The early fascists liked to think of themselves as revolutionaries, and until lately many of them had been socialists, syndicalists, republicans, anti-clericals and even libertarians. Mussolini claimed he too was still a revolutionary and he often talked about ‘the fascist revolution’. Yet it was difficult for them to take revolutionary positions when their main enemies were the socialists, their main supporters were the petty bourgeoisie, and their main backers were the landlords and capitalists who had paid them to defend their property.
Mussolini’s way of dealing with this problem was to insist that fascism was both modern and traditional, conservative and revolutionary, a movement that drew from the past yet looked to the future. He thought of himself as an iconoclast like Marinetti and longed to destroy the image of Italians as innkeepers and mandolin players. Like the Futurists, he was an enthusiast for speed and technology, and he enjoyed the backing of their leader, who thought fascism a logical extension of Futurism and invented a new movement, aeropittura futurista (Futurist painting from the air), which he baptized as ‘the daughter of fascist aviation and Italian Futurism’.1 Yet Mussolini could not endorse Futurist yearnings to flood Italy’s museums and burn down its libraries because he needed to reassure Catholics and conservatives. He also needed to promote the past – specifically the classical past – to remind Italians of what they were capable of achieving. With modern history, however, he had to be selective: thus he identified Garibaldi and Crispi as antecedents who had tried to make Italy great but simultaneously he derided most other politicians. Fascism was happy to be regarded as the final stage of the Risorgimento so long as people realized it was also a revolutionary rupture with the liberal past and its futile spokesmen.
It is difficult to find intellectual coherence in Italian fascism, perhaps because its own leader contradicted himself so frequently. Corporatism, government not by individuals but by bodies representing different economic groups, is sometimes claimed as the great fascist idea, one so brilliant that it was copied by, among others, Spain’s General Franco and Portugal’s António de Oliveira Salazar. Mussolini announced that the fascist state was corporative or it was ‘nothing’ and claimed that corporations were the ‘fascist institution par excellence’. Yet the corporate system was not organized properly until 1936, when it proved to be expensive, cumbersome and useless to the economy. The idea that industrial strife would cease because capital and labour would each be represented in government by like-minded fascists was at best naive. Fascism claimed it ran a ‘direct’ democracy rather than a representative one, but there was little democratic content to either the regime or its corporations. Corporatism was in effect a cloak for dictatorial control of the economy.
Mussolini liked to identify things he regarded as fascist. Boxing, for example, was ‘an exquisitely fascist means of self-expression’.2 Virility was fascist, speed and sporting prowess were fascist, fecund women with swarms of children were fascist, and above all war was fascist – it was to men what maternity was to women. He was less good at clarifying fascist ideas. He liked to conflate Italy and fascism, regarding them together as forming an organic whole, which enabled one party secretary, Roberto Farinacci, to assert that ‘the anti-fascist’ could not be an Italian. Beyond that was the vague idea that fascism was a sort of faith and the nation a spiritual entity. As Farinacci again put it, fascism was ‘not a party but a religion’; it was ‘the future of the country’.3 Such nebulous thoughts make one sometimes wonder whether fascism was anything beyond ways of speaking, acting, fighting and controlling. Giovanni Gentile, who was supposed to be its philosopher, described it as mainly a ‘style’ of government, while D’Annunzio, as we know, regarded it from the beginning as simply dannunzianesimo. Even Mussolini occasionally wondered whether fascism was a strategy rather than a doctrine, a technique for acquiring and then retaining power. In such moods he thought of fascism almost as an extension of himself, mussolinismo, a personal thing that would die with him.
In the 1930s the regime’s style became more ostentatious. There were more parades, more uniforms, more censorship, more hectoring, more speeches from the leader, more shouting, gesturing and grimacing from a balcony to vast crowds, which greeted Mussolini’s every reference to patria and gloria with roars and chants of ‘Du-ce! Du-ce! Du-ce!’. Some of this change of style can be attributed to military successes in Africa and also to the influence of Adolf Hitler, which will be discussed later, but part of it was the responsibility of another party secretary, Achille Starace. Nobody made the fascist regime look more pompous and silly than Starace, who banned hand-shaking because he deemed it effete and unhygienic and made visitors to the dictator’s office run in and out of the room at the double. When asked why he had appointed a ‘cretin’ as party secretary, Mussolini admitted that Starace was indeed ‘a cretin, but an obedient one’.4 The Duce was the type of leader perennially worried that he might be outshone by intelligent subordinates. When Italo Balbo, one of the ablest and most successful fascist ministers, became too popular with the Italian public, he was removed from the air ministry and sent off to govern Libya.
One of Mussolini’s chief projects was to change the character of the Italian people. In an interview with an American newspaper he claimed that fascism was ‘the greatest experiment in our history in making Italians’.5 Previous attempts may have failed, but if fascism could create a new nation, surely it could create a new native? Mussolini wanted to fashion a fascist way of living, one that abhorred comfort and sloth and embraced courage, discipline and respect for authority. A favourite verb of his was plasmare (to mould or shape), which illustrated his ambition to be the new Italians’ designer, though he later substituted this for the stronger forgiare, which implied he saw himself as their blacksmith.6 When explaining to the fascists’ Grand Council why he wanted to restore the death penalty, which had been abolished in 1889, he said he wanted ‘to make Italians more virile, to habituate them to the sight of blood and to the idea of death’.7
Certain parts of the project were carried out sensibly and to some extent successfully. The regime’s Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro created ‘after-work’ clubs which gave opportunities of sport, theatre and other recreations to people who had seldom experienced such pleasures. By the late 1930s nearly 4 million Italian adults were members of the clubs, while 7 million of their children belonged to the fascist youth organization, the Balilla, named after the boy from Genoa who had touched off the riot against the Austrians in 1746. This gave children the chance to become little fascists at the age of six, when they became figli della lupa (children of the she-wolf), and to advance through other stages to become avanguardisti (advance-guards) and finally adult party members. At summer camps in the mountains or by the seaside, they were told that they were descendants of the Romans and that Musssolini was the spiritual progeny of Caesar. Yet in spite of the brain-washing, these predominantly working-class children from northern cities were able to enjoy holidays their parents had never dreamed of.
The fascist regime wanted Italians to become more aware of their history or at any rate of the historical periods it approved of. Little was done to remind people of their Baroque past, which was considered a decadent and effeminate age, but the Middle Ages, with their phallic towers and their Gothic town halls, were extolled. Much effort and money was thus spent on restoring the town of San Gimignano to its medieval glory; modern windows were replaced, crenellations were added, and a Baroque church was deprived of its nave because it blocked the view of the Porta San Giovanni. The ‘medieval’ embellishments still look remarkably authentic. Linking the town’s two squares is a vaulted loggia that seems to belong to the fourteenth century; in fact it was built in 1936.8 San Gimignano’s architecture looks more medieval today than it did in 1902 when E. M. Forster visited the setting of his first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread.
