Mussolini

Mussolini by RJB Bosworth, 428 pages

Benito Mussolini was the first of the fascist dictators.  Il Duce ruled Italy for over twenty years, pursuing a policy of national unity through the subordination of all things to the state, with the state incarnate in the charismatic flesh of the dictator.  For much of that time Mussolini was widely perceived, by foreigners as well as Italians, as one of the most talented and dynamic European leaders.  In the end, however, Italy was humiliatingly crushed in the Second World War, and Mussolini himself was killed by partisans, his corpse hung from a meathook in a public square in Milan.  In the public imagination he is often reduced to Hitler's "ignoble second", and implicitly associated with Nazi crimes without receiving the benefit of Hitler's luciferian glamour.  Nor have historians been much kinder, often considering him, in the words of AJP Taylor, "a vain, blundering boaster without either ideas or aims".

Bosworth contradicts some of these views.  Mussolini was capable of great ruthlessness, but he talked about the supposed value of ruthlessness more often than he actually acted ruthlessly.  He was the most intellectual of twentieth century tyrants, with the possible exception of Lenin, and one of the few to have something resembling a traditional domestic arrangement, despite his habitual adulteries.  The picture of Mussolini that emerges is that of a born journalist who never outgrew the habit of concentrating on the headlines and letting the stories write themselves.

Bosworth's central interest is not in Mussolini the man, however, but in the interaction between Mussolini and society.  There have been a number of analyses of Nazi Germany (most famously by Goldhagen) which have highlighted the fact that Germans under Nazism tended to "work toward" Der Fuehrer, attempting to anticipate his will rather than waiting for an explicit order.  Bosworth uncovers similar examples in Fascist Italy, notably in fulfilling the dictator's brutal rhetoric with real crimes.  The author also convincingly demonstrates that although Italian fascism was the ideology for which the adjective "totalitarian" was coined, it never managed to overcome the strong Italian commitment to family, region, and religion, but instead was forced to work around or through these more durable institutions.