M: Son of the Century

A Novel

Antonio Scurati, Anne Milano Appel

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780062956118
• eBook ISBN: 9780062956132
• Subtopic: Letteratura generale

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“This relentless chronicle of authoritarianism emboldened and empowered offers a painful and valuable reminder that democracy is fragile, never to be taken for granted and always in need of committed defense.” —Washington Post

The massive international bestseller—an epic historical novel that chronicles the birth and rise of fascism in Italy, witnessed through the eyes of its founder, the terrifyingly charismatic figure who would become one of the most notorious dictators of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini.

It is 1919, and the Great War that has ravaged Europe is over. In Italy, the people are exhausted. Tired of the political class. Tired of vague promises, inept moderates, and the agonizing machinations of a democracy that has failed ordinary citizens.

While elite leaders have sat idly by, achieving nothing, one outsider—the director of a small opposition newspaper and a tireless political agitator—is electrifying the masses, promising hope for a demoralized nation hungry for change.

A former socialist leader ousted by his own party, he is a drifter who knows what it is to feel lost. His voice speaks for the misfits and the outcasts; he is a protector of those who are forgotten. 

He is Benito Mussolini. And soon Italy—and the world—will be forever remade. 

In M: Son of the Century, Antonio Scurati tells the story of fascism from within the mind of its founder, the man known to his followers as Il Duce. Steeped in historical detail and interspersed with period documents and sources, this masterful saga explores the seductive power of nationalism and idolatry, revealing how authoritarianism took hold and a nation bent to the will of one ruthless strongman. Provocative and resonant, M is a chilling reminder that the past is never gone, and that it holds urgent lessons for us today. 

1922

Benito Mussolini, Pietro Nenni

CANNES, JANUARY 8, 1922

THE DAY IS dying on the band of the horizon. Shadow overtakes the pinewoods, touches the sumptuous villas on the coast, and submerges the port, swallowing up the city. Hotels and cinemas light up, the winter air is gentle, mild. The tender night descends on Cannes.

It was Aristide Briand, the French prime minister, who insisted on the elegant opulence of the Côte d’Azur for the conference that is to launch the economic and diplomatic reconstruction of a Europe devastated by the apocalypse of the war. Lloyd George, the English premier, is staying in Villa Valletta, Briand came down to the Carlton Hotel, the army of photographers and film cameramen has been stationed in front of the nautical club, and on the Promenade de la Croisette politics is being discussed in all languages of the world. For the first time since the end of the war, a German delegation is also expected. The Germans, the vanquished aggressors, have asked for a moratorium on reparation payments; while the British are favorable, the French are opposed. Briand fights valiantly for reconciliation among the great European nations, but journalists report the latest news from Paris. It is bad news. Briand, back in Paris, encounters a vote of no confidence. Nationalists’ revolvers lurk in the shadow of the trees. The palms are feral, the arguments heated. Only late at night does the ferment calm down.

The moon now reigns in a sky glittering with stars. The sea is gleaming. The waves break gently on the port’s breakwater. The two men who can be seen walking along the Croisette are from across the border, from Italy, a country where not a week goes by without some bloody event having to be recorded. They are arguing animatedly but they are compaesani, from the same town, once friends and it was impossible to avoid one another. Pietro Nenni and Benito Mussolini are now enemies, though they once shared a cell during the struggle against the imperialist war; their wives became friends in the prison visiting rooms, Pietro held little Edda, his friend’s daughter, in his arms, Benito hired him as managing editor at his newspaper and had him at his side until 1919. In April of that year Nenni founded the first Fasci di Combattimento in Bologna and cheered the devastation of Avanti! Two years later, however, in March 1921, he rushed to the defense of that same newspaper during the second fascist attack. That day, he went from being a republican fascist sympathizer to being a socialist, and he is now in Cannes as a correspondent for the newspaper whose destruction he had once cheered.

The fascist movement, meanwhile, born anti-party, anticlerical, socialist, revolutionary, and republican, has transformed into a conservative, monarchical party, armed with its own army, allied with the ruling class that the two old comrades fought together as boys.

As they stroll along gesturing under the palm trees, the nocturnal amblers are talking face to face for perhaps the last time and from opposing sides.

It is only the second time that Mussolini has traveled out of the country. The previous time he did so as an emigrant in search of a living in Switzerland. This time he also allowed himself a stop in Paris, to be stirred by the memory of youthful revolutionary fantasies, and to break the routine of day-to-day brutalities. Arriving in Cannes, before going to interview Briand, he played at the casino, lost, then, to hide the frayed seams on his shoes, bought a pair of white spats.

“The civil war was a tragic necessity. I take responsibility for it. We had to stop the Bolshevik threat, restore authority, save the nation.”

