The cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians

Introduction

Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri

The aim of this volume is to provide the first multifaceted analysis of the genesis, functioning and decline of the personality cult surrounding Benito Mussolini, the dictator who ruled Italy from 1922 to 1943 and who headed the Nazi-dominated Italian Social Republic between 1943 and 1945. Mussolini was the first European dictator of the inter-war years and many of the forms of leadership embraced by Hitler, Franco and others were inspired by the practices that flourished around the man known at home and abroad as ‘Il Duce’. Mussolini’s biography has been written many times, most recently by Richard Bosworth (Mussolini, Arnold, 2002) and Pierre Milza (Mussolini – published in French and Italian, 2000), but up until now no one has systematically investigated the extraordinary range of practices that sustained the belief that Mussolini was a truly exceptional man in Italian history (a ‘man of providence’, in the words of Pope Pius XI). Although the dictator’s biographers and numerous scholars of Fascism have explored topics including Mussolini’s personal magnetism, his oratory and popular appeal, his physical presence and the regime’s propaganda machine, these have not been subjected to systematic scrutiny. By the same token, newsreels, popular biographies, portraits, postcards and other representations of Mussolini have been topics of selective separate examination without being drawn into an overall interpretation of the nature of the cult of the Duce.¹

The cult of Mussolini was vital to the way Fascism became a regime and consolidated itself. It provided a justification for the abolition of democracy and the centralisation of power. It furnished a focal point for the integration of the Italian population into a system of regimented consensus. It offered a personalised channel of communication that was in some ways distinct from Fascism itself. It even enabled the regime to weather the discontent and disaffection caused by the early setbacks of the Second World War and ensuing hardships. The narratives of exceptionality that had been woven around Mussolini meant that he was often personally exempt from criticisms directed at his regime.

The cult involved expressions of faith in the powers of Mussolini and the institutionalisation of these in collective rituals and the reorganisation of public spaces. The Fascist Party and state institutions extended the personality cult into the school system, public architecture and the arts. The mass media, which were directly or indirectly controlled by the party or the regime, provided a powerful echo as well as new platforms that the dictator happily exploited.

The primary organisers of the cult were the Fascist Party secretaries Augusto Turati, Giovanni Giuriati and Achille Starace, who institutionalised devotion to the Duce and created rituals and practices to formalise it. However, Mussolini was himself heavily complicit in the fostering of the cult and was in some respects its chief initial architect, although in the early 1920s the roles of his mistress and first biographer Margherita Sarfatti and of his brother Arnaldo, editor of the Fascist daily Il Popolo d’Italia, were also crucial. He stage-managed himself, created his own wardrobe and personally checked all uses of his name and image. He also received many visitors, both domestic and foreign, and oversaw a private office that processed the steady stream of letters and requests from ordinary Italians – on average well in excess of a thousand a day in the 1930s. Italians of all ages and backgrounds wrote to Mussolini expressing their loyalty, gratitude and even love.

At least up until the later 1930s, and to some degree beyond, there was genuine, spontaneous participation in the cult. Artists, for example, needed no persuasion to paint or sculpt a man who was widely seen as charismatic, and they created a body of works which blurred the boundaries between openly propagandistic visual representations and the domain of the fine arts and design. Mussolini’s personal popularity meant that companies were always keen to use his name or image to market the most varied of goods. The vast majority of the many thousands of postcards featuring the Duce produced under the regime were manufactured by commercial enterprises, not by the party.

For many convinced Fascists, Mussolini’s exceptionality was an article of faith that was only shaken (but not always destroyed) by the events of the war. For others, admiration for him was an effect of the way the chief of Fascism came to embody the nation and a project of modernity in a particular historical phase. This identification was achieved most fully between the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and the establishment of the empire in 1935–36. In subsequent years, the alliance with Hitler, the expansion of political control over everyday life, the racial laws, corruption, military defeat and worsening economic conditions eroded the Duce’s popularity. But so concerted and sustained were the efforts to promote belief in Mussolini’s uniqueness as an Italian genius that their effects would be felt for many decades.

