Two Views of a Little Caesar

By Gerald Clarke

MUSSOLINI by Denis Mack Smith; Knopf; 429pages; $20

MUSSOLINI by Anthony James Joes; Watts; 405 pages; $18.95

May 1938: the Duce was entertaining the Fuehrer with a grand show of Italy's naval might. Dozens of warships steamed across the Bay of Naples, and, like precision swimmers, 85 submarines dived beneath the water, resurfacing eight minutes later in perfect formation to fire an eleven-gun tribute to their Nazi guest. It was a dazzling display from a master of spectacle, but like most other things Benito Mussolini did, this muscle flexing was little more than an act: two years later, after a few disastrous encounters with Britain's Royal Navy, his impressive-looking fleet cowered in port, all but useless to the Germans.

If Hitler has gone down in history as the personification of evil, Mussolini has won his own immortality as the archetypal thug. But the founder of Fascism was a complex thug who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fearsome breaker of the peace, like his neighbor to the north, or a geopolitical showman, the P.T. Barnum of international politics. Judging from Denis Mack Smith's study, by far the more solid and persuasive of these two new biographies, the Duce (chief) was a bit of both.

Born in 1883 in the Romagna, a region south of Venice, Mussolini was a hereditary rebel; both his father and his grandfather had been imprisoned for their political beliefs. Papa Alessandro, a blacksmith with intellectual aspirations, was one of the earliest proclaimed socialists in Italy. Young Benito was a loner with what would now be called sociopathic tendencies, a street fighter who looked on violence as the natural way to get what he wanted. Yet he was unquestionably intelligent. He read extensively in German, French and English and even wrote a novella in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. It is history's loss, if not literature's, that it was never published. Another work of fiction, an anticlerical novel, was printed and achieved some success.

His zeal for scribbling led to journalism; he became a major socialist writer and editor, with a talent for extremist invective. "The national flag is for us a rag to plant on a dunghill," he wrote in the years before World War I when he was a strong internationalist. But Mussolini could believe almost anything passionately, and not long after a dispute led him to split with the Socialists, he established a new party, the Fascists, molding it along the lines of his own erratic and opportunistic temperament. As he described it, the party was "super-relativist," with only one guiding light: Italy. "Our myth is the greatness of the nation," he said, adding that it was the historical mission of an antiliberal elite to build and maintain that greatness. When he became Prime Minister in 1922, after the famous March on Rome, he made it clear that to him greatness meant conquest. He vowed "never to leave the Italians in peace," and, so far as he was capable, he kept his promise.

But, as Smith shows in tragic detail, Mussolini was not very capable. For several years he did manage to control the newspapers, dictating some of their approving stories, praising himself for making the trains run on time and reducing unemployment by increasing the armed forces. He also introduced the stiff-armed Fascist salute--probably because he believed it was unhygienic to shake hands--and encouraged Fascists to end their letters with "Viva il Duce." People who came into his office were told to approach his desk at a run, then, when they were through, to leave twice as fast, saluting before they dashed through the door. But these demonstrations of respect were only a brutish version of show business. Attempting to look the part of a great leader, he appeared merely ridiculous. As Smith tells it, a young reporter by the name of Ernest Hemingway once arrived at a press conference and discovered him "registering dictator," frowning over a book and seemingly oblivious to his audience. Hemingway tiptoed over to see the title: it was a French-English dictionary held upside down.

Increasingly isolated, Mussolini rarely confided his military plans even to his generals and admirals, and except for a brief, savage excursion into Ethiopia, his ill-prepared forces fared poorly wherever they ventured. The incapacity of the Italian troops became one of World War II's most enduring jokes; even on their home turf, Mussolini's battalions proved extremely vulnerable. Yet, until his final years, the Duce retained a hold not only over the unsophisticated but over Hitler himself. In 1941, after the Greeks had thrown back an Italian invasion, the Fuehrer rushed an army to aid his fellow aggressor. As a result, Germany may have had to delay, perhaps fatally, its attack on the U.S.S.R.; winter caught the Nazi troops before they could overrun Moscow. According to his biographers, Hitler cursed the day Italy joined him in war. According to Smith, so did Mussolini. Indeed, he came to believe that both of them "might be a bit mad."

Unlike the Fuehrer, he was eventually repudiated by his own people. Instead of being allowed to commit suicide, he was executed at the age of 61 and, with his mistress, hung by his heels in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan, an appropriately melodramatic ending for the man who turned his country into a stage and then set the curtains on fire.

Smith, an Oxford historian, tells this depressing but compelling story with authority and brevity, giving Mussolini his due and not a jot more. Joes, a political scientist at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, gives him a good deal more. If his biography were not so obviously silly, it would be repellent. As Joes recounts the tale, Mussolini came close to being an Italian Franklin D. Roosevelt, bent on bringing some order out of economic and political chaos. Fascist imperialism, which included mass murder and the use of poison gas on the natives of Ethiopia, is excused as no worse than the colonialism of other nations. Joes is capable of conclusions that belong in the field of fiction, not history: "In striving to rouse his countrymen to the defense of their nation's rightful place in the world, Mussolini was not acting very differently from a Winston Churchill or a Charles de Gaulle." Fortunately, Smith, whom Joes often cites as an authority, offers a different version. Unfortunately for the world, and all the millions Mussolini killed or ruined, the evidence shows that Smith's version is the true one. Mussolini was not so bad as Hitler, but he was quite bad enough.

--By Gerald Clarke

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