Nonetheless, Geppert may have a point worth noting: much of the development of Mussolini’s image as a Latin lover run wild actually occurred after the war, where stories of his rampages became a natural partner to the sentimentalising of the dictatorship in the illustrated weeklies. Before 1945 ordinary Italians, if it is possible to use the term, in the great majority of cases lived their daily lives far from the centres of power, and Geppert is correct in arguing that Fascist welfare policies, despite what now can be comprehended as their corruption and confusion,12 were marketed by an active and adroit propaganda as gushing like a fountain from the dictator himself. The Archivio Centrale preserves tens of thousands of letters, written by Italians to their dictator, the majority of which seek implicit or explicit gain through Mussolini’s personal intervention and are more interested in property, employment and improved living conditions than sex.13
Moreover, there are other reasons to doubt the common implication that Mussolini was unusual in his sexual reach and performance. After all, the literature hostile to autocratic power is filled with sex scandals and regularly insists that dictators display their ruthlessness in bed as unrestrainedly as they do in public policy. The behaviour of such Julio-Claudian emperors as Caligula and Nero (or, with a different gender cast, Tiberius), as slyly described by Suetonius and Tacitus, has been a lasting model. In more recent times, especially, and perhaps in Mussolini’s wake (however transmuted by local factors), pen portraits of the copulative habits of dictators have remained conspicuous. Muammar Gaddafi, a French journalist declared, was ‘a tyrant who ruled through sex, obsessed with the idea of one day possessing the wives or daughters of the rich and powerful, of his ministers and generals, of chiefs of state and monarchs’. On a daily basis, Gaddafi made do with raping and enslaving ‘hundreds of young girls’, the charge runs. Only in brutal and rapid sexual congress could he be truly satiated in his rise from poor Bedouin to ‘Brotherly Leader’ of his people.14
More flamboyant was Jean-Bédel Bokassa in the Central African Republic, an admirer of Napoleon who, in 1976, elevated himself to emperor. Bokassa tallied seventeen legitimate wives and thirty recognised progeny, of whom one bore the euphonious name Charlemagne. An expert on his regime has suggested that Bokassa’s children numbered ‘in the hundreds’;15 with this quiverful, Bokassa eclipsed his imperial model. In regard to the romance of power, however, Napoleon is still an eminent figure and one from whom it is hard to separate politics and sex. The Frenchman is especially remembered for his frank expression of love. As he wrote to Josephine Beauharnais, he longed to ‘kiss her heart and then lower on her body, much, much lower’.16 Not for nothing was Mussolini the (co-)author of a play about Napoleon, being given to muse uneasily with Claretta whether he yet had come up to the Corsican’s heroic ideal.17 Petacci was, however, no Josephine, being far too prudish to allow her diary to record their physicality over-frankly; she coyly wrote ‘c..o’ for culo (‘bum’), ‘p . . .’ for puttana (‘whore’) and could not spell pederast or haemorrhoid,18 while Mussolini’s own youthful bodice-ripper, The cardinal’s mistress (1910), was scarcely explicit in its depiction of sex.19
If dictators (and they are always male) are often assumed to have been rampant in their lust, other prominent men of the Fascist era scarcely confined themselves to the marriage bed. The Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti assured his diary in 1917 that he needed a new woman every day. ‘I am always a man of rapid and violent coitus,’ he ruminated complacently, ‘then comes sleep and detachment’ (although, in possible retribution for such sexism, in 1923 he married Benedetta Cappa, twenty-one years his junior; she proved at least as thrusting a personality as he).20 Before that, Marinetti’s self-consciously wicked denunciation of the family as ‘an inferior sentiment, almost animal, created by fear’ was wildly inaccurate as a presage of the behaviour of actual families, like the Petaccis and Mussolinis, under Fascism.21
Gabriele D’Annunzio, another poet whose political appeal made him a serious rival to Mussolini as a post-First World War Duce, judged himself immodestly to be ‘the world’s greatest lover’. According to his most recent biographer, D’Annunzio possessed special flair in cunnilingus (a sceptical historian might wonder whether Claretta could imagine that version of intimacy).22 On the other side of the gender divide lay Doris Duranti, early cinema star and sometime lover of Alessandro Pavolini, the secretary of the revived Partito Fascista Repubblicano (PFR; Republican Fascist Party) under the Repubblica Sociale Italiana, who claimed in her memoirs to have bedded at least one hundred men.23 She was also demanding: early in their relationship, Pavolini was reported to have given her five expensive furs just as a token of love.24