Garibaldi was predictably the figure from the recent past whom the fascists exalted above all others. In appropriating him as a proto-fascist, the regime was assisted by one of the great man’s grandsons, Ezio, who argued that the ‘march on Rome’ and the seizure of power had been very Garibaldian events; fascism, he claimed, was the continuation and fulfilment of his grandfather’s dream. In 1932, fifty years after Garibaldi’s death, the body of Anita, the hero’s first wife, was brought to Rome and reburied with much ceremony on the Janiculum Hill. Mussolini, who understood the propaganda value of the ‘Lion of Caprera’, dominated the celebrations. He even interfered with the design of the commemorative statue, insisting that the heroine on her galloping steed should cradle a baby as well as a gun – maternity and warfare in unison. Yet in the speech he gave at the unveiling of the statue he virtually ignored Anita and concentrated on establishing connections between his regime and the garibaldini. The blackshirts, he declared, the men who had fought and died to make the fascist revolution, were the political heirs of the redshirts and their gallant leader. If Garibaldi could now come to life and open his eyes, he would recognize the descendants of his men in the veterans of Vittorio Veneto and in the blackshirts of the fascist regime.9
Although many fascists saw themselves as the heirs of Garibaldi, so inconveniently did many anti-fascists. While fighting on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War, Mussolini’s corps of so-called volunteers was defeated at the Battle of Guadalajara (1937) by an enemy force that included the Garibaldi Battalion of Italians fighting in the International Brigades. In 1945, as he was trying to escape to Switzerland, Mussolini was discovered and captured by the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade of anti-fascist partisans. And in the elections of 1948 the Italian Communist Party used Garibaldi’s face as its emblem. The old hero would have been bemused and possibly amused, but he would surely have preferred the partisans to the blackshirts, just as he would have fought with Spain’s republicans rather than Franco’s nationalists.
No recent allusions, however, appealed to fascism as much as the example of ancient Rome. Mussolini, who claimed the word Rome was ‘like a boom of thunder’ in his soul, saw himself as the descendant of Julius Caesar and Augustus, triumphant, omniscient and imperial; perhaps he anticipated that he too would have a month named after him. He loved the idea of romanità (‘Romanness’) and wanted Italians to inhale it so deeply that they would become more disciplined, more feared, more courageous and less Italian. The official emblem of the regime was the fascio littorio, the bundle of rods enclosing an axe that Roman lictors used to hold; another emblem was the she-wolf, who had suckled Romulus and Remus, who gave her name to child fascists and whose image from the Capitoline Museum was used at celebrations of romanità. If any commune in the country was still without a Via Roma, it was ordered to create one forthwith and to ensure that it was a principal thoroughfare and not a secondary street. In Sicily new settlements were christened Dux and Mussolinia, and old towns were given more resonantly Roman names, Girgenti making way for Agrigento and Castrogiovanni reverting to the ancient Enna; one impoverished hamlet on the island suddenly became the village of Roma. Much of this ‘Romanizing’ was self-evidently trivial and obsessive: Mussolini changed the date of Labour Day from 1 May to 21 April, the mythical date of Rome’s foundation in 753 BC, and he altered a regional boundary so that Monte Fumaiolo, source of the River Tiber, would be in the Romagna instead of Tuscany. Not all of this programme was strictly Roman, even if it pretended to be. Shortly before Hitler’s official visit in 1938, Mussolini ordered his army to adopt the goose-step style of marching, but he called it the passo romano so that he could deny he was imitating the nazis.
Yet there had to be a serious side to a policy that set out to retrieve, instil and export classical Roman values. One important achievement of the fascist era was the excavation and restoration of ancient buildings. The Ara Pacis, the ‘altar of peace’, erected in Rome to celebrate the age of Augustus, was unburied and reassembled on the banks of the Tiber; the neighbouring mausoleum of the first emperor was also restored, its vast structure liberated from the debris of centuries and a history that included spells as a vineyard, a bullring and a concert hall. Both projects were timed, along with the ‘Augustan Exhibition of Romanness’, to coincide with the 2,000th anniversary of the emperor’s birth. To emphasize the connection between the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of Mussolini, the monuments were framed on three sides by a piazza of fascist buildings designed by the Jewish architect Vittorio Morpurgo. As with the Garibaldi celebrations, Mussolini placed himself at the centre of the enterprise and was photographed wielding a pickaxe outside the mausoleum as he commenced the demolition of the surrounding buildings. The Duce liked to remind people that he was a destroyer as well as a builder. He once planned to knock down all of Rome that had been constructed during ‘the centuries of decadence’ after Augustus, but in the end he contented himself with razing the quarter (including its churches) between the Colosseum and the Piazza Venezia to make way for an imperial thoroughfare (now the Via dei Fori Imperiali) along which his ‘legions’ could parade.
Fascism’s architectural style was intended, like the regime itself, to be a hybrid between the classical and the modern. Some of it simply took the form of pastiche (for instance, the sports stadium in Rome once known as the Foro Mussolini) or even pillage (the Duce copied Augustus by stealing an obelisk from Africa). Yet most of it was serious, as one can still see in the outskirts of Rome at EUR (Esposizione Universale di Roma), an unfinished attempt to create an ‘ideal city’ for an exhibition that was planned for 1942; its Palace of Italian Civilization, a cube of six storeys containing fifty-four arches on each side, is the first beautiful building that travellers arriving at Fiumicino see on their way into the city. Guidebooks routinely dismiss the architecture of the era as ‘bombastic’ and ‘typically fascist’, but many buildings do not merit such dismissals. The architect Marcello Piacentini designed the lumpy and inappropriate Piazza della Vittoria in Brescia, but in neighbouring Bergamo he built in an elegant, restrained and unheroic style. In Como the young Giuseppe Terragni constructed several fine buildings, including the Casa del Fascio, one of the most beautiful examples of modernist architecture in Italy. Fascist buildings are often disparaged not because they are bad buildings but because they happen to have been built by fascists.
Italy under Mussolini is sometimes regarded as a cultural desert, its artists reduced to conformity and even servility by a police state and an oppressive censorship. This was not the case. Artists worked with a freedom unthinkable in nazi Germany or soviet Russia, and many of them were convinced fascists. Such was Pietro Mascagni, the composer of La cavalleria rusticana, and both Puccini and Toscanini were sympathizers, though the former soon died and the latter changed his mind after Mussolini came to power: later he refused to conduct the fascist anthem (‘Giovinezza’), was beaten up in consequence and took himself into exile. No composer had an opera banned apart from Gian Francesco Malipiero, one of whose works aroused the whimsical fury of the Duce. Yet it was an exception. There were enough cultured and broad-minded fascists, including the arts minister Giuseppe Bottai, to deter those burners of books and destroyers of canvases who flourished in other dictatorships. Mussolini himself found museums rather boring and sometimes wished they contained fewer paintings and more captured flags. Yet unlike Hitler or Stalin, he did not interfere with artists or force them to produce paintings of valiant soldiers and heroic proletarians. He also had a more sophisticated attitude to art than the Führer, appreciating both modernist painting and rationalist architecture. He wanted art to be – like everything else – a blend of the modern and the traditional, but he did not try to impose a ‘state art’ until near the end, under the influence of Hitler and on the eve of the Second World War, Farinacci sponsored the Cremona Prize awarded to painters who created ‘fascist art’. Even in 1939, however, Bottai established the rival Bergamo Prize, which gave awards to artists irrespective of their style or political views.10
The regime was active in its support for theatre and cinema. After Luigi Pirandello had made his name as a playwright in Paris, Mussolini saw his potential as an adornment of the state and helped him set up a theatre company in Rome. The potentialities of cinema were even greater. What splendid propaganda messages could be made through a film about the Roman general Scipio Africanus, or through Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860, which ended with a mutual saluting scene between ancient redshirts and youthful blackshirts. The regime subsidized and promoted cinema and built Cinecittà in Rome, the largest film studios in Europe. Yet few overtly propaganda works were in fact produced, and many were not more nationalistic than those made in more democratic nations. British film-makers liked to show the valour of the British on the North-West Frontier, and American film-makers managed to depict ‘Red Indians’ as hordes of aggressive savages unreasonably objecting to the presence of a few white-skinned pioneers.
