by Tim Parks
Aside from the fascination one is bound to feel for a life at once so contradictory and eventful, there is the growing conviction as one reads recent biographies of Mussolini that the conflicting codes of behaviour between which he oscillated are still in competition for our minds today. In a nutshell: while most politicians will do everything to present themselves as ‘good’ and above all peace-loving, though often behaving in ways that seem to us tainted with self-interest if not downright evil, Mussolini was determined to appear warlike and ruthless while frequently finding it difficult to carry through his threats. No published photo, he ordered, must show him smiling. It was better, he felt, that the Italians be known for torturing their prisoners than for their mandolin-playing. But when a dangerous political opponent was murdered by Fascist henchmen, a shamed Duce was quick to give a generous pension to his family. There is room here for considerable controversy.
Born in 1883 near the provincial town of Forlì, son of a blacksmith, a man known for his militant socialism and heavy drinking, young Benito soon had a reputation for turbulent behaviour. At school there were knife fights. He was expelled three times. But between these crises there were also long periods of quiet diligence and excellent exam results. Benito’s mother was a schoolteacher, much admired for her exemplary piety, and in his late teens it was her vocation that he chose. He taught languages in primary school and in later years, often at moments of great drama, he would withdraw from his duties to immerse himself in some literary or historical translation, as if an alternative and contemplative way of life were still available to him. The works of Plato were always on his desk, together with a revolver.
In his early twenties the young Mussolini liked to take a woman by brute force, rape almost, then become romantically attached, then move on to another town. His father kept a mistress. Dismissed from his first school where, unlike his mother, he had been unable to control the children (‘some of them were incorrigible and dangerous urchins’1 he complained), he wandered poverty-stricken around Switzerland, until involvement with the Socialist Party led to the discovery of a genius for inflammatory journalism. He was expelled from various Swiss towns and finally from the country. Back in Italy, he was sacked from other teaching jobs for blasphemy in the classroom, philandering, running up debts and political agitation. It was as if his mother’s job had been given to someone with his father’s qualities; but his mother was dead now, killed by meningitis in 1905. Brief periods were spent in gaol.
All the same, Mussolini was still hard-working and evidently talented. In 1909 he was given control of the socialist newspaper in Austrian-held Trento, where he engaged in a fierce battle of words with future Italian leader, the very Catholic Alcide De Gasperi. ‘The church was a corpse’2 Mussolini wrote. The notions of loving your neighbour and turning the other cheek were pathetic and pernicious. Violence was the necessary and moral response to capitalist injustice. Once again he was expelled. But in 1912, with a view to imminent revolution, the Socialist Party decided to make use of his capacity for stirring up conflict and appointed him head of their national newspaper, Avanti, based in Milan. It was the breakthrough from minor agitator to major player.
The pattern of this early part of Mussolini’s life, then, is one of kicking against all forms of authority while at the same time seeking both power and approval for himself, first with schoolchildren and lovers, then in the Socialist Party and its newspapers. Even his marriage in 1910, swiftly followed by the birth of his first child Edda, involved a breach of authority, if not taboo. Seventeen-year-old Rachele Guidi was the daughter of his father’s long-time mistress. Both Benito’s father and Rachele’s mother were sternly set against the union. To get his way, Mussolini threatened suicide. Of peasant stock, uninterested in politics, regularly producing children and always supporting family values, Rachele gradually got a hold on her man and saw off a series of mistresses. One of her strategies was to challenge him really to play the macho part he advocated. His first supporter and goad, she invariably insisted that he be harder on opponents. Years afterwards, observers would remark that Mussolini appeared to be afraid of his wife. Whether or not that is true, he clearly experienced relationships of whatever kind as power struggles in which one side must eventually assert authority and take control. This psychological make-up, rationalised by an acceptance of Darwinian determinism, would ultimately be fatal in his dealings with Hitler.
