The Body of Il Duce (2 page)

Much has been said about the circumstances that made Mussolini's political survival possible, and even helped consolidate his power, after Matteotti's assassination. But despite the recent attention of historians, we know less about the ways in which the anti-Fascists expressed their grief at the death of the Socialist deputy. In the first weeks after Matteotti's disappearance, writers and politicians paid homage in strongly religious terms. Matteotti was an apostle. His portrait was passed around like an icon. Filippo Turati, the Socialist Party secretary, turned emphatically to the rhetoric of religion when he spoke in Parliament: “In vain they will have mutilated him (if so they have), in vain subjected him to barbarous insults. In vain his kind, grave face will have been disfigured. Now he is whole again. The miracle of Galilee has come to pass a second time.” The tomb is empty now; the dead man rises, Turati went on. He rises with the face of historical vengeance; he looks past the mere murderers toward the man who ordered his execution. No longer victim, Matteotti is now executioner. “Dying, Giacomo Matteotti has had the better of them.”
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The longer it took to find his corpse, the more charismatic a guide he would become to his followers, Turati predicted.

The anti-Fascists' expressions of grief were uncannily like the rituals accorded Mussolini's body by the neo-Fascists after World War II. No less striking are the parallels between the measures taken by the Fascist regime to inhibit the cult of Matteotti and those used by the republic to block the cult of Mussolini. In each case the aim was to prevent the faithful from building a shrine at the scene of the crime—near the Tiber in Rome, where Matteotti was kidnapped, or by Lake Como, where Mussolini was shot. And with both men, the campaign to obtain a burial site set off a cycle of pilgrimages, police crackdowns, and clashes between Fascists and anti-Fascists. Whether the destination was Matteotti's birthplace of Fratta Polesine in the 1920s or Mussolini's birthplace of Predappio in the 1950s, the dynamic was similar. In each case there was also a plan to steal the corpse and move it, a plan motivated more by political calculations than by compassion for the remains.

All of this will be discussed in detail. But it is important to be aware of the postmortem parallels between Matteotti and Mussolini. In twentieth-century history, Mussolini's was not the only body to be worshipped as a sacred relic. Nor was the Fascist regime alone in trying to impose an oblivion of memory on its adversaries.

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THE DEAD NOT
only drag us down, they also live on. So Turati warned Mussolini, and his warning was taken up in various ways by anti-Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s. The more cultivated among them borrowed a phrase Marx was fond of—
le mort saisit le vif
—to express their hope that the murderer would face the victim's retributive justice. For others, the equation was simple: Mussolini was guilty of killing Matteotti. In any event, the 1924 murder and a famous speech of Mussolini's, delivered in Parliament on January 3, 1925, in which he assumed political responsibility, remained engraved in the collective memory of many as proof of Fascist criminality. Among younger people, especially of the working class, Matteotti's murder generated a rage and grief that led many to an anti-Fascist vocation. The murder also became the stuff of legend: one Roman artist, decades later, would trace his lifelong Communist militancy to the “terrible shock” he experienced while taking a walk in the woods just as Matteotti's body was discovered “with his head hacked off.”
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More radically, the Matteotti crime fueled the anti-Fascist appetite to assassinate Mussolini. From the earliest hours following the Socialist deputy's disappearance, the belief that Mussolini was involved prompted plans to take the dictator's life. A group called the Friends of the People, heavily infiltrated by the police, began to plot. There was a certain amount of naïveté among the conspirators, who variously turned to an astrologer to guide them and then to a mysterious countess who had her own plan to poison Il Duce. In an equally romantic scenario, it was decided that if the attempt on Mussolini's life were to fail, Peppino, Ricciotti, and Sante Garibaldi, grandsons of Giuseppe Garibaldi, one of the founders of modern Italy, would step in and lead a national uprising. Creaky as these old-fashioned intrigues were, they reflected widespread sentiment in the anti-Fascist pockets of Italy, a longing for lost liberties linked to the wish to see Mussolini's end, and a determination to bring it about.

Matteotti's murder remained the driving force behind this passion and commitment. Gaetano Salvemini, a prominent historian, journalist, and former Socialist deputy, became an eager conspirator in Friends of the People. Exiled in 1925 for anti-Fascist activity, this university professor spent his time hunched over the available documents like a medieval monk, determined to prove Mussolini's complicity in the killing. Salvemini, who devoted the greater part of his life to fighting Mussolini's physical and symbolic survival, would be involved in the long odyssey of Il Duce's body as few anti-Fascists were. For Sandro Pertini, Socialist leader and later president of the republic, his relentless struggle against Mussolini began in 1925 when he placed a wreath on a city monument in Savona to honor Matteotti.

Even children were marked by the memory of the Matteotti crime. The young son of a miner in Racalmuto, Sicily, the future writer Leonardo Sciascia, remembered that his aunt, a seamstress, had a picture of the murdered Socialist hidden in a basket among her spools of thread and scraps of cloth. When young Leonardo, then three or four, insisted on taking it out, she warned him darkly never to say a word about the portrait to anyone. Matteotti, she told him, had been ordered murdered by
him
.
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Thereafter, Mussolini's existence was a burning problem for Sciascia. At just ten, he suffered bouts of insomnia after one of the many attempts on Il Duce's life failed. And throughout his life, Sciascia would ponder the fatal nexus of a harsh destiny and the prediction of one: “A man who dies tragically is, at any moment of his life, a man who will die tragically.”
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POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS AND
their symbols do not always evolve in tandem. Formally, the Italian republic was established on January 1, 1948, when Italy's newly minted constitution went into effect. In a broader sense it was born on June 2, 1946, with the referendum in which the majority of Italians voted against the monarchy. But in terms of deep popular sentiment the republic was born on April 29, 1945, when the people of Milan and the partisan brigades came together to celebrate the death of Il Duce. That day the anti-Fascists assigned Mussolini's corpse the tragic job of making a statement about the polis. Strung upside down in front of a gas station in Piazzale Loreto, Mussolini's body declared the victory of the Resistance and announced that the pact between Il Duce and the Italian people was over. Gone were the cult of the superman, the reign of violence, the imperial ambitions, the king's complicity with a provincial upstart. Il Duce's body merits a historical study if only because it was on his corpse that the new Italy pledged itself to a pacific, democratic, republican future.