Mussolini was not cast by nature for the role of censor. While it was absurd to claim, as he did in 1928, that the press enjoyed more freedom in Italy than in any country in the world, he initially kept the same censorship laws set in place by his liberal predecessors. The situation worsened from 1934, when publishers were forced to send in their books for vetting, and in 1940 it deteriorated further. Yet Croce was allowed to publish his anti-fascist writings throughout the dictatorship, and Cesare Pavese could have a book published in 1936 even though he had been a political prisoner the year before. Wisely, the government thought it preferable to influence writers with perks and subsidies than to ban their books. Several members of the left-wing intelligentsia after the Second World War had been avid supplicants for fascist funds, a fact they later tried very hard to conceal. Mario Alicata, a future stalinist, received money for his journal from the Ministry of Popular Culture. Alberto Moravia, the novelist and a future MEP on the Communist Party list, was so eager for state money and assistance that he sent grovelling letters to Count Ciano (Mussolini’s son-in-law), whom he hailed as a role model for Italian youth, and to the Duce himself, to whom he shamelessly lauded the achievements of the regime and its ‘exemplary and extraordinary’ leader. It was difficult for Moravia to be critical of a state while he was begging it to give him $500 in order to travel to the East and write about China.11
Fascist Italy was a braggart state, a bully state and a police state, but for all its rhetoric it was not – within its own boundaries – a very bloodthirsty state. It kept files on more than 100,000 subversives, but very few went to prison. In 1931 Italy’s 1,200 university professors were forced to swear an oath of loyalty to fascism as well as to the king, but the action did not greatly inconvenience the academics: only a dozen refused to swear and consequently lost their positions. The usual way of punishing political dissidents was confino, internal exile, a method that liberal governments had employed against malcontents in Naples and Sicily in the nineteenth century. During the fascist dictatorship a few thousand dissidents were exiled, usually to remote villages and islands in the south, where they were prevented from travelling and forced to report to the police each day. Many years later, Silvio Berlusconi scoffed at the punishment and said confino was like being sent to a holiday camp. It was of course nothing of the sort, but neither was it Dachau or the Gulag.
More crass and vindictive was the regime’s policy towards the country’s ethnic minorities on the frontiers. Slovene was banned although half the people in and around Trieste were Slovenes. Italian was the obligatory language in the Alto Adige, where 90 per cent of the population spoke German as a first language. No suggestion of autonomy was permitted in the province. The teaching of German was forbidden even in private, newspapers in German were suppressed (except one produced by the government), and Italian immigration was actively encouraged. As a way of emphasizing the status of the ex-Austrians as a conquered people, Mussolini erected an enormous victory monument, its giant pillars sculpted in the form of the Roman fasces, in Bolzano, their provincial capital. Some of the inhabitants, who continued – and continue – to consider themselves Tyrolean, later hoped that nazi Germany would come to their rescue. But Hitler had no intention of rescuing these quarter of a million members of the Volk. He had 9 million Germans from Austria and Czechoslovakia whom he planned to gather to his reich, and he needed Italian friendship for his schemes. After the Anschluss in March 1938 he guaranteed Italy’s frontier with Austria near the Brenner Pass and forced Tyroleans to choose between emigrating to Germany or staying in the Alto Adige and renouncing their cultural and linguistic rights.
A minority that was not oppressed during the first sixteen years of fascism was Italy’s Jewish community. Consisting of only 48,000 people, it was considered neither a ‘problem’ nor a threat by even the most extreme nationalists. One Italian diplomat recalled in a memoir published in 1938 that Jews were not regarded as aliens but as ‘patriotic and useful members of the community’ who were ‘not conspicuous enough to figure as scapegoats in times of depression’.12 Jews were welcomed into the Fascist Party, some took part in the ‘March on Rome’, and a few became ministers; Italo Balbo acknowledged that the three ‘best friends’ of his life had been Jewish.13 Within the Jewish community there was little discontent or anxiety, and only a handful of its members chose to become zionists and go off to colonize Palestine. Giorgio Bassani, the Jewish novelist whose books include The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, wrote mainly about the Jews of Ferrara, his home town (and Balbo’s), and admitted he could not remember anyone in the community who had not been a fascist.14
Mussolini himself was not innately anti-Semitic, though later he pretended to be in order to refute accusations that in 1938 he was simply imitating Hitler’s policies. His favourite mistress in the 1920s was Jewish, and he chose a Jewish architect to do the work on the Ara Pacis and its surroundings. Although he hoped to ‘give Italians a feeling of race so that they [wouldn’t] create half-castes’,15 and though he encouraged them to treat Arabs and Africans and later Slavs as inferior peoples, he did not share the racial doctrines of the nazis and he was understandably uncomfortable with theories that exalted fair-haired, blue-eyed northerners above all other races. Yet in 1938, plainly influenced by Germany, he declared racialism to be an essential fascist dogma and said that the purity of the Italian race could only be preserved by the expulsion of the Jews. As Governor of Libya, Balbo protected the colony’s Jewish inhabitants but in 1942, after his early death, Mussolini persecuted them with new edicts; fortunately General Montgomery and his Eighth Army soon arrived and made the new policy redundant. In the autumn of the following year 183 members of Ferrara’s Jewish community were deported to nazi concentration camps. Only one returned.
Visitors to Italy after the Second World War received the impression that most of its people had been anti-fascists. It was simply not true. The dictatorship could not have lasted for twenty years if Mussolini had been despised and fascism had been detested. In recent years there has been much debate about how popular Mussolini really was, how much consenso – a word somewhere between acceptance and approval – he enjoyed among the Italian people. For a decade after his victory in the last real elections in 1924, consenso seems to have been fairly general. The diplomat Daniele Varè expressed the view of many when he claimed that fascism ‘embodied an ideal of Order, Discipline, Authority, wedded to the Italian temperament’.16 This was what most people wanted, especially the middle classes and above all the members of the petty bourgeoisie. Mussolini himself had charisma – to men and to women – and also a certain charm, difficult though this may now be to discern. It is revealing to look at a newsreel of him making a speech in the late 1930s in Padua’s Prato della Valle, one of the largest squares in Europe. The piazza contains nearly the entire population of the city, tens of thousands of people cheering every sentence and throwing their hats in the air or twirling them deliriously at the end of their sticks. The event was, of course, orchestrated, but the enthusiasm was genuine. Those who failed to attend such spectacles were not arrested and put in prison.
