The Body of Il Duce Read online

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  1. TOUGH TO ERADICATE

  2. THE OX OF THE NATION

  3. AN UNQUIET GRAVE

  4. MUSSOLINI, DEAR DEPARTED

  5. THE EXECUTIONER

  6. THE QUALITY OF MERCY

  7. THE RETURN OF THE REMAINS

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  There are some experiences, even very abstract or spiritual ones, that are lived only through the body. If the body belongs to another, so does the experience.

  What the bodies of our fathers experienced, our own cannot. We can try to imagine, we can reconstruct and interpret; we can write a history, that is. But the reason history interests us so passionately (and more than any other science) is because the most important element in it irrevocably eludes us.

  —Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio

  Prologue

  No previous event in Italian history comes close to the horror at Piazzale Loreto. Even tribes of cannibals do not visit such atrocities on the dead. We cannot say that the murderers stand for progress; they represent a descent into primitive bestiality.… Nor can we say that the war was the cause of their ferocity, since the lynch mob of Piazzale Loreto never saw the trenches. These are the shirkers, the deserters, the boys too young to have gone to war.

  STRANGE AS IT may seem, these lines are not a news report from Milan at the end of April 1945, when the Resistance and the Allies had just liberated the city from the Germans. This is not a crowd driven wild by the suffering and privations of World War II; the victims are not Benito Mussolini and other Fascist Party bosses; the lynch mob is not a group of partisans. No, the events in question took place earlier, in June 1920, during the great wave of strikes and political unrest known as the biennio rosso, the “red years” of 1919–20. The dead person was an anonymous Carabinieri officer, Giuseppe Ugolini, who just happened to be crossing Milan’s Piazzale Loreto. The perpetrators were Socialist and anarchist militants who had grown violent after a long general strike, infuriated by the government’s repressive response. Benito Mussolini did play a role, but not as the victim. The editor of the Fascist daily Il Popolo d’Italia, Mussolini was the writer, the source of the commentary.

  The conjunction is remarkable, a rare find for a historian: an editorial written by Mussolini himself (accomplished journalist that he was) on the tortured fate that awaited him twenty-five years later at the very same piazza. The connection is pure coincidence, of course; Mussolini wrote these lines just as he was preparing to put the fasci, the Fascist combat groups he controlled, at Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti’s disposition to squelch the threat of a pro-Bolshevik revolt. His piece in Il Popolo d’Italia thus properly belongs to the study of the origins of the Fascist regime, not to the history of Il Duce’s dead body.1 And yet his “tribes of cannibals” editorial is as good as any place to begin such a history, if only because Mussolini’s words underscore—with all the intensity of pure chance—the intrinsically tragic dimension of his life. A man unaware he is passing judgment, twenty-five years in advance, on the precise and terrible circumstances of his own demise: is this not the stuff of tragedy?

  In Mussolini’s writings there are other premonitions of what he once called his “grotesque and sublime” destiny as a public figure who would be both widely loved and despised.2 “I would have to be extremely disingenuous to ask to be left in peace after my death,” he wrote, for “there can be no peace at the gravesides of those who lead the great transformations we call revolutions.”3 Yet, lest coincidence lead us astray, a reminder: that Benito Mussolini died a violent death at the hands of Communist partisans outside the gates of a villa near Lake Como was not the mark of predestination. Nor was the violence visited on his corpse, the way his body was strung up in view before the people of Milan. This does not mean, however, that we should ignore Mussolini’s past when trying to understand his postmortem life. Out of that past comes the historical logic of his death, the restless fate of his corpse in the early postwar years, and the impact his body—his dead body—would exert on Italian life and the Italian imagination.

  It was Mussolini himself who first structured his life story under the double aegis of life and death—or even more extravagantly, of death and resurrection. From his earliest experiences as a soldier in the trenches of the Great War, Mussolini cast himself in a large public role, in the sense that this particular soldier was a prominent personage, a leader in the movement calling for Italy to enter the war on the side of the Allies. But he was public also in the sense that he represented the common man, because he was risking his life just like the humblest foot soldier. When he was gravely wounded, Mussolini skillfully used his convalescence as a propaganda tool, suggesting a kind of imaginary descent into the realm of the dead. His subsequent recovery—seen as an act of duty to those who had fallen in battle—earned him the eternal gratitude of bereaved mothers and widows. Mussolini had arisen from the inferno of the battlefields by passing the highest test—he had shed blood. In his struggle to give Italians a better future, Il Duce had risked dying even before he was born.

