Table Of ContentPEREGRINE BOOKS
MUSSOLINI’S ROMAN EMPIRE
Benito Mussolini has been described as a demi-god, a conquering
Caesar, a dupe, a megalomaniac, and a paper tiger. He set out to
make Italy feared throughout the world, and succeeded in making her
universally despised.
Denis Mack Smith, whom the New York Times called ‘the foremost
historian of modem Italy writing in English’, offers a masterly
assessment of Mussolini’s imperial policies from the start of the fascist
era to the fall of Italy in 1943, and an authoritative account of his
diplomacy, colonial policies, military preparedness and leadership and
his war aims. He demonstrates convincingly how these can be explained
by the paradox of the Duce himself: a brilliant propagandist all too
easily deceived by his own lies; an opportunist too careless to grasp
the opportunities he made; an impresario so vain he made disastrous
snap judgements to impress the world with his spontaneous genius;
a man who could make trains run on time, but who could declare war
without telling his generals . . .
For anyone who wants to understand the vital if ambiguous role of
Italy in the events leading up to the Second World War, this is
essential reading.
‘Written with verve, at a pace that seldom slackens, there is hardly a
page which does not contain some anecdote designed to divert the
reader’ - Observer
Denis Mack Smith is Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
He is the author of Cavour and Garibaldi i860. Garibaldi, Italy: A Modern
History, Medieval Sicily, Modern Sicily, Victor Emanuel, Cavour and the
Risorgimento, and editor of The Making of Italy 1796-1870, Garibaldi, Le
Rivoluzioni d'Italia and G. La Farina, Scritti Politici.
MUSSOLINIS
ROMAN EMPIRE
DENIS MACK SMITH
PENGUIN BOOKS
Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Penguin Books, 625 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 2801 John Street, Markham, Ontario, Canada L3R 1B4
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Reprinted in Peregrine Books 1979
Copyright © Denis Mack Smith, 1976
All rights reserved
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Fletcher & Son Ltd, Norwich
Bound by Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
Set in Videocomp Janson
Maps by Paul J. Pugliese
Except in the United States of America,
this book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser
PREFACE
If a politician has to be assessed by whether his speeches are in
any way profound or prophetic, or even just sensible, then Benito
Mussolini was no better than third-rate. If instead the test is how
far he changed his country and the rest of the world, the rating
would be far more in his favour, although, if the criterion also
includes whether he left the world a better place, the inventor of
fascism would in nearly everyone's estimation score no marks at
all. Mussolini would himself have preferred to be judged by
whether he succeeded in frightening Europe and making his
country of greater account in the world, on which reckoning even
his enemies would probably have to admit that he was a very con
siderable personality indeed.
Such hypothetical assessments must always depend on personal
and subjective considerations, but a preface is a place where as
sumptions and prejudices can be stated without apology. The
theme of this book is how Mussolini deliberately and even care
fully steered his fascist movement into imperialism and into a suc
cession of wars which eventually left Italy prostrate. The defeat
was as total as it was unexpected, and those fascist leaders who
survived were thereby persuaded in retrospect not only to admit
that much must have been wrong with fascism, but also to put
most of the blame on Mussolini personally. Although their mo
tives are suspect, it is hard to disagree with this conclusion. Nev
ertheless the apportionment of blame is not a particularly interest
ing or important matter. Many grave offences were committed by
the Fascists in their twenty years of rule and they would have had
much to answer for in a court of criminal law, but no Italian was
ever brought before the Nuremberg tribunal, and local Italian
courts preferred wherever possible to ignore or exonerate in an
understandable attempt to reduce animosities and black out what
was painful in the past. History, however, has as its purpose not
PREFACE
exoneration, nor condemnation, and certainly not the blacking out
of what may be painful and embarrassing, but rather the attempt
to comprehend and make intelligible. Among other tasks it must
examine what the Fascists wanted to do and how far they suc
ceeded in doing it.
When Mussolini himself recalled what he liked to think of as his
greatest successes in foreign policy, he singled out first his con
quest of Abyssinia (1935-1936); next, his blocking of commu
nism by sending troops to help General Franco in the Spanish
civil war; thirdly, his mediation at the Munich conference of
1938, which seemed to save Europe from a major war; and then
his intuitive choice of June 1940 as the best moment for making
war on Britain and France. Subsequently he also boasted about
his decision to invade the Balkans in October 1940, though when
he declared war on Russia and the United States in 1941 he him
self seems to have realised that these were the actions of a gambler
whose luck was beginning to run out.
How far any one of these decisions justified his self-satisfaction
will be discussed later, but by his own standards he was certainly
successful in much of what he tried or pretended to do. In so far
as he aimed to make Italy feared and hated in the world, he
achieved his purpose, even though he also provoked the additional
and unexpected reaction of scorn and contempt. He used to say
that he wanted to test the mettle of Italy in war, and here too he
succeeded. He meant to assert Italy’s “rights” to territorial expan
sion even if, in his own words, this would involve setting fire to
Europe and bringing civilised life to a halt. He was as good as his
word and many hundreds of thousands of Italians died in conse
quence, though he accepted such losses philosophically because he
prided himself on being a realist who saw life as struggle and per
petual combat. He therefore accepted blood-letting as not only
normal but desirable. The fact that he incidentally brought eco
nomic ruin and civil war to Italy, and also advanced the cause of
communism in Europe, was unintended and obviously unwel
come, but he nonchalantly ascribed such disasters wholly to the
malevolence of his opponents.
