The cult of the Duce

Mussolini and the Italians

Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, Giuliana Pieri

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526101419
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The cult of the Duce is the first book to explore systematically the personality cult of the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. It examines the factors which informed the cult and looks in detail at its many manifestations in the visual arts, architecture, political spectacle and the media. The conviction that Mussolini was an exceptional individual first became dogma among Fascists and then was communicated to the people at large. Intellectuals and artists helped fashion the idea of him as a new Caesar while the modern media of press, photography, cinema and radio aggrandised his every public act. The book considers the way in which Italians experienced the personality cult and analyses its controversial resonances in the postwar period. Academics and students with interests in Italian and European history and politics will find the volume indispensable to an understanding of Fascism, Italian society and culture, and modern political leadership. Among the contributions is an Afterword by Mussolini's leading biographer, R.J.B. Bosworth.

Part I

The Origins of a Personality Cult

1

Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–1922

Christopher Duggan

The cult of the Duce in Fascist Italy in many respects filled a vacuum. From the time the movement for national unification (the Risorgimento) began in the wake of the French Revolution, a central concern of patriots had been to find a political arrangement that could resonate emotionally with a population of some twenty-five million (largely illiterate) people and bring together an historically fragmented peninsula into a cohesive unit. Giuseppe Mazzini and his democratic followers had looked to create a republic by galvanising popular support around what they hoped would be the propulsive ideals of a ‘Third Rome’ and a God-given mission for Italy. Most patriots, though, recognised that a republic would be too abstract a system for a country with deeply rooted monarchical and absolutist traditions, in both religion as well as politics. Vincenzo Gioberti’s proposal in the early 1840s that Italy could be brought together as a federation under the leadership of the Pope was in many ways the most realistic programme to emerge in the Risorgimento. But Pius IX’s definitive break with the movement for Italian unity in 1848 dashed all hopes that the papacy could be yoked to the national cause. This left a secular monarchy as perhaps the only viable alternative – and indeed this was the arrangement that was introduced in 1860 when, following a series of plebiscites, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia became the first king of united Italy.

However, as this chapter will examine, the Italian monarchy struggled between 1860 and 1922 to establish itself as a strong and unifying national symbol, despite the efforts of countless politicians, and propagandists who worked to invest the Savoy dynasty with a mythical aura, recognising that charismatic leadership offered the best hope of binding the masses to the state. The view, famously voiced by the former revolutionary, Francesco Crispi, in 1864, that ‘the monarchy unites and a republic would divide us’, was widely shared among the national elites, principally on the grounds that the Italian masses were too immature still, and too conditioned by their history, to accept a kingless state. The extraordinary cult that sprang up around Giuseppe Garibaldi in the 1850s and 1860s was evidence, it seemed, of a popular impulse towards sacralised leadership. As the historian Gioacchino Volpe said in a letter to Mussolini published in Il Popolo d’Italia in the summer of 1921, when there was lingering talk of Fascism’s republican tendencies, the Italian peasantry had been conditioned by Catholicism ‘to conceive of authority solely in monarchical terms … and to have looked for centuries to the monarch – and what else was the State for them? – for protection against the privileged classes’. Italy still had ‘the great shadow of the Vatican’: it could not jettison the idea of regal authority.¹

The development of the cult of the Duce owed much to the inability of the liberal state to invest the monarchy with sufficient prestige and charisma for it to serve as a focus for national loyalties. From this perspective, the exaltation of Mussolini can be seen as a form of political surrogate; and the passivity of Victor Emmanuel III in the face of the cult of Mussolini was tantamount to an acceptance of the monarchy’s historic failure to develop as a potent symbol. For many observers the Duce appeared to be encroaching on terrain traditionally occupied by royalty, thus making the monarchy look increasingly otiose. This was especially the case after the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–36 and the de facto transfer of primacy in military affairs from the king to Mussolini. When Hitler visited Italy in May 1938 he suggested the Duce abolish the monarchy on the grounds that it was now an anachronism; and in the summer of that year Mussolini told his son-in-law Ciano that he would indeed get rid of the Savoys as soon as he could. They were, he confessed, just ‘an encumbrance on the Regime’.²

Italy and the monarchical imperative

The need to find a coagulating principle around which to construct national unity had been a central preoccupation of the Risorgimento. The fact that the history of Italy since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West had been characterised by fragmentation made the search for unification seem both more urgent and elusive. History offered few examples of collective action that could be elevated to mythical status. Episodes such as the Lombard League in the 1160s and 1170s or the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 – both of which were heavily milked by historians in the middle of the nineteenth century for their alleged patriotic connotations – struggled to emerge from their obviously municipal or regional contexts. The idea with the greatest emotional power was ‘Rome’ – deployed by Mazzini in the form of the ‘Third Rome’ (though given some corporeity with its gloss as the ‘Rome of the people’) and by Vincenzo Gioberti in the far more potent version of the Pope as the leader of an Italian federation. But, as the ‘national’ euphoria surrounding Pius IX in 1846–48 or Garibaldi in 1860 underlined, it was far easier to link mass support to an exceptional individual than to a concept.

The critical role of the figure of the monarch for united Italy was discussed by the Neapolitan philosopher and politician Angelo De Meis in a well-known essay entitled Il sovrano published in 1868. Echoing some of the observations made a year or two earlier by the British writer, Walter Bagehot, in his analysis of the ‘dignified’ elements of the English constitution, De Meis argued that in the modern age a monarch was critical for mediating between two classes that were ‘irreconcilably opposed to one another’: the educated elite and the ignorant masses. And in Italy, the natural antagonism between these two groups, he said, was exacerbated on the one hand by the exceptional poverty of the majority and on the other by the fact that the rivalry mapped onto the bitter ideological divide between liberalism and the Catholic Church. If Italy was to avoid a recurrence of the civil war that had marred the first half of the 1860s in the south of Italy, it was vital that ordinary people identified with the king, not in an abstract intellectual fashion (that was the basis of the nexus with the upper classes), but ‘religiously’. And this was the function of ‘a glorious national Dynasty’, which was ‘the religious and conservative instinct of the sentient People made visible to the masses themselves.’³

As De Meis acknowledged, the monarchy of united Italy had struggled from the outset to win popular support, especially in the South where there was a strong tradition of loyalty to the Bourbons among the common people. In large part this failing was due to the reluctance of King Victor Emmanuel II to forgo his Piedmontese past and identify clearly with ‘Italy’. He refused in 1861 to change his dynastic numeral and claimed regal authority using the archaic and contradictory formula, ‘by the grace of God and the will of the nation’. Francesco Crispi – who was to be probably the most astute critic of the monarchy and its role as a national symbol in the last decades of the nineteenth century – suggested he be styled far more unequivocally and patriotically ‘Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy’.⁴ During the 1860s the king did nothing to prevent the state from assuming a strongly Piedmontese character, and the top echelons of the civil service and the army were populated with Piedmontese officials. Victor Emmanuel also made it clear that his geographical heart lay in Turin and the Alpine valleys where he loved to hunt: even after the capture of Rome in 1870 he refused to spend much time in the new capital, and he left it to his son, Umberto, and above all his daughter-in-law Margherita, to attempt to make the Quirinal Palace a ‘national’ rival of the papal court.⁵

By shunning his capital after 1870 Victor Emmanuel largely avoided the challenge of Rome. The papacy took full advantage. Pius IX set out to counter Italian nationalism with the triumphant internationalism of his own and the Church’s authority, convening the spectacular Council of 1869–70, declaring papal infallibility, and extracting the maximum propaganda value out of the emotive concept of the ‘prisoner in the Vatican’. The Pope’s simple charm and accessibility, and his sometimes brutally colourful rhetoric, gave him a personal charisma unmatched by any of his predecessors, and pilgrims flocked to the Eternal City on an unprecedented scale. The court of the Crown Prince and Margherita struggled to compete with the Curia; and many of the city’s most illustrious aristocratic families remained doggedly wedded to their ‘black’ traditions. The extraordinary popular appeal and moral authority of Pius struck many commentators forcibly. As one observer noted in 1875:

When this Holy Pontiff, this gentle old man, this supreme priest, with the triple crown surrounding his white locks, raises his holy hand, turns his eyes to heaven and invokes the blessing of God on his children, on the Church, on the whole world, how many heads do not bow, how many foreheads are not prostrated, how many knees do not bend to be blessed by Him who has been given by God the power to loose and to bind, to open and to close for men the gates of Heaven! … It is impossible to imagine a greatness superior to this, and all others, however powerful and marvellous they might be, pale into insignificance beside it.⁶

The effectiveness of the papacy in reaching out to the masses after the loss of the temporal power (and the extraordinary rapport that Pius developed with huge crowds of pilgrims was emblematic of its success) underlined for liberals the critical importance of elevating the monarchy into a rival focus of popular enthusiasm. The fact that the Church had been brilliantly successful in appealing to the popular imagination using, among other things, music, art, architecture, rituals, incense and spectacular vestments, made the challenge seem all the more pressing and was one reason why many politicians opposed measures that might jeopardise the magnificence of the royal family (‘whether republic or monarchy, the head of state should be kept in splendour’, Crispi declared in parliament in 1883, condemning as paltry a rise of 100,000 lire in the civil list for the king’s cousin).⁷ Aesthetic considerations also induced commentators (particularly of democratic extraction) to wonder in the 1870s and 1880s if liberalism might not be too austere for most Italians. Could it be – as Hippolyte Taine was suggesting at the time in his seminal study of modern France – that a rational and agnostic ‘state’ had been imposed inappropriately on a ‘nation’ whose mental habits and emotional expectations had been profoundly shaped over many centuries by the Church and absolutism?⁸

Cults of the dead and the living, 1878–90

One particularly important aspect of the aestheticisation of politics lay in the cult of the dead. Crispi played a key role in making Victor Emmanuel II an object of national veneration after the king’s death in January 1878. As Minister of the Interior he was the principal architect of the monarch’s elaborate funeral, and he hoped that mass participation in the event and the carefully orchestrated public grief at the time would serve as springboards for a subsequent ‘national’ cult. This was why it was critical in Crispi’s eyes for the monarch to be buried in Rome, not Turin (and he had to resist considerable pressure on this score): the king should demonstrably belong to Italy, not Piedmont. And the choice of the Pantheon was also carefully ma...