“A paper monument. The Duce’s Private Secretariat 1922-1943” – Carlo Franza’s blog

Hundreds of thousands of letters were sent by Italians to Mussolini during the twenty years of fascism. Far from the clamor of the squares and the huge gatherings, men and women told the dictator about their sufferings, giving voice to a poor and suffering people, very far from the image of prosperity offered by propaganda.

The Mussolini to whom the Italians wrote was not the strong and authoritarian leader, but the good family man. It is with that man that they felt they could establish a personal relationship. In a sometimes colloquial, sometimes obsequious tone, they asked for favors, subsidies, recommendations for a job. The letters were short texts, often written in uncertain Italian, by authors with little familiarity with the written word. Widows with large families, men who had lost their jobs, young women who lacked the equipment to get married, children who could not go to school for lack of shoes or books.

“A paper monument. The Duce’s Private Secretariat 1922-1943” (Publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Campi del Sapere, pp.256, November 2024, price 23.75 Euros); This is the title of a book signed by Giovanni and De Luna and Linda Giusva.

The correspondence flowed to the Duce’s Private Secretariat, where it was sorted based on content and entrusted to officials responsible for responding. Through excerpts of letters from the Central State Archives, Giovanni De Luna and Linda Giuva reconstruct the many faces of the myth of the Duce during the twenty years: the charismatic and infallible leader, the father figure, the man of humble origins who never fails to give a word of comfort, a thank you, a help to those who turn to him. A myth that the correspondence with the Italians helped to consolidate.

The construction of the myth of the Duce told through the letters of Italians to Mussolini.

I read in the book by Giovanni De Luna and Linda Giuva “A paper monument. The Duce’s private secretariat 1922-1943” (Feltrinelli): “When, on the afternoon of 25 July 1943, Nicola De Cesare, Mussolini’s last private secretary, left Palazzo Venezia to accompany the Duce to Villa Savoia, he did not know that he would be arrested together with Mussolini and that he would never return to his room. He then left many confidential documents on the desk: information on the friendships and acquaintances of important political figures such as Count Giuseppe Volpi, who in the previous days had been removed as president of Confindustria, and Paolo Thaon de Revel, Minister of Finance, until February of the same year; requests for recommendations; reports on the ration situation and the discontent that was spreading in relation to the disorganization of public services and the profiteering of “profiteers”; control over the correspondence of the Duce’s relatives; investigations born due to news on the incorrect behavior of civil and military officials. And there must have been many other paperslto which confidentiality was such as to induce those who entered the roomafter learning of the nocturnal vote of the Grand Council which had “ousted” the Duce, to tear them up but not to destroy the tiny pieces that still lie in the Secretariat’s archives and which could be recomposed by some patient archivist or historian, not so much to learn who knows what secrets, but to explore the criteria used by diligent and prudent officials to hide documents deemed particularly compromising. Today those papers abandoned on the desk show us, on a small scale, the overflowing dimensions of the activities, varied and multiple, which fell within the functions of the Duce’s Private Secretariat. In fact, the history of this office emerges from a mountain of documents whose enormous quantity is also a qualitatively relevant index of its importance. An avalanche of mail arrived at Mussolini; and, today, each of those letters tells us a lot about both Italians and Italian women who wrote to the Duce, and on the way in which fascism, in the answers patiently drafted for each of them, built step by step the “myth” on which the regime was based. Mussolini was fully aware of his role and function and of his progressive transformation into a sort of automatonalong a path within which the function of the Secretariat ended up assuming such importance that today it is an amazing opportunity for historians to valorise, in a historiographical key, the immense documentary heritage left behind. It’s true, in Italy with fascism the masses entered history; they had already done it in the trenches of the First World War, getting themselves killed “en masse” in a ruthless and cruel conflict; they continued to do so with fascism, crowding the squares with support for the Duce, with their hearts inflamed by his speeches and his “poses”. Here too, the twentieth century was the “century of masses”; however, it was done by amputating freedom and democracy their tumultuous irruption into public space, forcing them into a form of political participation that took on the features of a true religious belief, based on the trinomial obedience, discipline, hierarchy. In this sense, rather than fascism it would be better to talk about Mussolinism. The physical person of the Duce was strategically at the center of the regime’s vast operation aimed at building the state and political framework in which the Italian “masses” were organized for twenty years; alongside the work of the police bodies, the judiciary, and all the repressive structures of the State, it was precisely in the political capacity of Mussolini that fascism found the solution to the problems posed by the twentieth-century dimension of the massification of politics. The masses then became those who applauded the Duce’s speeches in the Italian squareswho patiently waited for him, stopping for hours along the railway routes for his journeys up and down the peninsula, who went to die in Ethiopia, in Spain, in Greece, in Albania, in Russia, in Africa in the unfortunate wars that marked the decline of fascism. But those masses were made up of individuals, individual men and women of flesh and blood. The Private Secretariat was interested in them, their worries, quarrels, family dramas or economic and social aspirations weaving a personal relationship that contributed to creating and sustaining the illusion of the Duce’s presence in all aspects of their personal life.”

It must be said that the book is a significant document, full of information, measures history and extends to sociology, allows us to rediscover the twenty years, sheds new light on the Duce, opens up to historians and leads to new paths and new studies; documents from which other historians will start for new formulations, new lights and finally rediscover a fascism as we have not yet known it today.

Giovanni De Luna teaches history at the School of Higher Studies of the University of Turin. Among his most recent publications: Passion and reason. The profession of the contemporary historian (Bruno Mondadori, 2004), History of the Action Party (Utet, new edition 2006), The body of the enemy killed. Violence and death in contemporary war (Einaudi, 2006) e Politics without religion (Einaudi, 2013). He published with Feltrinelli The reasons for a decade. 1969-1979. Militancy, violence, defeat, memory (2009)The Republic of pain (2011), The perfect resistance (2015) e The Republic is restless. Post-war Italy. 1945-1948 (2017).

Linda Giuva, from Foggia, she is married to Massimo D’Alema and has two children, Giulia and Francesco.

Carlo Franza