R. J. B. Bosworth’s prize-winning Mussolini was greeted on publication in 2002 as the definitive life of the Duce. He is Professor of History at the University of Western Australia and has been a Visiting Fellow at a number of institutions, including the Italian Academy at Columbia University, Clare Hall (Cambridge), Balliol College (Oxford), All Souls College (Oxford) and the University of Trento. Mussolini’s Italy won the 2005 Western Australian Premier’s Non-Fiction Book Award.

R. J. B. BOSWORTH

Mussolini’s Italy

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Therefore doth heaven divide
The state of man in divers functions,
Setting endeavour in continual motion;
To which is fixed, as an aim or butt,
Obedience: for so work the honey-bees,
Creatures that by a rule in nature teach
The act of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts;
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home,
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad,
Others, like soldiers, armed in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they with merry march bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor:
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
The singing masons building roofs of gold,
The civil citizens kneading up the honey,
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate,
The sad-ey’d justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone. I this infer,
That many things, having full reference
To one consent, may work contrariously;
As many arrows, loosed several ways,
Fly to one mark; as many ways meet in one town;
As many streams meet in one salt sea;
As many lines close in the dial’s centre;
So may a thousand actions, once afoot,
End in one purpose, and be all well borne
Without defeat. (Henry V, I. 2.183–213)

A highly politic and decidedly war-mongering Shakespearean Archbishop of Canterbury sketching a corporate state. For Fascist bees, see chapter 8.

List of illustrations

4. The complexity of salutes in Fascist Italy, Rome, 1926. (Reading University Library)

5. Mussolini smiling and striding (with Achille Starace), Rome, 1927. (L’Illustrazione Italiana)

6. Mussolini and Edda becoming respectable in the Borghese gardens, Rome, 1927. (L’Illustrazione Italiana)

7. Victor Emmanuel and Mussolini in civvies at the harvest. (L’Illustrazione Italiana)

8. Mussolini meets peasants in the Pontine marshes. (L’Illustrazione Italiana)

9. The athletic Renato Ricci and his boy scouts, Rome, 1930. (Rivista dell’ONB di Bolzano, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

10. Boy scouts from Bolzano at Rome zoo, 1930. (Rivista dell’ONB di Bolzano, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

11. The Sala del Mappamondo with a very small Duce at a desk in the corner. (Touring Club Italiano/Alinari Archives Management, Milano)

12. Dante and Battisti joined as ghosts, Trento, 1935. (Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

17. ‘Liberated Tigreans’ and the Fascist white man’s burden, 1935. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

18. Little migrant Fascists in Melbourne, Australia, 1936. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

19. A seventy-six-year-old lady named Camilla donates her wedding ring after fifty-six years of marriage, 1936. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

20. Cesare De Vecchi di Val Cismon as Minister of Education, 1936. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

21. Giuseppe Bottai being scholarly. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

23. Vittorio Mussolini’s wedding – the Mussolinis in high society, 1937. (L’Illustrazione Italiana)

24. Queen Elena, being statuesque, 1937. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

25. Achille Starace, the King and small children, Rome 1937. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

26. Princess Maria José and baby prince Victor Emmanuel, 1937. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

27. Mussolini, Italo Balbo and small migrant Fascists in Libya, 1937. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

28. A Caesarian trio for ‘the New Roman Empire’, 1937. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

30. Church and State in the rain, 1938. (Il Legionario, from Biblioteca Comunale, Trento)

34. Italians pleased to become POWs, Calabria, September 1943. (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

35. Schoolteacher partisan, Val d’Aosta, 1944. (by permission of the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London)

List of abbreviations

Note on further reading

The research material used in writing this book can be traced in the notes. For published sources up to 2000, see the extensive bibliography in my biography of Mussolini (London: Edward Arnold, 2002, pp. 520–63). Though now becoming dated, the fullest bibliography on the Fascist era is R. De Felice, Bibliografia orientativa del fascismo (Rome, 1991). My thanks to Sage, publishers of the European History Quarterly, and to Cambridge University Press, publishers of Contemporary European History, for permission to reprint material first published in these journals.

