Taccuini Mussoliniani - The Mussolini Notebooks by Yvon De Begnac edited by Francesco Perfetti translated by Adam Victor Published by Il Mulino, 1990 2 Mussolini is quoted directly, throughout these Notebooks gathered by Yvon de Begnac during ten years of interwiews with the Italian dictator and published only after de Begnac’s death, in 1990. It is not known when and in what order these paragraphs were spoken. 3 Preface by Renzo De Felice: Pages which should, to a large degree, be read "in context", and far more with reference to the time in which Mussolini was talking, as opposed to the time to which he was referring, regard the "Captains of the South" and "Lieutenants of the North", which, in our opinion, may only be understood and assessed correctly with reference not so much to the situation in 1921-22 (when the role of the "Lieutenants of the North" was far more significant and decisive than that of the "Captains of the South", as Mussolini knew full well), but rather to the reality of the regime (and the nature and limitations of consensus) and Mussolini's growing impatience with the rebellion and criticisms levelled at him by men such as Balbo, Grani and Bottai. This explains his exhortations to the "Captains of the South" (of whom, after the death of Aurelio Padovani, not a single man was a leading figure in the fascist movement) to demonstrate "absolute loyalty" and "affectionate deference", and his attempts to attribute the shortcomings and failures of the regime to the "realism" and social insensitiveness of the "Lieutenants of the North". The many -- and frequent -- statements concerning Count Volpi and Alfredo Rocco should also be read "in context". Taken at face value, the comments on Volpi are wholly unreliable; but if they are read "in context" they take on a specific meaning. On one hand, these passages are an implied but nonetheless animated dispute with the most modern and forward-looking component of Italian business, focused more on developments in international capitalism than on fascism (it is interesting to note the stark distinction Mussolini draws between the "two differing conceptions of the nation's economic health" which, as he says, are embodied by Volpi and Agnelli); they are also an attack on the fumisterie of a certain brand of corporativism deemed to be left-wing or overly organicist. At the same time, he reiterates his condemnation of "super-capitalism", a feature of which was Mussolini's elevation of Volpi into a symbol of an "enlightened" mercantile capitalism, aspiring not to profits at any cost, but to the winning of national economic independence and, at the same time, the "dissemination of culture". As regards the comments on Rocco (a man who had quit the scene and was associated more with the history of fascism and the regime than its present and future), looking closely, they reveal how much -- though praising him and making use of him to tackle the aftermath of the Mateotti crime -- in his heart of hearts Mussolini felt far removed from Rocco's ideological realism, and how he had mistrusted the position of the deceased 4 Justice Minister excessively static and conservative when measured against his own conceptions of fascism and his own plans for the future. 5 Page 261 Rocco did not perceive revolution as an event suited to implanting a new method of human society within the far from shakeable context of capitalist civilisation, just as by that time Count Volpi was already considering contact between "us" and "them". Besides, Rocco did not consider revolution to be a force with which to promote capitalism, as the last of the true revolutionary syndicalists continued to believe. Along with De Ambris, they had missed their appointment with history. In the winter of 1924, Rocco kept repeating that the real revolution had begun on 29 October 1922, and that now, nobody should be allowed to fall back into positions of surrender or, worse still, entertain the idea that everything had been achieved. 6 Page 446 In 1914 I did not share the thesis of my friend Agostino Lanzillo, developed in an admirable article in "Utopia", my review of socialist thought. The goal of absolute neutrality, which the monarchy and Giolittians wished to espouse, did not boil down to wishing to keep in power Di San Giuliano and his gilded diplomatic corps, his ambassadors in Berlin or Vienna, and the Balkan businesses of Commendator Volpi. Application of the provisions of the triple alliance really did prevent the Latin portion of the West from completing its own civilisation and its own economy. But that was not the result of the economic triplicism practised by the Banca Commerciale, as my friends Preziosi and Gray would have it. It was down to the absence of a cultural will, in Italy and in France, to bring back to the Latin tradition not the charm of Cicero's common sense, but the concreteness of Titus Livius's unitary thought. Senator Pais told me he was of the same opinion. 7 Pages 505-548 Chapter 12 The Last Doge and the Adventure of the Lira The 1929 Crisis The 1929 crisis was a long time coming. Its prehistory was too protracted and too entwined with the past for men and nations to care about finding its causes. The crisis broke when it had to break. Nothing could have averted it. To almost everybody, it seemed impossible to head it off in time. Foolishly, people had believed that what was possible and what was likely stood in opposition to one another. We heard the rumble of the far-off storm. To avoid its horrors, we had constrained our economy to the minimum of autonomy permitted by events. Father Hegel had dared to shout that the Machiavellism of the "end justifies the means" type was a trivial, or at least improper expression, in the sense that the right means is that which is solely designated to achieving the right end. Now, the crisis of 1929 was the finishing line at which, exhausted, people seemed condemned to arrive. We did not consider it inevitable that it would end this way. We did our best to contain the increase in unemployment; we asked those in work to make sacrifices, and we capped what had until then been a disproportionate growth in profits. We adopted the right means to reach the right goal. The crisis of 1929 was not a crisis of growth in the capitalist method. It did not depend on industrialisation outstripping a sufficiently expanded potential for consumption. It was the price paid, the punishment imposed by society, for considering land as space to be used for factories and building sites, in the process removing it from agricultural use. Count Volpi realised in time, and he explained to me and all supporters of the capitalist method in Italy, that the forthcoming crisis, of which too many people, in too many places, were wholly unaware, would not be a question of overproduction, but rather of under-sociality. Alongside the savings of Italians, Count Volpi was relying on revaluation of the lira as the only way of protecting the world of wage-earners from the impending crisis. 8 He understood that salvation of the capitalist method depended on preserving the purchasing power of wages, saving it from the grip of inflation which would have brought about a recession. Italian manufacturers reacted in different ways to Count Volpi's moves. But fascism acknowledged him as possessing the wisdom and farsighted direction of a financial policy which was the precursor of state control over the entire domestic Italian economy. Count Volpi 1919 It was Piero Marsich, noble companion in the initial battle of the fascist movement against an Italian leadership proud of the stagnation in the country's history, who first introduced me to Count Volpi, the brilliant Italian plenipotentiary who had led Turks and Italians to peace many years earlier in 1912. The same Count Volpi who, then simply known as Commendator Volpi, was hesitant about the 1919 fascist programme. He told me it was necessary to soften a dozen or so anathemas, in order to achieve the consensus without which any victory would have remained a mere Utopia. Way back in 1920, Commendator Volpi had faith in us, as we tackled the slapdash politics that threatened to overwhelm President Nitti's grip on reality. I was struck by the unpopular thesis he openly supported, namely that the Great War, which had ruinously upset the balance in Middle Europe, as well as spawning immediate chaos, would have led to far more serious conflicts than the one which had only just come to an end. At the "Danieli" in Venice, Count Volpi told me what he had been saying to Marisch for some time: "revolutions need time to mature". Count Volpi had personally learned of the ancient Greeks from the modern descendants of Socrates and Plato. Every change in society is an act of maieutics on the flourishing body of history. Everything issues from the roots of the world. And it is we, with too many vices and too few virtues, who are the leaves of this forest. To my knowledge, in October 1929 Count Volpi was the only European financier to survive the Wall Street earthquake unscathed. In the years before, exhorting me to impart a revolutionary impetus to the nation's finances by revaluating the lira, he had said, "Dear President, do not concern yourself with the cries of small-time industrialists. If we cannot export, we 9 shall make sure that we return a profit on domestic labour through domestic consumption.