The Italian Socialist Party of the early twentieth century was internationalist: capitalism was an international phenomenon and the workers as a class must respond with an international revolution. The socialists thus opposed wars between nation states as merely furthering the ends of capitalist manufacturers. As editor of the socialist newspaper, therefore, Mussolini vigorously opposed the idea of Italian intervention at the beginning of the First War. But his position rapidly shifted and in October 1914, without consulting his colleagues, he published a leading article claiming that Italy could not stand on the sidelines while such great events were going on.
There were various considerations behind this dramatic volte-face, not least the calculation that war might create a situation favourable to revolution. But with Mussolini the drive to take action and play a leading role – something to which he attached positive moral value – together with the attendant fear of being seen to be weak, was almost always decisive. In any event, he collected another expulsion, this time from the Socialist Party, and opened his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, telling the readers ‘From now on we are Italians and nothing but Italians.’3 The move from international socialism to Fascism, or National Socialism as a similar phenomenon would elsewhere be called, had begun.
It was characteristic of Mussolini that he always assumed that wars would be short and victorious. ‘The winner of the war will be whoever wants to win it’,4 he felt, declaring a faith in the power of human will over material reality that would remain with him till the end. Conscripted into the army in 1915, he was wounded by a hand grenade in exercises behind the lines in July 1917 and thus back at the newspaper in Milan before the terrible collapse at Caporetto in October of that year which saw 300,000 Italians taken prisoner and the Austro-German army on the brink of capturing the Northern Italian plain. Eventual victory with Allied help brought a huge sense of national achievement but not the territorial gains that Britain and France had originally offered when encouraging Italy to join the war. With half a million dead, half a million injured, a weak government, a weak economy and a general sense that the country had been cheated, Italy was now fertile ground for political agitation. In particular, the rapidly growing Socialist Party had before it the example of the Russian Revolution.
It is in telling the next part of the story, the three years that brought Mussolini to power, that recent biographies declare their differences most powerfully. What is at stake is our attitude to democracy and to the use of violence in domestic politics. In 1919 Italy introduced universal male suffrage with a radical form of proportional representation. Every area of opinion would be faithfully represented in parliament, including the newly formed Partito Popolare Italiano which represented Catholic Italy and had the blessing of the Pope. The year’s election thus returned a parliament where no one grouping had a majority and where neither the socialists nor the PPI would work with each other or with the older and now much diminished Liberal Party. The minority Liberal government eventually installed was faced with a dramatic wave of strikes organised by the socialists, who were evidently seeking to push the country to revolution.
Within this scenario of chronic fragmentation, a recurrent Italian nightmare, Mussolini had formed, in February 1919, the so-called Fasci di Combattimento (Combat Bands). Members were not obliged to relinquish membership of other parties. The idea was rather to ignore class differences and economic interests, insisting on solidarity, with all its advantages. At its simplest, one might say that Mussolini’s Fascism, as it was soon being called, aimed to create, in peacetime, the embattled, nati
onalist solidarity he had experienced during the war. (A fascio is a bundle of things tied together.) So all differences of opinion would be subordinated to the principle of the good of the nation. In reality, this meant subordination to the principle of taking power over the nation. Every ‘divisive’ party, and in particular the socialists, would be attacked and denigrated until all parties were dissolved and the people bound together in the solidarity of Fascism. Expelled from every organisation he had been a member of, Mussolini would now absorb all organisations into his own.
Despite Mussolini’s remarkable journalism and powerful public speaking, the new movement polled only 5,000 votes in the 1919 election. Very soon afterwards, however, it found a role in transforming widespread public resentment of socialist strikes into orchestrated punitive raids. While the police stood by, reluctant to intervene, groups of the Fasci di Combattimento set out in their black shirts and black lorries to break strikes, beat up opponents and burn down socialist headquarters. There were deaths on both sides.
