The Woman who Shot Mussolini - Softcover

Frances Stonor Saunders

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571239781 ISBN 13: 9780571239788

Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2010

Synopsis

7 April 1926: on the steps of the Capitol in Rome, surrounded by chanting Fascists, The Honourable Violet Gibson raises her old revolver and fires at the Italian head of state, the darling of Europe's ruling class. The bullet narrowly misses the dictator's bald head, hitting him in the nose. Of all his would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history. What brought her to this moment? She was the daughter of an Anglo-Irish lord, had once consorted with royalty and the peerage. Yet terrible unhappiness lurked beneath that glittering surface. She was a serious-minded young woman in an age when girls were meant to marry well and think little. Her spiritual quest took her to a kind of left-wing Catholicism, sympathy for Irish nationalism and a passionate love for Italy. When Mussolini's thugs took it into the moral cesspit of Fascism, she felt she had to act. She paid for it for the rest of her life, confined to a lunatic asylum, like other difficult women of her class. Frances Stonor Saunders' moving and compulsively readable book rescues this gentle, driven woman from a silent void and restores her dignity and purpose.

About this title

About the Author:

Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of the bestselling Hawkwood, and of Who Paid the Piper? She lives in Oxford.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

PROLOGUE: NOW

Wednesday, 7 April 1926

A glance. Duration one, possibly two, seconds. In particle physics, an eternity. In history, the briefest of encounters, an infinitesimally small exchange. Two arms are raised, Benito Mussolini's in the Fascist salute, Violet Gibson's in the leveling of a pistol. The distance separating these two people, who have never met, is approximately eight inches. Close enough to breathe each other's breath. Murder can be a very intimate business.

Violet, the daughter of a peer, looks like a pauper. She is wearing a black dress, shiny with wear; her gray-white hair is pinned up in an erratic bundle with straggles that have fallen loose; she is very thin. Mussolini, the son of a blacksmith, is dressed like a stockbroker. Butterfly collar, black tie, spats, overcoat with velvet-trimmed collar—clothes picked out that morning by his Jewish mistress, who has spent the night with him. He hasn't slept very well, on account of a suspected stomach ulcer that causes him frequent discomfort. (Away from the crowds, it has become an everyday reflex for him to loosen his trousers and knead his stomach with his hands.) Violet, who has been preparing to kill Mussolini for some time now, hasn't slept well either, because she too suffers from stomach pains.

Until she raises the pistol and points it at Mussolini's face, it's been a normal Fascist morning. At eight o'clock Quinto Navarra, Mussolini's valet, arrived at his apartment in the Palazzo Tittoni on via Rasella. Shortly after, they got into a black Lancia and were driven to Mussolini's office at Palazzo Chigi. His Excellency the Prime Minister Benito Mussolini, Il Duce, sat behind his desk, receiving his proconsuls and listening to their petitions. His staff and security services have been fine- tuning his schedule, issuing detailed orders for its flawless execution. The chief of police has just completed Security Order number 08473, detailing policing arrangements for the following day. Carbon copies of these security orders are dispatched daily to those responsible for public order, including the heads of the military and political police, the Interior Ministry, and the royal protection squad. The chief of police has to cope with a poorly trained force that has no efficient telephone system, an almost complete lack of motor transport, and cramped and unhygienic local police stations. In a few hours, he will have to revise the order substantially. But, for the moment, everything is running as it should in the new Roman imperium.

Violet, in the meantime, is making her way from via Nomentana, a broad avenue of villas and apartments extending across what had been, until recently, a rural hinterland of Rome. Does she walk? Does she take the tram? Violet has no staff to draw up and attend to the minutiae of her schedule. As the nuns at the convent where she is lodging will later testify, Violet rose at six and appeared, veiled, for Mass in the convent chapel. She went out after breakfast, at 8:30 a.m. She was a little agitated, "as if she was trying to control some inner emotion." Asked if she would be back for lunch, she answered yes, with "a half-smile." Sister Riccarda was concerned. In the night, she had taken Violet some medicine for her stomach pains. The nun noticed that she had been reading an Italian newspaper and had marked up some passages. "I didn't realise that tomorrow I would have to be out for such a long time," Violet said, her meaning, as always, elusive. As she sets out from the convent, she is unaware that the mother superior, Mary Elizabeth Hesselblad, is watching her closely from a window.

Violet passes through Porta Pia, Michelangelo's great travertine portal, and heads toward the Church of Santa Susanna. Here, three days ago, on Easter Sunday, she attended Mass, seated beneath florid frescoes depicting the martyrdom of Susanna, the third-century saint who had consecrated her virginity to Christ. Violet, though not a virgin, is ready to embrace her own martyrdom, because God has willed it so. In her right hand, which is tucked into a pocket, she carries a Lebel revolver, the standard-issue weapon of the French military, capable of firing six 8mm rounds loaded into a swing-out chamber. She has wrapped it in her black veil. In her room at the convent, where she has been practicing with the empty revolver, gripping it with both hands for a steady aim, she has a box of twenty live bullets. In the left pocket of her spinsterly dress she carries a large stone, concealed in a black leather glove, with which she will smash the windshield of Mussolini's car should she need to shoot him in the vehicle. These are the implements of her saintly gest.

