Amelia was standing at her window in Genoa one day when she saw a parade of schoolboys in their little fascist uniforms march past. They were singing one of the new fascist songs, its refrain ‘Bombs! Bombs!’ ‘I saw the abyss into which we were falling,’ she wrote later. ‘For the first time . . . I realised that this was a bottomless pit, which could not be filled in. That night, in bed, I wept.’
In the wake of the October violence, the Tuscan fascists had been reorganised into 270 sections, with 30,000 members, and four legions – 6,398 men – of militia. Amelia went home to find Florence calm and the house in Via Giusti intact. The tourists had returned. She discovered that many of her former acquaintances had made their peace with the fascists; some, indeed, had taken official positions in their ranks. She stopped seeing them. Some of her Jewish friends had been reassured by an article in Critica Fascista stating that the fascists felt great ‘respect’ for the Jews and their ‘profound and ardent fidelity’ towards the patria. Amelia’s circle in Florence had now shrunk to a very few, very close, friends: the Orvietos, Alessandro and Sarina Levi, Zio Giù and Zia Gì.
Carlo was convinced that the only way forward was to come up with a new kind of socialism, to reject all the old orthodoxies – especially the ‘blind and tortuous dogmatism’ of Italian Marxism – and to turn instead to the young and channel their youthful enthusiasm to better ends. Despite growing evidence to the contrary, he continued to insist that fascism still inspired moral revulsion in a great number of Italians. His new philosophy was, above all, to be pragmatic, plain-speaking and insurrectionary. He found an ally in Pietro Nenni, a republican from Faenza, veteran of the post-war workers’ revolts, and former editor of Avanti! He and Mussolini had once been friends, which meant that Nenni knew only too well the ruthlessness of which Mussolini was capable.
Unlike most of the other socialist luminaries, who were hanging desperately on to the notion that Italy might yet regain its sanity, Nenni was prepared to accept that the old guard had been definitively defeated. Though in many ways very different, both in temperament and age – Nenni was thirty-five, Carlo twenty-five – the two men were convinced of two essential things: that no compromise with Mussolini was possible, and that something had to be done, quickly, to galvanise a public rapidly becoming quiescent and lethargic. But Nenni had fallen into a state of inertia and discouragement himself, and it was some weeks before Carlo was able to cajole and bully him into agreeing to start a new clandestine paper, to take over from where Non Mollare and Gobetti’s Rivoluzione Liberale had left off. ‘Above all,’ Carlo wrote to him, chiding him for his apathy and apologising for his own urgency and outspokenness, ‘I want to give proof of energy, character and initiative.’ It was his absolute ‘duty’ as a ‘socialist and a rich capitalist’, and he would feel it to be ‘liberation’ from the money which weighed on him.
With most of the clandestine papers closed, there was a fund of excellent writers to call on. Nello would contribute articles of historical analysis, examining the reasons for the defeat of the left and the rise of fascism. Carlo would put up the money, and between them all they would put behind them the paralysing obsession with class struggle that seemed to enfeeble left-wing Italian thinkers. Then they would navigate a new path through the ‘enervating and unworthy’ crisis into which the country had been plunged, stir their readers out of their ‘intellectual paralysis’ and prompt them to demand a society in which ideas were more important than self-interest.
Carlo was persuasive. Nenni capitulated. What mattered, Carlo told friends, was that Nenni was prepared to take risks in these horrible and perilous times. The first issue of Il Quarto Stato, a ‘socialist magazine of political culture’ appeared on 27 March 1926. Before long, it had well over a thousand subscribers and seven times that number of readers. Though Nenni and Carlo wrote as ‘noi’ – ‘we’ – Carlo’s tone of unquenchable energy and enthusiasm came through loudly. ‘We don’t see ourselves as beaten or resigned,’ he wrote. ‘On the contrary, our real future begins today.’
They were not left in peace for long. In April, a Milanese police inspector arrived to arrest Nenni. He was taken to spend twenty days in the prison of San Vittore; he would have been there far longer but for his international reputation. When he emerged, he too spoke of joining Salvemini and Rossi in exile.
