Appreciation: Bosworth on Mussolini

Mussolini's Italy by R.J.B. Bosworth is at least three books in one. It is the book of the title--straight narrative of Italy under the Duce. But it is also a trenchant inquiry into the nature of Italian fascism, in contrast to (or in the context of) its Nazi neighbor. And it is at times also a meditation on decency and civility and the possibility of a tolerable public life. Here, for example is one of the more remarkable inflection points in M's sorry career. The time is 1944; Musolinni is no longer the leader of all Italy, but the pathetic puppet leader of a puppet state dominated by the real Nazis. Count Galaezzo Ciano has been executed by a firing squad. Ciano was the husband of Mussolini's favorite daughter (and father of her children) and sometimes Mussolini's sidekick and henchman. His death was effected on the order, or at least with the silent acquiescence, of the dictator himself. Bosworth observes:

Ciano's execution carried a heavy implicit message. It signified the boasted liquidation of the bourgeois version of Fascism, with its weak acceptance that, in this wicked world, the family and raccomandazioni, corruption and high living, ideological equivocation and practical realism, are necessary parts of life. ... The Duce, a coward of the most profound sort, willing to sacrifice his best-loved daughter's husband in order to conceal his own manifold failures and contradictions, with some nervousness and much after-the-event self-exculpation, knowingly let Ciano go to his doom in his stead.

--RJB Bosworth, Mussolini's Italy 515 (2005).