When he was removed from office, Galeazzo Ciano stopped writing.
He had been keeping a diary since at least 1937, and probably since at least 1936, the year he was appointed foreign minister. In inexpensive, flimsy eight-by-ten-inch calendar notebooks, he filled each day’s allotted page with personal reflections on government meetings and diplomatic personalities before locking the diaries away in the small safe in his office for the evening.
His final regular entry was on Monday, February 8, 1943, three days after Mussolini fired him. There would be only one more entry, a coda of sorts, written for us, his imagined readers, penned two days before Christmas, still ten months in the future, when Galeazzo Ciano had no illusions left to shatter.
* * *
By summer 1943, it was clear that Galeazzo had been right about the war. Hitler’s optimistic New Year’s speeches had not stood up against the encroachment of reality. Germany was preoccupied with the Eastern Front. Mussolini was left to try to manage the Mediterranean, but Italy could not win that theater—not materially and not tactically. Mussolini, faced with the inevitable, needed reinforcements, but he could not persuade a monomaniacal Hitler to turn his attention back to the war on Italy’s doorstep.
By July 10, 1943, word was circulating in Rome that the Allies had landed troops on Sicily. From there, the forces would slowly and arduously push their way northward, up the boot of Italy. By July 16, Italy’s ambassadors, passing a secret message from Mussolini, warned the Japanese that “Italy was on the verge of collapse,” hoping for some reaction. Mussolini urgently needed to persuade the Axis that his power was tenuous. He needed something to persuade Hitler that, without German reinforcements—and without the peace on the Eastern Front that such reinforcements would require—Italy would fall, and the Allies would take the Mediterranean.
So Mussolini decided to take a wild, last strategic gamble to force Hitler’s hand. It would be, he hoped, the final wake-up call that the Führer needed. The plan would backfire catastrophically. And it would also be the moment when Galeazzo Ciano—whatever his moral qualms about his father-in-law and fascism—would have to decide whether to speak or to remain silent in the shadows.
* * *
Strictly speaking, Italy had remained throughout the fascist period a monarchy, ruled by King Victor Emmanuel III. However, the king was an ardent supporter of fascism and had appointed Benito Mussolini as his prime minister in 1922. By the 1930s, Mussolini ruled with an iron hand, with the king acting as a mere rubber stamp to his power. There was, by the time the war began, only one political party in Italy, the National Fascist Party, and although the king was still asked, as a courtesy, to assent to Mussolini’s decrees, in fact Victor Emmanuel had only one curb on his prime minister: the right (but not the obligation) to remove him from office, if—and only if—the Fascist party’s so-called Grand Council voted to recommend it. And while the Fascist Grand Council, as an assembly of party loyalists, retained the right to select the party leader, only Mussolini could convene a meeting of the Grand Council. Quite simply: If the Grand Council did not meet, it could not vote. If Mussolini wished to rule forever, there was no one who could stop him.
Those political realities made Mussolini’s call for a meeting of the Grand Council on July 24 to discuss the progress of the war all the more astonishing. The war was clearly not progressing well. He knew that the Grand Council would make it a referendum on his leadership. He knew there would be criticisms of his decisions. Perhaps there would even be calls to replace him with a different party chairman. Mussolini had been warned that a coup was brewing inside the party. He had seen the intercepted secret telegram written by Allen Dulles. Yet heedless of it all, Mussolini barreled ahead with the meeting. He didn’t see any alternative. It was a last, reckless gamble.
In Mussolini’s mind, the meeting was nothing more than political theater, with an audience of one: Hitler. He did not believe the Grand Council would dare to offer more than political posturing. Some of the ministers would complain and give long speeches. Then they too would settle on a strategy of appeasement. When all the roiling internal discontent was reported back to Germany, however, Mussolini calculated that a vote of no confidence would, at last, “scare [Hitler] with the impending collapse of fascism and…give an edge to the Japanese in their peace efforts,” as one historian has summarized his strategy.
Mussolini was supremely confident of his grip on power. The Grand Council could talk all night about replacing him as party leader. As long as the king supported Mussolini’s authority—and why would he not, Victor Emmanuel had been cowed for decades and supported the Fascist party—his position was secure. He knew it, and he knew that the Grand Council knew it. The Grand Council knew, too, what had happened to Mussolini’s other opponents.
* * *
The Grand Council meeting was called for the evening of July 24, 1943, a Saturday. Rome sweltered, and the air was heavy and muggy. Behind the scenes, the Ciano marriage was on the rocks. It had never been anything other than tumultuous. Edda and the three Ciano children had fled the capital for the seaside. Fabrizio, their eldest boy, was twelve, their daughter Raimonda was nine, and Marzio was a sturdy little boy of five that summer. The family had recently come into possession of an airy new oceanfront villa in the hamlet of Antignano, on the southern edge of Livorno, where the air was cooler. The villa had been expropriated under wartime anti-Semitic laws from a wealthy Jewish family, a fact that concerned neither Galeazzo nor Edda. Edda planned a series of beachfront dinner parties and, turning a blind eye to Galeazzo’s Roman infidelities, comforted herself with tanned and athletic seaside alternatives.
