Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after three revolutionary heroes. The name Benito — a Spanish name, as opposed to the Italian equivalent, Benedetto — was inspired by Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary turned president who not only toppled the emperor Maximilian but had him executed. The other two names were inspired by now-forgotten heroes of anarchist-socialism, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.
Mussolini's father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and ardent socialist with an anarchist bent who was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engels and served on the local socialist council. Alessandro's "[h]eart and mind were always filled and pulsing with socialistic theories," Mussolini recalled. "His intense sympathies mingled with [socialist] doctrines and causes. He discussed them in the evening with his friends and his eyes filled with light."13 On other nights Mussolini's father read him passages from Das Kapital. When villagers brought their horses to Alessandro's shop to be shod, part of the price came in the form of listening to the blacksmith spout his socialist theories. Mussolini was a congenital rabble-rouser. At the age of ten, young Benito led a demonstration against his school for serving bad food. In high school he called himself a socialist, and at the age of eighteen, while working as a substitute teacher, he became the secretary of a socialist organization and began his career as a left-wing journalist.
Mussolini undoubtedly inherited his father's hatred of traditional religion, particularly the Catholic Church. (His brother Arnaldo was named in homage to Arnaldo da Brescia, a medieval monk, executed in 1155, who was revered as a local hero for rebelling against the wealth and abuses of the Church.) When Mussolini was ten, the priests at his school had to drag him to Mass kicking and screaming. Later in life, as a student activist in Switzerland, he made a name for himself by regularly offending devout Christians. He particularly liked to ridicule Jesus, describing him as an "ignorant Jew" and claiming that he was a pygmy compared to Buddha. One of his favorite tricks was to publicly dare God to strike him dead — if He existed. After returning to Italy as a rising socialist journalist, he repeatedly accused priests of moral turpitude, denounced the Church in sundry ways, and even wrote a bodice ripper called Claudia Particella, the Cardinal's Mistress, which dripped with sexual innuendo.
Mussolini's Nietzschean contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity was sufficiently passionate that he'd sought to purge Christians of all kinds from the ranks of Italian Socialism. In 1910, for example, at a socialist congress in Forli, he introduced and carried a resolution which held that the Catholic faith — or any other mainstream monotheism — was inconsistent with socialism and that any socialists who practiced religion or even tolerated it in their children should be expelled from the party. Mussolini demanded that party members renounce religious marriage, baptism, and all other Christian rituals. In 1913 he wrote another anti-Church book on Jan Hus, the Czech heretic-nationalist, called Jan Hus the Truthful. In it, one could argue, lay the seeds for Mussolini's Fascism to come.
The second major theme in Mussolini's life was sex. At the age of seventeen, in 1900, the same year he joined the Socialist Party, Mussolini lost his virginity to an elderly prostitute "who spilled out lard from all parts of her body." She charged him fifty centesimi. At the age of eighteen, he had an affair with a woman whose husband was away on military duty. He "accustomed her to my exclusive and tyrannical love: she obeyed me blindly, and let me dispose of her just as I wished." Boasting 169 mistresses over the course of his sexual career, Mussolini was also, by contemporary standards, something of a rapist.14
Indeed, Mussolini was one of the first modern sex symbols, paving the way for the sexual deification of Che Guevara. The Italian regime's propagandistic celebration of his "manliness" has launched a thousand academic seminars. Countless intellectuals celebrated Mussolini as the ideal representative man of the new age. Prezzolini wrote of him, "This man is a man and stands out even more in a world of half-figures and consciences that are finished like worn out rubber bands." Leda Rafanelli, an anarchist intellectual (who later slept with Mussolini), wrote after hearing him speak for the first time, "Benito Mussolini...is the socialist of the heroic times. He feels, he still believes, with an enthusiasm full of virility and force. He is a Man."15
Mussolini cultivated an impression of being married to all Italian women. The investment paid off when Italy faced sanctions for its invasion of Ethiopia and Mussolini asked Italians to donate their gold to the state. Millions sent in their wedding rings, 250,000 women in Rome alone. Nor were the ladies of high society immune to his charms. Clementine Churchill had been quite smitten with his "beautiful golden brown, piercing eyes" when she met him in 1926. She was delighted to take home a signed photo as a keepsake. Lady Ivy Chamberlain, on the other hand, treasured her Fascist Party badge as a memento.
Because Mussolini trifled with men's wives, owed money, enraged the local authorities, and was approaching the age of conscription, he found it wise to flee Italy in 1902 for Switzerland, then a European Casablanca for socialist radicals and agitators. He had two lire to his name when he arrived, and, he wrote to a friend, the only metal rattling in his pocket was a medallion of Karl Marx. There he fell in with the predictable crowd of Bolshevists, socialists, and anarchists, including such intellectuals as Angelica Balabanoff, a daughter of Ukrainian aristocrats and a longtime colleague of Lenin's. Mussolini and Balabanoff remained friends for two decades, until she became the secretary of the Comintern and he became a socialist apostate, that is, a fascist.
Whether Mussolini and Lenin actually met is the subject of some controversy. However, we know that they were mutual admirers. Lenin would later say that Mussolini was the only true revolutionary in Italy, and according to Mussolini's first biographer, Margherita Sarfatti (a Jew and Mussolini's lover), Lenin also later said, "Mussolini? A great pity he is lost to us! He is a strong man, who would have led our party to victory."16
While in Switzerland, Mussolini worked quickly to develop his intellectual bona fides. Writing socialist tracts wherever he could, the future Duce imbibed the lingo of the international European left. He wrote the first of his many books while in Switzerland, Man and Divinity, in which he railed against the Church and sang the praises of atheism, declaring that religion was a form of madness. The Swiss weren't much more amused with the young radical than the Italians had been. He was regularly arrested and often exiled by various cantonal authorities for his troublemaking. In 1904 he was officially labeled an "enemy of society." At one point he considered whether he should work in Madagascar, take a job at a socialist newspaper in New York, or join other socialist exiles in the leftist haven of Vermont (which fills much the same function today).
While Mussolini would become a fairly inept wartime leader, he was not the bumbling oaf many Anglo-American historians and intellectuals have portrayed. For one thing, he was astoundingly well read (even more so than the young Adolf Hitler, who was also something of a bibliophile). His fluency in socialist theory was, if not legendary, certainly impressive to everyone who knew him. We know from his biographers and his own writings that he read Marx, Engels, Schopenhauer, Kant, Nietzsche, Sorel, and others. From 1902 to 1914 Mussolini wrote countless articles both examining and translating the socialist and philosophical literature of France, Germany, and Italy. He was famous for his ability to speak on obscure subjects without notes and in great depth. Indeed, alone among the major leaders of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, he could speak, read, and write intelligently in several languages. Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler were undoubtedly the better politicians and commanders in chief, largely because of their legendarily keen instincts. But by the standards that liberal intellectuals apply today, Mussolini was the smartest of the three.17