Mussolini was scarcely one of the quintessential villains of modern history, though neither was he the oratorical buffoon depicted in hostile propaganda, writes Brian Fallon
Mussolini. By R.J.B. Bosworth. Arnold, 584pp. £25 sterling
It is, in fact, difficult to pin down exactly what he was, since behind the rhetoric and the swagger he remains in some respects oddly nebulous. Perhaps he was intrinsically more a casualty of his times than one of the century's evil geniuses - a man who at one stage promised much, even, initially, achieved a good deal for his country, but in the end led her into a disastrous alliance and left her defeated, weakened and disillusioned. It makes for a heavy indictment, which this book does not soften.
As the original Fascist, he stands condemned even before trial, but the matter is not as black-and-white as that. Fascism today is usually identified with Nazism, a movement which (fortunately) was sui generis, but its character was quite different, at least to begin with. What the two movements had in common - apart from their street-marching, quasi-military character - is that they were both born largely out of the breakdown of European morale which followed the first World War, and that both harped on national grievances created by that war.
In Hitler's case it was the indefensible Versailles Treaty, while in Mussolini's it was the poor return Italy had gained for her entry as a belligerent in 1915, and her subsequent sacrifices on the side of the Entente. Three million Italians served in uniform, half a million were killed and there were hundreds of thousands of mutilati. About two-thirds of these were peasants, and Mussolini (who was himself wounded in the war) came of a line of peasant smallholders in the Romagnole Apennines. When peace came, however, Italy - which had won a major and often underrated victory over Austro-Hungary at Vittorio Veneto - got little reward at the conference table.
As various modern historians have remarked, the Great War unleashed something ugly and brutal in the European psyche, spelling death to the old patrician liberalism and bringing in the age of populism and violence, actual or potential. Mussolini, an ambitious opportunist by nature, was well-equipped to grasp the situation and make the most of it. He had started out as a humble country schoolteacher, then found he had a talent for political journalism and also for oratory. At first he threw in his lot with the Left, whether Marxist or anarchist, and was even expelled from Switzerland as a revolutionary agitator. War service then helped to make him more respectable, and when he resumed his politico-journalistic career in 1919 he was seen as a man with a future.
Soon, however, he performed a blatant volte-face, moving from Left to Right and setting up the Fascist movement, which threatened his former comrades. How much was conviction, how much sheer opportunism, and how much was virtual bribery by the monied and landowning class, is not clear. What is obvious, at least, is that he possessed energy and organisational ability as well as rabble- rousing powers of oratory and persuasion. Leftist agitation and street violence, in any case, had frightened many Italians, particularly middle-class ones. The famous March on Rome followed, though Mussolini himself arrived tamely enough in the capital by train, even if he was backed by thousands of blackshirted followers. The political opposition was divided or paralysed, while the elder politicians intrigued against one another; under pressure, the King, Victor Emmanuel II, made Mussolini prime minister at the age of 39.
Famously, Mussolini made the trains run on time and drained the Pontine Marshes, neither of which was a negligible feat. Trains were enormously important to an economy based heavily on tourism, while archaeology and the Roman imperial past were always among Mussolini's passions.
There were other achievements too, including the taming of the Mafia, but his aspiration to turn the dolce far niente Italians into an industrious, northern-style people never came to much. Neither did he really oust official corruption - or if and when he did, it was quickly replaced by new forms of corruption. Violence and amorality had been endemic in Fascism from the start, and it now stained itself further with a number of political murders and the persecution of ideological opponents. Also, the slump was sweeping Europe, sowing economic misery and undermining the social order.
With so many of his domestic policies either failures or half-failures, Mussolini resorted increasingly to a kind of hollow neo- imperial rhetoric which culminated in his ill-advised invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. At first he had been strongly on his guard against Hitler, fearing a renewal of German expansion. He distrusted the Fuhrer, but when the Anschluss made Austria a part of the German Reich, his cautious policy fell apart. Italy no longer had a protective buffer state between it and Nazi Germany, and in any case Mussolini had alienated Britain and France. So Italy, willy-nilly, became Hitler's ally, with results too familiar to need spelling out here.
In spite of much flag-waving propaganda, the mass of Italians probably never really wanted to fight in the second World War. The poor performance of their armies in north Africa and elsewhere soon made Italy a junior partner in the Axis, and she suffered the miseries of invasion and civil war before Mussolini and his mistress, Claretta Petacci - trying to flee to neutral Switzerland - were captured by Communist partisans and riddled with bullets. Accounts of these executions, or assassinations, are confused and contradictory - did they die together, or separately? To the end, Mussolini professed loyalty to his tough, shrewd, uncultured wife, Rachele, and through all his infidelities he had maintained the façade of being a good family man.
Bosworth's portrait of the dictator seems scrupulously factual and detailed, and the can of worms which was Continental politics in the 1930s becomes more comprehensible through his account. Yet Mussolini as a personality does not quite seem to add up - whether this is due to a blurring of the portrait, or to something essential missing in the man himself, I cannot say. In his way, he was an intellectual, who had mastered political dialectics in his years as a Marxist, and some of his writings are by no means contemptible. He was also a patron of the arts and at least one of his mistresses, Margherita Sarfatti, was a formidable bluestocking and art pundit. Mussolini, then, was no mere gutter demagogue, but nevertheless he mirrored the mass brutality of his era and even went beyond it. It does not seem possible at this stage to rehabilitate him, nor does this book ever attempt seriously to do so.
Brian Fallon is an author and critic. His book, Imogen Stuart, Sculptor, is published by Four Courts Press