The Body of Il Duce (16 page)

By declining to return the body to the Mussolini family, the Italian government wanted to prevent Il Duce's grave from becoming, for better or worse, a shrine. The authorities did not want the cemetery at Predappio, Mussolini's birthplace, to turn into a pilgrimage destination for neo-Fascists, nor did they want any of the vandalism inflicted on the Musocco cemetery while the body was buried there. The secret resting place did not, however, stop Italians from wondering about the fate of Il Duce's corpse. On the contrary, the fact that nobody knew where the body was stimulated the popular imagination. Italians were free to fantasize about the most likely places the dictator's remains might be hidden. The physical absence of the body guaranteed it would be everywhere, in the imagination.

Mussolini's posthumous legacy was hardly limited to his corpse. The legends of Il Duce's ghostly peregrinations were not the only means through which Italians grappled with his symbolic afterlife. In the early postwar years, Mussolini's posthumous vitality was perpetuated by a great deal of journalism and literature, by no means all banal. Distinguished writers, not just obscure Fascist nostalgics, wrote about the body of Il Duce. Mussolini's life after death went beyond remaindered copies of books by passionate neo-Fascists. It is found in some of the classics of modern Italian literature.

In the first decade of the Italian republic, anti-Fascists preferred not to dwell on the “sad figure” of Mussolini, as they saw it. So the word on Il Duce was left to writers who stood aloof from the ideals of the Resistance. In various genres, at various levels of quality, this literary production was remarkably consistent in what it had to say, since its necrology was informed by ideology.

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LENIN, MUSSOLINI, HITLER, MAO:
when leaders who have had large followings die, posterity asks whether they left a political last will and testament. The question differs depending on whether the death marks the end of a regime, as in Italy and Germany in 1945, or whether the system survives its founder, as in the Soviet Union in 1924 and in China in 1976. In the two Communist systems, the deceased leaders' intentions posed a lively political problem, since the fate of the country rested on how well the candidates for succession were able to interpret them. For the two Fascist regimes, the dictators' last wishes represented more of a symbolic legacy. To Germany, in ruins after the war, Hitler's testament was a melodramatic final assertion of the Nibelungian ties the Führer felt linked him to his people. In Italy, determining the last wishes of Mussolini did not seem very urgent because Il Duce had repeatedly insisted that he would never leave a final testament.

But with the passage of time, many Italians began to wonder whether Il Duce had indeed left any parting wishes. The question had little political weight in the republic born of the Resistance, because Prime Minister De Gasperi showed no interest in courting Mussolini's political heirs, even after the birth of the neo-Fascist Italian Social Movement. The concern with Mussolini's will for the future emerged not from the political arena, but from the collective imagination. Italy of the late 1940s was a country that looked forward to the ethos of consumerism and, at the same time, backward to the rituals of Fascism. Like the characters who live in Italo Calvino's Laudomia, in
Invisible Cities,
early postwar Italians felt the need to turn to the cemetery to find explanations for themselves. Above all, they needed to understand the reasons for their recent Fascist past. But after the trials of Mussolini's body in 1946, there was no cemetery—not even a metaphorical one—where Italians could ask their questions at the tomb of the leader. If conversation with the dead Mussolini was impossible, perhaps the live Duce's last words could provide some enlightenment.

For ten years after Mussolini's death, the debate over the dictator's parting vision—whether this or that document qualified—periodically occupied the popular press. There was one statement, though, that was so evidently an invention that nobody wasted time arguing its legitimacy.
My Good Man Mussolini,
as it was called, was published in 1947 by journalist Indro Montanelli, who in his postliberation novel
Here They Do Not Rest
(1945) had established himself as an able interpreter of post-Fascist sentiment. In 1946 he and writer Leo Longanesi coauthored
Memoirs of Mussolini's Manservant,
in which they imagined the life of Il Duce's doorman in the days when the dictator held court at Palazzo Venezia. This retrospective keyhole view allowed them to show Fascism not as a totalitarian regime but as a bonfire of the vanities in which Mussolini was not a terrible tyrant but merely the most fatuous of Italians. Now, in
My Good Man Mussolini,
Montanelli was ready to speak for Il Duce himself.