Nicholas Farrell, in his Mussolini: A New Life, is sanguine about all this. Bolshevism was a real threat, he points out, and the socialists ‘gave as good as they got’.5 He repeats this formula three times. Anyway, ‘the Fascists’, Farrell writes, ‘opposed the bourgeoisie as much as they opposed the socialists because both exalted one class at the expense of the other. The Fascists exalted the nation, united not divided.’6
This of course was the official line, but is difficult to square with the fact that in the early days Mussolini’s newspaper and movement were funded primarily by land-owning and industrial interests. For the moment, resentment of the bourgeoisie, however heartfelt, went no further than rhetoric. The Socialist Party was the enemy that, largely because of its internationalism and relations with Russia, aroused the animosity that bound together Mussolini’s variously assorted followers.
Farrell is likewise ready to endorse Mussolini’s route to power. In 1921, new elections saw the Fascists gain thirty-five seats in parliament and take a place in government. But in 1922 when the socialists threatened a general strike and the government followed its normal line of non-intervention, Mussolini undertook his long-threatened March on Rome. Claiming to be more patriotic than the country’s leaders, 30,000 of his followers converged on the city, for the most part travelling by train. For the good of Italy, the government must act or hand over power to those who would. The Fascists could easily have been dispersed given the army and police presence around the city. But the king was unwilling to call the marchers’ bluff, perhaps afraid that widespread violence would ensue. Instead he invited Mussolini, who had barricaded himself in his office in Milan, to form a government. Mussolini thus took power legally, though only by threatening an illegal course of action.
Farrell, whose determination that we take a fresh look at Mussolini and Fascism is welcome, spoils his position by making enthusiastic claims such as: ‘the king was in tune with what the majority of Italians wanted and felt they needed.’7 Certainly there was a desire to put an end to widespread strikes, but whether that meant people would have chosen Mussolini as their prime minister we have no way of knowing. King Victor Emmanuel will not go down in history as a man who knew or cared much about the will of his people. Farrell’s repeated use of the disparaging expression ‘chattering classes’ to describe those who write off Mussolini without, as Farrell sees it, considering the consequences of a socialist revolution or the stalemate of Italian democracy, suggests that he is in fact using his book as a personal polemic against political correctness and liberal orthodoxies in general. As a result some of the excellent points he makes are less telling than they might be.
Presenting his new government to the Chamber of Deputies, Mussolini, now thirty-eight, told them: ‘I could have turned this deaf and grey Chamber into a bivouac for my legions … I could have barred up parliament and formed a government only of Fascists. I could have, but I have not wanted to, at least not for the moment.’8 The speech is typical of the two contrasting attitudes that are always present in Mussolini’s life and that characterise his relationship with the Italian people. On the one hand there is the arrogant, self-glorifying claim of the moral right to violence and destruction, on the other he looks for approval for not having done what he says he might have; for being, at the end of the day, benevolent. The concluding ‘at least not for the moment’ is both a real threat and an example of the way he learnt to keep competing moralities apart by reserving the more drastic manifestations of himself for some unspecified future occasion. For the moment he will deal with the king, the parliament and the Pope and accept their institutional roles; later, if he so desires, he may destroy them. Similarly, in the 1930s, Mussolini would speak frequently of the need for a European war to destroy the pernicious power of Britain and France, but this cataclysm was always to take place at some distant date. In this regard he was less drastic and ruthless than Hitler, who always wanted the future to arrive as rapidly as the German armaments industry could bring it about. One senses that Mussolini praised men of action and instinct so incessantly (‘If I trust my instinct I never make a mistake’9 he claimed) because he actually pondered a great deal before taking action and more often than not found himself paralysed by indecision.
