by RICHARD J. EVANS
Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy by Christopher Duggan
Bodley Head, 501 pp, £25.00, November 2012, ISBN 978 1 84792 103 1
The Fascist Party and Popular Opinion in Mussolini’s Italy by Paul Corner
Oxford, 320 pp, £65.00, July 2012, ISBN 978 0 19 873069 9
Shortly after he was forced out of office in November 2011, Italy’s longest serving postwar prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, told the press he was spending his time reading the last letters written by Mussolini to his mistress Clara Petacci. ‘I have to say,’ he confessed, ‘that I see myself in many aspects of those letters.’ In the Duce’s view, according to Berlusconi, Italy was ungovernable. ‘What sort of democracy is this?’ Mussolini had wondered. When a journalist suggested that it might not be entirely accurate to describe Mussolini’s Italy as a democracy, the former prime minister replied: ‘Well, it was a democracy in a minor way.’
The right-wing parties which have dominated Italian politics since the end of the Cold War have consistently rejected the legacy of anti-Fascism represented by the Christian Democrats and the Communists, the two parties that dominated Italian politics from the late 1940s until the early 1990s. Exploiting Italians’ deep frustration at the chaotic instability and corruption of the postwar political system, the New Right has based its appeal on its claim to represent law and order, on the idea of Italy for the Italians, on respect for the Catholic Church and its values and, not least, on financial rectitude and political stability. Neo-fascist and self-styled ‘post-fascist’ political groupings have played a full part in the manoeuvrings and mergers that have characterised Italian politics over the past two decades, moderating their policies and rhetoric where necessary in order to obtain a share in power.
In this situation, serious public criticism of Mussolini has become increasingly rare. His rule, which lasted from 1922 until 1943, is widely portrayed as having been relatively benign. ‘Mussolini,’ Berlusconi told the Spectator in September 2003, ‘never killed anyone.’ If he sent his opponents into internal exile it was to holiday resorts. Politicians like Gianfranco Fini, who began his career in the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI), had no difficulty in attaining high political office under Berlusconi (he was foreign minister for several years). In 1992, Fini declared that Fascism had been ‘part of the history of Italy and the expression of permanent values’. Alessandra Mussolini, the dictator’s granddaughter, after playing a prominent but repeatedly disruptive role in post-fascist politics, became a member of the Italian legislature as part of Berlusconi’s right-wing alliance. In 2008, Gianni Alemanno, the former secretary of the youth wing of the MSI, was elected mayor of Rome on the promise of expelling illegal immigrants from the city. His victory speech was greeted with arms raised in the Fascist salute and chants of ‘Duce! Duce!’ from the crowd.
London Review of Books
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