The Pope and Mussolini

by David I. Kertzer

  Born in 1880 to a wealthy Venetian Jewish family, Margherita Sarfatti had studied at home with private tutors. By fourteen, she had learned French, German, and English. She read philosophy, memorized verses from Shelley, studied art criticism, and developed a passion for literature. Attractive and green-eyed, with auburn red hair, at eighteen she married a Jewish lawyer fourteen years her senior.

  The newlyweds soon moved to Milan, where Margherita gravitated toward the Socialist Party and began writing cultural articles for its newspaper. She met Mussolini when he arrived in late 1912. What immediately struck her was his eyes. Bright and large, they seemed to move feverishly as he spoke. When she later got to see him in action at a Socialist rally, she marveled at his ability to capture a crowd with pithy eloquence. He was like a legendary hero of old, she thought, who, clad in rusty, dented armor, succeeded time after time in unhorsing the gleaming knights in royal tournaments. He also brought to her mind the fifteenth-century Dominican Savonarola. Mussolini shared with the fiery friar the same “strange fanatical gleam in his eyes and the imperious curve of his nose.”15

  They began their affair in 1913. When Mussolini returned from the war in 1917, the two became inseparable.16 In November 1918 Benito’s sister, Edvige, in Milan for the armistice celebrations, was surprised to see he had shaved off his mustache. He wore a good suit with a spotless white high collar and even had a flower in his lapel. He looked, she thought, remarkably clean cut. She guessed he was in love.17

  Set against Mussolini’s love life were the brutal upheavals of postwar Italy. In many northern cities, industrial workers seized factories. The recent Russian revolution was on everyone’s mind, and calls for an end to “bourgeois” democracy and the installation of a workers’ state were bandied about. In the Italian countryside, left-wing peasant leagues struck. Landowners, accustomed to dictating terms to the peasants, now found themselves on the defensive. Hundreds of thousands of veterans were unable to find work. The government was out of funds and paralyzed by political bickering and personal feuds. Socialists were creating something of a state within a state, taking over municipal governments and building labor cooperatives throughout a vast northern swath of the country, from the feet of the Alps in the northwest to the Adriatic Sea in the east.

  Mussolini found his natural constituency in the returning veterans, playing on their nationalism, their sense that the country owed them something, and their unwillingness to abandon the kind of camaraderie under arms that they had recently enjoyed. Attacks on war profiteers, defeatists, inept generals, and corrupt politicians proved a heady mix. On March 23, 1919, he convened the first meeting of his fascist movement.

  Along with the rest of the establishment, the Church was one of the fascists’ early targets. Mussolini called for seizing the property of religious congregations and ending state subsidies for the Church. In a November 1919 article in Il Popolo d’Italia, he invited the pope to leave Rome, and a month later he expressed his hatred for all forms of Christianity.18

  The fascists got their first chance to run candidates for parliament that same month, but it proved a great embarrassment.19 In Milan they received under two percent of the vote and failed to elect anyone. Nationally, they elected only one deputy.20

  Although his movement was not yet getting many votes, Mussolini was attracting a great deal of police attention. Shortly before the election, the authorities prepared a confidential profile. It portrayed him as physically imposing but syphilitic. The claim that he had contracted syphilis, a common disease at the time, should not be surprising given his many sexual partners. People would whisper about it to the end of his life, and some would blame it for his later presumed mental decline. But his autopsy would find no sign of the disease.

  Mussolini got up late each morning and left for his newspaper office around noon, but he did not return until long after midnight. Emotional and impulsive, the police reported, he also had a sentimental side, which helped explain why so many people found him attractive. Intelligent and astute, he had a knack for sizing up people’s strengths and taking advantage of their weaknesses. A good organizer, able to make quick decisions, he stuck by his friends but long nursed grudges against those who slighted him. Uncommitted to any particular set of convictions, he readily abandoned old ones and took up the new. Most of all he was extremely ambitious, convinced that it was his destiny to shape Italy’s future.21

  By early 1920 Mussolini had jettisoned much of the socialist ideology that he had up to that point so loudly declaimed. Realizing that his path to success lay in taking advantage of the chaos in the country, he cast himself as the champion of law and order and national pride.

