BOOKS
Little Caesar
BY JAMES JOLL
THE monstrous figure of Hitler has until re- cently obscured that of his brother dictator, Mussolini. As a result, the Hitler legend has been analysed and destroyed; there is now no Hitler myth, and we are beginning to have an idea of how the Nazi system worked, how Hitler suc- ceeded in captivating the German people. Even the Eichmann trial, horrific reminder though it has been, has revealed little that we did not know. There is, in fact, not much more to be said about Hitler; and no voice has been raised to rehabili- tate him. Mussolini, on the other hand, is still a controversial figure, and the legends about himself which he so sedulously fostered have not yet all been examined. It is still possible, it would seem, to take opposing views of his per- sonality and even of his achievements.
Thus, from two serious biographies* which have appeared almost simultaneously, one gets the impression, on one view, that Mussolini was a coward (In his whole life there is hardly an act that can be ascribed to genuine courage,' Mrs. Fermi writes), untouched by spontaneous human affection, incapable of consistency or concentration. On the other hand, according to Mr. Hibbert, Mussolini was 'behind the bluster- Ins of the tyrant and the marble-like impassivity Which he delighted to impose upon his massive face, both emotional and compassionate,' a man whose bravery and coolness in the face of attempted assassination were much admired. Whatever differences there may be in the assess- ment of Mussolini's character, he was a man Who can be analysed in terms of ordinary human vices and virtues, not a monster from outside normal experience such as Hitler was.
`When I am gone,' Mussolini wrote in 1943, when finally disillusioned with the Italians, 'I am confident that historians and psychologists will ask how a man had the power to lead such a people for so long,' He was right, though not in the sense that he meant. The problem is how so vain and empty a demagogue succeeded in captivating the Italians and leading them to disaster. 'On my grave I want this epitaph,' he said in 1937. 'Here lies one of the most intelli- gent animals ever to appear on the surface of the earth.' It was a typical boast, and yet not so preposterous as it might appear. The skill which Mussolini showed in the critical years 1921 and 1922, the shrewdness with which he divided his opponents and survived the crisis produced by the murder of Matteotti in 1924, the way in which a few genuine social reforms and public works were combined with protection of the industrial- ists and landowners, all perhaps justify the com- ment of the novelist Moravia : 'If he had had a foreign policy as clever as his domestic one, perhaps he'd be Duce today.'
Because of the importance of Mussolini's methods in attaining and keeping power, Mrs.
MUSSOLINI. By Laura Fermi. (University of Chicago, 42s.) BENITO MUSSOLINI. By Christopher Hibbert. (Longmans, 25s.) Fermi is right, in her excellent book, to devote much of her space to his career before he became dictator and to his seventeen years of power before the Second World War. She herself grew up in Fascist Italy and lived there till 1938, so that she experienced Mussolini's dictatorship at first hand, as well as the political mood of the Italian middle classes which had allowed him to come to power. She has the great advantage over Mr. Hibbert of an intimate familiarity with the world she is describing. Mr. Hibbert tells us that his interest in Mussolini had been aroused during the war and that he returned to Italy fifteen years later to try and compare the Mussolini of historical reality with the Mussolini of wartime propaganda. He is mainly interested in Mussolini's later career and his foreign policies, and 1e provides a lively narrative of Mussolini's fall and the events which followed, although this suffers from the fact that he does not seem to have used many of the German sources. Occasionally, he betrays by a slip a lack of familiarity with the earlier back- ground of Mussolini's career (the most brilliant and tragic of the early anti-Fascists, Piero Gobetti, is referred to as Pietro Gobbi, for ex- ample), and occasionally he follows Mussolini's pro-Fascist biographers, Pini and Susmel, rather too unquestioningly. Nevertheless, he has pro- duced a consistent and readable book which says well what little there is to be said for Mussolini.