The founding fathers of the Italian republic were fully aware of the great symbolic value vested in the death of the tyrant. At the same time, the savage scene at Piazzale Loreto immediately became a kind of taboo for the Committee of National Liberation, the organization uniting the Resistance forces. To the extent that Mussolini's battered body bore the horrors of a civil war, it told a tale that was not altogether presentable as a founding myth for the young republic. How to remember Il Duce without making reference to the fact that he had been strung up in a public square? Moreover, what to say about the cheering crowd that stood around his corpse? Was there any difference between the jeering crowd in Piazzale Loreto and the people who had cheered Mussolini for twenty years in Rome's Piazza Venezia? Between Italy of the Crucifixion and Italy of the Hosannah?

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DRAMATICALLY PRESENT IN
the days of the Liberation, Mussolini's corpse was singularly absent in the early years of post-war Italy. In the summer of 1946 the authorities decided to hide the body, once they had reclaimed it from the neo-Fascists who had spirited it out of Milan. Only in 1957 were the mortal remains of Mussolini returned to his family and buried in the family crypt. Between the absolute transparency of the body hanging in the piazza in 1945 and the decadelong blackout following 1946, the contrast was striking. For more than ten years after the dictator was executed, the republic did not feel sufficiently confident to permit a final resting place where Fascist adherents could celebrate their nostalgic rites. Italy's fledgling republican institutions feared a corpse's symbolic power.

With no body at hand, Italians threw themselves into trying to divine the whereabouts of Il Duce's remains, an exercise that left ample trace in the literature of the late 1940s and early 1950s. Imaginative flights of fancy were mixed with the torment of memory, although real self-examination was lacking. Two philosophies—two mutually exclusive approaches, mirror images of each other—grew up around the body of Mussolini. One was secular, unforgiving; the other inclined to Christian pardon for the dictator and his followers. In many ways, Benito Mussolini's life after death reflects the peculiar political life of the Italian republic—torn between intransigence and indulgence, radicalism and opportunism, the obligation of memory and the art of forgetfulness.

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T
OUGH TO
E
RADICATE

For twenty years after Mussolini's March on Rome of October 1922—when thousands of Fascists converged on the capital and propelled their leader to power—the majority of Italians passionately loved Il Duce. Indeed, the mainstay of popular consensus for the Fascist regime was the personal charisma of Mussolini. The fact that King Victor Emanuel III was a mediocre figure both physically and politically allowed Il Duce to occupy the public stage as the vigorous personification of power. It was not the distinguished Savoy king but the son of a blacksmith from Romagna who dominated the reality and imagination of Italy between the wars.

For a tourist visiting the capital, a glimpse of Il Duce on his balcony in Rome's Piazza Venezia was as important, if not more, than a visit to St. Peter's to see the pope. The dictator's tireless motion did the rest, multiplying his appearances in Italy's streets and squares. Crowds gathered along the railway lines where Mussolini's train was expected, hoping to catch sight of the illustrious traveler through the window. “Il Duce is tireless, and the people never tire of seeing him,” one propagandist wrote.
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Most Italians wanted to measure themselves against Il Duce's physical presence and were proud of it. “You are Italy!” shouted one Roman admirer after an attempt on Il Duce's life, a cry immediately taken up by the cheering crowd. Fascist Italy identified Mussolini's bodily self with power, and the people identified physically with their leader. As one caricaturist put it, Il Duce's body was a gigantic “commonplace” of Italian life.
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Common as it was, Mussolini's body was also extraordinary, making any public showing exceptional, an epiphany. So much so that one of the literary conventions of the Fascist period was to describe Il Duce's appearance. The huge cranium, the high curved forehead, the powerful jaws, the protruding nose, the bushy eyebrows, the large dark eyes: both in the size of the features and in the impact of the profile, Mussolini's head warranted the title of supreme ruler. But Il Duce's presence was all the more impressive because he was not only ideal man but flesh and blood. So his Fascist followers were invited to look beyond the mask of power for the human face of the dictator: his deep gaze, his soft voice, his youthful smile. Even the blind could see Il Duce's gentle nature. Carlo Delcroix, blinded in the war and head of the National Association of Injured Veterans, described his leader: “I have never seen Il Duce but I do not believe the harsh descriptions I've heard. Perhaps he shows himself at his most natural to those who cannot see, but I have never perceived that terrible look on his face that artists and writers attribute to him.”
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Attractive and human as it was, Il Duce's body was to be observed only from afar. As scholars of absolute monarchy have made clear, the distance between a ruler and his subjects is a basic element of power. Nevertheless, the story of Mussolini's body (and Hitler's, for that matter) cannot be compared to that of sovereigns by divine right. One of the tenets of royal power in medieval and modern Europe was the dynastic principle, by which the monarchy outlived the mortal king (summed up in the familiar French phrase “The king is dead; long live the king”). In the twentieth century, however, the power of charismatic leaders was based on the uniqueness of the man at the top: after the dictator, the deluge. In the Western tradition the sovereign's physical self was secondary to his political role. In Fascist and Nazi ideology, the leader's authority derived directly from his body.