Mussolini survived so long partly because he incarnated certain strands of italianità; he embodied the hopes, fears and grievances of a generation that believed Italy had been cheated of its due, both by its liberal politicians and by the attitudes of its wartime allies, who had forced it to accept the ‘mutilated peace’. Until 1934, before he began to squander Italy’s wealth on invasions of Africa and Europe, he faced little opposition to his rule from his countrymen. Probably he made Italy feel more united than ever before – or indeed since. As the historian Alberto Mario Banti has suggested, the middle years of Mussolini’s dictatorship were ‘the apex of the process of nationalizing the masses’, the moment when ‘Italy’s national identity was at its strongest and most widespread’.17
Anti-fascist views seldom reached the ears of the Italian populace, and organized opposition rarely consisted of much more than a few clandestine cells of the Communist Party. The regime’s few outspoken critics were mainly dead (Gobetti and Giolitti), imprisoned (Gramsci), in exile (Salvemini and the popolari leader, Don Sturzo) or murdered (Matteotti and Giovanni Amendola as well as later victims such as the Rosselli brothers, whose anti-fascist group Justice and Liberty tried to create a united opposition of politically disparate elements). Few Catholics followed Sturzo into opposition because Mussolini made intelligent concessions to the Church. He allowed Catholic Action (an organization of 2 million people in 1930) to continue to operate, and in 1929 he gave the Vatican the status of a sovereign and independent state. Also, in one of his many about-turns, he abandoned his early anti-clericalism and his enthusiasm for contraception. However much Catholics might dislike other aspects of fascism, many of them shared the regime’s view that women’s priorities should be maternity, domesticity and religious observance.
Fascism’s appeal was blunted, however, by its failure to provide prosperity. Italians might be deceived into thinking they were well governed but they could not be deceived into thinking they were well off. They could see in American films that other people were much richer than they were, and they could observe this discrepancy in person when emigrants returned for spells in the homeland with plenty of dollars to spend. Mussolini himself was not an acquisitive person and he wanted Italians to care more about their country than about their wealth. His economic policies duly reflected this priority: it was for reasons of prestige rather than financial advantage that in 1926–7 he kept the lira overvalued against sterling. A more damaging result of his craving for prestige was his insistence that Italy became self-sufficient in wheat. The so-called Battle for Grain did indeed achieve this objective, but the consequent monoculture led to soil exhaustion, a decrease in animal farming and a decline in exports of more profitable crops, especially fruit; for a while, Italy even became an importer of olive oil. Italy also suffered from a lack of coal and other raw materials, which meant it could never hope to compete as an industrial power with Britain and Germany. Yet it could have become wealthier if its rulers had shown any zeal in looking for oil in Libya. Foreign oil companies offered to help in exploring the sands, but Mussolini rejected their approaches, once again for reasons of prestige. Proud of the technological inventiveness of his countrymen, he thought it would be humiliating to accept foreign assistance.
Fascism was a phenomenon of the north. It was made in the Po Valley, and its leaders were northerners; Gentile was almost the only Sicilian who became an important figure in the regime. In the south, where the petty bourgeoisie – its natural recruiting-ground – scarcely existed, fascism was imposed and then accepted without enthusiasm. The Duce did not like the south, and he especially disliked Sicilians, who did not care very much for him. Many of the island’s noblemen viewed the regime with aristocratic disdain; on seeing Mussolini for the first time, the Prince of Butera observed, ‘Too many spats! Too many spats!’18 The fascist government did virtually nothing to develop the southern economy, though it created some employment by erecting prestigious buildings such as headquarters for the party and barracks for the carabinieri. Little was done to exploit Sicily’s gas, and nothing was done to reform the latifondi until the Second World War, when it was too late.
On a visit to a Sicilian town in 1924, Mussolini was upstaged by a local mafioso, who hogged the publicity and made him feel inferior. The episode goaded the Duce to fight and try to destroy the Sicilian clans, and before long the annoying mafioso found himself in prison. Fascists could not in any case have been expected to tolerate what they considered a state within a state. A year later, Mussolini appointed a Lombard policeman, Cesare Mori, as prefect of Palermo with wide-ranging powers for a campaign against the network of criminal gangs collectively known as the Mafia.
Mori was a man with a sense of mission. He believed that the ‘great soul of Sicily’ could be recovered only by extinguishing the Mafia. The task of extinction was complicated, however, by the fascists’ failure to agree on who in fact belonged to the Mafia. Radicals among them identified it with the old ruling class, but conservative fascists found it among bourgeois arrivistes. Others seemed simply to equate mafiosi with their political opponents. Mori himself, who believed the Mafia was a ‘parasitic’ middle class, admitted that its members could not be empirically unmasked. ‘The figure of the mafioso,’ he declared, was ‘recognized above all through intuition: he is divined, sensed.’ In the event, Mori sometimes used his intuition to ensure the downfall of fascist rivals, revealing to Mussolini their alleged links with the Mafia. His campaign against the mafiosi consisted of sweeping police operations, thousands of arrests and massive trials. Many mafiosi were caught, many others escaped, and many innocent people suffered. Although the crime rate dropped, the fascists did not manage to destroy the Mafia, partly because they insisted on seeing it as a secret and sinister organization, when in fact it was more than that; it was also a way of living that could not be extinguished by mere repression.19
The Duce’s insistence that the Mafia had been destroyed meant that the subject could not be mentioned by the press and, as a result, many murders and robberies went unreported. This was a typical Mussolinian situation. A decree of 1925 stated that the Duce had ‘meditated with passion and knowledge’ on ‘the Southern Question’ and had thereby cut ‘the gordian knot of its solution’.20 In consequence the issue was no longer an issue and could not be a subject for public discussion. When Luigi Barzini was sent by the Corriere della Sera to report on Sardinia in 1933, he was ordered not to mention poverty, malaria or banditry because officially these no longer existed. Soon after his arrival, a captain of the carabinieri invited him to watch a shoot-out with some bandits.21
Visitors from the north could see very well that ‘the Southern Question’ had not been solved, and they were, like the meridionalisti before them, appalled by the poverty and the sight of people living in one-room hovels together with their animals. They met young men volunteering to fight in Africa and Spain not as enthusiasts for those wars but as people who knew they had no future in their villages. Many observers were struck by the sheer joylessness of rural life in the south, where nobody sang, not even at harvest-time. One witness was an anti-fascist intellectual from Turin, Carlo Levi, who in 1935 was sent to confino in a village in the hills of Basilicata, which was then known by its Roman name, Lucania. A doctor by training and a painter by profession, Levi managed to empathize with the poor of the rural south in a way that few northerners have been able to do. A decade later, he distilled his experiences in Christ Stopped at Eboli, a hauntingly evocative work, part memoir, part study and part fiction.
