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Chapter 1
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Early Years and the Great War 1883–1918
The Rise to Fame
Benito Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 near Dovia (now Predappio Nuova), a village a couple of miles from Predappio (now Predappio Alta) in the Romagna region of central Italy. His father, Alessandro, was the local blacksmith, a self-educated, forceful character who had been imprisoned as a revolutionary anarchist in his early years, still took a keen idealistic interest in politics, sat on the local council as a Socialist, and knew personally many of Italy’s left-wing leaders. He was a man of firm opinions firmly expressed, generous to his friends and implacable to his foes. He could be quick-tempered and he liked both women and drink, but he was not a caricature drunken bully. He used his belt on Benito quite often, but he also encouraged his son’s reading and helped him become aware of the wider world.1 In short, he was an overbearing and rather unpredictable man, just the kind to make a child feel insecure. Benito admired him, resembled him physically and adopted many of his values. Benito’s mother, Rosa Maltoni, was a very different character. She was the local primary school teacher, a serious, responsible woman and a devout Catholic, but she suffered from ‘nerves’ and she never really understood her eldest son. Soon the family grew, although it remained small by nineteenth-century standards. In January 1885, 18 months after Benito, his brother Arnaldo was born – another big blow to Benito’s security if we believe the psychiatrists, especially as Arnaldo soon had to be sent away for wet-nursing (the two boys got on extremely well later on). In November 1888 his sister Edvige appeared.
With two such different parents, whatever the young Benito did was unlikely to please both of them. The contrast became evident very early on. His mother insisted on him being baptised, but his father chose the names: Benito, after Benito Juárez who had led the Mexican revolution against France in the 1860s; Amilcare, after Amilcare Cipriani the radical hero of the Italian Risorgimento; and Andrea, after Andrea Costa the famous Romagna anarchist turned Socialist. With names like that, poor little Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini could hardly help growing up a ‘subversive’, like his father. To ensure this happy outcome, his father would cheer everybody up by reading Les Misérables to the family in the evenings, and even Machiavelli’s The Prince as well. One wonders how much fun and laughter there was in the Mussolini household. Furthermore, Benito was the ‘son of the teacher’, expected to behave well but liable to mockery from fellow-pupils. Romagna in the late nineteenth century had a reputation as an unruly society, where children’s arguments were settled by fists or knives, and adult disputes could lead to lengthy family vendettas. In reality, the region was a provincial backwater, although enlivened by occasional crimes of passion. But it had a romantic image, and the Romagnoli pretended to live up to it. So the young Benito learned to look after himself, a trait he never lost.
The Mussolinis were a relatively prosperous and well-educated family, with two incomes and only three children. A blacksmith had a skilled job, always in demand; a teacher had a secure one, with high social status. Money was short at times and food was plain, but both Benito and his brother went to school until the age of 18, and this was very unusual in rural areas. At home, the family spoke Italian, not dialect. Benito’s grandfather had been a landowner, and in 1903 Alessandro bought some land himself with a legacy and rented it out to a local peasant – and was expelled briefly from the local Socialist party as a result. The property was worth 9,000 lire when Alessandro died in 1910, so Benito and his two siblings inherited 3,000 lire each, quite a substantial sum.2
Benito learned to speak late but was soon reading avidly, a life-long trait. He was a lonely child, shy and introverted, but fond of animals. At the age of nine his parents – or rather his mother, overriding his anticlerical father’s objections – sent him away to a boarding school run by Salesian friars in the nearby town of Faenza. This was a miserable experience for the young Benito. Discipline was strict, and he was homesick and lonely. The other boys were not peasants but came from prosperous middle-class families. Hitherto he had been the teacher’s son, and the outstanding pupil; now he was at the bottom of the social ladder, and had to eat at the poor boys’ table. Furthermore, his teachers (laymen, in the primary classes) disliked him as the son of a notorious left-wing agitator, and by his own account persecuted him unjustly.3 Benito was not one to take humiliation lying down. Aware of his own merits, he reacted very strongly indeed. Eventually he was expelled for twice pulling a knife on a fellow-pupil. All this naturally boosted his insecurity and sense of grievance against an uncaring world. Perhaps the Salesians have a lot to answer for, although in all probability the real psychological damage had already been done, at home. At any rate, the young Mussolini was consumed by resentment, and by a need to show the world what he was worth. He hated the middle classes, he hated the Church, he hated authority and he hated humiliation.
His next school, the Istituto Magistrale at Forlimpopoli, trained future primary teachers and was more suitable socially, if not educationally. The other pupils were lower middle class like himself, and the teachers soon realised that Benito had outstanding ability. Mussolini’s education there was traditional, but perhaps not traditional enough. He studied nineteenth-century Italian history, geography, literature, French and basic mathematics, but he learned very little about science, technical subjects, economics, art or classics – anything that might have given him a training in logical thought or a wider perspective. Still, it was a far better education than most Italians received. Benito was much happier at this school, although here, too, he caused trouble: he organised a successful strike against the food, and was eventually expelled from the boarding wing, again for threatening a fellow-pupil with a knife. He was allowed to continue at school, but had to live in lodgings nearby. At age 16 he learned something about sex, losing his virginity in a Forlì brothel in a scene worthy of Fellini: it cost him half a lira, and the woman ‘oozed fat from every pore’.4 He also discovered a natural talent for oratory, and was chosen to give the commemorative address on the death of Giuseppe Verdi in 1901. The same year he qualified as a primary teacher, following in his mother’s footsteps, with 132 marks out of 150: he was particularly good at pedagogy and at Italian language and literature, but weaker at maths and agronomy.5
When he went home, his father tried to get him a job at the local council as assistant secretary, but in vain. Then he applied for a teaching post in Piedmont, but was turned down. He consoled himself with a local girl, Virginia E. His own later account of this episode is revealing: ‘I grabbed her on the stairway, pushed her into a corner behind a door and made her mine. She got up crying, and insulted me through her tears. She said I had “stolen her honour”. Perhaps so. But what honour was there? Virginia was not angry with me for long. For three months we loved each other, emotionally very little but physically a great deal.’6 This idyllic affair ended early in 1902 when Benito found his first job, as replacement teacher at Gualtieri in Emilia. He was paid 56 lire a month, of which 40 went on board and lodging. He found the work dull and the life duller, although made more bearable by music – it was here that he took up the fiddle – and by Giulia, the wife of a local soldier stationed elsewhere.
