In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an ax bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff armed Roman salute after the handshake was deemed fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasseled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras.
For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him. He was on amiable terms with King George V, moreover, who in 1923 publicly congratulated the dictator on his ‘wise leadership’. Mussolini was seen by many British politicians as a potential ally against Hitler’s Germany. To anyone disgruntled at all by parliamentary democracy, leftist poets, Jazz Age flappers and imagined Judeo-Bolshevik threats, fascism offered a ‘virile’ political alternative.
As the cult of ducismo strengthened, the high priests of fascism hailed Mussolini as a ‘divine Caesar’ figure, and adopted the passo romano, the Latin goose-step, for military parades. A mood of jingoist triumphalism swept Italy after Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935 and incorporated Haile Selassie’s vanquished kingdom into a vast new East African empire, along with Eritrea and Somaliland.
With his rapid Africa conquests, Mussolini won the hypnotized consent of the majority. To his legion female admirers he radiated a manful potency and near-animal allure. He had relations with literally hundreds of women, perhaps ‘as many as 400’ according to one Italian historian. They were brusquely mauled by him under a large ministerial desk or on mattress-like cushions installed for the purpose.
Sex lay at the heart of the fascist cult of physical daring or ardimento. (‘My great lord and beautiful Duce’, a Bologna housewife typically wrote to Mussolini. ‘I have done nothing but trouble you’ — she had sent him a total of 848 letters.) Towards the end of his 23-year dictatorship, facing defeat, Mussolini became addicted to a German-synthesized aphrodisiac pill trademarked Hormovin. Popping this prototype Viagra was in some ways a political act, one that served to prolong the myth of the supremo who never flagged.
Beneath the vainglorious sexual antics and balcony ranting was a man who earnestly dreamed of a second Roman empire for Italy, and dominion over all the Mediterranean. How this pontiff-like Caesar-divinity brought Italy to such a state of ruination yet bedazzled so much of Europe is the subject of this impressive new history, Mussolini’s War.
John Gooch, a Leeds University professor, views Mussolini as deep down a solitary figure, who ‘never believed in experts unless they agreed with him’. Alone and aloof at the head of fascist government, he surrounded himself with reliably complaisant functionaries, who displayed a dog-like obedience and devotion to his warmongering aims.
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