement—and despite the attacks from the extreme-right press, still angry about the anti-Fascist stance Zoli had taken earlier. Soon the pages of Il Mondo were featuring a cartoon by satirist Mino Maccari showing two black boots labeled “the pillars of a right-wing majority.”5
The Body of Il Duce Page 19