Il Duce and the Naked Princess

There is a scene in Nixon, the biopic directed by Oliver Stone, recording the former president’s historic trip to China, accompanied by Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State. During an interview with Mao Zedong, Kissinger, whose reputation clearly travelled ahead of him, was pointedly asked how a fat man like him got so many women, rather ironic considering what we now know about the appalling red hypocrite. “Power, Mr Chairman”, he responded, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

I was reminded of this on reading recently about the sexual conquests of a fat, short and bald man – Benito Mussolini. These included Claretta Petacci, almost thirty years younger than Il Duce, loyal enough to join him in death. But now comes a surprise: evidence has been uncovered claiming that his mistresses also included Marie Jose of Piedmont, wife of Umberto II and the last queen of Italy.

There were certainly rumours of a relationship in the 1930s, when the Belgian-born Marie was still the crown princess. Evidence of a kind, I suppose, was provided by Petacci herself, who recorded in her diary that the princess made an attempt to seduce Mussolini, even swimming naked in his presence, which, so he assured his mistress, he found “repulsive.” Yes, sure.

The new evidence, if it can be considered as evidence, is really not that much more substantial. It comes in a letter from Romano, one of Mussolini’s sons, to Antonio Terzi, the former deputy editor of the newspaper Corriere della Sera. Although written forty years ago it was only recently published in an Italian magazine. For some reason it was never used by Terzi, now dead, and only discovered when his own son was searching through his archives. In this Romano writes;

I can in good faith confirm that often in our house the relationship between my father and Maria Jose, both political and romantic, was spoken of, I can tell you with sincerity that my mother was considerably more explicit – between my father and the then princess of Piedmont there was a brief period of intimate relations, which I believe was then called off by my father.

All I can say is that the relationship may indeed have been ‘spoken of’ but this is just another rumour rather than conclusive proof. Besides the suggestion that there was a ‘political relationship,’ along with the romantic, tends to undermine the document’s credibility. Almost alone among the royal family, Marie was always sceptical of both Mussolini and Fascism. During the Second World War she was an important conduit between the Allies and the Axis power, a British diplomat going so far as to describe her as the only member of the royal family with sound political judgement.

Although this letter may enhance still further Mussolini’s reputation as a sexual predator, just it traduces the good name of the late Marie Jose, it adds nothing to our understanding of the man or the times. It may, though, just add a little to our understanding of the political psychology of a country which rather admires leaders with a certain macho reputation. How else does one explain the ability of Silvio Berlusconi to survive sexual scandal after sexual scandal, even so far as a certain Ruby the Heart Stealer? But that’s another story altogether! (Oh, if you must know Google this – Bunga Bunga and the Heart Stealer.)

Thoughts of a Sawdust Caesar

Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s last mistress, murdered alongside him by communist partisans in 1945, has come back to life. Not only that but she is also causing something of a sensation. Extracts from the first volume of her diary are presently being published in Italy, with fresh revelations about her relationship with the dictator, revelations about him as a lover and as a man.

The document was seized by the police in 1950, who kept to a strict seventy year rule on restricting access. Even now the later part, covering the wartime years, will not be publishable for another five years. The diary’s apparently massive and obsessive in attention to detail. I’ve not seen anything of the original but Richard Bosworth, a specialist in modern Italian history, gives a decent synopsis in the current issue of the BBC History Magazine.

I have to say I’ve always felt sorry for Claretta. In herself she was totally inoffensive, and did nothing to deserve her death, or the subsequent desecration of her remains. Her only crime was to remain loyal to Mussolini, a lover almost thirty years her senior. She had to put up with a sexual performance that was not exactly fulfilling or tender, as well as the insecurities of a grumpy old man.

In her diary she records his opinions and his fuming, or his fuming opinions. I was amused by his view of the English, a bunch of pigs, so far as he was concerned, who only “thought with their bums.” How one thinks with one’s rear end I have not the least idea! His opinion here was clearly brought on by a personal sense of inferiority, some slight, perhaps, from those who “…detest anyone who rises from the ranks and imposes himself, anyone exceptional.” Seemingly our only great man was Disraeli, and he was an Italian, as well as being the lover of Queen Victoria!

His opinion of the Spanish was not much better, an indolent race contaminated with Arab blood. He describes Francisco Franco as “an idiot”, though in every way he was a far shrewder man than Il Duce. The French were even worse, infected with syphilis and cursed with a free press. Their only great man was Napoleon and – guess what? – he was an Italian!

After the war the novelist Alberto Moravia, no friend of the Fascists, said of Mussolini that he was not a bad man and that “…if he had a foreign policy as clever as his domestic one, me might still be Duce today.” Yes, he might have lasted if he had been a little more “idiotic”, a little more like Franco. His moves in foreign policy were unbelievably stupid, turning from a blustering bully in his early days to Hitler’s hyena in the later.

There were rare points where he could behave with courage and determination, and here I’m thinking specifically of his actions in 1934 to forestall any German moves against Austria after the murder of Engelbert Dollfuss, the chancellor and a personal ally. But he threw it all away in 1938 by agreeing to the Anschluss, thus overturning, as Bosworth says, Italy’s strategic victory in the First World War.