WHAT THE TOURISTS SEE

Classical Rome, medieval Rome, renaissance Rome, baroque Rome, eighteenth-century Rome, postunification Rome. Foreign visitors (an estimated 150,000 of whom have arrived in the city to celebrate Easter) are venturing forth from hotels and pensioni to pace out their routes across all these Romes, two thousand years of history and confused memories squashed into rubble or sculpted onto soaring masonry. For many tourists, it's the last chance to rummage through their Baedeker or Murray's Handbook of Rome before beginning the exodus home. Edith Wharton loathed these "red volumes which accompany the traveller through Italy," because they had "so completely anticipated the most whimsical impulses of their readers that it is now almost impossible to plan a tour of exploration without finding, on reference to them, that their author has already been over the ground." But Violet's impulses carry her along on a trajectory unmeasured by any guidebook.

Fascist Rome, great gusts of Roman glory, the sense of what Virginia Woolf identified as "an age to come of pure, self- assertive virility." The "unmitigated masculinity" of the new Rome is personified by its leader, Benito Mussolini, whose "muscles" and "extraordinary vitality" are a delight to Lady Asquith, wife of the former British prime minister (who offers, by contrast, an unconstructed physique and indoor skin). An estimated thirty million pictures of Il Duce in up to 2,500 different poses are in circulation. He has been photographed swimming, fencing, boxing, riding, cutting corn shirtless, his chest glistening with sweat— unimaginable for most of his political contemporaries. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Baldwin, Chamberlain, Roosevelt, Blum, and Franco are not visibly "men" in this way, timidly keeping their bodies as private concerns. Mussolini's body, it is said, leaves "after-images" of itself to arouse the faithful. Clementine Churchill, meeting Il Duce in March 1926, found him "quite simple and natural, very dignified . . . [with] beautiful golden brown, piercing eyes which you can see but can't look at." As if looking at him were like looking at the sun. All in all, she concluded, "one of the most wonderful men of our times." She was delighted to take away a signed photograph in memento. Lady Oxford described his sonorous voice as one of the most beautiful she had ever heard. Lady Ivy Chamberlain, wife of Foreign Secretary Sir Austen, was an enduring fan who treasured her own Fascist Party badge (and, while they lasted, the orchids Mussolini sent her). Lady Sybil Graham, wife of the British ambassador, Sir Ronald, was said to be equally charmed.

Tourist guides advise that Mussolini himself is among the sites to visit. "Everyone who came to Rome wanted to have an interview with Mussolini," observed an American journalist. "To see him was as much a part of the long-planned trip to the Eternal City as it was to visit the ruins or to walk over the places where the heroes of antiquity had once walked." Women travelers dream of tea with Mussolini—though he doesn't drink it, except for chamomile, which he takes both orally and through the rectum, as a palliative for his stomach pains.

Sister Caterina Flanagan will testify that Violet had watched an official pro cession in September 1925 but came back indignant because Mussolini had not appeared. This was not surprising, the nun explained (ignorant of Violet's intentions), as many foreign guests at the convent who were great admirers of Mussolini "were constantly trying to catch a glimpse of him, and were disappointed if they failed." How ridiculous, muses Foreign Secretary Dino Grandi, are these "elderly widows and elderly deracinated ladies"—pace Miss Jean Brodie, a woman in her prime— who adore Il Duce and long to give him seedcake.

WHAT THE TOURISTS DO NOT SEE

They do not see the political prisoners, the castor oil, the manganello clubs, weighted with thick leather or lead; or the body of the murdered opposition leader Giacomo Matteotti, left to rot in a ditch outside Rome; or the three thousand dead and buried, bludgeoned or knifed or shot by Fascist squads. The tourists, as they settle into their wagon-lit trains (fully booked three weeks in advance, on account of Easter), do not see the prisoners transported to confino, internal exile, in cattle cars attached to third-class trains, chained, handcuffed, without food or air. The tourists do not see the smashed bones on the corpse of the anti-Fascist Catholic priest Don Giovanni Minzoni; or the contusions and internal bleeding of Socialist Party leader Giovanni Amendola, savagely beaten by Fascist thugs in July 1925. His broken body will never recover. Nine months later, on this very day, Wednesday, 7 April 1926, it is cooling on a slab in a hospital morgue in Cannes. A normal Fascist morning.

