Antonio Scurati: "Mussolini was not a monster"

On March 23, 1919 in the Plaza del Santo Sepulcro in Milan there are barely a hundred men, mostly soldiers and officers who have left the desire to live in the trenches of the Great War. The first meeting of the Fighting Fascia is made up of a decadent group of "facinerous, maladaptive, criminal, genialoid, idle, anarchist, petty-bourgeois playboys, exconvicts ..." from which a 36-year-old man who despises them emerges, but sees in them, in that «humanity of waste» , the wicker with which History is built.

That vehement and daring guy, editor of the Il Popolo d'Italia newspaper, a former radical socialist in search of a new ideology to inflame the masses, is called Benito Mussolini.

Around what would later be known as Il Duce , the academic and writer Antonio Scurati (Naples, 1969) has built M. The son of the century (Alfaguara), a colossal documentary novel in which no fact or character narrated are the result of The imagination of the author.

With its more than 800 pages, ranging from that first meeting of the Fascios to a keynote speech as president of the country in 1925, Scurati has won in 2019 the prestigious Strega Prize - maximum award of the letters in Italy - and the beginning of everything a literary phenomenon, with about 400,000 copies sold in Italy, a second part already underway and the project of a television series co-produced by HBO .

Q. At what time did you decide to immerse yourself in such an ambitious project?

A. I was working on my previous novel (Il tempo migliore della nostra vita) , dedicated to an intellectual hero of anti-fascism, Leone Ginzburg , who was tortured and killed by the Nazis in jail. While watching the films of the Luce Institute [the equivalent of NO-DO in Italy] in which Mussolini came out talking from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, those that we have seen so many times that we have stopped looking at them, I had an intuition . There are thousands of books and essays on fascism, but what had never been done was to tell the character and those events with ruthless freedom and without prejudice of literature. I knew it had never been done because until recently something like that was a taboo, it was impossible. Now it is possible and necessary.

Q. And how do you filter four years of prior documentation to transform historical facts into a novel story?

A. I made a great effort of narrative synthesis hugging all sources, including fascists. In the last 70 years, both in Italy and in Europe, totalitarianisms were narrated from the point of view of their victims, as in justice should be. But that has left in shadow a fundamental question: who were the fascists? Why did they act as they did? What did they think, what did they feel, what did they believe? As for the novel, when I tell you that at the end of the march on Rome, Mussolini locks himself in his hotel with his closest comrades and swaggers of victory, he takes off his boots and puts his feet on the table ... after for a whole day walking with his boots his feet smell very much. That concrete, humble detail that historians do not have in mind because it is irrelevant, gives meaning to the scene and is something that comes from the memories of one of the fascists who were there.

Q. Does humanizing the monster allow us to understand it?

R. Humanizing it allows us to understand that it was not a monster. It is the most important thing this novel brings. Mussolini was a man with extraordinary qualities that led to evil and misfortune. But we have to follow this journey of man within his time. If we paint it as a monster or as a fantoche we will never understand it.

Q. How is the figure of Mussolini perceived in today's Italy?

A. Before, if you wanted to participate in political life or civil life in Italy, you had to accept the condemnation of fascism first. It was an indispensable condition. And it is not like that anymore. Now we are witnessing the birth of political leaders like Salvini, who quote phrases from Mussolini and get some popular consensus flirting with fascism. Does that mean your voters are nostalgic for fascism? No, it means that this pillar of our democracy that has been militant anti-fascism belongs to the past. I have tried to contribute to the renewal of anti-fascism by counting without prejudice what Mussolini was, his political genius, the mistakes of the socialists of the time ... to say that today, to be anti-fascist, we do not have to wave the red flag or take out To walk the image of Che Guevara, you just have to sincerely defend democracy itself.

Q. Do you see parallels between the situation of the 20s and 30s in Italy and the one we are living now?

A. In a sense, yes, because the same democratic principles are discussed, as happened a century ago. Mussolini's political propaganda in those early years was directed against the threat of socialist revolution on the one hand, but also against the decline of the political class and parliamentary institutions. He labeled them obsolete, ineffective, corrupt, a caste of privileged ... exactly the same as many politicians do today. The current problem is not so much the resurgence of the extreme right but something more vast, which has to do with those parties that appeal to the masses such as the Northern League or the 5 Star Movement.

Q. What are the coincidences with the strategy of that primal fascism?

A. Mainly, the incitement to fear and hate. They exercise a brutal simplification of the complex reality of democratic life, reducing almost everything to a single problem: to identify an enemy that is painted as an invader and threatens our well-being. If then that enemy were the Socialists and the danger was the revolution, most of today's populist leaders talk about the invasion of immigrants. It is exactly the same type of propaganda. From the outside, that invader threatens your life, your society, your well-being. You shouldn't just fear it, they tell you, you should hate it. And that, unfortunately, works.

Q. "The future exists to correct mistakes," says the book's narrator. Are we in time to correct them?

A. We are in time to make other mistakes. Hopefully not fall into them 100 years ago.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• literature
• culture
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