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The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy
The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy

By

Lucia Ceci

Translated by

Peter Spring

leiden | boston
The translation of this work has been funded by seps – segretariato europeo per le
pubblicazioni scientifiche
Via Val d’Aposa 7, 40123 Bologna, Italy
seps@seps.it - www.seps.it
Original title: L’interesse superiore. Il Vaticano e l’Italia di Mussolini.
Cover illustration: L’Illustrazione Italiana, 62, 15 December 1935.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ceci, Lucia, 1967- author.
Title: The Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy / by Lucia Ceci.
Other titles: Interesse superiore. English
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2017] | Translantion of: L’interesse superiore : il Vaticano e l’Italia di
Mussolini. Roma : Laterza, 2013. | Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Identifiers: lccn 2016036655 (print) | lccn 2016042389 (ebook) |
isbn 9789004308596 (hardback : acid-free paper) | isbn 9789004328792 (e-book) |
isbn 9789004328792 (E-book)
Subjects: lcsh: Fascism and the Catholic Church--Italy--History--20th century. | Catholic Church--Foreign
relations--Italy. | Italy--Foreign relations--Catholic Church. | Church and state--Italy--History--20th
century. | Mussolini, Benito, 1883–1945. | Italy--Politics and government--1922–1945. | World War,
1939–1945--Italy. | World War, 1939–1945--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. | World War, 1939–1945--Causes.
Classification: lcc dg571 .c43313 2017 (print) | lcc dg571 (ebook) | ddc 322/.10945--dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016036655

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface.

isbn 978-90-04-30859-6 (hardback)

isbn 978-90-04-32879-2 (e-book)

Copyright 2017 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Contents

List of Abbreviations vii

Introduction 1

1 Religion, War, Nation 12

1.1 ‘La Mala Educación’ 12
1.2 Political Anticlericalism, Pornographic Anticlericalism 26
1.3 The ‘Guerrone’ 44
1.4 A Gory Ideal of the Fatherland 53

2 Transitions 59
2.1 The Right Time 59
2.2 The Caltagirone Antipope 66
2.3 An Anti-modern Pope? 73
2.4 Lending Credence to the New Power 78
2.5 Discreet Agreements 83
2.6 The Superior Interests of the Church 88
2.7 The ‘True’ Nationalism and the ‘Non-opposition’ 94

3 The Holiest of Nations 104

3.1 The Italian Way to Holiness 104
3.2 A Bumpy Road 115
3.3 A Look beyond Italy 123
3.4 Conciliation and Competition 129
3.5 Two Exclusive Faiths 144

4 The Most Roman of Empires 156

4.1 A War Machine 156
4.2 Mother Rome 164
4.3 Pure, Strong, Modern: A Catholic Virility 172
4.4 A War for Empire-Building 178
4.5 Against ‘Hybrid’ Unions 189
4.6 A Crusade Just Like the Old Ones 196
vi Contents 

5 Public Cheers, Confidential Showdown 206

5.1 ‘Hit the Pope and You Die’ 206
5.2 A Solitary Reconsideration 214
5.3 The Speech that Enraged Mussolini 222
5.4 Inexpiable Sin? 232
5.5 Adverse, But Not Too Much 240

6 Punishment and Purification 252

6.1 Time Out 252
6.2 At Mussolini’s Side to Prevent the War 255
6.3 Ongoing ‘Non-belligerence’ 261
6.4 Oscillations 264
6.5 The Early Signs of a Changing Policy 275

7 Atonement 285
7.1 Divine Providence Doesn’t Go to Salò 285
7.2 ‘A Poor Christian’ 296
7.3 Nothing to Apologize about 299

Bibliography 307
Index of Names 330
Index of Subjects 342
List of Abbreviations

aas Acta Apostolicae Sedis

aci Azione Cattolica Italiana (Italian Catholic Action)
adss Actes et documents du Saint Siège relatifs à la
­Seconde Guerre Mondiale
asdmae Archivio Storico Diplomatico del Ministero degli
Affari Esteri Italiano, Rome
aa.ee.ss. Congregazione degli Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari
Arch. Nunz. Archivio Nunziatura
arsi Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome
asv Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Vatican City
Congr. Concist. Relat. Dioec. Congregazione Concistoriale, Relationes Dioecesium
fuci Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana (Italian
Catholic Federation of University)
giac Gioventù Italiana di Azione Cattolica (Italian
Catholic Youth)
guf Gioventù Universitaria Fascista (Fascist University
Youth)
iri Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (Italian
­public holding company)
onarmo Opera Nazionale per l’Assistenza Religiosa e Morale
degli Operai (Catholic organization for industrial
workers)
onb Opera Nazionale Balilla (Fascist schoolchildren’s
organization)
psi Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party)
psis Partito Socialista Italiano in Svizzera (Italian Socialist
Party in Switzerland)
pnf Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party)
ppi Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian Popular Party)
rsi Repubblica Sociale Italiana (Italian Social Republic)
s.rr.ss. Segreteria di Stato, Sezione per i Rapporti con gli
Stati, Archivio Storico

