Mussolini

September 28, 1998
Hitler once allegedly told Mussolini that he was "too kind to be any good as a dictator." The remark, suggests prolific biographer Ridley (Thomas Cranmer; Lord Palmerston; Garibaldi; Tito), was "banter between friends in which an apparent censure conceals a compliment." Yet the line also anticipates Ridley's own approach to the brazen, boastful demagogue who ruled Italy ruthlessly for 21 years with the help of thugs and thieves who did Il Duce's bidding. Although Mussolini's revived Roman empire is generally seen as a house of cards, the corrupt creation of a shrewd phrase-maker, Ridley is nonetheless cautiously admiring. His Duce is a good family man (despite his mistresses), a patriot (beneath the propaganda), an adroit politician (except in foreign affairs), even a humanitarian (who didn't deport arrested Jews to death camps). He portrays Mussolini as a pragmatist in peacetime, a bumbler in war. In his account of the years from 1923 to 1940, Ridley writes that Fascism "did not greatly interfere" with ordinary lives and "brought some real benefits to the people," but any such benefits were undermined by an opportunist choice of wartime allies. Perhaps losing interest, or failing in sympathy with the wartime Duce, Ridley passes over the embarrassing and disastrous Axis years in relatively few pages, closing with Mussolini's summary execution by partisans in the last days of the war. Somewhat casual with facts and lacking the sharp candor of Denis Mack Smith's still-standard life (1982), Ridley's Mussolini is not a page-turner. Sixteen-page photo insert.