Exploring Mussolini's Leadership and Ideology

Peter Williamson, welcome to the Real Clear Values podcast. Thank you very much indeed. Peter, you've written a fantastic book on Mussolini, a biographical work which is called Duce, The Contradictions of Power, The Political Leadership of Benito Mussolini. So this is such an interesting book because I've got an interest in a couple of these. threads that you've drawn on here yeah Mussolini for a start because I think he's a great encapsulation of somebody who pursued power for better or worse and also power itself and one thing that particularly impressed me about your book is how you've weaved this all together there's a lot of detail as we were talking about just before going live on the call there's a lot of detail in relation to Mussolini in relation to Mussolini's Italy, fascist Italy, all the different characters, all different names and the dates. But what you've done is create an excellent synthesis of Mussolini's rise to power and his governance within his particular approach. So the first question, Peter, is to really kick things off, is why should we take Mussolini seriously? Why have you taken him seriously? Because in the past... He's been treated as a bit of a buffoon, hasn't he? Nobody's really taken him that seriously. But why is it then that we should take him seriously, do you think? Well, a variety of things. You're absolutely right to say that Mussolini was seen probably until the turn of the century in a popular way, but also in academic circles as a kind of a bit of a buffoon, a bit of a joke, a war funny hat and so on and so forth. And also was a buffoon in the sense that militarily, Italy had a very bad Second World War, which seemed to be associated with Mussolini, didn't really know what he was doing. And up to a point, that's right. But to me, it's not the complete picture of Mussolini. I think one of the key things that sometimes gets forgotten about, he held power for 22 years in Italy. He wasn't power. He was able to use that power, not always as he would have wished to have used it, but he certainly had power. He certainly made things happen. And what I was interested in is, well, beyond the buffoon, if you like, how was he able to do it? And also, we know it wasn't, you know, 100% successful. So why wasn't he as successful as he hoped or intended to be? So that, for me, was kind of the interesting question. And just adding to that, I mean, Mussolini is a historical figure and in some ways is not as important as Stalin or Hitler, but he is remembered in some ways, which for an Italian leader from over 100 years ago is quite a feat. But also I think, more importantly, he was the first... political leader who relied on character and personality. I think that was, you could certainly argue that. He was also one of the first, if not the first, leaders to actually start dismantling democracy that had been established in the state. And I think he's interesting. because he was very good at using power. He used power well. And I would say he's a very good example. And there are warnings on how he used power about the dangers of dictatorship. And maybe not the absolutely brutal dictatorships, but the slightly more subtle ones, Nazi Germany, not Stalin's Russia, not indeed Franco's Spain. So that for me was what was kind of sucking me into looking at Mussolini in some more depth. Yeah. So how did you go about untangling the different narratives on Mussolini then? Because you write in your book that you weren't particularly satisfied with previous works on him. So how did you go about making sense of them, picking out the details, making sense of... Mussolini as well in a way that you felt was more satisfactory and representative. Yes, I mean, I wouldn't say it was dissatisfied with... individual works. I think a lot of the writing has a lot of merits, but what I did think was when you put them all together, they didn't quite seem to gel. And indeed, one of the points I've often made is nobody seemed to, until my good self, step back and say, what does all this add up to? But people presented biographies and biographies that were kind of focused a bit on the life and times of Mussolini and that are kind of chronological. story. And therefore, I think it was more difficult with that kind of approach to draw things together. So that's, in a sense, what it was doing. It wasn't the easiest thing, because as I say in the book, there were a range of different sites to Mussolini, some of the contradictions, and we might want to come on to that. And so in writing the book, you'd say, oh, yes, right. I understand them, I've got a hook here, and then some other side of it would appear and the hook would be kind of wrenched from my hand. So what I began to think was that actually Mussolini had a series of contradictions and to understand them was how he managed these contradictions. So for example, just and we can talk more about this if you want to talk. An evident contradiction was he wanted to be seen as a successful revolutionary leader, a leader who would make his mark on history. But he was seeking to do that within a country where the state, the elite, the economically powerful were very conservative. And throughout his complete political leadership, he was always trying to balance wanting to be more radical, to push on, to be a great leader. with the fact that many of those with power in Italy were not really that interested in it. Yeah, yeah. And therefore he was always concerned, you know, I'll be radical and then, well, that might destabilise things that, you know, people might react against me, the elite. I think he was always concerned that they could dispose of him if they really wanted to. He was always managing that relationship. So that contradiction he had to kind of manage. And he ended up, to my mind, stuck in the middle. He wasn't kind of a radical Hitler who just drove things through, or Stalin who did the same. Nor was he a kind of Salazar who kept the lid on, it was just a conservative country. He was somewhere in the middle. So there was a lot of certainly radical show, maybe less. radical delivery but he did try things that were could be seen as such yeah interesting so with all this in mind this is talking about Mussolini at a bird's eye view so to speak let's talk a little bit about the development of the man himself his philosophy and his ideology he had a sort of influence in his life early on didn't he from his father's side socialism was quite a strong influence from his mother's side it was the church yeah and he developed his own views there didn't he in terms of was socialism good was it a good way to to do things what about the church and and and how i think he had experience at a boarding school with celestian monks yeah so tell us about his early years in terms of his political philosophy and his development of ideology in relation to politics and also religion as well. Right. Mussolini's father was a socialist. Some people say he had sort of anarchist tendencies and did take his youngest son to a lot of political meetings. And his father was not uninfluential politically in the area for Li Pradapio, where they lived. He was known on that. But the whole Emilia Romana, particularly Romana, was a very socialist area. So it was no surprise, even I think without his father, Mussolini would come into touch with socialism and anarchism at that time. and also a reaction against the state because until the middle of the 19th century the Romano had been part of the Papal States, had been very authoritarian, very dominating. So yes, Mussolini's father would have been an influence, but the Romano was a centre of socialism and indeed anarchism in the late 19th, early 20th century. So Mussolini would have been aware of that. It's not in a think... in a sense, a surprise that he was drawn into socialism. There was a lot of poverty in the area. There was a fair amount of resentment of the state because it was a history of being, Romania was part of the people states, which were very authoritarian. So it wasn't just that his father kind of, I think there was a wider set of circumstances, if you like, that drew Mussolini to socialism. But what was, I think, fundamentally important, was his mother and his mother ensuring that he continued his education until he was 18. So he'd ended up with qualifications, teaching qualifications in effect, but that also enabled him to write. His early career was as a writer and a bit of an organiser, quite young, probably 17, 18, he was already doing that. But he was finding it difficult to find work, apart from teaching, where twice he had to give up the jobs because of misconduct, let's put it that way. And he ended up, like a lot of Italians, going to Switzerland for employment purposes. And he was there for over two years. And that's where, in a sense, his career, his writing career, he got a job working for the... Swiss Brants of the Italian Socialist Party. And he started reading a lot and he started coming into contact with people who had ideas. He even attended a short course at the University of Lucerne. So he started picking up ideas. He started writing about these. It wasn't always successful. Sometimes he had to do labouring jobs, he wasn't guaranteed an income, but you could see the beginnings of his political development. But the point was that many of the writers he was coming into contact with were not mainstream socialists. At this time, he became aware of the writings of Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that politics were always going to be dominated by the elite, therefore the idea of creating a socialist society was a kind of shimmerer. He came into touch to some degree with Marxist ideas but he was never really a Marxist. He came into ideas critical of religion and he'd had bad experience at school. a Catholic boarding school, so he had a real dislike of organised religion and the Catholic church in particular. So in Switzerland he began to be open to ideas. It's difficult to kind of say in any case, yes this made a difference, but he was open to ideas. The interesting thing about them was a lot of them weren't mainstream socialist ideas. So very early on, and I think one can say Nietzsche in particular, became an influence from that early period in Switzerland. And he developed his thinking, he came in touch with, in due course, revolutionary syndicalists, and some of their ideas attracted him. Later on, he came into touch, in touch with what I call radical nationalism, a radical nationalism that grew up in Italy just at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, which went on to play a major part in fascism. So Mussolini was an unusual character. He was a card-carrying socialist, but if you read a lot of what he was saying, it didn't read like mainstream socialism. No. And some of the ingredients were, firstly, a disdain of the masses. So he wasn't actually out there. The masses were there to be manipulated and mythology was also part of his thinking from Gustave Le Bon, the idea of the crowd and how they could be managed, Pareto himself, how to use manipulation. So he wasn't really in one sense on the side of the masses. He saw the masses as a means under a sort of elite leadership to be directed to revolutionary change. Yeah. So on that point then, Peter, this is interesting because I feel like this is where we get into the nub of it with Mussolini and what's driving the man. Because what interests me, what you say there about him moving over to Switzerland to work, it reminds me of... a New York Times interview that I read between Mussolini and Oscar Levy. I think it was in 1924 or something like that. So a hundred years ago. Yes. Coincidentally. But in this particular interview, Nietzsche points out that he's read, sorry, Mussolini points out that he's read all of Nietzsche from cover to cover and that Nietzsche has essentially cured him of his socialism. And that's interesting because he talks about this as if, well, I was cured of this and I kind of moved on from it sort of thing, almost like it was a childish preoccupation that he had with socialism. And then he moved on from it because he got into Nietzsche. And then these ideas, this idea of almost a disdain for the masses. In some ways, you could say that is a Nietzschean idea, because you think about the will to power, you think about the ubermensch, the corollary untermenschen as well. So, you know, the higher man, the lower man, or the underman, and this idea of power. So in some respects, I wonder, is it that we're really wondering about Nietzsche's power? political ideology or are we really talking more about his own will to power like you say if he has if he's a card-carrying socialist but he's got all these funky ideas that don't really match up with socialism is it that socialism for him is merely a vehicle to manipulate the masses and then fascism so to speak which is you might say the other end of the political spectrum I know some people say that socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. But if we take it at face value that it's opposite ends of the spectrum and we're trying to make sense of it and saying, well, how does he go all the way from over here to all the way over there? Is it simply because what we're talking about here is that people are a means to an ends for Mussolini, that politics itself is a means to an ends? and that he was looking for an opportunity to be able to manipulate the masses and build a platform for himself. Is there much purchase in that particular look? I think there is some purchase. So part of Mussolini was, as you absolutely say, about power. And sometimes you begin to almost think power for its own sake. But then he did try to achieve things. Sometimes he tried, back to the contradictions, to achieve things that threatened his power base. So he wasn't as simple as, you know, everything I do is simply to hold on to power. There was a good chunk of that. But at the same time, he did things that were a risk, certainly, to his position. His movement away from socialism, though, is difficult to track. He went from, in 1911, he went from obscurity within the Socialist Party, because he was arrested for anti-war protests. He went up very quickly in the Italian Socialist Party, got onto the National Governing Council, and at the end of 2012 or thereabouts, he was invited to edit the party's newspaper, Avanti. And he was in one sense preaching a kind of radical revolutionary socialism at that point. He was on that side. part of what we call the maximalists of socialism. But you always felt that there was more revolution than there was socialism. So there was this kind of, we're going to change things. And again, at times you almost think any change, as long as it's revolutionary, is great, doesn't really matter. So you kind of detect that view. And some of the other members of the Italian Socialist Party kind of said that about him. So he was writing, editing Avanti quite successfully in some ways. And then the First World War arose and he, contrary to the party policy, said Italy should intervene in the war. And cut a long story short, he completely fell out with them. And I think that's a crucial point, that that began to detach him from socialism. that they turned his back on him. And the people then he came into contact with, because he was pro-war, were more middle class industrialists. So his social milieu also changed at that time. But he didn't quite drop the socialism completely. And even in 1921, a year before he came to power, He was still talking about, you know, calling ourselves a Labour Party. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a decisive event. It was, and I think in times he was conflicted, tormented indeed by his kind of doctrine. But in 1921, he resigned from the National Executive. There was a lot of reaction within the socialist movement against him. He was seen as... basically too left-wing, too pro-socialist. He resigned. He hoped that they'd invite him back, but they didn't. So he had to work behind the scenes. And at the end of 1921, less than a year away from him becoming prime minister, there was a sort of reconciliation. But for other leaders within the fascist party, that reconciliation meant him dropping any pretenses to socialism um or even kind of social democracy laborist kind of politics fascism was a movement that was against socialism indeed was against working class organizations as um as john putin his book is drawn out brilliantly yeah okay so so that's interesting so that's mussolini so that's about his sort of development if you like his evolution from you if you could call it that. I'll say, Todd, I mean, it's in one way, I mean, it's fascinating, but it's also complicated. Very much so. Because at times it was, you know, imbued with this kind of anti-enlightenment nationalism, this state of some organic being, international class struggle between nations. But also at the same time he was writing about a different sort of nationalism, a kind of patriotism, where he wanted to re-establish Italy as a great country, looking back, okay, to Roman times, but also to the Enlightenment, to Italy being a source of civilization, good ideas. So there was always a lot in the cocktail, in the mix of the cocktail that he was, from which he was drinking. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about Italy itself then, because we've talked a little bit about Mussolini and his transition from socialism to fascism. Of course, that didn't happen in a vacuum, but also the ascent of fascism in Italy itself didn't happen in a vacuum. So what's happening in Italy? You've alluded to this pro-anti-war divide that there is in Italy around the First World War. What's going on there then? What's happening with this radical nationalism that's really starting to develop? Because it's starting to ramp up in the run-up to the First World War, isn't it? So what happens there? And how does that relate to liberal Italy as well? What have they got to offer in this debate? For much of the first day or so, the Italian Prime Minister, although he was in and out of office a bit, Giovanni Giolitti, trying to kind of balance the interests of the elite, which were represented by the liberals. with socialism. He failed ultimately, I think he recognised he failed, because he wasn't particularly radical. And what he allowed to happen was the centre in politics to disappear. And in the run up to the war, you could see an emerging right, nationalist right, and a quite intransigent... socialist party with no centre ground. And that became the politics of Italy. I'll call them the extremes of the right and the left, with less in the centre, became the politics, as I say, the politics of Italy. That went into the war. and indeed came out of the war. And the socialists were blamed, for example, for some of the military reverses, particularly Caporetto, which weren't true. But the whole war became a political fight in a way I don't think happened, say, in Britain, although people were resistant to the war in the First World War. The war was a real pulling apart. And after the war, the economic elite, industrialists, those with power were concerned that what was going to happen in Italy was going to be a Soviet style revolution. And there was a lot of red activity, it was called the two red years, the Viena Rosso, where the country was struggling, there was a lot of political conflict. But at the same time, what was emerging was a violent fascist reaction to this. Interesting. So there is this thing that's going on where there is this scramble, so to speak, at the fringes. What about the vision of Liberal Italy? Did Liberal Italy have much of a vision to offer that people could get behind? No, I think that's a really good point. Italy was unified in name only. It was regionally diverse, it was in social relations, it was also, we've got to remember, the influence of the Catholics in Italy. The Catholic Church was a major influence over what happened. in Italy had a lot of political power of its own, although it had lost some with the advent of liberal Italy. And it would be hard to say what was the overall vision. The liberals, I think, were hoping for economic growth, economic development, but within largely the same socialist structure. And the socialists were really looking... to overturn, turn something. And the kind of GLEs balancing things out, almost trying to avoid a vision, but was, you know, I'll move a bit to the left, no, I'll now turn to the right, we'll make a concession, no, we'll now take that concession away. It was kind of, and I think some people see it, it's a bit disparaging to GLEs, a kind of grubby politics, trying to... hold things together when they're not really ever going to be together. So that's one thing that you look in vain for. But again, I would say I'm not so sure that you look at other countries, I may not say some of the same things, but the state in particular, and indeed the monarchy, was not a great unifying force. in Italy. And in some ways Italian nationalism, patriotism, wasn't until for some certainly beginning in Florence it began to develop in the run-up to the war. But even then it took time to get hold and Two things, I think. One, Geolity decided to... spice things up at home invaded Libya in 1911, which the nationalists were able to exploit quite successfully. So that gave a sort of impetus to this kind of more aggressive, yeah let's call it aggressive nationalism. Yeah, yeah, interesting. Something that I spoke with John Foote about was the rise of the fascist squadristi, which Mussolini wasn't in control of. He wasn't at the head of. It was very much a regional phenomenon, quite decentralised. But Mussolini was effectively... able to usurp power, if you like, from the fascists or the fascist movement, or he was at least able to position himself as a central authority figure within fascism and positioned himself as the leader of the movement, but also put, I suppose, the government in a fait accompli. when the March of Rome happened, it was almost as though the government had a gun to its head along the lines of, well, you accept a change in the guard or there's going to be a civil war. It was something to that effect. So going back to your point, Peter, about Mussolini's use of power, he knew how to use power when he didn't formally have it as well. He knew how to get it. but he also knew how to leverage what he had in the moment as was really i think that's really evident in the march on rome and he wasn't even in rome he was in was he in milan or somewhere when the march was in the plan cynics say he was in milan because it was close to the swiss border if things went wrong but i mean just as a quick aside it had implications for him so he came really after the march had happened. And the march was a bit of an irrelevance anyhow, because he'd already really been appointed as prime minister. But it gave the appearance that the change to fascism had happened thanks to those marching, the 30-odd thousand, however many it was, and not to Mussolini. So actually, tactically, he was probably put himself in a more difficult position by hanging back in Milan. But that's a classic Mussolini, I think, waiting to see which door is going to open. Is it definitely open? And then I'll nip in pretty quickly. Yeah. And there was a lot of uncertainty about the March of Rome. And again, people say the army could have stopped it. I mean, the march was a bit of a shambles that people weren't really that well armed. It's a perspective. Yeah, yeah. So. Sorry, no, no, you go ahead, you finish your point. Right. So Mussolini was leader of the fascists, but to many fascists in the run up to the March of Rome was unwelcome. And in that period, so the 2022, there were often discussions. about could we have another leader? And at times, Gabriele D'Annunzio was regarded as much, the national poet was regarded as a better leader or potential leader, seemed to embody something more solid about Italy than Mussolini did. Mussolini was seen as a slightly sort of grubby politician in a way. And there was all this violence going on, which actually, the one thing, he didn't control it, but it resurrected, in a way, his career. Because by the end of 1919, Mussolini was thinking about giving up politics. But about the same time, fascist squad activity really began to take off. And although he wasn't directing it, it was, as John Foote says, a kind of sort of almost bizarrely autonomous people here and there without necessarily a lot of connection, taking on working class organisations, taking on the fascists, indeed taking on anybody in due course, and probably including each other. But what Mussolini seems to have done, and it's still to me a bit of a mystery, was he was able to articulate, give it some sort of ideology, some sort of doctrine, some sort of... raison d'etre politically, whereas the squads didn't necessarily have that. And the squads were very locally focused. They were called local bosses, the RAS, and they were interested in local politics. They weren't really interested in running the national government necessarily. Although that... began to emerge, again, quite quickly. So fascism changed from a kind of local concern as we will take control of the government, we will take control of the state. Mussolini, I think, was able to articulate that, was able to organise that, and able to be eventually the front person. And I think a lot of that was done It's a real political skill, real political manoeuvring, able to convince a lot of people that he was going to do certain things that they were going to be comfortable with, the problem being that he said different things to different people. Yes, yes, and this is one of the things that dissuades people from thinking that he did have a definite political stance, is this idea that he said different things to different people. But let's go maybe a little deeper than that. If it is deeper than that, maybe to Mussolini it was superficial, maybe it was just a tactic to manipulate the masses. But what was the role of myth-making in his leadership? He spoke, you've already alluded to this, but he spoke of Rome as a myth. One of the quotes in your book is him saying, we dream of a Roman Italy. So... How did Mussolini use myth-making in his leadership, in obtaining and retaining power? What was an important component of power was to get people to believe, in a simple way, things were other than they actually were. But also, as part of that, to... build support to encourage people so you might say there's something in saying yeah Rome center of the world or certainly center of a large part of the world resurrect again with the enlightenment so it was designed to encourage to motivate people politically it also to some degree simply covered up from the fact that there wasn't much behind the scene going on. It was a front. But, and I think this is important, it penetrated quite far. In fact, one of the things that I find, you can listen to historians, well-known historians, on... BBC Radio 4 talking about Mussolini and saying, oh, he did this. And they're just repeating the myths. The myths, some of the myths to some people have survived. So it's difficult to tell how far, you know, every Italian was or wasn't taken in by these myths. But I think they were important. They were part of creating an alternative view, which some people... eventually bought into yeah so would you would you yeah so just on that point peter would you characterize mussolini as a demagogue no it's not what motivated mussolini and it's interesting in in a way that people before he came to perth noticed that he had a desire, as he put it, to make his mark in history. So people that worked with him in Avanti. Lady Raffanelli, she said, you know, I could see that he was wanting to make a mark. His lover, his biographer as well, Margarita Sarfatti, she also noticed this. In fact, even police spies who were checking up on him noticed this. So there was something about, seemed to be driving him. We can speculate what's the psychology here, but seemed to be driving him. that he was going to be Italy's Napoleon, probably better than Napoleon. Yes. And that was what it was. And he would go down in history, you know, as a great man of history. That's what he wanted to be. Now, where that all came from, I haven't a clue. I'm not even, maybe Mussolini didn't have a clue. Yeah, And how deep it was, again, we don't know. But I think the important thing was, as he became leader, as fascism turned to the cult of Mussolini, the great leader, the omnicompetent leader, which was a political tactic almost to say, well, you're not going to have democracy, but you're going to have something even better, an omnicompetent leader. That entirely reinforced in his mind, I think, the fact that he was or would become a great leader. Of course, he could also use myths and just pure propaganda to build up the case for that. And he did. Yes. So this is quite interesting then. So like you say, it's impossible to know exactly where this drive, this will to power within Mussolini came from. You could look at some of the influences that he had. You could take what he says in New York Times interviews about Nietzsche being his spiritual master. You can look at various different things, but it's clear that his drive to power, to be great, to make Italy great, dare I say, he wanted to make Italy great again, to coin a phrase. But his reference point is Rome, which is going back quite a long way. So he's trying to do this. He's trying to do it through myth. He's doing it through charisma as well. He's charismatic. He's good at persuading people. He's good at talking his way into things. As we've discussed earlier about him positioning himself as the figurehead of fascism, which was no small thing to do. But like you say, he's positioned himself as, to use a Nietzschean phrase, He's positioned himself as a Superman, hasn't he? Because when you write in the book about omnicompetence, about Mussolini as the omnicompetent leader, and earlier in the book as well, you write about this sort of disdain that he has for the masses. I just, I read Nietzsche in that. I mean, I've read a lot of Nietzsche myself, and he, as a topic of conversation, his philosophy is featured on his podcast as well. And I very much see Nietzschean influences there. But what's fascinating to me about the way you elucidate this in the book is the drawbacks of this omnicompetent persona. Because it's all very well to present yourself as being omnicompetent, as being this putative Superman or the Superman incarnate. But there's a drawback to that, isn't there? There's a drawback to this persona of omnicompetence. So talk to us about the limits, because I think this ties into the essence of your book on the contradictions of power. So what are the challenges that Mussolini faced as the omnicompetent leader? The biggest challenge in a way was he wasn't very competent as a leader. If by that we mean using power to positive ends. He was very competent at using power to hold on to power to keep, protect his position. But the contradictions began to emerge. The main thing was he couldn't be seen to be taking advice. Why would he? If he was only competent, he wouldn't need to. So he became, I think, Probably from the late 20s