The photographs appeared in media around the globe. The body of the former dictator Benito Mussolini, hung by the feet from a metal girder, facing a jeering crowd in Milan's Piazzale Loreto on April 29, 1945. His body and that of his mistress Clara Petacci had been horribly abused: spat upon, beaten and urinated on. By the time they were sent to the city's morgue, the remains were unrecognisable.
Unlike Adolf Hitler, the “Duce” chose to flee as the end of the war approached rather thancommit suicide.
Influential members of Mussolini's government turned against him by 1943 with the Allies capture of Sicily. He was arrested by the Fascist Grand Council and deposed in July, 1943, before being freed from prison by German special forces in September.
Mussolini was brought to German-occupied northern Italy to establish a puppet state, the Italian Social Republic, which lasted until April 1945.
As Allied forces advanced and the military situation deteriorated, the former dictator found himself with few options.Italy'sValtellina Valley bordering Switzerland was one possible stronghold, a place “for a desperate last stand”, says historian Giovanni De Luna, a professor at the University of Turin.
Another option was to“enter into immediate negotiations with the Allies in an attempt to save his own skin”, De Luna notes.“In the end, he chose to flee in a column with an armoured car, disguised as a German soldier in the back of a truck."
The aim was to reach Switzerland to escape capture by the Italian resistance fighters, the partisans. "Mussolini was no Hitler; he lacked the tragically idealistic streak that would drive the Führer to suicide. He did not have a mission to be a martyr. In this respect, Switzerland was an ideal and important destination for the Duce. He had already fled there as a young man to avoid military service, and had considered taking refuge there in 1922, when he was unsure whether his coup d'état, the March on Rome, had succeeded,“ notes Italian historian Francesco Filippi, author of “Mussolini Also Did a Lot of Good: The Spread of Historical Amnesia”.
‘The sentence is carried out quickly’
But the attempt to escape failed. On April 27, 1945, Mussolini's column was stopped by a small group of partisans not far from Lake Como. The Italian leader was discovered slumped over in one of the convoy's vehicles. Condemned to death by the Committee of National Liberation for Northern Italy, Mussolini was executed the following day along with his mistress. Manyaccounts have been put forwardas to the circumstances of his death in the village of Giulino di Mezzegra,at which few people were present, but as Filippi points out, “the sentence was carried out quickly, as it was considered too complex and risky to transfer Mussolini to Milan”.Filippi says that even if the protagonists themselves gave contradictory versions of the facts over the years, what matters "is the unanimous agreement on the entirely Italian dynamic of the execution. It was the Italians who ended the life of the Fascist leader".
On the evening of April 28, the bodies of Mussolini and Petacci, along with those of 16 other executed Fascists, were transported to Milan. In the early hours of the following day, they were dumped on the ground in Piazzale Loreto. The choice of this spot was deliberate: "It was the place where a year earlier, in August 1944, the bodies of 15 [executed] partisans had been left to lie in the sun for a whole day, as a warning intended by the Germans and Fascists to intimidate the population.”
“Bringing Mussolini's corpse to Piazzale Loreto was nothing more than the application of the law of an eye for an eye,” says Giovanni De Luna, author of a book that focuses on what happened in Milan on April 29, 1945, entitled "Una domenica d'aprile: Piazzale Loreto, 1945: una fine, un inizio" (A Sunday in April: Piazzale Loreto, 1945: An end, a beginning).
But for De Luna, it wasn't just the desire for revenge that drove the crowd to physically attack the Duce's remains: "You can't understand Italians' fascination with Fascism and Mussolini if you don't take Mussolini's body into account. He put his body on stage, shirtless, bathing on the beaches of Rimini and Riccione and being photographed in 1,000 poses. This body, so idolised and loved, became an object of mockery, profanation and insult in Piazzale Loreto."
De Luna also says that this outpouring of violence occurred at a specific moment, duringthe transition between two regimes: "The old power is no longer there and the new one has not yet arrived. The partisans don't know how to control this crowd, which is regaining its sovereignty and almost getting drunk on blood, because it knows that this moment will come to an end."
‘The Duce's brutal contempt for Italians’
After his death, Mussolini's body was buried in an anonymous grave in a Milan cemetery. Exhumed by neo-fascists in 1946, it was then hidden for 11 years, before being returned to his family in 1957. It was then transferred to the crypt of the family chapel in the cemetery of San Cassiano in Predappio, in the northern region of Emilia-Romagna, which has become a pilgrimage site. On the anniversary of his execution, thousands of those nostalgic for fascism gather there.
Eight decades after the fall of the dictator, this anniversary has taken a new turn. The far-right Fratelli d'Italia (Brothers of Italy) became the largest party in parliament after the 2022 legislative elections,propelling its leader Giorgia Melonito the post of prime minister and making nostalgia for fascism acceptable. “Things risk being watered down,” says De Luna. He notes that the president of the Senate, Ignazio La Russa, who holds the second-highest office in the Italian Republic, “has a bust of Mussolini in his room”.
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Fellow historian Filippi says that we are witnessing a rewriting of history: "Many people are trying in various ways to recuperate and revalue the memory of historical fascism. There's the version that Mussolini was basically a ‘good person’ concerned with the welfare of his subjects. An affectionate father who had made mistakes, but who had acted for the good. In reality, many accounts show the Duce's brutal contempt for the Italian people, whom he tried to transform over a period of twenty years. Mussolini wanted to create 'new Italians' because he didn't like the old ones."
Filippi says thatthe country did not undertake a repudiation of fascism, or"defascistization", after the war because “too many links had been forged between fascism and Italian society over a 20-year period”.
He also says that the return of fascist ideas and nostalgia for Mussolini are “a clear symptom of the crisis of representative democracy”. Coincidentally, the 80th anniversary of the Duce’s death is occurring during the periodfollowing the death of Pope Francis.
Mourning the death of a pope is aperfect pretext for the far right to downplay the events of 80 years ago,says Filippi:“Taking advantage of his death, the government proclaimed five days of national mourning, compared with three for John Paul II, including April 25” – Liberation Day in Italy, marking the end ofNazi occupation and fascist rule.
"The government has called upon citizens to celebrate this Liberation Day with sobriety, in other words, without too much enthusiasm," Filippi notes.
This article was translated from the original in French by David Howley.
