CHAPTER SIX
Planting a Tree
Salvemini’s wish that Mussolini would rapidly destroy himself by his circus-like antics was soon disappointed. The Duce’s initial moves were calm and shrewd. Only five ministries in his first cabinet went to fascists; the other nine were offered to friendly allies. The philosopher Giovanni Gentile, a man with an international reputation, was made minister for education. When Mussolini appeared in parliament on 16 November, boasting that he could well have turned this ‘bleak assembly room into a bivouac for my platoons’, and demanding ‘full powers’ to reform the state, only the communists and socialists opposed him. All five liberal former prime ministers – Giolitti, Salandra, Orlando, Bonomi and Facta – voted with the majority. In the senate, where there were no fascist senators, just twenty-six people voted against.
Mussolini could now govern without having to seek parliamentary approval. Clare Sheridan, the English journalist, sculptor and diarist to whom he gave an interview for the American press soon after his victory, noted that he had effectively browbeaten the deputies into submission, but that as a character he was less impressive than Kemal Atatürk or Lenin, both of whom she had also interviewed. The Times was more approving: here, they said, was a very possible heir to Garibaldi. Even the legendary editor of the Observer, J. L. Garvin, spoke of him as a ‘volcano of a man’.
Settling briskly down to work with what even his enemies agreed was an impressive show of diligence and determination, Mussolini rose very early, exercised fiercely, ate a sparse breakfast and read several Italian and foreign newspapers before arriving in his office at 8 o’clock. Twice a week, he visited the indecisive and feeble Victor Emmanuel in the Quirinale. His previous threat to replace the king with the more energetic and martial Duke d’Aosta was not repeated, his earlier rantings against the monarchy and the Church forgotten.
Having moved the foreign ministry into the Palazzo Chigi, where there was a useful balcony overlooking a square, Mussolini set about making friends on the European stage. Sir Ronald Graham, the British ambassador, came away ‘agreeably surprised and favourably impressed’ from a first meeting. This was a man ‘with whom one could do business’, though he admitted that it was a bit strange that Mussolini drove about the streets of Rome with a lion cub perched at his side. ‘The Italians seem to like this sort of thing.’
In private, even if some colleagues complained that he was humourless, fidgeted constantly and seemed boorish and ill-versed in the niceties of governance, Mussolini could also be charming. He was still a bit gauche, a ‘sheep’ in private conversation, but ‘a lion in a crowd’. The Daily Express of New York compared him favourably to the Ku Klux Klan: both shared, it said, a mission to protect their countries from a decline in morals caused by corruption in the government and the judiciary, and by the presence of ‘inferior races’.
Not everyone was impressed, especially when Mussolini started to travel abroad. At his first foreign meeting, in Lausanne in July 1923 to discuss the Turkish peace treaty, he turned up late, brought a bodyguard of squadristi, and seemed very ill at ease. A British delegate noted that he was a ‘second-rate cinema actor’, an ‘absurd little man not destined to stay in power long’. In London, where he joined international leaders to discuss German reparations for the First World War, thirty Italian immigrant fascists who turned out to greet him at Victoria Station in their black shirts singing ‘Giovinezza’ had to be persuaded to leave their manganelli behind. Privately admitting that he had little patience with compromise or lengthy negotiations, he briskly demanded severity towards Germany. The British, who wanted to be lenient, referred to him as a ‘dangerous rascal’ and ‘possibly slightly off his head’. But these were early days, and Mussolini was learning fast.
At home, his appearances were far surer. They needed to be, as Italy’s main cities remained lawless, with squadristi battling it out in internecine squabbles and continuing to run riot. The ras remained all-powerful. At the end of 1922, in an attempt to curb the power of local thugs and enforce his own central authority, Mussolini had announced that he was turning the squadristi into a national militia, the Milizia Volontaria per la Sicurezza Nazionale (the MVSN), responsible directly to him, to defend the ‘revolution of October 1922’ and to act as a political police force. The MVSN’s leaders would be known as ‘centurions’ and ‘consuls’ and receive good salaries, and its members were to display military discipline and obey the Fascist Party. An amnesty was declared for squadristi previously charged with violent crimes; those who had been wounded in the ‘civil war’ were to receive pensions. He also set up the Grand Council of Fascism, to run alongside and counterbalance the cabinet, in order to formulate policy; to this were appointed senior fascist leaders who had not got ministerial positions.