onwards, he became more detached from advice, I think, and even just an understanding of what was happening, what was going on. So there was that detachment. But there was also the other side of that, which was, I think, an increasing confidence that he was right. that he could take decisions. So he started drinking his own Kool-Aid then to coin a phrase? I think that's part of the explanation and I can see a psychology and I'm no psychologist but I can see a psychology where if you're trying to reconcile contradictions be the only comp... competent, but actually probably be a bit anxious that you don't know what you're talking about. And maybe you have to kind of agree with all sorts of people about all sorts of things to not be exposed to an argument. I mean, I think one of the interests is relationship with most of his ministerial fascist colleagues was to avoid any discussion of anything. And the reason is... he wouldn't then be exposed. So there was that, yes, not being exposed. But, again, he was aware, repeat this point, I think he was aware that he would be exposed. He didn't say, you know, bring on any discussion, I'll win. He was and the consequence of that was that i think psychologically he had to find answers yeah yeah to how things were going to work out why they weren't working out he used myths for his own comfort for his own security yeah that's really interesting and that point about about how he is with others how he is with those running that's what really stood out to me in the book was Just what a low trust environment he really operated in. He really didn't seem to trust any of his leadership team. He just did not seem to, he seemed to keep everybody at arm's length and people knew pretty much after decisions had been made, nobody was consulted beforehand. And he didn't, in that regard, you could argue that he didn't have an inner circle. You think about someone like... Vladimir Putin, who is said to be a very distrusting individual. I can imagine Putin would have closer relationships with his leadership team than Mussolini did by the sounds of how it was with Mussolini. It sounds like he was very, very isolated as a leader in terms of decision making, in terms of... thought process as well right even before you get to the decisions just actually figuring out what is the way forward here he it seems like he's taking that on on his own and it's amazing really actually when you think about how long he was in power you know the the ventenio the 20 years or so that he was in power it's amazing that he did last that long in such a low trust environment of his creation because you can only imagine that as much as we talk about Mussolini's will to power and his drive to have power to cling on to and retain it you can imagine that there would have been other people in his circles that would have fancied a bit of that power themselves so it's quite a paradox really but yeah but how do you see that this really limits him then in terms of actually you achieving the ends that he wants to achieve. You're right just going back to to the distrust and people got about him being a charismatic leader and actually most of those who were around him were willing to speak very highly of him kind of signed up to this idea of the superman leader and you see this in other dictatorships and authority and you know elevation of the leader a cut above the rest but the fascist leaders signed up to them in one sense they were very loyal but he was unable to use it he could I in a sense I kept asking well why you know these guys are with you just you don't need to humiliate them treat them you could you could build a team but psychologically Mussolini wasn't up for that. And what he was also, I think, not good at was actually taking decisions. He didn't have confidence a lot of the time that the decision he was taking was right. He was known to kind of... um and ah a bit around it. He creates smoke screens to disguise that. But what comes out, particularly towards the end of the regime, is a sort of vacuum. I mean, I think it was Giuseppe Botti, one of the ministers, described it as, you know, it was just chaos in the centre of government. Mussolini wasn't really, in many ways... driving decision making. The decision making was of a poor quality but there was others had kind of been isolated and certainly up to a point and therefore couldn't step in and provide some impetus to it. So it wasn't effective and it meant decisions often were low level. And there's quite a lot of interesting research. How did Mussolini govern? Well, he governed like a sort of bureaucrat. The man of action, I see, he wanted to be the man of action, but he governed Italy largely from behind the desk, where people presented papers to him. He scribbled something on, you know, good idea or what's this about. These papers were often pretty vacuous. They weren't really good policy documents. So there was this kind of... churning bureaucracy really going nowhere a lot of the time of course some powerful interests were able to fill the vacuum particularly I think in in local regions so it wasn't complete chaos but in the centre of government I think there was this kind of lack of real real momentum yeah yeah and like you say it seems to be a theme you know this like this general idea of distrust seems to be a theme throughout Mussolini's tenure because he is trying to negate the regional fascists as well isn't he because he doesn't want he wants them to toe the line so he negates their power but in so doing he limits his own power or the power of the party and then You've got the Catholic Church as well. What you write about the Catholic Church is particularly interesting because, as we've already discussed, Mussolini's not a fan of Christianity as a theology and a way of life, but he's particularly not a fan of the Catholic Church. So tell us about that relationship then, because this is quite a tense push and pull between... the two parties and i think at one point in the book you write how essentially the well the catholics wanted the fascists to become more catholic and the fascists wanted the catholics to become more fascistic and so there is this kind of tug of war between the two the catholic church is tremendously influential in italy mussolini doesn't quite seem to get that does he he doesn't quite seem to get how the catholic church being part of the fabric of italy doesn't lend itself well to him then being able to form this alliance with them and be the ultimate top dog so it seems like he wants to be seen as the top dog irrespective of the existence of the catholic church and it's sort of like a zero-sum way of looking at it have i understood that correctly yes i think russolini was aware, despite his disparaging of organised, almost hatred of organised religion in the Catholic Church, as he was moving towards power, came to the view that a potential threat to it was the Catholic Church, in that it was an influential voice. And therefore, like a lot of other influential institutions, Mussolini, before coming to power and just after coming to power, did a lot to reassure. He also then quite early on moved to what we'll call the reconciliation between the Italian state and the Vatican. And what had been since the unification, there'd been a lot of tension between the state, the liberal state, and the Catholic Church. And what Mussolini was, I think, recognised was that for the country to move forward, and certainly for fascism to move forward, there needed to be a coming together. So he brought the Catholic Church on board. he gave them not expensive but major concessions and started the move towards in effect recognizing the Vatican as a separate state, rather this ambiguous position it had within the Italian state to compensating the church for the land it lost and in a sense trying to bring the state and the church together in some sort of unified way. The problem a bit with that was the church, and particularly the Pope, Pius XI, also believed that the church should be absolutely dominant, not only in spiritual, but in political and social matters. So you have this kind of... I mean, I don't know if I've heard you again saying top dog, but there was almost that kind of who's going to be top dog. Mussolini came out of the political fight better than Pius XI. Particularly the Catholic Church, when Mussolini started the alliance with Hitler, given the church. the Nazis were attacking the Catholic Church quite violently in Germany, the relationship began to break down a bit, but not that much. But the point is, the Catholic Church was very favourably disposed to fascism, because Mussolini gave them what they wanted. But the idea of a hierarchical order that very much fitted in with Catholic doctrine. So was it seen as a Faustian pact of sorts then, certainly from the Catholic side, in the sense that the Catholics were getting what they wanted, they were getting these concessions. Mussolini was calling off the dogs because there was this issue as well of Catholic organisations and youth groups getting roughed up by fascists, and Mussolini was calling off the dogs. So did... Do you think the Catholic Church saw this sort of alliance? I think it was the Lateran Accords was the formal term for it. Do you think that the Church thought this Faustian pact was acceptable in view of the benefits that it gave them? The Church did. Not necessarily all Catholics did. I mean, although it was underground, the opposition. they were Catholics and they also being socialists, liberals or whatever. And I think what is particularly interesting is that a lot of the priesthood bought into fascism, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia. There was a lot of buy-in from priests. So it was a complex picture. But as you rightly say, at the same time, fascist squads or... other forces were attacking Catholic societies, particularly young Catholic societies. So again, it was a sort of odd relationship. It can't be characterised, oh it was this, it had a number of different strands to it. But again, the Catholic Church liked fascism because it saw it as a bulwark against socialism and communism yeah and so it was at least a minimum it was better the devil you know than the devil you end up something with yeah yeah yeah yeah better the devil you know better the devil you've got perhaps yeah than the devil that you might have instead that's interesting now you mentioned pious the 11th pious the 11th is interesting because although you mentioned that the Catholic priesthood was in favour of fascism. Pius XI wasn't, and he saw Ethiopia as an unjust war, and he was particularly vocal about Mussolini's proximity to and partnership with Adolf Hitler. Did he in some ways predict or forewarn of Mussolini's downfall? just before his death he was beginning he he issued a number of let's just call them documents people's statements that warned against totalitarianism uh extreme nationalism a lot of it was directed at germany but some a lot of it was quite oblique um and still had I think an undertone of yes, but Soviet communism is the real threat. So he was trying, I think, to move away. In these terms, he had no power. He had very little influence over Mussolini by then. I think Mussolini had probably by then... got enough power consolidated that the Catholic Church really wasn't as important. And what I think was beginning to annoy Mussolini was that the Church at times, particularly Pius XI, was not endorsing what he was doing. He didn't need to, but he wanted, you know, it'd be nice to have. Is it accurate as well, I think I recall reading this in the book, Peter, that that the ambassador to the Vatican threatened the Pope, Pius XI, on behalf of Mussolini, when he spoke out against his actions, his international expansion. Is that accurate? Let's put it this way. Pressure was put on the Pope. Yeah. And in many ways successful was to not... coming behind questioning the war um and to some extent not in your christmas address mentioned peace yes yeah yeah i i noted that actually from reading the book that he he was dissuaded from mentioning peace in the christmas address which is really interesting and it's interesting like you say it seems like there was this sort of tipping point somewhere along the lines where Early on, it seems as though the Catholics had a decent amount of power themselves in the negotiation with Mussolini. But it seems as though there comes a point where it doesn't seem like that's the case anymore. And that Mussolini can go ahead and threaten the Pope without any great fear of recrimination from the Catholic Church. Then Pius XI gets sick. He passes away. Pius XII comes in, who is more pliable, more amenable to the plans of Mussolini, kind of fits in, goes along to get along. I think Pius XII was just much more in tune with fascist ideas and in a sense was welcomed. Mussolini was thought that that was a kind of pull needed and to some extent the catholic church did give backing um they'd give backing to to the war and only very belatedly kind of i think were those mistakes um revealed yeah yeah so so going back to going back to this and coming coming towards the The undoing of Mussolini, if you like, it's interesting because what Pius XI said about Mussolini's potential unraveling in this alliance with Hitler is interesting because, as we've just been talking about, there was this hold that Mussolini had on the country, this power that he had. He didn't really have prominent political opposition, you know. Mattiotti's gone we haven't talked about that that's a whole different can of worms we were joking before the call that we probably won't get into that because that's a whole thing in itself but suffice it to say that Mussolini's in a very strong position in Italy in terms of his power but that's until he gets involved seriously in war and what you write in the book about this is particularly interesting because it seems as though, I suppose a Westerner, let's put it like this, as a Westerner it's easy to think of Mussolini and Hitler in World War II as hand in glove. If you read speeches from people like FDR and Churchill around the time of World War II you probably see Mussolini and Hitler as hand in glove but it wasn't quite like that was it? It wasn't even really like that. in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, the Spanish Civil War seems like it was pretty costly for Italy. And in some respects, they were not given a great deal of respect by Franco. And they bore these high costs. And then when it came to World War II, they pretty much had to go in when Hitler went in. with Germany as well. So talk to us a bit about what happened in terms of the unravelling of Italy through war. I think Hitler, from my perspective, is the central figure in this for two reasons. First reason was, as Hitler came to power, he became the dominant fascist figure and whatever your views of fascism he clearly put Mussolini internationally but therefore to some extent domestically in the shadow so he had reason to not like Hitler because he had sort of come on the stage and was now the big actor. And remember Mussolini had international ambitions, he wasn't. But Hitler was now the big challenge to the British and the French in particular. But at the same time, Germany could be an ally in Mussolini's expansionist ambitions. And so, again, this kind of contradiction, I don't really like Hitler, he's stolen all my thunder, but he's going to have a bloody big army, so we could join up in some form or other. So a lot of what happens in the late 30s is a kind of play out of distrust. Hitler, though he said he admired Mussolini, again, he wasn't really, you know, Hitler