Carlo was now sole editor. In the next edition, he published tributes to Gobetti, Amendola and Anna Kuliscioff. ‘In just a few months,’ he wrote, ‘the highest peaks of the Italian opposition have fallen. Three mountains, three generations . . . who shared a common longing for an absolute morality in life.’ More and more he felt as if he were one of the embattled patriots of the Risorgimento, and in a review written at around this time quoted a letter of Mazzini’s: ‘When it comes to action, I am more determined than ever, more firmly resolute, to be of some use to a future Italy, and I will live and die, I hope, for her.’ When Nenni told him that he would have liked to have given his life for an idea, Carlo wrote back: ‘I too have often dreamt of being able to finish life so usefully for a great cause.’ What he admired most about Mazzini, he said, was ‘his boundless faith, his tenacity, his constancy, his courageous optimism, his utter determination’. Amelia had every reason to feel proud of Carlo.
To judge from two letters written by Nello to Amelia during the spring of 1926, Amelia was still far from reconciled to having Marion as a daughter-in-law. The first of them, written perhaps after some altercation, assures his mother that, whatever happened, Nello and Maria would try to give Amelia nothing but ‘serenity’. The second is more revealing. He had been certain, Nello wrote, that once Carlo was away from Marion, ‘he would turn off the tap called Marion and open another’. Since this had not happened, then Amelia had actively to seek ‘tranquility’. ‘You have done all that was humanly possible to do: now your, our, efforts at erosion will only become negative and corrosive.’ If only for Carlo’s sake, as well as his own, Amelia needed to play an ‘intimate and daily’ part in all their lives.
For himself, he added, though he was not yet sure that Maria loved him as much as he loved her, for his love was ‘gigantic’, he could not imagine ever again being so much in love. He spent his days, he said, feeling like a ‘leaf wafting through space on a capricious wind’. It was not long before he and Maria were engaged, and Amelia felt nothing but delight at the prospect of their marriage. Maria was both loving and sensible, though not very robust in health. With great tact, she wrote to her forthcoming mother-in-law: ‘Dearest Signora Amelia, I want to send you especially tender and affectionate greetings.’
How aware Carlo was of the depth of Amelia’s reservations about Marion is not clear. He was also in love. Perhaps choosing to disregard his mother’s feelings, he told her firmly that Marion was ‘bellissima e deliziosa’. Marion too was in love. From Capri, where she was staying in a pensione run by German nuns, she wrote, ‘Dear little Carlo . . . I would never have believed it possible to feel such happiness. Buona sera, my dearest and most handsome boy, buona notte, sleep well.’ Salvemini had been to visit Marion’s parents in England and wrote to tell her how much he had liked her intelligent and highly strung sister, but realised that her parents’ life in Uxbridge was not Marion’s world and that she had needed to get away.
Carlo had been living under the illusion that no one had noticed his presence in the north. But in March the fascist newspaper Il Littorio opened an offensive against the ‘opponents of the regime’ and Carlo’s name was on the list of those they intended to pursue. What he continued not to realise was that his police file was growing fatter by the day. At 9 o’clock on the morning of 27 April, as he was walking down the street, he was stopped by three young men, ostensibly to ask some question about his class. They started to punch him. He fought back, shouted loudly and a crowd gathered. His attackers ran off before he was badly hurt. In the police report made of the incident, Carlo was described as being ‘heavily built’, with a wide forehead, fair hair with no parting
, blue eyes, a snub nose, long ears, and hands and arms like those of a blacksmith. When he arrived in his classroom at 3 o’clock, there were cheers and claps. Then a small group of students began shouting ‘Viva il fascismo!’ They were quickly bundled out. To Amelia, Carlo made light of the attack.
University teachers were now required to produce certificates of ‘good character and citizenship’, and soon orders arrived from Rome that Carlo must be dismissed for ‘actions against the national government’. The rector demurred. But Carlo, for whom the attack by students had been a symbol of intolerable fascist interference, had had enough: he was sick of the restrictions that had come to exhaust and humiliate him. Greatly to Amelia’s disappointment – which she made no effort to hide – he resigned from all his teaching positions but decided to stay on in Milan, taking a flat from where he intended to go on editing Il Quarto Stato. The uncertainty about whether or not to be an academic, which had plagued him for so long, was abruptly put to one side when he learnt that the university was under intense pressure to remove him altogether from their books. ‘Kaput at last!’ he said to Amelia. He would now give himself up fully to fighting the fascists. The moment had come, he told Salvemini, to do what others before him had done, and that was to sacrifice all ‘for the triumph of ideas’ and renounce ‘the easier honours and successes of the official world’. The magazine was selling well and providing him with precisely the forum he needed in which to explore his thoughts. He appeared unbothered by Nenni’s arrest and what it meant for his own future. When the premises of a typesetter whom he was using was raided by the fascists, with the loss of 5,000 copies of Il Quarto Stato, he cheerfully moved to another.
