Mussolini

Peter Neville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415734097
• eBook ISBN: 9781317613039
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This new edition of Peter Neville's Mussolini traces and analyses the life of one of the most fascinating twentieth century European dictators, Benito Mussolini, while placing his life in its historic Italian context. Engaging and accessible, the Duce's career is traced from his roots as a journalist and socialist to his capture and execution in 1945, addressing crucial issues throughout: was Mussolini really a far right ideologist, or simply a political opportunist? How successful was he at communicating his core beliefs to the Italian people?

This thoroughly updated new edition synthesises the scholarship of the last ten years to consider Italian atrocities in Africa, and the reaction to them by ordinary Italians, in addition to a consideration of the relationship between Mussolini and Hitler while other periods of Mussolini's life are expanded upon and reconsidered. Finally, the author considers Mussolini's legacy and his continuing influence in modern Italy.

This biography gives students a useful analytical introduction to the period and the man and provides an explanation of what fascism was and why it resonated with so many people in Italy. It will be essential reading for all students of modern Italy and the history of fascism.

1 The shaping of a political leader, 1883–1919

DOI: 10.4324/9781315750736-1

Youth

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was born on 29 July 1883 in the commune of Predappio in that part of Italy known as the Romagna. It was an impoverished area, which lacked amenities such as railways, and the nearest large town Forlì was some 15 kilometres away.

Mussolini was named after three left-wing heroes. One was the Mexican revolutionary Benito Júarez, the other two Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa being heroes of the Italian Left. The choice of names was his father Alessandro’s and reflected his left-wing political views. Alessandro was a potent influence on his eldest son and took him to political meetings while Benito was still a young boy. He, according to one of Mussolini’s biographers, was ‘stocky, dark-haired and dark complexioned, with a friendly face cut by a pair of soldierly moustaches, and short square hands’.¹ He was a blacksmith, lacking formal education but fiercely committed to socialism, even admiring the Russian anarchist leader Bakunin. Alessandro served time in prison for his political beliefs and was regarded locally as a dangerous firebrand. His son was to inherit this rebellious streak.

The contrast with Mussolini’s mother Rosa was sharp. Where Alessandro was an atheistic rebel, Rosa was religious and conformist. She attended Mass regularly and was a qualified elementary teacher. To a degree, therefore, she had married beneath her, but believed that education would be the means of lifting her children out of rural poverty (Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo was born in 1885, and his sister Edvige in 1888). Rosa taught school in a room in the small family house which was turned into a granary in the summer vacation. To enable her to teach, Benito’s grandmother lived with the family and looked after the children.

On his own admission in his autobiography, Mussolini was a difficult child. ‘I was,’ he wrote, ‘unruly. And I was sometimes indiscreet. Youth has its passing restlessness and follies.’² Mussolini’s ‘restlessness’ in fact involved wild and bullying behaviour towards his younger brother Arnaldo, an amiable fat child, and a tendency to dominate other village children. Sanitised later versions of Mussolini’s childhood suggest that he was popular with his peers. This seems unlikely as the young Benito had a strong vindictive streak. He reportedly spent hours sharpening a stone so that he could stab another boy who had provoked him. He was always getting into fights, a fact which distressed his mother, so that Benito went to some lengths to try to disguise the cuts and bruises resulting from his various schoolboy scrapes.

As a child, Mussolini must have felt divided loyalties. His loyal Catholic mother ensured that he attended Mass regularly (although the incense reportedly made him sick), while his socialist father, who was overfond of alcohol, took him to taverns. Later the dictator Mussolini was to write of how his father’s heart and mind ‘were always filled and pulsing with socialistic theories. His intense sympathies mingled with doctrines and causes.’³ Alessandro was an atheist, but although his choice prevailed in naming Benito, it was Rosa who was to decide what sort of education their son received. Mussolini was to claim that his greatest love was for his mother, who was ‘quiet, so tender, and yet so strong … I often thought even in my earliest appreciations of human beings, of how faithful and patient her work was. To displease her was my one fear.’⁴ Such filial devotion did not, however, prevent Benito’s escapades, his fights or his theft of fruit and birds’ eggs in the locality.

