‘The Perfect Fascist’ Review: Mussolini’s Man

When Mussolini assumed power in 1922, he surrounded himself with the men who had supported him in his struggles. Known as gerarchi, or hierarchs, they were for the most part veterans of World War I: ruthless, ambitious, greedy and deeply rivalrous among themselves. What they shared was their utter, often craven, dependence on Mussolini, who promoted, favored and sacked them at will. If they annoyed or threatened him, he dispatched them to positions of small power in far-flung lands. Some have come down in history: Italo Balbo for his aviation exploits, Roberto Farinacci for his venality and crassness, Achille Starace for the absurd rituals he imposed on Italy.

For her new and fascinating book on the Fascist years, and particularly its social mores, Victoria de Grazia has chosen one of the least-known gerarchi, a man described by Mussolini’s foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, as very mediocre but extremely loyal, yet whose life perfectly mirrors the vicissitudes of the times. Attilio Teruzzi was a 41-year-old career military officer, a good looking man with a wiffly moustache that twirled upwards, watchful blue eyes and dark chestnut hair, when he entered Parliament in April 1924 as one of the first Fascist deputies. This was to be the last free vote in Italy for more than 20 years and it brought to the stuffy, legalistic chamber the brawling manners of the street.

The Perfect Fascist

By Victoria de Grazia

Belknap/Harvard, 499 pages, $35

At the time, Teruzzi was courting a rising American opera singer, the daughter of a rich factory owner from Manhattan, who had come to Italy to pursue her career. Lilliana Weinman was 20, tall, robust, “with a big pouf of ash-brown hair.” She was also Jewish—not yet a problem in Italy, but soon to become one. Mussolini blessed the marriage and acted as witness. He was happy, he told Teruzzi, that the bride was American. “English women are ugly, French women perverse, Spanish women bring us bad luck, and we get along with America.” Lilliana took instruction in the Catholic faith. Six hundred guests attended the wedding party. Helped by Lilliana’s wealthy father, the socially ambitious couple revelled in the lavish lifestyle of the gerarchi. After Teruzzi was made plenipotentiary to the Italian colony in Cyrenaica, the two splashed out on sumptuous receptions and a splendid rococo residence. She tolerated his brazen womanizing, but failed to produce any children.

Then, in 1929, without warning, Teruzzi, now commander of the national militia, announced that he was leaving her. The timing for a divorce could hardly have been worse. Mussolini and the Vatican had just agreed to the Lateran Accords, which included a stipulation that the Church alone would have the power to invalidate marriages, religious or secular. Teruzzi embarked on a 15-year battle to repudiate the woman who was no longer his “talented, loyal, adorable” spouse but rather a “scheming, smut-talking whore.”

Ms. de Grazia is good on the convolutions of the annulment process, the deviousness of the lawyers and priests involved, and the chicanery of Teruzzi’s cronies, who lined up to perjure themselves. Challenging Hannah Arendt’s claim that totalitarianism’s “iron band of total terror leaves no space for private life,” Ms. de Grazia is eloquent on the daily lives of ordinary Italians as they fought to uphold their family values under a regime of informers, draconian edicts that covered all aspects of behavior, and in which the jealous jostling for power was conducted amid rampant scandal mongering.

Meanwhile, Teruzzi found a new paramour. She, too, against all odds in an Italy hastening toward anti-Semitism, was Jewish. When he met her in the mid-1930s, Yvette Maria Blank was 27, a bosomy, down-to-earth raconteuse with a mysterious Egyptian past, recently arrived in Rome and in need of a protector. She soon found herself pregnant, and the matter of Teruzzi’s divorce became more pressing. Further appeals to the Vatican produced another morass of perjury and lies, but the senior clergy remained surprisingly unyielding. When Mussolini, influenced by his new ally Hitler, brought in anti-Semitic legislation in 1938, Teruzzi had himself declared the baby’s legal guardian and, after Yvette tried to kill herself, had her exiled to a penal colony on the island of Lipari.

Teruzzi’s career, which blossomed during Fascism’s good years—he rose to become the minister of Italian Africa—unravelled as Italy’s fortunes collapsed. Whether Mussolini’s delusions that war by Hitler’s side would result in a new Italian empire actually influenced Il Duce’s disastrous decision to go to war, as Ms. de Grazia speculates, is not clear. By 1940 Mussolini was no longer listening to those who warned him that, after financially ruinous campaigns in Ethiopia and Spain, Italy’s army was fatally weak, the war would not be short and decisive, and Hitler would prove an unpredictable and terrifying ally.

Teruzzi was not on the Fascist Grand Council that toppled Mussolini in July 1943. He was arrested by the incoming regime of Gen. Pietro Badoglio, but left to join Mussolini in Salò in the north of Italy as soon as he was freed. As the Allies advanced up Italy he managed to hide, by now reunited with the long-suffering Yvette. When he was captured by the partisans, his years of corruption, profiteering and brutality were treated with remarkable leniency. After a spell in prison on the island of Procida, he was released in 1950 and died, from heart failure, within a month. Few gerarchi had such peaceful deaths.

Teruzzi was indeed the perfect Fascist: disciplined, unscrupulous, brutish, fanatically loyal to Mussolini; a “New Man” in a society, based on obedience and martial values, which required, as the leader famously put it, “all in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” The brilliance of Ms. de Grazia’s book lies in the way that she has made a page-turner of Teruzzi’s chaotic life, while providing a scholarly and engrossing portrait of the two decades of Fascist rule.

—Ms. Moorehead is the author of “A House in the Mountains: The Women Who Liberated Italy From Fascism.”

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