The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy.(Book review)

• Author: Stove, R.J.
• Position: 155873242
• Pages: 67(6)

THE BODY OF IL DUCE: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy

by Sergio Luzzatto

(trans. Frederika Randall)

(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005)

Hardcover: 258 pages with index

One curious, seldom-noticed interaction between Italian and American political history is the despair at supporters' antics which Mussolini and Warren G. Harding voiced, independently, just months apart. Harding, before Teapot Dome publicly blew up, lamented to Kansas newspaperman William Allen White: "I have no trouble with my enemies ... But my damned friends, my God-damn friends, White, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" Less than a year later, in June 1924, Il Duce complained in analogous terms. Fuming at how junior Fascists had tortured socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti so severely as to induce their victim's fatal heart attack, Mussolini echoed Harding almost to the syllable: "My worst enemies could not have done me as much harm as my friends."

There, however, the similarity between the two leaders' attitudes to their troublemaking confederates finishes. Harding died when few except political insiders realised the full extent of the damage his allies had done. Mussolini enjoyed no such good luck. Not only did the world's press deplore Matteotti's demise, but his fellow Fascists exulted--as they were to do many a time again--in how easily they could manipulate, and frequently flout, their ostensible boss. From the appearance by Fascist Party secretary Roberto Farinacci as legal counsel for Matteotti's chief killer, to the mutual recriminations of supposed Mussolini loyalists during the 1943-1945 Salo regime, an unvarying pattern prevailed: outward fidelity towards Mussolini the symbol, coupled with reckless disregard for the best interests of Mussolini the man. Nor did their disregard cease with the dictator's ignominious death. The Body of Il Duce, by a history professor at the University of Turin, explains in greater detail than any previous English-language source the almost necrophiliac obsession that mesmerised otherwise sane Italians for decades after World War II. This obsession (far from a principally apolitical and adolescent fetishism, such as has always characterised the JFK deification machine) possessed a direct bearing on day-today Italian administrative life. Sergio Luzzatto's study, instead of being a mindless ghoul-fest, chronicles events that changed Europe.

Professor Luzzatto begins with a terrible prefiguring of 1945's events: the 1920 description, by Mussolini himself, of a feral socialist-anarchist mob defiling a policeman's corpse in Milan's Piazzale Loreto, the same venue where he himself would be execrated a quarter of a century later. Sodden with dramatic irony, this outrage--little different in itself from most of the leftist crimes that abounded during Italy's "Red Biennium" of 1919-1920--indicates an aspect of inter-war politics which historians, in their over-intellectualised "Origins of Fascism" tropes, are much too prone to neglect: the sheer physicality of Mediterranean societies' ideological conflict. This physicality could manifest itself as much...