On 14 June 1934, Hitler and Mussolini met for the first time, in Venice. Mussolini was in full fascist uniform, complete with boots, spurs and a dagger; Hitler was in a yellow raincoat and looked, said Mussolini, like ‘a plumber in a mackintosh’. The meeting was not a success. Hitler irritated Mussolini by talking on and on in German and dismissing the modernist art at the Biennale as degenerate. Mussolini annoyed Hitler by making a speech saying that they had agreed to preserve an independent Austria as a buffer between their two countries, and that if necessary Italy would defend Austria by force. When, two days later, Hitler returned to Germany, Mussolini complained that it had been like having a conversation with a record player.
Mussolini, Hitler and the King and Queen of Italy inspecting the troops
Mussolini’s pledges over Austria had no effect on Hitler’s plans. On 25 July, the Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss was murdered by Nazis disguised as Austrian soldiers, as it happened just as his wife and children were arriving to spend a holiday with the Mussolini family. Mussolini moved troops to the Austrian frontier. In the event, no intervention was needed: the revolt was put down and, for the moment, Hitler abandoned his intentions to interfere in Austria. At home and abroad, Mussolini was congratulated for his firm hand. However, he had plans for territorial gains of his own.
Mussolini’s language had always been bellicose. Well over a million young Balilla boys marched with their toy guns to the beat of war. In the Italian Encyclopedia of 1932, Mussolini had written that ‘war alone brings to its highest peak of tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the people who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are subservient.’ Italians, he told the Grand Council, had to be habituated to ‘the sight of blood and the idea of death’. The slogan ‘Credere, obbedire, combattere’ – Believe, obey, fight – was everywhere.
Over the years there had been considerable resistance on the part of the local population to the Italian colonisation of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and it had been dealt with harshly. It was time for further conquest, this time of Abyssinia, on which Mussolini had long had his eye as a country ideal for economic exploitation and one which would link the existing colonies of Italian Eritrea and Italian Somaliland. Neither Britain nor France, Mussolini believed on the basis of past conversations, would oppose him if he attacked Abyssinia, providing he did not infringe on their own colonial interests. And there was another good reason for going to war. For all the large-scale public works, and all his insistence that ‘corporatism’ had brought efficient and profitable state control, Italy’s finances were shaky. An invasion of Abyssinia would distract attention from schemes that were doing little to alleviate Italy’s enduring poverty, and mobilisation would reduce the numbers of unemployed.
In December 1934, there was a skirmish for the possession of wells at Wal Wal, on the ill-defined border between Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia. The Italians demanded compensation, and the Abyssinians turned to the League of Nations to arbitrate. Diplomatic discussions, disagreements, proposals and acrimonious exchanges went on all through the spring and summer of 1935. Winston Churchill and Austen Chamberlain called for sanctions against Italy if she violated the covenant of the League, causing Marinetti to decry British ‘snobismo’, alcoholism, degeneracy, lack of genius and above all ‘their sexual abnormalities’. The crisis deepened. On 3 October 1935, Mussolini ordered the bombing of Addis Ababa and despatched troops into Abyssinia from Eritrea and Somaliland. ‘Workers and fascists,’ he told the crowds assembled in the Piazza Venezia, ‘on your feet! Fill the skies with your shouts! . . . shouts of justice, shouts of victory!’ On 10 October the League threatened to apply economic sanctions, while continuing to negotiate.
Carlo had long been observing the approaching invasion with anger and disbelief. Now that it had come he was everywhere, talking, writing articles, making speeches, trying to mobilise opposition, exhorting people to rise up and protest. ‘For fascism,’ he kept repeating, ‘war is the sole form of politics’; the fascists were ‘reducing the Italians to massacre and ruin’; it was nothing but an attempt to deflect attention from the sorry state of the economy. Any war in Africa had to be opposed ‘today, tomorrow, always’.
