Claretta

by R. J. B. Bosworth

  The ubiquitous slogan of the Fascist regime was, by contrast, Mussolini ha sempre ragione (‘Mussolini is always right’) and it hangs over the histori-ography of the Italian dictatorship as summation of a system where the Duce ruled alone and untrammelled. The corollaries typically are that Mussolini was hell-bent on empire and war. As a fascist must be (the small ‘f’ removing any idea that his ideology and practice were merely Italian), he preached and practised violence and murder. Seeking total power, he was a damnable enemy of human freedom, a purpose summed up in the regime’s totalitarian determination on a system where all ‘was for the state, nothing was against the state, no one was outside the state’. At the same time he was an adamant enemy of female liberation. Under the theory of Fascism, women were returned to the bedroom where their only serious role was to make children for the patria. Neither politics nor thought was for them.

  There is much that is justified in such interpretation. Certainly in the long run, the dictatorship did not improve the wellbeing of its subjects, male or female. Its wars in Africa and Europe brought a million victims prematurely to their graves (almost half of them the peoples of Libya and Ethiopia). Fascist Italy was also an active participant in the Holocaust, that nadir of human civilisation. The image of a bloody, ‘modern’, patriarchal Fascism, killing freedom with totalitarian determination, is deeply inscribed in current historiography. It was well expressed in the American historian Michael Ebner’s important recent study of the sanctions imposed against anti-Fascists under the dictatorship, published as Ordinary violence in Mussolini’s Italy. Ebner entitles his introduction ‘the Fascist Archipelago’, thereby apparently establishing a connection between the Italian regime ruled by Mussolini and Stalinism.15 It may be that the Rome-based historian Emilio Gentile was the intellectual pioneer of the re-assertion of a genuine totalitarianism in interwar Italy.16 But he has had a legion of disciples, especially in the United States and especially now when, in the practice of history, a culturalist methodology has triumphed over what, during the 1970s, was still the leadership of social history.

  There is something intriguing about the chronology of such argument since, as Francis Fukuyama first perceived in however stuttering prose,17 with the fall of communism and the certainty that its economic and political models were both bad and incompetent, we live under a hegemony of neoliberalism. We therefore subsist with what might almost seem a totalitarianism in reverse, wherein ‘all is for the market, nothing is outside the market, no one is against the market’ (at least in regard to government policy). Such a terrible simplification of budget-making is conditioned by identity politics and its ideal of a thousand flowers blooming (as distinct from the rigidity and narrowness of class). Since fascists are practitioners of a state religion, it is usually maintained, they must be bad guys; was it not the residue of French fascism that trickled into the (rival) Baathist regimes of Saddam in Iraq and the Assads in Syria that made them so much ‘worse’ than the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, for example?

  Since, the argument continues, Mussolini instituted a regime of untrammelled state power, there can be no reason to limit its present condemnation. Even if, in reality, Fascism rose to destroy Italian socialism, especially as implemented by the unionised poor peasantry of the Po valley (admittedly with an addition of hyper-nationalism aroused on the nation’s expanded borders through victory in the First World War), it must have fundamentally been a dictatorship viciously opposed to freedom. Liberalism, not Marxism, must have been its real enemy; indeed, as totalitarianist theory in the liberal USA of the 1950s urged, communism and fascism were in fact opposite sides of the same evil modern coin.

  Again I am willing to accept quite a bit of such analysis, despite wanting to note wryly that any governor of Texas executes more of his citizens in a single term of office than Mussolini did throughout his rule in Italy in peacetime, and that the victims and ‘collateral damage’ of neoliberal imperialism must by now be threatening the tally of those killed in its fragile empire by Italian Fascism. I might also wonder at the claim to unsullied virtue of our neoliberal present, as expressed, for example, in its euphemism of ‘taking out’ (that is, murdering with no hint of legal process) ‘bad guys’ and any unlucky enough to find themselves near the ‘strikes’ inflicted on them by anonymous drones or distant pilots. Should we really assume that our times and our side are virtuous and, thus armed and equipped, move on to liquidate fascism historically?

