Mussolini's Italy

Twenty Years of the Fascist Era

Max Gallo, Charles Lam Markmann

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429655432
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Originally published in 1964, this book holds the story of Italian Fascism and its leader up to the light. Gallo explains how Fascism triumphed in Italy, what it did to and for that country, and what its heritage is for present-day Italy. The character of Mussolini is explored as it is interwoven with the history of the dictatorship he founded, and Gallo demonstrates beyond doubt the enthusiasm with which Italian industry, finance, and business supported Mussolini's self-styled, anti-capitalist movement.

Part I
The Origins of Fascism and the Conquest of Power

(1883–October 30, 1922)

1
A Young Country, A Young Man

(1883–1914)

"Outside history, man is nothing."—MUSSOLINI (June 11, 1932)

AT ABOUT ELEVEN O'CLOCK in the morning of October 30, 1922, three taxis, trailed by a group of young men who shouted as they ran, stopped at the main gate of the Quirinal Palace in Rome. A crowd waiting nearby tried to identify the men who got out of the cars and were swallowed up under the portico. In a few seconds their silhouettes had vanished, and only the silent, braid-bedecked doorkeeper was left beneath the two statues by Bernini. The crowd had seen nothing, but a historic event had just taken place: Mussolini, black-shirted and bare-headed, was being received by King Vittorio Emanuele III, who was about to entrust the government of Italy to him. "The Fascist Era" was beginning.

Who was this thick-set, heavy-faced Italian who, at a resolute pace, had climbed the staircase framed by heavy bronze rails that leads from the square to the gate of the palace? The crowd of Romans waited outside the Quirinal as if hoping, at the sight of him, to identify the man and the meaning of the event. The crowd was curious rather than enthusiastic; it could not guess that for the next twenty-one years its fate and Italy's would depend on that thirty-nine-year-old man.

Young men in black shirts came and went with much gesturing in front of the peaceable spectators in their ordinary business clothes. In the distance, as if nothing were happening, the streetcars and the workers' bicycles continued on their way, and it is against the background of these contradictory fleeting images that one faces the question of the country that was accepting a dictator in that Roman morning.

But a country is first of all a history that does not readily lend itself to being fragmented into isolated periods. If one wishes to understand Mussolini's Italy and to know the man, antecedents and points of reference must be traced far in advance of that morning; one must go back to the major characteristics of Italy's personality as she was at the time when the man who would profess to recreate her was born and grew up.

Mussolini was born on July 29, 1883; twenty-two years earlier, on March 23, 1861, King Vittorio Emanuele II of Piedmont had been proclaimed king of Italy after a vote by both chambers of Parliament; but the ceremony was performed in Turin, for that sober city, cloaked in the fogs of the Po, was still the capital of the kingdom. Rome was not conquered until September 20, 1870, and it was not until a year later that the king took up residence in the Quirinal It was at that time, after a long struggle, almost an Odyssey, that Italy had at last achieved unity and a capital. Thus the Risorgimento, that resurrection whose stages had been established and whose accomplishments had been garnered by Cavour, and in which Garibaldi had represented the vital essence of the people, reached its conclusion on the banks of the Tiber as a monarchist, conservative triumph. It was only twelve years after the king's entrance into his Roman palace that Mussolini was born.

In the life of a nation, a dozen years are youth itself, even if, as in Italy's case, the citizens of the peninsula derived a feeling of Italianness from the language of Dante, their civilization, their history, their struggle for unity. And it was this nation, whose regional differences set Milan against Naples, whose unification had been achieved by Cavour, a man born to the French language who had never seen Sicily, Naples, or Rome, it was this nation, still as puny as an adolescent, that in 1914 was to be confronted with a European war that was at times to shake the foundations of nations whose histories were counted in centuries. If one loses sight of these essential premises, one cannot comprehend the magnitude of the crisis that carried Mussolini to power between 1919 and 1922. Nor can one then understand the man who "was born on a Sunday, July 29, 1883, at Varano dei Costa, a little cluster of old houses built on a height of Dovi a, a hamlet in the commune of Predappio, near Forlì in the Romagna,"¹ this Benito Mussolini who was the son of an Italy still in the process of being born, a nation whose youth was evidenced by the persistence and the vigor of its dialects as well as its illiteracy and its violent customs.

¹ Mussolini's Autobiography.

It is enough to consider these simple statistics: in 1882, one year before Mussolini's birth, the right of suffrage was extended to every citizen who had completed his elementary schooling, and these totaled one and a half million voters; in 1892, when Mussolini was ten years old, the total was three million, or 9.57 percent of the population!

