When it comes to dazzling political spectacle, no regime in history can touch the Fascist powers. Inducing mass rapture by convincing one’s countrymen to abandon themselves to the leader’s will — goose-stepping legs and saluting arms by the tens of thousands jerking upward like those of marionettes — is an art that Hitler and Mussolini commanded. “One must always know how to strike the imagination of the public: That is the real secret of how to govern,” Mussolini declared, authoritatively.
That the public should have a single imagination — that everyone learn to think the same thought, feel the same feeling — was required for the sort of governance Mussolini had in mind. Il Duce on his balcony would shout out a question, and the assembled multitude below would respond in ecstatic unison. There was no room for improvisation, by Mussolini or the crowd. The only questions he could ask were those he knew the crowd would answer as expected. He called the balcony his stage, and like any other actor he had to charm his audience. Although he was given to claiming that he would reshape the Italian character in his own heroic image, he proved in the end far more image than hero.
A new life of Mussolini, the eighteenth book by the English biographer and historian Jasper Ridley, makes one reflect on what happens to a showman when reality intrudes on his show.
Born in 1883, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named by his father, a blacksmith and devout Socialist, for three heroes of the left (beginning with the Mexican president Benito Juarez). Young Mussolini was a handful. He was a bookish type, even something of an embryonic intellectual, but already as a boy he showed himself an adept young thug by knifing two classmates who had made the mistake of crossing him. Later he taught school, tramped his way around Switzerland, and contributed articles and poems to Socialist newspapers. Marxism was his intellectual daily fare, but the “spiritual eroticism” of Nietzsche ravished him. He told acquaintances that he had written a history of philosophy and another of Christianity, but no one ever saw them.
Despite these highbrow pretensions, his real talent lay in what is now called popular culture. His novel Claudia Particella: The Cardinal’s Mistress (which combined bodice-ripping with anticlericalism) was serialized in a Socialist weekly paper. But newspaper writing proved even more his
line than novels. After a spell in jail for threatening to bludgeon a factory manager during a strike, he was rewarded in 1909 with the editorship of the socialist Worker’s Future in Trentino, a largely Italian-speaking province of Austria. During the seven months he spent there, the authorities regularly hauled him into court, mostly for an excess of journalistic vehemence.
Back in Italy, he began editing the Class Struggle, a four-page weekly in Forli with a circulation of one thousand, which he promptly doubled by assailing Italian nationalism every chance he got: “The national flag is for us a rag to be planted on a dunghill.” In 1911, speaking out against Italy’s imperialist war on Libya, he urged workers to blow up the local railway line and bring troop transport to a halt. Imprisoned for inciting violence, he spent his five-month sentence writing his autobiography. A few days after Mussolini’s release, an anarchist tried to assassinate the king; when three distinguished Socialists of a moderate stripe joined in the formal congratulation of the King on his escape, Mussolini accused them of class collaboration and betraying the revolution, and he spearheaded a movement that expelled them from the party.
Word got around about the young firebrand. Writing from Vienna in the newly founded Pravda, Lenin praised Mussolini for his uncompromising revolutionary stand. A few months later, Mussolini was appointed editor of the national Socialist party daily, Avanti!, and he proved he had the touch: Circulation rose from 34,000 to 60,000 during his first eighteen months. With a style that he called “electric” and “explosive,” he made a reputation as the leading popular journalist in Italy. His star was ascendant, and it was red.
World War I, however, was to change the course of Mussolini’s career. At first he adhered to the Italian Socialist anti-war line. It was an easy choice: By treaty Italy was obligated to fight on the side of the Central Powers, Germany and Austria — which no Italian wanted to do, because the Hapsburg Empire was a longstanding enemy of Italian freedom. But an Italian republican movement to join instead the French and British Allies was building, and a number of Socialists signed on. In October 1914, Mussolini came around to a pro-war position, unable to resist the power of the crowd. The Socialists promptly purged him, but — vowing to be a true Socialist all his life — he was within a few weeks celebrating the “really great war” in the pages of a new paper of his own, the People of Italy, financed in part by Belgium and France.