Taking lovers was standard practice among Fascist Party hierarchs. As was noted, Ciano was thought a competitor with his father-in-law in his array of sexual partners. Italo Balbo, the most serious potential rival to Mussolini within the Fascist Party, while remaining solicitous towards his wife (she was the daughter of a rich banker) and family, found time for numerous affairs. There were even rumours of intercourse with Crown Princess Maria José, who was locked in a loveless marriage with Umberto, the heir to the throne. When Balbo was rusticated in 1933 to be governor of Libya, he took with him his young lover, the actor Laura Adami, and patronised her appearances there as Ophelia, Juliet and in other celebrated roles.25 Adami, born in 1913, was a year younger than Claretta. Michele Bianchi, Roberto Farinacci, Ettore Muti, Arturo Bocchini and many other Fascist bosses behaved similarly.26 Mussolini’s private secretariat kept extensive, and presumably useful, files on the sexual peccadilloes of the regime’s ruling elite; there, charges of adultery were at least as common as complaints about peculation.27
But too inflated emphasis on dictators and Italians may be mistaken. After all, American president John F. Kennedy assured the gentlemanly British prime minister Harold Macmillan (who had the courtesy to put up with his wife’s longstanding affair with his bisexual friend, Robert Boothby), that he needed a woman every three days or else would be rent by a terrible headache.28 Another biographer reckons it was one per day but adds that Kennedy declared that his ‘passion’ was ‘spent quickly’ and readily ‘disposed of like an itch’.29 An aide computed knowingly that, in so far as the administration of the American empire was concerned, sex demanded ‘less time than tennis’.30 In our own era, Dominique Strauss-Kahn sounds as though he was at least as ruthless as Kennedy in his mating habits,31 while Berlusconi retailed a myth of himself as a great lover as enthusiastically as did Mussolini.32
Nor was patriarchal behaviour very different in that generation which made Italy during the Risorgimento. Giuseppe Garibaldi, for one, broke immediately with a second wife thirty-four years his junior when he heard allegations of her infidelity. His next wife, married in 1880 just before his death, was forty years younger than he and the wet nurse of his grandchildren. Earlier, as Lucy Riall has described, Garibaldi ‘had a series of passionate, overlapping relationships with several women’, some of them foreign.33
Patriarchal attitudes and actions may flourish wherever men gather. But, of modern ideologies, Fascism is the most extreme in putting men on top in its imagined ideal society. In that regard, Victoria De Grazia began her study How Fascism ruled women: ‘Mussolini’s regime stood for returning women to home and hearth, restoring patriarchal authority, and confining female destiny to bearing babies.’34 Often enough, Mussolini was crass in expressing his contempt for women. As he assured his celebrated interviewer, Emil Ludwig, in 1932, with himself in mind, ‘women exert no influence upon strong men’. After all, he added, they were ‘analytical, not synthetical’ and could only ‘play a passive part’ in the great world. ‘During all the centuries of civilisation’, they had followed and not led men, he concluded sententiously.35
Quite a few historians have accepted that Mussolini’s Ascension Day speech in 1927 was the crucial guide to his regime’s purpose with its pledge to ‘dictate demography’ and thereby police and animate the be
drooms of the masses.36 Yet the most recent study of the fate of the Italian family under the dictatorship has concluded that Fascism failed to decide ‘the exact contours of the family discourse that it wanted to propagate’, with the result being that, throughout the era, Catholicism, not the dictatorship, ‘offered the dominant model of family life in Italy’. The regime failed to alter either the law or Italians’ ‘long-standing beliefs, habits and customs’ in regard to their family loyalty.37 Similarly De Grazia wryly deployed the cliché in her book’s title in order to expose the actual variation and confusion of policy and practice, especially where there was radical chat about the marshalling of the ‘new Fascist woman’.