A new spy in Paris, Nicola Casavolta, reported to Rome that Carlo was saying ‘We must at all costs rise up, we can’t remain passive.’ Whenever he left his house now, there was a spy behind him. Fifty photographs of him had been handed out among the informers. Spy number 512, Egidio Traina, told Bocchini that Carlo was saying to his friends that ‘all methods to crush the enemy are good’, and that what he feared was that others would defeat the fascists before the Italians rose up to do the job themselves. ‘To us must fall the honour of bringing down [fascism] like a rabid dog. The hour of revolution has sounded.’ When, on 6 October, Carlo made a speech against the war at the Palais de la Mutualité in Paris, there were four spies in the audience, each one of whom sent their own report to Rome. The Italian newspapers, describing him as a ‘rubicund Jewish millionaire’, claimed that he was the ‘most violent enemy of Italy’.
An unnerving incident took place at around this time; Carlo chose to make little of it. One day he received a visit from a young émigré, Giuseppe Zanata, who told him that he had deserted the army rather than go to fight in Abyssinia. A little later he returned with a different story. He told Carlo that the wife of one of the communist exiles in Paris had given him a revolver and some cartridges and instructed him to kill Carlo, telling him that he would receive 15,000 lire if he did so. Under cross-questioning, the young man contradicted himself, and said that he had thrown the revolver into the Seine. But when Carlo insisted on searching him, the revolver was still in his belt. Zanata confessed that OVRA had sent him from Rome, and that instructions for the assassination had in fact come from the Italian vice consul in Paris. Carlo ordered the terrified Zanata to write down his confession and sign it. He then filed it away, but characteristically said nothing.
The Abyssinian campaign was brutal. The Italians used poison gas on civilians, to horrific effect. Abyssinian casualties kept growing, to an estimated 70,000, while the Italians suffered few losses, not least because Abyssinia possessed neither artillery nor an airforce. The delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross described the battle scene as a ‘veritable hell’, in which screaming and moaning women and children were ‘dying like flies’, their faces made unrecognisable by the burning poison gas. On 18 December 1935, Mussolini called for a ‘Day of Faith’ and invited Italians to donate their gold to the war effort. Many thousands of women gave their wedding rings; Pirandello sent his Nobel Prize medal to be melted down. Thirty-five thousand kilos of gold were collected. In England, the Italian fascio raised £18,480 for the war coffers, and declared that there would probably now be shortages – ‘no more gorgonzola’. As one English journalist shrewdly observed, the Italians had become ‘a nation of prisoners, condemned to enthusiasm’.
Carlo’s opposition to the war took on a desperate note. He railed at the League for its pusillanimity and at Britain and France for their secret dealings, warning that ‘this could become one of the determining causes of a new European conflagration’. He had thousands of flyers printed on rice paper urging the Italian soldiers to desert; he planned to distribute them to the troops on their transit ships, but they were seized by French customs. For a while, he almost believed that he could see signs of exhaustion in the Italians and a desire to climb out of the ‘moral humiliation’ in which they now lived. ‘The war in Africa’, he declared, with more hope than belief, ‘will be the tomb of his Excellency.’
He was wrong. The speed of the Italian victory surprised everyone, as did the low number of Italian deaths. Though Mussolini had entered the war with little planning, and no thought of what to do with Abyssinia once the country was conquered, it was over by May 1936. On the 3rd of the month the Italians entered Addis Ababa and the Emperor Haile Selassie fled into exile. Ecstatic crowds in Rome learnt that Italy at las
t had its empire, ‘a fascist empire, an empire of peace, an empire of civilisation and humanity’. Victor Emmanuel III took the title of Emperor of Abyssinia. Mussolini’s prestige had never been higher, even if the cost of the war had been prohibitive, as would that of pacifying and ruling the new colony, and Italy’s range of options had been narrowed, so that it would be driven ever closer into an alliance with Germany. The fascist papers spoke of Mussolini as ‘infallible’, and ‘divine’. Nello, lying low in triumphalist Florence, wondered whether the moment might have come to join Carlo in exile.