  In the spring of 1920, in the Po Valley, socialist leagues organized an agricultural strike. When the government did nothing to intervene, the local landowners turned to the fasci. By autumn, armed fascist bands—wearing their trademark black shirts and black fezzes—were sacking socialist chambers of labor and other left-wing targets. Modern Italy had never known anything like it. While Mussolini presided in a loose way over the network of these fascist marauders, he did not directly organize them, relying on local fascist bosses to do his dirty work. On November 21 one such band invaded Bologna’s city hall, where a newly elected Socialist administration was being sworn in. Ten people died in the resulting battle, and the government suspended the new city administration. The violence spread, as fascist bands attacked left-wing city governments, Socialist headquarters, and union halls.

  Presiding over a new movement with little structure, Mussolini struggled to maintain control over his pugnacious political progeny, as the local fascist bosses established strongholds of their own, one to a city. His battle to turn a fractious, locally based series of violent fiefdoms into a national, top-down, smoothly functioning political organization would consume him for the next years.22

  WITH THE GOVERNMENT PARALYZED, the king dissolved parliament and set new elections for May 15, 1921, only a year and a half after the last round. The resulting campaign took place amid an orgy of fascist violence that engulfed the country’s northern and central regions, along with scattered areas of the South. The bands—furnished with trucks by the agricultural landowners—burned down Socialist clubs and union halls and attacked their leaders.23

  In the five weeks preceding the 1921 election, a hundred people were killed and hundreds more injured. But the Socialists kept most of their seats, electing 122, to which could be added the 16 elected by the Communist Party, a Socialist Party faction that had split off earlier that year. The Catholic Popular Party, another object of Fascist attack, gained seats, electing 107 deputies. Mussolini and the Fascists had run in coalition with members of the old conservative elite, most notably with the then prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, who saw the Fascists as the bludgeon he needed to bring the Socialists under control. Together they won a majority, with 275 deputies, including 35 Fascists, led by Mussolini.24

  Shortly after the new parliament convened, Mussolini rose to give his first speech. It would prove memorable. Hundreds of millions of Catholics throughout the world looked to Rome as their spiritual home, he said. This was a source of strength that Italy could not ignore. Fascism, he pledged, to the shock of many who knew him, would help bring about the restoration of Christian society. It would build a Catholic state befitting a Catholic nation.25

  Mussolini’s surprising embrace of the Church came without any previous consultation with Vatican authorities. The Catholic Popular Party stood in the way of his efforts to portray himself as the country’s best hope for stopping the Socialists. To get the pope to abandon it, he would have to convince him that he could help the Church more than the Popular Party could. In November the fascist movement formally became the Fascist political party and adopted a new program. Gone was all mention of expropriating Church property and separating church and state.26

  In trying to enlist Vatican support, Mussolini had his carrot—ending the liberal democratic regime and imposing an a
uthoritarian Catholic state—and his stick. Indeed, he literally did have a stick, the dreaded manganello, the wooden truncheon proudly wielded by the Blackshirts. From the Fascists’ perspective, the Popular Party was part of a larger network of Catholic institutions in the countryside that stood in their way. At the local level, this obstruction included Catholic Action groups—groups of Catholic laymen and women engaged in religious activity under ecclesiastical supervision—and various Catholic cooperatives. The squadristi saw all as fair game for their bloody nighttime raids.

