The Body of Il Duce (17 page)

Just two weeks before the elections, the legend of Mussolini's conversion got a boost when it was recounted in the popular weekly
Oggi
. The article, written by Alberto Giovannini, a reporter who had worked in the Republic of Salò, depicted Il Duce in the edifying guise of a man preparing himself for baptism: “As the years passed, perhaps pressed by the blows of destiny, Mussolini had become a believer.” He held frequent talks, Giovannini said, with Father Eusebio, the Franciscan who headed the Black Brigades' Spiritual Assistance Office, talks during which Mussolini “liked to discuss God at length.” Then, sometime around mid-April 1945, Mussolini asked Father Eusebio to absolve his sins, said Giovannini. Taken by surprise, the priest initially refused, but seeing Mussolini before him with his famous jaw humbly resting on his chest, Father Eusebio relented and raised his hand, repeating the words of the rite, “
Ego te absolvo
…”
8
It was a scene of high repentance, conceded to Mussolini by an undistinguished journalist on the eve of an important election. Before long, Mussolini's “return to God” was postdated by another priest to his imprisonment in 1943 on the island of Ponza. And some years later, in the 1950s, the legend of Mussolini's conversion was revived with the publication of a purported spiritual last testament of Il Duce, dated April 27, 1945, Dongo, on Lake Como.

Even today, a visitor to the Mussolini family tomb in Predappio will be handed a brochure quoting this document in full—a text of some twenty lines. As early as 1946, brief excerpts were published in the Rome weekly
Il Pubblico
. In 1947, it appeared in a neo-Fascist paper in Buenos Aires,
Il Risorgimento,
and in 1951, the document made the rounds at a secret mass celebrated for Mussolini in the Sant'Agostino church in Rome. Then, two years later, Duilio Susmel, the editor of Mussolini's complete works, prompted a public discussion about the veracity of the “spiritual will”; priests, graphologists, historians, and Salò veterans all leaped to the fore to express their opinions. In June 1953, the weekly
Epoca
declared the document an “absolute falsehood,” while Susmel, who also wrote for
Epoca
, maintained that Mussolini had “rejoined himself to God in the moment of his defeat,” quoting the “spiritual will” as evidence of Il Duce's conversion.
9
Since then, the document has generally been considered legitimate by amateur historians while professionals believe it a fake.

In this “spiritual will” Mussolini declared that he could face death reassured by the supreme comfort of religious faith. “I believed in the victory of our military forces as I believe in God, our Lord,” the text reads. Il Duce's faith in the other world had been bolstered by Italy's military losses, because it was in defeat, he thought, that the Italian strength of character and moral grandeur became most visible. “So if today is therefore the last day of my life,” the will says, “I give my forgiveness even to those who abandoned me and have betrayed me.”
10
Thus, from one phony testament to another, the vigorous, living Mussolini had been transformed into the ethereal, dead Mussolini. The good man of Montanelli's title had instead become Mussolini, dear departed.

*   *   *

AMONG THE SURVIVORS
of Fascism's defeat, there was at least one who genuinely converted to Catholicism—the intellectual and ex-minister Giuseppe Bottai. He converted without waiting until the very last minute, having found consolation in the Christian faith in the early 1940s, during intense conversations with a priest, Don Giuseppe De Luca, who was accustomed to dealing with nonbelievers. After Mussolini's unexpected resurrection as head of the Republic of Salò, Bottai, who had withdrawn his support for the dictator in July 1943, risked serious repercussions for his disloyalty. Only the intervention of the Holy See protected him from Mussolini's revenge. But Bottai had no desire to remain hidden in the shadow of Vatican power. In the fall of 1944 he undertook to expiate his sins by enrolling in the French Foreign Legion and going off to fight in France and Germany. For three years after the end of the war, Bottai served as a legionnaire in North Africa, waiting for the right conditions—both judicial and political—to return to Italy. He did not want to go to prison for his past as a high-ranking Fascist, nor did he consider his public career necessarily closed, perhaps the only leading ex-Fascist in that position.

Bottai's diary from his period as a legionnaire suggests the conflicts of a post-Fascist. He expresses pride at having been a Fascist and having consciously obeyed history's command. Yet he registers disapproval of neo-Fascism, which he sees as a sterile imitation of the original model. From his African exile, Bottai reads the news about cemetery plundering and Domenico Leccisi with great indifference. “This neo-Fascism, scratching around between tombs and epitaphs,… it smacks of cadavers and tarnished crowns,” he writes.
11
The ex-Fascist has no intention of repudiating Mussolini, who had been the guiding influence of his youth, his compass in maturity, even the inspiration for his betrayal in 1943, with him playing the role of disillusioned lover. But he refuses to follow the Italian Social Movement in its absurd cult of “Il Duce resurrected,” and few developments on the political scene seem to him more pernicious than the reborn Mussolini.

At the heart of the diary entries lay a criticism Bottai had voiced from the earliest days of the March on Rome and repeated through two decades of Fascism. He believed that the regime was too closely tied to the figure—and thus the mortal existence—of Il Duce. As the cult of Mussolini grew, Bottai had warned of the danger that Fascism would become a theatrical display. In private, Bottai conceded the time-honored anti-Fascist cliché that Il Duce was above all a great actor: in notes from 1940, he wrote that the multiple Mussolinis on offer to the people had turned Il Duce into a politician “of the stage.” Playing the farmer, miner, athlete, soldier, man of the world, or worker, Mussolini was “the great universalist … in the style of an actor.”
12
At the same time, the regime's collapse after Mussolini's ouster in 1943 was yet more proof of the man's charisma. How to imagine, then, a Fascism that did not depend so much on Mussolini? In the monasteries outside Rome where he hid in 1943 and 1944, on the battlefields of Alsace and Lorraine where he fought in 1944–45, in the Maghreb battalions where he took refuge between 1945 and 1948, Bottai mulled over the problem that intense charisma did not translate into stability of power.