His professors were sad to see him go. Before he left, they told him that he had been an inspired and distinguished teacher, a brilliant conversationalist with an ‘uncommon elegance of expression’ and an entertaining lecturer, even if better as an analyst than as a theoretician. Both the staff and the students had loved him. His departure was a ‘real loss’. To his mentor Luigi Einaudi, Carlo described himself mockingly as a ‘semi-innocent and a heretic’ when it came to real economics.
Carlo and Marion were married in the town hall of Genoa on 25 July 1926. He was twenty-seven, she was thirty and somewhat bitter about the long delay. Amelia, Nello and Santino Caramella, a philosopher recently sacked from his university for anti-fascism, were present. No one from Marion’s side came out from England. The couple went for their honeymoon to a hotel in Santa Margherita, a small seaside resort on the coast north of Liguria. One day, Alberto Moravia turned up with pages from a novel he was writing about the alienation of young people in post-war Italy; he planned to call it Gli indifferenti and read parts of it aloud to them. A chilling tale, started when he was still nineteen, it laid the groundwork for his later books, with their sly, venal, narcissistic characters. Largely thanks to Amelia, he had been completely cured in his sanatorium in Cortina, and he professed to feel enormous gratitude towards her. Towards her sons he was cool and critical. ‘I thought’, he wrote later, ‘that my cousins belonged to the eighteenth century and were deluding themselves, their heads filled with a mass of generous but impractical ideas.’ In the house of Amelia’s brother in Rome, fascists were regular visitors.
In September, Carlo and Marion went to Stresa, to a hotel on the lake, where the heat was sweltering and Carlo spent his mornings at his desk. After lunch, they sat on the terrace practising their German by translating the letters between Marx and Engels, before taking a boat out on the lake in the cool of the evening. After dinner, they returned to the terrace and talked or read books on the history of philosophy. ‘Voilà tout,’ as Carlo described it in a letter to Amelia. Neither he nor Marion was exactly light-hearted; in any case both felt deeply involved in what was going on around them. Even before they married, Carlo had told Marion that for the moment he had no choice: politics, the fight against fascism, had to come first before her, before any children they might have. He meant it. The charming, humorous, teasing boy was still there; but the urgency of the times had brought with it an impatient and steely determination. What concerned Marion was being strong enough to share Carlo’s life. ‘I want to be a lively companion to you, always ready to take an active part in your political life.’
Finding the heat excessive, they moved on to Portofino. They were still there when a letter came from Amelia. It said much about how difficult she was finding it to break the intimate tie that had bound her for so long to her sons. With a lack of restraint and self-knowledge perhaps surprising in one so attuned to the fleeting nuances of human relations, she wrote to Carlo: ‘I beg you, write me a line . . . Silence is the worst thing. To tell you the truth, the distance between us now and to which I must reconcile myself would be nothing if you wrote to me. You no longer tell me anything, and I can no longer follow what you are doing. This makes me very sad and fills me with a great sense of emptiness and loneliness.’ What Carlo replied is not known. One can only imagine what Marion must have felt.
Back in Milan in late September, they found Carlo’s flat too small for them both. Leaving the offices of Il Quarto Stato there, they moved into a large, quiet apartment at 5 Via Borghetto, near the Porta Venezia. It was, Carlo wrote to his mother, worrying as ever about spending money on himself, too big and too beautiful. But he loved its light airiness.
Mussolini called 1926 ‘l’anno Napoleonico’, the Napoleonic year, of fascism. During its first ten months, he survived three more assassination attempts, and turned Italy into a dictatorship. Others would remember 1926 as a year of waiting.