The adult Mussolini conceded that he was a bad boy. But he was not without intelligence. Initially, he had some difficulty in learning to speak (an irony for one who was to found a career on loquaciousness) so that his parents feared that he might be dumb. In fact, he proved to be intellectually sharp, but troublesome at his primary school (he crawled under the desks in the classroom to pinch the bare legs of other pupils!). The son of the devoted Catholic Rosa was also guilty of throwing stones at children on their way to Sunday school. It was this sort of anti-social behaviour which persuaded his mother to send Benito to the Salesian school at Faenza in 1892 at the age of 9.

The Salesian Order’s founding father was Dom Bosco (who reputedly had visions of the Devil). He preached a doctrine of nonviolence towards pupils but also believed that the child, although to be cherished, should be kept under observation at all times. Such a régime was bound to be irksome to a rebellious youth like the young Benito Mussolini. He grew to hate the Salesian fathers, and one of his teachers was later to say that he had never had such a difficult student. Mussolini was a loner at Faenza, having only one real friend, ‘a boy with a skull so thick that he let Benito amuse himself by hitting him hard with a brick’.⁵

Part of the problem was that Benito was obliged to accept the Salesian practice of making boys sit at three tables according to the amount of school fees they paid (Mussolini knew that his parents had difficulty in finding the fees). This meant that he had to sit at the table of the poorest children in the school, and not with the majority of his class-mates. Economic circumstances, therefore, deprived her son of the status which Rosa Mussolini’s lower middle-class origins would have marked out for him. Although Mussolini claimed later that he was proud of his family’s poverty from which he was to free himself, the evidence suggests otherwise.⁶ He fiercely resented this social slight, and other irksome rules such as the requirement to remain silent at mealtimes and observe absolute silence during Easter week. He was still a rebel who led his fellows in a strike over bad food during his second year at Faenza and was then expelled for stabbing another boy at supper. Subsequently, the Salesians sued his family for the payment of fees. Neither of these facts is mentioned in Mussolini’s own account of his schooldays. He recorded merely that at Faenza, ‘I studied, slept well and grew’.⁷

For some months thereafter in 1893, the 10-year-old Mussolini was educated, with his mother’s assistance, at home. He was then sent to school at Forlimpopoli which was also in the Romagna. This had several advantages as far as the restless Benito was concerned. It was not run by priests or nuns and attendance at Mass was voluntary rather than compulsory. The food was better too, and the discipline less rigorous than that of the Salesians at Faenza.

Yet even this more liberal régime did not reform the young tear-away. Benito continued to bully other pupils and to get involved in fights. This behaviour led to suspension and to his being sent home for short periods when he was impertinent and (yet again) stabbed another pupil. It says something for the long-suffering staff at Forlimpopoli that Mussolini was allowed to return to school and complete his education six years later. Although he liked to pretend that he had been at the top of his class (he did show some aptitude for literature, language and music), Mussolini seems to have been only an average student. He was disliked by his fellow students as a bully, but some indications about his character were emerging.

The flamboyant dictator of the future played the trombone in the school band at the age of 17 (a characteristically noisy instrument perhaps for the later braggart public speaker). And in his last year, 1901, Mussolini received his first public recognition. He was asked to make a public speech about the composer Verdi before his entire school. Significantly, it was the socialist newspaper Avanti! (Forward), which would have been aware of his father’s leftist links, that commented on the young man’s performance. ‘Last night,’ wrote the paper’s correspondent, ‘the comrade student Mussolini commemorated the Swan of Busseto [a Verdi opera], delivering a much applauded speech.’⁸

Despite his stormy school years, Mussolini finished his education at Forlimpopoli with an elementary schoolteacher’s diploma, the same qualification which his hard-working and conformist mother had obtained years before him. He was by now able to argue with his father’s socialist friends in the family forge, and his education had produced some interesting pointers for the future. On his own admission, Mussolini was already a fervent admirer of the Roman Empire, and enjoyed history lessons about it. Lazy, fiery and ill-disciplined, he had frustrated his teachers and frightened his peers, but he was already a strong personality resentful about his humble origins and, like his father Alessandro, an instinctive socialist. One of Mussolini’s biographers describes the 18-year-old student as having a ‘pale face and his wide, black piercing eyes gave him the appearance of a poet or revolutionary, and he liked to think of himself as both’.⁹ Mussolini was about to embark on the first part of his political apprenticeship.

