BOOKS

Journalist-dictator

Owen Chadwick

This is certainly a brilliant life of Mussolini. It is of the man, not of his time; it is Mussolini, not Mussolini's Italy; and men are not quite intelligible except within their time. But Denis Mack Smith has written elsewhere on several aspects of Fascist Italy. So this life is a portrait of a Person, what he did, what was the gossip about him, how he managed and by whom he was managed. The result leaves little vir- tue in Mussolini. If the reader begins by thinking that Mussolini must have been a man of character in doing what he did for the Italians, at least during his middle years as dictator, that hesitantly friendly opinion will hardly survive the evidence set forth in this book. The piling up of information is so devastating that it amounts almost to the destruction of a personality.

What is more, the portrayal takes on the Proportions of an epic tragedy. Here, ac- cording to Mack Smith, was a worthless an who found himself by accident at the head of a party and then, by the weakness of politicians, at the head of government. Once in power, and once in control of the Press, the only instrument of state which he understood, he found the way to be a peo- Ple's idol, and achieved the pinnacle of a nation's admiration as the saviour of his country. To remain perched on the pinnacle he had two absolute disqualifications. First, he must push Italy forward towards risks and gambles and aggressive noises for which neither the Italian economy nor the Italian tradition could possibly be suffi- cient. Secondly, the worthlessness of his character meant that the policy was never a real policy, but only words for popular con- sumption. And so he fell into the clutches of Adolf Hitler, maundered away his last Months near Lake Garda like Napoleon boring his visitors on St. Helena, and when he was murdered was the most hated Italian of the centuries. So this is the tragedy of a nasty young man who in strange cir- cumstances became the hero of a nation, could not sustain the role, damaged his country irretrievably, and at last made the Mob, jeering at his body hung upside down in the square at Milan, almost forgivable.

But the biographer is far too subtle and sensitive to make his portrait unrelieved. The Mussolini of this book is a man, too combative no doubt, but with courage. He had a natural resilience which continually sustained his faith after disasters. He was more shrewd than intelligent, but in politics shrewdness and sense of timing are gifts far more useful than theoretical analysis. He Was a very private person, friendless apart

from his women, and hardly even knew the names of men close about him; but he could charm visitors, and was full of vitality, and entertained with his readings and memory like a man who often reads articles in the Encyclopaedia. For part of the time he refused to take his stipend, and gave away money to charities. He loved fresh air, and riding, and jogging, and health. The press were allowed to take pictures of a half nak- ed dictator keeping fit.

He failed, according to this portrait, because he cared only for facade. This was government of the media, by the media, and for the media. Instead of a philosopher-king, Italy had a journalist- dictator. The one place where he had prov- ed himself was in the editor's chair of a series of newspapers. In that light he saw all government. He asked not whether policies were good but whether they made headlines. He therefore thought that jour- nalists make the best ministers in a cabinet. His own first task each day was a prolonged study of yesterday's newspapers, and a planning of the next day's newspapers, and telephoning editors to explain what they must do. The head of his private press of- fice saw him frequently and sometimes ap- peared at meetings of the cabinet. He once told an assembly of reporters that they car- ried a marshal's baton in their knapsack. For foreign information he relied as much upon private letters from journalists as upon official letters from ambassadors. He gave Arnaldo Mussolini, who was a second- rate journalist, a funeral like the obsequies of some saint or emperor, with crowds kneeling along the railway line as the coffin crossed Northern Italy.

His experience with newspapers left him with a contempt for the human race. He knew that he could say one thing on Tues- day and the opposite on Wednesday, and that few would notice and fewer complain. He underestimated anything that could not be put into a column. If a book was long and boring, like Mein Kampf, he knew it to be useless. He preferred to avoid anything, even if it was just, which newspapers would have to print and which would reflect discredit on the regime. Thus he preferred to protect scoundrels if they were Fascist scoundrels. Their iniquities were less impor- tant than the damage if they were exposed.

Not slowly he was taken over by the myth which he made. He shut himself up, like a Byz'antine in a palace, and surrounded himself only with flatterers. He rid himself of advisers who were independent or critical. Even the ritual of an interview became Byzantine, a running the length of the r6om to his desk, a running to get out before turning at the door to salute. Inter-

views ceased to be real exchanges of ideas and became formalities.

But behind the ceremonial mask of this portrait lies someone more sinister. The more civilised of the dictators proves, on in- spection by Mack Smith, to be cruel, murderous, protective of murderers, and vindictive. During the last months in the Republic of Salo, while the allied armies ad- vanced into northern Italy, unofficial Fascist bands murdered ruthlessly and inno- cent leaders were executed on Mussolini's order. This repellent last phase has sometimes been seen as uncharacteristic of Mussolini, and to be attributed to local domination by S.S. blackguards. But the Mussolini of Mack Smith's Said is a natural issue of the early Fascist leader with his pleasure in thugs, and proud exhibitor of castor oil as part of his road to power.

