The Body of Il Duce (5 page)

If the police archives are any gauge, Mussolini's prestige survived Italy's entry into the war and well into 1941; even the country's setbacks in France, Greece, and elsewhere failed to damage Il Duce's image as the country's savior: he was seen as fallible only insofar as he was surrounded by mediocre Fascist officials. This perspective was strongest in the center-south of the country, where the war had the least impact; in the industrial north, insults were hurled at Mussolini (“Il Duce is a crackpot”), followed by outright threats. In February 1941, a worker at the Fiat Grandi Motori factory named Alfredo Colombi was heard expressing the following fantasy: “At the end of the war I'm going to put him in a cage and show him off for five lire a head, and I'm sure I'll become a millionaire.”
27
Colombi's boast cost him a five-year sentence in
confino,
the Fascist regime's internal exile in a remote part of Italy. But within a few months men like Alfredo Colombi were multiplying throughout the cities of Italy as it came under heavy bombing. Ten years of Mussolini's rhetoric about Fascist efficiency crumbled under the evidence that the antiaircraft system was woefully unprepared. The supreme commander's uniform seemed to fit him less with every passing day. It is not by chance that Fascist propaganda showed fewer and fewer portraits of Mussolini in his soldierly role.

The final blow came with Italy's heavy losses at the Soviet front. Even the Church began to distance itself from the regime; the clergy, in particular, lent its moral backing to the people rather than to Il Duce. At a time of shortages and suffering, religious sympathy was no longer seen as due the leader once known as the “man of divine Providence.” The plight of Mussolini was of no interest to mothers concerned with their children and grieving for their dead. In a letter to her husband in Germany that was intercepted by the censors, a Ligurian woman wrote: “The king and queen came to inspect the damage in Genoa and the crowd booed them, calling for the other one with the bald head. They say Il Duce has cancer; let us hope that it is true.”
28
In the fall of 1942 there were new rumors that Mussolini was in poor health. This time they contained a modicum of truth, as Il Duce was suffering from gastric problems. Overall, police records from the period show a major reversal in public opinion. Mussolini was seen no longer as bold, honest, and wise but as cowardly, thievish, insane. Perhaps he had syphilis and was still running after Clara Petacci and various actresses and who knew who else?

Mussolini a coward, dishonest, unfaithful—these accusations are worth keeping in mind, since they would stick and reverberate powerfully after Il Duce's fall from grace. In the months that led up to his ouster from the government on July 25, 1943, the Italians' relationship to Il Duce seemed reduced to one long meditation on death. On the streets of Milan, an OVRA informer said, the “death to Mussolini” graffiti were often not even painted over. The name of Milan's department store UPIM was now invoked as a macabre invitation, the letters standing for
“Uniamoci per impiccare Mussolini”
—“Let's get together and hang Mussolini.” In Rome, the police reported, people lining up outside shops to buy food as early as 4:00
A.M.
cursed him and called for his death. Similar wishes were widespread in the country as well. A farm woman from near Cuneo, in Piedmont, wrote to her brother, a soldier, hoping to evade the censor: “To tell the truth, when I'm shifting manure I get so angry about the war that if I had someone here I would stick my pitchfork in his stomach. My dear, I cannot tell you who that someone is, but you understand, don't you?”
29
Farmers in the area were reported as saying, “If only we could kill Mussolini, we would burn him alive.”
30

In the winter of 1942, Gaetano Salvemini was not the only anti-Fascist intellectual exiled in the United States to ponder Mussolini's death.
31
The question tormented Vincenzo Vacirca, an important opponent of the regime. Largely forgotten today, Vacirca was a Socialist deputy at the time of the March on Rome, one of Mussolini's toughest adversaries even before the Matteotti murder, and one of the first to leave the country. Having escaped to America, Vacirca used his energies as a journalist for the New York Italian-language newspaper
Il Nuovo Mondo,
trying to reconcile the various strands of anti-Fascism in the States—the anarchists, the Communists, and the liberal Socialists. He also wrote a book with a prescient title,
Mussolini: The Story of a Corpse,
which he finished in 1934 but was not able to bring out until 1942.

In an epilogue Vacirca sought to explain why he was publishing the book despite its being out of date. He was eager, he said, to tell Americans the truth about Mussolini in the run-up to an Allied landing in Italy—to tell them more than the mixture of fact and fantasy in so many of the books published by English and American journalists during the years of Il Duce's rule. Although he had written the book about “a man who is alive,” Vacirca intended the work as “the autopsy of a moral corpse.” In his most moving chapter, he intertwines the story of Mussolini's live body with the tragic episode of Matteotti's corpse, a dead body that took a long time to be found, “since the corpse of an assassinated man is a terrifying accuser.” It tells us all about the crime: the number of wounds, the weapon used, the degree of premeditation, the torture imposed and on which parts of the body.
32

Nearly twenty years after Matteotti's murder, Vacirca remembered every detail of the collective anguish the Italian people had lived through during the weeks following his disappearance. Every morning forty million Italians woke up and asked themselves whether the body had been found. “Everyone could see it,” he wrote, “and everyone had an obsessive image floating in his dream space.”
33
When the body was discovered, he recalled, Mussolini carefully avoided any public mention of Matteotti, so powerful was the dead man's aura.