He had also embarked on a sexual apprenticeship, and began to boast about love affairs. At 17, he was already visiting brothels in Forlì, a fact omitted from his sanitised 1928 English language autobiography, and his attitude towards women was chauvinistic. A passage in his posthumous 1947 Italian language autobiography is revealing about an early sexual experience. Mussolini wrote:

I caught her on the stairs, throwing her into a corner behind a door, and made her mine. When she got up weeping and humiliated, she insulted me by saying that I had robbed her of her honour and it is not impossible she spoke the truth. But I ask you, what kind of honour can she have meant?¹⁰

Even allowing for the chauvinistic Italian culture of the turn of the last century, Mussolini’s cynicism about sexual matters is striking. Throughout his life he was to regard women as little more than sexual playthings. By contrast, and surprisingly for a man who later claimed to encapsulate martial masculine virtues, Mussolini had virtually no male friends and gained something of a reputation in Predappio for being a misanthrope who rarely left the family house except at night.¹¹ He stalked the streets reciting parts of Dante’s Inferno out loud (he had a very good memory) to disturb the sleeping bourgeoisie.

The socialist

In February 1902, Mussolini got a job as a teacher in a school at Pieve Saliceto in the commune of Gualtieri. It seems likely that he got the job because the local socialist councillors preferred his brand of politics to that of the other candidates. Mussolini himself had a low opinion of his employers, regarding the local socialists in Gualtieri as being ‘weak and flabby as spaghetti’.¹² He saw himself as a Bohemian intellectual who wore a broad-brimmed black hat and a floppy cravat, but he was too restless to be happy as a provincial schoolmaster.

Mussolini was also in financial difficulties. His salary at the school gave him just 56 lire a month and, of that, 40 lire went to cover board and lodging. This did not, however, prevent the young man from playing cards in local inns and getting involved in fierce political discussions. Fragments of the early autobiography suggest that Mussolini and other young tearaways were involved in raids on dance halls. Predictably the hot-tempered Benito also got into fights over girls (although these escapades were airbrushed out of later autobiographies).

In Gualtieri Mussolini had his first mistress, and his 1928 autobiography boasts of a wild and fierce love. In fact, he reverted to type and stabbed the woman in the thigh with the knife which he always carried with him. How he subsequently escaped prosecution remains a mystery, but a pattern of bullying and abusive behaviour towards women had been well established. Such behaviour was tolerated in Italian society of that time in a way which would be unlikely today.

On the positive side, Mussolini was marking out the beginnings of a career in politics when in March 1902 he was elected by the local teachers’ association to represent them at an educational congress in Bologna. Despite his frequently wild and aggressive behaviour, Mussolini was still able to impress with his dynamism, which helped to cover up moral and intellectual weaknesses in his character. Nevertheless, this success in Gualtieri was not enough for the young man. In June 1902 he wrote to a friend telling him that he had decided to emigrate to Switzerland. But the year in Gualtieri was important, Mussolini wrote later, because his experiences there had made him decide, after the year teaching, not to return home to the Romagna. Predappio was, he wrote, ‘a narrow world for me, with affection to be sure, but restricted’.¹³ The journey to Switzerland began a two-year period when the young Mussolini drifted from country to country outside his homeland.

In fact Mussolini had little choice about leaving Gualtieri itself in the end. In characteristic style, he had become involved in a violent row with the local mayor and been forced to leave the school, bizarrely leaving his academic gown in part payment of the rent at his lodgings.

