Tragicomic Revolutionary

IL DUCE (367 pp.)--Christopher Hibbert--Little Brown ($6).

"I who was born a revolutionary tell you that you cannot permanently sacrifice the principles of YOUR revolution." So wrote Benito Mussolini to his brother rebel Adolf Hitler in a letter dated Jan. 3, 1940, reproaching Hitler for his cordial relations with yet another revolutionary--Stalin. But Mussolini, the founder of Fascism, proved in his own life the spiritual twinship of Fascism and Stalin's Bolshevism. He had marched under both banners without changing step.

To the present generation, Mussolini seems a semicomic ogre remembered most for his operatic posturings and his gruesome death--murdered with his mistress and strung by the heels like an undressed carcass outside a village butcher's shop.

That he was one of the most fascinating characters of the 20th century is clear from this new biography by British Historian Christopher Hibbert, 38.

"What a Character." Few recall that Mussolini once fancied himself as "the Lenin of Italy" and that Lenin himself (though Hibbert does not record the fact) returned the compliment by calling him the most hopeful prospect for Bolshevism among Europe's Socialists. In those days before World War I, Mussolini was a wide-eyed, impoverished zealot living in Milan. He edited a paper called La Lotta di Classe (The Class War), had written an anticlerical novelette, The Cardinal's Mistress, and was dedicated to revolution --particularly the violent revolution of the Communist creed. "Who has steel has bread," was his favorite aphorism.

But after World War I (in which, according to Hibbert, Mussolini was a good soldier), Mussolini broke with Bolshevism because of its call for international solidarity of the workers against mere national governments. He sent squads of his blackshirted thugs against the Communists then forming Soviets in towns all over northern Italy. He believed that the factories should be taken over, all right--but that he should take them in the name of Italy. To little King Victor Emmanuel III, he seemed to promise order in a chaos of revolutionaries; the midget monarch asked him to take charge.

The result was the famous "March on Rome." In reality, Mussolini arrived by train a day ahead, resplendent in black shirt, spats and a bowler. Then he called in his blackshirted squadristi, who arrived by suburban train and were permitted to parade. Mussolini posted himself at their head for the benefit of photographers recording the event for history. "What a character," said Donna Rachele Mussolini, his faithful, dowdy wife, when told of these heroic events.

Litanies of Response. As an orator, Mussolini was incomparable (until Hitler began his blacker magic). He developed an incantatory style capable of evoking litanies of response from his audience.

But, Hibbert meticulously shows, Mussolini's Italy was mostly fagade and noise. It was his revolution that he had led, not that of a class. Except for the murder of Socialist Deputy Matteotti (a mistake of excess by his thugs that Mussolini deplored), his regime was marked by none of the awesome brutality of German National Socialism. He made the trains run on time (they still do) and drained a swamp or two, but the Italian tradition of graft and deep family spirit rather than zeal for the commonweal made a mockery of Mussolini's economic policies. The wonder is that he won the admiration of so many eminent people. He was a Napoleon to British Press Lord Rothermere, a Cromwell to President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia University, a genius to Boston's William Cardinal O'Connell. People as diverse as Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and George Bernard Shaw declared their admiration, and Aristide Briand called him "a great and good man." Yet, as a statesman, Mussolini was a mediocrity--and in his mediocrity Hibbert finds an excuse for the man. From the first, Mussolini regarded Hitler as "quite mad," Naziism as incomprehensible transalpine barbarism. Anti-Semitism was "the German vice"; in "a country with a healthy system of government," there could be "no Jewish question." (Nonetheless, after he became closer to Hitler, he appropriated Jewish property.) There is a pathetic comedy in Mussolini's contempt for Hitler. Hitler had asked for his autographed photograph as early as 1926 and had been curtly refused. Yet in the end it was Hitler who outdid Mussolini and all his works. "If his foreign policy had been as clever as his domestic one, perhaps he would be Il Duce today," Alberto Moravia said recently.

Women Between Memoranda. Il Duce provides a richly detailed tapestry for historians, but, more than that, it gives the reader a chance to make his own psychological assessment of a puzzling and bothered man. Mussolini was morose and vain.

An early enemy of the church, he was haunted toward the end by doubts about God (did he perhaps exist?) Plagued by an atheist's superstitions, he would touch his testicles to ward off a curse when he thought someone in a crowd had fixed the evil eye on him. He despised Hitler's perversity, was a good father and family man, yet in office hours at the Palazzo Venezia would take women visitors between memoranda, as it were. He removed neither his trousers nor his boots, but preferred to fling the ladies to the floor, panting curses--only to end the brief encounter, according to many of the women, by snatching up a violin and fiddling a few bars of soft music.

Mussolini once confessed that he was more of a mad poet than a statesman.

There was, in fact, a curious clarity about his self-knowledge and his private estimates of his public accomplishments.

When the sands were running out, he answered his own question as to what Fascism was all about: "One could call it irrationalism." But the irrational leads to boredom when it does not also lead to crime. All the frenetic posturing of Fascism led to Mussolini's last desperate apathy--almost torpor--and his meat-shop death. Mussolini's articulate explorations of his own dilemma give an awful fascination to Hibbert's history. In the end, it makes it possible to pity the Fascist dictator in a way that no one has ever pitied Hitler.

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