The Fascists were not slow to invest their politics with messianic zeal, and the template of Catholicism provided, and continues to provide, a ready means for interpreting the Duce in religious terms. In his influential Il culto del littorio (published in English as The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy) and numerous other writings,² the historian Emilio Gentile has argued that Fascism is best understood as a political religion with its own belief system, liturgy, rituals, temples and spirituality. Although it did not conflict at every level with Catholicism – indeed, Gentile argues that it complemented Catholicism while seeking to integrate it into its own Roman-centred outlook – the regime did compete with the Church by developing religious elements and practices, including adoration of a secular but godlike figure.³ ‘The myth of Mussolini and the cult of the Duce were certainly the most spectacular and popular manifestation of the Fascist religion’, he argues.⁴

Gentile’s work captures some important aspects of Fascism and helps to explain the devotion of ideologically committed Fascists to Mussolini, but his view hinges on an idea of Fascism as totalitarian that has never been universally accepted by historians.⁵ It also relies on a methodology that focuses purely on Fascist writings and the activities organised by or through the regime itself. Although he acknowledges that ‘the myth of the Duce as it emerged after the March on Rome consisted of multiple elements, some of them external to Fascism’,⁶ his work does not reflect this important trait.

In our view, the dictator’s cult of personality resonated widely with the general public because it was a complex and multifaceted phenomenon to which various factors contributed. These include the tradition of exceptional figures within Italian nationalism and the widespread belief that the nation’s future required a new hero, the nascent cinematic star system, and the persistence of primitive religious practices in large parts of rural Italy. It was the particular combination of the traditional and the modern, of historical motifs and contemporary themes, the organised and the less organised, that produced a cult that manifested itself in many different ways. It did not function in a vacuum but in a society in which people lived, worked and passed time in ways that were only ever partially Fascistised.

The cult is best seen as a complex synergy of Italian nationalism, mass politics, visual culture, popular religion, celebrity and consumerism. It arose as a result of a coming together of several different strands in politics, society and culture. Some of these could be controlled from above, while others were more spontaneous. These different elements, combined with what eventually became the particular Fascist attachment to personalised rule,⁷ mean that the regime can be described as a form of ‘politicised spectacular modernism’ in which the cult of personality was a central, but not always controllable aspect. This definition should not be confused with that of ‘Fascist spectacle’ advanced by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi.⁸ In her view, the spectacular aspects of Fascism were crucial to the regime’s battle against a modernity it sought to contrast and combat.⁹ In our perspective, by contrast, there was – in the realm of the cult of personality – a constant and unavoidable interchange between political anti-modernism, avant-garde artistic practices, technological modernisation, celebrity and consumerism. This ensured that the cult of personality was always a realm rich with inconsistency and contradiction. At times, it was an extraordinarily powerful phenomenon that was the primary structuring element of the public sphere. At others, it wavered or declined, as some of its constitutive elements escaped the official framework of the cult and manifested themselves in ways that were not fully compatible with it. By adopting an ‘open’ view of the cult, this book aims to capture not merely its Fascist content but the broader currents that it harnessed and which bore on it.

Four particular features of the volume deserve to be highlighted. First, the cult is related to distinctive features of the Italian nation-state as it had developed since unification in 1861. The weakness of popular patriotism, the low status of parliament, the limited involvement of the masses in public life and the challenge of anti-system forces, notably socialism, made the search for unifying national symbols seem imperative. For a variety of reasons, the monarchy failed to secure a commanding symbolic position at the heart of the state. The nationalist adventurer Giuseppe Garibaldi was certainly popular, though the radical and heterodox aspects of his personality did not always make him a comfortable national icon. The crisis of the institutions after the First World War rendered the need for a unifying symbol all the more urgent. The cult of the Duce is thus seen as fulfilling a critical political and historical function in Italy.