Levi’s title came from a saying of the villagers of Aliano (a place he called Gagliano in the book), who felt they were outcasts treated by other people as if they were not Christians or civilized people or even normal human beings. They inhabited a world ‘hedged in by custom and sorrow, cut off from History and the State’, a ‘land without comfort or solace, where the peasant lived out his motionless civilization on barren ground in remote poverty, and in the presence of death’.22 The most vigorous villagers had emigrated to Argentina. Those who remained tramped for hours to distant fields, they suffered from malaria and other diseases, and they were still further oppressed by the regulations of the regime. The government had decided that crops should be protected by a national tax on goats, but in Aliano, where there were no crops for goats to eat, they survived on thorn and scrub. All the same, the Alianesi were as subject to the tax as anyone else and, since they could not afford to pay it, they were forced to slaughter their goats and thus deprive themselves of milk and cheese.
The case of Aliano illustrates a widespread phenomenon in the south, one that long predated fascism. It is the concept of people from fuori, people from outside, from ‘over there’, people from the state, officials who are automatically distrusted and from whom no good can be expected. Peasants felt no attachment to the state, whoever controlled it, because they had never been made to feel that they belonged to it. No peasants in Aliano were members of the Fascist Party because fascism meant power, and they had no power. For them the state was a distant and alien entity that taxed them, conscripted them and made them kill their goats. They had absolutely no reason to feel affection for those ‘guys in Rome’. In the peasants’ houses, which he frequented as a doctor, Levi never saw prints of the king or Mussolini or even Garibaldi; alone on the walls were images of President Roosevelt and the Madonna of Viggiano, who in their different ways represented hope. When Aliano’s mayor tried to enthuse the peasants with talk of empire and the conquest of Ethiopia, they remained silent and uninterested. Nearly all their families had lost sons in the Great War for a cause they had not understood, and they did not wish to support the even less comprehensible project of an empire in Africa. As they told Levi, if the ‘guys in Rome’ had enough money for a war, why did they not spend it on providing Aliano with a reservoir or repairing its bridge or even planting some saplings?
Aliano no longer feels lost in time or ‘cut off from History’. Much of the landscape is still desolate, the jagged slopes of its eroded hills stretching away towards the mountains of Calabria. But between the hills there are new fields and young olive groves as well as scraggy clumps of incongruous eucalyptus. Money from the government, remittances from emigrants and pilgrimages from the writer’s admirers have erased the sense of poverty that so troubled Carlo Levi. There is now no misery or malaria in the village, but neither is there much sign of wealth creation. Aliano today is a silent place, populated mainly by the old, by women in black who chatter from windows to their neighbours across alleyways, by old men in berets hobbling about or sitting together on benches under the ilex trees. Most of the people they knew as children went to Buenos Aires or further south to Bahía Blanca; there are far more Alianesi living in Argentina than in the old village in Basilicata. Most of the young have also left, and the village football team has been reduced to playing five-a-side soccer. The dismal demographic statistics listed in the parish newsletter tell a story that is only too typical of the south. There are more deaths than births, more women than men, more emigrants than incomers, and, among those who remain, unemployment is high.23
Mussolini’s first appearance on an international stage was at Lausanne at a conference summoned in late 1922 to settle Turkey’s borders after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. His fellow delegates were not impressed by Italy’s new prime minister. The British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, found him ‘a very stagey sort of person’ who was always trying to create an effect, sometimes with a band playing ‘Giovinezza’ in attendance. On the opening day of the conference Mussolini contributed nothing to the discussions and spent his time strutting around with his blackshirts and making eleven statements to the press. Although he left Lausanne the following day, still without any achievement, Italian newspapers managed to describe his performance as their country’s first diplomatic success since 1860.24
Mussolini’s directives to his delegation soon convinced Curzon that, apart from being ‘stagey’, the fascist leader was a ‘thoroughly unscrupulous and dangerous demagogue, plausible in manner, but without scruple in truth or conduct’. From Rome he threatened almost daily ruptures of the alliance with the Great War victors and warned he would withdraw from the conference unless he was promised a slice of the Middle East, a stance that suggested to Curzon ‘a combination of the sturdy beggar and the ferocious bandit’. Soon he went beyond threats and adopted a policy that the South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, described as ‘running about biting everybody’.25 When four Italians working for an international boundary commission were mysteriously killed on Greek soil, Mussolini delivered an impossible ultimatum to Athens and then bombarded and occupied the island of Corfu, killing a number of civilians. Although the Italians were eventually persuaded to evacuate, they did so only after the Greek government was made to pay a large indemnity for a crime it knew nothing about and which was probably committed by Albanians. The Duce was determined, like the Venetians of old, to control the Adriatic and demonstrate the fact.
Mussolini was converted to imperialism in his thirties at a time when the idea of empire was losing ground in other parts of the world. The Atlantic empires of Spain and Portugal had long gone, and Britain and France were faced with increasing opposition in some of their colonies. The British may have been building a new imperial capital in Delhi, but by now much of the subcontinent’s administration was being conducted – except at the very top – by Indians. Yet when Mussolini embraced an idea, he invariably hugged it to excess. He talked about reviving the Roman Empire and incorporating within it Malta, the Balkans, parts of France, parts of the Middle East and most of north Africa. Although he had signed the Treaty of Locarno in 1925, which was intended to guarantee peace in western Europe, he later raved about defeating France and Britain by himself, of marching ‘to the ocean’ and acquiring an outlet on the Atlantic. Like Crispi, he wanted colonies for reasons of prestige rather than for their wealth – such as it was – or their potential as a place to settle land-hungry Italians.
Fascist Italy inherited certain colonial positions which it quickly resolved to strengthen. Somaliland thus had to be properly subdued and ruled more vigorously than before. The situation was more complicated in Libya because the liberal regime, aware that by the end of the Great War it controlled only a few areas along the coast, had made an agreement with the Senussi leader which gave the Arab tribes autonomy and economic assistance in exchange for accepting Italy’s sovereignty. This created a very unfascist state of affairs, and the policy was soon abandoned in favour of subjugating the tribes, first in Tripolitania and later in Cyrenaica. In 1930 two senior generals, Pietro Badoglio and Rodolfo Graziani, herded the entire population of Cyrenaica into detention camps where conditions were so bad that thousands of people perished along with nearly all their goats and camels. The following year the ‘rebel’ leader in Cyrenaica, the septuagenarian Omar al-Mukhtar, was captured and executed in front of his followers. Half a century on, when a film called the The Lion of the Desert was made about this heroic figure, it was banned in Italy on the grounds that it was ‘damaging to the honour of the Italian army’.26
Mussolini believed that a nation could only remain healthy if it fought a war in every generation. The Italian army had been fighting for years in Libya, but its activities there did not count as a war: it was carrying out the ‘pacification’ of a territory that already belonged to Italy. The real thing would be to conquer and annex a foreign country. Mussolini was old enough to remember the defeat at Adowa and he had long-nurtured ideas of avenging it by conquering Ethiopia and overthrowing its emperor, Haile Selassie. It was unfortunate that the country was Christian, independent and a member of the League of Nations, but the Duce was not deterred by such things. He had generally disliked and affected to despise the League, a body formed in 1920 from which his new admirer, Adolf Hitler, had already withdrawn; he also had some support from the French foreign minister, Pierre Laval, who had allegedly offered him ‘a free hand’ in Ethiopia.