Playing the farmer, miner, athlete, soldier, man of the world, or worker, Mussolini was “the great universalist.” (
Istituto Luce
)

Some of the most telling pages of Bottai's diaries were written in Algeria in 1946 and published in 1949 as
Twenty Years and a Day
, a memoir. Bottai thought of the book as notes toward the phenomenology of Fascism “in corpore Mussolini.”
13
Bottai praised that body, “not too large,” that nonetheless conveyed an impression of enormousness; he praised the inexplicable grandeur, “a grandeur beyond the physical, of those limbs,” the eyes “normally sized” that still projected an “immense, limitless” gaze. The voice was “not so powerful” yet vibrant with “infinite echoes.”
14
In more ways than one, the legionnaire Bottai's declaration of love for the deceased Mussolini formed the first chapter in his phenomenology of Fascism. While early anti-Fascist historians of Fascism ignored the extraordinary qualities of the body of Il Duce, Bottai understood perfectly the corporal nature of the Fascist regime.

From 1922, Bottai said, the entire plan for the future society had rested on the shoulders of Mussolini—strong shoulders, but human nonetheless; unlike Atlas, Il Duce was subject to fatigue. The Fascist state had been incarnated in the body of Il Duce, turning the political order upside down. “No longer is the state man writ large,” argued Bottai. “Man is now the state writ small.” But Fascism did not fail because of this; the regime faltered when its theatricality overtook its corporeality, less because Mussolini wanted it so than because the Italian people did. Italians saw Il Duce as a character more than a person and pressed the reluctant regime to take to the stage. The Fascist crowds, said Bottai, had transformed the puppeteer into the puppet. “Alone before the mirror,” Il Duce was “forced to admire himself, to contemplate himself, and to posture.”
15
Mussolini had merely followed a script written by forty million faithful followers. This conclusion that Bottai reached in exile emerges from his diary as hard-earned and sincere. But it is also lenient, for it exonerates both Mussolini and the Italian people from any moral responsibility for Fascism's failure. If everyone was guilty, then no one was guilty.

Formed during his lonely years as a legionnaire, Bottai's interpretation nevertheless mirrored the many other memoirs by ex-Fascists—part autobiography, part amateur history—that crowded the bookstores after the war. One of them was
Roma 1943,
by the journalist Paolo Monelli, a book that, despite its narrative and historical merit, ultimately lacked intellectual honesty. Like Bottai, Monelli blamed Italians for Fascism's focus on the person of Mussolini, for the atrophy of the founding ideals, and for the excessive growth of the physical cult of Il Duce—in sum, for the Fascist revolution's degeneration. He considered “theatricality” a distinctive characteristic not only of Mussolini but of Italians in general and believed Il Duce was a “typical representative of a large part of us.”
16
The love of uniforms, medals, and honorary titles; the tendency to change one's behavior when observed, particularly by a woman; the need to let others know immediately who one was and what one did; the desire to be at the center of things—these were all characteristics Mussolini shared with legions of his followers.

This revised version of what Fascism had been—pantomime—was tempting to many in the first years after the war. But again, the idea that Il Duce had been “sent by destiny to act as our mirror” served as much to absolve Italians of responsibility as to incriminate them.
17
In
Three Unconquered Empires
, a book published in 1946, Aldo Palazzeschi sought to indict all Italians:

“Il Duce” does not exist and never existed; there is only an image that is a mirror in which we must study ourselves. We are the ones who, day after day, gave him those hands and that voice, those eyes and that jaw; “Il Duce” is our creation, flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood. We created him at a moment of vanity, vacuity, and ecstasy. So you must look as carefully at this image as into a mirror; otherwise you will create not a new society but only a new image, vain and foolish. Not a society but the mystification of one.
18

One reviewer, Vittore Branca, certainly no Fascist sympathizer, responded to Palazzeschi's book with unease, asking several tough questions. Could Fascism really be reduced to a play acted by Mussolini and written by the people, his playwright? Was Italian support for Fascism really motivated exclusively by the body of Il Duce—the “massive chest rising above short, spindly legs, the criminal tilt of the eye, the outsize jaw”?
19
Writing in 1946, Branca responded as a veteran of the Resistance, his career as a literature professor still ahead of him. His questions implied another, more subtle, more burning problem: was there really a difference between collective incrimination and general absolution?

“If you read Monelli's
Roma 1943
or Palazzeschi's
Three Unconquered Empires,
you may find them interesting, even amusing,” wrote the novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, one of twentieth-century Italy's most original writers, to a friend in 1946. Gadda, a thoroughgoing misogynist, certainly enjoyed Monelli's allusions to a state of imperial decline in the waning days of Fascism, when Mussolini, at the mercy of Claretta Petacci, permitted national policy to be dictated by the moods and caprices of the “busty, curly-haired brunette (just his type).”
20
And Gadda surely appreciated Palazzeschi's discussion of the “strange itch” that afflicted Italian women in the presence of Il Duce's powerful virility. “Normal” men and women held little interest for these writers, whose sensibility made them scathing toward the presumed greatness of those considered “grand” and gentle toward the “fools,” people who had somehow failed to make the grade or had fallen by the wayside.
21
Unless this mercy for the victims of history is taken into account, it is difficult to understand why Gadda, in his own writing, treated Mussolini as he did.