My Good Man Mussolini
pretends to be the dying wishes that Il Duce entrusted to a faithful priest at Lake Como and that the priest then passed on to Montanelli in his role as journalist for the
Corriere della Sera
. The hundred-page text was immediately taken up by the popular weeklies. “All of us,” the book's prologue asserts, “have felt the need for a will left by Mussolini.” This was true both of his Fascist defenders, who sought reasons for self-justification, and of anti-Fascists, who looked for new cause to attack the regime. “Well, here it is,” Montanelli proclaims—Mussolini's long-awaited final testament.
1

Montanelli's audacity was matched by that of one other distinguished journalist of the regime, Curzio Malaparte.
2
Montanelli's book and Malaparte's novel
The Skin
—a best seller of higher literary quality, published in 1949—shared the same paradoxical message. In
My Good Man Mussolini,
Il Duce declares that he meant for Italy to lose in World War II because Italians show greatness not in victory but in defeat. In Malaparte's work on defeated Italy, he too depicts the losers as superior to the winners. Among the country's most influential commentators, “young” Montanelli, who was thirty-eight when he published his book, and “old” Malaparte, fifty-one when he published
The Skin,
were united in playing the contrarian. But they also shared a desire to give voice to “Italy's bad conscience,” writing in the service of an ideology that might be called anti-anti-Fascism. Their efforts represented a glossy bourgeois version of the more vulgar, plebeian
qualunquista
protest; they were a rebellion against the ideals of the Resistance and the system's desire to punish those who had served under the Fascists. What were they so guilty of, anyway, Italians who had believed in Il Duce? And what was Mussolini himself so guilty of? Paradoxical, part-serious, theatrical, or
qualunquista
—whatever they intended, with their polemics, the two journalists helped push the ghost of Mussolini onto the new republic's stage.

Leaving Malaparte aside for the moment, let us look at Montanelli's invocation of Mussolini. His short book concentrates all the historical and political arguments that for half a century after the Liberation constituted the anti-Resistance arsenal. Mussolini's defeat on July 25, 1943? The Fascist Grand Council's decision that day to oppose Mussolini was courageous—perhaps the only act of courage against Fascism in the history of the regime. The anti-Fascist celebrations of the following day? They didn't amount to much, says Montanelli-Mussolini. And why should Italians hate Il Duce, anyway? After all, “the worst thing about him was the faces he made.” For over twenty years the Mussolini government was marked by its “mildness,” having only punished a few hundred opponents with internal exile.
3
It was significant that all the victims of the antiregime marches after Mussolini's fall were symbolic—monuments, plaques, busts. In a gentle dictatorship, these were the objects of hate. As for the epilogue of his political career, Montanelli's Mussolini speculates as to what might have become of him had the Nazis not rescued him from his prison at Gran Sasso. Perhaps he would have gone on to be a Hollywood actor (as the great Neapolitan actor and playwright Eduardo De Filippo once said of Il Duce). Perhaps he would have found himself the defendant in a war crimes trial at the United Nations. “More likely, though, the commander of a partisan band, like so many of my officials.”

Montanelli's Mussolini justifies his choice to head the Republic of Salò with the same line of reasoning later used by Salò apologists: he made a personal sacrifice “to save what could be saved in occupied Italy.”
4
He knew the vengeful fury of the Germans and the cruelty they could have unleashed after the monarchy embraced the Allies, and so he had positioned himself as a fender between the Nazis and the Italians. For six hundred interminably long days Il Duce had sought to soften the blows the Wehrmacht and the SS delivered to the nation's body and soul. Like Pétain in Vichy France, Mussolini bowed to the moral law that obliges the true statesman to choose the most difficult option available. He elected to walk the path of death to spare countless fellow citizens the same fate. His decision was all the more tragic, says Montanelli's Mussolini, because he expected to be finished off “by the people's fury.” At the end of April 1945, he left Lake Garda for Milan so that the circle of Fascism would close where it had opened in 1919, so that the city of his defeat would be the same as the city of his victory.