Mussolini now brought the conservatives, monarchists and nationalists into a ‘marriage of convenience’, fusing the nationalist and fascist parties. He courted the Vatican, denouncing contraception and making swearing in public a crime against the state. In his years as a journalist he had loudly condemned the dangerous practice of censorship, but he now set about controlling and silencing the press. ‘What can save our country now?’ Kuliscioff wrote to Turati. ‘A revolution? a civil war? new elections?’ October 1922 was made the ‘anno primo’, and the Roman salute, an outstretched arm, became the official form of greeting. A fascist court uniform, a hybrid of diplomatic, military and naval dress, was designed. As Lina Waterfield shrewdly observed, Mussolini was enlivening ‘national vanity’. By early 1923, the number of fascists had almost trebled to 780,000.
The socialist leader, Filippo Turati, with his lifelong companion, Anna Kuliscioff
In May, George V and Queen Mary paid a state visit to Italy, travelling in the specially built Royal Saloon train carriage, which was kept in a little hut in Calais; it was hitched to Victor Emmanuel’s royal train at the Italian border. The British royal couple gave Mussolini what he called the ‘Gran Croce dell’ordine del Bagno’, which sounded absurd in Italian. To their embarrassment, they were greeted on their return to Victoria Station by a guard of honour of black-shirted Italian fascists.
Italy’s constitution was intact, and, for the time being, was not being challenged, but Salvemini was not alone in changing his mind: Mussolini was not after all a clown, but fast on his way to becoming a dictator. ‘The right has scored a clamorous triumph,’ Carlo wrote to his mother. ‘An enormous black plague has settled on the body of Italy.’
Fascism quickly spread its tentacles over the fabric of Italian life. The army, the aristocracy, the Church and industry, all were rallying to defend the rights of a usurper. Those who disapproved turned their backs and looked to their private lives; but not Salvemini. From the day of the March on Rome, he adopted a position of absolute moral intransigence towards the fascists; and he never abandoned it. There were to be no deals, no games, no concessions. What had been allowed to happen to Italy was a shameful betrayal and a terrible indictment of Italian intellectuals. In the Circolo di Cultura, wrote Ernesto Rossi later, Salvemini immediately ‘gave us our orders. Our duty was no longer to obey laws, but to disobey them. We had just one goal: to eliminate Mussolini and his accomplices. Violence had to be met with violence. Intentions were useless unless they were accompanied by actions. We were not to concern ourselves with the likelihood of success, but with saving our souls.’ Mussolini had to be proved utterly wrong when he spoke of the ‘putrefying corpse of liberty’. Salvemini’s passion, his total contempt for the paltriness of Roman politics, expressed wittily, brusquely, with touches of a kind of peasant malice, were very attractive to his young disciples. As Rossi said, he was ‘our perfect mentor’.
But he was not an optimistic one. In October, just a few weeks before the March on Rome, Turati, Matteotti and Claudio Treves, all three of them expelled from the Socialist Party, had founded a new party, the United Socialist Party, the PSU. But while wholeheartedly endorsing their views, and personally liking the men themselv
es, Salvemini had little faith in their ability to achieve much. In the Circolo, surrounded by Carlo, Nello, Rossi and Calamandrei, he would say that, much as he hated the fascists, there were times when he hated the opposition even more, for its reasonableness and compromises. ‘The more I think about it,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘the more I am coming to think that Italy is a country which is not worthy to exist, and that it is condemned to decompose, to fall yet again under foreign servitude.’ Carlo, whom the others were beginning to regard as Salvemini’s spiritual son, was of another mind. He was ready for a fight. But he needed to distance himself, if only briefly, from his mentor, telling Rossi that he could no longer tell what was his own thinking and what was Salvemini’s.