In the last period of his life, as he mused on his own triumph
and defeat, Mussolini could not accept that he had any major re
sponsibility for what had gone wrong. He thought that if only
others, and in particular Hitler and Churchill, had listened to him
vi
PREFACE
and yielded to his better judgement, Europe could have been
saved from disaster. He was proud to think that historians would
see him in a better light than contemporaries might. He believed
that future generations would above all admire the way he had
created fascism, a set of ideas which in his opinion was destined to
survive defeat and remain the central theme of the twentieth cen
tury. They would admire the way he had made such a rebellious
and changeable people as the Italians obey him for twenty years—
something no one else had ever succeeded in doing. This success in
dealing with Italians he once called his political masterpiece, even
though he was ready to admit that his fellow-countrymen proved
unworthy of him and of what he tried to do in their name. Such
arrogance and insensitivity were characteristic of the man. Never
theless one should remember that, despite appearances, Mussolini
possessed considerable intelligence and an unusual political skill.
Even though he spoke more rubbish than most other contempo
rary politicians, he generally did so deliberately and after carefully
gauging his audience, and was quite able to talk good sense when
he wanted or needed to.
Where he seldom went wrong was as a propagandist com
municating with the masses. Even though he said he cared little
for public opinion, and perhaps thought that he meant what he
said, Mussolini spent a great deal of time trying to mould popular
beliefs, because he discovered that he had the capacity for making
his listeners believe almost anything he liked. He was by training
and profession a journalist, and through editorship of several
newspapers had first—as he himself put it—felt the pulse of the
Italian people. No sooner had he succeeded in identifying an audi
ence through his leading articles, than he proceeded to use them
as a lever for attaining political power. As he freely admitted,.lies
might sometimes be more useful than truths, and for the purposes
of propaganda he deliberately manufactured a false image of him
self, a carefully tended and increasingly distorted personification
which became the kernel or central structure round which the fas
cist movement was built. Aided by an army of petty intellectuals
and "journalists, he fashioned a make-believe effigy of the Duce,
who was depicted as a leader of vast intelligence, personal magne
tism, and profound humanity: a man of immense power who was
admired and feared by the whole civilised world. These journal
ists sometimes spoke of him as a real God to whom all personal
vu
PREFACE
liberties must be sacrificed; in return for such a sacrifice, he would
transform the nature of Italians and make them mighty and irre
sistible.
In this sense it can be claimed that journalism and public rela
tions were the most essential of all professional activities under
fascism. If one examines the ruling elite in the Grand Council of
fascism, at times almost half the members of this body held union
cards of the journalists’ trade union; as Mussolini was ready to ac
knowledge, it was these journalists in the inner councils of the
party who were the best Fascists and the most useful of all his col
laborators. In return for high salaries and prestige, they helped
him to give Italy, if not the reality of strength, at least the appear
ance of it, which he thought might come to almost the same thing
so long as ordinary people could be made to believe it. For this
reason any history of Mussolini’s foreign policy has to be also, or
even mainly, a history of propaganda. By persuading foreign gov
ernments that he was the strong leader of a strong country, he
made it possible to pursue a belligerent foreign policy without
having to waste scarce money on providing the material sinews of
war. By convincing Italians that he and he alone could lead them
to greatness and riches at negligible cost to themselves, he won the
plenitude of power for himself without much opposition.
Mussolini’s greatest skill was in the manufacture and com
munication of such myths, and in his hands they became as im
portant a part of the substance of history as were the external
“facts” of fascism. But in retrospect it is important to distinguish
facts from propaganda, to see what was reality and what was
illusion. Failure to make this distinction was one important reason
why so many of the older generation of Italian liberals misunder
stood fascism, and gratuitously helped Mussolini into power by
taking his propaganda at face value. A similar failure then led the
next generation to disaster just because he convinced them of his
own genius and of their invincibility. Today, however, it is easier
to discern what was counterfeit and see how the trick was carried
out.
In recent years a great deal of historical writing has built up a
clear picture of how fascism succeeded in establishing its authority
during the early and middle 1920s, but much has still to be done
to investigate what Mussolini came to stand for in later years.
Inevitably, the archives of government departments for the 1930s
viii
PREFACE
are still very largely inaccessible. Nor in Italy were there official
enquiries about the Second World War like those carried
out, admittedly in an often partisan spirit, about the First. And
some of the official and semi-official histories, for instance of the
army, navy, and air force, have been excessively purged of con
troversy before publication. The mere fact that, thirty years after
Mussolini’s death, fascism or the memory of fascism is still a polit
ical issue in contemporary Italy, means that the subject is not yet
open for completely dispassionate investigation.
The present volume is an essay on one very important aspect of
Italian fascism. Its prior assumption is that the nature of Musso
lini’s political career is better revealed by what fascism becalhe
than by how it began: ex fructibus eorum cognoscetis eos. It is a study
of political and military defeat and the reasons for that defeat. It is
incidentally a study of the effectiveness and the dangers of prop
aganda. Fascism largely succeeded in isolating Italy from the rest
of Europe. It employed not only the press and radio, but Italy's
whole educational system, to build up a series of convenient
myths. These myths were intended to make Italy a dominant
power in the world, but instead, because Mussolini silenced criti
cism, led to bankruptcy and destruction.
Denis Mack Smith
Oxford, 197s