  Setting such moralising aside, in the narrower arena of history writing, the point needs underlining that, in offering an understanding of life under the Italian dictatorship, the totalitarianist version offers sight of half the glass but not its entirety. As the senior Italian historian Roberto Vivarelli, himself once a young and fanatical Fascist and later a liberal patriot, Italian-style, has noted in some puzzlement, Mussolini should not be assumed to have been just another Hitler or Stalin. The Fascist chief was, Vivarelli contended, ‘rather more moderate, more malleable, alien to fanaticism, deprived of all the most repugnant traits of those bloody tyrants’. Crude, vain and cynical Mussolini no doubt was; yet he was also a recognisable Italian man, Vivarelli urged. This dictator required less fanatically religious belief from those he ruled and more ‘obedience and conformism, an individual’s renunciation of his own dignity and character’. The main practical ideology of the regime therefore was not so much deep theory as ‘vulgar Machiavellianism’. Given such reality, Vivarelli has asserted, perhaps remembering his own liberalism, ‘Fascists and fascism were not the same thing . . . a negative judgement on the phenomenon, a historical judgement, does not necessarily extend . . . to all those who were, in various but active ways, then actors of the phenomenon.’18

  If a close reading of Mussolini’s character elicits mixed messages, study of Claretta Petacci is little different. Her writings show her to be an unrepentantly Fascist racist (whether in her drastic assertion of her timeless and ‘noble’ purity of blood or her anti-Semitism). Equally she frequently urged her lover into greater violence, while advocating the closest ties with Hitler and Nazi Germany. Read literally, her words suggest that she was the model of a ‘new Fascist woman’, a true believer in the radical fascism that was enunciated as the purpose of the Repubblica Sociale or, if her subordination is read as involving the confinement of her mind, no more than her master’s voice.

  Yet the most fanatical political chiefs of the revived revolutionary promise of the RSI regime despised and hated Claretta and her family, as was made crystal clear when Marcello awaited execution with fifteen of them beside Lake Como. They were right after all to be suspicious since, as has been noticed, even in its most passionate expression, the Petacci version of Fascist revolution was conditioned by family loyalty, Catholicism, class, a Roman setting and a number of other factors. At the same time, it may be suspected, when the deep beliefs of Pavolini, Starace, Bombacci or any of those whose bodies were destined to be exposed in Piazzale Loreto are reviewed, there, too, currents of Fascist ideology were mixed with other ideas and actions.

  Much social history of the Italian experience of the regime remains to be written. It will need carefully to distinguish deeds from words, the practical from the ideological. It will perforce examine the functioning of family life, not merely that of people of the Petaccis’ class and urban background but of many different sorts of Italians.

  Yet bringing Claretta’s family story into focus is a start. Taking them at their own word, the Petaccis were Fascists, racists, anti-Semites, fans of Hitler and Franco, nationalists, Catholics, clients and patrons, capitalists and Roman bourgeois, possessed of a snobbish ambition to rise into the nobility and a staunch class identity. In their firm family solidarity, the Petaccis, old and young, saw no contradiction in such amalgam. They were not atomised individuals who had surrendered their agency to an all-powerful state, despite the fact that, in April 1945, their family crumbled away as a result of Claretta’s connection with Mussolini in a love story that was less tragic than i
t was pathetic. In their multifarious, complex and ambiguous thought and action, Claretta and the rest of her family hold a telling place in contemporary history. Their story illuminates much about what life was like in the first avowedly ‘totalitarian’, yet decidedly Italian, dictatorship.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This book owes its conception to Christopher Wheeler who, almost two decades ago now, won me over to the idea that I should venture to write a biography of Benito Mussolini. In the new millennium, I gradually became aware of the existence and eventually the public availability of a massive new source on the regime and its dictator, stimulated first by contact with Mauro Suttora, the editor of the initial collection from the Petacci diary. It was published in Italian in 2009 and, to our frustration, has not been translated into English. I was further encouraged by my long friendship with Mimmo Franzinelli, the most productive Italian historian of his generation, and an extraordinarily honest one. Franzinelli edited a second collection from the diary and prepared still unpublished extracts for a third. He generously gave me access to these. My book, supplemented by further material from the Petacci family papers, is dedicated to him.

