The days of Hitler’s jackal

When Benito Mussolini invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1935, Italians were filled with jingoist pride. The dictator triumphantly announced the conquest of the promised sub-Saharan kingdom. ‘He’s like a god,’ marvelled one Fascist. ‘Like a god?’ returned another. ‘He is a god.’ Mussolini was part demagogue, part buffoon; on occasion he wore a tasselled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the world’s cameras. His cult of imperial Rome considered the handshake fey and unhygienic, so the stiff-armed salute was introduced. As the regime strengthened, the high priests of Fascism hailed Mussolini as ‘divine Caesar’, and called for an embargo on all foreign locutions and non-Latin terms. Thus Italians could no longer take a ferry-boat but had to travel instead by pontone, just as Julius Caesar had done (when he invented mobile bridges).

Behind the classical bombast, however, Italian Fascism relied on bludgeons and intimidation. In this marvellous book, R. J. B. Bosworth does not exonerate the Duce from charges of murder and pro-Nazism. Mussolini’s 23-year dictatorship, he says, was ‘as meretricious as it was vile’. The Fascist party took its name from the martial Roman symbol of authority — an axe bound in rods, or fasces — and used violence to overthrow parliamentary democracy. Early Fascists revered the Italian poet-aviator Gabriel D’Annunzio, whose followers were dubbed ‘legionaries’ to recall ancient Roman greatness. Mussolini delighted in D’Annunzio’s violent contempt for liberalism and was impressed by his balcony ranting and, above all, priapic exploits. (On 12 May 1929, we read in D’Annunzio’s diaries, the poet was straddled by a woman who continued her gyrations so long that he feared for his testicles.)