My Autobiography

by Benito Mussolini. With a foreword by Richard Washburn Child. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1928. 8vo. xix + 311 PP. $3.50.

‘THERE is no other autobiography by me,’ we are assured in Mussolini’s own hand, and on the front cover of this egregious volume, as if to guarantee that autobiographies, unlike interviews, would not be the most bountiful product of the dictatorship. Indeed there may still be just a doubt as to whether there is any autobiography by Mussolini, if in an autobiography one hopes to find an examination of the forces that make the man or the subtle shaping of a character that is trying to change the destinies of Italy. For this book is a glorified interview, dictated and edited first by Mussolini himself, then by Mr. Child.

Perhaps it is too much to expect of autobiography in general, and of Mussolini’s in particular, that it should show the growth of a personality. He, more than most, may justifiably make his life a record of events, omnium pars magna fuit, since he has lived almost entirely in acting. The word ‘extravert’ is a sadly misused label, yet one may certainly say of Mussolini’s Autobiography that he builds himself up by scenes of action. Within twelve pages he is an exile in Switzerland, characteristically without mention of his father’s arrest as being in any way connected with his ’urge to escape’ from ’the short rope’ with which he was tethered as a country school-teacher. In the scope of twenty-two pages he has plunged into the war — short shrift enough for those Socialist follies of youth, or for troubles with the police! There is small mention even of those shaping years of wandering and exile in which he soaked up such ideas as fitted his needs for a philosophy of violence and action — although he significantly pays his special homage to Gustave Le Bon for introducing him to The Psychology of the Croud. To Mussolini, all the world is a crowd, Italy his particular part of it, and Rome the stage from which to sway it.

If there is anywhere an embodiment of the pure act toward which Gentile has turned Italian idealism, it is Mussolini. His thinking is itself a form of violent leaping to a new field of acting. War called him, and he left the Socialism which in its revolutionary fervor had seemed for a time to mean action. War gave him a glimpse of the power of the patriotic ‘Mythus’ and the possibilities of hierarchical discipline. It confirmed him in a contempt for half-measure, ‘cowards,’ and all compromisers. D’Annunzio had, after the War, gradually to yield his place as the most operatic figure in Italy to the great veterans’ leader, who, in the brief years between 1919 and 1923, made the most complete volteface of any public man in modern times, from complete social democracy to complete autocracy, and an autocracy actually used to defend monarchy, clericalism, and capitalism from the very treatment that in 1919 he had advocated against them.

There is, of course, no attempt at an explanation of the causes of this shift, except to paint once more Italy’s humiliation. The tide was flowing: Mussolini found its crest. Bolshevism he reproached at first with being impotent, to create Revolution. Then he found in its insults to ex-soldiers and its allegiance to Moscow an excuse for launching sacred violence against the shell of the Liberal State. ‘The popular party [Don Sturzo’s liberal Catholic Democratic partyl, along with the others, was too much in a hurry to close the parenthesis of the war.’ It did not suit Mussolini for so good a war, one which had brought him to national attention, to come to an end. The rest of the work is a description of battles, happily most of them bloodless.
He dismisses the parliamentarians, Giolitti, Bonomi, Facta, Nitti, and the rest as a lot of cowards and weaklings, who were selling Italy to the mob for its suffrages and betraying her sacred soil to the foreigner. About the slain Matteotti, whose fearless revelation of Fascist intimidation and control of the 1924 elections cost his life, he is almost venomous. Throughout it is Mussolini, the iron-jawed, who assumes responsibility for all, keeps all in motion and under discipline.

Certainly this is the most histrionic figure of the generation, set on an Italian stage eminently fit for posing. That Mussolini has will power and that he knows the right moment for a coup de théâtre, this apologia serves abundantly to prove — if more proof were needed. He reviews with firm pride each act of the Fascist régime, each tightening of the circle of powers vested in him — the abolition of freedom of criticism; the incorporation of Labor and the professions into Fascist syndicates; the regimentation of the youth of Italy to a worship of the State, ‘the sacred Nation’; the institution of the podesta to control local government more completely. That there maybe a clash between this pagan Roman State and the universal Church within it does not disturb Mussolini. He lives on clashes and enjoys suppressing them.

The head of the ‘Corporative State,’regulating every association and economic activity within it, has apparently convinced even the conservative business elements and the members of the Senate that his claim to absolute control is to be taken seriously. One will not learn from this bit of super-propaganda the difficulties which have had to be overcome in disciplining the old violent Fascisti like Farinacci, but one will get an adequate picture of the way Mussolini thinks and acts. The judgment which individual readers will pass will reflect their own estimates of Italian capacity for a different type of government, and perhaps reflect also an underlying attitude if not a political philosophy. What a gift it would be to see ten or fifty years ahead into the judgment that events will write on this magnificent actor! Will he seem to that day a great man, a psychopath, or perhaps both?

W. Y. ELLIOTT