The first attack on Mussolini was carried out by the rebellious and eccentric fifty-year-old daughter of an Anglo-Irish peer, Violet Gibson, who had fallen in love with Italy and wished to save it from his thuggery. On 7 April 1926, while Mussolini was raising his arm in the fascist salute during a visit to the Campidoglio in Rome, she fired a revolver at his head. Looking much like a pauper in the crowd, dressed in a shiny black dress and with her straggly long greying hair pulled up into an untidy bun, she had not struck anyone as menacing. The bullet grazed Mussolini’s nose, which bled profusely. Reacting much as he had over the Zaniboni affair, he had his nose bandaged, then proceeded with his plans, declaring, whether consciously or not paraphrasing a leader of the French Vendée revolt in 1793, ‘If I advance, follow me; if I retreat, kill me; if I die, avenge me.’ As an act of clemency, Violet Gibson was sent back to Britain, where a society doctor declared her insane and sent her to spend the rest of her life in a lunatic asylum.
The second attempt on Mussolini’s life took place on 11 September, as he was being driven to Palazzo Chigi. It was very hot and the car windows were down. A loud bang, as if a stone had been thrown against the car, was heard. The quick-witted chauffeur accelerated and the car was thirty metres away when the grenade exploded, wounding eight passers-by and shattering the windows of nearby buildings. Again, Mussolini made light of the attack, which was discovered to have been made by an anarchist marble-worker from Carrara called Gino Lucetti, who was seized by police before he had a chance to lob a second grenade.
The third event was more mysterious, and had immediate, drastic consequences. It took place just six weeks later, on 31 October, in Bologna, as Mussolini was being driven in an open Alfa Romeo by the local ras, Leandro Arpinati, having just been serenaded by the triumphal march from Aida. This time the bullet was apparently fired from the crowd by a fifteen-year-old apprentice printer, Anteo Zamboni, but since the boy was immediately set upon and lynched and his body paraded around the streets on a spike, nothing could be proved about him. The bullet narrowly missed Mussolini. Anteo’s father, a well-to-do printer, was arrested, along with his mother and ten other members of his family. All over Italy, fascists went on the rampage.
This was just the beginning. It had been possible to dismiss Violet Gibson as insane. But the attacks by Lucetti and Zamboni showed how vulnerable Mussolini had become, even if all he had to show for four assassination
attempts was a small wound to his nose. On 5 November, a series of ‘exceptional’, fascistissime, laws were enacted. All parties except for the Fascist Party were dissolved; anti-fascist organisations and publications were closed down; passports were withdrawn and the police ordered to shoot anyone trying to leave the country clandestinely; the death penalty, abolished in 1889, was reinstated for anyone attempting to murder the king or the head of government. The 120 Aventine secessionist deputies, who had prevaricated and stalled so uselessly and for so long, were dismissed from parliament. They had become so irrelevant that, as Turati observed, what they did or did not do was of no more than ‘archaeological interest’.
Most crucially, a Special Tribunal for the Defence of the State was set up to try ‘any activity whatsoever capable of damaging national interests’. Presided over by a senior officer from the army, navy, airforce or militia, with five assistant judges who had sworn an oath to ‘obey the orders of the Duce’, the Special Tribunal was given powers to hand down warnings – ammonizioni – prison sentences, and periods of forced residence – confino – in a village or penal settlement far from home. There was no anti-fascist activity of any kind which was not illegal, and no newspaper that was not incorporated into the totalitarian state: by the time it was definitively suppressed, Avanti! had been confiscated 132 times in two and a half years.
Fascism was now no longer a means but an end; as Mussolini told an audience gathered in Milan’s Teatro alla Scala, the Italian citizen was nothing more than a cog in the great machine of state power. Realising that he had to bring Italian intellectuals into line, and get from them some kind of legitimacy, he turned to the right-wing philosopher Giovanni Gentile, who obediently came up with a Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, the fruit of a conference held in Bologna to prove that no gulf existed between fascism and culture. A large number of otherwise respectable academics were persuaded to sign it. In response, the Manifesto of Antifascist Intellectuals was drafted by the historian and editor Benedetto Croce, and this was signed by Salvemini, Piero Calamandrei, Guglielmo Ferrero and many of their friends. In it, they dismissed Gentile’s paper as a ‘schoolboy’s exercise’, and said that it was as incoherent as it was bizarre. Mussolini responded by calling Croce an ‘impotent professor’ whose work he would not deign to read.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 19