  In March 1922 priests from the northern region of Mantua sent a letter to government authorities protesting the Fascist beatings of local priests and Catholic activists. The next month Fascists in Bologna assaulted two Popular Party city councilors. Ratti, who had become pope only a couple of months earlier, was especially incensed to learn that Fascist thugs had sacked the Catholic Action headquarters in his home area of Brianza.27 And in May, in one of many such stories describing Fascist violence, La Civiltà cattolica, Rome’s Jesuit journal, reported that, as a group of boys were leaving a Catholic youth club meeting one evening in Arezzo, a squad of Fascists set upon them with clubs and whips. In the months that followed, the daily Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore romano, carried a steady stream of similar stories of attacks on Popular Party activists, local Catholic clubs, and priests. No mention was made of Mussolini, who kept a studied public distance from the raids.28

  No one better served the role of Fascist stick in dealing with the Church than Roberto Farinacci, boss of Cremona, in northern Italy, another young veteran and former Socialist of the lower middle classes who dominated the early fascist movement. The most fascist of the Fascists—a title he proudly embraced—Farinacci carried a pistol nestled in a garter strapped under his pants. He embodied not only the exuberance, violence, intolerance, and authoritarianism of the movement but also its anticlerical roots. Later, when Mussolini would need to keep the Vatican in line, he could count on Farinacci. Meanwhile Mussolini’s message was clear: he was the only one in the country who could keep violent anticlerics like Farinacci under control.29

  Watching the police stand by as marauding Fascist bands torched their local centers and beat up their leaders, the Socialists decided to act. On July 29 they called a national strike, threatening not to return to work until the government stopped the violence. But the strike boomeranged. Fascist bands burned down union halls and forced strikers back to work. On August 3 the squadristi took over Milan’s city hall. Only the Fascists, Mussolini proclaimed, could prevent Italy from following Russia’s path.30

  With the country in tumult, the government paralyzed, and the police and military showing their sympathies for the Fascists, the new pope and his closest advisers began to question the wisdom of opposing Mussolini’s crusade. Pius XI had never embraced the Popular Party; although it had been founded with the blessing of Benedict, it proudly professed independence from the Vatican. Nor was Pius XI by ideology or temperament enthusiastic about parliamentary government. He believed that Italy needed a strong man to lead it, free from the cacophony of multiparty bickering. If he could be sure Mussolini would work to restore Church influence in Italy, he was not inclined to hold his anticlerical past against him. Along with this cautious hope, however, the pope also harbored a fear: if he were to oppose the Fascists and throw Church support to the Popular Party, might Mussolini unleash the anticlerics of Fascism in a reign of terror against the Church? Behind Mussolini, worried the pope, stood many Farinaccis. Never under any illusion that Mussolini personally embraced Catholic values or cared for anything other than his own aggrandizement, the pope would be willing to consider a pragmatic deal if he could be convinced that Mussolini would deliver on his promises.31

  On October 2, 1922, Cardinal Gasparri, the Vatican secretary of state, sent a circular to all Italian bishops telling them that priests were not to align themselves with any political party. As the Fascists plotted their path to power, the pope began to distance the Church from the Catholic party.

  Matters came to a head later that month. On October 16 Mussolini convened a meeting of heads of the Fascist militias to finalize plans for an insurrection. Fascist squads would occupy government buildings in the major cities of the country while other Fascist forces would gather in different locations for a march on Rome, aimed at seizing the central government ministries.

  Mussolini and the Fascist Quadrumvirate at Naples, October 24, 1922. Front, left to right: Emilio De Bono, Michele Bianchi, Italo Balbo, Benito Mussolini, Cesare De Vecchi.

  (photograph credit 2.1)

  As the man who was to head the new government, Mussolini was to remain in a safe place, able to follow reports from throughout the country and make a dramatic entry to Rome when it had fallen. Four Fascist leaders, Cesare De Vecchi, Italo Balbo, Michele Bianchi, and Emilio De Bono—destined to become the “Quadrumvirate” of Fascist myth—were to lead the march on the capital. The other Fascist bosses would return to their cities and orchestrate the seizure of local government buildings.