Preface

I began to research and write this book very soon after I had completed my biography of Mussolini. I was stimulated to a degree by what seemed to me a sensible comment from a reviewer in the Spectator. Jonathan Sumption said, very kindly, that my book was ‘the best biography [of Mussolini] in English to date’. Then came the rub. Sumption continued: ‘Yet the main reflection which it provokes is the inadequacy of biography as a vehicle for explaining’ terrible events. Really to comprehend inter-war Italy, he ran on, ‘one would have to dig into the life of the small towns and cities and the thousands of local institutions and associations of provincial Italy to understand why so many Italians’ accepted the ‘Italian dictatorship’. ‘Inter-war Italy was a fragmented country with a large apolitical peasantry and a developed system of local clientage and power-broking, in which mutual favours counted for a great deal more than ideology. At this level, Fascism was often no more than a convenient label, appropriated by local interests which had existed before Mussolini was ever heard of and endured long after his death. Against this inherently unstable background, the Duce survived because he was cunning enough to be many things to many men. Perhaps this is just politics. Perhaps it is a fraud. But if so it may well be that those Italians who cared were willing participants in the deception.’

Scanning these words, I could only agree while rather regretting that my effort to produce a biography where a Great Bad Man had been deliberately placed in context and where the limits of his free will had been closely described had not won over my reviewer. But, with the extraordinary good fortune that has been my fate as a writer of history over the last decade, Simon Winder of Penguin, nudged by the excellent Clare Alexander, was soon in touch, suggesting that I produce a history of the life of Italians under the Fascist dictatorship which lasted a generation. That is what I have done in this new study, a book that I wryly call to myself ‘Mussolini without Mussolini’. It is true that readers will be able to locate the regime’s leader in its pages, especially in chapter 12. But he certainly has not been given a prominent part in the story, all the more because I trust that anyone interested in him can turn to my biography or to the growing list of other accounts of the Duce’s rule.

My task, rather, has been to unveil the lives of Italians under a generation of dictatorship, be they men, women or children, party officials and party intellectuals or anti-Fascists, landowners and industrialists or workers and peasants, all coming from the many and varied regions of Italy or, on occasion, emigrants passed beyond the national border. It is, of course, an impossible project. Aspiring to write the total history of a totalitarian society is a delusion. Yet any reader who consults the book’s pages will find that a vast array of people turn up in my tale and that it spans from Sardinia to Sicily, from Turin to Reggio Calabria, from Trieste to Bari and beyond. There are many stories in the pages that follow and my hope must be that readers will find them emblematic and will draw a general picture from their impressionist detail.

In this preface I do not want to start composing another parallel book. Rather it is time to express gratitude. Mussolini’s Italy was written over a fifteen-month period in 2003–5 and in three beautiful and stimulating places. I remain a staff member of the University of Western Australia, whose antipodean architecture, with its campanile and colonnades and worthy slogans etched into walls, has an air that De Chirico, if not Mussolini, might recognize. It is a generous place for a historian, especially one who is given such free rein to research and write. My thanks to the Vice Chancellor, Alan Robson, for his acceptance that the humanities cannot and should not be circumscribed too severely by the intellectual and ethical narrowness spreading in contemporary Australia. Among my work colleagues, Rob Stuart has been a helpfully critical reader, Giuseppe Finaldi a delightfully zestful substitute when I laid aside my teaching programme, Philippa Maddern, a head of school of infinite dedication to and love for the discipline of history. Such doctoral or proto-doctoral students as Marianne Hicks, David Ritter, Sarah Finn, Michael Ondaatje and, especially, Frances Flanagan, who doubled as an error-corrector, have kept my enthusiasm glowing, as of course have what are becoming my memories of two generations of marvellous Australian undergraduates, determined not to be dumbed down. Similarly sustaining my commitment to the history trade were Reto Hofmann, Ben Mercer, Samantha Quinn and Yavor Siderov, once of UWA and now of the world. I should not forget that UWA is Australia’s foremost centre for Italian studies, where Finaldi, Loretta Baldassar, Nick Harney, Susanna Iuliano and others constitute a new cohort to replace that splendid historian of the Renaissance, Lorenzo Polizzotto, and me as we approach academic, if not writing, retirement. Born and bred in Sydney and a teacher at the university there for two decades, I am also heavily in debt to many people in that place, notably Gianfranco Cresciani, ‘my first student’ and therefore my early teacher, and, as for all my books, the two Whites, Graham and Shane, civilized and rigorous Americanists, who hammer away at an Italianist’s inelegance and confusion. When I am trying to be a cosmopolitan historian and stay a loyal, if lonely, Australian fan of the Pakistan cricket team (with support from Wasim), it may be that I am being happily structured by my origins in Sydney, traditionally the most outward-looking of Australian cities.