For Carlo, the victory was crushing. To Giacomo Antonini, another spy whom he believed to be his friend, he wrote sadly: ‘You know that it is in my nature to see the positive side in every situation. But how not to believe the evidence in this case?’ Sylvia Pankhurst had started a new paper which published reports on the massacres in Ethiopia and the continuing brutality of the fascists in Italy, to which Carlo and Salvemini contributed articles. But for both the League and the anti-fascists, Abyssinia had been a terrible defeat, and when Carlo heard that the League of Nations had officially ended its sanctions against Italy, he felt ‘nausea’.
These were not easy times. The Concentrazione Antifascista, riven by doctrinal differences, was coming apart. The stabilising element provided by Treves and Turati, with their passionate belief in the cause and their moral stature, had disappeared with their deaths. Far from becoming a united movement, the various parties within it had kept up their constant sniping against each other. A new pact of unity in Paris between the exiled socialists and communists was greeted warily by Carlo, who had just had a first encounter with Trotsky which he described as a ‘cordially hostile verbal duel’. Bocchini’s many arrests in Italy had driven more rebels to seek safety in France and these also fed into the sense of scratchy unease that had settled over the Parisian anti-fascists.
Among Carlo’s friends too, schisms had opened up. Lussu, his constant companion for seven years, left to pursue a cure for his lingering TB in the Haute-Savoie, where he had seven ribs removed, largely financed by Carlo. Complaining that Carlo was not sufficiently ‘revolutionary’, he declared that his own real interest in the struggle lay in military actions, of which there were now none. Tarchiani, whose views had always lain some way to the right of Carlo’s, and who was in any case in desperate need of money, drifted off. Carlo was also having disagreements with Don Sturzo over the Church’s collaboration with the fascist regime, and even with Salvemini, who accused him of losing his way, flirting with Marxism and a proletarian revolution, and beginning to sound like a typical Mazzini exile, living on dreams and abstract ideas. And that, said Salvemini, ‘would be a real disaster . . . You are losing your once certain touch. One day a drift to the left, another to the right.’
Meanwhile the Concentrazione, after more ill-tempered meetings, disbanded itself. One of the many spies sent to Paris to report on the exiled community described it as confused, leaderless, bigoted, reduced to seditious talk; the exiles, he said, were a sorry bunch, ‘totally ignored and isolated’. This news was greeted with delight by Mussolini. ‘Not so much concentrazione as dead,’ he noted. ‘Very dead. Putrefied.’ There was also more criticism from Bernard Shaw who, having heard that the International Committee of Writers was opposed to fascism, wrote to tell Sylvia Pankhurst that he wanted nothing to do with it: ‘As against Salvemini, Rosselli and the Liberal parliamentarians, generally I am on the side of Mussolini.’
Carlo and Giustizia e Libertà were now alone, with Carlo in sole command. More than ever propelled into the limelight, he remained buoyant, telling the friends who came together for the anniversary of Matteotti’s death that it was inevitable that he had been assassinated, as Amendola and Gobetti’s deaths had also been inevitable. ‘And, unless we save them, Rossi, Gramsci, Bauer and many other Matteottis’ would die too, ‘all of them by their very natures the opposite of Mussolini’s character and sensibility’. The dictator, he went on, was ‘singularly impotent with men who escape his mental horizons. He therefore suppresses them.’
What Carlo did not know was that the spies were warning Rome that he was now regarded as the ‘main peril’, a man ‘ambitious to excess, cold, calculating, ready to risk when it appeared to him there was even a slender possibility of success’. As one anonymous informer put it: ‘To my mind, it is absolutely necessary to eliminate him.’ In the report in the archives, the last three words have been circled in red.
Characteristically, Carlo did what he always did when under assault. He counter-attacked, sounding optimistic. With the bickering Concentrazione gone, he said, ‘great dreams’ lay ahead. ‘Many people who were slumbering are waking up.’ Writing the editorials himself, he started a new weekly Giustizia e Libertà paper, small enough to be folded in two and put into an envelope, looking much like a page pulled out of a lesson book. He opened its columns to all comers, politicians, historians, economists alike. ‘To you’, he wrote in an article directed at the fascists, ‘the Empire. To us, the nation. To you, decadent Rome; to us a republican, united Risorgimento . . . To you, a totalitarian dictatorship; to us, hope and rebirth. One period has ended. Another is opening.’