In examining Claretta Petacci and her world, it is important therefore to underline that Mussolini’s behaviour towards his sexual partners was more nuanced than sensational accounts of the ‘Great Ejaculator’ have allowed. It may be that evidence about his other relationships is less reliable and extensive than that revealed so rapturously about Claretta’s ties with the Duce in her papers. Yet a full comprehension of their affair in turn demands knowledge of the dictator’s other dealings with women and a portrayal of how Mussolini behaved sexually during his socialist youth, his Fascist rise to power and once installed as dictator.
By his own account, his first intercourse occurred while a teenager in a local brothel, as it must have done for many boys of his class. The woman, he recalled, was older than he was and much more experienced. It was not his only meeting with a prostitute. When serving his term of military conscription in 1905–6, he informed Claretta in 1938, ‘I often went to the brothel where the women were rather knowing and dirty. But they initiated me into the mysteries and vices of sex.’ Before that ‘a romantic’, afterwards, he explained coldly, ‘I have regarded all the women whom I have taken as if they were in a brothel. For my carnal satisfaction.’38
The chronology of Mussolini’s memory was as vague as his sentiments were crude and peremptory. But there are accounts, more or less credible, of fleeting affairs with women, often the wives of other men, who crossed his path while he was a primary school teacher in the provinces or a questing socialist emigrant in Switzerland and the Austrian Trentino. When he was teaching at Tolmezzo, for example, he disclosed to Claretta, ‘the girls were wild for me’, but the name of only one of them – Graziosa – had stuck in his memory.39 The use of force was often a key part of Mussolini’s recollection, and a method to be applauded. Whether events happened exactly as he described and whether male aggression was unusual in his world at the time remains imponderable. More established is the claim that, at Trento in 1909, he fathered a boy child on a socialist comrade called Fernanda Oss Facchinelli. But the baby did not survive infancy and the relationship soon ended.40
Apart from his ‘sainted mother’, Rosa Maltoni, who died, aged only forty-six, in 1904 – Mussolini never ceased to invoke this reverent or clichéd image of her maternal love for him in his waywardness41 – the most impressive woman whom he met in these years as an aspirant revolutionary was the Russian Marxist Angelica Balabanoff. Five years his senior, she assumed a major part in his life as a teacher of elementary dialectics, a legacy that remained with him as dictator when he had frequent need to appear knowing, without having the time or will to master the subject involved.42 A recent biographer of Balabanoff has contended that she and Mussolini were lovers from when they met in Switzerland for almost a decade until 1913, but the contention seems based on the fancy, common in that era, and certainly held by Mussolini, that a man and a woman could not be alone together without sexual congress.43 If there was once a fondness between them, Balabanoff had radically changed her mind in a work first published in New York in 1942, where her character study of the dictator was devastatingly hostile. ‘Naturally diffident, a misanthrope, always worried about looking a fool, envious of those who knew anything . . . Mussolini saw in every intellectual an enemy and competitor.’ For all loyal socialists, she concluded, he was nothing more than ‘A Man bought and sold, a Judas, a murderous Cain.’44 Mussolini, by contrast, was surprisingly generous in his recollection of her, telling a young male admirer that she had indeed taught him how to think.45
Speculation about a period when many wild oats were sown does not end but takes a new course after the commencement of the Duce’s partnership with his eventual wife and the mother of his five legitimate children, Rachele Guidi, late in 1909. The two were joined in a socialist small-town romance, with Mussolini soon carrying off his young lover (born in April 1890, she was almost seven years his junior) from his father’s home through the rain so they could live together in a tiny flat at Forlì, where Mussolini was the editor and sole serious journalist on the staff of the earnestly entitled local socialist paper, La Lotta di Classe (‘The Class Struggle’). As he later drooled in his rough manner to Claretta, Rachele was then ‘in flower, buxom, with magnificent breasts, beautiful’. ‘A peasant’, he added in evident sop to his bourgeois lover’s readily aroused jealousy, ‘but a beautiful one’. One day, he ran on, ‘I threw her on an armchair and took her virginity . . . with my accustomed violence.’ Soon thereafter she fell pregnant and, accepting her plea that he not abandon her, they agreed to pursue a life together, with the result that he abandoned a half-idea he was treasuring of immigrating to the USA.46