Second, significant emphasis is given to the way the cult manifested itself in different contexts. The city of Rome was the primary seat of the Fascist cult. As a city endowed with unique historical and religious resonance, it provided a special setting for Mussolini’s grandiose plans for the nation. This was reflected in the use of public spaces and in various architectural projects that incorporated the cult of personality. But there was also a local dimension to the cult. In addition to Predappio, Mussolini’s birthplace, highly ritualised visits to the Italian regions have been studied. Finally, the attempt to export the cult to the Italian colonies in North Africa following the proclamation of the Empire in 1936 is analysed.

Third, the cult is seen as a cultural phenomenon and not simply as the byproduct of a system of rule. The variety of artistic and other visual representations of Mussolini means that the cult is related to currents within Italian and European art. The vast array of representations of the dictator, which included artworks of dubious artistic quality which could easily then and now be dismissed under the category of kitsch, at almost any stage of the life of the regime, also contained artworks by Italy’s most celebrated and talented artists and most notably those associated with the avant-garde. In contrast, say, to Nazism, Fascism enjoyed a fruitful and creative relationship to the artistic avant-garde, notably Futurism, whose supporters backed it from the start and who furnished it with striking modern imagery. Mussolini was not only depicted conventionally, in figurative art and monumental sculpture, but in a variety of abstract and extra-human guises. These abstractions were taken up in Fascist mass culture, which made ample use of the mass ornament to reinforce the magical quality of the letter ‘M’ and the word ‘Duce’.¹⁰ Commercial advertising also contributed, with its extensive applications of abstract motifs, homunculi and machine men that recalled the Futurists’ image of a modernistic Duce.

Fourth, special attention is paid to the partial persistence of the cult. In significant ways, its multiform character ensured that Mussolini continued to hold a place in the popular imagination in Italy in the years after his violent death in 1945. Although Fascism was replaced by a democratic republic, the artefacts that had testified to the Duce’s special status (buildings, artworks, sculptures and monuments, photographs and so on) often remained on view in public places or were only partially concealed. Some elements of the legend that flourished around him continued to circulate and occupy a place in popular culture. In the aftermath of the Second World War, it was Mussolini the private man – the father, husband and lover – who remained in the collective consciousness more than the dictator who had led the country to military defeat and civil war. Nonetheless, some political nostalgia for the dictator also flourished in the years after 1945. The case of the artworks which depicted Mussolini is particularly instructive. Their almost total disappearance from public display lasted until the 1980s and has changed considerably since the advent of the digital age, which has created a wider platform and market for the visual paraphernalia of the regime. The renewed interest in and wider public acceptance of the visual imagery of Fascism and its leader is also linked to a postmodern reappropriation and an often seemingly apolitical reflection upon the visual and artistic culture of the regime and the cult of the Duce in particular.

It is our hope and expectation that, in addition to providing advances in the understanding of the place of Italian Fascism and its leader in twentieth-century history and culture, our volume will provide a series of insights that may be employed in the study of other examples of authoritarian and/or charismatic leadership. Mussolini has been called ‘the very model of a modern tyrant’ who ‘pioneered the model of modern dictatorship’.¹¹ As the first of the many dictators who would take power after 1918, he provided a template that many others would imitate or take from. The comparison with Hitler is particularly pertinent. In the public memory of the twentieth century, the Führer is the Ur-dictator, the man whose godlike status was most securely established and whose personalised rule led to the most evil consequences. Mussolini, by contrast, is commonly recalled abroad in comical key or as the man who achieved the minor feat of getting Italian trains to run on time. In fact, Hitler was Mussolini’s greatest admirer and he copied many aspects of Fascism and its dogma of the infallible leader. The two men had widely different styles; Hitler distanced himself from the day-to-day running of government while Mussolini immersed himself in every aspect of policy. Such was the range of the latter’s activities that he projected the impression, to use Milza’s expression, of a ‘human orchestra’.¹² Moreover Mussolini’s whole body became crucial to the visualisation of power in a way that Hitler’s never did.¹³ However, both leaders were men of humble origins who built political movements and careers on the back of the First World War and the extraordinary political, economic and cultural displacements that followed it. Furthermore, many features of the Hitler cult were modelled on Mussolini’s. If Nazi propaganda was often more impressive than Fascist products and the visible aspects of the leadership cult more charged with myth, this was mainly because of the more organised and mediated nature of German society.