First, Carlo needed to complete his two university degrees. In December 1922 he went to Turin to search for a supervisor for his dissertation on economics from among the political philosophers who had made the city their home. Turin, with its sombre, imposing buildings and its vast open piazzas, its long straight streets built on a grid, and its neoclassical and baroque architecture, prided itself on being different from other Italian cities. Having played a decisive role in the unification of the country, its inhabitants regarded themselves as the nation’s moral guides. The Piedmontese values of hard work, honesty and reason, they claimed, had created a city ‘which works and which thinks’. Turin was home to heavy industry, to vast modern factories, to Fiat, to new working-class suburbs encircling the city, and to the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, with its call for a working-class elite dedicated not solely to material well-being but to human dignity. Its inhabitants, who had participated in the most violent and protracted strikes of the biennio rosso, were very outspoken against the industrialists, whose profits were immense and who kept their workers on the breadline. But Turin was also home to a collection of highly articulate liberals, communists, republicans and anarchists, all of them intent on challenging Mussolini. They were gathered around one of the most remarkable figures in the as yet very small world of anti-fascists.
The youthful Piero Gobetti, fierce critic of Mussolini
Carlo had heard a great deal about Piero Gobetti. Born in Turin in 1901, and thus two years younger than Carlo, Gobetti was tall and very thin, with a pale, gentle, oval face, an attractive, sensual mouth, and long, unkempt reddish-brown hair which flopped over his forehead. His sight was poor and he wore glasses; he also smiled a great deal. Indifferent to what he wore and despising all forms of elegance, so that he looked like a scruffy student, Gobetti had bright and penetrating eyes which conveyed both utter certainty and youthful power. People found his uncompromising gaze disconcerting, though no one left his company without feeling that they had met someone truly remarkable. He could be censorious, even a little prudish, but the strength of his lively and inventive character, and the unshakable certainty of his convictions, were magnetic. When he spoke of being a ‘sacerdote di se stesso’, a priest and master of his own conscience, and declared that people with ‘elastic consciences’ were evil, his friends listened. They also listened when he described his ‘inexorable passion for liberty’ and his contempt for the intellectuals who had gone over to the fascists. As a friend put it, Gobetti possessed a ‘democratic aristocracy of values’.
Gobetti was not quite eighteen when he started a monthly magazine called Energie Nuove, aimed at infusing the ‘tired’ cultural life of his ‘rancid and decrepit’ city with fresh ideas. Drawn to the cross-currents of European literature, he would say of himself that he was not a theorist, but an ‘organiser of culture’. By the time Carlo met him, however, Gobetti had abandoned his cultural review, largely as a result of listening to Gramsci on the struggles of the workers in Turin’s immense factories; he had, he would say, grown up, matured, read a great deal. He had taken a degree in the philosophy of law and recently started a new magazine, Rivoluzione Liberale, in which he had begun to alert readers to the dangers of fascism. Unlike Salvemini, he had never believed that fascism would quickly exhaust itself. Fascism, he said, was part of Italy’s ‘autobiography’, an expression of all that was lacking and all that had gone profoundly wrong in its history, and an indictment of the moral weakness of Italians. Youthful, enthusiastic fascism had been made possible precisely because of the authoritarian and elitist way in which the country had been governed since 1870, and because Italy had never had an Enlightenment.
Gobetti was running his magazine from his home in the heart of the old city, where he lived with his parents, and was about to marry Ada Prospero, a young woman no less remarkable than himself, with whom he had learnt Russian, and who also had a degree in the philosophy of law. Ada was nineteen. The two of them looked little older than children.
In Florence, in his cousin Alessandro Levi’s house, Carlo had been introduced to Claudio Treves, the socialist leader and Turati’s closest friend. In Turin, exploring his academic future, he met them both again. Levi considered Turati to be the ‘giant’ of Italian socialism. Everyone loved this soft-hearted, rumpled, quiet man, whom friends compared to ‘a kindly faun’ and who, as a small boy, had helped carry his school banner for Manzoni’s funeral. Turati and Anna Kuliscioff lived on the fourth floor of a building on Piazza del Duomo in Milan, its high windows looking directly on to the cathedral. Their apartment had become the main meeting place for young Marxists and intellectuals from all over Italy. Kuliscioff was now an old lady, her hands twisted by arthritis, her small face heavily lined but smiling. Though she had lived in Italy for over forty years, she still spoke Italian with a foreign inflection; it bore, said a young friend, ‘a quality of velvet’.