Under such conditions, political circles were isolated from the people, of whose real problems they were ignorant, and they rejected Catholicism out of fear of the Vatican: since 1871, after all, the church had forbidden the faithful to take part in elections and the pope had regarded himself as a prisoner in unified Italy. Hence parliamentary circles were cut off, torn by clannishness, by personal rivalries, by corruption, and by self-interest, and thus incapable of breathing life into political parties.

Such was the kingdom In which Mussolini grew up.

The peasants around him in the Romagna spoke in dialect. If its use was forbidden in the Mussolinis' home, it was because Signora Mussohm was a school teacher. Her husband, Alessandro, was a blacksmith, boastful, garrulous, a wencher and a drinker, and also a correspondent for the pro-anarchist newspapers of Forlì; he preened himself on being a writer on Socialism and the revolution.

Now the political and social system was already being challenged in this Italy in which public opinion was composed of some seven or eight hundred persons, because public expenditures and taxes were increasing. Whether arrogant or paternalistic, the members of Parliament whose dream it was to forge a mighty state never boggled in fact at casting the whole burden of their ambition on the shoulders of a population that was not allowed to vote. Suffering persisted, and sometimes it grew worse.

The Mussolini family was always short at the end of the month. But the father had built a small threshing machine, which he rented out to peasants, and the mother, Rosa, born Maltoni, contributed her salary to the family funds. When she died at the age of forty-six in 1905, worn out by work and devotion, Alessandro moved to Forlì and set up as an innkeeper. There he lived with Anna Guidi, the widow of a penniless peasant, one of those innumerable peasants overburdened with debts and taxes who had lost whatever little they had owned and become members of the vast army of braccianti, those miserable day-laborers. By way of illustration: in a large Sardinian village, Ottana, the peasants owed eighteen years' taxes! And none of these braccianti, like Anna Guidi's husband, ever earned more than one lira (about twenty cents) for a day's labor!

It is understandable that Alessandro Mussolini could assemble an enthusiastic audience when, before the marveling eyes of his son, he read aloud the articles that he wrote for such little newspapers as la Rivendicazione or la Lotta. His listeners applauded his forceful platitudes—"bourgeois society and justice are monstrous but crumbling structures"—and everyone had a drink on them.

Though in comparison to the miserable day-laborers Alessandro was privileged, he too experienced first-hand the hardships of his time. In his new household—Anna Guidi was already the mother of five daughters—the youngest girl, Rachele, who was born in 1892 and who was later to be Benito's wife, worked as a maid for a family named Chiadini in Forlì, earning three lire a month.

In the Mussolinis' home, as in many other Italian homes, there was one dish for the evening meal, polenta—maize flour—cooked in water: meat was a rarity, almost unknown. Yet the Mussolinis never suffered the hunger and the absolute destitution that were familiar then to many Italian families. Benito's childhood was sheltered from the hardships of labor and hunger. He was a quarrelsome, brawling boy, sharp in claiming his share in the petty thefts committed by the children who ranged through all the villages:

"Twenty-five years ago," he wrote later, "I was an arrogant and violent child. Some of my playmates still have scars on their faces from the stones that I threw at them. A nomad by instinct, I wandered along the river from morning until night, robbing birds' nests and stealing fruit. I went to mass. . . . I followed my mother. . . . I helped my father in his modest, difficult work. . . ."

At that time the Mussolinis lived in a house that was certainly simple—three scantily furnished rooms—but it contained the essentials: the iron bed, the sideboard, the wardrobe; one of the rooms, as long as Mussolini's mother was alive, was used as a school room. His mother, whom Benito loved devotedly, saw to it that he received a solid education. She enrolled him in the Salesian school in Faenza, where discipline was strict and inequality of treatment among the pupils was the rule: in the dining room there were three tables—one for the young nobles, one for the rich, and one for the poor. Arrogant and quarrelsome, Mussolini—who had told his mother: "One day Italy will be afraid of me"—chafed at the bit; he threw an inkwell into a teacher's face, he tried to run away, he was caught, he stabbed a classmate with a pocket knife. Nonetheless the school did not expel him: he was a good student. But his family had no money, and in the end Benito had to be withdrawn from the school when a request for a scholarship was refused.

He was then sent to a boarding school in Forlimpopoli, but he was soon forbidden to live in the school because of his behavior, though he was allowed to continue his studies as a day pupil, lodging in the house of an old woman. A penniless scapegrace, he developed a sudden passion for music.

