What I Am Reading: "The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy" by Sergio Luzzatto

Human bodies had a great significance in fascist iconography, perhaps none more so than that of Benito Mussolini himself. The regime exalted in the muscular physicality of its young supporters, and in its early days also made political hay out of the wounded bodies of its WW1 veteran supporters. Similar to Vladimir Putin today, Il Duce never missed an opportunity to be photographed in an action pose, or shirtless, or receiving adoration from crowds, his body a synecdoche for the strength of his regime. The interest and intrigue in Mussolini's corporeal form continued after his death, through the adventures and discussion of his corpse.

Luzzatto, a history professor, gives a thorough rundown. Corpses played a symbolic role in fascism before this: an early flash point was the body of socialist MP Giacomo Matteotti, discovered defaced after his abduction in 1924, the source of considerable gloating by the right and anguish on the left. During his heyday, there were many attempts made on Mussolini's life, though their failures contributed to an aura of invulnerability. Luzzatto charts the grim public interest in killing Mussolini through police documentation, as these threats were criminalized and many were imprisoned for expressing them. Bodies appeared regularly during the civil war in 1944-45; after the Allies liberated southern Italy and the Nazis set Mussolini up in control of a puppet state, known as the Salò Republic, in the north. Fighting between partisans and loyalists was brutal, with executed victims displayed often in public places, including the Piazzale Loreto in Milan that would therefore later be selected as the site for the display of Mussolini's own body.

Mussolini was captured by partisans in April of 1945, along with several fascist officials and his mistress, Clara Petacci, as they attempted to flee to Germany in disguise. He was held for a day in a farmhouse near Lake Como, then shot by partisan captain Walter "Colonel Valerio" Audisio. His body, along with that of his companions, was brought to Milan, where a vengeful mob gathered to abuse and defile it. Eventually it was hung from the crossbeam of a gas station, before being taken down and autopsied in an American morgue.

Many foreigners and Italians, especially outside of Resistance circles, were dismayed by this crude display, lamenting it in public and private forums. I, personally, think that it was Italy's finest hour, a display of public justice that many other dictators have escaped or will escape. Meanwhile, interest in Mussolini's body continued even after it was taken down from the gas station crossbeam. Despite popular rumor, no syphilis or brain tumor was discovered that could serve as an explanation for his conduct and behavior.

For a while it would be a bit o taboo for the Resistance to talk about the killing, and in fact it took years for the Communists to bring forth the men responsible. The subject was the source of some post-war hand-wringing, embodying northern excesses to some in the south, countered by the northern assertion that, as they were the ones actually engaging in a war, they could not be judged. This came against the backdrop of the 1946 referendum on the monarchy, which resulted in a dramatic north-south divide in voting results.

Shortly before this referendum, the body was stolen by young neo-fascist Domenico Leccisi, and was the subject of considerable tabloid coverage before being discovered in a monastery, "folded up" in a crate. Leccisi would subsequently be elected to Parliament over other, more veteran fascists, and spent his career as a Mussolini revanchist.

Political battles over other corpses went on for many years after the war. The Resistance made great efforts to identify and return the remains of their own dead, often found in mass graves. Officials were sometimes willing to go outside of the law (prohibitions on rail transport of bodies) to facilitate this. The fate of the Republic of Salò dead were more controversial. Many Resistance members opposed any repatriations or commemorations, but the great central mass of those who were not Fascists or active against Fascism were more willing to forgive. This ties in to questions of Italian identity that were being hashed out at the time in the culture. Unlike in France, where (in my estimation) the question was over people attempting to exaggerate their role in or support for the Resistance, in Italy it was preferred to simply put the whole episode behind them; to feel a generalized, non-specific guilt, but engage in a spirit of Christian forgiveness. This forgiveness was extended by many to the Salò dead, and by some to Mussolini.

After the body was recovered, it was held by the government for eleven years. It was hidden away in another monastery, with the location known only to a few. Naturally, speculation ran rampant throughout the country. The body was an object of popular fascination and imagination, much of it by whom Luzzato terms as "anti-anti-fascists," people who were not fascists but were opposed to the generally left-wing Resistance. Writers cited Mussolini's defense against "Bolshevism" (relevant in the post-war climate of relative Communist strength) or otherwise wanted to explain away fascism as simply the dominance of political theater and not toxic ideology, or trivialize it as a phallic cult. These ideas, as well as obsession around Mussolini's health and its decline through the war years, his body's rumored cancerous or sexually-diseased state, served as a shortcut for the center and right to avoid investigating the deeper social causes of fascism.

The fascists themselves attempted to downplay Mussolini's squalid death, and restore some level of dignity. Fascism had long emphasized a "good death," worthy of a man truly in control of his situation. Mussolini's death obviously did not fit the bill. They also sought to avenge himself on his killer, Audisio, both violently and through belittlement, after the man became an MP.

The mainstream attitude of forgiveness and both-sidesism persisted throughout the 1950s, as the popular culture sought not (as one might have expected) to scapegoat Mussolini for the country's sins, but rather to forgive him, and thus forgive themselves and be able to move on from their past. They wanted to send Mussolini not to heaven or to hell, but to purgatory (p. 147). It was not to be, or at least, not permanently.

Mussolini's body was given a final resting place in his home village in 1957 as part of a grubby political pander. The Christian Democrats, a center-right party that dominated Italian politics for many years, put forth the gesture as part of a compromise with the neo-fascists in Parliament (after the CD leader, Andone Zoli, had promised that he would never coalition with them). The burial was the site of a brief ceremony, and soon became a place of considerable fascist pilgrimage. In fact, in the first months, so many fascists (many of them young neo-fascists) traveled to the site and conducted illegal fascist displays that the left wrote to Interior Minister Fernando Tambroni demanding that he enforce the laws against their gathering. There were some counterprotests and some minor violence, but eventually the pilgrimages tapered off a bit. Tambroni, however, ignored the left's will at his peril. When he became Prime Minister himself in 1960, he allowed his neo-fascist coalition partners to hold a previously-illegal mass assembly, and attempted to bring them into the government as ministers. The resulting left-wing protests, mainly by a new generation of young people who had embraced the ideals of the Resistance more than their parents had, brought down the government. The Christian Democrats shifted to primarily coalition with the left. At the same time, the widespread introduction of television introduced the new generation to the cartoonish overacting of Mussolini's oratory, trained as he was prior to microphones and voice amplification. The young wondered how their parents and grandparents had ever fallen for someone so transparently ridiculous.

From this high point, the historiography up to the present (the book was actually originally published in 1998) gets a little dreary. Amid the unrest of the 1970s, it again became fashionable to deplore the violence of Mussolini's execution. Mussolini and his henchmen were again studied on a personal, not historic level, and some Resistance members regretted that Mussolini hadn't been subjected to a trial to better document his crimes. The violence of his end even allowed some to posit a moral equivalence between the fascists and the Resistance, especially after new American footage of the Piazzale Loreto crowd was shown in the 1990s. I can only hope that this was a minority view then, but I am not incredibly confident with the rise of nationalism in subsequent years, especially in Italy (continuing to this very day). I think an update to this book would have a lot to add, since Mussolini's corpse clearly held great symbolic importance to Italy and Italians.