The Pope and Mussolini (7 page)

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, Socialists denounced it as the work of warmongering imperialists and capitalists happy to use the proletariat as their cannon fodder. The workers of the world were to unite, not to butcher one another in the name of God or country. But to his comrades’ surprise, two months after the war began, Mussolini published an article questioning the wisdom of Italian neutrality. Pacifism was not in his character, and he chafed at the thought of Italy standing by and simply watching as the rest of Europe waged war.
Whether he thought he could persuade his fellow Socialists to follow his lead is unclear. If he did, he soon found out how mistaken he was: within a month he was not only forced out of
Avanti!
but expelled from the party.

Over the next years, in what his erstwhile comrades considered an inexplicable and traitorous transformation, the Socialist leader became the Socialists’ worst enemy. He kept the revolutionary’s disdain for parliamentary democracy and fascination with the possibilities of violent action. But he jettisoned much of the rest of Marxist ideology. The chaos surrounding the end of the Great War, he realized, had created a void, and he meant to fill it. He had always been committed, above all, to himself and to a belief in his own ability to rise to the top. Now he began to see a new path that could allow him to realize those dreams.

Four years earlier, in 1910, Mussolini had had a child, Edda, with his hometown lover, Rachele Guidi, who would later become his wife. They lived at the time in a two-room, literally flea-ridden apartment in Forlì. Such, however, was Benito’s love life that for decades rumors spread that Edda’s mother was not Rachele. Edda would later write with some irritation of the widespread gossip that her mother was really Angelica Balabanoff, a Russian Jewish socialist (and later secretary of the Third Communist International) who had settled in Italy and become one of Mussolini’s more significant lovers and political mentors. “Knowing my mother,” wrote Edda in her memoirs, “I know very well that she wouldn’t have kept me for five minutes if I had been Balabanoff’s daughter.”
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Born to a poor peasant family, Rachele first met Benito when she was seven and he was substituting for his mother in the local elementary school. Rachele was not much of a student, and in any case her father died when she was only eight and she was sent to work as a maid in Forlì. Although she would later grow rather matronly, as a youth she was attractive, blond, short, slender, and blue-eyed.

Rachele thought Edda was Benito’s first child. But a few months before Edda’s birth, a coffeehouse waitress gave birth to a boy she named Benito. This little Benito died at a young age, but there would
be other illegitimate children, including at least one other Benito.
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One might be forgiven for wondering how Mussolini had any time for his journalistic and political career as he juggled several love affairs. His women could hardly have been more different. In 1913 he had a baby with another Russian Jew whom he had met a few years earlier, although he never recognized the child.
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That same year he became enchanted by the unlikely Leda Rafanelli, thirty-two years old and one of the better-known anarchist authors in Milan, distinctive for having embraced Islam some years earlier after spending a few months in Egypt. Benito began sneaking from his office to pay visits to Rafanelli’s incense-filled apartment, where guests sat on the floor. Their tryst lasted until the fall of 1914. Many decades later, as an old woman, Rafanelli published forty letters that the young Mussolini had written to her in those torrid months.
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In November 1915 a second Benito was born, this to another of Mussolini’s lovers, Ida Dalser, a woman who worshipped him. Perhaps in an attempt to ward off Dalser’s increasingly insistent claims that she was his true wife, Mussolini married Rachele. The hurried civil ceremony took place a month after Benito’s birth, despite the fact that Mussolini was a patient in a typhoid ward at the time. When he failed to answer her letters, Dalser got a court order to have his furniture seized. In a spiteful rage, she gathered up his modest collection of tables and chairs in her hotel room and set it all ablaze.
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Back in November 1914, fresh from his ejection as editor of
Avanti!
, Mussolini announced he was starting his own newspaper,
Il Popolo d’Italia
(The Italian People).
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Begun with support from Italian industrialists who would benefit from Italy’s entrance into the war, it would remain his paper for the next three decades.
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Around the same time he started his newspaper, he organized the
Fasci d’azione rivoluzionaria
, revolutionary cells or, as he would describe them, “a free association of subversives,” who supported Italy’s entrance into the war and called for an end to the monarchy.
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They held their first meeting in January 1915, four months before Italy entered the war on the side of Britain and France. Soon Mussolini was
drafted and sent to the front in the mountains of northeastern Italy. On February 23, 1917, his military service was cut short when a mortar he was trying to fire exploded in its tube, killing five of his own soldiers and puncturing his body with shrapnel. Despite surgery, or perhaps because of it, infection set in and a fever raged. But he survived and returned to Milan, where his most important lover and political confidante awaited him.

Born in 1880 to a wealthy Venetian Jewish family, Margherita Sarfatti had studied at home with private tutors. By fourteen, she had learned French, German, and English. She read philosophy, memorized verses from Shelley, studied art criticism, and developed a passion for literature. Attractive and green-eyed, with auburn red hair, at eighteen she married a Jewish lawyer fourteen years her senior.