To be a student in such a school was a privilege that was anything but common among Italians of his age. At that time almost 80 percent of the population in the south was illiterate; that Mezzogiorno has always been the cancer of Italy. Circumstances unfavorable by nature were aggravated by the burden of history: uncultivated estates owned by absentee landlords side by side with inadequate little plots in a region of arid soil where peasants endure lifetimes in prey to malaria, hunger, exhaustion, and ignorance. The Mafia and the Camorra control the country, and their "clients" are the voters: such was the start of Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, who became Premier of Italy at the end of the First World War. In contrast to such conditions, of course, the Mussolinis' Romagna seemed a land of privilege.

And yet, even though the south was stagnating, even though the growth in the population was making the situation still worse (in spite of emigration, between 1871 and 1914 the Italian population increased by more than eleven million to a total of thirty-seven million, and population density rose from thirty-four to fifty-two inhabitants per square mile), there was a sharp upsurge in the Italian economy at the time when young Benito Mussolini left the school at Forlimpopoli in order to start his training as a teacher.

The years between 1880 and 1910 were in fact decisive for Italian capitalism; the impetus was especially strong after 1900. In that year FIAT was founded with a capital of eight hundred thousand lire and by 1913 Italy was already exporting four thousand cars; the textile industry expanded so much that in 1908 its cotton sector was menaced by overproduction; powerful hydro-electric installations were established on the rivers. But this development was peculiar to northern Italy, and in large measure it was accomplished at the expense of the Italian small farmers who were sacrificed to trade treaties, especially in the Mezzogiorno.

It was a Sicilian who presided over this immolation of the south to the north: Francesco Crispi, a disciple of Mazzini and a participant in the expedition of Garibaldi's Thousand. It was said of him that he sought to copy Bismarck and Boulanger, and, like the Iron Chancellor, he wanted to leave his mark on his country. His long tenure of power—from 1887 to 1896—brought into the open the alliance that was being formed between the intellectual or agrarian middle class of the south and the industrial interests of the north.

One day Alessandro Mussolini said to his son: "You will be the Crispi of tomorrow."

Actually, regardless whether the elder Mussolini really said this, the remark has a certain validity, for Crispi's ideas and his style represent one of those deep-lying veins that exist in the history of a nation, revealing an aspect of its character, to which statesmen return at long intervals and under varying conditions, repeating, sometimes unconsciously, the language of remote precursors.

The Sicilian, Crispi, initially a revolutionary and then an authoritarian minister, the artisan of a policy of reaction and repression, projected himself as the defender of order against the extremist parties, even attempted a reconciliation with the Vatican, and, above all, undertook a program of prestige that culminated in an alliance with Germany and a colonial adventure in Abyssinia. In actuality Crispi was an admirer of Germany because he was a hater of France, but also because of the fascination in which he was caught by the strong state built by Bismarck.

The gradients that led from Crispism to Fascism were manifested thus in the field of foreign policy, in confirmation of the principle that the choices available to a nation are not infinite; and thus we can see what Fascism owed to Crispism and how, for all its appearance of being new, Mussolini's movement derived from a national tradition.

And Crispi, who loved to play at being chancellor, Crispi, who was so solicitous of the nation's honor, wore the chains of the Triple Alliance, accepted its contempt for Italy—"a whore who works the streets," Bismarck said in 1879—and led his country into the disaster of Adowa: five thousand men killed, including two generals and three hundred officers, and all the artillery left in the hands of the Abyssinians.

Standing erect with his companions in the school room, Benito Mussolini paid tribute to the dead of Adowa and swore to avenge them. This fact should be kept in mind because of what it demonstrates: the wound suffered by Italian national feeling at Adowa in 1896. But others reacted to the defeat at Adowa as a proof of the foolishness of colonial adventures. One of these was Alessandro Mussolini. He took up collections for the wounded and sick in the Abyssinian army; anti-militarist demonstrations broke out all over Italy. There were shouts of "Evviva Menelik," and crowds tore up railway tracks in order to prevent the departure of troop trains. This was how the energy of the new Socialist tendency expressed itself.

In August, 1892, the Italian Workers' Party was created in Genoa. But this party was the heir to a long tradition. Alessandro Mussolini aptly epitomized all the idle talk, the generosity of spirit, the anarchy, and the confusion that co-existed in the ancestors of Italian Socialism.

He was a member of the International and his house was the theater of unceasing discussio...