ABSTRACT
It is exceptionally difficult to get Mussolini into focus. The absurdities of his posture, his jutting jaw and contemptuous lip, his hands on hips, chest thrown out, the cult of personality which required that the Duce know everything, see everything, hear everything, understand everything, which required that the light be on in his office so that passers-by would note that at any hour of the day or night the Duce was at work, provide the stuff of caricatures and gave Charlie Chaplin one of his most effective inspirations. Yet for Bottai and his generation in Italy, for the young men maddened by the experience of the trenches and disorientated by the chaotic world of peacetime, the encounter with Mussolini was 'destiny'. Antonio Salandra, sometime Prime Minister and one of the old-style politicians whom Mussolini outplayed and outmanoeuvred, offered this portrait of him:
Enigmatic mixture alternatively of genius and vulgarity, of sincere profession of noble sentiments and of base instincts, of reprisal and vendetta, of rude frankness and badly dissimulated histrionics, of tenacious assertions and sudden changes, of effective and occasionally overwhelming eloquence adorned with culture and presumptuous ignorance expressed in plebeian language; at the core . . . an exclusive, I would say ferocious, cult of himself . . . no limits of discrimination between good and evil, no indication of a sense of the law, in general a force of nature containable only by greater forces. 2 1
The image of a natural force recurs in many descriptions of Mussolini by those who knew him well, an uncontainable, explosive personality. The Russian Jewish socialist, Angelica Balabanoff, knew him in his down-and-out phase before the First World War and recalled an occasion in Lugano when Mussolini suddenly burst out, waving his arms at the well-to-do in the restaurants, 'Look, people eating, drinking and enjoying themselves. And I will travel third class, eat miserable cheap food. Porca Madonnal how I hate the rich! Why must I suffer this injustice? How long must we wait?' 2 2 Yet it was not the things of this world, riches and luxuries, that Mussolini desired. He was no Goring who accumulated rings and furs but a
frugal man who lived simply. What Mussolini craved was power. He said years later: T am obsessed by this wild desire. It consumes my whole being. I want to make a mark on my era with my will like a lion with its claws. A mark like that! ' 2 3 With that he scratched the covering of a chair from end to end.