The second site for the writing of my study of life under the dictatorship was Trento and its fine university, which welcomed me as a visiting professor in the first half of 2004. I am enormously indebted to Gustavo Corni and Mark Gilbert for the invitation to go there and for the lightness of my teaching load once I had arrived. Similarly the libraries of the city were perfect places in which to research. I should never have known of the (alleged) link between italianità and local bees if I had not worked in Trento. In the usual seductive Italian fashion, the city itself is a jewel. Each morning from a flat in the foresteria at Sardagna I could look down on cathedral, castle, river and walls or up to the framing Alps (and imagine sad, lingering echoes of battle from the terrible First World War fought along the summits I could see).

For quite a time my computer may have lived at Trento but the research for this book has been done, in 2002–4 and over many years before that, in a host of Italian libraries and, above all, in the efficient Archivio centrale dello stato, redolently housed in the model Fascist suburb of EUR in Rome. Too many friends have helped me in my Italian years to be listed here but I must mention Patrizia Dogliani (herself the author of a penetrating study of Fascist society), Dante Bolognesi, Fabio and Ariella Malusà, Giovanni and Susanna Minelli, Gino and Patty Rizzo, Mario and Giovanna Ronchetti-Rosselli and Paul Corner for their hospitality towards and intellectual engagement with a wandering Australian.

If there are any moments in my text where my prose glitters, it is the result of my being hunched over my computer in a third place, All Souls College, Oxford. I came to that sanctuary in September 2004 with a not-quite-finished first draft and found myself immersed in a restless sea of scholarship. My old friend Jim Adams, my new friends, the modern historians of the place, Noel Malcolm, Hew Strachan, Ian Maclean and Robin Briggs, such fellow visitors as Richard Yeo and Walter Stephens and a host of All Soulsians may have on occasion terrified me with their span and understanding but they were unfailingly generous and welcoming and courteously ready to listen to Fascist tales. They sent me back to my computer to polish and polish again, helped now by the commentaries on my MS that I was receiving from such other English friends as Roger Absalom, Carol Jefferson-Davies and Christopher Duggan, and by responses to my various papers at this or that British centre, as well as from the ever-perceptive Simon Winder and the similarly rigorous and encouraging Scott Moyers of Penguin’s New York office. When I talked Fascism with Nick Stargardt and Lyndal Roper, Jonathan Morris and Carl Levy, Martin Blinkhorn and Bob Moore, Martin Conway and Chris Clark, I was reminded that it was to a degree possible to be a British Italianist even while being Australian.

Allen Lane/Penguin were endlessly responsive to my authorial worries. My special thanks to Jane Robertson for her perceptive sub-edit, to Alison Hennessey for tracking down issues relating to the photographs, and to Richard Duguid and Elisabeth Merriman for their careful editorial work.

I have visited Italy at least once per year since 1967 and, even when not there, I have constantly benefited from reading Italian research and scholarship. Appropriately, Italians, since Fascism, have argued passionately about the meaning of their dictatorship. My debt to their labours can be tracked in my notes, while my stance on their disputes can be found in another of my books, The Italian dictatorship (London, 1998). Among the historians of the last decades, special acknowledgement must be given to Renzo De Felice (1929–96), the author of a massively detailed and more than 6,000-page biography of Mussolini, which doubles as a political history of the dictatorship. I have quite a number of political and methodological disputes with De Felice’s work but it would be churlish to deny that his archival labours have left behind a mine of material that no later historian in the field can ignore.

A further complication in what might be my ‘real’ ethnic identity may result from my participation in Italian debates. Can I claim thereby to be in some part ‘Italian’? Perhaps. But nationality is not the beginning or end of identity. My time at Oxford was sweetened by the smaller and yet embracing world of family matters. My fellowship at All Souls coincided with one held at Wolfson College by my criminologist daughter, Mary. For a decade she had been based in the USA but was now living in the same block of flats as Michal and I. Mary, Anthony and baby Ella kept reminding me that an Australian, as well, is a familist and glad to be one. So, too, did Edmund, who, despite the business of his banking life, continues to read and apparently enjoy his father’s prose. And, of course, it goes without saying to anyone who knows me, in every event, whether geographical or intellectual, I was accompanied by Mike, best of wives, friends and intellectual partners.

While my life composing this book in 2003–5 has been a continuous delight, the greater world has not seemed so benign. I am not convinced that Fascism is somehow back. Paul Ginsborg’s nightmare at the end of his recent study of Berlusconi of ‘piccoli Forzisti’ (Berlusconian scouts) going to bed in 2013 ‘clutching in their small palms the medals of Silvio Berlusconi, as the “piccoli Balilla” did with that of Il Duce in 1935’¹ is too feverish for my tastes. Yet the world which lives under the hegemony of economic rationalism and which seems every day more in the care of neoconservatives is a frighteningly irrational and brutal place. The ghosts of Fascists past may indeed break open the champagne when they hear of the current approval of pre-emptive strikes and the cheerful acceptance that vast collateral damage may accompany them. Spin on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other are similarly retrograde ideas or practices, of powerful influence on Italians between the wars, then and thereafter properly damned, but now seemingly resuscitated. Renzo De Felice made himself unpopular to me, among others, by his insistence during the 1970s and 1980s that the then Italian Republic was morally not necessarily better than Fascism. But perhaps his comment needs restating. Can we be sure today that we are the moral superiors of Fascist Italians?