Galeazzo did not need to be in Rome. His father-in-law assured him that his presence at his sinecure post was not strictly necessary. If he had wished to make his life easy, Galeazzo would have simply joined his family on holiday at the beach and kept his own counsel. But for a long time he had been uneasy. He had not supported the war or Hitler, even when serving as Italy’s chief diplomat. He remained deeply opposed to the war and convinced that it would turn out to be a disaster for Italy. Now he felt certain that Mussolini was a danger. He was no longer certain that he could do nothing. There were twenty-eight members of the Fascist party’s Grand Council, and Galeazzo Ciano was one of them. He had decided already: He would join the meeting at the Palazzo Venezia.
Once again, inexplicably in light of the circumstances, Galeazzo seems to have been blithely unaware of the pitfalls. His speaking was an act of courage. Galeazzo did what he did next from a sense of moral purpose. It would have been more courageous if it were clear that he understood fully what he was setting in motion.
Not all the Grand Council members were so sanguine or so confident. One of Mussolini’s fiercest critics, the forty-eight-year-old Dino Grandi, the chief instigator of the planned coup, went into the meeting armed with live hand grenades in the event Il Duce tried to have him arrested. Dino Grandi had not always been a critic of Mussolini. He had been an enthusiastic Blackshirt in his youth and remained dedicated to fascism. But like Galeazzo, he had been purged from Mussolini’s inner cabinet in February for daring to hint that Italy had made a mistake in joining the Nazi war effort.
Mussolini opened the meeting at just after five o’clock with a rambling speech. The tone was melodramatic. The scene in the palace was opulent and theatrical. The men sat ranged in a semicircle at boardroom tables, with Mussolini framed at the head of the room, flanked by portraits of Renaissance princes. Mussolini’s remarks, to the minds of his critics, were just the same old excuses and platitudes. When Mussolini attempted to justify the German decision to abandon southern Italy to the Allies, there were groans of exasperation. There were then more flattering speeches, from more loyal council members, and Dino Grandi could clearly see that it was all heading in precisely one direction: nowhere.
Furious and impassioned, believing that he was fighting for Italy and for fascism, Dino Grandi rose to the floor. His words electrified the room. Not content to indict Mussolini, he demanded action. Grandi called on Victor Emmanuel to resume control over the military and negotiate a peace treaty with the Allies. He called on the Grand Council to advise the king to remove Mussolini as the head of the party—and, in a one-party state, from power. The room gasped. Grandi was demanding—there was no other word for it—a coup, and he was doing so face-to-face, mano a mano with Mussolini. The move took courage, even for a man armed with explosives under his jacket.
Dino Grandi’s speech failed in one respect. He had wanted immediate action. Instead his call to arms set off hours of bitter and tedious debate in council. Mussolini listened to them all bicker patiently, confident that his goal had been accomplished: Here was enough dissatisfaction to shake Hitler out of his complacency. Surely the Führer would now see that he must rally around his friend and early mentor and send troops to Italy.
By midnight, Mussolini felt confident that enough had been said to spur Hitler to action. He had no intention of being removed from power. Banking on cooler heads in the morning, he called for an adjournment and moved to shut the meeting down. Papers rustled, and the council members eyed the doors. By dawn, all the hard words would be forgotten, and Mussolini—still Il Duce—would see to it that his loyal party members were rewarded.
Dino Grandi was having none of it. He was under no illusions about what awaited him in the cold light of morning. There could be no retreat now. And so he took the simple, radical, and entirely unprecedented step of demanding that the Grand Council vote on his motion before retiring. No one had ever asked for a vote against Mussolini. Dino Grandi had pulled the pin on the only grenade that mattered. The motion set off a fresh round of acrimonious debate. But it would have to end now with a show of hands. At two o’clock in the morning, voting started.
One by one, the members of the Fascist Grand Council placed their chips. For whether they wished for it or not, they all understood in that moment that the political wheel was spinning. Whether Mussolini survived or whether he fell, there would be consequences rippling out from consequences. Dino Grandi proudly, unrepentantly, voted no. He did not support Benito Mussolini as the leader of Italian fascism or its government.
Deaf and befuddled, the elderly General Emilio De Bono, once a formidable Fascist party founder, voted no as well, though it was very late and he was no longer quite sure what he was voting for.
Galeazzo Ciano stood. When he announced that he too chose not to support his father-in-law, the room fell silent.