b. busta
fol. folio
fasc. fascicolo
pos. position
r. recto
v. verso
Introduction

The damage inflicted by Fascism is becoming ever clearer. Fascism in

fact has:
1. created a confusion between party, Italy, and the Duce. Result: the
Duce’s whim is Italy’s ruin;
2. destroyed any freedom of action and discussion. Result: the
­Italian people have by now been reduced to a flock of sheep who
run wherever the shepherd, with his stick, propels them;
3. educated generations in violence. Result: everyone is a hero, ready
to raise his fists, sure that the others won’t have any option… but
to take a beating;
4. followed a line of arbitrary acts, incivilities, clashes, threats and
bullying in foreign policy. Result: it has ensured that the whole
world is opposed to Fascism;
5. heralded, prophesied, and proclaimed an empire. Result: it is ex-
hausting itself in a savage and costly colonial war, which will only
have two aims: that of wasting money and conquering inhospi-
table lands. […];
6. proclaimed the greatness of Italy to the four corners of the world.
Result: today […] a weak and undeveloped people possesses an
air of being the greatest people on earth;
7. deified the Duce, making everyone kneel down to this god. Result:
there’s no longer any political life, no longer any chance of pre-
paring new energy to meet the inevitable needs of the future.
8. claimed and imposed on everyone the most absolute and intran-
sigent docility. Result: nothing is left but a mob of slaves, ever
ready to say yes, to clap their hands, utterly full as they are … of
enthusiasm;
9. concentrated all powers, all resources, all ages in the hands and
organizations of the State. […];
10.  created a whole labyrinth of laws, conventions and associations
that place everything and everybody at the mercy of the State.1

This coherent analysis of the characteristics and evils of Fascism is not the
work of a militant antifascist. The document was written on 1st December 1935
by Monsignor Domenico Tardini, one of Pius xi’s closest aides, at a time when

1 s.rr.ss., aa.ee.ss., Italia, Conflitto Italo-etiopico, 1935, pos. 967, vol. i bis, fols. 63–64 “Previ-
sioni e giudizi di Mons. Tardini sul conflitto tra l’Italia e l’Etiopia”, 1st December 1935.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_002

2 Introduction

the regime, with the war in Ethiopia, was reaching the height of its popularity.
It wasn’t a document for private consumption, but an official memorandum
written with care by one of the major exponents of the diplomatic action of
the Holy See, and intended for the prelate’s audiences with the pontiff.
Tardini grasped all the ills of the regime. He identified all its liberticidal and
totalitarian aspects. He articulated all the dire consequences of the dictator-
ship for Italian society as a whole. But at the same time he placed the Holy See
outside this situation and these dynamics. The lucid analysis conducted in the
Secretariat of State and presented to the Pope seemed in short not to imply any
responsibility on the part of the Vatican: neither for the rise of the dictatorship
and the popular consent it had won up until that time, nor for the positions to
be taken, in public, in the future.
The fact is that, on the level of public debate, the question of the Church’s
responsibility during the two decades of support for the Fascist regime was
never subjected to any critical reflection. Italian Catholicism avoided the fun-
damental question: why did the Catholic world, which was able to recognize
the crimes of the regime, and clearly to spell them out, remain so susceptible
to its propaganda and its seduction? The German bishops reacted very dif-
ferently: following Germany’s unconditional surrender, they lost no time in
launching publications and systematic studies on the Church’s relations with
Nazism. The Argentine bishops, to take a different but familiar case, accepted
John Paul ii’s appeal for purification and made solemn atonement for their
acquiescence and complicity in the desaparecidos. Italian Catholicism did nei-
ther the one nor the other. Ever since the collapse of the regime, the question
of how the positions adopted by the Holy See, episcopal hierarchy, clergy and
laity towards Fascism should be judged was simply sidelined or rather it was
placed within a wider perspective aimed to define the cultural and political
parameters within which the Church would place her influence and organiza-
tion in the post-war period. What prevailed was an approach intent not only
to avoid a critical reflection on the responsibility of Catholics for the support
of dictatorship, but also to underline, instead, the role they had played in the
struggle against Fascism. Regenerated in her political credibility by the major
campaign of charitable assistance, which, in the name of Pius xii Defensor
civitatis, priests and bishops had conducted on behalf of the Italian population
during the German occupation, the Catholic Church emerged from the venten-
nio with her prestige not seriously dented by her embrace with Fascism. Thus,
she was able to present herself, at the end of the war, as the sole protagonist
able directly to take into her hands again the reins of Italian society. Palmiro
Togliatti’s confident prediction, following the Lateran Pacts, that the price of
Introduction 3

