Italian writer Antonio Scurati, 57, has spent the last 15 years studying, investigating and writing about the life of Benito Mussolini — a 3,000-page literary undertaking with global impact that began in 2018 with the first book, the award-winning M. Son of the Century, and culminated with the fifth, now being published in Spain. M. The End and the Beginning recounts the terrible epilogue of fascism, from the regime’s fall in 1943 until the dictator’s death in April 1945, nearly two years that make up the darkest, most sinister stretch of that historical tunnel, when the regime’s most terrifying face emerged.
The book describes a tragic end marked by chaos and horror, a total moral darkness. After Italy’s surrender on September 8, 1943, the country is split in two. The German army goes from being an ally to becoming an occupier in the northern half of the peninsula. Hitler keeps Mussolini as a puppet at the head of the Italian Social Republic, the so-called Republic of Salò — named after a town on Lake Garda at the foot of the Alps where the dictator resided.
At the local level, fascism survives in each town in the hands of the worst elements produced during the previous two decades. Criminals, sadists and killers who in many cases the regime itself had sidelined now reappear in this final hour, driven by bitterness and a thirst for revenge. In the collapse of fascism they are the only ones still willing to die while killing. At the same time, the partisan resistance begins, and a genuine civil war breaks out. In those months the Nazi deportation of Jews begins, along with massacres of civilians by the German army.
Mussolini passively witnesses the collapse. By then he has become a depressive, defeated figure trapped in the hands of the Nazis. He considers several escape plans, including the possibility of going to Franco’s Spain. He is ultimately executed by a firing squad and his corpse is kicked by the crowd and hung upside down.
The alarming paradox is that this very dark ending is the seed of later neofascism: the Italian Social Movement (MSI), the neofascist party born in democracy, draws direct inspiration from the Italian Social Republic, and its founders were part of it. It is a political line that reaches as far as Giorgia Meloni.
“The last page of fascism is the worst, the darkest one of all, in which men return from their origins, but 20 years later, aged, melancholic, desperate,” Scurati says by phone in a conversation with EL PAÍS. “They give rise to a completely nihilistic violence, without horizon, without a project, without any possibility of victory. Sadistic, ruthless, pointless. And the striking, shocking thing is that this page of fascism is the least known in our country, the most that has been most stubbornly erased. But it is also the page to which postwar neofascists refer and from which they draw inspiration.”
Mussolini emerges as a “despicable and unforgivable” figure, a leader who drags his people into the abyss and “for whom he never feels the slightest compassion.” In one of his letters to his lover, Clara Petacci, he finally writes: “Today I discovered a new feeling: self-pity.” “But he never utters a word of compassion for his people,” Scurati notes. “Indeed, those letters are full of invectives against Italians while thousands of them are dying at the front and under the bombs. He calls them cowards, pusillanimous, inept. He blames the Italians for the failure of fascism, not fascism for having ruined the lives of the Italians. And the incredible thing is that this abject individual, this perverse leader, should ever have been considered by neofascists a great statesman. And those who govern the country today, who were neofascists in their youth, have never felt the need to reconsider that judgment.”
Hence the book’s ambiguous title: the end of fascism is the beginning of democracy, but also the beginning of a shadow that has continued to haunt the history of Italy and the world. Moreover, Scurati closes his cycle with an eye on the present. “Yes, the end is the beginning of, let’s say, an underground story — that of democracy constantly fighting neofascism and anti-democratic impulses.”
Fascism returns
The book, in fact, opens with a dedication that is a warning: “To all those who still believe in democracy. Prepare to fight.” When the series began in 2018, the author did not imagine that the development of his work and the interest it generated would run in parallel with the political situation. “The surprise over these 15 years, from when I began conceiving and working on the project until today, is that fascism has come back into the public eye,” he says.
That surprise, Scurati admits, has been one of the main discoveries he has made in recent years: “It was the last thing I understood. With the hedonism and irresponsibility of the eighties and nineties we believed democracy to be something inherent to nature, like the blue sky, eternal, and we forgot that it is the result of struggles, suffering and the tragedies of previous generations. The short history of democracy shows that there can be no democracy without fighting for it. The struggle has revived now and the outcome is unclear. It will depend on how many democrats are willing to fight and with what determination.”
When Scurati first talked years ago about his idea of telling Mussolini’s life in the form of a novel, grounded in solid documentation, editors and friends reacted with disbelief. “They were somewhat annoyed and very surprised. Annoyed because there then existed a kind of taboo; fascism had to be told from the victims’ point of view, from the antifascists; and they surprised because they didn’t understand the reason,” he says. The success of the series explained the reason: to learn the origin of a phenomenon that was returning but was actually very little known.
Scurati himself says that along the way he discovered many things, “including much about fascism that I didn’t even know.” “Because I’m not a specialist in fascism, although I’ve become one, and I’m not even a historian,” he says. “One of the things I have understood is that Mussolini was the first populist. The Mussolini I write about is different from the one that others write about, and has all the characteristics of a populist leadership. He is an empty man who has no original ideas, no personal principles, no coherent ideology. Fascism is always thought of as an ideology, but in reality it is like a vase that is filled with moods, temperaments, resentments, that sniffs the air, blows on them, stirs them up, stimulates them and is guided by them.”
Scurati says that after finishing the last book he felt a release. He had promised himself a sabbatical year, but then thought that the flip side of fascism, the struggle for democracy, deserved another book. He has already written one on resistance heroes across Europe in the 20th century. It will be published in October in Italy.
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