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France 24
27-04-2025
- Politics
- France 24
Eighty years after Mussolini's execution, nostalgia for fascism persists
The photographs appeared in media around the globe. The body of the former dictator Benito Mussolini, hung by the feet from a metal girder, facing a jeering crowd in Milan's Piazzale Loreto on April 29, 1945. His body and that of his mistress Clara Petacci had been horribly abused: spat upon, beaten and urinated on. By the time they were sent to the city's morgue, the remains were unrecognisable. Unlike Adolf Hitler, the 'Duce' chose to flee as the end of the war approached rather than commit suicide. Influential members of Mussolini's government turned against him by 1943 with the Allies capture of Sicily. He was arrested by the Fascist Grand Council and deposed in July, 1943, before being freed from prison by German special forces in September. Mussolini was brought to German-occupied northern Italy to establish a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, which lasted until April 1945. As Allied forces advanced and the military situation deteriorated, the former dictator found himself with few options. Italy's Valtellina Valley bordering Switzerland was one possible stronghold, a place 'for a desperate last stand', says historian Giovanni De Luna, a professor at the University of Turin. Another option was to 'enter into immediate negotiations with the Allies in an attempt to save his own skin', De Luna notes. 'In the end, he chose to flee in a column with an armoured car, disguised as a German soldier in the back of a truck." The aim was to reach Switzerland to escape capture by the Italian resistance fighters, the partisans. "Mussolini was no Hitler; he lacked the tragically idealistic streak that would drive the Führer to suicide. He did not have a mission to be a martyr. In this respect, Switzerland was an ideal and important destination for the Duce. He had already fled there as a young man to avoid military service, and had considered taking refuge there in 1922, when he was unsure whether his coup d'état, the March on Rome, had succeeded,' notes Italian historian Francesco Filippi, author of 'Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good: The Spread of Historical Amnesia'. 'The sentence is carried out quickly' But the attempt to escape failed. On April 27, 1945, Mussolini's column was stopped by a small group of partisans not far from Lake Como. The Italian leader was discovered slumped over in one of the convoy's vehicles. Condemned to death by the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy, Mussolini was executed the following day along with his mistress. Many accounts have been put forward as to the circumstances of his death in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra, at which few people were present, but as Filippi points out, 'the sentence was carried out quickly, as it was considered too complex and risky to transfer Mussolini to Milan'. Filippi says that even if the protagonists themselves gave contradictory versions of the facts over the years, what matters "is the unanimous agreement on the entirely Italian dynamic of the execution. It was the Italians who ended the life of the Fascist leader". On the evening of April 28, the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci, along with those of 16 other executed Fascists, were transported to Milan. In the early hours of the following day, they were dumped on the ground in Piazzale Loreto. The choice of this spot was deliberate: "It was the place where a year earlier, in August 1944, the bodies of 15 [executed] partisans had been left to lie in the sun for a whole day, as a warning intended by the Germans and Fascists to intimidate the population.' 'Bringing Mussolini's corpse to Piazzale Loreto was nothing more than the application of the law of an eye for an eye,' says Giovanni De Luna, author of a book that focuses on what happened in Milan on April 29, 1945, entitled "Una domenica d'aprile: Piazzale Loreto, 1945: una fine, un inizio" (A Sunday in April: Piazzale Loreto, 1945: An end, a beginning). But for De Luna, it wasn't just the desire for revenge that drove the crowd to physically attack the Duce's remains: "You can't understand Italians' fascination with Fascism and Mussolini if you don't take Mussolini's body into account. He put his body on stage, shirtless, bathing on the beaches of Rimini and Riccione and being photographed in 1,000 poses. This body, so idolised and loved, became an object of mockery, profanation and insult in Piazzale Loreto." De Luna also says that this outpouring of violence occurred at a specific moment, during the transition between two regimes: "The old power is no longer there and the new one has not yet arrived. The partisans don't know how to control this crowd, which is regaining its sovereignty and almost getting drunk on blood, because it knows that this moment will come to an end." 