Dead Duce walking.

The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini's Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, by Sergio Luzzatto; translated by Frederika Randall, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2005. 258 pp.

ONE CURIOUS, seldom-noticed interaction between Italian and American political history is the despair at supporters' antics which Mussolini and Warren G. Harding voiced, independently, just months apart. Harding, before Teapot Dome publicly blew up, lamented to Kansas newspaperman William Allen White: "I have no trouble with my enemies ... But my damned friends,... White, they're the ones that keep me walking the floor nights!" Less than a year later, in June 1924, Il Duce complained in analogous terms. Fuming at how junior Fascists had tortured socialist parliamentarian Giacomo Matteotti so severely as to induce their victim's fatal heart attack, Mussolini echoed Harding almost to the syllable: "My worst enemies could not have done me as much harm as my friends."

There, however, the similarity between the two leaders' attitudes to their troublemaking confederates finishes. Harding died when few except political insiders realized the full extent of the damage his allies had done. Mussolini enjoyed no such good luck. Not only did the world's press deplore Matteotti's demise, but his fellow Fascists exulted--as they were to do many a time again--in how easily they could manipulate, and frequently flout, their ostensible boss. From the appearance by Fascist Party secretary Roberto Farinacci as legal counsel for Matteotti's chief killer, to the mutual recriminations of supposed Mussolini loyalists during the 1943-1945 Salo regime, an unvarying pattern prevailed: outward fidelity towards Mussolini the symbol, coupled with reckless disregard for the best interests of Mussolini the man. Nor did their disregard cease with the dictator's ignominious death. The Body of Il Duce, by a history professor at the University of Turin, explains in greater detail than any previous English-language source the almost necrophiliac obsession that mesmerized otherwise sane Italians for decades after World War II. This obsession (far from a principally apolitical and adolescent fetishism, such as has always characterized the JFK deification machine) possessed a direct bearing on day-to-day Italian administrative life. Sergio Luzzatto's study, instead of being a mindless ghoul-fest, chronicles events that changed Europe.

Professor Sergio Luzzatto begins with a terrible prefiguring of 1945's events: the 1920 description, by Mussolini himself, of a feral socialist-anarchist mob defiling a policeman's corpse in Milan's Piazzale Loreto, the same venue where he himself would be execrated a quarter of a century later. Sodden with dramatic irony, this outrage--little different in itself from most of the leftist crimes that abounded during Italy's "Red Biennium" of 1919-1920--indicates an aspect of interwar politics which historians, in their over-intellectualized "Origins of Fascism" tropes, are much too prone to neglect: the sheer physicality of Mediterranean societies' ideological conflict. This physicality could manifest itself as much through extremes of love as through extremes of hatred. The most famous example of such love in a Fascist context is Mussolini's fondness for doffing his shirt and exposing his manly chest to the cameras (especially if cameramen could also incorporate into the same picture the midget King Victor Emmanuel III, fully uniformed and contemptibly incapable of cramping Mussolini's half-nude style). But this was a positively restrained instance compared with some. More notable and less celebrated is the letter to Mussolini--which Professor Luzzatto cites--from a Florentine girl in 1936, preparing for her First Communion, and addressing her hero with an abjectness at which even the most sycophantic British female, contemplating Tony Blair's leadership, would shudder: "If only I could receive you along with Jesus. If only you could enter on my tongue, sit on my chest, rest on my poor heart."

It is, or should be, perfectly clear that parochial Anglo-Saxon cliches about Mussolini as ham-actor cannot account for such devotion, or for the decision of his former journalistic colleague Manlio Morgagni to commit suicide in July 1943 rather than endure an Italy without Mussolini in charge of it. In his office, Morgagni wrote a note saying: "The Duce has resigned. My life is finished. Viva Mussolini!" Then he blew his brains out. Professor Luzzatto's overriding merit lies in his gift for taking Mussolini's pretensions seriously, although never solemnly. Whereas typical accounts of Italian Fascist rule leave the reader puzzled as to how it lasted ten minutes, Professor Luzzatto makes obvious why Mussolini mattered and endured.

The sheer ingenuity by which anti-Fascists blended "fail-safe" murder plots with spreading baseless rumors about their chief enemy's diseases--Mussolini was supposed to have had a fatal stomach ulcer for twenty years, much as Kaiser Wilhelm II had been purportedly "dying of cancer" back in 1916--encompassed such oddities as a 1928 plot to eliminate the Duce by unilateral germ warfare. Eminent novelist Alberto Moravia, despite benefiting from Mussolini's encouragement, dreamed of the Duce being shot at a prize-giving ceremony; but he wanted the shooting carried out by someone else. (Moravia thereby upheld the grand twentieth-century tradition of vicarious authorial bloodlust, which inspired Jean-Paul Sartre to outdo even Frantz Fanon in his ravings against Western colonialism, and which moved Ben Hecht to delirious glee at the Stern Gang's massacres.) Future Italian President Sandro Pertini, not content with demanding that partisans kill Mussolini "like a mangy dog," was periodically--albeit, it seems, wrongly--credited with firing the lethal bullets. In lighter moments Pertini confined himself to boasting of his plans to assassinate Victor Emmanuel's son Umberto. A substantial library of conspiratorial literature has arisen concerning Mussolini's last hours, and concerning exactly who organized the execution: whether Communist Senator Walter Audisio, as the standard version indicates, or some alternative gunslinger.

Professor Luzzatto has ransacked Italy's Foto Publifoto/Olympia archive for some mercifully unfamiliar post-mortem pictures of Mussolini, his mistress Claretta Petacci, and other Fascists. (In one such picture, both Claretta and her lover, dangling upside-down, have their heads frighteningly close to the lens. By tacit consent, the main international news outlets in April 1945 confined themselves to less offensive images.) He also supplies juicy quotes on the general theme, "The libation of freedom must be quaffed in blood." Most of them came from either Stalinists or fellow-travelers, but the liberal and Christian Democrat publications joined in. Veteran expatriate academic Gaetano Salvemini gloated: "They hung him [Mussolini] up by his feet like a butchered ox." "The people," Socialist journal Avanti! trumpeted in best deterministic fashion, "were forced to execute their tyrant to free themselves from the nightmare of an irreparable offense." (A few Left-wing mavericks, such as Pietro Nenni and Giuseppe Saragat, showed some basic decency in their own utterances about the affair.) Alcide De Gasperi, as his own government inched towards the Right, was once told: "There is already talk of hanging you up in Piazzale Loreto." Demonstrations against Giorgio Almirante, who had served in Salo's Ministry of Culture before leading the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), included the charming assurance: "We like Almirante better head-down."

Soon, nonetheless, an odd change occurred: as Professor Luzzatto notes, "Piazzale Loreto constituted a taboo for the Resistance. There was no television at the time, of course, but there were also no newsreels [of that day's events]." Those who, for whatever motives, lusted after visual evidence of Mussolini's degradation had to make do with buying photographs: either originals or, failing those, the postcard reproductions which solicitous bureaucrats issued ad terrorem. It did not take long, though, for even the postcards to become rarities. A vague disquiet surfaced, however powerful the implied threat of a repeat performance remained as a last-resort weapon.

Part of the change came from a freakish theft in April 1946. Three young Mussolinian enthusiasts, wanting to accord the Duce a funeral and interment more dignified than it had so far been given, spirited away their master's corpse from its anonymous-looking grave in Milan's Musocco cemetery. (At no stage had Mussolini indicated that he sought such an eventual show of allegiance towards his cadaver, but the grave-robbers happily admitted to being plus royaliste que le roi.) The official, and in particular the official Communist, embarrassment at this purloining may be predicted. "Did not [the theft] ... prove," Professor Luzzatto remarks, "that this was a very unusual body? Did it not highlight the charismatic nature of the Fascist regime at a time when Italians preferred to forget it?" Well, yes. Prototypically postmodern editorials about "the immaterial nature of mourning" were very fine, no doubt, but it would be much more agreeable to have the Great Satan back underground.

For a while, Italy's yellow press dwelt almost as repetitively on the enigma of Il Duce's whereabouts as its English equivalent would dwell, two generations afterwards, on Princess Diana's fatal car crash. The more newsprint the subject consumed, the quirkier it seemed: a bunch of petty crooks had outwitted the highest Italian police authorities. Within months the corpse turned up in Pavia, but there could be no question of returning it to its old home, or of letting Mussolini's relations have it. Until 1957 it reposed in secret at a chapel not far from Milan, within the see (and with the approval) of Milan's archbishop Ildefonso Schuster.

The year 1957 marked Chapter Two in the biography of Mussolini's remains, and the inauguration as Prime Minister of Adone Zoli, a more than usually malleable Christian Democrat. Zoli gave the clearance for providing Mussolini's relatives with their paterfamilias' body. He did so with a clear eye on parliamentary statistics: his lack of a majority in the legislature forced him to deal with the MSI, which insisted on the handing-over of Mussolini's corpse as the price for its backing. Eleven years after the Duce had been removed from Musocco, he came to rest where he still lies: in the family vault at Predappio, his birthplace.

Zoli, in countenancing this relocation, fared better than his Interior Minister Fernando Tambroni, who himself took over Zoli's post in 1960. Tambroni, wishing to include the MSI within the "arco costituzionale" of politically respectable parties with which he could form coalitions, allowed the MSI to hold a national congress at Genoa. The resultant Socialist and Communist rioting drove Tambroni from office. Subsequent Christian Democrat Prime Ministers, Aldo Moro above all, took to heart the chief lesson of Tambroni's ruin: never again must their party dare attempt serious opposition to Communist blackmail. And never again did it do so. To the limited extent that the Communists found themselves thwarted in any degree after Tambroni's departure, they could blame their setbacks not on the center-Right, but on "infantile leftism" of the Red Brigade kind; on the unaligned Right-wingers guilty of the 1980 bombing in Bologna (Italian Communism's heartland); and on venal, hard-nosed Socialists like Bettino Craxi, Prime Minister, 1983-1987. Meanwhile the MSI had split apart on the question of how far, if at all, it should continue honoring Mussolini's exploits.

If Christian Democracy and the MSI were permanently humbled by Tambroni's overthrow, mainline Communists proved brilliantly proficient at damage control. "In the 1960s," as Professor Luzzatto observes, "the popular image of the Resistance was simplified, shorn of its elements of hate and violence and softened with stories of heroism ... Italian schoolbooks offered a prudish version of the past. They had little or nothing to say about Mussolini's death and the events of Piazzale Loreto."

Partly because of the Christian Democrats' absolute inability to wage what later would be called culture wars, a ludicrous situation arose by which schoolchildren learned much more about Louis XVI's execution than about their own erstwhile ruler's. The terrorism-infested 1970s--the anni di piombo, "leaden years," as Italians now call them--taught Communists anew the dangers of luxuriating in political mayhem as a glorious epiphany. Orchestrated indignation against the "Fascist" Silvio Berlusconi's emergence (and against his mild comments suggesting that Mussolini did good as well as harm) was shrill, but more ritualistic than heartfelt. Today the Predappio mausoleum peddles abundant Mussolini memorabilia, including watches, key chains and T-shirts as well as more conventional souvenirs, snapped up by the 100,000-odd annual tourists who visit the grave. In 1983 the government repealed a postwar statute that had prohibited trafficking in graven Duce images, though doubtless Romano Prodi's new leftist bloc (not elected to office until after Professor Luzzatto's book appeared) will be eager to re-impose such legislation. Should that occur, we may wonder if it will be any more effectively enforced than it was forty years ago, when technically every flea-market owner throughout the land could have been prosecuted for breaching it.

The temptation is, therefore, to predict that as the original Italian militants of 1943-1945 die off, passions will cool. Yet recent trends elsewhere in Europe, to say nothing of America, belie this assumption. Paul Gottfried has conclusively explained, in The Strange Death of Marxism (2005), how the very completeness with which Europe's leftist parties have abandoned old-fashioned socialist economics has sharpened, rather than blunted, their zeal to proclaim their anti-fascist credentials in every other sphere of life. Sniffing out dotards who can be charged as Vichy collaborators has become one of France's few efficient modern industries (similar punishment for Moscow collaborators is naturally unthinkable). Blair endeavors to rationalize his Iraq escapade by parroting simple-minded equations of Saddam with Hitler. For the last two years Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero--Blair's counterpart in Madrid--has led what amounts to the Second Spanish Civil War, not solely declaring open season upon whatever might survive of traditional Franco-era Catholicism, but also frenziedly seeking to eradicate every depiction of Franco's corporeal existence. Given these Popular-Front-type crusades, no one should declare careerist Italian anti-Fascism to be down for the count.

Let the concluding words remain with Fascist ex-Minister Giuseppe Bottai, who after leaving politics (he died, of natural causes, in 1959), pondered, in a diary entry, Mussolini's downfall with both sorrow and a touch of wit. "To lose one's life is serious," Bottai mused, "[b]ut there is no remedy for the man who fails to keep a grip on his death."

R. J. STOVE lives in Melbourne, Australia, and is a Contributing Editor of The American Conservative.