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Episode: Benito Mussolini Part 1: Italy’s Fascist Godfather

Author: NOISER
Duration: 01:05:26

Episode Shownotes

We begin at the end… in 1945, with a pile of bodies dumped in Milan then strung up for all to see. Among them, the most powerful man in Italy. One of the most significant figures in modern history. How did it come to this? In this episode, we scroll

back to follow the start of Benito Mussolini’s extraordinary rise. From humble origins as the son of a blacksmith and a schoolteacher, Il Duce will emerge as an incendiary journalist and activist. And before long, the onetime vagrant and draft-dodger will be on his way to the front line of World War One… A Noiser production, written by Jeff Dawson. Many thanks to Giulia Albanese, Joshua Arthurs, John Foot, Nicholas O’Shaughnessy, Lisa Pine, Helen Roche. This is Part 1 of 7. Get every episode of Real Dictators a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:01 Speaker_07
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00:00:37 Speaker_01
It's April the 29th, 1945. A Sunday, just before dawn. We're in Milan, northern Italy, in the Piazzale Loretto, a large square next to the railway station. In the early hours it's quiet.

00:00:56 Speaker_01
In the dying days of the war, after years of destruction, eerily so. Through the empty streets comes the splutter of a two-stroke engine. It's a truck, an old removals lorry. It grinds into the piazza and reverses across the cobbles.

00:01:18 Speaker_01
In the half-light, men leap out. They're partisans, members of the Italian resistance. They flip down the tailboard and heave out their load. The lorry drives off again. Silence resumes. Later, as Milan wakes, a crowd begins to gather.

00:01:46 Speaker_01
Rumors are spreading like wildfire about this mysterious manifestation. In the spring sunshine, folks are coming out to sea. By 9 a.m., the Piazzale Loretto plays host to an excitable crowd.

00:02:04 Speaker_01
In normal times, the sight of dead bodies dumped in a heap would be sickening. But there is nothing normal about Italy. These cadavers are those of the partisan's enemy. And one in particular. He is a big prize. The scalp of all scalps.

00:02:30 Speaker_01
It seems at first to defy the imagination. Dressed in plain jacket and military trousers, the man is not instantly recognisable. His famously bold features now grey, scrunched and battered.

00:02:45 Speaker_01
His signature shaven head is patchy, the once bear-like physique reduced. But he is, almost unbelievably, one Benito Mussolini, il Duce, the formerly unassailable Iron Man dictator of Italy.

00:03:05 Speaker_01
His limbs are entwined with those of his young mistress, Clara Petacci. Around them lie a tangle of corpses, assorted loyalists and henchmen. They were apprehended in an Alpine pass, it is whispered, trying to flee to Switzerland.

00:03:23 Speaker_01
Their fate, a summary execution, to be riddled with bullets from a submachine gun. with some still unable to comprehend the enormity of this moment. A second opinion is sought. A captured Mussolini sidekick is dragged forward.

00:03:44 Speaker_01
His name is Achilles Starace. As Starace nods his head, yes, it's them, people surge forward to punch, kick and brutalize the corpses, Mussolini's in particular. In an act of communal catharsis, stones and rotten fruit are hurled.

00:04:07 Speaker_01
Some whack away with sticks. Others urinate on Mussolini's miserable remains. Someone stamps his head so hard the skull crunches. Shots ring out. Five. People duck. An elderly woman dressed in black brandishes a revolver.

00:04:30 Speaker_01
She has pumped yet more bullets into Ilduch's body. For my five dead sons, she wails. With the situation getting out of hand, the fire brigade are summoned. They spray hoses to keep back the crowd. On the corner is a standard oil filling station.

00:04:52 Speaker_01
Its canopy is supported by an iron girder. Ankles trussed with ropes, the principal corpses are hoisted to hang from it, there for all to see, raised just above their reach. Starace has played his part. He too is murdered and added to the gibbet.

00:05:17 Speaker_01
And there they swing, upside down, strung like pigs in a butcher's shop, arms dangling, blood dripping down to pool on the pavement. Patachi's dress flops down over her face, revealing her silk underwear.

00:05:35 Speaker_01
A female onlooker climbs up to tuck the skirt between her legs, preserving her modesty. All day long, people come to view this gruesome tableau. Children are lifted on shoulders to witness history.

00:05:57 Speaker_01
For over 20 years, Benito Mussolini was the most powerful man in Italy, wildly popular at home and, for a while at least, revered abroad. He was the capo di capo, the godfather of a brand new totalitarian creed, fascism.

00:06:19 Speaker_01
It was meant to ensure his absolute power At his peak, Il Duce was a virile performative icon, the first rock star leader, addressing crowds of adoring thousands. He seemed invincible, superhuman, godlike. Mussolini was Italy.

00:06:43 Speaker_01
No one in their wildest dreams could imagine it would come to this. Say Mussolini today and there are certain preconceptions. He dragged ailing Italy into the modern world, establishing the country as a major power.

00:07:05 Speaker_01
In a land famously indifferent to matters temporal, he even made the trains run on time. But that was then.