The newlyweds soon moved to Milan, where Margherita gravitated toward the Socialist Party and began writing cultural articles for its newspaper. She met Mussolini when he arrived in late 1912. What immediately struck her was his eyes. Bright and large, they seemed to move feverishly as he spoke. When she later got to see him in action at a Socialist rally, she marveled at his ability to capture a crowd with pithy eloquence. He was like a legendary hero of old, she thought, who, clad in rusty, dented armor, succeeded time after time in unhorsing the gleaming knights in royal tournaments. He also brought to her mind the fifteenth-century Dominican Savonarola. Mussolini shared with the fiery friar the same “strange fanatical gleam in his eyes and the imperious curve of his nose.”
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They began their affair in 1913. When Mussolini returned from the war in 1917, the two became inseparable.
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In November 1918 Benito’s sister, Edvige, in Milan for the armistice celebrations, was surprised to see he had shaved off his mustache. He wore a good suit with a spotless white high collar and even had a flower in his lapel. He looked, she thought, remarkably clean cut. She guessed he was in love.
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Set against Mussolini’s love life were the brutal upheavals of postwar Italy. In many northern cities, industrial workers seized factories.
The recent Russian revolution was on everyone’s mind, and calls for an end to “bourgeois” democracy and the installation of a workers’ state were bandied about. In the Italian countryside, left-wing peasant leagues struck. Landowners, accustomed to dictating terms to the peasants, now found themselves on the defensive. Hundreds of thousands of veterans were unable to find work. The government was out of funds and paralyzed by political bickering and personal feuds. Socialists were creating something of a state within a state, taking over municipal governments and building labor cooperatives throughout a vast northern swath of the country, from the feet of the Alps in the northwest to the Adriatic Sea in the east.

Mussolini found his natural constituency in the returning veterans, playing on their nationalism, their sense that the country owed them something, and their unwillingness to abandon the kind of camaraderie under arms that they had recently enjoyed. Attacks on war profiteers, defeatists, inept generals, and corrupt politicians proved a heady mix. On March 23, 1919, he convened the first meeting of his fascist movement.

Along with the rest of the establishment, the Church was one of the fascists’ early targets. Mussolini called for seizing the property of religious congregations and ending state subsidies for the Church. In a November 1919 article in
Il Popolo d’Italia
, he invited the pope to leave Rome, and a month later he expressed his hatred for all forms of Christianity.
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The fascists got their first chance to run candidates for parliament that same month, but it proved a great embarrassment.
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In Milan they received under two percent of the vote and failed to elect anyone. Nationally, they elected only one deputy.
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Although his movement was not yet getting many votes, Mussolini was attracting a great deal of police attention. Shortly before the election, the authorities prepared a confidential profile. It portrayed him as physically imposing but syphilitic. The claim that he had contracted syphilis, a common disease at the time, should not be surprising given his many sexual partners. People would whisper about it to the end of
his life, and some would blame it for his later presumed mental decline. But his autopsy would find no sign of the disease.

Mussolini got up late each morning and left for his newspaper office around noon, but he did not return until long after midnight. Emotional and impulsive, the police reported, he also had a sentimental side, which helped explain why so many people found him attractive. Intelligent and astute, he had a knack for sizing up people’s strengths and taking advantage of their weaknesses. A good organizer, able to make quick decisions, he stuck by his friends but long nursed grudges against those who slighted him. Uncommitted to any particular set of convictions, he readily abandoned old ones and took up the new. Most of all he was extremely ambitious, convinced that it was his destiny to shape Italy’s future.
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By early 1920 Mussolini had jettisoned much of the socialist ideology that he had up to that point so loudly declaimed. Realizing that his path to success lay in taking advantage of the chaos in the country, he cast himself as the champion of law and order and national pride.

In the spring of 1920, in the Po Valley, socialist leagues organized an agricultural strike. When the government did nothing to intervene, the local landowners turned to the
fasci
. By autumn, armed fascist bands—wearing their trademark black shirts and black fezzes—were sacking socialist chambers of labor and other left-wing targets. Modern Italy had never known anything like it. While Mussolini presided in a loose way over the network of these fascist marauders, he did not directly organize them, relying on local fascist bosses to do his dirty work. On November 21 one such band invaded Bologna’s city hall, where a newly elected Socialist administration was being sworn in. Ten people died in the resulting battle, and the government suspended the new city administration. The violence spread, as fascist bands attacked left-wing city governments, Socialist headquarters, and union halls.

Presiding over a new movement with little structure, Mussolini struggled to maintain control over his pugnacious political progeny, as the local fascist bosses established strongholds of their own, one to a city. His battle to turn a fractious, locally based series of violent fiefdoms
into a national, top-down, smoothly functioning political organization would consume him for the next years.
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WITH THE GOVERNMENT PARALYZED
, the king dissolved parliament and set new elections for May 15, 1921, only a year and a half after the last round. The resulting campaign took place amid an orgy of fascist violence that engulfed the country’s northern and central regions, along with scattered areas of the South. The bands—furnished with trucks by the agricultural landowners—burned down Socialist clubs and union halls and attacked their leaders.
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In the five weeks preceding the 1921 election, a hundred people were killed and hundreds more injured. But the Socialists kept most of their seats, electing 122, to which could be added the 16 elected by the Communist Party, a Socialist Party faction that had split off earlier that year. The Catholic Popular Party, another object of Fascist attack, gained seats, electing 107 deputies. Mussolini and the Fascists had run in coalition with members of the old conservative elite, most notably with the then prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, who saw the Fascists as the bludgeon he needed to bring the Socialists under control. Together they won a majority, with 275 deputies, including 35 Fascists, led by Mussolini.
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Shortly after the new parliament convened, Mussolini rose to give his first speech. It would prove memorable. Hundreds of millions of Catholics throughout the world looked to Rome as their spiritual home, he said. This was a source of strength that Italy could not ignore. Fascism, he pledged, to the shock of many who knew him, would help bring about the restoration of Christian society. It would build a Catholic state befitting a Catholic nation.
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Mussolini’s surprising embrace of the Church came without any previous consultation with Vatican authorities. The Catholic Popular Party stood in the way of his efforts to portray himself as the country’s best hope for stopping the Socialists. To get the pope to abandon it, he would have to convince him that he could help the Church more than
the Popular Party could. In November the fascist movement formally became the Fascist political party and adopted a new program. Gone was all mention of expropriating Church property and separating church and state.
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