  Helped by Mariapina Di Simone and her expert staff, I read further in the family papers at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato, that emblematically Fascist building in the Fascist model suburb of EUR. I had already spent quite a bit of my research life there and had collected material on other characters in the story to be related in this book. The ACS, as every historian of contemporary Italy knows, is a delightful place to work; expert archivists, ample and well-lit research space, cheap coffee and two excellent ‘fasts’ to choose from for lunch. In Rome, my investigations were reinforced by the helpful and efficient staff of other libraries, notably the Biblioteca Nazionale, Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea, Biblioteca Baldini (where Silvia Concina was especially helpful) and Istituto Gramsci. When visiting the Eternal City, I have grown used to staying at the British School at Rome, where there is another excellent collection of books and journals as well as an array of scholars of wondrous variety in interest and place of origin, where sociability and intellectuality are deftly sustained by the director, Christopher Smith (no narrow classicist he).

  I may be a stubborn Roma-phile. But I have on occasion strayed to other places in Italy and must especially acknowledge the help over the years of the staff at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana and Biblioteca Querini Stampalia at Venice and the Biblioteca Classense and Biblioteca Oriani at Ravenna. In my search for a place in the world, I have found the most delightful of sanctuaries in Oxford for five years now: imagine living in a house fifteen minutes’ walk from the Bodleian (with lunch to be had at a college two minutes away). An old man in paradise! Every now and again I have searched out books elsewhere, and so should add my thanks to the Taylorian Institution Library, the Vere Harmsworth Library, Worcester College Library, the British Library and Reading University Library.

  I have had other generous assistance in tracking down places in Italy where the Petaccis resided or had connection. I owe particular thanks to Giovanni Minelli for continuing legal advice and Susanna and Patty for meals and joys at Venice, to Max Tosetti and the staff of Villa Fiordaliso at Gardone for my tour of the villa there and a fabulous lunch, to Camilla Bettoni for twice escorting me to the Vittoriale degli Italiani and its environs, to Alessia Micheletti for showing me around the Villa Feltrinelli at Gargnano, to Verena Vok for allowing me to inspect her Villa Schildhof, to Georg Schedereit for smoothing that visit (and more generally for acting as a sensitive and generous host when I visited Merano/Meran), and to Fabio Malusà for assisting my locating of the Petazzi chapel at Trieste. I am also in debt to Simon Levis Sullam at Venice, Gustavo Corni at Trento and Dante Bolognesi at Ravenna for assisting my researches there, as well as to Patrizia Dogliani for a reminder visit to Predappio, now quite a few years ago.

  My brilliant and hard-working colleagues at Jesus College have been wholly welcoming to an elderly historian of Australian birth, incapable of long resisting the chance to chatter about Claretta. John Krebs, the college principal until 2015, could not have been more helpful to someone with claims to act as the oldest ‘nut boy’ in Jesus history. The college’s ‘real’ historians, Patricia Clavin, Alex Gajda and Sue Doran – women who, unlike me, still fill their hours with teaching and yet find time to research and write – are splendid colleagues (even if I sometimes feel guilty at my inactivity compared with theirs).

  Daniele Baratieri, Gianfranco Cresciani, Christopher Duggan (so sadly lost to us in November 2015), Mark Edele, Giuseppe Finaldi, David Laven, David Lowenthal, Joe Maiolo, Ross McKibbin, John Pollard, Mark Thompson, fine historians every one, have corrected at least some of my errors and infelicities and helped me remain active as a writer and researcher. Gerald Steinacher confirmed a footnote; Reto Hofmann deserves thanks for two.

  As ever I owe a massive debt to Michal. Our fiftieth anniversary fell just as I was about to start writing this book, but that did not stop her being, as ever, my first critical reader. I am similarly happy with and proud of our children, Mary, learned and active Oxford professor of criminology, and Edmund, now an Irish banker. My agent, Clare Alexander, pushes me effectively into readable topics and Heather McCallum, Rachael Lonsdale, Samantha Cross, Lauren Atherton, Heather Nathan, Maha Moushabeck, my copy-editor Jacob Blandy and the rest of the fine staff in the London office of Yale University Press put up with my vagaries as a historian and produce books of high quality that do not look as though their only purpose is rapid sale.