00:07:14 Speaker_01
In hitching his star to the Nazi war wagon, Mussolini is regarded as something of a buffoon, a clown, the hapless bumbling foil to straight man Hitler.

00:07:30 Speaker_05
The way he was portrayed in satirical journalism has really shaped popular opinion even today. There's this idea that, oh, well, Mussolini, he's a bit of a comic opera character. He's melodramatic.

00:07:48 Speaker_05
This is the dictator that the Italians deserve because they're all over-emotional as well.

00:07:56 Speaker_06
Mussolini's an important historical figure because, of course, he was the ruler of a fascist dictatorship. He was also the first fascist. The reason why he has many imitators and advocates even today among neo-fascists.

00:08:12 Speaker_03
He is absolutely central to the 20th century. Mussolini invented fascism. So without Italy, you don't get fascism. Without Mussolini, you don't get fascism.

00:08:21 Speaker_00
And Hitler? Hitler, in fact, borrows it. He plagiarizes it. It's the sorcerer's apprentice. Mussolini is a sorcerer. The Mussolini of popular imagination is the kind of person who might kick you to death in a slimy little dark alley in jackboots.

00:08:41 Speaker_00
And this is the frightening thing. He was both the jackbooted thug and supreme intellectual. Mussolini is a huge enigma.

00:08:51 Speaker_01
Mussolini was, according to his colleague Fernando Mezzosoma, by turn shrewd and innocent, brutal and gentle, vindictive and forgiving, great and petty. He is the most complicated and contradictory man I have ever known. He cannot be explained.

00:09:14 Speaker_01
Winston Churchill, who had once chorused his approval, came to a more definite view, calling him the one man and one man alone who plunged Italy into tragedy.

00:09:27 Speaker_01
Eleven years before Hitler, fourteen before Franco, it was Benito Mussolini who provided the dictatorial blueprint.

00:09:38 Speaker_02
I'd say, in our collective imagination, that no individual embodies dictatorship in his physical being more than Mussolini. His physique, his gestures, his glare, these are all archetypical traits of the modern dictator. He casts the mold.

00:10:00 Speaker_04
I don't like considering personalities or single men as the change factor of history. But we have to, in a way, recognize that there are figures in history that are able to really change the course of it.

00:10:24 Speaker_01
From the Noiser Network, this is part one of the Mussolini story. And this is Real Dictators. It's the summer of 1883, near the commune of Predapio in north-eastern Italy.

00:11:14 Speaker_01
Nestling on a hillside is a collection of modest houses, the hamlet of Varano di Costa. It's hot, brutally hot. Among the square stone homes with their shuttered windows is one belonging to a young married couple, Alessandro and Rosa Mussolini.

00:11:37 Speaker_01
In the fertile province of Romagna, 60 miles from Bologna, life is fundamentally rural. The people till the soil. They sow the seeds. They are, in the main, God-fearing, hard-working. Alessandro is a blacksmith. Rosa, a local schoolteacher.

00:12:00 Speaker_01
The Mussolinis can trace their roots locally back to the 13th century. Alessandro, a barrel-chested man with an impressive moustache, has a fondness for women and drink. In a deeply macho culture, such things are tolerated.

00:12:19 Speaker_01
Rosa, meanwhile, is a devout Catholic. Alessandro has no time for God. He is something that not too long ago would have been deemed unthinkable on papal land. He is an atheist. More than that, an anarchic socialist.

00:12:38 Speaker_01
for these are turbulent times politically. Northeast Italy is enthralled to a new revolutionary doctrine, Marxism. As a union agitator, Alessandro Mussolini is pegged as a troublemaker. Rosa, meanwhile, will strive for a life free from sin.

00:13:01 Speaker_01
The Mussolinis will have three children, two boys and a girl. The oldest, born on the 29th of July that year, is baptized into the Catholic faith, just as his mother insisted.

00:13:15 Speaker_01
But he is named not after a saint, as is customary, rather, at his father's insistence, a Mexican revolutionary, Benito Juárez. His middle name, too, attributes to two leading Italian leftists.

00:13:34 Speaker_01
And thus, Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini enters the world.

00:13:46 Speaker_08
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00:14:12 Speaker_01
Lisa Pine is Associate Fellow of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.

00:14:18 Speaker_06
His mother Rosa was an ardent Catholic who had her children baptized. She took them to church every Sunday. She was also the local school teacher, so she provided the regular income to the family.

00:14:31 Speaker_06
In contrast to his father Alessandro, a blacksmith who worked irregularly, and because he was given to drinking and womanizing, wasn't really doing what he should have as the family man.

00:14:43 Speaker_06
Now, Benito Mussolini feared his father because he hit him to discipline him. But at the same time, he admired Alessandro for his ideals. And his father then had considerable influence on Benito's character and beliefs.

00:15:00 Speaker_01
Young Benito will find himself living something of a double life. On the one hand, there's his rambunctious, disciplining, proselytising papa. On the other, is the mother who will cosset her son, smothering the turbulence with maternal love.

