The Woman Who Shot Mussolini: A Biography - Softcover

Frances Stonor Saunders is the author of The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters, which was short-listed for the Guardian First Book Award, received the Royal Historical Society's Gladstone Memorial Prize, and was translated into ten languages. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, as well as The Guardian and The Independent. She lives in London.

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.

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.

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 fasc...