From the title of his book on through, Vacirca treated Mussolini as if he were a dead man. This reflected a fundamental difference between his view of the dictatorship and that of his better-known compatriot Gaetano Salvemini, who was also in the United States. As Salvemini saw it, Mussolini would continue to dominate the political scene as long as he was alive. A dictator like Mussolini, Salvemini argued, could not just be deposed and retire to private life like an ordinary president of a democratic republic. Nor could he take refuge abroad because no country would be willing to harbor him. In Salvemini's reasoning, the writing was on the wall: “Mussolini … will remain where he is, or he must be assassinated.”
34
But who, Salvemini continued, would get rid of Il Duce? Only a military coup d'état would remove him, one that would physically eliminate him and dissolve the Fascist Party and other Fascist institutions. Such a coup could obviously occur only if the army commanders were to take the initiative. In his most thoughtful essay of the period, “What to Do with Italy?,” Salvemini wondered if they would.

Then, on July 25, 1943, Mussolini was abruptly removed from office on the king's orders. Il Duce's meekness before the Carabinieri sent by Victor Emanuel III made him seem almost a caricature of himself. The following day, in various cities, he was cursed, mocked, and murdered in effigy. In Rome, busts of him (often made of cheap metal rather than bronze) were tied to the backs of streetcars and dragged along, clattering like empty cans. In the all-too-graphic testimony of novelist Aldo Palazzeschi, young Romans showered portraits of Mussolini with “all that their bold, sturdy bodies could muster” and Il Duce's noble features disappeared under “everything the human body contained in the way of refuse and excrement.”
35
The fury of the crowd was not limited to such abuse. There were cries for a guillotine to be set up in Piazza Venezia, for a military trial to be followed by the cruelest possible execution.

In Milan, the atmosphere was much the same. A column of Alfa Romeo workers headed downtown, dragging a bust of Mussolini. Out came a woman who put two fingers in Il Duce's bronze eyes, spit on the statue, and screamed, “Murderer! This is for my son whom you sent to die in the war.”
36
The scene is all the more striking because it would be repeated by Milanese women two years later in front of Il Duce's actual body. A letter from a Milanese resident tells of another enthusiastic incident: “Everyone was cheering and clapping because they had taken a statue of Mussolini and hanged it.”
37
The iconoclastic fury of the Milanese extended to scurrilous songs like this one: “If on the night Il Duce was conceived / Donna Rosa, illuminated by divine light / Had offered the Predappio blacksmith / Instead of her front her backside / Then someone would have been buggered that night / But not the whole of Italy.”
38
Meanwhile the walls of Milan were covered with graffiti, “some of it actually very clever,” one police officer admitted.
39

Il Duce the fallen as Verrocchio's Colleoni, Venice, December 1944. (
Istituto Luce
)

From the archives come examples of the anti-Fascist fury and homicidal intentions the police had been denouncing for years. “The donkey from Predappio has stopped braying,” read one slogan. “Mussolini has slain the sons of Italy. Long live Matteotti. Matteotti, you are not dead, because the dead are those who are forgotten, while you live on in the minds of all and you will be revenged. Cut off his head,” it continued. Another comment played on the letters of Mussolini's surname:
“Morirai Ucciso Solo Senza Onore Liberando Italia Nostra Independente”
(You will die alone and without honor, liberating our dear independent Italy). Other graffiti referred to the shameful way Il Duce had exited the political stage, without any resistance on his part or that of other Fascist officials: “The hangman has disappeared. Note: We're looking for a pig that's run away from Rome. A large reward for the finder.… All his followers are in the toilet with a bad case of the runs.” Mussolini, one graffiti writer complained, had failed miserably to save his honor: “The scoundrel has disappeared without even the courage to do himself in.” But perhaps the most striking of the slogans are those that refer to Il Duce as if he had died. “He's finally dead,” read one scrawled comment, while another said, “He wanted to be Caesar but he died Vespasiano,” referring to the Roman emperor whose name in Italian is shorthand for public toilet.
40

For half a century, Italian historians, mostly nonacademics, have pondered how Italy went to sleep a Fascist country on July 25, 1943, and awoke an anti-Fascist country the next day. This supposed change of heart is one of postwar Italy's great clichés, reinforced by tales of the saturnalia that took place across the land on July 26. An observer of the events in Rome told of a “well-known actress wearing only her pajamas and a large dose of libido” who was dragged and tossed around by the young men of Via del Tritone.
41
That not all Italians waited for Mussolini's fall before cursing him and calling for his death is a useful corrective to the historical myth. Moreover, the number of participants in the celebrations of July 26 was relatively small. Even in Milan, the anti-Fascist marches were joined by only a few hundred people. Nowhere in Italy could the demonstrations that day be described as mass events. And the large number of participants who were killed (eighty-six dead and more than three hundred injured between July 26 and August 1) suggests how the new government headed by former army chief of staff Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio approached the demonstrations: the marchers were criminals, not average Italians.

“He wanted to be Caesar but he died Vespasiano,” referring to the Roman emperor whose name in Italian is shorthand for “public toilet.” (
Foto Publifoto/Olympia
)