Mussolini had assembled a huge force of 400,000 men, consisting of regular troops and fascist militiamen, and in October 1935 he ordered them to invade Ethiopia from Eritrea and Somaliland. Although he knew the invasion was initially unpopular at home, he believed that a rapid victory and the consequent prestige of imperial ownership would change public opinion. After a triumphant entry into Addis Ababa, fascism would be unstoppable; it would next turn against Egypt, throw the British out and liberate Italy from the ‘servitude of the Suez Canal’. Seven months after the campaign’s inception, Badoglio’s troops entered the Ethiopian capital, an event which earned their commander the title of Duke of Addis Ababa. Victory justified the prediction of the Duce, who informed ecstatic crowds at home that, after a gap of fifteen centuries, empire had returned to the seven hills of Rome. Gentile seemed to embody the national mood when he claimed that Mussolini had not only founded an empire but ‘done something more. He ha[d] created a new Italy.’27 One ludicrous aspect of the enterprise was the military boastfulness that followed. The victory may have been Italy’s first ever without allied support but it was hardly, as its propagandists claimed, one of the most brilliant campaigns in world history: you did not have to be brilliant in the 1930s to defeat an enemy that possessed neither artillery nor an air force.
Victory was achieved with the help of poison gas and bombing raids on civilian targets. One of Mussolini’s sons wrote a book about his experiences as an air force pilot in Ethiopia, describing fighting as ‘the most beautiful and complete of all sports’ and recalling how ‘diverting’ it was to watch groups of tribesmen ‘burst out like a rose after [he] had landed a bomb in the middle of them’. 28 The sport did not cease after the proclamation of victory. As in Libya in the decade before fascism, most of Ethiopia remained unoccupied by Italian troops, and native resistance continued after the fall of the capital. Mussolini reacted by ordering a systematic policy of terror, burning hundreds of villages, executing prisoners without trial and shooting all adult males in places where resistance was discovered. When weapons were found in the great monastery of Debra Libanos, at least 400 monks and deacons were murdered; the Coptic Archbishop Petros, who had come from Egypt to be head of the Ethiopian Church, was also executed. When in February 1937 two Eritreans threw grenades at the viceroy, Marshal Graziani, killing seven people and wounding others (including the viceroy), the local fascist boss gave his men three days to go on the rampage, ‘to destroy and kill and do what you want to the Ethiopians’. At least 3,000 Africans – and probably many more – were slaughtered in consequence. The victims had nothing to do with the bomb throwers; they did not even belong to the same part of the fascist empire.29
Italian soldiers used to enjoy the reputation of being brava gente, good fellows, ‘the good soldier Gino’ who remained good even in uniform. Italians claimed they were not like the nazis. Nor were their generals, whose decency is supposed to have been certified later by the fact that none of them faced a trial like the leading nazis at Nuremberg. Yet in recent decades an Italian historian, Angelo del Boca, has gone through the colonial records and painstakingly compiled, in volume after volume, evidence that the generals committed horrific atrocities in Africa and later the Balkans and that ‘the good soldier Gino’ is a myth: the brava gente were as adept at massacring as anyone else. The Italian army reacted by trying to have Del Boca prosecuted for ‘vilifying the Italian soldier’.30
In July 1936, two months after the capture of Addis Ababa, Mussolini decided to fight another war, this time in support of Franco’s insurrection against the republican government in Spain. He dispatched a squadron of bombers, which he soon added to, and a small army of blackshirts, which he increased with regular soldiers so that ultimately Italy sent 73,000 Voluntary Troops to the Iberian peninsula. Fascists and their apologists claimed they were sent to counter the ‘Bolshevik threat’, but at that moment no such threat existed.31 The Spanish Communist Party had sixteen deputies in a Cortes of 473, it was not part of the government, and communism was not even mentioned in the manifesto that Franco issued to justify his rebellion. Communism only became a force in Spain because the government, opposed by Italy and Germany and ignored by Britain and France, had to appeal to the Soviet Union for arms.
Mussolini decided to intervene in Spain because he believed intervention would add to the glory of Italy and its Duce. This time he was wrong. Fighting Spanish republicans backed by Russian tanks was very different from fighting African tribesmen, and it was demoralizing to be facing fellow Italians in the International Brigades who kept the volunteers awake at night with loudspeakers urging them to show solidarity with the workers by deserting to the Spanish government’s side. At the Battle of Guadalajara in March 1937, Mussolini’s troops were blocked by republican units that included the Italians of the Garibaldi Battalion, and they were forced to retreat, losing a lot of men, arms and prestige in the process. Although it was a clear defeat for the fascists, the Duce managed to proclaim it a victory.32
Historians have long been divided between those who believe that Mussolini intended all along to build an empire and an alliance with Germany and those who see the Duce as more of a predatory opportunist than a dedicated expansionist and aggressor. The sheer erraticism of the man, his frequent doubts and changes of mind, make one wonder whether he could really have been as single-minded as the ‘intentionists’ believe. He had the eye of a chancer, looking for easy pickings such as Corfu and later Albania, which he invaded a week after the end of the Spanish Civil War. He admired the German Reich much more than the French Republic yet, when in 1934 Austrian nazis murdered his ally Chancellor Dollfuss in Vienna, he signed a treaty with France and talked about war against Germany. Mussolini was a show-off who thought in slogans which he seldom wholly believed in – he did not, for example, really think it better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep. And he was always talking about fighting wars even when he had no intention of waging one. His neutrality in 1939, his dithering in 1940, his failure to produce a half-decent army and his refusal to join the war until France was beaten – none of this suggests the character of a conqueror.
Yet it is easy to build up a case on the other side, and certainly there is space for a compromise. Even before the rise of the nazis, Mussolini had hoped for an alliance with a revived Germany and a joint war against France and Yugoslavia; he also believed that ‘the axis of European history passes through Berlin’.33 In 1932 he ordered Italian newspapers to support the nazis in elections that brought them to power, and in the same year he sacked his foreign minister for allegedly being too fond of the French and the British. Although Mussolini held ambivalent views about Hitler and liked to belittle him, he supported most of the Führer’s actions in the years before the Second World War. He accepted the German army’s occupation of the Rhineland, like Hitler he fought for Franco, and he eventually acquiesced in Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938 and its occupation of Czechoslovakia the following year. Renzo De Felice, the author of a seven-volume biography of the Duce, used to argue that fascism was very different from nazism, that Mussolini desired to be a mediator in Europe, and it was only Britain’s championing of economic sanctions against Italy after its invasion of Ethiopia that drove Mussolini into the German camp. Yet this sounds too much like the plea of the apologist. Had he wished, Mussolini could have preserved peace and contained Hitler by aligning himself with Britain and France. He chose instead to join Germany, securing the support of a powerful ally to protect his position in Europe while he pursued his dream of empire in Africa.34
On a state visit to Germany in 1937 Mussolini was hugely impressed by the sight of armament factories and army parades staged in his honour. Soon afterwards he took Italy out of the League of Nations, made anti-Semitism a fascist policy and signed an anti-communist pact with Germany and Japan. In March 1938 he was perplexed (and privately furious) that Hitler grabbed Austria without warning him, and later in the year he made his sole appearance as a mediator, going to the Munich conference to persuade the Führer to opt for the peaceful cession of the Sudetenland rather than a military invasion of Czechoslovakia. Yet Mussolini felt uncomfortable in the role of peacemaker, as he soon demonstrated when he told the fascist Grand Council that Italy must acquire Nice, Corsica, Albania and Tunisia.
At Munich the Duce was deeply unimpressed by the British prime minister (Neville Chamberlain) and the French premier (Édouard Daladier), whose feeble performances in the face of Hitler’s pugnacity reinforced his view that Britain and France were decadent and geriatric states that could easily be defeated by the young and virile nations of Germany and Italy. Much influenced by a meeting of the Oxford Union in 1933, when idealistic undergraduates had voted against fighting ‘for king and country’, Mussolini had decided that the British were effete and unhealthy (and too fond of umbrellas), that their empire was in terminal decline, and that their country should be destroyed like Carthage. He also convinced himself that Italy could capture Egypt without difficulty because the British were unable to fight in the heat; perhaps he was unaware that they had won a few summer battles over the years in India. Such views were strengthened by reports from his ambassador to London, Dino Grandi, who watched British soldiers on parade and dismissed them as ‘marionettes of wood’ who would be too cowardly to defend their country.35
In March 1939 Germany enacted another aggression without warning Italy, this time overturning Mussolini’s ‘success’ at Munich by seizing Prague and setting up a German ‘protectorate’ in Bohemia and Moravia. Although the Duce felt humiliated by this episode, he decided to stand by ‘the Axis’ and to demonstrate parity with Germany by conquering something for himself. After briefly considering Croatia as a target, he opted for Albania, a strange decision considering that the little country was already largely under Italian control. In May Germany and Italy formalized the Axis with the ‘Pact of Steel’, a name that, while professing equivalence between the two signatories, drew attention to the disparity in industrial might: Germany produced ten times as much steel as Italy. Once again the Germans were dishonest with their ally. They told Mussolini that no European war would take place for over three years, which would give him time to strengthen his armed forces and to hold his big exhibition, the EUR in Rome. They also pretended they had no intention of attacking Poland, although Hitler had already selected September 1939 as the month for his invasion and on the day after the pact’s signature he informed his generals of his plans. When Mussolini finally learned that the Germans were about to strike, he panicked and sent Ciano, his foreign minister, to entreat them to desist. Although keen to fight and make territorial gains – what he called ‘our share of the plunder’ – he was beginning to have doubts about Italy’s armed forces and how they might perform in battle.
Among his other posts, the Duce was minister for the army, the navy and the air force, and he talked so much about the invincibility of each service that Italians were led to believe they were as good as any in Europe. He boasted that he could raise an army of 8 million men – a figure he later raised to 12 million – yet he was unable to produce rifles for more than a sixth of that number; he vaunted Italy’s technological skills, though some of his best artillery had been captured from the Austrians in the Great War; and he claimed to possess enormous tanks, though the Italian model was little more than an armoured car, and its vision was so limited that it had to be guided by infantry walking ahead, often with fatal results for the guides. No wonder Farinacci told Mussolini he was the commander of ‘a toy army’ or that, after inspecting it, the German war minister in 1937 had concluded that his country would stand a better chance in the coming war if Italy was on the other side.36
A great deal of money was spent on speedy new battleships, but these were ineffective in action, and their guns apparently failed to hit a single enemy ship at any time during the war; far more dangerous were the courageous Italian frogmen and the manned ‘slow speed torpedoes’ (known as maiali – pigs) entering the harbours of Gibraltar and Alexandria and inflicting considerable damage on British ships. More sensible than building battleships would have been the construction of aircraft carriers, which would have been useful for attacking Malta, a strategic goal that Mussolini ignored until it was too late; they might also have protected the rest of the fleet from devastating raids by the RAF. The greatest deficiencies, however, were in the air force, which the Duce had taken charge of in 1933, when he sensed that Balbo was doing too well in the job – a replacement that proved disastrous for Italy. Mussolini claimed to have over 8,500 aeroplanes, so many that they could ‘blot out the sun’ and so effective they could reach London or destroy Britain’s Mediterranean fleet in a single day. Yet in fact he had fewer than a tenth of that number, and he failed during the war to build a great many more. At the height of the conflict Italy was manufacturing as many aeroplanes a year as the United States was producing in a week. One of the most revealing statistics about the inefficiency of fascism is that Italy managed to produce more aeroplanes in the First World War than it did in the Second.37
While Mussolini vacillated during the August of 1939, news of the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact made some fascist leaders question the wisdom of an alliance with Germany; communism was after all meant to be their chief enemy. At a meeting of the Grand Council earlier in the year, Balbo had criticized the policy of ‘licking Hitler’s boots’ and later he suggested that Italy should fight on the side of Britain and France. This suggestion had no appeal to Mussolini. Although in September he declared Italy’s neutrality or ‘non-belligerence’, his sympathies had been long with the nazis, and he wanted to fight with them when he was ready. Meanwhile he played for time by demanding from the Germans more millions of tons of oil, steel and coal than they could possibly supply and transport. All the same, he knew that a position of neutrality was rather ridiculous for a man who had been threatening wars for seventeen years and who was still telling Italians that warfare was ‘the normal condition of peoples and the logical aim of any dictatorship’.38 At the beginning of 1940 he warned his government that Italy could not remain permanently neutral and ordered the armed forces to be prepared for war against anyone, even Germany. Soon afterwards he issued bizarre instructions to the navy, which in the coming war was to go on the offensive everywhere, to the air force, which was to remain passive, and to the army, which was to stay on the defensive in all places except east Africa, where it would attack the British colonies. Even more bizarrely, he continued to erect costly fortifications along the Alpine frontier with Austria, a policy he did not abandon during the war and which understandably annoyed the Germans, who had already demonstrated in the case of the Maginot Line that such defensive schemes were outmoded and useless.
The nazis’ rapid conquests of Denmark and Norway in April 1940 convinced some waverers that Germany would win the war. Yet Mussolini continued to hesitate until France was close to collapse in June. Believing that Italy would somehow gain prestige as well as territory by defeating an already defeated enemy, he then announced a ‘lightning war’ against France and Britain to a crowd in Rome which, as leading fascists admitted, showed little enthusiasm for the enterprise. Many Italians were undoubtedly embarrassed about joining a war after Paris had fallen and the British army had scuttled back across the Channel. Yet a large majority did not want to fight anyway: even Victor Emanuel later claimed he was against the war although, as in May 1915 and October 1922, he did not try very hard to make the right decision.
On 17 June the French asked Germany for an armistice, and three days later Mussolini ordered an attack on them. An Italian army was dispatched to the Alps, where it suffered many casualties and failed to defeat a far smaller French force that suffered hardly any. Once France was out of the war, the Duce made territorial demands in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, but the Germans told him to curb his appetite until Britain had also been defeated. In the meantime they suggested he used his huge army in Libya to attack the British in Egypt and capture the Suez Canal. Yet Mussolini was now more interested in conquest close to home and, instead of attacking an enemy power in Africa, he wanted to invade a neutral country in Europe, Greece. In October 1940 a large Italian army duly assembled in Albania and invaded Greece, where it was stopped by numerically inferior opponents and forced to retreat. By then the Duce had at last ordered an attack on Egypt, but the results were even more disastrous. Graziani’s army of over 250,000 men was defeated in a series of engagements by 36,000 British troops, and 135,000 prisoners were taken. The Italians fared no better at sea: after defeats by the British at Taranto in November 1940 and at Cape Matapan the following spring, the navy remained in harbour and played little further part in the war.
Hitler had made an offer of German tanks for Italy’s Egyptian campaign, which Mussolini had rejected because he wanted his troops to win glory on their own. As a result, the Führer had to send an army under Field Marshal Rommel to defeat the British in north Africa and regain the initiative. The Italians also had to be rescued in Greece, which the Germans quickly overran in an operation that delayed their invasion of Russia and thus contributed to their later defeats on the Eastern Front. This series of military failures reduced Italy to a very subordinate role in the Axis. It had already lost Addis Ababa and Italian Somaliland, and the main task of its armies was now to garrison the Balkans while the Germans and later the Japanese did most of the fighting. The behaviour of their forces in south-eastern Europe rivalled the savagery of their allies and buried the myth of ‘the good soldier Gino’. After provoking guerrilla warfare from partisan groups in Yugoslavia, Italian troops carried out extensive reprisals against civilians. In the province of Ljubljana alone, a thousand hostages were shot, 8,000 other Slovenes were killed, and 35,000 people were deported to concentration camps.39
In July 1943 Anglo-American forces invaded Sicily, landed a few weeks later on the Italian mainland and spent the next twenty months slogging their way north through the Apennines against a German defence brilliantly conducted without air support. Soon after the landings in Sicily, the Grand Council in the presence of Mussolini approved a motion to return military command to Victor Emanuel, a move that led to the dismissal of the Duce and his eventual imprisonment at a skiing resort in the Apennines. He was replaced as prime minister by the vain and elderly Marshal Badoglio, a disastrous choice.* Together with the king, this former chief of staff dithered for six weeks, remaining in the Axis, until the imminence of the Allied landings at Salerno forced them to accept Anglo-American terms for an armistice. They continued to dither even after that, failing to do anything to prevent German reinforcements from rushing south to occupy the peninsula as far down as Naples. Although they had promised to help the Anglo-American forces, the two changed their minds and even cancelled an Allied attack on Rome, which Badoglio himself had requested, on the very day it was planned to take place. Fearful for their personal safety, premier and sovereign fled across the peninsula to Pescara and, accompanied by hundreds of courtiers and generals, took ship to Brindisi, far from the threat of the Germans. It was a very thorough abdication of responsibility. Badoglio did not even inform his fellow ministers he was leaving and gave no orders to his troops except to tell them not to attack the Germans. Left on their own in increasingly chaotic circumstances, Italian forces offered little resistance to the Germans in Italy or the Balkans, and nearly a million of them were quickly captured; on the island of Cephalonia, where Italians did resist, 6,000 soldiers and prisoners of war were murdered by the nazis. In mid-October, from the safety of Apulia, Victor Emanuel declared war on Germany, a move that gained Italy the status of ‘co-belligerent’, eased the country’s post-war relations with the victors and enabled hundreds of men to avoid trials for war crimes.
The collapse of the state made it easier for the Germans to rescue Mussolini from his mountain prison and install him as their puppet ruler of the Republic of Salò, a new fascist state based on Lake Garda in the nazi-held north. Many young men volunteered to fight for this new entity, which intellectuals such as Gentile, Papini and Marinetti were also prepared to support. Mussolini himself returned to the beliefs of his youth, insisting once more that fascism was a revolutionary ideology and that industry should be nationalized. Yet he was too demoralized and too powerless to do much except whine about the defects of his countrymen. The chief significance of Salò was that it encouraged the growth of the Resistance, the Italian partisans, and within a short time led to a civil war in the north marked by terrible atrocities, most of them committed by the republic’s ‘black brigades’.
Even in his impotence Mussolini deluded himself with the thought that he was a great man, comparable to Napoleon, and that he had been brought down by the character of the Italians. Even Michelangelo, he had earlier pointed out, had ‘needed marble to make his statues. If he had had nothing else except clay, he would simply have been a potter.’ At Salò Mussolini grumbled that he had tried to turn a sheep into a lion and had failed; the beast was still ‘a bleating sheep’.40 Yet he himself did not die like the lion he had pretended to be: in April 1945 he ran away to the north, disguised as a German, with wads of cash in his pockets. Captured by communist partisans on the western shore of Lake Como, his final moment may have been slightly more impressive. According to one report, he opened the collar of his coat and told his executioner to aim for the heart.
The flight of Badoglio and Victor Emanuel marks one of the lowest points in the history of united Italy. The nation dissolved: all real power was now in the hands of the Germans, the British and the Americans. Italy might be built anew, but it could never be the same Italy.
Both Italians and foreigners have liked to think of fascism as an aberration, as an unlucky and almost accidental episode in the history of a constitutional country. Sforza regarded ‘the vain show of the fascist years’ as ‘only a brief interlude of unreality’,41 while Croce described the dictatorship as a ‘parenthesis’ in his nation’s story, implying that it was not closely connected with what happened before or after. The genuine connection, so it was claimed, was between the regimes that preceded and succeeded Mussolini. The young liberal Piero Gobetti may have got closer to the truth when he observed in the 1920s that fascism was part of Italy’s ‘autobiography’, a logical consequence of unification’s failure to be a moral revolution supported by the mass of the people. That fascism was ‘the child of the Risorgimento’ was also Gentile’s verdict, a view much derided in the years to come but supported intrinsically at the time by the fact that so many liberal fathers had fascist sons without having family ruptures.
Fascists liked to present themselves as a continuation of the Risorgimento but at the same time as a breach with its liberal heirs. The exercise was never very convincing because, apart from the abolition of parliamentary elections, the fascist ‘revolution’ changed little of substance, certainly in comparison with the French Revolution of 1789 or the Spanish Revolution of 1931. It retained the monarchy, protected private property, exalted the family and established good relations with the Church. Abroad its policies were aggressive and avaricious but not so very different from those of some preceding governments. Both Crispi and the earlier Victor Emanuel had wanted war in Europe and colonies outside, and they and many others had spoken in tones almost as bellicose as those of Mussolini.
The real break in Italy’s twentieth-century history came not in 1922 but at the end of the Second World War. The essence of Risorgimento thinking, which had been liberal, nationalist and anti-clerical, evaporated after 1945 and was replaced by the anti-nationalist ideologies of communism and christian democracy. At the same time Italy abandoned its pretensions to become a Great Power and concentrated, with far more success, on achieving prosperity for its citizens.