For any Anglo-Saxon writing about modern Italy, there is a further issue. In English-language treatment of that past, the presence of a superciliousness sprung from a racist belief that Anglo-Saxons are always and inevitably purer and more efficient than Italians can easily enough be traced in the scholarship. On both counts, there are reasons to avoid cheap moralizing about Fascist sins. As the new millennium advances, I may in this book still want to argue that the Italian dictatorship was a murderous regime, no proper model for any believer in the good of humankind. But I must also accept that the democracies of our times (not to mention the dictatorships) have not yet brought us to happiness and, sadly, may presently be transporting us away from that desired state. The battle is not over. Historic Fascism is probably dead and buried but, in our future, anti-Fascism, loosely defined as a sustained search for liberty, equality, fraternity and sorority, must go on. In that hope, I dedicate this book to Ella, Oliver and Nicholas of the newest generation.

Introduction

Adolf Hitler continues to stand as a sort of banal shorthand for our terrible past, even in a new millennium. Every understanding of the Second World War and of the ‘locust years’ that preceded that appalling conflict is refracted through our comprehension of the ‘mad’ Führer. It is the ghost of Adolf Hitler who, history tells us, carried the world to total war and, with blind and (pseudo-) scientific fanaticism, to the massacre of the Jews in the ‘final solution’. After we have learned the lessons of such history, it is the ghost of Adolf Hitler who pushes us to our understanding of the world. It is the ghost of Adolf Hitler who persuades us that our opponents comprise The Other – the imponderable, incomprehensible, fundamentalist, ‘mad’. It is the ghost of Adolf Hitler who ensures that we think of all dictators and all societies that have the misfortune to be ruled by them as the replica of his murderous and inexorable regime.

But letting Hitler be our history teacher and implicit model is not a good idea. At the onset of the Balkan wars of the 1990s, the still Yugoslav journalist Slavenka Drakulic warned against the resurfacing of terrible simplifiers. ‘Once the concept of “otherness” takes root,’ she wrote sadly, ‘the unimaginable becomes possible.’¹ It is a comment that should be kept in mind when turning to examine what I some years ago called the ‘Italian dictatorship’. From 1922 to 1943 and then, in a terrible coda in central and northern Italy, from September 1943 to April 1945, the Italian people fell under the domination of a vicious and retrograde tyranny. It banned rival parties, arbitrarily imprisoned or drove into exile their leaders and, before and after 1922, killed from 2,000 to 3,000 of its political opponents. It destroyed the free press, liquidated non-Fascist trade unions, infringed the rule of law, sponsored a secret police, tempted Italians to spy on, and inform against, each other and reaffirmed crudely patriarchal practices. It talked about building a corporate state that the world would marvel at and thereby unite bosses and workers and bring welfare and justice to all. In practice, however, the dictatorship’s economic performance was patchy at best. Its erratic pursuit of free trade at first and autarchy or protection thereafter did nothing to lessen Italy’s relative financial and technological weakness or to improve the Italian population’s lower standard of living compared with the richer and greater powers to its north and west.

Any glimpse of economic advance was blighted by the fact that Fascist Italy indulged in almost constant warfare, during the 1920s ‘restoring order’ in its empire, in 1935 invading Ethiopia, after 1936 impelling ‘volunteers’ to fight on the insurgent side in the Spanish Civil War, and in 1939 occupying Albania, its erstwhile puppet. After allying with Nazi Germany in the original Axis of Evil, this dictatorship wilfully entered all the Second World Wars, from June 1940 against Britain and France, from June 1941 against the USSR and from December that year against the USA, despite the millions of Italo-Americans who had moved across the Atlantic. In October 1940 Fascist Italy launched its own dismally incompetent attack on Greece and, after being rescued by the Germans in March–April 1941, was a brutal, if erratic, administrator of the Nazi-fascist new order in the Balkans and the rest of occupied Europe. Italy’s foreign policy adventures had been prefigured at the beginning of the Fascist movement, when the doctrine of pre-emption and the ready acceptance of collateral damage on innocent bystanders were integral elements of ‘squadrism’ and its motorized and armed raids on fascism’s political opponents. Always in theory and sometimes in practice, Fascists savagely eliminated their enemies without by your leaves and without pondering the complexities of life. If, in 1920–21, it was right to sally forth against socialist or Catholic foes at home, so, eventually, when opportunity came, it was just and necessary to launch aggressive foreign wars.