If Mr. Hibbert and Mrs. Fermi give differing views of Mussolini's personality, it is because they emphasise different aspects of his violent, histrionic and impulsive nature. Their choice of the biographical form for their narratives in- evitably limits their account of Mussolini's political importance, and neither of them really attempts an analysis of the structure of the Fascist State or the basis of Mussolini's support. To do so, indeed, involves an analysis of Italian society since the Risorgimento, for the success of Fascism depended, not on the ex post facto doctrine which it evolved, but on the way in which it was able to mobilise the contradictory forces in Italian life. These same contradictions finally led to Mussolini's downfall. In order to capture conservative support, he had made a compromise with the monarchy; and it was the court which eventually supplied one of the centres of resistance to him. However enfeebled as an institution, however much overshadowed by the personality of the Duce and the pompous trappings of Fascism, the monarchy, by its very existence, was an essential element in Mussolini's overthrow. If it was the defection of some of the more conservative-minded among the Fascists which made possible the dismissal of Mussolini and his replacement by Badoglio, it was, on the other hand, some of the most radical representa- tives of the republican supporters of Fascism who, at the end, took seriously the ideals of the Republic of Salo. There is more in the fall of Mussolini and the civil war which followed than
the adventure story Mr. Hibbert has written.
Much light on the nature of the Fascist regime and of the eventual reaction against it is thrown by Professor Delzell's scholarly and exhaustive researches.t He shows how little spontaneous anti-Fascist feeling there was in the Twenties, when only a few intellectuals and politicians dared to criticise the regime openly and were soon banished or imprisoned as a result. It was pos- sible for someone of Croce's eminence to acquire a symbolic status by remaining at least aloof from the regime and its blandishments, but, in general, there was, in Italy itself, very little that the opponents of Fascism could or would do. It was only Mussolini's disastrous subservience to Hitler and his gratuitous entry into the war which gradually turned Italian patriotic feeling into anti-Fascist channels, to produce a resistance movement which was far more than the tool of the Communist. Party Mr. Hibbert supposes it to have been.
Mussolini's relations with Hitler were the source of his greatest mistakes. Through a desire to fare figura, to win spectacular gains on the cheap, and through a fundamental underestima- stion of Allied, and especially American, strength, Mussolini ended up as Hitler's puppet. In a sense, each was the other's only friend, and, indeed, Hitler's confidence in Mussolini seems to have survived long after the Duce's confidence in him- self had gone. 'Hitler and I have surrendered ourselves to our illusions like a couple of lunatics,' Mussolini is reported to have said. `We have only one hope left : to create a myth.' (it is a remark which Hitler could never have made, and shows how Mussolini never totally lost contact with the real world.) But, apart from the circumstances which forced the two dictators into a friendship which was part of the myth they were creating, there were certain similarities of temperament. Each was, so to speak, a Bohemian, dabbling in one thing after another, incapable of settling down to the drab routine of life. Each saw himself as a Nietzschean super- man (as Miss Elizabeth Wiskemann showed in her Rome-Berlin Axis, which remains the test study of the dictators' relationship), though with Mussolini there• was a more conscious sense of play-acting. Each had ultimate aims which were nebulous and unlimited.
The tragedy for Mussolini was that he did not really know what he wanted, beyond the sense of power and the day-to-day drama of his political and military adventures. He had in- tended to follow an independent foreign policy which would demonstrate Italy's status as a great power; in fact he only subordinated himself and the Italian people to Hitler's strategy. It was the divergence between Italy's interests and Hitler's war aims which led to the revulsion against Mussolini and exposed the hollowness of the Fascist system. Mussolini himself tried to escape the responsibility and put the blame on History, and wrote after his downfall : 'One day history will judge us and say that many buildings were built, that many bridges were thrown across many rivers; but it will be forced to conclude that as far as the spirit is concerned we were only common pawns in the recent crisis Of human conscience, and that we remained pawns to the end.' His assassins had other views, which are perhaps nearer to the judgment of History : 'The shooting of Mussolini and his accom- plices . . . is the necessary conclusion of a his- torical era.'
t MUSSOLINI'S ENEMIES: THE ITALIAN ANTI- FASCIST RESISTANCE. By Charles F. Delrell. (Prince- ton and O.U.P., £5.)
Previous page
