Not Simply an Understudy
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Not Simply an Understudy Mussolini: A Biography by Jasper Ridley St. Martin s. 430 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News con-espondent A new biography of Mussolini?...
...Two wartime years in the Army gave Mussolini standing as a patriot who could storm against pacifist and Socialist "traitors...
...In so many respects, the child was father to the man...
...For 21 years, the King received his Prime Minister in audience twice a week...
...It appears that he was a good soldier, not active in politics, although once he completed his service it was clear that he remained a fire-eating, anticlerical, antipatriotic international Socialist...
...This heightened his appeal to conservatives who feared Bolshevism and appreciated the tight controls he imposed on union labor...
...Why, you might ask, recount the life of a man who today seems little more than a footnote in the story of the 20th century, one recalled by people who remember him at all as a burlesque understudy of Adolf Hitler...
...The enigmatic Mussolini was a teetotaler who lived simply, a fornicator who loved his wife and their children...
...All his life he wanted to be on the winning side, though he got it badly wrong in 1940...
...Before long he wavered...
...He played his waiting game well...
...The Council members pressing the move had expected instant, sharp reprisal...
...Next came Italy's support of Generalissimo Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War...
...Two years of penury and menial labor followed, yet he made his mark on the Socialist scene...
...In some cases they were given refuge in Italy...
...Within six years he dismissed the Parliament, established a dictatorship and was dubbed the Duce (leader...
...There was indeed...
...Twenty minutes later he was bundled into an ambulance and driven away...
...Well after midnight everyone went home...
...His goon squads beat and murdered opposition figures, torched and wrecked Socialist and Communist offices and printing presses...
...He profited then and later from the European governments' belief that his regime was preferable to the Communism or anarchy they thought would follow its removal...
...But, at the very end, the Duce ordered the soldiers of his "Socialist Republic" to help the Nazis round up Jews...
...They were forbidden to join the Army, employ more than 100 workers or own more than 50 hectares of land...
...Ringleader Dino Grandi was armed with a couple of hand grenades...
...The Fascist State," he wrote, "is a wish for power and domination...
...The King played along, and was made King of Albania and Emperor of Ethiopia...
...He resigned as editor of the Socialist Party daily Avanti!, started // Popolo d 'Italia, financed mainly by France, and joined the pro-Allied Fasci d'Azione Rivoluzionaria Intervenista...
...The League condemned the aggression and ordered economic sanctions against Italy, but—as Mussolini had accurately calculated—not those that would have ended the invasion: an oil embargo and closing the Suez Canal...
...He loved Verdi's music and learned to play the violin, his favorite relaxation throughout his life...
...The partnership with Hitler in this undertaking led to the "Pact of Steel," and to Mussolini's fading into insignificance...
...After Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1932 showed the League of Nations was no obstacle, he decided to invade Ethiopia, using aerial bombardment and mustard gas against the barefoot enemy...
...He ordered all Jews who had taken up residence in Italy, Libya or the Dodecanese Islands since January 1, 1919, to leave within six months...
...He was a major figure in his turbulent time, making history and holding a mirror up to Europe's fatal hypocrisies until they were all swept away by the storm he helped raise...
...King Victor Emmanuel III did not attempt to turn them back...
...The Duce, who made himself dictator, who crushed the Mafia and would tolerate no competing power center, had long ago made his peace with the King and the Army...
...Despite his rabble-rousing from the balcony, he could be subdued and immensely charming in private...
...Those permitted to stay could not become teachers or be admitted to any school or university...
...When he wanted to start a family with his teenage sweetheart, Rachele, the two refused any civil or religious marriage ceremony...
...In other words, the real Mussolini was an opportunist...
...A year later he was jailed briefly for urging a crowd to bomb a railroad line and stop the movement of troops in the war that took Libya from Turkey in 1911...
...He wrote articles for Socialist publications and joined in strikes so energetically that he was threatened with deportation...
...He offered Mussolini a dukedom and turned over command of the Armed Forces to him when he took Italy into World War II...
...This was logical for him as a nationalist and is what gave him legitimacy...
...Croatian Jews escaped the murderous Ustashe militia by fleeing to the Italian zone of occupation...
...He wanted an empire...
...In October 1914, he decided the War was just and democratic...
...Ridley, whose Mussolini lacks the depth and spirit of previous biographies, deals with this remarkable episode only briefly and in a tone curiously flat...