At the same time, he pushed the two ideas about which he felt most strongly: European unity in the face of fascism and the Nazis, and the need to entice the young to set up small mobile groups of youthful anti-fascists who had ‘never betrayed’. It was time for fresh action, and to these newcomers, who had been turned into an enormous grey zone, ignorant, indifferent, sceptical, bored, servile, regimented and dulled by all-embracing fascism, he could offer guidance, help and experience. Revolution, he declared, had become not only an economic necessity, but a ‘patriotic duty’, and whoever captured the minds of the young ‘will control tomorrow’. He wanted, he said, to ‘detoxify’ the atmosphere in which they were living, build a bridge between what came before fascism and what would follow, and give them ‘almost a new faith’.
Depressed by seeing a photograph of Italian nuns giving the fascist salute, he had come to believe more strongly than ever that Catholicism was a ‘fatal enemy’ of all liberty, and that only lay people were capable of true progress, a stand that earned him a cold letter from Don Sturzo, who accused him of wanting to create a ‘pagan religion of the state . . . a Bolshevik cult of the anti-God’.
In his new paper he decided to include a literary page, drawing attention to everything in Italy that smacked of revolt. As his model, he chose his cousin Moravia and wrote an article saying that his new book, Le ambizioni sbagliate, had been banned because Mussolini rejected its depiction of young people in Italy disaffected by fascism. Carlo praised Moravia as an authentic and realistic writer. As it happened, the book had not been banned, but Carlo’s article was shown to Ciano and then Mussolini, who decided that it should be, and also got the Gazzetta del Popolo, for which Moravia wrote, to sack him. If Carlo had hoped to win Moravia over to the cause of the anti-fascists, he was disappointed. Moravia wrote a grovelling letter to Mussolini, and, as censorship and soon racial persecution became stronger, resorted to ever more compromises.
In the summer of 1934, the Rossellis moved house again. Though Carlo had speculated successfully on the stock exchange, the anti-fascist cause was eating into his inheritance and the large sunny flat overlooking the Pantheon had become too expensive. They found a smaller one not far from Nenni’s house in Rue Vavin, on the third floor of 79 Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, a long, winding street full of tall buildings, with little shops below and old-fashioned lamps which cast a pleasing yellow glow. Though Carlo was forced to leave his grand piano behind, and mourned the loss of the evening light on the cupola and the vast skies all around, the new flat was bright and Marion papered the children’s bedrooms with flowered patterns and painted the dining room a light biscuit colour. Carlo’s studio was once again entirely lined with books. He told Amelia that the move had done him good, taught him not to become too attached to familiar places. During the move, Marion took
refuge in a hotel near Saint-Sulpice, where she lay in her bed looking out over the gardens of a convent school feeling guilty that she was not helping. But her heart problems were getting worse and she tired quickly. ‘In our life,’ she told Carlo sadly, ‘there is no room for a sick woman.’
For his birthday that autumn, she gave Carlo a weekend suitcase in pigskin. Very early that morning, the three children climbed into his bed, bringing him their presents of marrons glacés, marshmallows and chocolates. Mirtillino had started writing poetry and was taking gym lessons from a Swedish lady who told them that he was as uncoordinated as a puppy. Carlo called the two younger children ‘le bestioline’, the little animals. Aghi now had a mass of curls. Melina’s outbursts of temper exhausted Marion, but the three children played happily in the nearby Jardin du Luxembourg. They spoke Italian at home, French everywhere else, and read Winnie the Pooh and Dr Dolittle in English. And yet, however hard Carlo and Marion tried to shield the children from the surrounding tensions, the household was permanently on edge. Many years later, Mirtillino would write: ‘Ours was a political childhood. Treason, hedging, fellow-travelling, fanatical loyalty to one’s own and hatred to the rest.’
A Bold and Dangerous Family Page 37