Carlo met Gobetti and Ada in their house in Via XX Settembre on his first visit to Turin, together with Carlo Levi, who was studying medicine. Levi had a long, serious face and a mass of dark curly hair; he, too, looked little more than a boy. Another frequent visitor was Giacomo Matteotti, the bold socialist deputy, whose wife Velia had recently given birth to their third child, a daughter called Isabella. Matteotti had already published his first, damning inquiry into fascist violence. Carlo was immediately struck by his seriousness, his obvious lack of egotism or self-aggrandisement. Matteotti exuded energy, he wrote, ‘he never adopted gladiatorial poses and he laughed readily’. What all these new friends were preaching was the need for a new, freer society in which men were neither tyrants nor servants, but took responsibility, courageously, for their own actions. To them all, the austere, implacable Gobetti was fast turning into a myth, reminding his listeners of the young Saint-Just, the eighteenth-century French revolutionary. As Carlo Levi later put it, ‘He seemed to me the most perfect man I had ever met.’
Carlo was not immediately drawn to Gobetti. He found him, he told Amelia, a little irritating; he was put off by his abrasive and dismissive attitude towards the Italian socialists, and his assertion that Mazzini’s views were nebulous and romantic, while Marx’s were ‘realistic and workable’. But when Carlo returned to Turin in February 1923, he was drawn into Gobetti’s inner circle and spent long hours in his house debating the Russian Revolution, liberal British politics and the way that industrialisation and urbanisation could transform not just politics, but how people thought. Gobetti, who refused to be pinned down to any one political credo, described his beliefs as ‘revolutionary liberalism’; he, Ada and their friends were talking of starting a clandestine anti-fascist movement, which they planned to call L’Italia Libera. Soon the tone of Rivoluzione Liberale shifted to one of open hostility towards Mussolini and his despotic and corrupt government; soon, too, Carlo began to contribute articles on the working-class movement and liberal economics, carrying on his disagreements with Gobetti in the pages of the magazine. In the summer of 1923 he published his first outline of what would become his defining political statement, ‘Socialismo Liberale’. Liberty, he said was something that had to be won, and once won, nurtured by people who remained constantly vigilant.
Gobetti’s renown was spreading, finding followers in
Rome, Florence and Milan, where another group of teachers, lawyers and university lecturers had been inspired to start a magazine of their own, Il Caffè. One of these was a level-headed, wary-looking, yet idealistic economist in his late twenties, Riccardo Bauer. Another was the slightly older Ferruccio Parri, a teacher, war hero and journalist, a tall, slender, very pale man with a shock of unruly dark hair.
On 6 February 1923, Gobetti was arrested as he returned from his honeymoon with Ada and charged with subversion, and for ‘plotting against the state’. The house and library were ransacked and papers carried away. Gobetti’s father was also taken briefly into custody. The prison in which they were held was bitterly cold. When Gobetti was released, two weeks later, after influential friends intervened, he started a new publishing venture to which he hoped to attract literary critics, essayists, poets – all of them hostile to fascism. He had no intention of being silenced. Rivoluzione Liberale was no longer an eclectic magazine of culture and ideas: it had become a ‘battle unit’ for a great range of people, some younger, some older, some to the right, some to the left, but who all shared a passionate belief that ethics, politics and culture had to go hand in hand and that they had to be fought for and protected. Carlo was turning into one of its most important voices.
The historian Gaetano Salvemini, ‘Father Bear’, mentor to Carlo and Nello
Under Salvemini’s socratic influence the Circolo di Cultura in Florence was attracting many new members. When they could no longer cram into the Rossellis’ house in Via Giusti, Carlo and Nello decided to use some of the money they received from the Siele shares to rent and furnish rooms on the second floor of a fifteenth-century palazzo at 27 Borgo Santi Apostoli. Carlo took exuberant pleasure in finding chairs and tables, hurrying around Florence in search of books for the library and arranging for subscriptions to ninety Italian, French and English papers and journals, including the New Statesman, the Observer and the Times Educational Supplement.
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 12