'The Duce's brutal contempt for Italians' After his death, Mussolini's body was buried in an anonymous grave in a Milan cemetery. Exhumed by neo-fascists in 1946, it was then hidden for 11 years, before being returned to his family in 1957. It was then transferred to the crypt of the family chapel in the cemetery of San Cassiano in Predappio, in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna, which has become a pilgrimage site. On the anniversary of his execution, thousands of those nostalgic for fascism gather there. Eight decades after the fall of the dictator, this anniversary has taken a new turn. The far-right Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) became the largest party in parliament after the 2022 legislative elections, propelling its leader Giorgia Meloni to the post of prime minister and making nostalgia for fascism acceptable. 'Things risk being watered down,' says De Luna. He notes that the president of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa, who holds the second-highest office in the Italian Republic, 'has a bust of Mussolini in his room'. 06:09 Fellow historian Filippi says that we are witnessing a rewriting of history: "Many people are trying in various ways to recuperate and revalue the memory of historical fascism. There's the version that Mussolini was basically a 'good person' concerned with the welfare of his subjects. An affectionate father who had made mistakes, but who had acted for the good. In reality, many accounts show the Duce's brutal contempt for the Italian people, whom he tried to transform over a period of twenty years. Mussolini wanted to create 'new Italians' because he didn't like the old ones." Filippi says that the country did not undertake a repudiation of fascism, or "defascistization", after the war because 'too many links had been forged between fascism and Italian society over a 20-year period'. He also says that the return of fascist ideas and nostalgia for Mussolini are 'a clear symptom of the crisis of representative democracy'. Coincidentally, the 80th anniversary of the Duce's death is occurring during the period following the death of Pope Francis. Mourning the death of a pope is a perfect pretext for the far right to downplay the events of 80 years ago, says Filippi: 'Taking advantage of his death, the government proclaimed five days of national mourning, compared with three for John Paul II, including April 25' – Liberation Day in Italy, marking the end of Nazi occupation and fascist rule. "The government has called upon citizens to celebrate this Liberation Day with sobriety, in other words, without too much enthusiasm," Filippi notes.
The Guardian
04-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Mussolini's March on Rome was neither peaceful nor bloodless
In her article about the TV series Mussolini: Son of the Century, about the rise to power of Benito Mussolini in Italy, Caroline Moorhead writes: 'The March on Rome was, in fact, concluded not in widespread bloodshed, as the series suggests, but remarkably peacefully. In Milan, Turin and Parma, where opposition was expected, the fascists took control quietly and smoothly' (As the far right surges around the globe, what can a new TV series about Mussolini teach us?, 26 February). Try telling that to the people of the neighbourhood of San Lorenzo in Rome, where numerous residents were killed by armed blackshirts during the March on Rome in October 1922. Argos Secondari was a well-known anti-fascist in Rome. He was attacked in his home by numerous fascists and savagely beaten, never recovering from his head injuries and ending his life in a psychiatric hospital. Giuseppe Lemmi, a communist, was kidnapped from the street by hundreds of blackshirts. His hair and beard were shaved, he was forced to drink castor oil, and he was paraded through the streets with humiliating signs around his neck. Many ordinary people were murdered in Rome and in other cities at that time, while private homes were raided and sacked. This, of course, came after a full two years of armed blackshirt violence across Italy, which saw thousands killed, many others threatened or injured, and numerous buildings linked to individuals, the trade unions or the left burned to the ground. In the summer of 1922, the blackshirts acted as a kind of occupying army, marching on entire cities like Ravenna and Bolzano, destroying buildings and murdering whoever got in their way. Far from exaggerating the violence of Italian fascism, it could be argued that Joe Wright's series plays it down. The idea that the March on Rome was peaceful or bloodless has been comprehensively debunked by historians such as Giulia Albanese and others over the last 20 years. Yet these powerful myths about Mussolini as a buffoon, and his squadristi as a bit of a joke, survive. These are dangerous myths because they underplay the centrality of violence to Italian fascism and to its seizure of power. It might be reassuring to think that those blackshirts took over Rome 'quietly', but that is not what happened in FootProfessor of modern Italian history, Bristol University
The Guardian
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guide #177: Son of a Century is a gripping, timely series – and maybe the end of the antihero drama
Retired history teachers everywhere must be quietly lamenting that Mussolini: Son of the Century wasn't around when they were building their Twentieth Century Europe modules. Joe Wright's Italian-language TV adaptation of Antonio Scurati's novel, which has just arrived in full on Sky and Now, is a world away from the fuzzy VHS recordings of old war documentaries that served as the multimedia element of many of our GCSE history classes. Following Il Duce's faltering first steps towards domination, from establishing his fascist party, through the March on Rome to the installation of a dictatorship in Italy, Wright's eight-part drama has the fidgety energy of a student trying to make history more exciting and cool. 'What if the scene where blackshirted goons violently attack that socialist paper was shot in a stylised, Tarantino-ish way?'; 'Could we replace the characters with puppets here?'; 'Wouldn't it be cool if Mussolini played with a grenade on his desk in this scene?'; 'How about we soundtrack the whole thing with frenetic big beat scored by one of the Chemical Brothers?' Amazingly, for the most part this approach works well. The restlessness of Wright's direction feels suited to the roiling, change-filled era of Italian history it depicts, when socialism and fascism were vying to usurp the old order, and all manner of literary, technological and artistic movements were bubbling up. At the centre of this circus is Luca Marinelli's spectacular performance as Mussolini, a fourth-wall-breaking narrator-lead who seems as interested in convincing the TV audience of fascism's charms as he is the Italian public. This Mussolini seems more than a little inspired by the TV antiheroes of the past two decades, men who carried us along for the ride as they did terrible things: a dash of Walter White's sociopathy and scheming here; a sprinkling of Tony Soprano's brutishness and brittle self-doubt there – not to mention his hairline too. Framing Mussolini in such a way is a high risk strategy. One of the less enjoyable aspects of TV's golden age were the bad fans, viewers who cheered on TV's antiheroes in their worst moments. On its release Scurati's novel, which uses historical documents alongside Mussolini's omniscient narration to retell the tale of the rise of fascism through its instigator's eyes, was criticised by some historians for 'resurrecting the cult of the leader' at a time when the far-right was making gains in Italy. It's hard not to imagine the same criticism being levelled at Wright's adaptation (though it should be said that Italian reviews have been unanimously glowing so far). For his part, Wright has spoken in interviews of the need for the audience to feel 'seduced' by Mussolini, to grasp how a nation might have fallen under his sway. And certainly the series is at pains to undercut its lead character's stump speeches at every opportunity: Mussolini is portrayed as pompous and craven, ready to sell out his fellow fascists whenever the movement looks like it is about to go south. The cruelty and brutality of that movement is shown in unflinching detail. As it moves from violent rabble to terrifyingly efficient force, uncomfortable parallels with recent violent rabbles-turned-terrifyingly efficient forces will be felt. Son of the Century arrives on our screens at an interesting cultural moment. The past decade of populist and far-right political movements have brought ideas and figures considered fringe or extreme closer to the mainstream: people like Curtis Yarvin, a previously obscure US 'neoreactionary' thinker who yearns for the replacement of liberal democracy with a 'form of one-man rule: halfway … between monarchy and tyranny' (vice-president JD Vance is reportedly a fan). The question for that mainstream, has been whether to go with option one: continue treating these ideas and figures as fringe and extreme – to 'no-platform' them, in essence; or option two: contend with them, but risk giving them oxygen to grow. For much of the past decade, it has felt like option one had won out. But then came Donald Trump's re-election in November, and with it the feeling that ignoring these fringe figures and ideas had either had no effect, or had been actively counterproductive. So now some are feeling it might be time to try option two. A case in point: on the eve of Trump's election the New York Times published an interview with Yarvin, arguing that 'given that [his ideas] are now finding an audience with some of the most powerful people in the country, Yarvin can't be so easily dismissed anymore'. Son of the Century too has more than a little of option two about it, reckoning with fascism in a way that some will find illuminating and others will feel is potentially dangerous. It feels emblematic of a new, charged cultural era. I wonder though if Son of the Century also signals something else: the definitive demise of the antihero drama. The TV zeitgeist already seems to have largely shifted away from the exploits of morally dubious men in the past few years – though Taylor Sheridan seems to be on a (actually pretty successful) crusade to keep them alive. But when a figure of such historical, outsized horror is being given the antihero drama treatment, where does the genre have left to go, what new moral depths does it have plumb? Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad's creator, used to describe the journey of Walter White, from cheery chemistry teacher to ruthless drug lord, as progressing from 'Mr Chips to Scarface'. Well, even that has nothing on the descent at the heart of Son of the Century. Sign up to The Guide Get our weekly pop culture email, free in your inbox every Friday after newsletter promotion If you want to read the complete version of this newsletter please subscribe to receive The Guide in your inbox every Friday