In 1915, he joined the war against Austria, and in 1917 he was injured by an exploding grenade launcher. It was “the most beautiful moment in my life,” he would later say, and it certainly could have been worse. He was not killed or crippled, and his honorable wounds furnished him with a heroic legend. Forty fragments of metal pierced his body, and he cavalierly refused anesthesia for their removal, so that no one could ever doubt his courage. To top things off, the Austrians, he claimed, heard he was in the hospital, and they shelled it with the specific intent of eliminating their single fiercest enemy. This exhilarating fantasy may have been the result of paranoia and vainglory — or it may have simply been a straightforward lie. Mussolini was given to a kind of hero worship in which he was the hero. Over the years he showed endless inventiveness in enlisting others in this one true faith.
As the war dragged on, it became increasingly difficult to see what Mussolini believed in, apart from his own greatness. Trincerocrazia, the rule of heroic warriors from the trenches, was his rallying cry. He saw that the veterans would be a powerful political force, but could not tell whether on the left or on the right, and his appeal was shrewdly calculated, by turns nationalistic, socialistic, imperialistic, capitalistic. The People of Italy changed editorial policy in 1918, repudiated socialism, and proclaimed itself “the newspaper of combatants and producers.”
Yet, while anti-socialism helped Mussolini attract wealthy financial backers for his paper, he advocated economic reforms that could scarcely be distinguished from those supported by the Socialists. Though he castigated Socialists for opposing the war, he persisted in using anti-capitalist slogans to secure the allegiance of disaffected workers. His thinking was tactical rather than ideological. “I put my finger on the pulse of the masses and suddenly discovered in the general mood of disorientation that a public opinion was waiting for me, and I just had to make it recognize me through my newspaper.” The people did not know what they wanted; Mussolini was just the man to give it to them.
The Fascist movement got underway in Milan in March 1919 at a gathering of some fifty people representing every conceivable political orientation. (Fascism got its name from the bundle of sticks that the ancient Roman lictors carried; each stick on its own could easily be snapped in two, but when the sticks were bound together the fasces was not to be broken.) The program that the assembly endorsed was inimical to the clergy and the monarchy, opposed to censorship and all manner of dictatorship; it favored giving land to the peasantry, expropriating factories, confiscating the loot of war profiteers, allowing women the vote, and abolishing the senate. Almost nothing of this original program was to remain as Fascism increased in power.
One permanent feature of Fascism soon emerged, however, when a pack of arditi, veterans devoted to street violence, wrecked the offices and printing press of Mussolini’s old Socialist newspaper, Avanti! Mussolini hailed this vandalism as the first triumph of the revolution. In a campaign of “violence against violence,” his squadristi smashed, burned, clubbed, pummeled, and administered “Fascist medicine,” castor oil, which was sometimes mixed with gasoline in lethal dosages.
In 1921, Mussolini signed a peace treaty with the Socialists — and the ensuing outrage of his followers forced his resignation as leader. He regained power only by acknowledging that squadrismo must be allowed to go about its business of atrocity unimpeded. To enhance the power of the squadristi and to consolidate his own power, Mussolini molded the squads, which had operated under the command of local warlords, into a kind of national militia, its organization and nomenclature taken from the army of ancient Rome. Dressed to kill in their black shirts and leather breeches, the legions of goons had a sinister allure, particularly for Italian youth; and nobody in Italy had the will to stop them.
There were only 35 Fascist parliamentary deputies out of 525 when the king appointed Mussolini prime minister in October 1922. The king had heard that a force of Black Shirts strong enough to overpower the Italian army was poised to descend on Rome, and he acted in the belief that he was averting revolution. He was mistaken: The army in Rome would have made short work of the Fascists, who were undermanned and largely unarmed. But out of this successful bluff, Mussolini propagated the legendary “march on Rome”: Three-hundred thousand armed Fascists, so the official history ran, conquered the capital through a bloody civil war, in which three thousand martyrs fell — while Mussolini on horseback led the victorious force across the Rubicon. (Actually, Mussolini had arrived in Rome by train a day after the king’s decision, but the squadristi destroyed the opposition newspapers’ presses, and the Fascist version of the story made not only the next day’s headlines but also the history books.)
