Something New

  We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“EDDA MUSSOLINI – The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe” by Caroline Moorehead (Chatto & Windus; distributed by Penguin/ Random House, $NZ40); “SELLING BRITISHNESS – Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire” by Felicity Barnes (Auckland University Press, NZ$49:99)

            Caroline Moorehead is a very capable historian, journalist and biographer who has written about many and varied lives. Her three most recent books have focused on people in Fascist Italy. A Bold and Dangerous Family dealt with an anti-Fascist partisan family and A House in the Mountains looked at the Italian partisan women fighting both Fascists and Nazi invaders in the civil war in northern Italy during the last phases of the Second World War. In both books, however, historical context loomed as large as biographical detail  (see my review of The House in the Mountains below). In effect, while highlighting particular people, Caroline Moorehead was really giving us a general history as much as, or even more than, biography.

 

            Edda Mussolini – The Most Dangerous Woman in Europe follows very much the same path. It certainly gives us the woman’s life but it is also a complete history of Fascist Italy from go to woe (and I really do mean woe), with Edda herself often side-lined. To get past one small quibble which does not mar a very good book, was Edda Mussolini really “the most dangerous woman in Europe”? The phrase was coined in 1939 in an obscure Egyptian magazine called Images, which went on to say that she “rules her father [Benito Mussolini] with an iron fist”. (p.235) By 1939, Edda Mussolini was well-known for her informal diplomatic missions,  buttering up English, French and German diplomats to woo them into accepting her father’s actions. Also in 1939, the American Time magazine put Edda Mussolini on its front cover, its journalist describing her as “Gaunt, pale faced… outstanding in ability, personality and intelligence… one of Europe’s most successful intriguers and string-pullers…” (p.212) But was she the most dangerous woman in Europe? I think others of the time might also have claimed that sobriquet. (Start with Ilsa Koch and keep looking.)

            So much for my one quibble.

            Edda Mussolini was born in 1910. At the time her father was a gifted and rabble-rousing journalist and a dedicated Socialist. It was the First World War, and his approval of soldiers and military authority, that made him turn against Socialism and create the Fascist Party. Edda was the eldest of Rachele and Benito Mussolini’s children. When she was a child “Journalists, constantly following the family’s every move, spoke of her grace and charm. In reality she was awkward, prickly and combative, with an excellent memory and a habit of caricaturing her own defects, hiding her skills and virtues as if she were ashamed on them…” (p.54) Eventually, the Mussolinis would have five children, but even from her earliest years, Edda was aware that her father had many mistresses and a number of bastard children; and frequently her father bellowed and fought with her mother. Edda was 12 when her father staged his so-called “March on Rome” and then bullied the king into making him prime-minister. There followed four or five years in the 1920s as Mussolini moved on to creating a totalitarian, one-party state. Only when things had more-or-less settled down for the regime (at the time of the Concordat with the Vatican in 1929) did Mussolini bring his family to live with him in Rome.

Despite the family’s long separation, and despite the fights she sometimes had with her father, young Edda still tended to idolise him. Her parents curated the boyfriends she was able to socialise with, and presented her with various potential suitors whom she rejected. Finally, in 1930 when she was 19, she married Count Galeazzo Ciano in a spectacularly-staged wedding. Ciano was 27. The two of them were supposed to be role-models for Fascist youth. “Edda was to stand for everything that was best about Fascist womanhood, while Ciano carved out the path of the ‘new Italian man’. Whether either of them wanted this role, or were suited to it, no one paused to consider.” (p.77)

As it happened, the private lives were very different from the public image. The couple were posted to Shanghai where Ciano worked as a diplomat, was successful in getting Chang Kai-Shek to adopt Fascist ideas and was able to sell Italian warplanes to the Chinese Nationalists, at a time when Japan had invaded Manchuria. Despite her youth, Edda proved to be a very capable society and diplomatic hostess. But Galeazzo Ciano was as much of a philanderer as Mussolini was and Edda was constantly outraged by stories of his affairs with Chinese women.

Called back to Italy, Ciano became the head of the regime’s propaganda department. These years, the early 1930s, were the heyday of Italian Fascism. On the whole, the Italian people accepted the regime, despite the covert brutality meted out to dissenters;  and Mussolini was wooed by democratic countries – especially England and France – as a possible bulwark against both Communism and the rising power of Nazism. It is often forgotten that Mussolini at first pitted himself against Hitler. In 1934 he sent divisions up to the Austrian border, effectively preventing Hitler from taking over Austria.

However, it is at this point in her narrative that Caroline Moorehead gives a detailed panorama of Fascist high society – the massive corruption practised by Fascist grandees; the personal fiefdoms created by local Fascist leaders;  the extravagant public displays eating away at the nation’s wealth; the rivalries and bitcheries between tradition aristocrats and newly-powerful Fascisti, played out in fashionable salons; the coordination of all social movements into Fascist control, including the suppression of Catholic youth movements. In the newspapers and magazines , Edda and Ciano were presented as the regime’s glamour couple, but by this stage both of them were having adulterous affairs (even if all three children that Edda eventually had were fathered by Ciano).

The mood changed in the mid-1930s, and in effect began the long disintegration of the Fascist regime. Early in 1935, Edda went to London to sound out whether or not Britain would really oppose Mussolini’s intention to invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia). She was welcomed in chic circles and basically understood that while Britain might half-heartedly pronounce sanctions against Italy, Britain would undertake no military action. So Italian warships were able to pass through the  Suez Canal (still largely controlled by the British) and be part of the brutal invasion of Abyssinia in which both Ciano and some of Mussolini’s sons took part. The next year, Mussolini was sending troops to help Franco in the Spanish Civil War and by this stage the British and French were aware that Mussolini was now drifting into Hitler’s orbit. So to the so-called “Pact of Steel”, the forming of the Axis. Mussolini was flattered to help broker the Munich Agreement in 1938, where the British and French weakly caved in and allowed Hitler to take over the Sudetenland. But Mussolini was quickly made aware that he was now bound to Hitler and the very-much-weaker partner of the Axis. Hitler didn’t bother to forewarn him that he was about to take over the rest of Czechoslovakia, annex Austria and make a pact with Stalin which allowed him to invade Poland and in effect  set off the Second World War.

And what was Edda doing in these years? Often she was a go-between with Nazi Germany. Just as often she was, like her husband, living a frivolous life, regularly holidaying in Capri, socialising and (one of her worst vices) gambling for great sums and usually losing. And yet she could rouse herself to worthwhile action when she put her mind to it. Later, when Italy was drawn into the war, she trained as a nurse and was apparently a very effective one in military hospitals.

Little point in my going into detail of the Fascist regime’s brutal decline, even though it is chronicled diligently by Caroline Moorehead. Mussolini committed Italy to the war in mid-1940, hoping to gain territory from Nazi-dominated France. He didn’t get what he wanted. Trying to build an empire, he endorsed the Italian attacks on Albania and then on Greece. For Italy, both campaigns were disastrous. In North Africa, Italian forces were defeated by the British and [literally] thousands of Italian soldiers became prisoners of war. Germany took over Greece and the North African campaign. Hatred for Mussolini grew in Italy, now under regular bombardment from Allied planes. In July 1943, the Italian king and the Fascist grand council voted to depose Mussolini and make terms with the Allies. Result? Germany now invaded Italy, treating it as an enemy state, followed by the long campaign as American, British and Commonwealth troops fought their way up Italy against stiff German opposition. And finally there was the brutal civil war (partisans versus Fascists and Nazis) that was waged in Northern Italy. For much of a year, Mussolini, who had been whisked away by German commandos, was able to “rule” a tiny Nazi-supported “republic” in the north. He had Count Ciano executed as a “traitor” for having been one of those who voted for his deposition. Finally Mussolini and his most recent mistress Clara Petacci were intercepted by partisans, shot dead and, with other prominent Fascists, hanged upside-down in a piazza in Milan.

If there is any moment in this whole lamentable tale where Edda becomes a sympathetic character, it is in the months when she set aside her annoyance at her husband’s infidelity, dedicated herself to him, and repeatedly begged her father not to have Ciano executed. Mussolini turned down her requests. You also have to give her points for looking after her three children – she was canny enough to have them sent to Switzerland, where she escaped to join them in the last months of the war. In these matters, for all her faults, she was a forgiving wife and a caring mother – not that she can be absolved of all the intrigues, plotting and devious deals she had made, in a very bad cause, over the years. She and her children survived that war (as did Mussolini’s wife Rachelle) and lived on in post-Fascist Italy.

When I sum up Edda Mussolini, I see some of the same features as her father – considerable intelligence, powers of persuasion, many skills, but little moral compass (except in her last days) a huge ego and much delusion working in a very bad cause. She might have often fought with her father, but she was very much her father’s daughter.

The most ambiguous person in this history, however, is Galeazzo Ciano. Despite his playboy ways and serial infidelity, he had the intelligence to see what was wrong with the regime and its ambitions. When made foreign minister, he had to meet the leading Nazis and he was unimpressed by them: “Unlike Edda, Ciano did not warm to the senior Nazis whom he met. He took an instant dislike to Ribbentrop, soon to be the German Foreign Minister, calling him a fool; he dismissed Goring as a ‘fat, vulgar ox’, capable, but interested chiefly in money and decorations; and he was wary of the ‘small, olive skinned’ cripple Goebbels, who lacked, Ciano said, the ‘stupid frankness of is colleagues’. To his mind, it was clear that Hitler was bloodthirsty and a bit mad. Germany, he concluded, was in the ‘hands of men of very inferior quality whom we must exploit.’” (p.161) Regrettably, while his summary of Nazi leaders might have been accurate, he failed to see the real danger they threatened and misunderstood that they would soon be dominating Mussolini. Ciano cannot be forgiven for promoting the disastrous campaigns against Albania and Greece; but he did have his lucid and commendable moments. In the first half of 1940, when Mussolini was dithering over whether Italy should join the war, Ciano was trying to persuade him that war would be disastrous for Italy. In those months, Ciano even gave a speech in the Fascist general assembly, praising the Poles for standing up to Hitler’s aggression. And of course, in 1943 Ciano was one of those who realised that Mussolini had to go and capitulation to the Allies was the best course. There is also the fact that Ciano’s voluminous diaries, complete with denunciation of Fascist party leaders, were saved and hidden by Edda, much to the joy of later historians who have read them as invaluable records of the regime.

Once again, we have in Ciano a man of intelligence and some moral standards, but too often swayed by the glamour of power, too addicted to a sybaritic way of life, and too often ignoring his own better judgement. In the end, what a sad waste of real talent.

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For the record, I include here my brief review of Caroline Moorehead’s A House in the Mountains. The review appeared in the NZ Listener on 18 January 2020.

            The big picture was complicated. Mussolini had been deposed, but German commandos spirited him away to set up a puppet “republic” in the very north of Italy. The Allies advanced slowly from the south, facing stiff opposition from German troops who had invaded the country and now treated its population as a defeated enemy. Italian hopes for a quick end to their war were dashed. And in the north, an Italian civil war was going on. Anti-Fascist partisans fought die-hard Fascists. The Fascists were supported by the SS and German regulars. The partisans were supported only half-heartedly by the Allies, who were both far away and unwilling to risk too much with costly air-drops of equipment.

            Caroline Moorehead’s A House in the Mountains deals almost exclusively with the situation in the north, especially Piedmont and the city of Turin. Here clashes between partisans and Fascists were at their fiercest. For nineteen months, from September 1943 to April 1945, this region suffered German occupation and there was more partisan activity, and more civilian deaths, than in any other part of Italy. SS and Fascist reprisals usually meant massacres, especially as the Fascists smelled defeat.

            A House in the Mountains is subtitled “The Women Who Liberated Italy from Fascism”. Moorehead’s declared purpose is to restore to historical memory those women who were an important part of the partisan movement. She tries to focus on four women in particular who were “staffetta” (runners, couriers and guides), who did propaganda work for the partisans, and who sometimes joined the male partisans in fights, raids and hold-ups. She also deals with women factory-workers who led successful strikes to improve conditions in the face of Fascist opposition; mothers who tried to protect their sons from deportation to Germany; and a nun who helped anti-Fascist prisoners to escape and avoid torture. Their actions were unquestionably heroic and their role was often crucial.

            But there is a snag here, which often defeats Moorehead’s purpose. In order to make sense of the situation, she has to give us a general survey of the different aims of diverse partisan groups – Communists, Socialists, Christian Democrats and independent bands – and the difficulties in coordinating them. In effect, Moorehead often shifts her focus away from the role of women. A House in the Mountains becomes a general history of the North Italian civil war.  There’s also the nagging fact that, until the last few months, almost as many Piedmontese supported Fascism as opposed it, and about the same proportion of women were in Fascist militias as were among the partisans.

            One interesting sidelight - this English author is particularly hard on British diplomats for their patronising attitude to Italian partisans. She paints the Americans as far more open-minded, despite their fear of partisan Communism.

She also ends on a rather dispiriting note. Post-war Italy, with its amnesties for most Fascist militias and its often-corrupt politics, was not the ideal country that the women partisans thought they were making. In real history, heroic endeavour often ends with a whimper, not a bang.

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Sometimes new books come my way a little late. Such was the case with Felicity Barnes’ Selling Britishness, subtitled “Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire”, which became available in November last year. Felicity Barnes, senior lecturer in the history department on the University of Auckland, has long specialised in studies of New Zealand’s colonial connections with Britain. In 2012, her detailed book New Zealand’s London (reviewed on this blog 12 November 2012) charted the social and cultural links between New Zealand and London, especially in the years between the two world wars.  Selling Britishness deals with the same era, but in this case Barnes’ focus is on the way “dominions” – meaning Canada, Australia and New Zealand – sold their produce to Britain by framing themselves as British.

As she notes in her opening chapter, the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, in 1925, was the stimulus for marketing boards on Canada, Australia and New Zealand to begin aggressive publicity campaigns, telling Britain that they too were British and their goods were produced by Britishers. As Barnes notes, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had majority “white”  populations, whereas British colonies in Africa and Asia might have been ruled by British officials, but white populations were a minority – often a very small minority. Therefore it was harder for, say, India and South Africa to be presented as “white” lands and their marketing strategies were quite different from those of  Canada, Australia and New Zealand. There was also the fact that a considerable part of the Canadian population was French, a fact that Canadian marketers had to step delicately around.

So in chapter by chapter, Barnes chronicles scrupulously how “Britishness” was sold to Britain. There was what she calls the construction of an imaginary “community” (Chapter 2) , the pretence that the dominions were simply an extension of Britain, thus creating “consumer imperialism”. Extreme British groups like the Self-Supporting Empire League did not last long – with an aim of importing only “British” (imperial) produce – but the sentiment often underlay much dominion marketing. There was, in dominion marketing (Chapter 3) a tendency to present Canada, Australia and New Zealand as sylvan British-looking landscapes, with Canadian wheat-fields and New Zealand and Australian dairy farms and lamb or beef raising depicted like scenes in the English Home Counties or Midlands.  There was also the tendency to exclude both women and indigenous people (Native Americans, Aborigines, Maori) from marketing publicity. The preference was for images of sturdy, heroic-looking male farmers and ranchers. Racial (or racist) assumptions meant indigenes didn’t exist and “whiteness” was played up as a virtue. Promotional films (Chapter 4), lauding dominion produce, were widely screened in Britain, especially once the talkie era began; and it would appear that only New Zealand promotional films occasionally acknowledged the existence of indigenous people (Maori) in a few travelogues. Barnes gives a more detailed account of the “whiteness” selling-point in Chapter 5; and in Chapter 6 she deals with British marketers selling genuinely British goods and produce to the dominions and colonies.

This is a book dense with detail and requiring close reading. In spite of this, it has some dominant themes. In her Introduction, Barnes notes  “… the construction of ‘British’ Dominions through advertising remained a pernicious process. Just as recent research on nineteenth-century commodity racism argues for its covert role in upholding imperial power in colonial settings, so Dominion empire marketing belied the violence of its origins…. Marketing fruit grown in ‘British soil’ required the expropriation of Indigenous land, a process simultaneously masked and restaged in a benign fashion in commodity promotions. As a result, First Peoples became even more marginal in these carefully constructed commodity identities than they had become in their own lands….”     (p.12) Much later, she has a similar statement “… the EMB’s [Imperial Marketing Board’s] campaigns for the colonial empire could be considered almost as a paint-by-numbers study in Edward Said’s orientalism, with depictions of ‘backward’ colonies serving to cast the metropolis as their natural superior. But the exotic othering typical in the imagining such colonies could not be deployed for the Dominions who were determined that they had transcended the ‘colonial’ state. Instead, the Dominions became the mirror image of the dependent empire. This meant they too were racially inscribed, gendered spaces, though analyses that either naturalise Britishness or limit empire’s cultural impact to the production of colonial difference have helped to camouflage this effect. The EMB’s British farming hinterlands, just like those created by the Dominions themselves, constructed Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as white and masculine, separating them from the dependant empire and emphasising their metropolitan attributes anew.”  (p.127)

These statements are, of course, a verdict made in our present age. I am aware that essentially New Zealand remained Britain’s offshore farm right up to the 1960s – farmers often seen as the backbone of the nation; and sheep, wool and dairy products, mainly sent to Britain, being essential to our economy. In those circumstances, selling things as “British” was probably a reasonable strategy. But now the underlying assumptions of this strategy look tawdry and very questionable. Autres temps, autres moeurs.