When the summer term ended, it was time for adventure. He borrowed 50 lire from his mother and caught the train to Switzerland – a strange choice for a 19-year-old seeking adventure, particularly as he already detested both democracy and the bourgeoisie. For the next seven years, apart from his military service in 1905–6, his life consisted of temporary teaching jobs in Italy – it is noticeable that he was never reappointed anywhere – and foreign travel, although the travel was always to nearby countries, where foreign revolutionaries were tolerated and the Italian community was large. He stayed in Switzerland, or just over the border in France, until November 1904, apart from a visit back home in late 1903 to see his mother who was seriously ill. He found work as a building labourer or errand boy/shop assistant (but only for a few weeks in all, at various times) and slept in cheap boarding houses or, on one occasion, under a bridge (but only one night, and it was July). However, he soon found his true vocation, as journalist and agitator. Within a month of arriving he was writing for the Italian-language L’Avvenire del Lavoratore in Lausanne, and making (paid) fiery speeches to the thousands of Italian immigrant workers, particularly during strikes or protest demonstrations. He became a brilliant and daring orator, specialising in anticlerical themes. Occasionally he was arrested for sedition or threatening behaviour, fingerprinted and photographed, given a few nights in the cells and then expelled to another canton. This was all much more fun than teaching. Mussolini soon became well known in Socialist circles and found influential friends and supporters, including the Russian Marxist Angelica Balabanova who became both his mistress and his mentor in Socialist politics and in the correct interpretation of Marx.
Mussolini was always a wonderful self-dramatist, and he played the part of angry young agitator to perfection. Thin, pale, scowling, with wide, staring eyes, he wore ‘revolutionary’ clothing (e.g. a red cravat) and demonstrated a revolutionary temperament. He was a caricature village Marat, a romantic symbol of uncompromising zeal. Once, debating the existence of God with a Protestant pastor in a crowded hall, he challenged God to strike him down dead within 10 minutes, to prove He existed. But God failed His test. Yet despite later myths, Mussolini’s youthful bohemian period was not all that uncomfortable. He did not go far – no transatlantic steerage trips for him – and so learned little of the outside world. He was, in any case, a voluntary emigrant. He had a teaching certificate, and could have found work in Italy. His period abroad was really an extended and not very adventurous ‘gap year’: time out to have affairs and find his vocation. He had plenty of affairs, particularly a serious one with a married Russian medical student, Eleonora H. As for his vocation, he rarely needed to do manual labour. Instead, he worked as a journalist and lecturer, or as a union organiser in the Lausanne building trade, or as translator or language teacher; his mother sent him money when he needed it. So he was fairly privileged, as penniless emigrants go. Indeed, in the summer of 1904 he enrolled at the University of Lausanne’s summer course, and attended lectures by the university’s most eminent professor, Vilfredo Pareto. He had plenty of time to read, although what he read – Nietzsche, Carlyle, Stirner, Blanqui, the wilder anarchists – served mostly to reinforce his egoism. Like most people, he read books that confirmed his prejudices, not ones that might challenge them. He certainly did not read difficult books on complex subjects: the Communist Manifesto yes, Das Kapital definitely no. His own ideas were romantic tosh, and at least 30 years out of date at that. Mussolini was and remained a very old-fashioned revolutionary.
All this was enjoyable and gave him some influence in exile politics, but of course if he wanted a real political role he would have to go back to Italy. However, back in Italy he would have to do his military service – indeed, he had already been posted as a deserter for not reporting to the army in 1903. He could return only because the government issued a general amnesty in 1904 to mark the birth of Prince Humbert. In January 1905 Mussolini joined the 10th Regiment of bersaglieri, stationed at Verona. Much to his surprise, he liked the army. There was plenty of physical exercise, always good for him, and there were opportunities to meet people from all over Italy. Perhaps the army taught him patriotism, although it seems unlikely: after his military service ended in September 1906 he was as anti-militarist and anti-monarchist as ever, and in 1911 was imprisoned for his part in demonstrations against the Libyan war. More probably, Mussolini was a good soldier just as he was a good journalist, or a good orator, or a good politician. He could grasp quickly what was needed, and knew how to fit in. One lesson he certainly did learn. The bersaglieri were crack infantrymen, and they marched at a trotting pace. Years later, Mussolini imposed this on his Fascist movement. He thus became the first jogging politician, one of his more dreadful legacies to posterity.
After military service, Mussolini went back to Romagna briefly, but it was now a gloomy place for him as his mother had died during his military service. He resumed schoolteaching, this time at Caneva di Tolmezzo, in north-east Italy. His stay there in 1906–7 was a period of excessive drinking and womanising, the latter including his married landlady, to great local scandal. Nor could the future dictator manage to keep order in cla...