the Church’s collaboration with Fascism would be a “mass rebellion” in the

form of “schism and heresy”, was resoundingly repudiated by later events.2
On the historiographical level, vice versa, the relations between the C­ atholic
Church and Fascism have not been repressed. They have, and especially in
more recent years, been closely scrutinized. They have been re-evaluated in
the light of fresh evidence. A new season of historical revision and historical
understanding has been inaugurated. Dismissive interpretations, polarized
only on the denunciation of complicity between the cudgel of the Blackshirt
and the aspergillum of the priest, now seem like a thing of the past – an ob-
solete cultural and political phase.3 The same may be said of apologetic in-
terpretations conjured up in defense of the policies that the ecclesiastical
institution adopted towards the dictatorship of Mussolini; their poor quality
attests perhaps to the lack of significance attributed to the question.4 The his-
tory of relations between the Catholic Church and Fascism can now boast of
a fruitful period of research over the last decade. New scenarios were opened
to historical study after the ecclesiastical sources relating to the pontificate of

2 Ercoli, “Fine della ‘Questione romana’”, Stato operaio (February 1929), then in P. Togliatti,
L’opera di De Gasperi. I rapporti tra Stato e Chiesa, Milano: Parenti, 1958, 169–187, quotations
185–186.
3 Conceived in circles of the opposition abroad during the years of the dictatorship, interpreta-
tions of this kind gained in popularity thanks to the publication, or re-publication, of some
writings of Gaetano Salvemini and Ernesto Rossi. Salvemini’s interventions on the relations
between the Vatican and Fascism have been reprinted in G. Salvemini, Opere, ii, Scritti di sto-
ria moderna e contemporanea, vol. 3, Stato e Chiesa in Italia, (ed.) E. Conti, ­Milano: ­Feltrinelli,
1969. The most significant work of this branch of research is however represented by the
book of E. Rossi, Il manganello e l’aspersorio. L’uomo della Provvidenza e Pio xi, ­Firenze: Paren-
ti, 1958. Two years later less categorical conclusions were reached by the young ­American
­scholar Richard A. Webster, a pupil of Salvemini himself at Harvard. In his book The Cross
and the Fasces, Christian Democracy and Fascism in Italy (Stanford: Stanford ­University Press,
1960), Webster, though acknowledging Ernesto Rossi’s role as interpreter of the relations
between Church and Fascism, underlined the uneven and fluctuating character of these
relations.
4 Among the first proponents of the “irreducible incompatibility” between the regime and
Catholic organizations we must undoubtedly place the conte Giuseppe Dalla Torre, editor-
in-chief of the L’Osservatore Romano from 1920 to 1960 and author, in 1945, of a little book
entitled Azione Cattolica e Fascismo (now in Idem, I cattolici e la vita pubblica italiana, Roma:
Edizioni Cinque Lune, 1962). The main tendency in Catholic circles was, in any case, to avoid
studies that dug too deep. Emblematic in this sense was the veil of silence raised round Artu-
ro Carlo Jemolo’s book, Chiesa e Stato in Italia negli ultimi cento anni (Torino: Einaudi, 1948).
4 Introduction