By then, Fascism had also become openly racist, whatever contradictions that policy line entailed in the light of Italians’ lowly slot on most racial hierarchies. After initial forays into public racism in its African empire, in 1938 the dictatorship brought in wide-ranging anti-Semitic legìslation. The Italian persecution of the Jews was not the same as the German, but from 1943 the Salò Republic (RSI or Repubblica Sociale Italiana) officially proclaimed Jews enemies of the nation and its bureaucrats and politicians actively helped the Germans transport some 7,000 Italian Jews to their doom in the east. Earlier, Fascist Italy had sought belatedly to bear the imperial white man’s burden and did so with severe damage to its subject peoples’ lives and spirits. In Libya and Ethiopia, Italian armed forces murdered with a will: Italy may have been a latecomer to European imperialism but it was no gentler than the rest. By bombing sacred sites at Cufra and Debra Libanos, Italians sought ruthlessly to cancel any rival native history that might contest its own. Before and after 1940 Fascist rhetoric was unrestrained in extolling the virtues of war and killing, each being inscribed as the essence of Fascist manhood. And, on more than one occasion, wicked words were followed with evil deeds.

It was for Fascism that the malign term ‘totalitarianism’ was invented and, if they did not coin it, Fascists adopted it as the special badge of the regime. In theory at least, the dictatorship became a place where everyone had to ask not what their state would do for them but what they would and must do for the overweening state. Fascism was new and ‘revolutionary’, so the formula ran, because it had found a way to rally the masses in their deepest souls behind an authoritarian form of government. Mussolini himself regularly explained that the key to his regime lay in its harnessing of youth, trade unionism and leisure through the instrumentalities of a single and ubiquitous party. There was much talk about a ‘liturgy’ becoming engrained in every Italian mind where, by implication, it must oust the ancient belief system of the Catholic Church or the modern ones of the liberal nation, consumer capitalism and socialist humanism, in favour of a new and Fascist ‘civic religion’. Here, in contemporary parlance, was what might be labelled Fascist fundamentalism. Regime propagandists spread an extreme and in retrospect ludicrous personality cult in which Mussolini was elevated into an all-seeing and all-knowing god, a Man who, Italians were assured, radiated a divine light and possessed an omniscient intuition. As the basic regime slogan went: ‘Mussolini is always right’ (Mussolini ha sempre ragione). At its most fanatical this cult required that Italians abandon contact with the world outside their leader, bow down and worship Him (like the Deity, he was habitually addressed in the capitalized form), purging from their minds everything that was not Fascist (or Mussolinian).

The Axis alliance with Nazi Germany had its ups and downs. Yet it was always in some sense ‘natural’. Despite their national distinctiveness, Nazism and Italian Fascism and the array of lesser fascist movements did retain some commonality, being more like each other as societies than was their totalitarian rival, Stalinist communism, or their half-embarrassed progenitor and later frequent butt, conservative liberalism.² At a minimum, Mussolini and his dictatorship acted as a model for Adolf Hitler when, during the 1920s, the Führer was still a peripheral and unsuccessful figure on the crowded and quarrelsome German right and the German dictator never altogether abandoned his gratitude for this spiritual patronage. The Fascist regime was a willing if often gullible sponsor of a slew of other rightists, who dreamed of the murderous overthrow of democratic systems and of the launching of new wars to enforce the national grandeur they regarded as ideal. Among them were Ante Pavelić and the Croatian Ustasha, perhaps the most odious of all inter-war fascist-like movements, and those brutal and dissident Spanish officers who, after 1936, excised what they saw as the pustule of social democracy in their country, with a death toll that ran into hundreds of thousands.

Here, then, was a regime that, at a minimal count, with its repressive policies at home and its aggressive wars in its empire and in Europe, must bear responsibility for the premature death of a million people. It holds a prominent place in the black book of human misdeeds in the twentieth century.