The first child of this relationship was a daughter, Edda, born on 1 September 1910. Until just before they set up house together, Rachele had been residing with her mother, Anna Guidi, who herself was the lover of Mussolini’s father, Alessandro, prompting unsubstantiated claims that Rachele may have been Benito’s half-sister.47 Scandalmongers on occasion have similarly asserted that Edda was ‘really’ Balabanoff’s child,48 and even contended that, after she had grown up, Mussolini committed incest with her.49
In 1912 a momentous change occurred in Mussolini’s life when his revolutionary faction triumphed at the Socialist Party congress at Reggio Emilia. In reward for this victory, Mussolini, still only twenty-nine, was promoted to editor of the main party newspaper, Avanti!, which had just moved its office from Rome to Italy’s business capital, Milan. Now Edda, her father and mother rented a flat in a bustling modern city; for Benito Mussolini confinement in the dull and politically flaccid provinces was over. This new world proffered fresh sexual opportunity: Mussolini was scarcely confined by comradeship with his partner, Rachele, (‘la mia compagna’, as he called her),50 even though they took out a civil marriage certificate in December 1915, before Rachele gave birth to two further children, sons Vittorio and Bruno, in September 1916 and April 1918.
While his legitimate family was expanding, Mussolini’s political life was subject to momentous change. From 1911 to 1914 he assumed a leading Party role as a socialist revolutionary, as well as proving a capable journalist and business manager on Avanti! The outbreak of European war brought a radical shift when, in October, following the guidance of many of his country’s leading intellectuals, Mussolini swung round to demand national entry into the conflict and did so at the cost of expulsion from the Socialist Party and the loss of his editorship of its daily paper. He quickly returned to the fray as editor of his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (‘The People of Italy’), its Mazzinian or warmongering populism announcing that he now spoke for the nation above class. Italy finally did enter battle against Austria in May 1915, and five months later Mussolini accepted conscription into the national armed forces, serving at the front along the Isonzo valley until wounded by shrapnel on 24 February 1917 in an accidental explosion behind the lines.51 But words and guns did not entirely fill his life. Through these hectic times, Mussolini, despite his union with Rachele, formed continuing relationships with three other women, Leda Rafanelli, Margherita Grassini Sarfatti and Ida Dalser, as his actual or hoped for sexual partners.
It was before the war that, on 28 February 1912, Clara (‘Claretta’) Petacci was born into a respectable, ambitious and deeply Catholic Roman bourgeois family (utterly antithetical to Mussolini’s the
n-imagined destiny as the leader of socialist and universal revolution). She owed her name to their devotion to Santa Chiara, an early follower of St Francis of Assisi. The pater familias was Francesco Saverio (Francis Xavier) Petacci, the piety of his name evoking the family’s longstanding and continuing links with the Vatican. Francesco Saverio had, however, been born in Constantinople in 1883, making him the same age as Mussolini. In the Turkish capital, his father, Edoardo, worked as a senior official in the Ottoman postal service, allegedly pioneering its use of stamps. Edoardo Petacci was one of those not uncommon Italian professionals who had for centuries been scattered around the Mediterranean basin, in an experts’ imperialism still lacking overt ties with that of the modern nation state. It was a background that Francesco Saverio shared with the Futurist chief Marinetti, born in Alexandria in 1876 to a lawyer and businessman who gave counsel to the khedive of Egypt.
In 1902 F.S. Petacci returned to Italy to complete medical training, rejoicing in the recommendations and patronage of his doctor uncle, Giuseppe, who held a prestigious post in the pope’s medical service. There, in 1915, he found space for his nephew. Francesco Saverio’s practice as a doctor was better rewarded financially in successive clinics that he operated, one being in the flourishing new Roman suburb of Monteverde. By the 1930s F.S. Petacci directed another medical practice, purposefully situated at Via Nazionale 69 in the city centre.
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