In the rogues’ gallery of modern dictatorship, Hitler may provide the easiest point of comparison, but it is Mussolini who is the practical model. Figures as apparently distant from him geographically or ideologically as Argentina’s Perón, China’s Chiang Kai-shek, the Romanian Ceauceşcu and Saddam Hussein can be seen as having borrowed different things from the Fascist cult of personality. For this reason, the study of Mussolini and the tools that bolstered his system of personal rule is not a matter solely of interest to historians of Italy or Western Europe. It is crucial to an understanding of the ways in which undemocratic political regimes of whatever ideological bent can establish legitimacy within a national culture and the manner in which political systems with a personalised focus can connect with people in a myriad of ways and on many different levels. Cults are not emanations of personalities so much as useful tools available to dictatorships. Although it surely helps, it is not even necessary for the leader to be a charismatic individual for many of the mechanisms to work.

The volume presents the findings of a large research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK which ran from 2006 to 2011. The principal investigator was Stephen Gundle and the co-investigators Christopher Duggan and Giuliana Pieri. Six other researchers at different points formed part of the core team, including Simona Storchi, Sofia Serenelli, Vanessa Roghi and Paola Bernasconi. Richard Bosworth and David Forgacs acted as consultants on the project. In addition to the present volume, three documentary films collectively entitled ‘Mussolini: The Story of a Personality Cult’ were made under the auspices of the project by Vanessa Roghi in collaboration with Alessandra Tantillo and Maria Grazia Pandolfo. An exhibition, ‘Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator’, curated by Gundle, Pieri and Storchi in conjunction with Roberta Cremoncini and Christopher Adams, was held at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art in London in 2010. The exhibition website can be viewed at www.mussolinicult.com. The book draws on the research of a complementary project sponsored by the Australian National Research Council led by Giuseppe Finaldi. This second project was concerned with two aspects of the cult and its legacy: the relationship between women and Mussolini, and the cult’s manifestations in the Italian colonies. Thanks to the generosity of the Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Western Australia, a workshop bringing together the lead researchers on both projects was organised by Richard Bosworth in Perth in September 2010.

Notes

1  The major works containing samples of the visual products of the personality cult are: R. De Felice and F. L. Goglia, Mussolini: il mito (Rome: Laterza, 1983); G. Di Genova (ed.), L’uomo della provvidenza: iconografia del duce 1923–1945 (Bologna: Bora, 1997); E. Sturani, Le cartoline per il duce (Turin: Capricorno, 2003); S. Barisone et al., Under Mussolini: Decorative and Propaganda Arts of the Twenties and Thirties from the Wolfson Collection, Genoa (Milan: Mazzotta, 2002). On biographies see L. Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (Rome: Laterza, 1991) and on newsreels M. Cardillo, Il duce in moviola (Bari: Dedalo, 1983) and E.A. Cicchino, Il duce attraverso il luce (Milan: Mursia, 2010).

2  Il culto del littorio (Rome: Laterza, 1993). English edn Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

3  Fascismo: storia e interpretazioni (Rome: Laterza, 2002), p. 211.

4  Ibid., p. 219.

5  In 1973, Adrian Lyttelton wrote: ‘Fascism had aspirations to be totalitarian; Mussolini virtually invented the term. But, leaving on one side the question of how far the totalitarian nightmare can ever be fully realized, it is clear that Mussolini’s grip on Italian society was not as firm, his influence so pervasive, as that of a Hitler or Stalin. Fascism left huge areas of Italian life practically untouched.’ The Seizure of Power: Fascism in Italy 1919–1929 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 1. For a more recent rejection, see D. Forgacs and S. Gundle, Mass Culture and Italian Society from Fascism to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), especially pp. 198–202. Gentile has insisted repeatedly on the need to see Fascism as totalitarian. See for example his introduction to Gentile (ed.), Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano (Rome: Laterza, 2008).