did what Hitler wanted to do. He wasn't bothered about anybody else in particular. So that began to play out. Mussolini did, I think, increasingly see an alliance with Germany as a way to further his ambitions. But the relationship with Hitler, particularly latterly when Hitler moved into Austria, which had always been a concern, getting a bit too close to Italy, then into Czechoslovakia. No consultation, really. And then finally into Poland. So Mussolini was put into, I think, quite a difficult position. We don't have the kind of diaries that really share his thoughts, but he was in a difficult position. Hitler was now off. he tried to persuade Hitler to hold the war back to the mid-1940s. He was now in a situation Hitler was in advance and the period of neutrality was abandoned and they joined the war by invading France. But actually, interestingly, one of the things that the Italians did do was put up a defensive arrangement in northeast Italy just in case I had to fight off the Germans. So there was never any trust. And also Mussolini was keen on ISIS, but I don't think he particularly bothered Hitler, was to have really run two parallel campaigns. So it wasn't fighting together. Mussolini would have North Africa, he went into Greece much to Hitler's annoyance etc. So there was a sort of parallel war. Yeah, yeah. It went very badly wrong. I mean even the invasion of France that was more or less surrendered by that point. Yeah, yeah. It was a third rate, it wasn't. And then the decision to invade Greece, the Germans had to rescue the Italians from that. And it just went from bad to worse. Yeah, one of the sets of numbers that you present in the book is pretty damning against the Italian army, the Italian military. You write that 30,000 British troops overwhelmed 250,000. Italian troops in Libya in 1941. That's pretty damning, isn't it? And at this point, Italy is no longer seen as a great power. And before all of that, Mussolini's been pretty much relegated to an international peacemaker before the war, the Munich Agreement. So he's really, this is before, of course, we get to his ultimate demise, but... He's really been knocked off his perch, hasn't he? He's really down and out long before it all comes to an end for him in terms of his life. Yeah. You can begin to see how he's getting more and more trapped on a particular railway line that's taking him forward. So you can begin to see... see the kind of where it's going to end up. It's almost like the fog lifts and you say yes. Because he didn't do a Franco, he maybe couldn't do a Franco and say, we're not going to get involved in this war. Stay out of the war. He was committed, I think, to expansion. Although the Italian public pretty wary about any war. It nonetheless had some traction of the glory of Italy. It'll be a short war, there'll be plenty of spoils to share out. That was kind of what it was offered at. But the big point was, and this is where Mussolini's real weakness in the decision-making came up, he'd committed resources to Ethiopia in 1935. We're still in Ethiopia, there was a an insurrection going on. There was a war in effect, an internal war in Ethiopia. That committed a lot of resources. It was about 70, I think as I remember, about 70,000 troops ended up in Spain, all told, a lot of aircraft. So actually a lot of the military spend was being spent elsewhere than was available. He was here. also had a misconception about how war was going to be fought. He was still going to fight the First World War when things had moved on, so Italy didn't have the kind of tanks that were needed, for example. There wasn't even the economic plan, how are we going to fund this? There was no, well there was a plan but it wasn't a very good one. Mussolini's on this track, he's heading to defeat. His only salvation is he has some connection to Hitler, there might be something like that, but then of course Italy gets tied into Germany's own military problems, particularly Russia and the retreat from Russia. And therefore, there's nothing really going to be left. Admittedly, it takes a long time. The Allies land in Sicily and then go into mainland Italy and fight the Germans all the way up the peninsula. Very bloody, very damaging. war. But just in case you thought Mussolini, well that's it. He was arrested eventually in 1943. It was quite clear Italy was in a perilous condition. The king dismissed them. He was arrested by the king. He over was then rescued. He was located in the middle of Italy, was being sort of held prisoner there. The Germans sprung him and he was flown back to Germany and Hitler put him in charge of a puppet regime in the centre and north of Italy. But by then, Mussolini was a broken man, really. Yeah, yeah. And then he ended up ultimately hanging upside down from a petrol station in Milan. next to his lover, Claretta Patacci. Yes, yeah. I mean, the first thing to say, a lot of people think he was hung up. No, he was shot on the side of Lake Combe. He almost made it to Switzerland. The line was that it was Switzerland, and then he was going to go to Spain. A lot of conspiracy theories have come out. Why was he shot? What was being covered up? Most of them, I think, are wrong. I think the partisan, communist partisans just decided, that's it, we've got him, we'll shoot him, there and then. So on this point of war, Peter. This is what really undoes Mussolini, isn't it? And I think if we're going to kind of bookend this in a way, if we're going to go right back to the beginning in terms of Mussolini's values, is it fair to say, because you write in the book that his ideological disposition meant that he saw war in abstract theoretical terms and not in practical realistic terms. He also... believed that the character of Italians could only be changed by fascism through war. So it seems to me that he was seduced by the possibilities of war, but he didn't, he was naive as to what that would entail. He didn't have a proper credible plan to make it happen. So was he seduced? I mean, ultimately you could say he was seduced by power, couldn't you? You could say that he was seduced by power itself. And he's on this track. And as you say, you can look at it like a train that's hurtling towards calamity. But he's thinking, if I'm going to carry on, if I'm going to use this will to power and continue to expand, I've got to get on the Hitler train because we don't have the resources to do this ourselves. But actually, if we ally with him... and ride on his coattails, we're going to get a lot further in terms of the power expansion, personally and nationally, than we otherwise would do. So do you see that he was seduced by the possibilities of war in that respect, and that that was ultimately his undoing? He, from an early stage, saw war as a form of national expression expansion. And again, there was a lot of philosophical writings, political writings that kind of gave him ideas, turned up the heat under his thinking around that. So in one sense, you would always expect that Mussolini would end up in the war. And the reason it took him so long was he didn't have confidence that the Italian military would be able to do it. And then they did eventually pick on Ethiopia. And even that was a bit of a, you know, not a success militarily for Italy. Lost a lot of troops. probably I think 20,000 troops, costs a vast amount of money, A, to take the country and hold on to it, but also then to sustain the economy and the infrastructure there. So Hitler offered an opportunity to grab land, grab spoils. But the other side of it, as you've said, was Mussolini in the 30s became very frustrated with what he saw as a lack of progress with this fascist revolution. And I mean, it's quoted as sort of saying, you know, it's not going to take x years it's going to take x times 10 years, times 10, sorry, to do this. So he could see the fascist revolution, as he saw it, whatever that would involve, slipping away. And the only way he thought he could achieve it, or certainly the major way he thought he could achieve it, was by making the Italians more warlike. more fascist and fascism became increasingly about war and not about a domestic order, became about war and in that sense was different in 1942 to what it was in 1922. So yes this belief that Italians or Italian men at least would be turned into proper fascists haven't had a a spot of war. And again, sort of contradiction, he kind of knew the Italians didn't want that. I mean, there was a lot of spying going on. There was reasonable intelligence of what Italians thought. And the last thing Italians really wanted was to enter into a war, particularly enter into a war with Germany. um yeah so there's there's all sorts in in your book peter and i think it draws out a lot of lessons and takeaways very very well that perhaps other works don't do in the same way and that's not to denigrate them in any way they're just focused on different things i think in your book you very much focus on the lessons in respect to leadership and governance. We've talked about Nietzsche's, Mussolini's influences and Nietzsche and Sorrell and the other people that were of interest to him. We've talked about his evolution in thinking. We've also talked about the omnicompetent leader as well. We've talked about this low trust environment in which he operated. with people even in his inner circle this omni-competence is particularly interesting to me because i think a lot of people can look at this idea or this pitfall of omni-competence and apply that to themselves and think am i trying to appear like i'm more competent not necessarily omni-competent but am i trying to appear more competent than i actually am and is this to my detriment so there are so many potential takeaways from the book What are some of the things that you might like to highlight to people as takeaways from the book, lessons to be learned from the pitfalls that Mussolini fell into? I think one of the things which has always struck me from the beginning of writing this book was how easy in some ways it was to take over the state. no It wasn't like Mussolini and a few fascists against the Italian population. There were people who were happy to go along with it. But what I think is, don't underestimate, if you have, and let's call it a will to power, you want power and you're willing to be fairly hard-nosed about it, it's maybe not that difficult to take over a state. and people, historians going about white social forces and that, you know, centuries to get where we are and all and I signed up to that but sometimes I think it just takes one determined guy and a few a few mates in a way and things in certain conditions and there were certain conditions there was a bit of a political vacuum in Italy after the war and the disruption of the war and so on people can move in and they can take over. And people will then join in because, well, if you don't join in, you might not get your pension, you might even get beaten up, you might get sent to a prison camp. But on the other side of the coin, you might get a reasonable job, etc. So, and I know a lot said about fascism and violence, and that was always part of it. You don't necessarily need a lot of violence, as Emilio Luso, Italian writer, said, you know, about confino holding people in prison camps, remote prison camps. The trick is that confino, prison camps, is for the few, but the fear of that is for the many, and that's how it works. So I think there's a lot there about, you know, even in modern states, more robust democracies, is it and we've seen it in certain countries in Eastern Europe. So that's the second thing back to what you've been talking about, Tom. In populism, there's a lot now of contemporary populist regimes and the debate is Was Mussolini a populist? I think the answer is no, but that's for another time. But the idea of a special leader, somebody who kind of stands out, who's got something, whether they embody the nation better, they represent its values better or whatever it is, I think is now part of modern discourse. And I don't think, although Mussolini might be regarded as a sort of extreme version of that, I don't think that is completely disconnected and I think that's important. The third thing, and we haven't touched upon this, but regimentation. Over half the population were members of one sort of fascist organisation or other by the end of the regime in 1941. And they didn't do much in a positive sense, but they were a good way of keeping people under control, regimenting them. And I think that's it. And then in the propaganda, whether people believed it or not, they had no access to the reality, to the truth, other than their everyday experience. So the book's about power. and Mussolini used power in a particular way and I think some of the lessons that could be drawn from Mussolini have a contemporary relevance as other dictators but Mussolini was good at manipulating power and therefore I think there's something in what he was doing that's worth thinking about. I'm not saying worth replicating but certainly worth thinking about. Yeah, I really like your answer there, Peter, because we speak a lot about governance in relation to the book. Yeah. But as you allude to, it's also about the other side of the coin, which is citizenship as well. And about our need as citizens to be vigilant, perhaps against those with that extreme will to power. who do have the mates who threaten violence. Like you say, the actual violence is for the few. And this is what came out in the conversation with John Foote. There wasn't, the violence that was perpetrated was kind of like, almost like mafia violence in the sense that it was targeted violence. It wasn't just indiscriminate violence on the streets, not just like blood on the streets randomly. It was very specific violence against specific targets. but the threat thereof like you say was sufficient to keep other people quiet so absolutely i mean diaries interviews um a lot of italians were there they talk about the fear there was a fear maybe not clear you know what that actually entailed but fear was part of their their everyday lives sorry Tom I got carried away there not at all I think it's a great discussion I think there's so much that we can draw out from looking at Mussolini the things that influence Mussolini his drives, his motivations this will to power that we've talked about, the way that he sets himself up in an omnicompetent way I think leaders everywhere in any context in any leadership capacity should be really careful about not project over projecting competence and actually been able to have a trusted cadre a trusted team of people that they can talk to that they can counsel with even people aren't formally in the team they need perspectives they need insight and information from others and there are real consequences to projecting this superman or superwoman image so there's so much to draw out of this i'm going to remind people again peter of the book's title it is duche the contradictions of power and then there's a little subtitle there the political leadership of benito mussolini i will also say in closing that it was this book was personally recommended to me by richard bosworth who is an eminent thank you richard yeah yeah he's an eminent historian of um Italy and particularly Mussolini and I can promise you that he doesn't just recommend any biography on Mussolini as as I also am aware so thank you for the book Peter thank you so much for your time on the Real Clear Values podcast as well. Thank you Tom I mean really enjoyed the discussion excellent discussion and some I think important avenues you've you've taken us down to so many thanks enjoyed it. Thank you, Peter.

threads that you've drawn on here yeah Mussolini for a start because I think he's a great encapsulation of somebody who pursued power for better or worse and also power itself and one thing that particularly impressed me about your book is how you've weaved this all together there's a lot of detail as we were talking about just before going live on the call there's a lot of detail in relation to Mussolini in relation to Mussolini's Italy, fascist Italy, all the different characters, all different names and the dates. But what you've done is create an excellent synthesis of Mussolini's rise to power and his governance within his particular approach. So the first question, Peter, is to really kick things off, is why should we take Mussolini seriously? Why have you taken him seriously? Because in the past...

He's been treated as a bit of a buffoon, hasn't he? Nobody's really taken him that seriously. But why is it then that we should take him seriously, do you think? Well, a variety of things.

You're absolutely right to say that Mussolini was seen probably until the turn of the century in a popular way, but also in academic circles as a kind of a bit of a buffoon, a bit of a joke, a war funny hat and so on and so forth. And also was a buffoon in the sense that militarily, Italy had a very bad Second World War, which seemed to be associated with Mussolini, didn't really know what he was doing. And up to a point, that's right. But to me, it's not the complete picture of Mussolini. I think one of the key things that sometimes gets forgotten about, he held power for 22 years in Italy.

He wasn't power. He was able to use that power, not always as he would have wished to have used it, but he certainly had power. He certainly made things happen. And what I was interested in is, well, beyond the buffoon, if you like, how was he able to do it?

And also, we know it wasn't, you know, 100% successful. So why wasn't he as successful as he hoped or intended to be? So that, for me, was kind of the interesting question. And just adding to that, I mean, Mussolini is a historical figure and in some ways is not as important as Stalin or Hitler, but he is remembered in some ways, which for an Italian leader from over 100 years ago is quite a feat.

But also I think, more importantly, he was the first... political leader who relied on character and personality. I think that was, you could certainly argue that. He was also one of the first, if not the first, leaders to actually start dismantling democracy that had been established in the state. And I think he's interesting.

because he was very good at using power. He used power well. And I would say he's a very good example. And there are warnings on how he used power about the dangers of dictatorship.

And maybe not the absolutely brutal dictatorships, but the slightly more subtle ones, Nazi Germany, not Stalin's Russia, not indeed Franco's Spain. So that for me was what was kind of sucking me into looking at Mussolini in some more depth. Yeah.

So how did you go about untangling the different narratives on Mussolini then? Because you write in your book that you weren't particularly satisfied with previous works on him. So how did you go about making sense of them, picking out the details, making sense of...

Mussolini as well in a way that you felt was more satisfactory and representative. Yes, I mean, I wouldn't say it was dissatisfied with... individual works. I think a lot of the writing has a lot of merits, but what I did think was when you put them all together, they didn't quite seem to gel.

And indeed, one of the points I've often made is nobody seemed to, until my good self, step back and say, what does all this add up to? But people presented biographies and biographies that were kind of focused a bit on the life and times of Mussolini and that are kind of chronological. story. And therefore, I think it was more difficult with that kind of approach to draw things together.

So that's, in a sense, what it was doing. It wasn't the easiest thing, because as I say in the book, there were a range of different sites to Mussolini, some of the contradictions, and we might want to come on to that. And so in writing the book, you'd say, oh, yes, right. I understand them, I've got a hook here, and then some other side of it would appear and the hook would be kind of wrenched from my hand. So what I began to think was that actually Mussolini had a series of contradictions and to understand them was how he managed these contradictions.

So for example, just and we can talk more about this if you want to talk. An evident contradiction was he wanted to be seen as a successful revolutionary leader, a leader who would make his mark on history. But he was seeking to do that within a country where the state, the elite, the economically powerful were very conservative. And throughout his complete political leadership, he was always trying to balance wanting to be more radical, to push on, to be a great leader. with the fact that many of those with power in Italy were not really that interested in it.

Yeah, yeah. And therefore he was always concerned, you know, I'll be radical and then, well, that might destabilise things that, you know, people might react against me, the elite. I think he was always concerned that they could dispose of him if they really wanted to.

He was always managing that relationship. So that contradiction he had to kind of manage. And he ended up, to my mind, stuck in the middle. He wasn't kind of a radical Hitler who just drove things through, or Stalin who did the same. Nor was he a kind of Salazar who kept the lid on, it was just a conservative country.

He was somewhere in the middle. So there was a lot of certainly radical show, maybe less. radical delivery but he did try things that were could be seen as such yeah interesting so with all this in mind this is talking about Mussolini at a bird's eye view so to speak let's talk a little bit about the development of the man himself his philosophy and his ideology he had a sort of influence in his life early on didn't he from his father's side socialism was quite a strong influence from his mother's side it was the church yeah and he developed his own views there didn't he in terms of was socialism good was it a good way to to do things what about the church and and and how i think he had experience at a boarding school with celestian monks yeah so tell us about his early years in terms of his political philosophy and his development of ideology in relation to politics and also religion as well. Right. Mussolini's father was a socialist.

Some people say he had sort of anarchist tendencies and did take his youngest son to a lot of political meetings. And his father was not uninfluential politically in the area for Li Pradapio, where they lived. He was known on that.

But the whole Emilia Romana, particularly Romana, was a very socialist area. So it was no surprise, even I think without his father, Mussolini would come into touch with socialism and anarchism at that time. and also a reaction against the state because until the middle of the 19th century the Romano had been part of the Papal States, had been very authoritarian, very dominating.

So yes, Mussolini's father would have been an influence, but the Romano was a centre of socialism and indeed anarchism in the late 19th, early 20th century. So Mussolini would have been aware of that. It's not in a think...

in a sense, a surprise that he was drawn into socialism. There was a lot of poverty in the area. There was a fair amount of resentment of the state because it was a history of being, Romania was part of the people states, which were very authoritarian.

So it wasn't just that his father kind of, I think there was a wider set of circumstances, if you like, that drew Mussolini to socialism. But what was, I think, fundamentally important, was his mother and his mother ensuring that he continued his education until he was 18. So he'd ended up with qualifications, teaching qualifications in effect, but that also enabled him to write. His early career was as a writer and a bit of an organiser, quite young, probably 17, 18, he was already doing that.

But he was finding it difficult to find work, apart from teaching, where twice he had to give up the jobs because of misconduct, let's put it that way. And he ended up, like a lot of Italians, going to Switzerland for employment purposes. And he was there for over two years. And that's where, in a sense, his career, his writing career, he got a job working for the...

Swiss Brants of the Italian Socialist Party. And he started reading a lot and he started coming into contact with people who had ideas. He even attended a short course at the University of Lucerne. So he started picking up ideas. He started writing about these.

It wasn't always successful. Sometimes he had to do labouring jobs, he wasn't guaranteed an income, but you could see the beginnings of his political development. But the point was that many of the writers he was coming into contact with were not mainstream socialists.

At this time, he became aware of the writings of Vilfredo Pareto, who argued that politics were always going to be dominated by the elite, therefore the idea of creating a socialist society was a kind of shimmerer. He came into touch to some degree with Marxist ideas but he was never really a Marxist. He came into ideas critical of religion and he'd had bad experience at school.

a Catholic boarding school, so he had a real dislike of organised religion and the Catholic church in particular. So in Switzerland he began to be open to ideas. It's difficult to kind of say in any case, yes this made a difference, but he was open to ideas. The interesting thing about them was a lot of them weren't mainstream socialist ideas. So very early on, and I think one can say Nietzsche in particular, became an influence from that early period in Switzerland.

And he developed his thinking, he came in touch with, in due course, revolutionary syndicalists, and some of their ideas attracted him. Later on, he came into touch, in touch with what I call radical nationalism, a radical nationalism that grew up in Italy just at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, which went on to play a major part in fascism. So Mussolini was an unusual character. He was a card-carrying socialist, but if you read a lot of what he was saying, it didn't read like mainstream socialism.

No. And some of the ingredients were, firstly, a disdain of the masses. So he wasn't actually out there.

The masses were there to be manipulated and mythology was also part of his thinking from Gustave Le Bon, the idea of the crowd and how they could be managed, Pareto himself, how to use manipulation. So he wasn't really in one sense on the side of the masses. He saw the masses as a means under a sort of elite leadership to be directed to revolutionary change. Yeah. So on that point then, Peter, this is interesting because I feel like this is where we get into the nub of it with Mussolini and what's driving the man.

Because what interests me, what you say there about him moving over to Switzerland to work, it reminds me of... a New York Times interview that I read between Mussolini and Oscar Levy. I think it was in 1924 or something like that.

So a hundred years ago. Yes. Coincidentally.

But in this particular interview, Nietzsche points out that he's read, sorry, Mussolini points out that he's read all of Nietzsche from cover to cover and that Nietzsche has essentially cured him of his socialism. And that's interesting because he talks about this as if, well, I was cured of this and I kind of moved on from it sort of thing, almost like it was a childish preoccupation that he had with socialism. And then he moved on from it because he got into Nietzsche.

And then these ideas, this idea of almost a disdain for the masses. In some ways, you could say that is a Nietzschean idea, because you think about the will to power, you think about the ubermensch, the corollary untermenschen as well. So, you know, the higher man, the lower man, or the underman, and this idea of power. So in some respects, I wonder, is it that we're really wondering about Nietzsche's power?

political ideology or are we really talking more about his own will to power like you say if he has if he's a card-carrying socialist but he's got all these funky ideas that don't really match up with socialism is it that socialism for him is merely a vehicle to manipulate the masses and then fascism so to speak which is you might say the other end of the political spectrum I know some people say that socialism and fascism are two sides of the same coin. But if we take it at face value that it's opposite ends of the spectrum and we're trying to make sense of it and saying, well, how does he go all the way from over here to all the way over there? Is it simply because what we're talking about here is that people are a means to an ends for Mussolini, that politics itself is a means to an ends?

and that he was looking for an opportunity to be able to manipulate the masses and build a platform for himself. Is there much purchase in that particular look? I think there is some purchase. So part of Mussolini was, as you absolutely say, about power.

And sometimes you begin to almost think power for its own sake. But then he did try to achieve things. Sometimes he tried, back to the contradictions, to achieve things that threatened his power base.

So he wasn't as simple as, you know, everything I do is simply to hold on to power. There was a good chunk of that. But at the same time, he did things that were a risk, certainly, to his position. His movement away from socialism, though, is difficult to track.

He went from, in 1911, he went from obscurity within the Socialist Party, because he was arrested for anti-war protests. He went up very quickly in the Italian Socialist Party, got onto the National Governing Council, and at the end of 2012 or thereabouts, he was invited to edit the party's newspaper, Avanti. And he was in one sense preaching a kind of radical revolutionary socialism at that point. He was on that side.

part of what we call the maximalists of socialism. But you always felt that there was more revolution than there was socialism. So there was this kind of, we're going to change things.

And again, at times you almost think any change, as long as it's revolutionary, is great, doesn't really matter. So you kind of detect that view. And some of the other members of the Italian Socialist Party kind of said that about him.

So he was writing, editing Avanti quite successfully in some ways. And then the First World War arose and he, contrary to the party policy, said Italy should intervene in the war. And cut a long story short, he completely fell out with them. And I think that's a crucial point, that that began to detach him from socialism.

that they turned his back on him. And the people then he came into contact with, because he was pro-war, were more middle class industrialists. So his social milieu also changed at that time. But he didn't quite drop the socialism completely.

And even in 1921, a year before he came to power, He was still talking about, you know, calling ourselves a Labour Party. So it wasn't, you know, it wasn't a decisive event. It was, and I think in times he was conflicted, tormented indeed by his kind of doctrine. But in 1921, he resigned from the National Executive. There was a lot of reaction within the socialist movement against him.

He was seen as... basically too left-wing, too pro-socialist. He resigned.

He hoped that they'd invite him back, but they didn't. So he had to work behind the scenes. And at the end of 1921, less than a year away from him becoming prime minister, there was a sort of reconciliation. But for other leaders within the fascist party, that reconciliation meant him dropping any pretenses to socialism um or even kind of social democracy laborist kind of politics fascism was a movement that was against socialism indeed was against working class organizations as um as john putin his book is drawn out brilliantly yeah okay so so that's interesting so that's mussolini so that's about his sort of development if you like his evolution from you if you could call it that. I'll say, Todd, I mean, it's in one way, I mean, it's fascinating, but it's also complicated.

Very much so. Because at times it was, you know, imbued with this kind of anti-enlightenment nationalism, this state of some organic being, international class struggle between nations. But also at the same time he was writing about a different sort of nationalism, a kind of patriotism, where he wanted to re-establish Italy as a great country, looking back, okay, to Roman times, but also to the Enlightenment, to Italy being a source of civilization, good ideas.

So there was always a lot in the cocktail, in the mix of the cocktail that he was, from which he was drinking. Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about Italy itself then, because we've talked a little bit about Mussolini and his transition from socialism to fascism. Of course, that didn't happen in a vacuum, but also the ascent of fascism in Italy itself didn't happen in a vacuum.

So what's happening in Italy? You've alluded to this pro-anti-war divide that there is in Italy around the First World War. What's going on there then?

What's happening with this radical nationalism that's really starting to develop? Because it's starting to ramp up in the run-up to the First World War, isn't it? So what happens there?

And how does that relate to liberal Italy as well? What have they got to offer in this debate? For much of the first day or so, the Italian Prime Minister, although he was in and out of office a bit, Giovanni Giolitti, trying to kind of balance the interests of the elite, which were represented by the liberals. with socialism.

He failed ultimately, I think he recognised he failed, because he wasn't particularly radical. And what he allowed to happen was the centre in politics to disappear. And in the run up to the war, you could see an emerging right, nationalist right, and a quite intransigent... socialist party with no centre ground.

And that became the politics of Italy. I'll call them the extremes of the right and the left, with less in the centre, became the politics, as I say, the politics of Italy. That went into the war. and indeed came out of the war. And the socialists were blamed, for example, for some of the military reverses, particularly Caporetto, which weren't true.

But the whole war became a political fight in a way I don't think happened, say, in Britain, although people were resistant to the war in the First World War. The war was a real pulling apart. And after the war, the economic elite, industrialists, those with power were concerned that what was going to happen in Italy was going to be a Soviet style revolution.

And there was a lot of red activity, it was called the two red years, the Viena Rosso, where the country was struggling, there was a lot of political conflict. But at the same time, what was emerging was a violent fascist reaction to this. Interesting. So there is this thing that's going on where there is this scramble, so to speak, at the fringes.

What about the vision of Liberal Italy? Did Liberal Italy have much of a vision to offer that people could get behind? No, I think that's a really good point. Italy was unified in name only.

It was regionally diverse, it was in social relations, it was also, we've got to remember, the influence of the Catholics in Italy. The Catholic Church was a major influence over what happened. in Italy had a lot of political power of its own, although it had lost some with the advent of liberal Italy.

And it would be hard to say what was the overall vision. The liberals, I think, were hoping for economic growth, economic development, but within largely the same socialist structure. And the socialists were really looking... to overturn, turn something. And the kind of GLEs balancing things out, almost trying to avoid a vision, but was, you know, I'll move a bit to the left, no, I'll now turn to the right, we'll make a concession, no, we'll now take that concession away.

It was kind of, and I think some people see it, it's a bit disparaging to GLEs, a kind of grubby politics, trying to... hold things together when they're not really ever going to be together. So that's one thing that you look in vain for. But again, I would say I'm not so sure that you look at other countries, I may not say some of the same things, but the state in particular, and indeed the monarchy, was not a great unifying force.

in Italy. And in some ways Italian nationalism, patriotism, wasn't until for some certainly beginning in Florence it began to develop in the run-up to the war. But even then it took time to get hold and Two things, I think.

One, Geolity decided to... spice things up at home invaded Libya in 1911, which the nationalists were able to exploit quite successfully. So that gave a sort of impetus to this kind of more aggressive, yeah let's call it aggressive nationalism.

Yeah, yeah, interesting. Something that I spoke with John Foote about was the rise of the fascist squadristi, which Mussolini wasn't in control of. He wasn't at the head of. It was very much a regional phenomenon, quite decentralised. But Mussolini was effectively...

able to usurp power, if you like, from the fascists or the fascist movement, or he was at least able to position himself as a central authority figure within fascism and positioned himself as the leader of the movement, but also put, I suppose, the government in a fait accompli. when the March of Rome happened, it was almost as though the government had a gun to its head along the lines of, well, you accept a change in the guard or there's going to be a civil war. It was something to that effect. So going back to your point, Peter, about Mussolini's use of power, he knew how to use power when he didn't formally have it as well.

He knew how to get it. but he also knew how to leverage what he had in the moment as was really i think that's really evident in the march on rome and he wasn't even in rome he was in was he in milan or somewhere when the march was in the plan cynics say he was in milan because it was close to the swiss border if things went wrong but i mean just as a quick aside it had implications for him so he came really after the march had happened. And the march was a bit of an irrelevance anyhow, because he'd already really been appointed as prime minister. But it gave the appearance that the change to fascism had happened thanks to those marching, the 30-odd thousand, however many it was, and not to Mussolini. So actually, tactically, he was probably put himself in a more difficult position by hanging back in Milan.

But that's a classic Mussolini, I think, waiting to see which door is going to open. Is it definitely open? And then I'll nip in pretty quickly.

Yeah. And there was a lot of uncertainty about the March of Rome. And again, people say the army could have stopped it.

I mean, the march was a bit of a shambles that people weren't really that well armed. It's a perspective. Yeah, yeah. So.

Sorry, no, no, you go ahead, you finish your point. Right. So Mussolini was leader of the fascists, but to many fascists in the run up to the March of Rome was unwelcome. And in that period, so the 2022, there were often discussions.

about could we have another leader? And at times, Gabriele D'Annunzio was regarded as much, the national poet was regarded as a better leader or potential leader, seemed to embody something more solid about Italy than Mussolini did. Mussolini was seen as a slightly sort of grubby politician in a way.

And there was all this violence going on, which actually, the one thing, he didn't control it, but it resurrected, in a way, his career. Because by the end of 1919, Mussolini was thinking about giving up politics. But about the same time, fascist squad activity really began to take off.

And although he wasn't directing it, it was, as John Foote says, a kind of sort of almost bizarrely autonomous people here and there without necessarily a lot of connection, taking on working class organisations, taking on the fascists, indeed taking on anybody in due course, and probably including each other. But what Mussolini seems to have done, and it's still to me a bit of a mystery, was he was able to articulate, give it some sort of ideology, some sort of doctrine, some sort of... raison d'etre politically, whereas the squads didn't necessarily have that.

And the squads were very locally focused. They were called local bosses, the RAS, and they were interested in local politics. They weren't really interested in running the national government necessarily. Although that...

began to emerge, again, quite quickly. So fascism changed from a kind of local concern as we will take control of the government, we will take control of the state. Mussolini, I think, was able to articulate that, was able to organise that, and able to be eventually the front person.

And I think a lot of that was done It's a real political skill, real political manoeuvring, able to convince a lot of people that he was going to do certain things that they were going to be comfortable with, the problem being that he said different things to different people. Yes, yes, and this is one of the things that dissuades people from thinking that he did have a definite political stance, is this idea that he said different things to different people. But let's go maybe a little deeper than that.

If it is deeper than that, maybe to Mussolini it was superficial, maybe it was just a tactic to manipulate the masses. But what was the role of myth-making in his leadership? He spoke, you've already alluded to this, but he spoke of Rome as a myth. One of the quotes in your book is him saying, we dream of a Roman Italy.

So... How did Mussolini use myth-making in his leadership, in obtaining and retaining power? What was an important component of power was to get people to believe, in a simple way, things were other than they actually were.

But also, as part of that, to... build support to encourage people so you might say there's something in saying yeah Rome center of the world or certainly center of a large part of the world resurrect again with the enlightenment so it was designed to encourage to motivate people politically it also to some degree simply covered up from the fact that there wasn't much behind the scene going on. It was a front.

But, and I think this is important, it penetrated quite far. In fact, one of the things that I find, you can listen to historians, well-known historians, on... BBC Radio 4 talking about Mussolini and saying, oh, he did this.

And they're just repeating the myths. The myths, some of the myths to some people have survived. So it's difficult to tell how far, you know, every Italian was or wasn't taken in by these myths.

But I think they were important. They were part of creating an alternative view, which some people... eventually bought into yeah so would you would you yeah so just on that point peter would you characterize mussolini as a demagogue no it's not what motivated mussolini and it's interesting in in a way that people before he came to perth noticed that he had a desire, as he put it, to make his mark in history.

So people that worked with him in Avanti. Lady Raffanelli, she said, you know, I could see that he was wanting to make a mark. His lover, his biographer as well, Margarita Sarfatti, she also noticed this. In fact, even police spies who were checking up on him noticed this. So there was something about, seemed to be driving him.

We can speculate what's the psychology here, but seemed to be driving him. that he was going to be Italy's Napoleon, probably better than Napoleon. Yes. And that was what it was. And he would go down in history, you know, as a great man of history.

That's what he wanted to be. Now, where that all came from, I haven't a clue. I'm not even, maybe Mussolini didn't have a clue. Yeah, And how deep it was, again, we don't know. But I think the important thing was, as he became leader, as fascism turned to the cult of Mussolini, the great leader, the omnicompetent leader, which was a political tactic almost to say, well, you're not going to have democracy, but you're going to have something even better, an omnicompetent leader.

That entirely reinforced in his mind, I think, the fact that he was or would become a great leader. Of course, he could also use myths and just pure propaganda to build up the case for that. And he did. Yes. So this is quite interesting then.

So like you say, it's impossible to know exactly where this drive, this will to power within Mussolini came from. You could look at some of the influences that he had. You could take what he says in New York Times interviews about Nietzsche being his spiritual master.

You can look at various different things, but it's clear that his drive to power, to be great, to make Italy great, dare I say, he wanted to make Italy great again, to coin a phrase. But his reference point is Rome, which is going back quite a long way. So he's trying to do this.

He's trying to do it through myth. He's doing it through charisma as well. He's charismatic.

He's good at persuading people. He's good at talking his way into things. As we've discussed earlier about him positioning himself as the figurehead of fascism, which was no small thing to do.

But like you say, he's positioned himself as, to use a Nietzschean phrase, He's positioned himself as a Superman, hasn't he? Because when you write in the book about omnicompetence, about Mussolini as the omnicompetent leader, and earlier in the book as well, you write about this sort of disdain that he has for the masses. I just, I read Nietzsche in that. I mean, I've read a lot of Nietzsche myself, and he, as a topic of conversation, his philosophy is featured on his podcast as well.

And I very much see Nietzschean influences there. But what's fascinating to me about the way you elucidate this in the book is the drawbacks of this omnicompetent persona. Because it's all very well to present yourself as being omnicompetent, as being this putative Superman or the Superman incarnate.

But there's a drawback to that, isn't there? There's a drawback to this persona of omnicompetence. So talk to us about the limits, because I think this ties into the essence of your book on the contradictions of power.

So what are the challenges that Mussolini faced as the omnicompetent leader? The biggest challenge in a way was he wasn't very competent as a leader. If by that we mean using power to positive ends. He was very competent at using power to hold on to power to keep, protect his position.

But the contradictions began to emerge. The main thing was he couldn't be seen to be taking advice. Why would he?

If he was only competent, he wouldn't need to. So he became, I think, Probably from the late 20s onwards, he became more detached from advice, I think, and even just an understanding of what was happening, what was going on. So there was that detachment. But there was also the other side of that, which was, I think, an increasing confidence that he was right. that he could take decisions.

So he started drinking his own Kool-Aid then to coin a phrase? I think that's part of the explanation and I can see a psychology and I'm no psychologist but I can see a psychology where if you're trying to reconcile contradictions be the only comp... competent, but actually probably be a bit anxious that you don't know what you're talking about.

And maybe you have to kind of agree with all sorts of people about all sorts of things to not be exposed to an argument. I mean, I think one of the interests is relationship with most of his ministerial fascist colleagues was to avoid any discussion of anything. And the reason is...

he wouldn't then be exposed. So there was that, yes, not being exposed. But, again, he was aware, repeat this point, I think he was aware that he would be exposed. He didn't say, you know, bring on any discussion, I'll win. He was and the consequence of that was that i think psychologically he had to find answers yeah yeah to how things were going to work out why they weren't working out he used myths for his own comfort for his own security yeah that's really interesting and that point about about how he is with others how he is with those running that's what really stood out to me in the book was Just what a low trust environment he really operated in.

He really didn't seem to trust any of his leadership team. He just did not seem to, he seemed to keep everybody at arm's length and people knew pretty much after decisions had been made, nobody was consulted beforehand. And he didn't, in that regard, you could argue that he didn't have an inner circle. You think about someone like...

Vladimir Putin, who is said to be a very distrusting individual. I can imagine Putin would have closer relationships with his leadership team than Mussolini did by the sounds of how it was with Mussolini. It sounds like he was very, very isolated as a leader in terms of decision making, in terms of...

thought process as well right even before you get to the decisions just actually figuring out what is the way forward here he it seems like he's taking that on on his own and it's amazing really actually when you think about how long he was in power you know the the ventenio the 20 years or so that he was in power it's amazing that he did last that long in such a low trust environment of his creation because you can only imagine that as much as we talk about Mussolini's will to power and his drive to have power to cling on to and retain it you can imagine that there would have been other people in his circles that would have fancied a bit of that power themselves so it's quite a paradox really but yeah but how do you see that this really limits him then in terms of actually you achieving the ends that he wants to achieve. You're right just going back to to the distrust and people got about him being a charismatic leader and actually most of those who were around him were willing to speak very highly of him kind of signed up to this idea of the superman leader and you see this in other dictatorships and authority and you know elevation of the leader a cut above the rest but the fascist leaders signed up to them in one sense they were very loyal but he was unable to use it he could I in a sense I kept asking well why you know these guys are with you just you don't need to humiliate them treat them you could you could build a team but psychologically Mussolini wasn't up for that. And what he was also, I think, not good at was actually taking decisions.

He didn't have confidence a lot of the time that the decision he was taking was right. He was known to kind of... um and ah a bit around it.

He creates smoke screens to disguise that. But what comes out, particularly towards the end of the regime, is a sort of vacuum. I mean, I think it was Giuseppe Botti, one of the ministers, described it as, you know, it was just chaos in the centre of government. Mussolini wasn't really, in many ways... driving decision making.

The decision making was of a poor quality but there was others had kind of been isolated and certainly up to a point and therefore couldn't step in and provide some impetus to it. So it wasn't effective and it meant decisions often were low level. And there's quite a lot of interesting research. How did Mussolini govern?

Well, he governed like a sort of bureaucrat. The man of action, I see, he wanted to be the man of action, but he governed Italy largely from behind the desk, where people presented papers to him. He scribbled something on, you know, good idea or what's this about. These papers were often pretty vacuous.

They weren't really good policy documents. So there was this kind of... churning bureaucracy really going nowhere a lot of the time of course some powerful interests were able to fill the vacuum particularly I think in in local regions so it wasn't complete chaos but in the centre of government I think there was this kind of lack of real real momentum yeah yeah and like you say it seems to be a theme you know this like this general idea of distrust seems to be a theme throughout Mussolini's tenure because he is trying to negate the regional fascists as well isn't he because he doesn't want he wants them to toe the line so he negates their power but in so doing he limits his own power or the power of the party and then You've got the Catholic Church as well.

What you write about the Catholic Church is particularly interesting because, as we've already discussed, Mussolini's not a fan of Christianity as a theology and a way of life, but he's particularly not a fan of the Catholic Church. So tell us about that relationship then, because this is quite a tense push and pull between... the two parties and i think at one point in the book you write how essentially the well the catholics wanted the fascists to become more catholic and the fascists wanted the catholics to become more fascistic and so there is this kind of tug of war between the two the catholic church is tremendously influential in italy mussolini doesn't quite seem to get that does he he doesn't quite seem to get how the catholic church being part of the fabric of italy doesn't lend itself well to him then being able to form this alliance with them and be the ultimate top dog so it seems like he wants to be seen as the top dog irrespective of the existence of the catholic church and it's sort of like a zero-sum way of looking at it have i understood that correctly yes i think russolini was aware, despite his disparaging of organised, almost hatred of organised religion in the Catholic Church, as he was moving towards power, came to the view that a potential threat to it was the Catholic Church, in that it was an influential voice.

And therefore, like a lot of other influential institutions, Mussolini, before coming to power and just after coming to power, did a lot to reassure. He also then quite early on moved to what we'll call the reconciliation between the Italian state and the Vatican. And what had been since the unification, there'd been a lot of tension between the state, the liberal state, and the Catholic Church. And what Mussolini was, I think, recognised was that for the country to move forward, and certainly for fascism to move forward, there needed to be a coming together. So he brought the Catholic Church on board.

he gave them not expensive but major concessions and started the move towards in effect recognizing the Vatican as a separate state, rather this ambiguous position it had within the Italian state to compensating the church for the land it lost and in a sense trying to bring the state and the church together in some sort of unified way. The problem a bit with that was the church, and particularly the Pope, Pius XI, also believed that the church should be absolutely dominant, not only in spiritual, but in political and social matters. So you have this kind of... I mean, I don't know if I've heard you again saying top dog, but there was almost that kind of who's going to be top dog. Mussolini came out of the political fight better than Pius XI.

Particularly the Catholic Church, when Mussolini started the alliance with Hitler, given the church. the Nazis were attacking the Catholic Church quite violently in Germany, the relationship began to break down a bit, but not that much. But the point is, the Catholic Church was very favourably disposed to fascism, because Mussolini gave them what they wanted. But the idea of a hierarchical order that very much fitted in with Catholic doctrine. So was it seen as a Faustian pact of sorts then, certainly from the Catholic side, in the sense that the Catholics were getting what they wanted, they were getting these concessions.

Mussolini was calling off the dogs because there was this issue as well of Catholic organisations and youth groups getting roughed up by fascists, and Mussolini was calling off the dogs. So did... Do you think the Catholic Church saw this sort of alliance?

I think it was the Lateran Accords was the formal term for it. Do you think that the Church thought this Faustian pact was acceptable in view of the benefits that it gave them? The Church did. Not necessarily all Catholics did.

I mean, although it was underground, the opposition. they were Catholics and they also being socialists, liberals or whatever. And I think what is particularly interesting is that a lot of the priesthood bought into fascism, particularly the invasion of Ethiopia. There was a lot of buy-in from priests.

So it was a complex picture. But as you rightly say, at the same time, fascist squads or... other forces were attacking Catholic societies, particularly young Catholic societies. So again, it was a sort of odd relationship.

It can't be characterised, oh it was this, it had a number of different strands to it. But again, the Catholic Church liked fascism because it saw it as a bulwark against socialism and communism yeah and so it was at least a minimum it was better the devil you know than the devil you end up something with yeah yeah yeah yeah better the devil you know better the devil you've got perhaps yeah than the devil that you might have instead that's interesting now you mentioned pious the 11th pious the 11th is interesting because although you mentioned that the Catholic priesthood was in favour of fascism. Pius XI wasn't, and he saw Ethiopia as an unjust war, and he was particularly vocal about Mussolini's proximity to and partnership with Adolf Hitler. Did he in some ways predict or forewarn of Mussolini's downfall? just before his death he was beginning he he issued a number of let's just call them documents people's statements that warned against totalitarianism uh extreme nationalism a lot of it was directed at germany but some a lot of it was quite oblique um and still had I think an undertone of yes, but Soviet communism is the real threat.

So he was trying, I think, to move away. In these terms, he had no power. He had very little influence over Mussolini by then.

I think Mussolini had probably by then... got enough power consolidated that the Catholic Church really wasn't as important. And what I think was beginning to annoy Mussolini was that the Church at times, particularly Pius XI, was not endorsing what he was doing.

He didn't need to, but he wanted, you know, it'd be nice to have. Is it accurate as well, I think I recall reading this in the book, Peter, that that the ambassador to the Vatican threatened the Pope, Pius XI, on behalf of Mussolini, when he spoke out against his actions, his international expansion. Is that accurate?

Let's put it this way. Pressure was put on the Pope. Yeah. And in many ways successful was to not...

coming behind questioning the war um and to some extent not in your christmas address mentioned peace yes yeah yeah i i noted that actually from reading the book that he he was dissuaded from mentioning peace in the christmas address which is really interesting and it's interesting like you say it seems like there was this sort of tipping point somewhere along the lines where Early on, it seems as though the Catholics had a decent amount of power themselves in the negotiation with Mussolini. But it seems as though there comes a point where it doesn't seem like that's the case anymore. And that Mussolini can go ahead and threaten the Pope without any great fear of recrimination from the Catholic Church.

Then Pius XI gets sick. He passes away. Pius XII comes in, who is more pliable, more amenable to the plans of Mussolini, kind of fits in, goes along to get along.

I think Pius XII was just much more in tune with fascist ideas and in a sense was welcomed. Mussolini was thought that that was a kind of pull needed and to some extent the catholic church did give backing um they'd give backing to to the war and only very belatedly kind of i think were those mistakes um revealed yeah yeah so so going back to going back to this and coming coming towards the The undoing of Mussolini, if you like, it's interesting because what Pius XI said about Mussolini's potential unraveling in this alliance with Hitler is interesting because, as we've just been talking about, there was this hold that Mussolini had on the country, this power that he had. He didn't really have prominent political opposition, you know.

Mattiotti's gone we haven't talked about that that's a whole different can of worms we were joking before the call that we probably won't get into that because that's a whole thing in itself but suffice it to say that Mussolini's in a very strong position in Italy in terms of his power but that's until he gets involved seriously in war and what you write in the book about this is particularly interesting because it seems as though, I suppose a Westerner, let's put it like this, as a Westerner it's easy to think of Mussolini and Hitler in World War II as hand in glove. If you read speeches from people like FDR and Churchill around the time of World War II you probably see Mussolini and Hitler as hand in glove but it wasn't quite like that was it? It wasn't even really like that.

in the Spanish Civil War. I mean, the Spanish Civil War seems like it was pretty costly for Italy. And in some respects, they were not given a great deal of respect by Franco. And they bore these high costs.

And then when it came to World War II, they pretty much had to go in when Hitler went in. with Germany as well. So talk to us a bit about what happened in terms of the unravelling of Italy through war. I think Hitler, from my perspective, is the central figure in this for two reasons. First reason was, as Hitler came to power, he became the dominant fascist figure and whatever your views of fascism he clearly put Mussolini internationally but therefore to some extent domestically in the shadow so he had reason to not like Hitler because he had sort of come on the stage and was now the big actor.

And remember Mussolini had international ambitions, he wasn't. But Hitler was now the big challenge to the British and the French in particular. But at the same time, Germany could be an ally in Mussolini's expansionist ambitions.

And so, again, this kind of contradiction, I don't really like Hitler, he's stolen all my thunder, but he's going to have a bloody big army, so we could join up in some form or other. So a lot of what happens in the late 30s is a kind of play out of distrust. Hitler, though he said he admired Mussolini, again, he wasn't really, you know, Hitler did what Hitler wanted to do. He wasn't bothered about anybody else in particular.

So that began to play out. Mussolini did, I think, increasingly see an alliance with Germany as a way to further his ambitions. But the relationship with Hitler, particularly latterly when Hitler moved into Austria, which had always been a concern, getting a bit too close to Italy, then into Czechoslovakia. No consultation, really.

And then finally into Poland. So Mussolini was put into, I think, quite a difficult position. We don't have the kind of diaries that really share his thoughts, but he was in a difficult position.

Hitler was now off. he tried to persuade Hitler to hold the war back to the mid-1940s. He was now in a situation Hitler was in advance and the period of neutrality was abandoned and they joined the war by invading France.

But actually, interestingly, one of the things that the Italians did do was put up a defensive arrangement in northeast Italy just in case I had to fight off the Germans. So there was never any trust. And also Mussolini was keen on ISIS, but I don't think he particularly bothered Hitler, was to have really run two parallel campaigns.

So it wasn't fighting together. Mussolini would have North Africa, he went into Greece much to Hitler's annoyance etc. So there was a sort of parallel war.

Yeah, yeah. It went very badly wrong. I mean even the invasion of France that was more or less surrendered by that point. Yeah, yeah. It was a third rate, it wasn't.

And then the decision to invade Greece, the Germans had to rescue the Italians from that. And it just went from bad to worse. Yeah, one of the sets of numbers that you present in the book is pretty damning against the Italian army, the Italian military.

You write that 30,000 British troops overwhelmed 250,000. Italian troops in Libya in 1941. That's pretty damning, isn't it? And at this point, Italy is no longer seen as a great power.

And before all of that, Mussolini's been pretty much relegated to an international peacemaker before the war, the Munich Agreement. So he's really, this is before, of course, we get to his ultimate demise, but... He's really been knocked off his perch, hasn't he? He's really down and out long before it all comes to an end for him in terms of his life.

Yeah. You can begin to see how he's getting more and more trapped on a particular railway line that's taking him forward. So you can begin to see... see the kind of where it's going to end up. It's almost like the fog lifts and you say yes.

Because he didn't do a Franco, he maybe couldn't do a Franco and say, we're not going to get involved in this war. Stay out of the war. He was committed, I think, to expansion. Although the Italian public pretty wary about any war. It nonetheless had some traction of the glory of Italy.

It'll be a short war, there'll be plenty of spoils to share out. That was kind of what it was offered at. But the big point was, and this is where Mussolini's real weakness in the decision-making came up, he'd committed resources to Ethiopia in 1935. We're still in Ethiopia, there was a an insurrection going on.

There was a war in effect, an internal war in Ethiopia. That committed a lot of resources. It was about 70, I think as I remember, about 70,000 troops ended up in Spain, all told, a lot of aircraft.

So actually a lot of the military spend was being spent elsewhere than was available. He was here. also had a misconception about how war was going to be fought.

He was still going to fight the First World War when things had moved on, so Italy didn't have the kind of tanks that were needed, for example. There wasn't even the economic plan, how are we going to fund this? There was no, well there was a plan but it wasn't a very good one.

Mussolini's on this track, he's heading to defeat. His only salvation is he has some connection to Hitler, there might be something like that, but then of course Italy gets tied into Germany's own military problems, particularly Russia and the retreat from Russia. And therefore, there's nothing really going to be left. Admittedly, it takes a long time. The Allies land in Sicily and then go into mainland Italy and fight the Germans all the way up the peninsula.

Very bloody, very damaging. war. But just in case you thought Mussolini, well that's it.

He was arrested eventually in 1943. It was quite clear Italy was in a perilous condition. The king dismissed them. He was arrested by the king. He over was then rescued.

He was located in the middle of Italy, was being sort of held prisoner there. The Germans sprung him and he was flown back to Germany and Hitler put him in charge of a puppet regime in the centre and north of Italy. But by then, Mussolini was a broken man, really. Yeah, yeah.

And then he ended up ultimately hanging upside down from a petrol station in Milan. next to his lover, Claretta Patacci. Yes, yeah.

I mean, the first thing to say, a lot of people think he was hung up. No, he was shot on the side of Lake Combe. He almost made it to Switzerland.

The line was that it was Switzerland, and then he was going to go to Spain. A lot of conspiracy theories have come out. Why was he shot? What was being covered up?

Most of them, I think, are wrong. I think the partisan, communist partisans just decided, that's it, we've got him, we'll shoot him, there and then. So on this point of war, Peter.

This is what really undoes Mussolini, isn't it? And I think if we're going to kind of bookend this in a way, if we're going to go right back to the beginning in terms of Mussolini's values, is it fair to say, because you write in the book that his ideological disposition meant that he saw war in abstract theoretical terms and not in practical realistic terms. He also... believed that the character of Italians could only be changed by fascism through war. So it seems to me that he was seduced by the possibilities of war, but he didn't, he was naive as to what that would entail.

He didn't have a proper credible plan to make it happen. So was he seduced? I mean, ultimately you could say he was seduced by power, couldn't you?

You could say that he was seduced by power itself. And he's on this track. And as you say, you can look at it like a train that's hurtling towards calamity. But he's thinking, if I'm going to carry on, if I'm going to use this will to power and continue to expand, I've got to get on the Hitler train because we don't have the resources to do this ourselves.

But actually, if we ally with him... and ride on his coattails, we're going to get a lot further in terms of the power expansion, personally and nationally, than we otherwise would do. So do you see that he was seduced by the possibilities of war in that respect, and that that was ultimately his undoing?

He, from an early stage, saw war as a form of national expression expansion. And again, there was a lot of philosophical writings, political writings that kind of gave him ideas, turned up the heat under his thinking around that. So in one sense, you would always expect that Mussolini would end up in the war. And the reason it took him so long was he didn't have confidence that the Italian military would be able to do it.

And then they did eventually pick on Ethiopia. And even that was a bit of a, you know, not a success militarily for Italy. Lost a lot of troops.

probably I think 20,000 troops, costs a vast amount of money, A, to take the country and hold on to it, but also then to sustain the economy and the infrastructure there. So Hitler offered an opportunity to grab land, grab spoils. But the other side of it, as you've said, was Mussolini in the 30s became very frustrated with what he saw as a lack of progress with this fascist revolution. And I mean, it's quoted as sort of saying, you know, it's not going to take x years it's going to take x times 10 years, times 10, sorry, to do this. So he could see the fascist revolution, as he saw it, whatever that would involve, slipping away.

And the only way he thought he could achieve it, or certainly the major way he thought he could achieve it, was by making the Italians more warlike. more fascist and fascism became increasingly about war and not about a domestic order, became about war and in that sense was different in 1942 to what it was in 1922. So yes this belief that Italians or Italian men at least would be turned into proper fascists haven't had a a spot of war. And again, sort of contradiction, he kind of knew the Italians didn't want that.

I mean, there was a lot of spying going on. There was reasonable intelligence of what Italians thought. And the last thing Italians really wanted was to enter into a war, particularly enter into a war with Germany. um yeah so there's there's all sorts in in your book peter and i think it draws out a lot of lessons and takeaways very very well that perhaps other works don't do in the same way and that's not to denigrate them in any way they're just focused on different things i think in your book you very much focus on the lessons in respect to leadership and governance.

We've talked about Nietzsche's, Mussolini's influences and Nietzsche and Sorrell and the other people that were of interest to him. We've talked about his evolution in thinking. We've also talked about the omnicompetent leader as well.

We've talked about this low trust environment in which he operated. with people even in his inner circle this omni-competence is particularly interesting to me because i think a lot of people can look at this idea or this pitfall of omni-competence and apply that to themselves and think am i trying to appear like i'm more competent not necessarily omni-competent but am i trying to appear more competent than i actually am and is this to my detriment so there are so many potential takeaways from the book What are some of the things that you might like to highlight to people as takeaways from the book, lessons to be learned from the pitfalls that Mussolini fell into? I think one of the things which has always struck me from the beginning of writing this book was how easy in some ways it was to take over the state.

no It wasn't like Mussolini and a few fascists against the Italian population. There were people who were happy to go along with it. But what I think is, don't underestimate, if you have, and let's call it a will to power, you want power and you're willing to be fairly hard-nosed about it, it's maybe not that difficult to take over a state.

and people, historians going about white social forces and that, you know, centuries to get where we are and all and I signed up to that but sometimes I think it just takes one determined guy and a few a few mates in a way and things in certain conditions and there were certain conditions there was a bit of a political vacuum in Italy after the war and the disruption of the war and so on people can move in and they can take over. And people will then join in because, well, if you don't join in, you might not get your pension, you might even get beaten up, you might get sent to a prison camp. But on the other side of the coin, you might get a reasonable job, etc.

So, and I know a lot said about fascism and violence, and that was always part of it. You don't necessarily need a lot of violence, as Emilio Luso, Italian writer, said, you know, about confino holding people in prison camps, remote prison camps. The trick is that confino, prison camps, is for the few, but the fear of that is for the many, and that's how it works. So I think there's a lot there about, you know, even in modern states, more robust democracies, is it and we've seen it in certain countries in Eastern Europe.

So that's the second thing back to what you've been talking about, Tom. In populism, there's a lot now of contemporary populist regimes and the debate is Was Mussolini a populist? I think the answer is no, but that's for another time. But the idea of a special leader, somebody who kind of stands out, who's got something, whether they embody the nation better, they represent its values better or whatever it is, I think is now part of modern discourse.

And I don't think, although Mussolini might be regarded as a sort of extreme version of that, I don't think that is completely disconnected and I think that's important. The third thing, and we haven't touched upon this, but regimentation. Over half the population were members of one sort of fascist organisation or other by the end of the regime in 1941. And they didn't do much in a positive sense, but they were a good way of keeping people under control, regimenting them.

And I think that's it. And then in the propaganda, whether people believed it or not, they had no access to the reality, to the truth, other than their everyday experience. So the book's about power.

and Mussolini used power in a particular way and I think some of the lessons that could be drawn from Mussolini have a contemporary relevance as other dictators but Mussolini was good at manipulating power and therefore I think there's something in what he was doing that's worth thinking about. I'm not saying worth replicating but certainly worth thinking about. Yeah, I really like your answer there, Peter, because we speak a lot about governance in relation to the book. Yeah. But as you allude to, it's also about the other side of the coin, which is citizenship as well.

And about our need as citizens to be vigilant, perhaps against those with that extreme will to power. who do have the mates who threaten violence. Like you say, the actual violence is for the few. And this is what came out in the conversation with John Foote. There wasn't, the violence that was perpetrated was kind of like, almost like mafia violence in the sense that it was targeted violence.

It wasn't just indiscriminate violence on the streets, not just like blood on the streets randomly. It was very specific violence against specific targets. but the threat thereof like you say was sufficient to keep other people quiet so absolutely i mean diaries interviews um a lot of italians were there they talk about the fear there was a fear maybe not clear you know what that actually entailed but fear was part of their their everyday lives sorry Tom I got carried away there not at all I think it's a great discussion I think there's so much that we can draw out from looking at Mussolini the things that influence Mussolini his drives, his motivations this will to power that we've talked about, the way that he sets himself up in an omnicompetent way I think leaders everywhere in any context in any leadership capacity should be really careful about not project over projecting competence and actually been able to have a trusted cadre a trusted team of people that they can talk to that they can counsel with even people aren't formally in the team they need perspectives they need insight and information from others and there are real consequences to projecting this superman or superwoman image so there's so much to draw out of this i'm going to remind people again peter of the book's title it is duche the contradictions of power and then there's a little subtitle there the political leadership of benito mussolini i will also say in closing that it was this book was personally recommended to me by richard bosworth who is an eminent thank you richard yeah yeah he's an eminent historian of um Italy and particularly Mussolini and I can promise you that he doesn't just recommend any biography on Mussolini as as I also am aware so thank you for the book Peter thank you so much for your time on the Real Clear Values podcast as well.

Thank you Tom I mean really enjoyed the discussion excellent discussion and some I think important avenues you've you've taken us down to so many thanks enjoyed it. Thank you, Peter.

Transcript for:Exploring Mussolini's Leadership and Ideology

Transcript for:
Exploring Mussolini's Leadership and Ideology