00:15:17 Speaker_01
Where Alessandra will encourage Benito to drink, to argue, to fight, Rosa will drag her boy to a redemptive mass. Alessandra's idealism, his questionable work ethic, will be offset by Rosa's pragmatism, graft and reliability.

00:15:36 Speaker_01
My greatest love was for my mother, her son will later write. She was so quiet, so tender, so strong. The worldview of Benito Amilcare Aldrea Mussolini will forever be colored by this tug of war. Kindness versus cruelty. Karl Marx versus Jesus.

00:15:59 Speaker_01
Order versus chaos. My father was a blacksmith who bent red-hot iron on the anvil, Mussolini will declare when acceding to power.

00:16:12 Speaker_01
Sometimes when I was a boy I helped my father in his hard and humble work, and now I have the infinitely harder task of bending souls. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham.

00:16:34 Speaker_05
Vedapur, which is Mussolini's birthplace. And part of Mussolini's whole halt and schtick, if you like, was, oh, you know, I'm the son of a blacksmith. I'm just an ordinary guy. My mother was a schoolteacher.

00:16:48 Speaker_05
You know, I've come from this small place, these humble origins, which made him very relatable.

00:16:55 Speaker_01
Young Benito grows up an individualist, brimming with self-importance. He has a younger brother, Arnaldo, with whom he shares a room, which doubles as the family kitchen, and a sister, Edvige. I was born at two in the afternoon on a Sunday.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
The sun had entered the constellation of Leo eight days before. He will later write, reflecting on the auspicious moment of his birth. One day, he tells his mother, I will astonish the world.

00:17:39 Speaker_01
Benito Mussolini is an intelligent youth, but he's also a violent one, constantly brawling. On the short side, but powerfully built, he could start a fight in an empty room.

00:17:53 Speaker_01
In an attempt to save him from himself, at age just nine, his mother removes him from local schooling. She gets him a place at a boarding school in the town of Faenza, 20 miles away, a strict religious institution run by Silesian monks.

00:18:13 Speaker_01
On the way, the donkey transporting him collapses and dies. It's regarded, unsurprisingly, as a bad omen. Indeed, the Catholic Fathers are perplexed by their new ward, this misfit, this dark foreboding presence.

00:18:32 Speaker_06
Mussolini recalled just that sense of feeling isolated, crushed, being sent away from home. He considered this to be a punishment contributing to his isolation, contributing to his sense of rejection.

00:18:46 Speaker_06
And as a child and a school pupil, he was grumpy, willful, bad-tempered. He didn't get on well with other children. He could be violent. Bullying behavior was there. And he also, and I think this is important, he also had a strong sense of vengeance.

00:19:08 Speaker_01
On the one hand, here is a boy who can recite poetry so beautifully that it will move the class to tears. In the playground, meanwhile, he'll whip out his penknife and stab a fellow pupil in the buttock. Mussolini is duly expelled.

00:19:25 Speaker_01
His next school, in Forlimpopoli, freed from the heavy religious vibe, is more to his liking. Nicholas O'Shaughnessy is Emeritus Professor of Communication, Queen Mary University of London.

00:19:42 Speaker_00
He was originally what I call a stab kid. He stabbed another boy at boarding school. They sent him to a new school where he was much happier, where his teachers liked him because this is the trouble. He was both a thug and very smart.

00:19:59 Speaker_01
He knuckles down this time. And in July 1901, at the age of 17, Signor Benito Mussolini, or as we should now say, Professore Benito Mussolini, qualifies as an elementary school teacher, just like Mama.

00:20:19 Speaker_01
Mussolini, however, has not shed his father's compulsion to stick it to the man. John Foote is Professor of Modern Italian History at the University of Bristol.

00:20:33 Speaker_03
Mussolini is born into a radical family. His names are all names of radicals. His father was a sort of anarchist blacksmith. And I think all of that marks him. You know, you can see traces of that even much later.

00:20:46 Speaker_03
When he's a fascist dictator, you can still see traces and elements of that kind of his youth, his radical youth.

00:20:55 Speaker_01
As the new master at a school in Galtieri, Mussolini tutors his seven-year-olds less in the three Rs and more in the glories of revolutionary socialism. He has swiftly shown the door.

00:21:09 Speaker_01
It doesn't help that he's had affairs with more than one of the schoolmaster's wives. Fists have been flying. Mussolini scraps as much in the schoolyard as a teacher, as he did as a pupil. There is fortunately another outlet for Mussolini's rage.

00:21:28 Speaker_01
June 1902 sees the 20th anniversary of the death of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great Italian patriot. Benito gives a rousing public speech in tribute. Local socialists take note.

00:21:43 Speaker_01
This fiery young man with his slicked dark hair is just the sort of performer they need. But Mussolini is sceptical. They're not serious enough, just playing at being revolutionaries. Tagliatelle socialists, as he taunts them, flaccid

00:22:06 Speaker_01
Mussolini's innuendo is never particularly sophisticated, nor is his relationship with women. Rather, it remains prehistorically crude. Females exist for one thing only.