Claretta records details of his relationship with Hitler, observations which seem to me to emphasise just how delusional Mussolini was. More than that, there are all sorts of rationalisations about anti-Semitic policies adopted under the German example, points where he becomes clownish in an artificial racism that had never previously been part of his character or his outlook.

I think it worth emphasising here that until the late 1930s anti-Semitism was never part of Fascist ideology. Among Mussolini’s previous lovers was Margherita Sarfatti, a Jewish intellectual who had aided him in the early days of the regime. In retrospect, in the light of the new anti-Jewish policy, he tells Claretta that he was repelled by Sarfatti’s body odour, and that she was responsible for one of the only three times in his life when he failed to get an erection!

His overwrought anti-Semitic protests and rationalisations go on and on. Beethoven, whom he once described as his favourite composer, is now absurdly dismissed as “Jewish.” On Easter Monday 1938 Claretta records him as saying that “these pigs of Jews are a people who must be cut to pieces”, that they are natural traitors, “Puah! I detest them.” It’s all so much wind, of course. Looking at this with an eye of an amateur psychologist, it seems to me to proceed from for a deeper sense of unease. Hitler did not talk like this, and Mussolini did not act like Hitler. Even in the worst days of the war Jews were safer in zones controlled by the Italians than almost anywhere else.

The diary confirms so many of the dictator’s insecurities. He was forever fretting over how he would be judged by history, fearing, like his mother and father he, too, would die while still relatively young, fearing for the loyalty of Claretta, who, given the difference in their ages, must eventually “betray” him.

But she did not. Instead she continued to act as his muse, recording even his impotent outbursts against his own family, including a particularly revealing one in the spring of 1938: “I am not a dictator. I am a slave. I’m not even master in my own house…I am stuffed with it all, stuffed by this whole old world. I need a new world that I can make.” Clearly he had ceased to recognise that this was the new world that he had made! There are some things, obviously, that even supermen cannot do.

The Munich Conference, which decided the fate of Czechoslovakia, was Mussolini’s ‘finest hour’, as he liked to pride himself, another measure of the depth of his self-deception. He thought himself the man of the moment, the man who had avoided war, whereas in truth he only had a bit part in a drama scripted by Hitler. A wiser man, a shrewder man, would have been sobered by the aftermath. Mussolini was neither wise nor shrewd.

Thereafter his bluster, his threats against the Jews, his declaration that “I’ll make a massacre just like the Turks did”, were also accompanied by outbursts against Catholicism, a religion that was “dying”, and the French – “completely finished, simply nauseating as a people.” Even his fellow Italians did not escape. Four million of them were contaminated with ‘bad blood’: he “would destroy them all, exterminate them.”

Bosworth asks – unnecessarily, in my estimation- if such statements can be taken as evidence that Mussolini intended to move in a more radical direction, before tentatively dismissing such an idea. It seems obvious to me that are no more than the empty posturing of a frustrated an insecure man, growing ever older, ever less relevant by the day. Claretta, in her loyalty, has ironically never done more to make her lover look like the Sawdust Caesar, and the unhappy man, he truly was.

Life after Death

Ah, the politics of the dead, a subject which reveals so much about the living, whether it be over the fate of Evita in Argentina or Lenin in Russia. But it’s perambulations of the dead Mussolini that gives wonderful insight into the political health of post-war Italy.

After his death, and the display of his corpse in Milan, Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave in Musocco, the municipal cemetery to the north of the city. On Easter Sunday 22 April 1946 his body was located and dug up by Domenico Leccisi and two other neo-Fascists. Making off with their hero, they left a bizarre message on the open grave "Finally, O Duce, you are with us. We will cover you with roses, but the smell of your virtue will overpower the smell of those roses."

On the loose for months-and a cause of great anxiety to the new Italian democracy-the Duce was finally 'recaptured' in August, hiding in a small trunk at the Certosa di Pavia, just outside Milan. Two Franciscan brothers were subsequently charged with concealing the corpse, though it was discovered on further investigation that he had been constantly on the move!

However, the Duce found was just as much of an embarrassment as the Duce lost to the fragile Italian government. This was a subject that divided the nation into mutually hostile camps; and unsure what to do, the authorities held the remains in a kind of political limbo for ten years, before agreeing to allow them to be re-interred at Predappio in Emila, his birth place, after a campaign headed by Leccisi and the Movimento Sociale Italiano. Leccisi, now a fascist deputy, went on to write his autobiography, With Mussolini Before and After Piazzale Loreto.

In the end it was, once again, all down to politics. Adone Zoli, the Prime Minister of the day, contacted Donna Rachelle, the former dictator's widow, to tell her he was returning the remains. He did so for one simple reason: he needed the support of the far-right in parliament, including Leccisi himself.

In Predappio Mussolini's tomb has become something of a fascist Mecca, constantly guarded by grim-faced, black-caped attendants. The whole thing is really quite vulgar, with Fascist kitsch on sale to the hordes of people who come to pay their respects, a source of both embarrassment and income to the left-wing local authorities!