6  Gentile, Il culto del littorio, p. 269.

7  ‘The one essential dogma of his regime’, says D. Mack Smith in Mussolini (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981), p. 103.

8  S. Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).

9  A similar view is elaborated by Roger Griffin in Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). He argues for a view of Fascism as a political version of modernism.

10  The idea of the mass ornament is taken from S. Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).

11  The two phrases occur on pp. 274 and 262 of R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘Dictators Strong or Weak? The Model of Benito Mussolini’, in Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

12  Mussolini (Rome: Carocci, 2000), p. 479.

13  On the importance of Mussolini’s body, see Passerini, Mussolini immaginario, pp. 70–6 and S. Luzzatto, Il corpo del duce (Turin: Einaudi, 1998).

Part I

The Origins of a Personality Cult

1

Political cults in liberal Italy, 1861–1922

Christopher Duggan

The cult of the Duce in Fascist Italy in many respects filled a vacuum. From the time the movement for national unification (the Risorgimento) began in the wake of the French Revolution, a central concern of patriots had been to find a political arrangement that could resonate emotionally with a population of some twenty-five million (largely illiterate) people and bring together an historically fragmented peninsula into a cohesive unit. Giuseppe Mazzini and his democratic followers had looked to create a republic by galvanising popular support around what they hoped would be the propulsive ideals of a ‘Third Rome’ and a God-given mission for Italy. Most patriots, though, recognised that a republic would be too abstract a system for a country with deeply rooted monarchical and absolutist traditions, in both religion as well as politics. Vincenzo Gioberti’s proposal in the early 1840s that Italy could be brought together as a federation under the leadership of the Pope was in many ways the most realistic programme to emerge in the Risorgimento. But Pius IX’s definitive break with the movement for Italian unity in 1848 dashed all hopes that the papacy could be yoked to the national cause. This left a secular monarchy as perhaps the only viable alternative – and indeed this was the arrangement that was introduced in 1860 when, following a series of plebiscites, King Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia became the first king of united Italy.

However, as this chapter will examine, the Italian monarchy struggled between 1860 and 1922 to establish itself as a strong and unifying national symbol, despite the efforts of countless politicians, and propagandists who worked to invest the Savoy dynasty with a mythical aura, recognising that charismatic leadership offered the best hope of binding the masses to the state. The view, famously voiced by the former revolutionary, Francesco Crispi, in 1864, that ‘the monarchy unites and a republic would divide us’, was widely shared among the national elites, principally on the grounds that the Italian masses were too immature still, and too conditioned by their history, to accept a kingless state. The extraordinary cult that sprang up around Giuseppe Garibaldi in the 1850s and 1860s was evidence, it seemed, of a popular impulse towards sacralised leadership. As the historian Gioacchino Volpe said in a letter to Mussolini published in Il Popolo d’Italia in the summer of 1921, when there was lingering talk of Fascism’s republican tendencies, the Italian peasantry had been conditioned by Catholicism ‘to conceive of authority solely in monarchical terms … and to have looked for centuries to the monarch – and what else was the State for them? – for protection against the privileged classes’. Italy still had ‘the great shadow of the Vatican’: it could not jettison the idea of regal authority.¹