Mussolini’s peremptory voice, strident, metallic, is the only disturbance in the quiet night. The hour is late, it begs for silence, but Nenni presses him:

“For the bourgeois classes whose tool you have become, the workers’ right to organize to defend their gains is called Bolshevism.”

“I am not unaware of any of this. I am not their tool. When the time came, I proclaimed that it was necessary to break the bloody circle of violence.”

“That’s when you were abandoned.”

“When I talked about peace, they laughed in my face; I had to accept war.”

The ghost of the pacification pact hovers over the Croisette like the aborted soul of a stillborn child. The squadristi opposed it from the beginning, the communists attacked the socialists for having agreed to it, the socialists only signed it out of tactical necessity. Both old friends know that in those days the squadristi were singing: “Botte, botte, botte sempre botte / se con noi non marcerà / anche a Mussolini botte in quantità,” “Thump, thump, thump, if he won’t march with us, Mussolini too will take his lumps”; they know that the walls of Bologna had been plastered with posters reading “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” that to stay in the saddle the general had to follow the temper of the troops.

Nevertheless, Pietro Nenni does not let up on his old comrade: “It’s your individualism that leads you astray. I don’t know what you will become but I’m sure that everything you do will be branded by the red-hot iron of willful license. Because you lack any feeling for justice.”

The waves on the port’s breakwater are now the only sound intruding upon the night’s silence. But Nenni hasn’t finished. In the heat of the altercation between the two Romagnoli, dialect mixes with the language. For two years politics has been a rissa, a brawl. Why? Do the fascists have a program? Do they aspire to something higher than the brutal desire to assert themselves?

“The pacification you offer my comrades would be their end. Then too, you forget too many things. You forget that you were the head of the Socialist Party, you forget that the socialists whom the fascists now attack became so in former times in response to your appeal, you forget the dead . . .”

By now the voices are weary, almost pained, the bench is besieged by the sea crashing against the breakwater’s rocks. The wakeful night becomes an outdoor pulpit for a melancholy meditation on the past.

Mussolini is silent, reflecting. Nenni is wrong to attribute everything to his cynical individualism. Individualism is relentless, it’s everywhere, individualism is modernity itself. It’s not in the least a personal inclination on the part of Benito Mussolini. Since the individual has been enthroned at the center of everything, everyone is free to create his own ideology, to design his own style of being, to toy with ideas according to what’s expedient. The romantic cult of personal feelings, spontaneity, heart palpitations, freedom to love oneself, has generated all this. Cynicism came along with the whole package, complimentary. Now when even the lowliest, somewhat bored moron yawns it seems like it takes over the world.

Benito Mussolini fears and scorns his squadristi, and the feelings are in large part reciprocated, but by now the circle of hatred is tightening all around. Perhaps, if he could, he would go back. But it’s too late. The base life of a class intoxicated with revenge must be obeyed. A vague presentiment of triumph drifts on the night breeze.

“I know the dead weigh heavily on the conscience. I know it better than anyone. I often think of the past as a foreign land.” The fascist’s voice is grim, morbid. His tone solemn and conclusive. Dawn breaks on the horizon. The breeze carries away the echo of the last words.

“But in life there is no place for sentimentality. Your friends need to understand that. I am ready for war as well as for peace.”

“You’ve lost the chance to choose.”

“In that case, it will be war.”

There is nothing left to say now. What do the delusions of two niggling men on a night on the Riviera matter in this immense tragedy? All modern life is the planning of necessary massacres. If anyone were to rise up in defense of life he would be crushed in the name of life itself. The industrial civilization, like war, feeds on carrion. Blood on the battlefield and blood on the streets: blood behind the scenes and blood in the workplace.

Besides, cynicism lies in actions, not in appearances. Take French women . . . all dissolute whores. He saw them cream in the brothels of Paris. French women love Negroes. Because instead of a sturdy, strapping dick, they have a very, very long one and women seem to crave that more. Yeah, they’re crazy about Negroes, those French women. All of them.

Benito Mussolini makes his way back along the Croisette alone, his strong jaw hunched into his broad shoulders, like a boxer ready to take the punch, head bent over the white spats of an upstart pauper.

Amerigo Dùmini

PRATO, JANUARY 17, 1922

FEDERICO GUGLIELMO FLORIO couldn’t ride a horse but he loved to walk through the streets of the center with a riding crop. Everyone in Prato remembers him: a cigarette in his mouth, old hat pulled down over his forehead and, in his right hand, the whip. He had a taste for lashing the wool mill workers across the face. Their blood spattered onto the leather-covered handle. To re-educate them, he said, to curb the arrogance of the wool workers who were victorious in the 1919 strikes. In reality, he enjoyed it the way a slave driver enjoys whipping his slaves. And everyone remembers that too.

