The Pope and Mussolini (8 page)

In trying to enlist Vatican support, Mussolini had his carrot—ending the liberal democratic regime and imposing an authoritarian Catholic state—and his stick. Indeed, he literally did have a stick, the dreaded
manganello
, the wooden truncheon proudly wielded by the Blackshirts. From the Fascists’ perspective, the Popular Party was part of a larger network of Catholic institutions in the countryside that stood in their way. At the local level, this obstruction included Catholic Action groups—groups of Catholic laymen and women engaged in religious activity under ecclesiastical supervision—and various Catholic cooperatives. The
squadristi
saw all as fair game for their bloody nighttime raids.

In March 1922 priests from the northern region of Mantua sent a letter to government authorities protesting the Fascist beatings of local priests and Catholic activists. The next month Fascists in Bologna assaulted two Popular Party city councilors. Ratti, who had become pope only a couple of months earlier, was especially incensed to learn that Fascist thugs had sacked the Catholic Action headquarters in his home area of Brianza.
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And in May, in one of many such stories describing Fascist violence,
La Civiltà cattolica
, Rome’s Jesuit journal, reported that, as a group of boys were leaving a Catholic youth club meeting one evening in Arezzo, a squad of Fascists set upon them with clubs and whips. In the months that followed, the daily Vatican newspaper,
L’Osservatore romano
, carried a steady stream of similar stories of attacks on Popular Party activists, local Catholic clubs, and priests. No mention was made of Mussolini, who kept a studied public distance from the raids.
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No one better served the role of Fascist stick in dealing with the Church than Roberto Farinacci, boss of Cremona, in northern Italy, another young veteran and former Socialist of the lower middle classes who dominated the early fascist movement. The most fascist of the
Fascists—a title he proudly embraced—Farinacci carried a pistol nestled in a garter strapped under his pants. He embodied not only the exuberance, violence, intolerance, and authoritarianism of the movement but also its anticlerical roots. Later, when Mussolini would need to keep the Vatican in line, he could count on Farinacci. Meanwhile Mussolini’s message was clear: he was the only one in the country who could keep violent anticlerics like Farinacci under control.
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Watching the police stand by as marauding Fascist bands torched their local centers and beat up their leaders, the Socialists decided to act. On July 29 they called a national strike, threatening not to return to work until the government stopped the violence. But the strike boomeranged. Fascist bands burned down union halls and forced strikers back to work. On August 3 the
squadristi
took over Milan’s city hall. Only the Fascists, Mussolini proclaimed, could prevent Italy from following Russia’s path.
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With the country in tumult, the government paralyzed, and the police and military showing their sympathies for the Fascists, the new pope and his closest advisers began to question the wisdom of opposing Mussolini’s crusade. Pius XI had never embraced the Popular Party; although it had been founded with the blessing of Benedict, it proudly professed independence from the Vatican. Nor was Pius XI by ideology or temperament enthusiastic about parliamentary government. He believed that Italy needed a strong man to lead it, free from the cacophony of multiparty bickering. If he could be sure Mussolini would work to restore Church influence in Italy, he was not inclined to hold his anticlerical past against him. Along with this cautious hope, however, the pope also harbored a fear: if he were to oppose the Fascists and throw Church support to the Popular Party, might Mussolini unleash the anticlerics of Fascism in a reign of terror against the Church? Behind Mussolini, worried the pope, stood many Farinaccis. Never under any illusion that Mussolini personally embraced Catholic values or cared for anything other than his own aggrandizement, the pope would be willing to consider a pragmatic deal if he could be convinced that Mussolini would deliver on his promises.
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On October 2, 1922, Cardinal Gasparri, the Vatican secretary of state, sent a circular to all Italian bishops telling them that priests were not to align themselves with any political party. As the Fascists plotted their path to power, the pope began to distance the Church from the Catholic party.

Matters came to a head later that month. On October 16 Mussolini convened a meeting of heads of the Fascist militias to finalize plans for an insurrection. Fascist squads would occupy government buildings in the major cities of the country while other Fascist forces would gather in different locations for a march on Rome, aimed at seizing the central government ministries.

Mussolini and the Fascist Quadrumvirate at Naples, October 24, 1922. Front, left to right: Emilio De Bono, Michele Bianchi, Italo Balbo, Benito Mussolini, Cesare De Vecchi
.

(
photograph credit 2.1
)

As the man who was to head the new government, Mussolini was to remain in a safe place, able to follow reports from throughout the country and make a dramatic entry to Rome when it had fallen. Four Fascist leaders, Cesare De Vecchi, Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi, and Emilio De Bono—destined to become the “Quadrumvirate” of Fascist myth—were
to lead the march on the capital. The other Fascist bosses would return to their cities and orchestrate the seizure of local government buildings.