While Farrell often expresses his enthusiasm for Il Duce as an admirable example of effective authoritarian rule, R. J. B. Bosworth begins his Mussolini by declaring that he considers Mussolini a complete failure. He points out that the Liberal government’s policy of non-intervention in socialist strikes had actually undermined and defused left-wing revolution. By 1922 Bolshevism was on the wane. Again and again he shows the inconsistencies in Mussolini’s declarations and simultaneously acknowledges that the Fascist leader was not concerned with intellectual consistency but with finding a way to power. In this view, however, and partly as a result of Bosworth’s heavy use of irony, Mussolini can seem merely cynical and opportunist, while the more visionary side of his personality appears only as a means to an end, or plain ridiculous. Bosworth uses the word ‘rant’10 to characterise the aggressive rhetoric that Farrell admires.
In his more modest Mussolini, prepared for the Routledge Historical Biographies series, Peter Neville uses the word ‘nonsense’.11 Neville drops various hints that he is not enamoured of his subject. He is a professional historian writing to order. But this does give him the advantage of having no axe to grind and no original research to show off. For anyone eager to get a succinct overview, at once well organised and easy to consult, his book is an excellent choice. What’s more, his rather schoolmasterly determination ‘to discern what really drove Mussolini and to assess the sincerity of his political opinions against his obvious desire to exercise great power’12 alerts us to an underlying problem with all these books. None of them offers a serious psychological study of this unusual mind and, despite all the lip service paid to context, and in Bosworth’s case an admirable handling of background detail, none takes time to go back in history and consider how that mind may have meshed in exciting and dangerous ways with long-term cultural conditions in Italy.
As early as 1826 the poet Leopardi had suggested that Italy occupied a very special position in Europe as far as public debate and morality were concerned. In his Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani he suggests that, faced with the collapse of traditional belief systems, England and France had been able to fall back on a well-developed aristocratic and moneyed society that had gradually substituted a morality based on metaphysics with one that rested entirely on custom and aesthetics, so that a man is ‘ashamed to do harm in the same way that he would be ashamed to appear in a conversation with a stain on his clothes’.13
Italy, on the other hand, divided as it then was, despotically governed and dominated by a religion people observed, as Leopardi saw it, mostly out of superstition and subservience, lacked such resources. Public debate was no more than a school for insults and people laughed at the idea of moral behaviour. A gesture o
f real nobility was unimaginable. What was required in these circumstances, Leopardi felt, was some kind of collective ‘illusion’, which, if it could never give life ‘real substance or truth’, might at least confer ‘the appearance of the same, so that we might be able to think of it [life] as important.’14
Other figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggest a moral condition in line with Leopardi’s description. Mazzini, the revolutionary ideologue behind the Risorgimento, found himself battling above all with the total indifference of the vast majority. To combat this he spoke of the need to encourage Italians to have a ‘religious concept of their nation’,15 an expression Mussolini would pick up.
Garibaldi, utterly scathing of the church and deeply pessimistic about the behaviour of his fellow Italians, nevertheless demonstrated how much could be achieved, at least in short-term military campaigns, by appealing to an exalted vision of the nation where solidarity and unity took precedence over any political colour. Like Mussolini, he frequently drew inspiration from the achievements of the Romans. Indeed it was precisely the abyss between past grandeur and present meanness that fed both despair and idealism. A convinced democrat, Garibaldi nevertheless decided that when you wanted anything done in Italy, you had to play dictator. Anti-Catholic as he was, he was worshiped as a saint, in much the same way that Mussolini would be. ‘Incredible,’ Mussolini remarked, ‘the readiness of modern man to believe.’16
Verga’s splendid novellas of the late nineteenth century also present a world where all public and in particular Catholic morality is quite empty, its rhetoric no more than a weapon in a vicious Darwinian power game. His magnificent portrait of the violent young miner Rosso Malpelo is a description of a man waiting for his innate violence to be enlisted in some collective enterprise. D’Annunzio too, who pointed the way for Mussolini when he led a people’s army into Yugoslav-held Fiume in 1920, had for many years been writing novels where an idealised rhetoric deployed by a Nietzschean superman imposes itself on and transforms grim reality into something noble.