Contrary to patronizing legend, Mussolini was a full-time dictator. History, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, mainly remembers his speechifying and implies that the dictator was so busy orating that he had little time for anything else. In practice, however, the Duce was, most of the time, an assiduous bureaucrat, fond of fine print and anxious to display his mastery over it. Details, he remarked on occasion with some affection, were the fleas of an executive’s life. They made you scratch your head and get weaving.62 Even at the darkest moments of the Second World War he liked to comment sarcastically on the errors he picked up in newspaper reports.63 It was true that, from time to time, the Duce did depart on trips around the country where speech-making was mandatory, although quite a few of the dictator’s declamations to provincial audiences were short and had little further aim than to warm the hearts of his listeners now that, for a moment, they had their chief in what he too agreed was their beautiful, unforgettable, historic and Fascist town. Major homilies were surprisingly few, with his Ascension Day effort of 1927 and its applauding survey of the totalitarian features of the regime, its yen for ruralization, its possible foreshadowing of racist legislation and its heartfelt praise of the police, being the most stark.
The speeches may have seemed spontaneous. The way charisma was inscribed on to the Duce meant that he had to be a spiritual vehicle of the nation and its revolution. For such a superhuman being, ratiocination was too tawdry and ordinary a matter. A Duce did not reason; he inspired. He did not counsel; he spell-bound and overwhelmed his worshipping crowds. Yet it is known that Mussolini did in fact prepare himself for his appearances at the microphone well beforehand and tried very hard to keep his emotions and his text coolly under control.64 If he conveyed as much through gesture and tone as through his formal argument, as regime propagandists, and notably the blind but still awed ex-soldier and celebrated war hero Carlo Delcroix were eager to contend,65 he did so knowingly and through study and practice.
But once he took office, oratory was more a hobby than the act of every day. Mussolini was a hard-working dictator. When he laid claim to labouring through a sixteen-hour day at the office he exaggerated but perhaps pardonably since he could often be found at his desk. Not for Mussolini, Hitler’s bohemian habit of very late rising nor the Führer’s time-consuming love of pointless chat. Not for the Duce, Stalin’s liking for drunken parties with his cowed colleagues, late into nights full of icy menace. Especially as the regime lengthened into its second decade in office, Mussolini eschewed any social contact with his colleagues and, perhaps oddly for an Italian, tried hard to avoid their physical touch. The Duce was not the sort of boss who exhibited his popularity by walking arm in arm with his juniors on a passeggiata or who kissed a guest on both cheeks. More sedately, in the Sala del Mappamondo, Mussolini conventionally and briskly shook hands with a visitor, ignoring Starace’s exhortations about making the Roman salute the only form of greeting.
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Succinctness in command can be a virtue but it also leaves vast space for underlings to interpret just what the ringing words ‘really’ mean. So it was in the power structure of Fascist Italy, where Mussolini frequently held numerous ministries at the same time and always interfered even more aggressively in those not directly under his aegis. When policy had to be converted to fact, a lapidary phrase, a bout of aggressive language, were often, if not the end of government, only its beginning since the Duce made very little attempt to work out how words might be converted into deeds, rather regarding such day-to-day matters as well below him. Charisma of the sort Mussolini was meant to incarnate has a connection with the history of those celebrities who nowadays fill our television screens and newspapers and, especially in the Italy of Silvio Berlusconi or in those places where actors of stage or screen have become political actors too, threaten to bewitch our minds and trash our democracies. Celebrities, beneath the glitter, are often people of no account. Only their dazzle matters. Similarly, the Mussolinian way of ruling was meant to be so charged with Fascist dynamism that it could allow no turning back and gave little time and less justification to any ponderous surviving view that a modern state to be properly ruled might above all need a clear decision-making process and a regular method for transmuting plans into action. But the Duce was too overwhelming to be expected to sift through memoranda carefully setting out alternatives and explaining the difficulties of a particular project. His rule was rapid or it was nothing.
Revelatory in this regard is Mussolini’s typical daily activity — the interview, confined to fifteen minutes by that ominously ticking desk clock. Most mornings were fully occupied in this fashion and the programme could extend into the afternoon as well. At least if one of his young admirers is to be believed, Mussolini, getting the mathematics palpably wrong, towards the end of his life would recall having held hundreds of thousands of such meetings during his dictatorship.68 Here, too, the method of dictatorial rule has its replica in today’s world. For much of the time Mussolini was foreshadowing the behaviour and the intellectual processes of the chat-show host, as first this person, then that, then another, here an Italian, there a foreigner, here a young party philosopher, there a grizzled veteran seeking family support, here a pretty woman, there a family member, minister, party chief or military officer, were ushered in and out of his grandiose office. Like a good journalist, and Mussolini was one, he liked to know beforehand whom he was meeting, what they were likely to say and what he should reply.69 Since vanity was hard to forgo and even an all-conquering Duce did not enjoy days chock-full of quarrelling, it was best to please (although bullying could never be ruled out) and the surest way to get through any meeting was to tell the listeners what they wanted to hear and to confirm what they already knew. The new book was brilliant, the scheme ideal, the movement well crafted, the subsidy forthcoming. Attentive observers had already noticed that, somewhere beneath the bravado, Mussolini, throughout his career, had been fond of stating the obvious and the agreeable, given to tailoring his words to what he had divined others expected and always himself well attuned to the attitudes and prejudices of his interlocutors.70 But, by the 1930s, much of the government of Fascist Italy was done this way, at great cost to efficiency, regularly blocking meaningful change and, above all, preventing any serious criticism of deficiencies and any assessment of how they might be overcome.
The, great problem with the system is that what was usually happening was a dialogue of the deaf. The Duce had not really mastered the subject he was discussing so vibrantly but so briefly. The interlocutor was not really told how to make concrete the agreed decision; that issue would have to be puzzled out later (or just avoided). This government by words and image, by spin, ensured that, over many important matters, there was no government at all.
Yet there were times when Mussolini did overtly and dominatingly impose his own views about policy. It has already been noticed how the Duce charged forward in the ‘battle for the lire’ and used the valuation of the national currency to teach the nation’s bankers and industrialists that they now must bow to him and to Fascism. Without being asked to explain his policy but responding aggressively to the merest hints of disapproval from his minister Volpi, and from others in the financial elite, Mussolini urged that it was his ‘infallible intuition’ which had pointed the way to the so-called Quota novanta (accepting that 90 lire equalled US$1).71 This statement, with its in retrospect whimsical confidence that economics, too, were ‘all in the mind’, marked the moment in which the old liberal elites knew that they were living in a dictatorship and were to be governed by what is best labelled ‘applied charisma’.