What Mussolini did and where he was in the hours leading up to the uprising remain matters of dispute. In the standard version, which the Fascist regime promulgated, he spent the night of October 27 attending the Milan opera with his wife, trying to lull the government authorities into a false sense of security. In a slight variant of this story, Margherita Sarfatti, not Rachele, accompanied Mussolini to the opera. In a less flattering account, Mussolini holed up in Sarfatti’s summer villa at Lake Como, ready to cross the nearby Swiss border to safety should the insurrection fail.
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Mussolini could be forgiven if he was a bit distracted at the time, for only a week earlier he had had a new daughter, Elena. He had begun his relationship with her mother, Angela Curti Cucciati, a year earlier, in the midst of his affair with Margherita Sarfatti. Elena would be unusual among his illegitimate children in gaining his deep affection. Years later she would be with him as he awaited his sordid end.
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Whether or not he was thinking of his new daughter, Mussolini did have last-minute doubts about the assault on Rome, realizing that if the army were ordered to stop his ragtag ruffians, it could easily destroy them. Just a few weeks earlier, one of Italy’s top generals had confidently predicted that at the first shot from the army, “all of fascism will crumble.”
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Margherita Sarfatti may have talked Mussolini out of his doubts. “Either march or die,” she is rumored to have told him. In any case, it was too late to back down. Fascist squads were already beginning to move in cities throughout northern and central Italy.
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While the October 28 March on Rome would later become the product of an elaborate Fascist mythology, more significant were the attacks on local government offices that had begun the previous night. In Perugia, the prefect surrendered to the Fascist squads. In Cremona, Farinacci’s squads cut off all electricity to the city and then seized the police station, the prefecture, and other strategic points.
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Elsewhere
Fascist
squadristi
took up their positions surrounding police headquarters, train stations, and telephone centers. Italian soldiers faced off against them but held their fire, awaiting orders from Rome.

No more than 26,000 men armed with old army rifles, and many carrying no more than a bludgeon, arrived on the outskirts of Rome, their enthusiasm literally dampened by heavy rain. Fascist legend would later claim they numbered 300,000. Facing the disorganized Fascist rowdies were 28,000 Italian troops, their machine guns and armored cars at the ready.

Prime Minister Luigi Facta, realizing that only military action could stop the Fascist mob, drafted a proclamation of a state of emergency. Troops throughout the country would be ordered to disperse the
squadristi
and arrest the Fascist leaders. At six
A.M.
on the twenty-eighth, Facta presented the order to a hastily called cabinet meeting. Following the ministers’ unanimous approval, at 7:50
A.M.
prefects throughout the country were notified that a state of emergency was about to be announced. At 8:30
A.M.
posters proclaiming the state of emergency began to be pasted onto the walls of Rome. Arriving at the royal Quirinal Palace just before nine, Facta placed the order in front of the king for his signature. But Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign. Facta was stunned. They had discussed the measure the previous day, and the king had seemed determined to defend Rome from the Fascist assault.
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The king was a curious character. His grandfather and namesake, Victor Emmanuel II, was the celebrated founder of modern Italy. His Savoyard troops had helped defeat the Austrians in the north and the forces defending the Papal States in the center of the peninsula. For depriving the pope of his lands, Italy’s founding king had been excommunicated. His son, King Umberto I, was assassinated in 1900 by an Italian American anarchist from New Jersey, making Victor Emmanuel III king at age thirty. The object of ridicule for his small stature—the mustachioed monarch barely cleared five feet—he never felt secure as king. Intelligent and well informed, he disliked having to deal with political parties and parliament. Nor did he have any love for the pope or
the Vatican. Priests, he thought, served appropriately as chaplains to the king. He found sharing his capital with another man who claimed authority over it to be distasteful.

As the American journalist Anne McCormick observed, no one in Italy made less trouble than the king, who shunned all publicity, avoided interfering with the government, and appeared in public only when he had no choice. One of the few occasions he showed himself in Rome was for the opening of parliament, which required his presence. McCormick got to see him at one such an occasion in 1921. He arrived in a crystal chariot drawn by white horses with jeweled harnesses, a bevy of buglers leading the way. When he entered the chamber and sat down, he seemed “dwarfed by the size of the throne … and when he kicked away the red velvet footstool … he looked not unlike an unhappy small boy dangling his legs in a chair too big for him.”
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The king had a strong sense of duty, but he was cautious and fearful. As he pondered his options on the morning of October 28, he worried that battling the Fascists might lead to even greater bloodshed. He knew he could not count on his own popularity, for he entirely lacked either the imperious confidence that might have inspired awe in his subjects or the warmth that might have promoted their goodwill. An inveterate pessimist, he worried that he could not count on the army’s loyalty. He also thought it might be more prudent to have Mussolini in the government rather than fighting it from outside. After years of social unrest, many among the military brass and the heads of industry thought Mussolini was their best bet for putting an end to the Socialist threat and restoring order.
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Humiliated, Facta resigned. The king first tried to name a conservative former prime minister to head the new government and give Mussolini and a few of his Fascist colleagues positions in the cabinet. But with Fascist squads occupying strategic sites in much of central and northern Italy and the king having decided not to send the army into action, Mussolini was in a position to reject the proposal out of hand. Left with little choice, the king capitulated. He invited the Fascist leader to return to Rome and form a government.

Mussolini came down by train from Milan, emerging from his sleeping car in the capital on the morning of the thirtieth. Presenting himself in his black shirt at the royal palace, he is said to have told the king, “Majesty, I come from the battlefield—fortunately bloodless.” Only on their leader’s arrival in Rome were the wet and weary Blackshirts finally allowed to enter the city. They pranced through the streets, singing, chanting, celebrating, and sacking the occasional local Socialist headquarters.

Over the next days, Mussolini put together his cabinet, reserving the two most important positions—minister of internal affairs, in charge of the prefects and the police, and minister of foreign affairs—for himself. The cabinet included two members of the Popular Party, along with three Fascists and an assortment of others from the old Liberal elite. In presenting the king with his slate, he began a complex relationship that was to last over two decades. The urbane monarch would seem to share little with the champion of thuggery and violence, a man who bragged about being “unsocialized.”
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Nor could the king feel comfortable with the rabble-rousing blacksmith’s son who had for years called for ending the monarchy. But he came to respect Mussolini’s drive, his ability to end the country’s chaos, his lack of personal venality, and his dream of restoring Italy’s greatness.
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