At the same time, this dictatorship (like so many others) was deeply corrupt. Mussolini’s henchmen had their snouts in any trough around. All ruling elites are rapacious but some are more rapacious than others. Under Fascism, patron–client ties flourished and the special personal reference or raccomandazione was a necessary part of life. Roberto Farinacci, the roughest and toughest ras (local boss), the ‘real’ Fascist, pronounced as his solution to the problem of getting through life not some ideological credo but the more familiar nostrum: ‘I never forget my friends’.³

Like landmines in the present Third World, political tests lay not far below the surface under this intrusive regime. Fascist welfare trickled down only to those deemed deserving in their Fascism. As Paul Corner has acutely noted: in this system, ‘the rules were in many ways unwritten rules and could only be guessed at – something that gave the authorities a great deal of discretionary power’.⁴ Yet, for all the political meddling and persecution, this permanent unpredictability meant that there was always a possibility that rules could be circumvented or bent to the advantage of the ruthless and the smart. For some prison; for others amnesty. For some endless petty persecution; for others rich reward arrived from the skies (or the Duce’s office). For some daily apprehension; for others status and power. Hope and hopelessness grew together. This trickiness at the root of Fascism, the variability in its behaviour, the perpetual overt gap between its theory and its practice, meant that, while it was conquering or seeming to conquer, the dictatorship remained a nervous regime, unsure where it would end, unclear about the succession to Mussolini, unconvinced that it had swept away all opposition, talking big because it was always most likely that it was little. When, in the middle of the 1930s, Fascism, by most measures, had won the consent, however passive, of its subjects, still Mussolini neurotically insisted on daily conversations with his cynical, apolitical, pitiless and able Chief of Police, Arturo Bocchini. The leader quizzed his official obsessively about the state of public opinion, asking if traces of anti-Fascism had surfaced. Despite its proclamation of empyrean grandeur and its assertion that it had invented ‘the ideology of the twentieth century’, this was a regime that never comfortably settled into office and hid its unease with pratings about ‘permanent revolution’, permanently about to start.

Lies abounded. Fascism proclaimed that its fundamental aim was national and social unity; that was what the fasces, rods bound around a retributive axe, symbolized. Yet Italy between the wars remained a place marked by an intricate regional hierarchy, a country where some parts (the great cities, the numerous historic towns, the ‘north’) were deemed civilized and others (backwoods paesi or villages, the countryside, the ‘south’) ‘barbarous’. Most Italians clung to this knowledge, deeply inscribed in mental maps of their own, ones that had been by no means reliably nationalized and homogenized but instead reflected individual, family, class, gender and paese experience. Peasants knew they were peasants, poveri cristi, who had much in common with each other and were separated by a yawning chasm from landowners, town-dwellers and the bourgeoisie. Women, even the richest and best-educated ones, could scarcely aspire to equality with men. Emigration connected Italians along migrant chains to France or Belgium, New York or Buenos Aires, more securely than they were wedded to those extensive parts of Italy where they had never been and which were often literally beyond their ken, let alone to the exotic national empire in Benghazi, Tirana or Mogadishu. Paradoxically for a society heralding national homogeneity, the punishment system for the tiniest display of political dissidence was grounded in the reality of difference and not the myth of uniformity. Those men and women dispatched to confino (forced residence elsewhere) were meant to suffer and bend their heads because they had to live among foreigners and in a foreign clime, sitting out their years among the ‘barbarous’, even though all the while they were in Italy.

If geography was a shifting subject for many Italians, so was history. Membership in the party could be adroitly backdated, personal records rewritten with aplomb. Here was a regime that was under-girded by ‘spin’, long before that word had been given its current ubiquity. The Fascist dictatorship is often best understood as a ‘propaganda state’, one where nothing was what it was said to be and where everything that mattered lay in the words. Along with spin – perhaps its natural partner – went a profound cynicism, a way of viewing a citizen’s surrounds and the world which deeply characterized the dictator, the leader or Duce, and which rarely left the minds of most Italians. Under this dictatorship, there may have been chatter about the philosophical acuity of Michels, Mazzini (and Mussolini), but Machiavelli (in vulgarized version) offered the handiest guide for comprehending the human condition.

A paradox lies at the heart of this book as it seeks to recount what the Fascists said they were doing, what they were actually doing and how the Italian people, in their class, gender, age, regional, religious, urban, rural and other diversities, coped with this dictatorship’s version of totalitarianism. No serious historian should want to forget or forgive the crimes and wickedness of a misrule that lasted a generation. Yet the story of Fascism, of the Fascists and of Italian men and women in their era is not a simple one. This was neither a regime nor a society which was completely ‘Other’. Lacking the power and the purpose to wipe clean the minds of its subjects and forge genuine ‘new men’ and ‘new women’, the dictatorship left a thousand histories still blooming in Italy and the Italies. In instance after instance, Italians, with power or without, from the top of society to the bottom, behaved in ways that may have been tinctured by Fascism but were at the same time deeply coloured by other factors, especially those which eddied powerfully through Italian society, moving with rhythms and effects diverse from that of the dictatorship.