Among the crises of this epic inferno which will particularly interest the reader is the moment of Mussolini's fall after the allied invasion of Sicily in July 1943. He collapsed like a house of cards, pushed over by a breath. Was that because Fascist power was only a veneer, kept in existence by conjuring tricks? On the two vital days when he had a chance of surviving the challenge, Mussolini behaved so strangely that Mack Smith floats the theory that he wanted to fall. The decisions, perhaps, had become intolerable. He could not resist the Allies yet he could not disengage from the Germans. Ahead he saw no course of action which did not end in a blank wall. Italy had no power left to make war, and yet no power to make peace. Perhaps he had a half-desire to abdicate, and leave the im- possible decision to someone else. 'He had once speculated that Julius Caesar knew all about the conspiracy to murder him and subconsciously sought in it a way out of the impasse'.

If this theory has truth — it is put for- ward only as a might be, but with extraor- dinary persuasiveness, — we suddenly look into a new sort of Mussolini hardly found elsewhere in this book; troubled behind the facade, putting on the best face, less confi- dent than he looked, and less swollen with bombast. Perhaps this different person was caused only by ill-health, or by drugs, or by the advance of Montgomery. But it may touch also a deeper strand of personality.

There was once a child Mussolini who was punished at a bad boarding school by being put out into the dark courtyard at night, and there prayed in an agony of fear to all the saints. What was it in this man which made Clara Petacci follow to the end, to her own murder, to hang side by side with him, upside down in the square at Milan? She had no need to follow, she had plenty of chances to go away. What was it in him that still captivates the memory of some older Italians, who to this day hardly dare to speak, but remember how before the fatal bondage to Hitler he did some good to Italy, and not only because the trains ran on time? They sensed a discovery of the Italian soul. Old divided Italy was united artificially in the Risorgimento. But still it felt the union to be a patchwork, with all the tensions of provincial loyalties and sundered dialects, so that party strife and class war were mingled with still deeper forces to tear the country apart. The historian may reasonably ask whether Italy felt itself to be truly Italy before 1929.

From this very complex Mussolini we on- ly get faint breaths in this book. 1 should lay more stress on the Lateran Treaty. Italy could never be Italy until the historic war between Garibaldi and the Pope was laid to rest. The old liberal parties of Italy were committed to an anticlerical policy, less by their desires than by their traditions, less by feeling than by the memory of Mazzini and Cavour. No country governed by that ar- chetypal liberal, Giolitti, could have signed the Lateran Treaty. Mussolini believed himself, and was believed by many Italians to be, the heir of the Risorgimento. Yet he won power, partly by strong arm squads, partly by hitching his star to the cause of fantastic D'Annunzio, but chiefly by realis- ing that the votes which could give him power were the Catholic votes. Therefore he could sign away the Vatican to be an in- dependent State, despite the opposition of King and Fascist squad-leaders and most of the old liberals. The act was as important to the making of modern Italy as Napoleon's reconciliation between the Revolution and the Church was important in the making of modern France. It survived its maker's fall and loss of credit, and was a landmark in the history of Italy.

Of such a heritage, Mack Smith makes an interesting diagnosis about the Sicilian Mafia. The Fascist press was made to pre- tend that the Mafia did not exist, its ban- ditry would be discreditable to Italy if disclosed. And yet 'the outward manifesta- tions of the Mafia were dealt with far more effectively by Mussolini than by any liberal government in modern times'. He was able to achieve this because his lack of scruple let him seek allies among criminals in Sicily; because he could imprison without trial, and did not hesitate to throw some 2,000 people into gaol; and still more because he rid himself of elections and juries, and the Mafia flourished especially by threats or bribes among electors or jurymen. But this was an achievement less lasting than the Lateran Treaty because it needed methods intolerable to a civilised government. So the portrait in this book is not all darkness.

But it has to be faced, this was a very ab- surd man. He had a passion for uniforms, so that ministers needed at least ten dif- ferent uniforms for different occasions; the preposterous puffing out of his chest and rolling back his lips, like a reach-me-down Tarzan in whom no spectator could believe; the choreography of his assemblies, which he borrowed originally from swashbuckling D'Annunzio, and which was developed into orchestrated cries; the Roman salute, which certainly looked, to those of us who remember seeing it, a very ridiculous mode of greeting; the applause squad, whose job was to go round ensuring that every ut- terance received an ovation. This book is not the last word on Mussolini. More archives will be opened and sorted, more witnesses will be found to have recorded, more analysis of foreign relations is already in progress. It is the man and only a part of his time; and therefore there are things in this book which cannot be understood by the reader and remain a mystery. It is possible that the man-in-his- time is more weighty than the man, and that contemptible clowns ' are on occasion capable of statesmanlike actions. But whatever reserves we make, this is the most compulsive reading of any book of modern Italian history that I ever remember to have read.