00:22:20 Speaker_06
That combination of charisma and violence also seemed to extend to his relationships with women. So he was as his father was, a womanizer. He was not particularly romantic in his relationships with women.

00:22:35 Speaker_06
He used them more for his own lust and his own desire rather than a kind of loving or mutual relationship. And they were sometimes quite violent relationships too.

00:22:47 Speaker_01
He celebrates the completion of his studies with a sexual assault of a 16-year-old girl in his village. We know because he writes about it, boasts about it, in a memoir. She was poor, but she had a nice complexion and was reasonably good-looking.

00:23:06 Speaker_01
One day I took her up the stairs, threw her onto the floor behind the door and made her mine. She got up, crying, and insulted me between her sobs. She said that I'd violated her honor. I probably had, he scoffs, but what sort of honor?

00:23:28 Speaker_01
power, gratification. For most of his life, he's not in the need of something so frivolous as companionship, friendship.

00:23:38 Speaker_03
He never has friends. I think that's one of the interesting personality traits of Mussolini. He has comrades, he has people, acolytes, entourage, who are absolutely, you know, faithful to him, will go to their death for him. But he doesn't have friends.

00:23:55 Speaker_03
He has lovers and there's the whole kind of nexus of Mussolini family man, Mussolini Latin lover, Mussolini rapist. You know, there's all these different personalities which emerge in his private life.

00:24:08 Speaker_03
But yes, a violent personality, almost like on the level of borderline personality disorder.

00:24:16 Speaker_01
The incident with the young lady is followed by a steamy affair with the wife of a soldier, who is away doing his duty. Mussolini stabs her in the thigh. Military service will soon be looming for Mussolini too.

00:24:31 Speaker_01
He is now eligible for the compulsory draft, something he has no intention of undertaking. He casts his gaze north. In July 1902, Benito Mussolini, kicked out of the teaching profession, crosses the Alps into Switzerland.

00:24:53 Speaker_01
Moving between Geneva, Fribourg and Bern, he will work as a stonemason, as a bricklayer, an errand boy, in a chocolate factory. Mussolini must trudge through a gig economy, at one point living in a packing crate under a railway bridge.

00:25:11 Speaker_01
another time in a public lavatory. That said, there are the usual pleasures to indulge, including a romp with a female Polish refugee, whose sexual prowess he scores highly.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
Switzerland, though, is becoming something of a haven for more than just draft dodgers. It's playing host to all manner of political exiles.

00:25:38 Speaker_01
Mussolini hurls himself wholeheartedly into the cells of revolutionary socialists who gather to plot the overthrow of capitalism from the luxury of one of the wealthiest countries in the world.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
Five feet six, squat, with a large head and that slicked back hair, albeit already starting to thin, He proves again to be a charismatic speaker, someone who can hold a room.

00:26:05 Speaker_01
He's equally adept, perhaps even more so, at committing his thoughts to paper. He contributes, in exile, to various Italian socialist newspapers.

00:26:18 Speaker_01
His talents are enough to charm a Russian émigré named Angelika Balabanov, who introduces him to the works of Lenin, and with whom he has the obligatory violent affair. But as ever Mussolini just can't help himself.

00:26:33 Speaker_01
He is an illegal alien, but he shows no inclination to stay out of trouble. He derides his Swiss hosts as a bunch of sausage makers.

00:26:44 Speaker_01
Arrested more than once, he is eventually deported from the canton of Bern, though he does manage to sneak back in illegally on a falsified passport. In Geneva, penniless and starving, Mussolini hits rock bottom.

00:27:06 Speaker_01
One day, he recounts, he sees two visiting Englishwomen sitting on a park bench, eating a picnic, and attacks them. I threw myself upon one of the old witches and grabbed the food from her hands.

00:27:21 Speaker_01
If they'd made the slightest resistance, I would have strangled them. He's arrested again over his counterfeit papers, though this time he's given clemency. He somehow ends up gate-crashing lectures at the University of Lausanne.

00:27:40 Speaker_01
But the Swiss adventure has run its course. In November 1904, the King of Italy makes a pronouncement. There will be an amnesty for those who've shirked military service, provided they make good on their obligation.

00:27:58 Speaker_01
And so, with 18 months in the army ahead of him, Mussolini, aged 21, goes home. In January 1905, he joins a regiment of bersaglieri, riflemen, in Verona. One month in, Mussolini is dealt a devastating blow. He is called aside by his captain.

00:28:23 Speaker_01
His mother, Rosa, is seriously ill. He arrives home just in time to see her take her final breath, succumbing to meningitis. She was just 46. Mussolini is deeply distraught. In his downtime he channels his energies.

00:28:43 Speaker_01
He devours the works of all manner of philosophers and political thinkers. He's obsessed with the Italian futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He reads Dante, Schopenhauer, Kant, as well as every future dictator's set text, Friedrich Nietzsche.

00:29:02 Speaker_01
In Switzerland, Mussolini has learned decent French, passable German, with some English and Spanish thrown in. Often he will translate from the original.