In telling this tale, I shall introduce readers to Fascist bosses, some of them war criminals who never went before an international court, the overwhelming majority killers at one or other moment of their lives. One of my tasks in this book is to trace the careers of such unlovely underlings of the Duce as Roberto Farinacci, Dino Grandi, Italo Balbo, Giuseppe Bottai, Giuseppe Volpi, Giuseppe Giuriati, Achille Starace and the rest to illustrate how they twisted and turned in their understanding and deployment of Fascism. At the same time, attention will often switch from ‘great men’ to the little Fascists of the regions, towns and suburbs and will give place as well to those Italians who sought to get on with their lives, doing their best to ignore the dictatorship and, wittingly or unwittingly, deny it control over their minds. I shall therefore trace a varied set of journeys through a totalitarianism that somehow never became fully normalized and that always remained open to some form of manipulation or at least to the expectation of it.

The richly textured histories of these people will be full of loyalties and perceptions that were not merely Fascist. Time and again, Italians proved able to give lip-service to totalitarianism while retaining a sense of self. I shall talk of an everyday constituted by Catholicism, the family, gender understandings, the special flavour of different regions, towns and villages and by those who found an identity or identities outside the nation. Comprehending the fluctuating story of ‘lite’ Fascist totalitarianism, sceptical Fascist fundamentalism, a Fascist liturgy that failed to make itself catholic and universal, Fascist wars that were frequently more toughly fought with words than with weapons, can act as a counter to the pervasive power of Hitler’s ghost. Reviewing the uneven experience of a people pent-up for two decades under the sway of a dictatorship of this Fascist sort may help us to the happy realization that, even in the worst of times, human fallibility, human hope and human struggle somehow obscure, delay and derail those determined to apply a simple and single answer, a seamless solution, to any question that matters. It might also allow us to examine in a more perceptive manner other dictatorships, great or petty and be they commanding countries, business concerns or just groups of individuals. Under the rule of Benito Mussolini, the history of Italian men and women – of intellectuals and businesspersons, landowners and peasants, priests and kings, the dictator, his henchmen and those committed to some form of anti-Fascism – was not cut off from the history of us all.

One Italy or another before 1914

The balcony stands there still today, jutting from the upper floor of the Palazzo Venezia, the building tourist guides describe as the first great Renaissance palace built in mid-fifteenth-century Rome. From this place, successively on 2 October 1935 and 9 May 1936, Benito Mussolini, Duce of Fascism, announced the invasion of Ethiopia and hailed a military triumph which, the dictator boasted, had brought empire back to the ‘fatal hills of Rome’. Here also, on 7 May 1938, Mussolini and Adolf Hitler together acknowledged the plaudits of the populace at the propaganda peak of the Führer’s most successful visit to Italy. From that balcony on 10 June 1940, the Italian leader joined his Axis ally, Nazi Germany, in the war against the ‘plutocratic’ and ‘decadent’ liberal democratic states, Britain and France. Entry into the conflict, he roared, marked ‘the logical development of our revolution’.¹ ‘Balcony Empire’, a pair of American journalists christened the regime in sardonic response.² Certainly the most familiar image in the history and memory of Fascism is of the dictator speechifying at one venue or another, his jutting fleshy chin, rolling eyes, florid gestures and vehement phrases caught by the newsreels of the time. The Duce’s oratorical technique now seems quaint, a period piece which prompts neither terror nor faith but rather a condescending smile. Italiani, we are assured in such bestsellers as Captain Corelli’s Mandolin or such prize-winning films as Life is beautiful, or just by commonsense, are brava gente; Italians are nice people, bumbling of course, no doubt corrupt, but charming always. They incarnate their particular variety of cuisine, fashion, style and elegant love-making; they could not practise murder or mayhem. Of all the nations in the world, it seems, Italians are the last to be typecast as willing executioners.

My favourite bumper sticker reminds me that ‘paranoids have enemies, too’, and stereotypes do generally contain a grain of truth. In this book, I shall have cause to relate Italian charm, Italian corruption and Italian blunderings. Yet, any glimpses of bravi italiani and even bravi fascisti should not be read with excessive complacency. The Fascist dictatorship does not deserve to be given its historical place bathed in that pink glow of nostalgia, which is better left to the sort of advertisements and soft-porn movies which, over the last decades, have filled Italian television screens, perhaps occupied Italian minds and certainly have assisted the financial and political career of Silvio Berlusconi. Between the wars, Fascist Italy paved the first and fundamental path towards the destruction of Marxism, socialism, communism and liberal democracy, mapping a short way to repress any followers of those ideologies who hoped to be the humanist heirs of the French Revolution and Enlightenment. Here was the ideology that did not altogether die in 1945 and whose more recent epigones include the Ba’athists of Syria and Iraq and so Saddam Hussein (and Iyad Allawi).