The inflation of Mussolini is continuous and pervasive. All newspapers are obliged to give prominent place to his articles and speeches; typesetters have to print the word DUCE in capital letters. There is a rush on gold paint and leaf, for decorating the lictors' maces and fasces and Roman eagles and the throne that is being constructed for Mussolini to sit upon during the ceremony, in a few days' time, to mark his elevation as "Caesar of the Modern Empire." The fascination and v©lan of Fascism; but at its heart lies a rancor, a nervous fear. The regime is permanently readying itself for "the muster, the march, the battle, the liquidation of foes who paradoxically never [lose] their menace . . . for another conflict, another test." Mussolini gives "fighting" speeches. "War" is declared against cabbies, who are told they must shave ("Edict Bans Whiskers and Prescribes Hat, Collar and Tie"); against women who are dressed in "immodest garb"; against bachelors who refuse to go forth and multiply little Fascists. On the walls of thousands of buildings Mussolini's historic slogans are daubed in indelible black varnish: Credere, Obbedire, Combattere (Believe, Obey, Fight); "Mussolini is always right"; "We shall shoot straight."

Violet knows how to shoot a pistol, having once used one on herself. But her aim might be a problem, as the bullet she fired into her body a year ago—"I wanted to die for the glory of God"—missed her heart and whizzed through her ribcage before coming to a halt in her shoulder bone.

CAPUT MUNDI

At 9:30, after a meeting with the Duke d'Aosta, a cousin of the king, Mussolini is driven the short distance from Palazzo Chigi to Campidoglio, the Capitoline. He isn't wearing the bowler hat his mistress handed to him before he left his apartment—too much, perhaps, under a brilliant April sun. (He later abandons the use altogether, when he realizes that bowlers are worn by Laurel and Hardy in the Hollywood comedies he so enjoys watching.) He gets out of the car at the foot of the wide, shallow steps leading up to the capitol of the capital of the world, and ascends them at full tilt, leaving his personal secretary huffing and puffing behind him. This place is the center—political, religious, administrative—of all Romes. If Mussolini has his way, it will be the center also of the new Roman Empire.

Michelangelo's exquisite geometry: a three- sided piazza of peach-colored buildings in the middle of which Marcus Aurelius rides his bronze horse, centuries of stormy events swirling at his feet. On the west side is the Palazzo dei Conservatori, which Mussolini enters through the main door. He proceeds along the dizzying marble corridors, his heels clacking like castanets against the stone. In the Sala degli Orazi e Curiazi, he mounts the podium and launches into the inaugural speech of the Seventh International Congress of Surgeons. Hundreds of surgeons listen with satisfaction as Mussolini praises their art and thanks them for their many interventions on his own body after bits of it had been blown off or shattered in the Great War. The storm of steel that hit him was a misfired shell he himself had loaded, leaving him with scores of fragmentation and puncture wounds, a smashed right collarbone, a temporarily paralyzed left arm, and a severe laceration in his right leg which became infected, requiring an agonizing scraping procedure down to the marrow of his shinbone. As it turns out, these have proved to be useful wounds, virtuous punctuation marks in the progress of a modern savior as he advances toward his triumph.

One early biographer of Mussolini wrote, in Dux, that he had so many war wounds he seemed like "Saint Sebastian, his flesh pierced as if with arrows." The author was Margherita Sarfatti, who as Mussolini's mistress was well qualified to trace the intimate details of his body. Mussolini collected near-death experiences like generals collect medals: duels (he fought at least two in 1919, and one in 1920), plane crashes (in March 1921 a plane he was piloting nosedived suddenly and crashed; he emerged with only scratches to his face and a twisted knee). And explosives. Shortly before the March on Rome, in October 1922, a bullet grazed his ear when a euphoric squadrista fired his gun into the air. As a newspaper editor in Milan, Mussolini used to keep several bombs and hand grenades on his desk, "in case his political enemies should attack him," reported Time magazine. Once, while writing an editorial, "he set fire to the fuse of one of these bombs by accidentally resting his cigarette upon it. An assistant noticed the smoldering fuse, screamed. Looking up, Editor Mussolini snuffed it out with his fingers, continued the writing of his editorial." "I like to live dangerously," Mussolini was fond of saying.

Violet approaches Campidoglio. Perhaps the large crowd gathered there draws her to the place. This is not on her itinerary for today, not the scene she has chosen for a fatal encounter with Mussolini. In her pocket is a tiny scrap of paper, the tip of the lip of an envelope, on which she has written "Palazzo del Littorio," the address of the Fascist Party headquarters where, according to the newspaper she has been reading, Il Duce will appear that afternoon. On Campidoglio, she approaches a tall, bearded man and asks if the king is present. No, not the king. Mussolini. She threads her way through the crowd and positions herself by one of the two lampposts just outside the Palazzo dei Conservatori. Nearby are two uniformed policemen. Directly in front of her are the liveried marshals of the capitol in stiffly brocaded silk coats and plumed bicorn hats. Plainclothes secret agents are everywhere...

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber and Faber Ltd.
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0571239781
• ISBN 13: 9780571239788
• Binding: Paperback