00:29:14 Speaker_01
Once demobbed, he channels his talents as an aspiring politico, honing his craft both as writer and public speaker, all the while jobbing as a teacher again, this time in Tolmezzo in the Carnic Alps. His students dub him Il Terano, the Tyrant.

00:29:39 Speaker_01
In the double life of Mussolini, the thug is never far from the surface. That compulsion for drinking, brawling, and increasingly whoring. Almost inevitably, Mussolini contracts syphilis. Depressed, he threatens to shoot himself.

00:29:59 Speaker_01
But he's soon well enough to be having an affair with the wife of his landlord. He delights in sneaking into her house to have sex with her while her husband snoozes in the other room.

00:30:16 Speaker_01
No one knows quite why, specifically, but Mussolini is soon back in jail. It's a pattern that will go on repeat. On release, he does what those in recovery call doing a geographical, relocating in the hope of a fresh start.

00:30:34 Speaker_01
Not Switzerland this time, but Trentino, the contested Italian-speaking Alpine region that lies within the borders of Austria. But he is far too open about his wish for it to be annexed by the new Italian state.

00:30:50 Speaker_01
In September 1909, he finds himself deported again. At age 26, Benito Mussolini is going nowhere fast. He slinks back to Bradapio to live off his dad. Widower Alessandro has had something of a turnaround. He is now an innkeeper. And he's loved up.

00:31:14 Speaker_01
He has a new woman in his life. Her name is Anna Guidi. He seems quite settled. Anna comes with five kids, including a daughter just 16. Her name is Rachele. For the first time in his life, Mussolini is smitten.

00:31:33 Speaker_01
He has finally found the one, though not before bedding her older sister Augusta. To demonstrate his love for Rachele, he dashes off a novel for her, a romance called The Cardinal's Mistress, in which she is the central character.

00:31:50 Speaker_06
Mussolini becomes obsessed with her, saying that he wants to live with her straight away and says he'll shoot himself in the head if he's not allowed to do so. So he's absolutely adamant and absolutely obsessed with the young Raquel.

00:32:07 Speaker_01
As you've probably already picked up, he can be a bit of a drama queen. But it does the trick. Parental consent secured, they move into a squalid apartment in Forlì. There, Mussolini makes a meagre living as a local socialist party official.

00:32:24 Speaker_01
According to his own legend, they will live on cabbages. It does not diminish their energy. Within a year, on September the 1st, 1910, Benito and Rachele have a child, a daughter named Eda.

00:32:41 Speaker_01
It's time for this new father to take some responsibility, to grow up. Or so you'd have thought. These are turbulent times. The tectonic plates of political power are shifting in Europe.

00:33:03 Speaker_01
Tsarist Russia has weathered one revolution and is bracing itself against the Bolshevik resurgence. The decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire is clinging onto its multi-ethnic Balkan realms.

00:33:16 Speaker_01
The French and British, former foes, are now engaged in a bromance. The Entente Cordiale, And there are two new nations, Germany and Italy, both only unified in the last 50 years. They are now muscling in on the scene.

00:33:37 Speaker_01
As an economic powerhouse, Germany is in the ascendancy. Prussia beat France in the War of 1870. It is the new dominant force on the continent. But Italy? Until as recently as 1861, there was no such thing.

00:33:57 Speaker_01
It was, as one diplomat put it, a mere geographical expression. A collection of dukedoms, republics and microstates, many under the suzerainty of the Austrian Habsburgs,

00:34:11 Speaker_01
But during the Napoleonic Wars, ideas about liberation and unity had been inculcated. Through the Risorgimento movement, via two wars of independence, Italy was unified, to be governed as a constitutional monarchy, the Kingdom of Italy.

00:34:36 Speaker_01
While it may hark back to the wonders of ancient Rome and the Renaissance, the modern variant is a work in progress. It's a hodgepodge of varying customs and differing languages.

00:34:49 Speaker_01
Economically, it's largely agricultural, relatively poor, technologically backward. But glories, riches and unity can be achieved, it is figured, with some international adventuring

00:35:06 Speaker_01
It casts a jealous eye at Britain and France in particular, with their bountiful overseas territories.

00:35:14 Speaker_06
They were a new nation, but they wanted to have a new empire.

00:35:17 Speaker_06
And at the end of the 19th century, they kind of went for whatever spoils were left in the continent of Africa, taking Somaliland, taking Eritrea, but being defeated by the Ethiopians at Adawa in 1896.

00:35:32 Speaker_06
This failure to take Ethiopia in the 1890s remained a thorn in the side of the Italians and was really a great wound to Italian national pride.

00:35:45 Speaker_01
It is one of the first ever defeats of a European colonizer by African forces.

00:35:51 Speaker_01
Undeterred, the Palazzo della Consulta, the Italian Foreign Office, shifts its interest to a territory much closer to home, right across the Mediterranean, in North Africa. It's November the 1st, 1911. We're in the azure skies over Cipolle Tegna.

00:36:26 Speaker_01
A monoplane cruises along. It's a German-made tauver, a glued-together assembly of canvas, wood and string. Its wings, in these early days of aviation, are even shaped like a bird's.

00:36:42 Speaker_01
The pilot is a man named Giulio Gavotti of the Corpo Aeronautico Militare, the Italian Army Air Service. At 600 feet off the ground, Gavotti circles the desert over Taguira. There is an oasis there. He's spotted some enemy troops.

00:37:02 Speaker_01
They are Ottomans, Turks. Under his seat is a leather bag containing four large grenades, each the size of a grapefruit. With one hand on the joystick, he pulls the pin on the first, lobbing it over the side.

00:37:20 Speaker_01
He watches it spiral down to explode amid the palm trees. Continuing on to the Turkish army base at Ain Zara, Gavotti offloads the others. His solo raid has just entered into the annals of military history.

00:37:41 Speaker_01
The first ever use of an aircraft as a weapon of war. The Turks will establish another new record soon after. Using rifles, they down one of Gavrotti's comrades. And thus, the Italians become the first to use and lose a plane in combat.

00:38:08 Speaker_01
historic land that Govotti has flown over, Tripolitania, is part of a region the Italians will refer to as Libya, the word the Romans had used for North Africa generally.

00:38:21 Speaker_01
To snatch it, Italy must first engineer a conflict with those who control it, the struggling Ottoman Empire.

00:38:30 Speaker_01
Gavotti's raid is an early engagement in what would become known as the Italo-Turkish War, a year-long conflict that runs into the autumn of 1912.

00:38:42 Speaker_00
So the new countries, they needed to forge an identity which gave a premium on hyper-nationalism as a way of integrating the country. It kicks off with the Italo-Turkish War. And so this is a 19th century idea of empire transposed onto the 20th.

00:39:00 Speaker_00
The idea of empire had become terribly unpopular with the senior powers by that stage. The idea of conquering peoples who didn't want to be conquered.

00:39:10 Speaker_00
Whereas in Italy, it was an ad seps performance in order to unite the nation and give it meaning, was to acquire and consolidate a huge new empire. The idea of becoming a new Rome.

00:39:27 Speaker_01
Italian forces begin a brutal suppression of the largely tribal resistance. Mussolini is at first appalled. Any good socialist should resist imperialism. Those behind this atrocity are bourgeois lickspittles, he says.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
Back in Fortley, he writes scathing pieces in the local press about the government, the church, the army, and makes inflamed speeches calling for a general strike. He even tries to block the embarkation of troops by starting a riot.

00:40:01 Speaker_01
As sure as night follows day, Mussolini ends up in prison again, this time for a five-month stretch on a charge of inciting the people to strike and insurrection. But, inadvertently, it's proven a good career move. He is a martyr to the cause.

00:40:28 Speaker_01
On release in December 1912, the war now over, Mussolini is embraced by his ideological kin. He is offered membership of the Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party, Partito Socialista Italiano, or PSI.

00:40:45 Speaker_01
Due to his impassioned journalism, he is also to be awarded the editorship of its national left-wing newspaper, Avanti. The job necessitates a move to Milan.

00:40:57 Speaker_01
Unfortunately, his father will not live to witness the success, for he too will soon be dead, aged fifty-seven. But his son is going from strength to strength. Within six months the circulation of Avanti has increased five-fold.

00:41:19 Speaker_01
In October 1913, Mussolini stands for election to Parliament on the Socialist Party ticket. He's defeated, but ends up as a Milan councillor. It's his first political office.

00:41:33 Speaker_01
As an orator, he's learning how to read the crowd, when to be soft, when to be loud, when to rise to a crescendo. The musicality of his performance is of interest. Mussolini, amid the blood and thunder, is also a keen violinist.

00:41:50 Speaker_01
He was taught to play as a youth by a fairground fiddler. When rehearsing his speeches, he's apt to break off and bow through a few bars of Paganini. He's certainly striking the right notes.

00:42:05 Speaker_01
As one reporter muses, I don't know what to make of this queer fellow Mussolini, but I know one thing, he's going to get somewhere. At 29, Mussolini is a rising star.

00:42:18 Speaker_01
If TV had existed, he would have been the ubiquitous talking head, the go-to man for an alternative and explosive opinion.

00:42:27 Speaker_03
He becomes very quickly one of the most popular socialists in Italy. He was an incredible speaker, but I think one of the key things was he was a journalist, a writer.

00:42:36 Speaker_03
He understood the press, he understood the media, and he wrote these rabble-rousing articles.

00:42:42 Speaker_03
When peasants were massacred by the state, he wrote these angry articles saying, the state is a murderer, you know, this kind of very violent language, which he'll carry through.

00:42:51 Speaker_03
So all of those things mark him out as a very important charismatic political figure, well before fascism is even on anyone's minds.

00:43:00 Speaker_00
This is truly extraordinary that he was a polemical, emotional, and brilliantly successful lefty. He was a commie. He was the most effective commie in Italy, so much so that Lenin said the Italian Revolution can't happen if Mussolini isn't part of it.

00:43:22 Speaker_00
He's already a very, very important man. And he is one of the biggest and most impressive figures on the European left. Certainly, intellectually, the most impressive figure that the European left has to offer.

00:43:43 Speaker_01
Remember when we last checked in on Mussolini's domestic life? With his young partner, Rachele, and infant daughter, Eda, there had seemed to have been some stability. Well, not so fast.

00:43:57 Speaker_01
In 1914, Mussolini abandons Rachele and suddenly gets married to a woman named Ida Dalsa. The following year, they have a son, Benito Albino Mussolini. It's a short-lived union that is as tempestuous as all the others.

00:44:15 Speaker_01
Ida will turn up one day outside his office with the child on her hip, screaming and shouting at Mussolini. He will lean out of the window and threaten her with a pistol. She will set fire to the furniture in her room at the Hotel Bristol.

00:44:31 Speaker_06
He'd married a woman called Ida and together with her had a son. And this became inconvenient for him during later years.

00:44:40 Speaker_06
So these two were quickly pushed out of the picture and swept very much under the carpet so that they didn't sully his reputation or get in the way.

00:44:51 Speaker_01
Ida will die in 1937, locked away in a lunatic asylum. Mussolini, the family man, will later have his son murdered, injected with coma-inducing drugs aged 26, following claims as to his true paternity.

00:45:14 Speaker_01
In December 1915, Mussolini will return to the loving embrace of Rachele and they will formally tie the knot. There remains a possibility that Mussolini is a bigamist. There is speculation too that he is marrying a stepsister. No matter.

00:45:34 Speaker_01
Benito and Rachele will go on to have four more children. Sons Vittorio, Bruno, Romano and another daughter, Anna Maria. It's not just the recent war in Libya. On the continent of Europe, the storm clouds are gathering.

00:45:58 Speaker_01
By 1914, the great powers seem set on a collision course. Since 1882, Italy has been part of the Triple Alliance, a military defensive pact between itself, Germany and Austria-Hungary.

00:46:15 Speaker_01
As it stands currently, an outbreak of hostilities will drag Italy into direct conflict with the Entente of Britain, France and Russia. There are many in the corridors of power who are no longer convinced of the merits of such an arrangement.

00:46:31 Speaker_01
But, too late. On June the 28th 1914, the spark ignites the tinderbox. The heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian radical. Austria bombards Belgrade. Germany and Russia mobilise.

00:47:00 Speaker_01
France, then Britain, are called to honour their own military obligations. There's a question over whether the war is truly defensive on the part of the Triple Alliance. This affords Italy some wiggle room

00:47:15 Speaker_01
At first she remains neutral, but the question is left hanging. The PSI naturally are opposed to Italy's involvement. The proletariats of Europe should be fighting the bourgeoisie, not each other. As before, the anti-war brigade takes to the streets.

00:47:40 Speaker_01
In Milan's Piazza del Duomo there are cavalry charges made against the mob. and it doesn't let up. Mussolini is fully supportive of the protestors, helping rip up the city's tramlines with a pickaxe.

00:47:56 Speaker_03
Anti-militarism is a big thing in Italy. And the clash between anti-militarism and militarism between the army and the people, if you like, is a huge division in Italian society. People are shot in 1914 in a place called Ancona by the army.

00:48:11 Speaker_03
And there's a huge uprising right across that area known as Red Week. And Mussolini is writing articles saying, this is great. This is a revolution. This is what should happen.

00:48:20 Speaker_03
So, you know, it's a very turbulent time socially and politically on the eve of the First World War. And much of that will change with the war, including Mussolini himself, who undergoes a radical transformation.

00:48:33 Speaker_01
You can say that again. After some reflection, Mussolini is about to perform the mother of all U-turns. Libya was a colonial But this is different, he reconsiders.

00:48:49 Speaker_01
Plus, the fall of the French Republic and the rise of the reactionary Germanic states would be a mortal blow to liberty in Europe. And war, anyway, according to Marxist doctrine, is the prelude to civil disorder, to revolution, is it not?

00:49:08 Speaker_01
In which case, taking part would actually further the socialist cause.

00:49:17 Speaker_06
He demonstrated his ruthlessness, his rejection of compromise. These are traditional socialist ideas, you know, kind of harking back to what Karl Marx had written, following on from what Lenin had done with the Bolshevik Revolution.

00:49:34 Speaker_06
And yet, on the other hand, we can see him as something of a political chameleon because he changed his colors exactly when it suited him.

00:49:44 Speaker_01
What's more, to further the revolution Mussolini argues, Italy should extract itself from its pact with the central powers. It should join the other side. Giulia Albanese is professor of modern history at the University of Padua.

00:50:02 Speaker_01
She is the author of the March on Rome, an editor of Rethinking the History of Italian Fascism.

00:50:09 Speaker_04
This was his way into politics.

00:50:11 Speaker_04
And this was one of the reasons it was so easy for him to pass from a position of rigid neutralism, July 1914, to a position in which it was a possibility of war in October 14, from a position of clear acceptance of the war in November 14.

00:50:30 Speaker_04
So it's a few months that managed him to pass from a position to another. There were in the Socialist Party a group of people that were less and less convinced of a position of neutrality.

00:50:43 Speaker_04
It was able to relate to other groups that were perceiving war as a possibility for a revolution.

00:50:52 Speaker_01
Mussolini's is not an isolated view, but his conversion is perceived as a shocking act of heresy by the PSI. On October 26, 1914, he's forced to resign his position at its newspaper. He signs off with a scathing editorial.

00:51:12 Speaker_01
As editor of Avanti, I address my first word to you, the young men of Italy, the young men of the factories and the universities, those who are young in years, young in spirit, the young men belonging to a generation to whom fate has given the task of making history.

00:51:30 Speaker_01
It is a word which in normal times I would never have used, but which today I am forced to utter loudly and clearly. In sincere and good faith, the fearful and fascinating word, war.

00:51:51 Speaker_01
Two weeks later, he launches a rival newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia, The People of Italy, which will become his own personal mouthpiece.

00:52:01 Speaker_01
It comes complete with proto-fascist slogans on its masthead, who has iron has bread, and revolution is an idea which has found bayonets.

00:52:14 Speaker_01
It will also turn out that Mussolini is a little more capitalist, a little more opportunist than you might think.

00:52:21 Speaker_01
The British Secret Service has been lining his pockets to the tune of £100 a week to bang the war drums, to agitate for Italy to join the Entente. An enormous sum. The French apparently have also had a hand in bankrolling Il Popolo.

00:52:51 Speaker_01
It's November the 25th, 1914. We're in a hall in Milan, the Casa del Popolo. We're here for the convention of the Italian Socialist Party. 3,000 people have crammed in, many travelling from miles around. It's been a busy evening, lots to discuss.

00:53:14 Speaker_01
But the biggest motion to be put before the room is the final item on the agenda. Should Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini, a member of its own directorate, be stripped of his party membership?

00:53:28 Speaker_01
For someone of Mussolini's stature, it's an extraordinary fall from grace. The motion to defenestrate him passes with an overwhelming majority.

00:53:38 Speaker_03
Mussolini had always been anti-war, anti-imperial, anti-colonial. He'd gone to prison for opposing the Libyan war of 1912. The socialist movement is pretty opposed to the war. The majority of Italians either don't want a war or are indifferent.

00:53:54 Speaker_03
Some of them are very radically against the war. And Mussolini suddenly from one moment to another writes these articles in favor of the war. And this is a great betrayal. Mussolini, for the socialists, is a great traitor.

00:54:06 Speaker_03
His argument for this is actually a left-wing argument, and it comes from a certain tradition of nationalism in Italy, is that war will make Italians. This is a war of national liberation. We will gain the territory that is legitimately ours.

00:54:20 Speaker_03
There are bits of Italy that are still not Italy. You know, it's not necessarily a radical break with certain parts of the tradition in Italy, but it is a radical break with the Soviet movement.

00:54:34 Speaker_01
Mussolini is given his moment. He takes to the stage to make his farewell address. Amid howls of Judas, he stands before them. Down at heel he wears a shabby suit that's too small. He has a thick moustache with several days' worth of beard stubble.

00:54:53 Speaker_01
Not quite the imposing figure of repute. There are coins thrown, even a chair, but he doesn't flinch. Do not think that by taking away my membership card you will take away my faith in the cause, he blasts, with full theatrical flourish.

00:55:14 Speaker_01
Against an almighty hiss, as if he were a pantomime villain, he assures them that history will be his judge.

00:55:23 Speaker_01
Amid the groans and by now not a little applause for his sheer effrontery, he signs off with a grimace and index finger jabbed to the heavens. You think to sign my death warrant, but you are mistaken.

00:55:37 Speaker_01
Today you hate me because in your heart of hearts, you still love me. And with it, he descends from the stage and strides down the aisle towards the exit. Out there on the streets he knows he's far from alone.

00:55:57 Speaker_01
Nationalists, dissenting socialists and others are marching to a similar beat. Not least the new Conservative Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra.

00:56:12 Speaker_01
There's been work going on behind the scenes, a secret seduction on the part of Britain and France, promises to Italy of rewards, of territory in the Alps along the Dalmatian coast, of expansion in Africa, anything to get her into the scrap.

00:56:33 Speaker_01
On April 26, 1915, these dealings will be acknowledged formally as the Treaty of London. A month later, on May the 23rd, hostilities are declared, initially against just Austria-Hungary. Mussolini celebrates in Il Popolo in characteristic style.

00:56:56 Speaker_01
From today onwards, we are all Italians, and nothing but Italians. Now that steel has to meet steel, one single cry comes from our hearts. Viva l'Italia! Italy and Mussolini are going to war.

00:57:30 Speaker_01
In the next episode... Wounded at the front, Mussolini's war ends early. Feeling cheated by the peace settlement, he forms a political movement stuffed with disgruntled army veterans.

00:57:48 Speaker_01
This new National Fascist Party will soon storm to power via an audacious march on Rome. That's next time.