...The story of the Italian dictator's fall from power is one of the oddest in an era so rich in melodrama...
...For one thing, several wealthy Jewishbusinessmen were financing his Fascist Party...
...But as his relations with Hitler developed he changed again, albeit not at Hitler's prodding...
...But many exceptions were allowed and his definition of who was a Jew was less extensive than the Nazis' When Italy entered World War II the Duce proclaimed Jews enemy aliens, confiscated their radios, froze their bank accounts, and had many interned in camps or sent to do forced labor...
...He let the motion carry, as if in a dream, and waved aside a loyalist's suggestion that the rebels be arrested...
...The following year his Black Shirts marched on Rome...
...Mussolini, in the chair, knew a motion would be made to depose him and return supreme authority to the King...
...At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Mussolini agitated against Italy's participation either on the side of Germany and Austria, to which it was tied by the Triple Alliance, or on the side of Britain, France and Russia...
...In 1938 Mussolini declared that Italians were an Aryan race and Jews were not Italians...
...Mussolini was also comfortable with brutality...
...Winston Churchill expressed his admiration, sharing the Duce's opposition to Communism...
...In 1921, amid Italy's postwar political chaos, Mussolini was elected to Parliament and his National Fascist Party was officially launched...
...His schoolmasters recognized his rhetorical talent, choosing him at the age of 17 to address a memorial meeting after the death of Giuseppe Verdi...
...The same combination marked his foreign adventures...
...Ridley explains: "The friends whom he most admired in the Socialist Party, the most vigorous and determined elements, were in favor of war and he felt that they would soon succeed in winning the support of the majority of the people...
...The Führer apparently never pressed the point, believing it was in the fundamental nature of every Fascist and nationalist movement to be anti-Semitic...
...He obtained her parents' acquiescence by going to their house, revolver in hand, and threatening, if refused, to kill Rachele and commit suicide...
...He read extensively in revolutionary literature, became fluent in French and German, and engaged in a number of love affairs he later catalogued in his autobiography...
...In the morning, Mussolini asked to see the King and argued that the previous night's proceedings had no constitutional validity...
...Mussolini was told he was through...
...He graduated from secondary school with distinction but, writes Jasper Ridley, "During his last two years at school he became interested in sex...
...Through his luckless involvement with Hitler during World War II and his own failed gambles in Albania and Greece, as well as his inability to hold Libya and to ward off the Allied landing in Sicily, he lost the support of his people and control of his own Fascist Party...
...Benito went his own way, though— traveling to Switzerland to meet the Swiss and foreign Socialists and anarchists who had found a haven there...
...Was there more to him than that...
...In 1945 Hitler died in his bunker, and Mussolini's corpse hung by the heels in Milan beside the body of his last mistress...
...He rode the two horses, savagery and respectability, to power...
...As a youth he was coarse, tough and highly intelligent, impressing his teachers especially in history, geography and Italian literature...
...On July 25, 1943, it was over...
...The partners remained faithful to each other, but for both there was no escaping Götterdämmerung...
...After the Bolshevik Revolution succeeded in Russia, he denounced it as the product of international "Jewish vengeance against Christianity...
...But nothing happened...
...He also wanted to escape Italian military service...
...He knew that Hitler was sending Jews to gas chambers yet voiced no objection...
...By then he was editor of a local newspaper, Class Struggle...
...Returning to Italy, Mussolini entered the Army, aware that he would otherwise have to spend his life in exile...
...Hitler saved him, having him plucked from a mountaintop in central Italy...
...Benito Mussolini started out as a revolutionary Socialist, indoctrinated in class warfare by his anarchist father, a village blacksmith in northern Italy...
...for another, he had a Jewish mistress at the time...
...In his 1922 March on Rome he demonstrated the additional political talents of bluff, timing and stage management...
...On July 24, 1943, the Grand Council of Fascism, the party's highest body, assembled to consider the disastrous state of the nation...
...instead, he named Mussolini Prime Minister...
...His anti-Jewish line was submerged...
...He pursued the pretty girls he met in the street and frequented the brothels in Forlimpopoli...
...On the other hand, there were no deportations from Italy, nor from the corner of France occupied by Italian troops...
...He wanted to be with them, to be popular with the masses, to gain the applause of the crowd...
Vol. 81 • December 1998 • No. 14