Terror and lies were the chief instruments of Mussolini’s rule, which became a dictatorship in 1925. He considered his journalistic expertise — especially writing convincing articles about things that never happened — to be the foundation of his art of governance. The main priority of his regime was to ensure that he got good press. He kept himself so busy poring over newsprint — bragging of reading as many as 350 newspapers a day — that he hardly had time for anything else. He gave editors daily instructions on what was to appear on the next day’s front page, even advising them on layout.
In this effort, Mussolini did receive some help. Police commissioners saw to it that papers printed only the approved facts. Opposition editors were replaced by Fascists. Foreign journalists critical of Fascism came to the attention of the “intimidation department” run by an undersecretary of state, after which they were assaulted or deported. And the memory hole got plenty of use. Mussolini was officially cool to Hitler until the Germans occupied the Rhineland in 1936, when he suddenly warmed to the idea of an alliance with so potent a nation. The Italian press was directed to stop badmouthing the Germans and to start praising them. When Italy, Germany, and Japan signed an anti-Communist treaty in 1937, the newspapers got their orders to knock off talk of the yellow peril and to tout the Aryan purity of the Japanese master race.
The only element of Fascist policy not subject to revision at a moment’s notice was Mussolini ha sempre ragione: Mussolini is always right. Other Fascist sayings included: “It is a crime not to be strong,” “Live dangerously,” “The more enemies, the greater the honor,” and “Peace is just the space between wars.”
But slogans alone could not cover over Fascism’s essential emptiness. Soon enough, the cult of Mussolinismo became the heart of Fascism, introducing a period of collective lunacy. Pronouns referring to Mussolini were capitalized, like those referring to God. Peasants knelt to him in the fields. Fascist dignitaries ran the twenty yards from his office door to his desk, and remained standing for hours in his presence. The story was told that he stopped a lava flow on Mt. Etna, saving a village from destruction.
Mussolini’s fatal mistake was believing his own press — or at least putting himself in a position where he had to act as though he believed it. Cutting a superb figure, seeming tireless and omnicompetent (he would keep a light burning in his office after he had gone to bed) were more important than actually doing what needed to be done. Mussolini always made war sound like the thing he most desired, but the coming of World War II brought down the whole lavish show. He had gathered all power into his own hands and didn’t have a clue how to use it.
Boasting that ten million soldiers could be mustered in a day, he never mobilized one-third that many during the entire war. Upon the declaration of war, he ordered all cabinet ministers and leading civil servants to front-line duty, thereby crippling the bureaucracy. No one informed Italian ships that Italy was at war, and one-third of the merchant marine was lost before the fighting even began. Mussolini wanted the Italian Air Force to share the glory he was sure the Luftwaffe would win in the Battle of Britain, but not until the Italian planes were in place did anyone notice that their range and equipment made them useless. By the time Mussolini got his planes back to the Mediterranean, his army in North Africa had been thrashed, in no small part for want of air cover. As generalissimo, II Duce was not only inept, he was a buffoon, arrogant, witless, desperate, and lost.
Jasper Ridley has written a good biography of Mussolini, but the life of choice remains that by Denis Mack Smith, the foremost English-language historian of modern Italy. In its wealth of telling detail, Mack Smith’s Mussolini is an exemplar of biography, commanding erudition wielded with concise elegance. Reading about Il Duce’s death — viewing the famous picture of his corpse strung up by the heels in a Milan square — one is almost compelled to remember the line La commedia e finita, the comedy is finished. It comes at the end of Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci and is said of the fate of another unfortunate, blood-soaked clown.
JASPER RIDLEY
Mussolini: A Biography
St. Martin’s, 384 pp., $ 27.50
Algis Valiunas is a writer living in Florida.