If, outside its western fringe, Europe, by the end of 1938, had proved that the mixture of parliamentarism, capitalism and self-determination, heralded in 1919 by President Woodrow Wilson, led only to autocracy or worse, then Italy had pioneered the path to this wreck of individual and social freedom. From its first moment, Fascist Italy was a state that did not hide or apologize for its social Darwinism and war-mongering, its use of social and military terror and its fondness for pre-emptive assault. Despite Italy’s signature to conventions banning its use, poison gas, the most obvious weapon of mass destruction of the time, was dropped by Mussolini and the Royal and National Italian Army on Libyans and Ethiopians and its wider deployment thereafter was seriously contemplated. As early as 1920, Mussolini spoke in favour of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the Balkans and, during the Second World War, Aldo Vidussoni, a Fascist party secretary, envisaged the liquidation of all Slovenes. Expressing its own special version of racism, the Italian dictatorship played a significant part in escorting the world to ‘Auschwitz’. In almost every sense the regime headed by Mussolini constituted the first and truest fascism and was a deadly enemy of what is best or most humane about humankind. It was not merely a joke.

ACS	Archivio Centrale dello Stato (Rome)
AN	Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance – post-fascists)
ANC	Associazione Nazionale dei Combattenti (National Returned Soldiers’ League)
ANI	Associazione Nazionalista Italiana (Italian Nationalist Association)
AOI	Africa Orientale Italiana (Italian East Africa)
BMOO	Benito Mussolini, Opera omnia (edited by E. and D. Susmel), 44 vols (Florence, 1951–62; 1978–80)
BN	Brigate Nere (Black Brigades)
CGdL	Confederazione Generale del Lavoro (General Confederation of Labour)
CIGA	Compagnia Italiana Grandi Alberghi (Italian Major Hoteliers’ League)
CIL	Confederazione Italiana del Lavoro (Italian Labour Confederation – Catholics)
CISNAL	Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Nazionali Liberi (Italian Free National Trade Union – neo-fascists)
CP	Confinati politici: fascicoli personali (personal files of those sent to confino)
DC	Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy)
DDI	I documenti diplomatici italiani, third to eighth series
DGPS	Direzione Generale di Pubblica Sicurezza (Directorate of Public Security)
EIAR	Ente Italiano Audizioni Radiotelefoniche (Italian Radio Company)
EUR	Esposizione Universale Italiana (Italian Universal Exhibition)
FIOM	Federazione Italiana degli operai metallurgici (Italian Metalworkers’ Union)
GUF	Gioventù Universitaria Fascista (Fascist University Youth)
INPS	Istituto Nazionale di Previdenza Sociale (National Insurance Institute)
IRI	Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (Institute for the Reconstruction of Industry)
MI	Ministero dell’Interno (Ministry of the Interior)
MRF	Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution)
MSI	Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement – neo-fascists)
MVSN	Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (Voluntary Militia for National Security)
NATO	North Atlantic Treaty Organization
ONB	Opera Nazionale Balilla (Fascist boy scouts)
OND	Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (National After-work Group)
ONMI	Opera Nazionale per la Protezione della Maternità e dell’Infanzia (National agency for mothers and children)
OVRA	Fascist Secret Police (the initials have no direct meaning)
PCd’I	Partito Comunista d’Italia (Italian Communist Party in 1920s)
PCI	Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party after Fascism)
PNF	Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)
PNM	Partito Nazionale Monarchico (National Monarchist Party)
PPI	Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party – Catholics)
PSI	Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party)
RSI	Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social or ‘Salò’ Republic)
SCP	Segreteria del Capo di Polizia (Senise-Chierici 1940–43) (Secretariat of the Chief of Police)
SPDCO	Segreteria particolare del Duce: Carteggio ordinario (general papers of the Duce’s personal office)
SPDCR	Segreteria particolare del Duce: Carteggio riservato (special papers of the Duce’s personal office)
SPEP	Situazione politica ed economica delle provincie (Review of the political and economic situation in the provinces)
TCI	Touring Club Italiano (Italian Touring Club)
UIL	Unione Italiana del Lavoro (Italian Labour Union – syndicalists)
UQ	Uomo Qualunque (Common Man Party)