Italy under Mussolini is revealed through the accounts of ordinary people
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Rome, 1940
Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy, by Christopher Duggan, Bodley Head, RRP£25, 528 pages
For
all his demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in prewar Britain.
Newspapers (notably Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail) carried flattering
photographs of the dictator; Mussolini was on good terms with King
George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated him on his “wise
leadership”. Parts of the British establishment initially saw a
potential ally in Mussolini and a bulwark against Hitler’s Germany. The
“virile” alternative of Fascism in the 1920s appealed to many Britons
disgruntled by an age of leftist poets, flappers and perceived
Judeo-Bolshevik threats.
Before the days of Hitler, it was a rare British writer who defended
Jewish culture. Caricatures of ugly moneylenders had marked 19th-century
British fiction – even Thackeray, that most likeable of Victorian
novelists, disparaged a Rothschild banker as a “greasy-faced compound of
donkey and pig”. Subsequently, many British writers and thinkers
advocated racial rejuvenation through genetic engineering. The young
Aldous Huxley dreamt of a samurai class of technocrats who would apply
panaceas to Britain’s interwar social malaise. Like HG Wells, he was in
favour of genetic engineering programmes and, in 1930, called for the
compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill.
Mussolini
had greeted Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 with suspicion. A racial
dogma that glorified blond northern Europeans conflicted somewhat with
the Fascist cult of romanità (the spirit of ancient Rome).
Nevertheless a latent tension had always existed between Fascism and
Italian Jewry. Zionists, in particular, were seen by Mussolini as a
self-regarding, supranational sect inimical to the sturdy Blackshirt
bond of race and nation. “These revolting Jews,” he told his mistress
Claretta Petacci in September 1938, “they need to be destroyed, all of
them.”
Christopher Duggan’s Fascist Voices, his excellent new
history of Italian Fascism, argues that Nazi Germany had never demanded
an anti-Semitic campaign as the price of friendship with Italy. On the
contrary, Mussolini resented the imputation that his anti-Jewish
legislations of 1938 (the so-called Manifesto of Race) were imposed on
him from without. His anti-Semitism dated back to the 1920s, he told
Petacci, long before Hitler rose to prominence. During the German
occupation of northern Italy, with Hitler’s collusion, Mussolini helped
to deport more than 6,800 Italian Jews to Auschwitz and other camps
within the Greater Reich. He made no attempt to justify the enormity.
Duggan, a professor of Italian history whose
previous books include a study of the Fascist regime’s attempt to
eradicate the Sicilian Mafia, is well placed to analyse the cult of ducismo. Fascist Voices
narrates the rise and fall of Fascism through the diaries, letters and
reminiscences of ordinary Italians during the 1930s and 1940s.
Housewives, hotel managers, schoolchildren and army conscripts are among
the many “little people” who provide eyewitness accounts of the regime.
To his legion admirers, Mussolini exuded a manful potency and
near-animal allure. In the course of his more than two decades in
power, the leader had relations with literally hundreds of women;
undeniably, sex was at the centre of the myth of Mussolini and his image
as a man of power. “My great lord and beautiful Duce,” a Bologna
housewife writes to him. “I have done nothing but trouble you.” (She
sent him a total of 848 letters.)
Petacci, the daughter of an eminent physician, similarly saw a
“sublime” magnetism in her hero. She first met Mussolini in 1932; before
long, a torrid sexual relationship developed between them in the
dictator’s headquarters at Palazzo Venezia in Rome. Though Petacci was
engaged to another man (and Mussolini himself was married with five
children), she felt exhilarated by the affair. Her diaries, published in
Italy in 2009 as Mussolini segreto (“Secret Mussolini”), are
amply quoted by Duggan. In spite of her saccharine pillow talk (“Your
masculine face, aggressive like a lion ... seemed to be radiating sparks
of force”), Petacci had much to say about Mussolini’s inner life,
personality and politics.
Like millions of other Italians, she viewed Mussolini as a
semi-divine “Caesar” figure, whose balcony ranting radiated a
pontiff-like authority. According to Duggan, Fascist racial supremacism
did not spring merely from a Vatican-influenced dislike of the Jews but
from the persecution of African subjects in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia)
where, after defeat to Italy, laws were introduced segregating whites
from blacks. From this it was a short step to advocating racial
supremacy at home in Italy.
In Duggan’s lucid analysis, Fascism was a “political religion” that
sought to invigorate and toughen the Italian people. Sport in particular
was a vital focus of Mussolini’s propaganda state. Mountaineering, like
skiing, became a measure of physical daring – ardimento – and
the manful Fascist spirit. Italian films of the period were thus full of
bare-chested, lantern-jawed sportsmen (rarely women) flying down the
snow slopes or laughing heartily après ski.
These days it is fashionable to claim Mussolini as a fundamentally
good fellow led astray by Hitler. Understandably most Italians wish to
view themselves as brava gente – decent people – so they prefer
to blame Hitler for Mussolini’s murderous anti-Semitism. Mussolini’s
birthplace of Predappio is currently awash with Fascist trinkets,
pseudo-Roman gewgaws and other Blackshirt memorabilia. Whether Mussolini
revisionism is the song and dance of a minority or something more
widespread and dangerous is hard to say.
Fascist Voices concludes with a selection of messages left
by neo-Fascist pilgrims to Predappio over the years. “You are still
living for us, in all our hearts,” wrote a 14-year-old schoolgirl in
2006. Mussolini speaks to his admirers from beyond the grave.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Vintage
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