Di Quella Pira! All’ Armi!

Mussolini’s Roman Empire By Denis Mack Smith Viking, 322 pp., $12.95 Italy, Robert Burton wrote, is hell for women and paradise for horses. The peninsula has also provided lush grazing for an occasional glib jackass. For none more so than Benito Mussolini, perhaps the most grotesque, tragi-comic political incendiary of all time. Even Adolf Hitler, who preserved a sentimental spot in his otherwise stony heart for his precursor in modern Caesarism, often found the Duce more than a little absurd. Albert Speer has recorded how the Führer, hardly a low-key orator himself, once treated his private entourage to a mocking imitation of his Italian counterpart. With jutting jaw, hand on hip, and legs astride, he “flung out a number of Italian or Italian-sounding words like patria, victoria, macaroni, bellezza, bel canto, telegráfico, and basta. It was,” says Speer (thereby raising some questions about his own sense of humor), “very funny.”

The Duce, for his part, complained that Hitler was a second-rate leader at the head of a first-rate country while he was a first-rate leader stuck with a second-rate country, a statement at least half true. Despite repeated efforts, Mussolini, who had real talent as a writer, could never wade through Mein Kampf. Far more damningly, he was never able to formulate a clear, permanent definition of his own Fascist philosophy for the excellent reason that there wasn’t any. The Duce’s Fascism was little more than a series of shifting slogans tied to a para-military cadre of party thugs, opportunistic journalists and politicians, and a few embittered rightwing intellectuals looking for a new anti-Communist movement with fresh color, appeal, and panache. The movement itself relied almost exclusively on a crude personality cult and fed on the wounded ego of a proud people whose recent history had been humiliating and whose “respectable” politicians—traditionally liberals and conservatives— were considered corrupt and ineffectual.

AB

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Aram Bakshian Jr.

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Mussolini’s Roman Empire By Denis Mack Smith Viking, 322 pp., $12.95 Italy, Robert Burton wrote, is hell for women and paradise for horses. The peninsula has also provided lush grazing for an occasional glib jackass. For none more so than Benito Mussolini, perhaps the most grotesque, tragi-comic political incendiary of all time. Even Adolf Hitler, who preserved a sentimental spot in his otherwise stony heart for his precursor in modern Caesarism, often found the Duce more than a little absurd. Albert Speer has recorded how the Führer, hardly a low-key orator himself, once treated his private entourage to a mocking imitation of his Italian counterpart. With jutting jaw, hand on hip, and legs astride, he “flung out a number of Italian or Italian-sounding words like patria, victoria, macaroni, bellezza, bel canto, telegráfico, and basta. It was,” says Speer (thereby raising some questions about his own sense of humor), “very funny.”

The Duce, for his part, complained that Hitler was a second-rate leader at the head of a first-rate country while he was a first-rate leader stuck with a second-rate country, a statement at least half true. Despite repeated efforts, Mussolini, who had real talent as a writer, could never wade through Mein Kampf. Far more damningly, he was never able to formulate a clear, permanent definition of his own Fascist philosophy for the excellent reason that there wasn’t any. The Duce’s Fascism was little more than a series of shifting slogans tied to a para-military cadre of party thugs, opportunistic journalists and politicians, and a few embittered rightwing intellectuals looking for a new anti-Communist movement with fresh color, appeal, and panache. The movement itself relied almost exclusively on a crude personality cult and fed on the wounded ego of a proud people whose recent history had been humiliating and whose “respectable” politicians—traditionally liberals and conservatives— were considered corrupt and ineffectual.