  In every way, my life devotion to modern Italian history has been a fortunate one, and I like to think that, even when portraying such flawed human beings as Benito Mussolini and Claretta Petacci, my exploration of humankind leaves me, now as ever, more an optimist of the will than a pessimist of the intellect.

  ENDNOTES

  Introduction

  1.Emblematically a recent popular evocation of the last days of the war in Europe starts with the deaths of Mussolini and his lover, and dwells upon the ‘anarchy’ of Piazzale Loreto. See Nicholas Best, Five days that shook the world: eyewitness accounts from Europe at the end of World War II (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2012).

  2.Anon, L’ultima favorita: Clara Petacci (Rome: Editore Francesco Mondini, 1945), p. 14. In fact, exhumation would show she had a broken tooth, a damaged jaw and other bruising, most likely received on the ground at Piazzale Loreto, although other, conspiratorial, explanations exist.

  3.Mirella Serri, Un amore partigiano: storia di Gianni e Neri, eroi scomodi della Resistenza (Milan: Longanesi, 2014), p. 125.

  4.Anon (ed.), Mussolini giudicato dal mondo (Milan: Universus, 1946), pp. 250–2.

  5.Ezra Pound, The Pisan cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1949), p. 7.

  6.Wladislaw Potocki, ‘Clara Petacci: “io sono la Petacci, voglio morire col Duce”’, Plush, 1964.

  7.The Times, 10 May 1975.

  8.Throughout my text, I shall call Petacci ‘Claretta’ in order to distinguish her from the other members of her family. Over their last years together, Mussolini did generally call her Clara but she was almost always Claretta within her family. She called her lover ‘Ben’, after initially using Gattone (‘Big Pussy Cat’) as her term of endearment.

  9.Robert D. MacDonald, Summit Conference (London: Amber Lane Press, 1982), pp. 8, 24. For a review of its first staging at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in 1978, see The Times, 21 January 1978. Recently, the popular historian Arrigo Petacco has written a less-than-compelling joint biography of the two. Analysis goes little further than his introductory note that each was an Acquarian, each died aged thirty-three and the two never actually met. See Arrigo Petacco, Eva e Claretta: le amanti del diavolo (Milan: Mondadori, 2012).

  10.The Times, 19 March, 29 April 1982.

  11.The Times, 13 August 1977, 16 May 1978, 30 May 1984. An offspring then finished second in its maiden contest behind a colt called Falstaff.

  12.Steiger reprised the role
in Lion of the Desert, directed by Moustafa Akkad (1981). The film’s exploration of Italian colonial genocide meant that it was long banned in Italy.

  13.The Times, 15 February 1972.

  14.For an apolitical account of Cardinale’s career as a ‘dark, shapely and sensual’ star, see Réka Buckley, ‘The emergence of film fandom in postwar Italy: reading Claudia Cardinale’s fan mail’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 29, 2009, pp. 523–59.

  15.Again the name of this Petacci, as will be noted further below, came with variations of name and its spelling. I shall use Myriam throughout since that was what she chose to call herself in her memoirs. In the family she was generally known as ‘Mimi’ or ‘Mimmy’.

  16.Roberto Olla, Il Duce and his women (Richmond: Aline Books, 2011).

  17.Nicholas Farrell, Mussolini: a new life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 20; 227.

  18.Guardian, 5 December 2014.

  19.FO 371/23825/R1805, Foreign Office to Lindsay (Washington), 17 March 1939.

  20.Daily Mail, 5 February 2015.

  21.Il Corriere dell’Umbria, 4 July 2015. There, it was emphasised that Claretta on more than one occasion had visited the tourist town of Spello.

  22.Il Corriere di Brescia, 18 October 2012.

  23.See http://www.museodisalo.it/it/repubblica-sociale-italiana (accessed 9 October 2015). For my more general assessment of Italian memory and its gaping lacunae, see R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘Victimhood asserted: Italian memories of the Second World War’ in Manuel Bragança and Peter Tame (eds), The long aftermath: cultural legacies of Europe at war, 1936–2016 (New York: Berghahn, 2016).