  The prehistory of Il Duce’s corpse must begin with World War I for another reason as well: after the victory, the bodies of the wounded and the dead dominated all political discussion surrounding the Great War. As editor of Il Popolo d’Italia Mussolini was quick to occupy this ground; as early as December 1917 he identified the war wounded as the vanguard of the mass of war veterans who would make up a postwar “trench-ocracy.” When the guns finally fell silent, the celebration of the rite of the Unknown Soldier suggested how large a role the body had come to play in postwar European politics. In Italy this emphasis was the result of Fascism’s decision to build its legitimacy and its political platform on the tragedy of the Great War, drawing from blood already spilled the mandate to spill new blood. Mussolini emerged from the trenches bearing the stigmata of the fallen, brought back to life by the will of the nation. But with him also came a vocabulary and an armory of violence that would provide the pillars of a new civil religion: physical aggression against opponents, the destruction of their meeting places, and murder as a legitimate political weapon. Mussolini’s opponents similarly employed religious symbolism, using terms like Calvary, resurrection, holocaust, and transcendence. Life, violence, and the sacred became tightly interwoven in Italy after World War I.

  Thus Mussolini’s body assumed political significance even before the rise of Il Duce and his seizure of power, in October 1922. For many Fascist sympathizers, especially survivors of the battlefield, Mussolini’s flesh and blood symbolized the just cause they had fought for and promised victory to a generation that was ready to join ranks in a military Fascist party. Not all of Mussolini’s supporters felt this way: Giuseppe Bottai, a veteran of the Arditi, the elite combat unit formed during the Great War, wanted to separate Fascism from its embodiment in the party leader. But the writer Curzio Malaparte was surely closer to mainstream Fascist opinion when he advocated militancy by calling on his leaders: “Oh, Mussolini, you old hard ass, when are you going to kick up some dust?”4 Mussolini’s opponents also attached great importance to his physical self. They were keen to see his body become a corpse; to them, it was a symbol t
hey wanted buried. Thus, after the general elections of October 1919 (a disaster for the Fascists), Socialist militants staged a mock funeral for Mussolini in the streets of Milan. Similarly, a journalist for the Socialist daily Avanti! wrote a macabre satire of a crime story, reporting that “a corpse found in the waters of the Naviglio was identified as that of Benito Mussolini.”5

  Less than five years later, in August 1924, the language of bodies became brutal when a real corpse, that of Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, one of Mussolini’s fiercest opponents, turned up in the woods outside Rome two months after his disappearance. The violence done to Matteotti’s body was primitive. Long before they beat him to death, the Fascist thugs made it their business to physically abuse the Socialist leader. He was battered repeatedly, the violence eventually culminating in sexual assault. For the Fascists, bringing Matteotti down meant destroying his body. When he was found, a rumor circulated in the Roman press that his genitals had been mutilated. Although it was false, that rumor suggests the depths of the political fight, how brutal it had become. Not a fistfight, not even a wrestling match, politics now demanded crushing, dismembering, even devouring the opponent. “We’ll make sausages of Matteotti’s flesh,” some Fascist militants are said to have chanted after the deputy’s murder—a boast that would echo down the years; a quarter of a century later the rumor that the assassins had sliced off Matteotti’s genitals and displayed them as a victory trophy was still alive.6 Sausages, trophies—Matteotti’s flesh was treated with the same profane disregard that many of Mussolini’s followers had developed in the trenches of the war, where they were forced to eat, drink, and sleep in the slurry of dead bodies. The trenches had forced a cohabitation between survivor and victim that had pushed the veterans’ knowledge of death beyond the obscene and the grotesque.

  In the anti-Fascist imagination, Mussolini’s demise began to take shape the day Matteotti’s body was found. At night, under cover of darkness on the streets of Rome, red paint was applied to pictures of Mussolini, drops of blood trickling down the Fascist leader’s throat. Twenty years before he was removed from office in a coup, Mussolini was already murdered in effigy. The fantasies were not always so violent, but dreams of Mussolini’s death would persist among those Italians who remained in opposition to the Fascist regime—Italians like the country priest from Puglia who spent his evenings working on an ambitious poem laced with references to Erasmus, in which Saint Peter halts Mussolini at the gates of Paradise and condemns him to perdition with “the insults of Earth, Heaven and Hell.”7 The priest set the distinguished anti-Fascist historian Gaetano Salvemini to reflecting on the epochal significance of Matteotti’s murder. Whether Mussolini was directly responsible for Matteotti’s death or not, Salvemini thought, the murder was clearly going to haunt him for the rest of his days. “There are two dead here, Matteotti and Mussolini,” wrote Ugo Ojetti, one of the most perceptive journalists of the time, “and Italy is divided between those who mourn the one and those who mourn the other.”8

  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.”9 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.

  * * *

  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.”10

  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.11 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.”12

  * * *

  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.