The development of the cult of the Duce owed much to the inability of the liberal state to invest the monarchy with sufficient prestige and charisma for it to serve as a focus for national loyalties. From this perspective, the exaltation of Mussolini can be seen as a form of political surrogate; and the passivity of Victor Emmanuel III in the face of the cult of Mussolini was tantamount to an acceptance of the monarchy’s historic failure to develop as a potent symbol. For many observers the Duce appeared to be encroaching on terrain traditionally occupied by royalty, thus making the monarchy look increasingly otiose. This was especially the case after the conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–36 and the de facto transfer of primacy in military affairs from the king to Mussolini. When Hitler visited Italy in May 1938 he suggested the Duce abolish the monarchy on the grounds that it was now an anachronism; and in the summer of that year Mussolini told his son-in-law Ciano that he would indeed get rid of the Savoys as soon as he could. They were, he confessed, just ‘an encumbrance on the Regime’.²

Italy and the monarchical imperative

The need to find a coagulating principle around which to construct national unity had been a central preoccupation of the Risorgimento. The fact that the history of Italy since the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West had been characterised by fragmentation made the search for unification seem both more urgent and elusive. History offered few examples of collective action that could be elevated to mythical status. Episodes such as the Lombard League in the 1160s and 1170s or the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282 – both of which were heavily milked by historians in the middle of the nineteenth century for their alleged patriotic connotations – struggled to emerge from their obviously municipal or regional contexts. The idea with the greatest emotional power was ‘Rome’ – deployed by Mazzini in the form of the ‘Third Rome’ (though given some corporeity with its gloss as the ‘Rome of the people’) and by Vincenzo Gioberti in the far more potent version of the Pope as the leader of an Italian federation. But, as the ‘national’ euphoria surrounding Pius IX in 1846–48 or Garibaldi in 1860 underlined, it was far easier to link mass support to an exceptional individual than to a concept.

The critical role of the figure of the monarch for united Italy was discussed by the Neapolitan philosopher and politician Angelo De Meis in a well-known essay entitled Il sovrano published in 1868. Echoing some of the observations made a year or two earlier by the British writer, Walter Bagehot, in his analysis of the ‘dignified’ elements of the English constitution, De Meis argued that in the modern age a monarch was critical for mediating between two classes that were ‘irreconcilably opposed to one another’: the educated elite and the ignorant masses. And in Italy, the natural antagonism between these two groups, he said, was exacerbated on the one hand by the exceptional poverty of the majority and on the other by the fact that the rivalry mapped onto the bitter ideological divide between liberalism and the Catholic Church. If Italy was to avoid a recurrence of the civil war that had marred the first half of the 1860s in the south of Italy, it was vital that ordinary people identified with the king, not in an abstract intellectual fashion (that was the basis of the nexus with the upper classes), but ‘religiously’. And this was the function of ‘a glorious national Dynasty’, which was ‘the religious and conservative instinct of the sentient People made visible to the masses themselves.’³

As De Meis acknowledged, the monarchy of united Italy had struggled from the outset to win popular support, especially in the South where there was a strong tradition of loyalty to the Bourbons among the common people. In large part this failing was due to the reluctance of King Victor Emmanuel II to forgo his Piedmontese past and identify clearly with ‘Italy’. He refused in 1861 to change his dynastic numeral and claimed regal authority using the archaic and contradictory formula, ‘by the grace of God and the will of the nation’. Francesco Crispi – who was to be probably the most astute critic of the monarchy and its role as a national symbol in the last decades of the nineteenth century – suggested he be styled far more unequivocally and patriotically ‘Victor Emmanuel, King of Italy’.⁴ During the 1860s the king did nothing to prevent the state from assuming a strongly Piedmontese character, and the top echelons of the civil service and the army were populated with Piedmontese officials. Victor Emmanuel also made it clear that his geographical heart lay in Turin and the Alpine valleys where he loved to hunt: even after the capture of Rome in 1870 he refused to spend much time in the new capital, and he left it to his son, Umberto, and above all his daughter-in-law Margherita, to attempt to make the Quirinal Palace a ‘national’ rival of the papal court.⁵

By shunning his capital after 1870 Victor Emmanuel largely avoided the challenge of Rome. The papacy took full advantage. Pius IX set out to counter Italian nationalism with the triumphant internationalism of his own and the Church’s authority, convening the spectacular Council of 1869–70, declaring papal infallibility, and extracting the maximum propaganda value out of the emotive concept of the ‘prisoner in the Vatican’. The Pope’s simple charm and accessibility, and his sometimes brutally colourful rhetoric, gave him a personal charisma unmatched by any of his predecessors, and pilgrims flocked to the Eternal City on an unprecedented scale. The court of the Crown Prince and Margherita struggled to compete with the Curia; and many of the city’s most illustrious aristocratic families remained doggedly wedded to their ‘black’ traditions. The extraordinary popular appeal and moral authority of Pius struck many commentators forcibly. As one observer noted in 1875:

When this Holy Pontiff, this gentle old man, this supreme priest, with the triple crown surrounding his white locks, raises his holy hand, turns his eyes to heaven and invokes the blessing of God on his children, on the Church, on the whole world, how many heads do not bow, how many foreheads are not prostrated, how many knees do not bend to be blessed by Him who has been given by God the power to loose and to bind, to open and to close for men the gates of Heaven! … It is impossible to imagine a greatness superior to this, and all others, however powerful and marvellous they might be, pale into insignificance beside it.⁶

The effectiveness of the papacy in reaching out to the masses after the loss of the temporal power (and the extraordinary rapport that Pius developed with huge crowds of pilgrims was emblematic of its success) underlined for liberals the critical importance of elevating the monarchy into a rival focus of popular enthusiasm. The fact that the Church had been brilliantly successful in appealing to the popular imagination using, among other things, music, art, architecture, rituals, incense and spectacular vestments, made the challenge seem all the more pressing and was one reason why many politicians opposed measures that might jeopardise the magnificence of the royal family (‘whether republic or monarchy, the head of state should be kept in splendour’, Crispi declared in parliament in 1883, condemning as paltry a rise of 100,000 lire in the civil list for the king’s cousin).⁷ Aesthetic considerations also induced commentators (particularly of democratic extraction) to wonder in the 1870s and 1880s if liberalism might not be too austere for most Italians. Could it be – as Hippolyte Taine was suggesting at the time in his seminal study of modern France – that a rational and agnostic ‘state’ had been imposed inappropriately on a ‘nation’ whose mental habits and emotional expectations had been profoundly shaped over many centuries by the Church and absolutism?⁸

Cults of the dead and the living, 1878–90

One particularly important aspect of the aestheticisation of politics lay in the cult of the dead. Crispi played a key role in making Victor Emmanuel II an object of national veneration after the king’s death in January 1878. As Minister of the Interior he was the principal architect of the monarch’s elaborate funeral, and he hoped that mass participation in the event and the carefully orchestrated public grief at the time would serve as springboards for a subsequent ‘national’ cult. This was why it was critical in Crispi’s eyes for the monarch to be buried in Rome, not Turin (and he had to resist considerable pressure on this score): the king should demonstrably belong to Italy, not Piedmont. And the choice of the Pantheon was also carefully made: it was a building in the heart of the capital and free of the massive religious freight of so many other shrines in Rome that would inevitably have highlighted the fraught relationship of Church and state.⁹ According to Crispi’s newspaper La Riforma, the Pantheon had to be developed into a focal point for secular pilgrimages, along with the Staglieno cemetery in Genoa (for Mazzini) and Caprera (for Garibaldi, whom Crispi strove unsuccessfully to have buried in Rome; though he did stop Garibaldi being cremated: he was adamant that a bodily presence was necessary for popular veneration): ‘These are the temples to which henceforward we must, with sincere and dignified solemnities, direct the Italian people.’¹⁰

The cult of Victor Emmanuel undoubtedly had considerable success. It was assisted after 1878 by a flood of commemorative literature and popular biographies stressing (in the teeth of a wealth of evidence to the contrary, which, with active official encouragement, was studiously ignored)¹¹ the monarch’s lifelong devotion to the cause of Italian unity and the ‘concord’ of his people. Statues also proliferated, most of them heroically equestrian and martial, and in the centre of Rome work on the colossal monument to the late king (the ‘Vittoriano’) began. In January 1884 a national ‘pilgrimage’ to the Pantheon was organised to mark the sixth anniversary of the king’s death. Victor Emmanuel’s coffin was exhumed and placed on a huge catafalque, and tens of thousands of visitors came to the capital to pay their respects – albeit in controlled batches, much to the annoyance of some on the left who would have preferred the government to have encouraged a more spontaneous outpouring of popular emotion.¹²

But the efforts of the state to elevate the profile of the Italian monarchy were overshadowed in the main by the parallel endeavours of the Church to magnify the Pope. Massive crowds may have turned out for the funeral of Victor Emmanuel; but perhaps twice as many, some 300,000, paid tribute to Pius IX the following month. Pius’s successor, Leo XIII, was a less charismatic figure than his predecessor, but his long pontificate, studded with jubilees, encyclicals and letters, and the introduction of highly popular devotions (especially to the rosary and the Virgin Mary) saw a marked accentuation of the tendency begun with the declaration of infallibility to exalt the person of the Holy Father. Catholic publishing houses played their part: Leo was the first pope to realise the full potential of the press (he was equally alert to other modern media: he was the first pontiffto be both recorded and filmed). So, too, did the organisation of the Opera dei congressi, with its fast growing network of parish and diocesan committees, and youth, student and workers’ associations. One of the most influential figures in the Opera, the authoritarian and aristocratic Giovanni Battista Paganuzzi, was particularly assiduous in using the movement as a vehicle with which to exalt the figure of the Pope as the true sovereign of the Italian people, describing Leo XIII publicly in 1879 as, ‘not merely the pontiff, but also the Father and supreme Duce of the Italians: the man who alone can save them. Into his hands we entrust the affairs of the Church and of the Fatherland.’¹³

The response of the state was nothing if not determined, and in the 1880s a huge array of artists and writers – journalists, pamphleteers, biographers, historians, poets and novelists – celebrated the monarchy in one medium or another. Many of the most passionate publicists were (like Crispi) former democrats, who now recognised that one of the best ways to render the masses patriotic and keep them out of the clutches of the Pope (and increasingly the socialists) was to glorify the House of Savoy. The tone of the cult was set by two of the most successful literary figures of the decade, Giosuè Carducci and Edmondo De Amicis. The erstwhile republican Carducci underwent a spectacular ‘conversion’ to the monarchy after meeting Umberto and his young wife Margherita in Bologna in November 1878. A rapturous ode to the queen was followed by an autobiographical essay, Eterno femminino regale, in which the poet described how he was smitten by what he felt was Margherita’s extraordinary dignity and charm. De Amicis placed devotion to the monarchy at the heart of his best-selling sentimental novel Cuore: Victor Emmanuel was portrayed as the ‘father’ of the nation, whose heroic achievements and commitment to Italy deserved the undying gratitude of his subjects (‘you will live in the heart of your people as long as the sun shines on Italy’); Umberto was presented as a high-minded and benevolent king, committed, like his father, to the well-being of the army and the nation, to whom every Italian man should feel proud to sacrifice his blood.¹⁴

Queen Margherita was central to the cult of the monarchy during the 1880s. She had been told at the time of her marriage to Umberto that she should work to make herself ‘a Garibaldi of peace … a creature, sometimes real, sometimes fantastic, whom the Italians will invoke to free themselves of all ills and to lift themselves out of the mire’.¹⁵ Her success in fulfilling this role was remarkable. Her beauty, her lavish wardrobe (sometimes disparaged by foreign observers as rather garish and provincial), replete with massive quantities of jewellery, her brilliant court circle and her close contacts with many of the country’s leading intellectuals, her grace, her carefully cultivated mannerisms (not least the enigmatic slow bow that so enchanted the young writer