In the concluding pages of Mussolini's “last words,” Montanelli has Il Duce attack the same idol the journalist himself tirelessly attacked over the next decade—the idol of anti-Fascism. Postwar Italy, says Montanelli-Mussolini, can progress only by ending the “melancholy back and forth” of Fascism versus anti-Fascism.
5
Rather than worship at the tattered images of Fascism's political exiles, better to be wary of such heroes because “any choice was preferable to exile.”
6
Italians had no reason to be ashamed of their history in the years before the Resistance. Above all, there was no reason to be ashamed of their past as Fascists; from the start, Fascism served to block the spread of Bolshevism in Europe. If Mussolini was guilty of any crime, Montanelli suggests, it was not that he deployed the Fascist terror but that he declined to deploy it. During the late 1930s, Il Duce had staged an “operetta” while Stalin's henchmen in Italy were busy with full-blown tragedies. Anyone who thought that Italian democracy had begun with the Liberation was mistaken; they had been blinded by the Communists, who had been cleansed of their crimes by the Committee of National Liberation.

Thus the Fascist March on Rome became the logical reaction to the Bolshevik victory in St. Petersburg, the Resistance a cabal of turncoat Fascists, Mussolini at Salò a martyr with stigmata. That is how Montanelli, writing in 1947, outlined the strategy for future revisionists. From the point of view of those under attack, Montanelli's revisionism was all the more insidious because he was no mere neo-Fascist but an influential journalist in the new republic—a top reporter for the
Corriere della Sera
, whose byline appeared frequently in the popular weeklies and the right-wing intellectual magazine
Il Borghese
. Montanelli's widespread success owed much to his ability, as “Italy's bad conscience,” to address the consciences of those Italians who had been Fascists but were no longer and did not want to be made to feel guilty for the past. So
My Good Man Mussolini
, read by a broad audience, probably did greater harm to the anti-Fascist cause than one other, more explicitly Fascist book, published a year later. Read mostly by neo-Fascists,
Mussolini's Political Testament
arguably gave a better representation of Il Duce's last will, had there been one.

Mussolini's Political Testament
had all the characteristics of a religious relic, being a photographic reproduction of the typed copy of Il Duce's final interview, which he gave to a reporter for a small paper in Piedmont, the
Popolo d'Alessandria
. The text was “dictated, corrected, and signed by Him,” according to the book's title page. Apart from anything else, the book reveals how vacuous an article from the Salò era might look in postwar republican Italy. The author, Gian Gaetano Cabella, a journalist possessed of dubious professional abilities, seems to have coped with the challenge of meeting Il Duce one on one by oscillating between Fascist clichés and homoerotic appreciation. Mussolini's voice had the “metallic tones” of the human machine Italians had come to admire at Piazza Venezia. His “white hand, a little plump,” lay so close to Cabella's that the journalist had to “exercise restraint not to caress it.”
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As for the interview itself, Mussolini embraces the role of ox of the nation, the leader who is ready to sacrifice himself for the good of the Italian people. Countering the infamous charges of the anti-Fascist press of the center-south—that Mussolini was a puppet of the Germans, that the only thing that moves Il Duce anymore is his mistress, that the dictator has his bags packed, ready to flee—the interviewer reveals a Mussolini who says he would never budge from his “place of work,” where whoever won the struggle would inevitably find him.

It is impossible not to read these words (from April 22, 1945, three days before the Liberation) against the reality of what happened the following week, when Mussolini, wearing a German greatcoat, took flight with Claretta Petacci at his side and Bank of Italy gold in his suitcase. But Cabella saw no reason, after the war, to let that embarrassment stop him from publishing the interview. Just three years after the events, when
Mussolini's Political Testament
appeared in 1948, the memory of Il Duce's shameful flight was too vivid for the book to appeal to any readers who were not neo-Fascists. The image of a leader who stood, irremovable, awaiting the arrival of the Allies and the Resistance forces, could only have seemed a lie to the great majority of Italians. More convincing—especially in 1948, when the electoral campaign was marked by priestly interventions against the Communists and on behalf of the Catholic party, the Christian Democrats—was the story that Mussolini had converted to Catholicism in extremis. The rumor complemented the image of Il Duce in his final days as the victim of circumstance, a man dragged along by other high-ranking Fascists rather than a leader, resigned rather than resolute, peace-loving rather than bellicose—in short, a humble Christian rather than a pillar of Fascism.