There may also have been another important reason why Mussolini decided to leave for Switzerland. Shortly after he made the decision to go, he would have become liable for military service, and there is at least an implication here that his decision to leave Italy was not a coincidence (the parallel with Mussolini’s fellow dictator Adolf Hitler is an interesting one – Hitler fled his native Austria in 1913 for Germany to avoid being called up).¹⁴ As is so often the case with Mussolini, it is hard to disentangle the truth from the lies and distortions of his propaganda machine. As he himself suggested, he may well have just been short of money or fled from the over-possessive mistress in Gualtieri.

Whatever the reasons, the move to Switzerland marked an important watershed in Benito’s life. Even the news that his father had been arrested, which Benito received at the border town of Chiasso while waiting for his train to Switzerland, did not change his mind (Alessandro had become involved in a socialist campaign of smashing ballot boxes at Predappio in protest at unfair elections). His official 1928 autobiography makes no reference to his father’s arrest, referring only to financial difficulties and ‘the urge to escape’ from Predappio.¹⁵

Mussolini arrived in Switzerland in July 1902 with just 2 lire in his pocket. In a letter to a friend, he described his struggle to survive as he was forced to take work as a hod-man for a builder:

I made one hundred and twenty-one journeys with a hand-barrow full of stones up to the second floor of a building in the process of construction. In the evening the muscles of my arms were swollen. I ate some potatoes roasted upon cinders and threw myself, in all my clothes, on to my bed, a pile of straw.¹⁶

Mussolini also claimed to have become so impoverished in Switzerland that he had to hide out in a public lavatory and under a bridge.

Such stories need to be treated with caution. The letter quoted above, for example, is to be found in a biography of Mussolini by his one-time mistress and admirer, Margherita Sarfatti. Certainly contemporary photographs of him show someone who is reasonably well dressed and not the skeletal figure described by Mussolini later. Such exaggerations were doubtless designed to create the impression that the 19-year-old future dictator had shared the sufferings of the workers.

What seems beyond dispute is that Mussolini held a lot of different jobs while in Switzerland. He was variously a butcher’s boy, an errand boy for a wine shop and a worker in a chocolate factory, as well as a hod-man.

Political influences

Mussolini’s chief interest was still in politics. While living in the Swiss city of Lausanne, he met Angelica Balabanoff, a young Marxist from a middle-class family in the Ukraine. Balabanoff, who knew Mussolini for a dozen years, was a genuine left-wing revolutionary (who also knew the Russian Communist leader Lenin). She provided us with a revealing description of the young Mussolini who had turned up at a socialist meeting she was addressing in Lausanne. Balabanoff was struck by Mussolini’s appearance: ‘I had never seen a more wretched human being … he seemed more concerned with his inner turmoil than what I was saying’.¹⁷

Balabanoff tried to help him with a translation of a German pamphlet for which he had been offered 50 francs. But she noticed the essential egotism of the man and the fact that, in intellectual terms, he was completely undisciplined. She believed (rightly) that Mussolini’s radicalism and vociferous anti-clericalism were more a product of his early environment than of any real conviction or understanding.

Nevertheless, under her influence Mussolini apparently (although some doubt remains) began to attend lectures by the influential political scientist Vilfredo Pareto at the University of Lausanne. He also dabbled, in intellectual grasshopper fashion, with the ideas of Nietzsche, the German philosopher, the French theorist Sorel and Buddhism.

In public, however, he remained a braggart. An attempt to heckle a visiting Belgian socialist during a lecture resulted in a humiliating rebuff for Mussolini. By this time his provocative opinions were attracting the attention of the Swiss authorities, who expelled him from Lausanne.

Mussolini then took refuge in the town of Annemasse on the French–Swiss border and began an affair with the wife of a local official, before moving on to Zurich. He again moved in local socialist and Marxist circles and became imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chronology
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The shaping of a political leader, 1883–1919
• 2 The achievement of power, 1919–24
• 3 Crisis and consolidation, 1924–29
• 4 The evolution of a Fascist foreign policy
• 5 Italian society under Mussolini, 1931–39
• 6 The Ethiopian War, 1935–36
• 7 Into the abyss: foreign and defence policy, 1936–40
• 8 The slide to disaster, 1940–43
• 9 The last phase, 1943–45
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index