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 oldstyle 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.21