For a man to vote against his party leader was one thing. But no Italian felt truly comfortable with a man betraying the patriarch of his family, even if that paterfamilias was Benito Mussolini. Galeazzo, in his own mind, was certain. He had been weighing this since 1940, when he first made note in his diaries of another passage from Dante, on the torment of those “hateful to God and to his enemies”: It is the moment famously, if rather loosely, rendered into English as “The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis.”
* * *
In the end, nineteen members of the twenty-eight-member Grand Council—a clear and decisive majority—cast their votes that morning to remove Mussolini from power. Mussolini, stunned, took the only avenue available. He promptly brushed aside the outcome, declared that black was white, and white was black, and recast the vote as “advisory.” To some extent it was more spin than mistruth: The Grand Council’s recommendation was not, in fact, binding on the king, who had long been loyal to his prime minister.
Even as he clung to power and swaggered into the predawn, Mussolini was undeniably damaged by the public rebuke. Behind the scenes, in moves worthy of a Renaissance drama and its princes, ministers were already jockeying for position. Back in his vast official residence at Villa Torlonia, one of Mussolini’s first actions was to place a call to one of the few advisers he wholeheartedly trusted: his eldest child and favorite daughter.
Edda missed her father’s call in the early hours of Sunday morning. The Allies bombed targets in central Livorno from the air that morning, and she and the children may have been huddled in the air-raid shelter when the call came, she conceded. Edda suspected something darker had been at work. She believed that the call had been blocked by those in the government already rushing to fill the power vacuum.
* * *
Unable to reach her father on the morning of Sunday, July 25, Edda, worried and anxious to hear the outcome at Grand Council, called Galeazzo. Her father, she predicted when she heard of the vote, would be furious. Galeazzo was not worried. “In a few hours Mussolini will have me arrested,” he agreed, but “then the king will take away his power and I will be let out.” Galeazzo privately hoped that he would be named as his father-in-law’s successor as the king’s new prime minister, and his first act would be to make official contact with the Allies. After all, he remained Mussolini’s son-in-law and heir apparent. Galeazzo was about to encounter a rude awakening.
* * *
Mussolini was also about to have an unpleasant encounter with reality. He requested an appointment on Sunday afternoon to brief Victor Emmanuel III on the party meeting. The king, of course, would need to respond to the vote in Grand Council. Mussolini arrived rumpled, unshaven, and blithely confident of the king’s support. Twenty minutes later, he left the meeting reeling.
“My dear Duce,” the king told him bluntly as he entered, “it’s no longer any good. Italy has gone to bits. Army morale is at rock bottom. The soldiers don’t want to fight any more.…The Grand Council’s vote is terrific—nineteen votes for Grandi’s motion.…You can certainly be under no illusion as to Italy’s feelings with regard to yourself. At this moment you are the most hated man in Italy.” Victor Emmanuel didn’t see how he had any choice but to appoint a new prime minister. Mussolini was dismissed. Just like that, nearly two decades of autocratic rule ended.
Mussolini retreated down the steps of the Villa Savoia toward his waiting car. The king, Mussolini remembered later, “was livid…he shook my hand without looking me in the eyes.” His mind was awhirl. Six policemen waited beyond the entrance. An officer of the carabinieri approached from somewhere, saluted, and asked Mussolini to enter a waiting ambulance. Only after the doors swung shut did Mussolini stop to wonder why they had sent a medical decoy and then comprehend that he was a prisoner of the king and whomever was destined to be the king’s new government. Alarmed, Mussolini looked back at the doorway and saw the king watching.
No one imagined that Mussolini would accept defeat quietly. For the first month of his arrest, Mussolini was moved in secret from location to location, first to offshore islands and then, famously, to the mountaintop Hotel Campo Imperatore at Monte Portella, to await Hitler’s daring liberation.
* * *
What Mussolini had not anticipated was that Victor Emmanuel had been looking for a chance to remove his autocratic prime minister for some time. The king had guessed what was coming at Grand Council and had met with Pietro Badoglio a week earlier and let him know that, if the vote were against Mussolini, he would be Il Duce’s replacement. Badoglio had been against the war with Germany. But he was also a military hard-liner and dedicated party loyalist, and the king wanted, above all, a determined fascist.
For Galeazzo Ciano, the news of Pietro Badoglio’s ascension to power was an unmitigated disaster. If there was one person whom Badoglio despised more than Mussolini, it was his son-in-law, who not only had amassed a vast and enviable fortune during his time as foreign minister but also held some private documents that incriminated Badoglio, who was himself reputedly crooked. The papers had been a sword over Badoglio’s head when Galeazzo’s father-in-law was running the government. Now Badoglio had a score to settle and—thanks to the vote of Galeazzo and the others in Grand Council—the means to do it. Pietro Badoglio relished the delicious irony. Galeazzo Ciano was, as yet, only dimly aware that he was in a great deal of trouble.