  What Mussolini did and where he was in the hours leading up to the uprising remain matters of dispute. In the standard version, which the Fascist regime promulgated, he spent the night of October 27 attending the Milan opera with his wife, trying to lull the government authorities into a false sense of security. In a slight variant of this story, Margherita Sarfatti, not Rachele, accompanied Mussolini to the opera. In a less flattering account, Mussolini holed up in Sarfatti’s summer villa at Lake Como, ready to cross the nearby Swiss border to safety should the insurrection fail.32

  Mussolini could be forgiven if he was a bit distracted at the time, for only a week earlier he had had a new daughter, Elena. He had begun his relationship with her mother, Angela Curti Cucciati, a year earlier, in the midst of his affair with Margherita Sarfatti. Elena would be unusual among his illegitimate children in gaining his deep affection. Years later she would be with him as he awaited his sordid end.33

  Whether or not he was thinking of his new daughter, Mussolini did have last-minute doubts about the assault on Rome, realizing that if the army were ordered to stop his ragtag ruffians, it could easily destroy them. Just a few weeks earlier, one of Italy’s top generals had confidently predicted that at the first shot from the army, “all of fascism will crumble.”34

  Margherita Sarfatti may have talked Mussolini out of his doubts. “Either march or die,” she is rumored to have told him. In any case, it was too late to back down. Fascist squads were already beginning to move in cities throughout northern and central Italy.35

  While the October 28 March on Rome would later become the product of an elaborate Fascist mythology, more significant were the attacks on local government offices that had begun the previous night. In Perugia, the prefect surrendered to the Fascist squads. In Cremona, Farinacci’s squads cut off all electricity to the city and then seized the police station, the prefecture, and other strategic points.36 Elsewhere Fascist squadristi took up their positions surrounding police headquarters, train stations, and telephone centers. Italian soldiers faced off against them but held their fire, awaiting orders from Rome.

  No more than 26,000 men armed with old army rifles, and many carrying no more than a bludgeon, arrived on the outskirts of Rome, their enthusiasm literally dampened by heavy rain. Fascist legend would later claim they numbered 300,000. Facing the disorganized Fascist rowdies were 28,000 Italian troops, their machine guns and armored cars at the ready.

  Prime Minister Luigi Facta, realizing that only military action could stop the Fascist mob, drafted a proclamation of a state of emergency. Troops throughout the country would be ordered to disperse the squadristi and arrest the Fascist leaders. At six A.M. on the twenty-eighth, Facta presented the order to a hastily called cabinet meeting. Following the ministers’ unanimous approval, at 7:50 A.M. prefects throughout the country were notified that a state of emergency was about to be announced. At 8:30 A.M. posters proclaiming the state of emergency began to be
pasted onto the walls of Rome. Arriving at the royal Quirinal Palace just before nine, Facta placed the order in front of the king for his signature. But Victor Emmanuel III refused to sign. Facta was stunned. They had discussed the measure the previous day, and the king had seemed determined to defend Rome from the Fascist assault.37

  The king was a curious character. His grandfather and namesake, Victor Emmanuel II, was the celebrated founder of modern Italy. His Savoyard troops had helped defeat the Austrians in the north and the forces defending the Papal States in the center of the peninsula. For depriving the pope of his lands, Italy’s founding king had been excommunicated. His son, King Umberto I, was assassinated in 1900 by an Italian American anarchist from New Jersey, making Victor Emmanuel III king at age thirty. The object of ridicule for his small stature—the mustachioed monarch barely cleared five feet—he never felt secure as king. Intelligent and well informed, he disliked having to deal with political parties and parliament. Nor did he have any love for the pope or the Vatican. Priests, he thought, served appropriately as chaplains to the king. He found sharing his capital with another man who claimed authority over it to be distasteful.

  As the American journalist Anne McCormick observed, no one in Italy made less trouble than the king, who shunned all publicity, avoided interfering with the government, and appeared in public only when he had no choice. One of the few occasions he showed himself in Rome was for the opening of parliament, which required his presence. McCormick got to see him at one such an occasion in 1921. He arrived in a crystal chariot drawn by white horses with jeweled harnesses, a bevy of buglers leading the way. When he entered the chamber and sat down, he seemed “dwarfed by the size of the throne … and when he kicked away the red velvet footstool … he looked not unlike an unhappy small boy dangling his legs in a chair too big for him.”38