But now Federico Guglielmo Florio lies in a mahogany coffin, shot point-blank in the belly by a worker who didn’t want to have his face whipped. Now bells toll, factories are shut down, tricolors fly at half-mast in front of closed shops, now citywide mourning is proclaimed, the Chamber of Labor has been burned down, its secretary wounded, the town hall invaded. Now Florio has been elevated to the rank of fascist martyr, his role as squadrista now entirely exonerated.

The procession has set out. Mass was celebrated in the cathedral by Monsignor Vittori himself, the bishop of Prato and Pistoia. He spoke of a trinity of light born of blood, of veins emptying to form the new baptismal font, he invoked a community that binds the dead to the living, the generations that were to those that will follow, the bitter duty of yesterday to the even more bitter one of tomorrow.

Tens of thousands of people throng the streets. The start was abrupt, sharp as the burst of a firecracker, stark as a trumpet blast. Legions of fascists stood at attention. At the second shot, pennants were unfurled in the wind, the fascists saluted and the band performed the anthem. At the third shot, everyone stood at rest again. Then they started marching towards the cemetery.

Along the way, the crowd, docile and primitive, kneels on the ground in the mud as though moved by the passage of the coffin. Everything is in slow motion, sorrow expands time disproportionately. The top authorities of the National Fascist Party parade by one after the other, from secretary Michele Bianchi to Dino Perrone Compagni, from Achille Starace to Pietro Marsich. Mussolini sent a salutation, he will write an obituary in Il Popolo d’Italia. The Florentine squads follow in full formation, the “Disperata” in the forefront.

Since the founding congress they’ve done nothing but argue about whether the party should be led by the bosses from the provinces or those from the capital, the rases or the deputies, the fighters or the politicians. The usual useless chatter. Here the leaders are all squadristi, here there is no distinction between politicians and fighters, here adversaries are despised, the dead are avenged, and tolerance is scorned, here the mentality is extremist, the conquest of power is a requisite consequence, here politics is militancy, life brutal, and death sacred, here there are only men united by the experience of a life of struggle. The art of human assembly has its songs, guttural, and its myths: war, the nation, youth. During the march to the cemetery the crowd kneels, time expands, sorrow is sublimated. The time has come for the myth to prepare to become history.

When they reach the churchyard, the fascist groups line up in close formation under the cemetery’s arcades. It is almost night. Deep silence. At the center the catafalque, at the sides four enormous candelabra. The funereal light of the torches transforms the living into a legion of ghosts. The evening breeze drifts down from above like a signal arranged for the burial hour. Darkness falls, the watch begins. The sentry stands guard over the gate. For this night and for all the nights to come.

Michele Bianchi reads Mussolini’s farewell address: “There are names that are symbolic. Noms de guerre and rallying signs. Snatched by death, they burst into immortality.” Then Bianchi kneels before the martyr’s mother. The woman is pale, tense, her blank stare seems to be fixed on the pavement, on the bloodstain that had been her son. Around her, the whole world is saturated with symbols, all the dead rise from their graves to repopulate the houses of the living, everything is over and has not yet begun.

Singing is heard from the squads. It is joyful, exuberant, practically brazen. It exalts youth, it replicates the anxiety of a declining, deceased world. Yet it is a callous song, full of pain, the priest doesn’t understand it, the mother who has seen her son die seems to shake her head slightly.

At the end, the hymn rises to a strange tonality, the profound note of a trumpet awakening the sleepers. Then it plunges back into silence, faces crumple, hardened and withered, suddenly aged. The fascists stare at the catafalque as if any minute they might see the resurrection of a Christ armed with a riding crop.

“Where is comrade Federico Guglielmo Florio?!”

The squad leader’s voice suddenly slashes the night in a demented shout. He is asking about the dead man, who everyone knows is imprisoned in the coffin. Maybe he’s gone crazy, maybe he drank.

Florio’s mother starts, terrified, stifles a sob. The undertaker’s knuckles turn white as he grips the spade like a club, the priest crosses himself three times.

“Present, sir!” The voices of a thousand surviving soldiers rise from their chests in unison. “Comrade Federico Florio, present!”

The cry fades in the night. The pennants, purified, bow down. The ritual is over, having taught how to both bury the dead and leave them unburied.

Giacomo Matteotti

JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1922

FOR GIACOMO MATTEOTTI and his wife Velia Titta, distance is like the wind. It puts out small fires and lights big ones. In the winter of 1922, however, the fires are ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1919
• 1920
• 1921
• 1922
• 1923
• 1924
• Principal Characters
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher