Book Review - M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati

 M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati, translated by Anne Milano Appel

London: Harper, 2021 (original Italian publication 2018)    ISBN 9780062956118

Wow. What a book! The first book in a five-part series of novels that deals with the political life of Benito Mussolini, M: Son of the Century is a massively gripping (as well as being, at over 700 pages, simply massive) description of Mussolini's rise to power, beginning with the first meeting of the fascists, and concluding with him gaining a total grip over parliament after the murder of Giacomo Matteotti in 1924.

While this is a novel, it has a very documentary feel, with the short chapters evoking real events, with interspersed newspaper reports, telegrams and other archival material. The effect is a little like a kaleidoscope, each chapter (from a different character's viewpoint) adding a piece to the chaotic picture that was Italy after World War One, and on into the 1920s.

 And chaotic it was - Scurati evokes the turmoil of a country that "won" the war but gained no dividend from the peace that followed. Veterans particularly were disaffected, as socialism gained ground - Mussolini had been a high ranking socialist before the War, but left precisely because they didn't support it. 

The violence of the rise of Fascism, the ineffectiveness and fatal factionalism of the Socialists, and Mussolini's constant shifting of his alliances and strategies are what drives this book forward. The internecine power plays within the Fascists, especially when power beckoned, and Mussolini's struggle to control his party are especially well described. The characters of the main protagonists are also well drawn; not only the Fascists such as Mussolini himself, but also Balbo, Dumini, Marinetti and Rossi, but also Fascism's political opponents such as Bombacci, Turati, Croce, Salandra and of course Matteotti. Mussolini's lover Margherita Sarfatti is a major character in the novel - mentor and perhaps even eminince grise in the early part of the novel, but discarded once Mussolini ascends to the Prime Ministership, she becomes somewhat of a tragic figure, as does Rachele, Mussolini's wife, who is not much more than a cipher in the book.

If you are interested in Italian history and literature, I can recommend this book - there is also an Italian television mini-series that is worth catching up with.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Mussolini's War by John Gooch

 Mussonlini's War: Fasicst Italy from Triumph to Collapse 1935-1943 by John Gooch

London: Penguin, 2020                                                              ISBN 9780141980294

This is a tale of woe: a case of a country that didn't have the means to undertake a war of conquest, but owing to a prideful dictator and generals who were too scared to say no (and who were fond of glory), embarked not only on colonial expansion in Africa, but also fought in Europe and Russia. The result, as John Gooch shows in this wonderful book, was never in doubt. Italy could never have won, even if they had limited their greed to the Balkans, let alone Greece, Russia and their African empire.

Mussolini's War is at base a military history of Fascist Italy, which shows quite clearly that it was not necessarily the military efficiency of Italy that was the problem (although it was a problem), it was the paucity of Italy's economic and natural resources that crippled all efforts by Italy on the battlefield. This paucity combined lethally with the personality of Mussolini, who was determined to re-create Italy as a great power, not only with his African empire, but also as a power to effect changes in the body politic of Europe.

Gooch begins this book with the invasion and conquest of Abyssinia, and shows that even in this military adventure, the Italian military and economy struggled to keep the army in the field. His adventure in Spain drained the well even further, without much to show for it. Economists explained to Mussolini and the generals that the country could in no way take part in a general European war until at least 1944, as it would take that long to get enough equipment made to equip the army. Mussolini not only agreed with that assessment, but assured his generals that nothing would happen in Europe until at least then, because it would take Germany that long to equip as well. Of course, Hitler could not contain his aggression, and war came much earlier in 1939.

At first Italy kept aloof from the conflict, based on its inability to equip itself. However after the quick German victories, Mussolini began to worry that an Italy that hadn't participated would be left out of any reckoning after a German victory. This led Italy to get involved in the Balkans, where they had already taken Albania after a war that didn't go entirely their way. Greece and Yugoslavia not only exposed the poor equipment of the Italian army, but also the lack of an effective officer corps. Needing Germany to help finish the job did nothing for Mussolini's ego, and led directly to him offering troops for Hitler's invasion of Russia.

The lack of equipment for Italian troops was chronic from the start, and never got better - the industrial capacity of Italy could from 1940-1943 barely keep pace with losses of Army equipment, let alone build up the Air Force and Navy. Italy spent almost its entire war going cap-in-hand to Germany to ask for raw materials and equipment to enable it to fight. The lack of equipment actually crippled Italy's ability to fight effectively : its armies couldn't maneuvre owing to the lack of transport, and when it did fight it struggled with ancient artillery and a lack of automatic weapons. The Air Force did not have enough aircraft to complete the tasks assigned to it, and the Navy didn't even have enough fuel oil to participate in the War at all in 1943.

The logistic problems did not end there - the capacity of the ports in North Africa was too small to enable proper re-supply of the Italian forces in Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, and Italy had no means to supply its East African colonies. Abyssinia was left to its own devices, and was destroyed by the Allies, and in North Africa Italy once again suffered Germanic take-over of their military effort. While Italy supplied most of the men in North Africa, men were not enough, especially when faced with the increasing all-arms co-operation that the Allies were perfecting.

While we may think of Italy as "Germany - lite", Gooch explains that, in the Balkans, Italy was not beyond massacring the local populace and burning whole villages. Both in the Balkans and Greece Italy was a ruthless conqueror, depriving Greece of food and leaving thousands to starve, and ruling its Balkan provinces with a first of iron. While it can be shown that Italian rule was not quite as disastrous for local populations in these areas as was German, it was far from benevolent.

Mussolini's adventurism finally caught up with him in 1943, when the Allies attacked Italian soil for the first time. While the Generals and the King had been sanguine about their relationship with Germany up until now, they realised that their future lay in surrender and a change of sides, something that would have been impossible with the Duce at the helm. Once they had got rid of him, the problem then became how to deal with a Germany that was determined to fight on in Italy, no matter what the government thought.

As a well-researched and well-written account of all these events, I think it would be hard to find a book in English that would surpass Mussolini's War. As someone who thinks they know quite a bit about World War II, I learnt a lot more from reading this book. While the maps in this book are merely serviceable, the other apparatus in this book are excellent - comprehensive notes, wonderful bibliography and good index. Recommended.

Cheers for now, from

A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Spain under Franco: a history by Max Gallo

Spain under Franco: a history by Max Gallo, translated by Jean Stewart

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1973 (originally published in French in 1969)

ISBN 0049460099

This an interesting, if somewhat dense, book that focuses on the politics of Franco and the various branches of the opposition to his rule, between the Civil War and the end of the 60s. Starting with the end of the Civil War, Gallo describes how the defining characteristic of Franco was his caution - he never made a move unless he was certain of the outcome, or had another path to take if needed.

Thus although he relied on the Axis powers for his victory in the Civil War, he was able to obfuscate around joining the battle against the Allied Powers, and nimbly move to the "other" side when the outcome of hostilities became obvious.

Once the War was over, Franco kept control through a classic "divide and rule" strategy, periodically seeming to acquiesce to the claims of one or other of the Falange, Carlists or other monarchist factions, only to quash them if they got too far ahead of themselves. He also controlled the Royal Family in much the same way, pitting father against son, and both against the Bourbon pretender.

These machinations enable Franco to seem to rise above petty squabbling and portray himself as the only person who could hold Spain together, and avoid a further fratricidal struggle, and keep Spain a country that was Catholic and united.

What Gallo shows us is that one thing Spain wasn't was united. From the end of the war, opposition to Franco emerged in guerrilla activities, sabotage, strikes and pamphleteering. The regime cracked down hard on any dissent, and the opposition groups could not put up a united front, with constant bickering between the Republicans, Monarchists and Communists blighting any attempt at country-wide protest. This doomed any effort at rebellion to failure, but these failures did not dim the desire for many to rid themselves of the Franco Regime.

Gallo is certainly not on the side of Franco in this book, although he clearly shows what an effective leader and ringmaster he was. While - as a Socialist and ex-Communist himself - he clearly sides with the opposition forces, Gallo explains clearly how they failed to make much of an impression on a system that was only too happy to resort to censorship, imprisonment and state-sanctioned violence to stay in power.

Staying in power was what the regime was all about, and it did this by pandering to those large land-owners and capitalists that controlled the country. Francoism did very little over it's history to ensure working people were better off, and was more than happy to ship large numbers of them to Northern Europe as workers. The regime deliberately curtailed education and training, and periodically tried to crush regional separatism as well. While many Europeans enjoyed the sun and sand of Spanish holidays, they failed to see that Spain was, still, effectively a totalitarian dictatorship.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Francoism died with Franco, and Spain rapidly transitioned to democratic rule - this was far from clear at the time Gallo wrote this book, and his fears for the future of the country are mapped out in the final few pages.

One for the aficionado, Spain under Franco is an interesting slice of history.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Benito Mussolini by Christopher Hibbert

Benito Mussolini : the rise and fall of Il Duce by Christopher Hibbert

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965

Although in the Twenty-First Century Mussolini has faded from view somewhat, he was for a time a significant actor on the World stage, as well as being the founder of the Fascist ideology that found its dreadful apotheosis in Hitler's Germany. Mussolini sought to change Italy, to turn it into a corporatised, twentieth-century state, into an empire, and into a military power. He failed on all three counts. And yet there are those groups of Italians - apart from the greedy and corrupt hangers-on of the regime - for whom Mussolini's rule improved their lives, and for whom, until the onset of war, he was a hero.

Mussolini started out as a socialist, and to the end that was his claim; that he was always for the worker. He was also for the State, and if the Fascist Party that he founded had one policy, it was that the State trumped all, and that the individual, industry, government and even the Church were subordinate to it. Mussolini saw himself as the embodiment of the State, and as he gained power, he lost touch more and more with what was going on in the country.

Christopher Hibbert, a professional historian and writer who is probably better-known for his books about English history, served in Italy during the War. Benito Mussolini is a well-written, serviceable account of Il Duce's life, although it centres too much on the War years and Mussolini's relationship with Hitler to be classed as a definitive biography. In fact there is very little discussion of politics or economics in this book at all. While we get an insight into the character of Mussolini, the reader will finish this book with little idea of how the Fascists were run, how Italy was financed, or how opposition to Mussolini grew.

Hibbert has drawn for us a Mussolini who was vain and insecure, who was out-of-touch most of the time, and who for much of the time was more concerned with his legacy than with governing. Unfortunately for Il Duce, the people he had around him were ineffectual, greedy or corrupt (or all three) and so a period of rule that began with some promise (Fascist Italy was lauded by many international politicians including Churchill) ended in shambolic disarray.

It was Mussolini's vanity and pride and his desire for glory, which led him to the disastrous decision to invade Greece, over the objections of his advisers. It is in descriptions of these decisions where Hibbert's lack of an economic or political viewpoint lets his biography down. Italy just could not afford to be a major military power. In fact during the War she relied on Germany for the raw material and industrial equipment with which to fight.

Hibbert's book is most effective in demonstrating Mussolini's ineffectiveness, especially after Germany came to his aid in Greece. Hibbert describes Mussolini alternating between fury and resignation as his power to act became more and more circumscribed. His description of Mussolini's last few weeks contains some good and dramatic writing. It's worth noting here the Hibbert wrote this book in 1960, and he was one of the first English-language writers to map out the final months of Mussolini's life, and so perhaps it is natural that he focuses more on this matter than he perhaps should.

I'm not sure if I recommend this book - I have yet to read the award-winning biography by Bosworth, which is probably the go-to book in English on Mussolini's life as I write. However, Benito Mussolini is a good read and interesting in it's own way.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell

Book Review - Mussolini's Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth

Mussolini's Italy : life under the Fascist Dictatorship, 1915-1945 by R.J.B. Bosworth

New York : The Penguin Press, 2006                                         ISBN 1594200785


It's no surprise that such an interesting and thought-inspiring book about Italian Fascism has been written by Richard Bosworth, who wrote an acclaimed biography of the Duce several years before he wrote this work. What is a little more surprising (to me anyway), is that Richard Bosworth is a history academic from Perth, Western Australia.

Be that as it may, the book under review is a fascinating and enlightening approach to the history of Fascist Italy. It is not a book for someone clueless about that period in that country - I thought I knew a fair bit about the subject, but still found myself occasionally referring to other texts while I was reading this book. That is because this is not a standard narrative history, but one historian's view of events as they related to the "average person" who was living through these events. Bosworth has skillfully used records from the Italian secret police archives to flesh out the social and political issues of the day.

The problem Fascism had throughout it's time in Italy was two-fold....they weren't sure what they stood for, and they failed to impose themselves into the strong and ancient fabric of Italian society.

Those of us who live in the "ancient" democracies, such as the USA, Britain and Australia, can have a tendency to forget that democracy in other places can have shallow roots. Italy was one of those places - as a country Italy was barely 50 years old at the beginning of the First World War. The Italian society and polity were not prepared for the slaughter that came to them at battles such as Caporetto, and the Liberal government's decision to enter the war for essentially shallow reasons of territorial greed left them bereft in the nation's eyes when the gains did not come. The war had instilled in those who served a sense that the Italian state could be much more than it currently was, if only the current system disappeared.

And so began the early post-war years, when ex-servicemen joined together in fasces, which varied from what were basically armed gangs to groups of people who wished to change the direction of politics. This idea that the original Fascists were a mixture of thugs and pseudo-intellectuals is in Bosworth's eyes more-or-less accurate, and the birth of Fascism as knowing what it was against, but not necessarily what it was for, led to the path of demagoguery and corruption.

Mussolini emerged as the Duce, but as dictators go, he seemed to have a fair sense that he was not fully in control of things in Italy. He was right. Many of the Fascist fellow-travellers started to fill their own pockets, and those of their connections, once power was in their grasp. The concept of raccomandazione - or seeking favour with those in power via your connexions or through sycophancy - was in Italy as old as the Roman Empire, and, despite early attempts by the Fascists to eradicate it, became firmly entrenched in Fascist life.

The one thing that the populace might have hoped to gain from Fascism was a better standard of living. The shambolic nature of the system meant that even this did not happen - the poor remained poor (and got poorer), the rich came to their accommodations with the regime (as the regime did with them), and life went on pretty much as usual; although there were more parades, and you could shop someone to the secret police at any time (although raccomandazione used well could get a sentence reduced or even quashed).

The problem of what Fascism stood for gnawed at the regime as well - the corporatist nature of Fascism as we understand it now developed slowly in Italy - the "socialist" word was used south as well as north of the Alps - although the anti Bolshevik nature of the movement existed from the beginning. The one thing Fascism needed was to be seen to be continually moving forward - owing to its corruption and lack of ability that couldn't happen on the Peninsula, so the regime started to push its colonial and war-like nature. All the colonial adventures gave the regime in reality was the approbation of the World, more corruption, and additional drains on the already extended national exchequer. In the minds of those that mattered, unfortunately, it made them think they were stronger than they in fact were - which led to the disastrous decision to enter the Second World War.

The under-prepared and ill-equipped Italian armed forces became easy prey for the Allies (including Greece), and the War showed the shallow roots that Fascism had propagated in Italian society. Led by Nazi Germany (once they had committed to the Axis, Italy had little say in overall strategy), Italy declared war on the United States: given the strong connexions between Italy and that country, the (rather poorly planned) propaganda now lost all reality to the people, who had their own sources of information from overseas.

The inevitable collapse of Mussolini in 1943 had all the hallmarks of Fascism's ultimate effect on Italy - a populace who didn't want war, a ruling elite looking for a way out without disturbing their lives, and a Duce who was tired and cynical. In some senses it was a velvet revolution as no one was "liquidated", and Mussolini headed off to an internal exile.

This didn't suit the Germans at all, so they flew in and whisked Mussolini away to become the puppet ruler of the bit of Italy the allies didn't control. His heart wasn't in it, and this led to the Salo Republic being much more viciously Fascist, in the German sense, than the earlier regime ever was.

What Bosworth shows well is the eternal cynicism of the Italian populace. With a history of well over a thousand years of dealing with more-or-less dictatorial regimes, they were past masters at doing enough to get by and keep out of trouble, of working the system to their advantage, and hopping off the bandwagon when the time was ripe. This book in many ways is a history of the Italian people as much as it is of Fascism, showing as it does the regional differences, the divided loyalties and the networks that flowed strongly under the surface.

And my recommendation of this book is as an insight into Italy than specifically as a history of Fascism - although as an insight into how the ideology began, continued and stuttered, and how the roots of its eventual failure were embedded in its beginnings, there is much here of interest.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell