Antonio Scurati wrote novel about Mussolini: 'Of my readers, 99 per cent consider the book anti-fascist. The other 1 per cent were already fascist and recognise themselves in it.'

Formation of the Fasci di combattimento (the Black Shirts)

Milan, Piazza San Sepolcro, 23 March 1919

 We overlook the Piazza San Sepolcro. Barely a hundred people. All men who don't count. We are few and we are dead.

They wait for me to speak, but I have nothing to say.

The stage is empty, awash with 11 million corpses, a tidal wave of bodies - turned to mush, mash - from the trenches of the Karst Mountains, Monte Ortigara, the Isonzo. Our heroes have already been killed or will be. We love them to the last gasp, indiscriminately. We put ourselves on the hallowed funeral pyre.

This is how M. The son of the century, the first volume of Antonio Scurati's series of books that has long captivated Italy. M. is the fist-thick first part of a series of novels about dictator Benito Mussolini, which on 2019 won Italy's most important literary prize by a landslide and became a huge bestseller. The Dutch translation of part two was recently published: The man of providence. Although M no less than a sloppy 850 pages and part another 600, copies are flying out of bookstores. An international television series is in the making and translations are also appearing worldwide. Was it Scurati's intention to turn it into a trilogy, meanwhile, the story goes that a part four and maybe even part five will also follow.

Lion's den

It must be monk's work for 62-year-old writer and professor Antonio Scurati. To write these novels, which cover the period 1919-1925, he wrestled his way through just about every document available about Mussolini and fascism in Italy. For although the book is called a novel, none of it is made up; everything Scurati describes in the book is based on reports, documents and other historical material. The author had to enter the lion's den: the thought world of this unprecedentedly honourable and violent leader. An experience that almost cost him his sanity.

What possesses someone to want to get into the skin and mind of someone like Benito Mussolini for such a long time?

'I wasn't actually fascinated by Mussolini, I was fascinated by anti-fascism and wanted to write a book about the resistance, the struggle of the partisans. But when I was doing my research for that, I realised that no novel had ever been written about Mussolini and fascism.'

'Literature in particular has the capacity to take a very penetrating look ín human beings. That's why I felt a great need to do that. I spent five years with Mussolini and looked into the abyss of his thoughts. This had a huge psychological impact on me. When I finished the first book, I was mentally dissociated from myself.'

What does a novel add to all the non-fiction books that have already been published?

'There are dozens of studies on fascism, but the form of a novel offers possibilities that a historical study does not. For example, a characteristic of the novel is that it has no ideological (pre-)judgements. Moreover, a novel is accessible to everyone - young or old, low or highly educated - and thus a very democratic medium. This makes the novel in itself, as it were, an answer to fascism, which rejected democracy and advocated a totalitarian state.'

From the inside

Scurati stroked his moustache for a moment and continued: 'Some time ago I met an elderly woman, and she told me that she had not been able to learn when she was young. Scientific non-fiction she could not follow properly because of that, but through my book, she said, she had finally been able to read and understand what happened in the past. I also meet young people who say they find my novel much more accessible and engaging than school history lessons. As a reader, you become involved in the story and follow the events as if they were happening live. Because the story is told from the inside, it comes much closer and that offers a richer form of knowledge of reality.'

Such as?

'Take, for example, the end of the March on Rome. Mussolini is sitting in a room with his officers, and while praising himself to the skies, he takes off his boots and puts his smelly feet on the table. To a historian, such a detail is irrelevant, but it makes that important moment much more concrete. As a reader, you thus discover a new, human side of Mussolini that is often missing from the usual picture.'

There is a foot odour.

            He took off the gaiters, removed his shoes, unbuckled the belt of his trousers and plopped down in the armchair in shirt sleeves. The cigarette dangles halfway to his lips, in his French, he puts his legs on the chair opposite, 'in his American way', he says.

(From M., p. 600)

Why did this man have such enormous appeal?

'At the beginning of the book, I show a Mussolini who lost. Less than 100 people attended the first meeting of the fascist party and the first elections were a fiasco; the party received only four thousand votes across Italy. Only three years later, he came to power. How did he succeed? In fact, he had two weapons. The first was the violence of his fascist gangs, the thugs. The other weapon was his newspaper, with which he developed a new journalistic style and produced brutal and aggressive propaganda. Thus he stirred up the basic emotions of the middle class, especially the fear of socialism.'

Intruders

'Socialists, according to Mussolini, were not Italians; they were invaders who only wanted to dominate Italy. Fear is passive, but by creating an enemy to fight against, he turned that into hate, and hate is active. The aim was to destroy everything the socialists had built: the workers' associations, the peasants' leagues, all the unions the socialists had created. The fascists did not go so far as to kill women and children, but what they did do was to go to the homes of socialists at night and kill them while women and children were present.'

Was it mainly hunger for power or was Mussolini driven by political agitation?

'Mussolini is the archetype of the populist leader we see all over Europe even today. He had no lofty political goals to which he wanted to inspire his people, well no. In the beginning he was a pacifist, he was against the bourgeoisie, against the monarchy, against the church. Later he held very different ideas, and went for war, made alliances with industry, got power from the king and got married in the church.'

Empty man

'My book paints a portrait of an empty man, a man with no positive political content, who managed to fill this void very capably with the zeitgeist. Mussolini followed the masses, as it were: he smelt the smells, the ideas, the prevailing opinions of the people. 'I am the man of the day hereafter,' he said of himself. He felt where the wind was coming from and he floated along on it.'

What can we learn from this story?

'What I have discovered is that actually a whole network of groups were complicit and made mistakes. Liberals tolerated Mussolini because he wanted to eliminate socialism and they thought they could tame fascism later. The middle class hoped for an easy solution to their problems and thought a little violence would improve their political situation. The feelings of the middle class then - fear, sense of loss and disappointment, rejection of certain ideals - are the same as those of the middle class today.'

And fascism is rising again.

'Yes, and not only in Italy, there are also movements in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe that are directly descended from fascism and Nazism. What I find dangerous is that large masses of people, who may not be violent in themselves, feel seduced and willing to trade their political freedom for the populist promise of protection and security.'

What can - or should - we do differently than we did then?

'I think we should aim for an alliance of all democratic parties in Europe, versus the populist, right-wing parties. In Italy you have a term, the sovranismo, for nationalist groups opposed to the European Union and its institutions. Those groups form a network within Europe. There should be the same from democratic parties. A unity that protects the ideals of European civilisation and sees meeting 'the other' not as a problem but as an enrichment.'

Do you find it annoying that M. is also read by supporters on the right?

'Of my readers, 99 per cent consider the book to be anti-fascist. The other 1 per cent were already fascist and recognise themselves in it. Mussolini once said, "The masses are like bitches, they only want to be dominated." You would think at such a statement: what an asshole. A fascist thinks: wow, how good. I know that M. in bookstores of the far-right is in the shop window. That doesn't surprise me. I only take it as a recognition of its literary quality, of the fact that it has become a real portrait, without judgement.'