Pius xi became accessible to scholars between 2003 and 2006.5 But cases in
which the results of this flurry of research have crossed the Alps or the Atlantic
Ocean and become familiar to foreign scholars are rare, due to the fact that
the Italian language is known only to a tiny minority in the world. Only a new
generation of scholars, who like myself have embarked on research in today’s
global society, has begun to engage with the international debate and with the
Anglophone public in a more direct, pro-active and systematic way. It seems to
me therefore important, and emblematic of a new phase in historical studies,
that this work (winner of the “Friuli Storia” Prize for Studies of Contemporary
History in 2014) should now be published in an English edition.
I felt the need to conduct a comprehensive reconstruction of the relations
between the Vatican and Mussolini’s Italy, after having long studied the role of
Catholicism both in Italy and in the Italian colonies in the 20th century. This
led me to reconstruct, from a new perspective, the history of the encounter
between the Catholic Church and Fascism by knitting together into an histori-
cal narrative the most significant and innovative findings that have emerged
from the rich source material that has accumulated in more recent years. The
new sources in the Vatican Archives have in fact permitted historians to throw
fresh light on individual aspects: the accession of Mussolini to power, the war
in Ethiopia, the racial laws, and the comparison between Pius xi and Pius xii.
In this book, by contrast, I will try to offer a more comprehensive reconstruc-
tion of the encounter, sometimes the clash, between the Church and Fascism,
with the aim of understanding the reasoning that led Catholics to support a
dictatorial, warmongering and racist regime.
The profusion of data and problems has led me to privilege a line of ar-
gument focused on the highest levels of civil and religious government:
­Mussolini on the one hand and the Vatican on the other. This is not merely
a narrative e­ scamotage. For all their diversity, the Church and Fascism shared
a hierarchical organization based on principles of authority, discipline and
obedience. Moreover, the doctrine and the prevalent practice in the Catholic
Church during the ventennio leave no doubt that the Pope and his episcopal
hierarchy exerted on the faithful a precise role of direction and of guidance,
from which no sphere was in principle excluded. And to this central source
of orientation Catholics, whether organized or not, had constantly to refer to
draw the guidelines for their own actions and moral choices. “Subjects” of the
Church, as they were called by Cardinal Pietro Gasparri in his Catholic Cat-
echism of 1932 – essentially the laity – were called to obedience in particular to

5 For a historiographical summation of this research see L. Ceci, “La Chiesa e il fascismo”, Studi
storici 55 (2014): 123–137.
Introduction 5

the Pope.6 Of course, in Fascist Italy, the average Catholic believer could have
barely been aware of the constant rivalry, the constant tug of war, between
the Pope and the Duce to achieve a monopoly over the conscience of Italians,
except for the bitterest moments of the conflict over Catholic Action in 1931
and 1938. From the Lateran Pacts onwards, in fact, the upper hierarchy of the
Vatican adopted a dual political strategy towards the regime: on the one hand,
fervent support for the government of Mussolini, manifested or corroborated
in public pronouncements, and, on the other, the claim for a separate identity.
Contrasting with the totalitarian ambitions of Fascism, this separate identity
was tenaciously defended and jealously guarded. It was pursued in confiden-
tial negotiations with the political powers.
By no means, however, does the painstaking reconstruction of the behind
the scenes machinations exhaust the scope of our enquiry, especially when
Fascism became a State and everything became amplified and more compli-
cated. For, as the Church reinforced her collaboration with the regime, the ac-
tive participation of Catholics in the new mass realities of the 20th century
was accelerated. Of course, the history of relations between the Church and
Fascism cannot ignore the epochal turning-point of the Lateran Pacts. These
historic documents stamped the seal on the reconciliation between the Fascist
regime and the Catholic Church. Signed by the head of the Italian government
and the Secretary of State in the Sala dei Papi at the Lateran, they were hailed
by Catholics as an event of the highest significance.
The Concordat was the solemn sanction of the public and official role of
Catholic religion in Italian society. It was the celebration of the metamorpho-
sis of the Fascist State into a Catholic State. In its aftermath, the Church played
an important role in extending and stabilizing support for the regime. On the
other hand, the totalitarian ambition of the regime, the sacralization of the
State as an alternative religion, and the influence this had on the languages,
rites and myths of politics, led Fascism to compete with the Church in the
formation of a national ethos. In response to the all-encompassing political
claims of the regime, Catholicism accentuated, in turn, its own character as
a totalitarian organization in its own way, by making significant inroads into
the new realities of urban life, forging new links with the middle classes, and
developing modern forms of associated life.7

6 Catechismo cattolico a cura e studio del cardinal Pietro Gasparri, was the first Italian version
approved by the author, Brescia: La Scuola, 1932, 120. Gasparri’s catechism had first been
published in Latin in 1930 (Catechismus catholicus cura et studio Petri cardinalis Gasparri
c­ oncinnatus, Città del Vaticano: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1930).
7 R. Moro, “Il ‘modernismo buono’. La ‘modernizzazione’ cattolica tra fascismo e postfascismo
come problema storiografico”, Storia contemporanea 19 (1988): 625–716.
6 Introduction

When, on 18 September 1938, in the midst of the Czechoslovak crisis, Pius xi

condemned the totalitarian pretensions of contemporary states, he would do
so in the name of a rival form of totalitarianism. He would assert that only the
Church had the right and the duty to vindicate the totality of her power over
individuals; so only the Church could rightly be recognized as a “totalitarian
regime – totalitarian de facto and de jure”.8 It is only in the dramatic final phase
of the pontificate of Pius xi that the category of ‘totalitarianism’ can, I believe,
be legitimately applied to the Church. It presumably alludes, in this context, to
the aspiration of the ecclesiastical institution to recover an integral role, and
thus re-conquer society for the Church. That explains why the role of Catholic
Action – the active role of the Catholic laity in Italian society – proved to be
the sticking point for Pius xi. He threw his habitual caution to the wind when,
on 28 July 1938, he warned the Duce that any attack on Catholic Action was an
attack on the Pope himself. The Church, in short, aspired to recover the ground
she had lost with the processes of secularization. So, in the end, two different
forms of totalitarianism, two different models of the total inculcation of man,
two patterns of mass mobilization, ended up by clashing with one other.9
This is the backdrop against which I have attempted to reconstruct the re-
lations between Mussolini and the Vatican and to elucidate the dynamics of
rivalry, defense and mutual influence that characterized the relation between
the two camps during the ventennio. As for Mussolini, his pro-Catholic volte-
face had begun, for reasons of political expediency, soon after the foundation
of the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919. It was motivated by his wish to
woo a broader and more socially diversified constituency. Thus began the
collusion between Church and Fascism, reinforced by their shared ‘totali-
tarian’ claims and by their shared perception of the common enemies by
which they were assailed (freemasonry, Protestantism, Judaism, liberalism,
communism, etc.).
The research underlying this book makes no claim to present a comprehen-
sive history of those years. Like any historical exposition, it is selective.10 The
interwoven strands between relations of an economic nature, for example, are

8 Thus Pius xi in his speech to the French Federation of Christian Trade-Unions, in Discorsi
di Pio xi, (ed.) D. Bertetto, vol. 3, 1934–1939, Torino: sei, 1961, 814.
9 For an exposition of the concept of totalitarianism applied to the Church, see the conclu-
sions of D. Menozzi and R. Moro, published in the volume edited by the same scholars,
Cattolicesimo e totalitarismo. Chiese e culture religiose tra le due guerre mondiali (Italia,
Spagna, Francia), Brescia: Morcelliana, 2004, 373–387.
10 See D. Diner, Raccontare il Novecento. Una storia politica, Milano: Garzanti, 2007, 9 (First
published in German: Das Jahrhundert verstehen. Eine universalhistorische Deutung,
München: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1999).
Introduction 7

only fleetingly touched upon. The specific regional or provincial situations,

characterized by the strength of local traditions or professional affiliations, are
also largely ignored. On the other hand, a strong emphasis is placed on the
different nuances that influenced the themes of the nation and war at the re-
ligious, cultural and political levels. For it was these questions that galvanized
the main transformations that took place in the Catholic world. And by look-
ing closer at these questions, we can better define the far-reaching contamina-
tions that were taking place between the two formative agents – Church and
regime – in the construction of a collective consciousness that left its indelible
mark on the Italian mind during this period.
The book devotes close attention to the positions adopted by the Catholic
Church towards State anti-Semitism, which historians have mainly studied by
concentrating on Germany and on the vexed role of Pius xii. To understand
the attitudes of Italian Catholicism towards the anti-Jewish policies adopted
by the Fascist government, I have considered it essential to recall the role
played by a Catholic culture that placed its indelible stamp on the formulation
and dissemination of anti-Jewish prejudices in the course of the 19th and first
decades of the 20th century: from the hoary clichés of deicide to the perceived
Jewish monopoly of finance, the purported conspiracy of International Jewry
aimed at subverting Christian societies, and, not least, after the Russian Revo-
lution, the nexus between Judaism and Bolshevism.
These and other models of Christian anti-Semitism were widely revived
during 1937, and especially in 1938, by a significant part of the Catholic epis-
copate and press. They ended up applying traditional Catholic prejudices to
Fascist (racially motivated) anti-Semitism, thus demonstrating how ineffec-
tual the Catholic culture’s response was to the regime’s discriminatory policies
against Jews. Regarding the Holy See, I felt it was important to highlight the
positions adopted by the top ecclesiastical hierarchy towards the first laws on
race: those issued by the Italian government in the colonies of East Africa after
the conquest of Ethiopia, when Pope Pius xi and his closest aides, however
much they denied on the doctrinal level that any differences between races
could ever exist, decided nonetheless to support Fascist policy for reasons of
Realpolitik. In the second half of 1938, by which time the scale and virulence
of anti-Semitic policies in Europe had become abundantly clear to the Holy
See, Pius xi initiated a reform of the Church’s doctrine to condemn racism and
anti-Semitism. But his decision, however, came too late and was strongly ob-
structed by the Roman Curia. So it was easy for his successor Pius xii to return
to a political stance that privileged the diplomatic détente both with the Ital-
ian and German governments. Seen from a global perspective, anti-Semitism
still represented for the Holy See a lesser evil than Soviet Communism.
8 Introduction

It is well known that, following the signing of the Lateran Pacts, Pius xi
r­ evived and accentuated the theme of an Italian primacy, à la Gioberti, pro-
jecting it on a global scale.11 The restoration of God to Italy and of Italy to God,
which the Lateran Pacts had sanctioned, suggested the idea of a projection of
the Catholic foundations of the nation at the public and institutional level.
An exemplary value was conferred on the status achieved by the Church in
the country that was the seat of the papacy. It was regarded as the sign of a
mission assigned by Providence to Italy and of her predestination to form the
central axis of a project of Christian civilization that transcended the nation
state. Keeping all this in mind, it is easier to understand why the government
of Mussolini should have integrated so many Vatican policies.
Yet, it is not only in her rapport with the regime that the attitude of the
Holy See during this period can be understood. For the importance played by
the world scenario as a whole cannot be ignored – due, in general, to the in-
ternational role that is embodied in the very nature of the Apostolic See; and,
in particular, to the dramatic events at the global level that the Church had to
come to terms with during the period covered by this book. It goes without
saying that reasons of exposition and concision led me to select only some
aspects from the enormous mass of source materials offered by the Church’s
international role during this period. Precisely for this reason I feel I should
point out the main aspects that I will try to emphasize at the interpretational
and narrative levels in the following pages. In defining the relations between
the Vatican and the government of Mussolini, we cannot underestimate the
link between the decisions taken by the Holy See in her relations with the re-
gime and what was happening in the Soviet Union, in Spain, in Germany, and
in Mexico. Especially since the mid-Thirties, the Holy See rashly placed trust in
her ability to exert influence on Mussolini to curb both the expansive force of
the Comintern and the aggressiveness of Nazi Germany.
In contrast to the traditional periodization, the history recounted in this
book does not begin in 1922, nor does it end in 1943. It begins with the child-
hood of Benito Mussolini in the final years of the 19th century, and it ends
with the sudden collapse of his puppet regime, the Repubblica Sociale Italiana,
on the shores of Lake Garda in 1945. My decision to opt for this longer time
frame came from the need to take into account the changes that took place
in Italian society and, within it, the role of Catholicism, within an historical

11 See F. Traniello, Religione cattolica e Stato nazionale. Dal Risorgimento al secondo

dopoguer­ra, Bologna: il Mulino, 2006, 29ff. Vincenzo Gioberti had, in the 1840s, famously
propounded the supremacy of Italy as the seat of the papacy and the moral and civil pri-
macy of the Italian people.
Introduction 9

continuum. This meant to some extent downplaying, or rather by placing in a

different light, the exceptional nature of the ventennio. But a wider perspective
is justified, I believe, by the need to show what a crucial role was played, by the
years of the Great War, both in laying the foundations of fascist ideology and
in fuelling a process I describe as the ‘nationalization’ of Italian Catholicism.
The ‘cultural turn’12 of historiography on the First World War has allocated to
the religious discourse, indeed, an essential place in defining the symbols and
representations that fuelled the mobilization of war and played a crucial role
in the interwar period.13 It was amid the Armageddon of trench warfare that
the great messianic hopes were born and were destined to be dashed in an
après-guerre bereft of all redemption.14 And during the conflict new forms of
the sacralization of war were experimented, destined to be amplified in the
Fascist wars in Ethiopia and Spain.15 Moreover, it was based on the myth of
the Great War, its exaltations, its patriotic fervors, its atrocities, that the ‘new
men’ modelled their own political message.16 It was by that myth that Catho-
lics became fully Italian citizens and were imbued, for the first time, by a spirit
of national patriotism.17
Summarily reviewing the events of the final phase of the Second World War
in Italy, from the armistice on 8 September, to Salò and Mussolini’s arrest at
Dongo, the focus of the narrative remains concentrated on the attitude of the
Church to the Repubblica Sociale Italiana. In adopting this focus, it has not
been my intention to downplay the role played by Catholics in the Resistance

12 J. Winter and A. Prost, The Great War in History. Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the
P­ resent, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 25–30.
13 Very influential, in this sense: A. Becker, La guerre et la foi: de la mort á la mémoire,
1914–1930, Paris: Armand Colin, 1994, and S. Audoin-Rouzeau and A. Becker, 14–18, retrou-
ver la Guerre, Paris: Gallimard, 2000. For a brief but incisive historiographic review see
C. M
­ aurer, “Vingt ans d’histoire religieuse de la Grande Guerre”, Schweizerische Zeitschrift
für Religion und Kulturgeschichte/Revue suisse d’histoire religieuse et culturelle 108 (2014):
19–29. The main historiographic results in English can be retraced in the relevant entries
of the Collective Bibliography published by the International Society for First World War
Studies, and available online.
14 E. Gentile, Il culto del littorio. La sacralizzazione della politica nell’Italia fascista,
Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1993 (English translation: The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).
15 Religione, nazione e guerra nel primo conflitto mondiale, (ed.) D. Menozzi, Rivista di storia
del cristianesimo 3 (2006).
16 G.L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, New York-Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1990.
17 R. Moro, “Nazione, cattolicesimo e regime fascista”, Rivista di storia del cristianesimo
1 (2004): 129–147.
10 Introduction

in the two years from 1943 to 1945, nor to minimize the importance of the grass-
roots action in defense of the stricken populations conducted by the bishops
and clergy once the country had become the theatre of a guerrilla war. I briefly
mention these crucial events, but their treatment, due to the many dynamics
and numerous protagonists associated with them, requires separate treatment.
Within the great transformations that took place in societies, states, inter-
national policies, and in the Catholic world itself, during the period considered
in this book, it seems to me that some fundamental criteria and some long-
term parameters can be grasped in the line adopted by the government of the
Church, and more specifically by the papacy. First and foremost I would argue
that there existed a prevailing tendency of the Holy See, under Pius xi as under
his successor, to judge a government or a political movement on the basis of its
attitude to the claims of the Church, her room for maneuver, her ability to fulfil
her role in society, in short, her ‘liberties’.

***

This book was developed thanks to many opportunities for discussion with
several scholars, both at home and abroad, on the major theme of relations
between the Catholic Church, totalitarian regimes and democratic political
systems in the 1930s. These discussions were prompted not only by the opening
of the Archives for the Pius XI years, but also by the willingness of scholars of
various countries to conduct analyses of the policies adopted by the Holy See
towards different national situations. I cannot name here all those to whom
I am indebted at the international level, but I would especially like to thank
Professors Alfonso Botti, Fabrice Bouthillon, Jean-François Chauvard, Emilia
Hrabovec, David Kertzer, Daniele Menozzi, Laura Pettinaroli, John Pollard, Eu-
gena Tokareva, Giorgio Vecchio, and Hubert Wolf.
Several of these discussions were promoted thanks to the research project
on Historical problems of the Twenties and Thirties in the Vatican Archives: in-
ternational order, democracies and totalitarian regimes in the Church of Pius xi,
funded by Italy’s Ministry for Universities and Scientific Research. As part of
the team of scholars involved in the project, I had the opportunity to benefit
from such experienced and challenging colleagues as Emma Fattorini, Carlo
Felice Casula, Alberto Melloni, Francesco Piva, and Maurizio Pegrari. To all of
them I owe a wealth of suggestions, queries, and reflections.
The present volume benefited immensely from the constructive discussions
occasioned by the research projects and teaching commitments conducted
with my colleagues of Contemporary History at the University of Rome Tor
Vergata. Here, in the Department of History, Humanities and Society, I had the
Introduction 11

privilege of working with such scholars and friends as Professor Silvio Pons,
who always was of great help with his deep knowledge of the history of the
twentieth century, and Professor Gianluca Fiocco, who never fought shy of a
discussion of content, closely monitoring my text with an eagle eye. Special
thanks are also due to Alessandro Ferrara, Professor of Political Philosophy: his
integrity, dedication and perceptive remarks have meant much to me. In their
discussion of my manuscript with me, Professors Tommaso Caliò, Alessio Ga-
gliardi and Chiara Lucrezio Monticelli proved invaluable; they helped me with
the intelligence that distinguishes them.
The support of my university was no less important for enabling me to com-
plete this work. Because of this, I wish to express my deep thanks to the Univer-
sity of Rome Tor Vergata, and to its Rector, Professor Giuseppe Novelli.
In this work, as in other research projects I have conducted in recent years, I
have had ample opportunity to appreciate the rigor and courtesy of the staff of
the Vatican Secret Archives, beginning with its Prefect, H.E. Monsignor Sergio
Pagano. In addition to the special thanks I would like to express to him for his
work both as archivist and as historian, I wish to add my gratitude to all his
assistants. Moreover, with regard to the Historical Archives of the Section for
Relations with States of the Secretariat of State, I want to express my gratitude,
in particular, to H.E. Monsignor Paul Richard Gallagher, Secretary for Relations
with States of the Secretariat of State, and to Dr. Johan Ickx, Director of these
Archives.
Within the walls of the Villa Sacchetti, in the great hall of the Laterza pub-
lishing house, I benefited too from observations of Anna Gialluca, Giovanni
Carletti, and Francesco Bartolini: they made this a much better book. I’m
grateful as well for all the support I received at Brill for publishing this book in
English: thanks especially to Laura Morris, Stephanie Paalvast, and Ester Lels.
Thanks, finally, to the translator Peter Spring, for his professionalism and his
willingness to follow the whole project.
 chapter 1

Religion, War, Nation

1.1 ‘La Mala Educación’

Benito Mussolini despised priests. It was against the clergy that the young
socialist agitator directed his most ferocious attacks. His was a total assault
against the conduct, the principles, and the very persons of priests. Mussolini
was more than an agnostic; he was an atheist – just as his father Alessandro
was, and just as were the majority of socialists in the Romagna. To explain
the young Mussolini’s aversion to religion and to priests, Margherita Sarfatti –
­author of the first biography of Il Duce (1925) – placed the emphasis on Benito’s
terrible experiences as a child in the Salesian boarding school at Faenza.
A writer and art critic of great sensibility towards the aesthetics of propaganda,
Sarfatti set herself the task of tracing the extraordinary portrait of Italy’s new
Caesar, her man of destiny.1 To that man she had been confidante, lover, and
intellectual mentor. To create the legend, Margherita spun a web of contradic-
tions that subtly augmented the fascination exerted by Mussolini: the son of
a blacksmith who disdained the masses, the internationalist who became the
prophet of a new nationalism.2 The accomplished Sarfatti (born into a wealthy
family, brought up in the family palazzo on the Canal Grande in Venice, mar-
ried at the age of 18) tried to recreate in her biography the first metamorphosis
of the man destined to guide the fate of Italy. She transformed the blasphem-
ing socialist who had spent much of his youthful energy vilifying the Italian
priesthood, the pretume italiano (as he contemptuously called it),3 into the
champion of Fascism who aspired to become the defender of Catholic ro-
manità. It was thus, in The Life of Benito Mussolini, first published in English in
London in 1925 and only in the following year in Italy with the title Dux, that
Sarfatti recounted Benito’s ‘prison’ in the Salesian boarding school at Faenza.4
The young Benito had arrived at the boarding school of Don Giovanni Bosco
(founder of the Salesians) in September 1892. He was nine years old. He had

1 Ph.V. Cannistraro and B.R. Sullivan, Margherita Sarfatti. L’altra donna del duce, Milano:
­Mondadori, 1993, 332–343.
2 Ibid., 337.
3 B. Mussolini, “I patriotti”, La lotta di classe (7 October 1911), now in Idem, Opera omnia, (eds.)
E. and D. Susmel, Firenze: La Fenice, 1951–1963, vol. 4, 75–76.
4 On the influence of this book on the collective image of Mussolini see L. Passerini, Mussolini
immaginario. Storia di una biografia, 1915–1939, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991, 43ff.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi 10.1163/9789004328792_003

Religion, War, Nation 13

completed his first two years in primary school at Dovia (or Dovia di Predap-
pio, in the province of Forlì-Cesena). He had been an alert, intelligent, but
­rebellious child. His unruly, pugnacious character was still vividly recalled by
his school friends at Predappio in their oral reminiscences to another biogra-
pher, Antonio Beltramelli, in 1923.5 To prevent the young Benito from turning
into a juvenile delinquent, his mother Rosa Maltoni thought of the Salesian
boarding school at Faenza. It seems that the school had been recommended to
her by one of her friends, Palmira, and that she had succeeded in convincing
her husband Alessandro, making him believe that it was a secular college.6 It
was to be a traumatic experience for the innocent young boy who, in Sarfatti’s
reconstruction, “was very fond of birds” and in particular “a certain breed of
small owls”, and who had regularly gone to church at Dovia with his mother and
grandmother.7 In describing his first religious experiences, Sarfatti lets Benito
speak for himself. It is he himself who recounts the deep emotion aroused in
his ingenuous soul by the “lights from the candles”, the “penetrating odor from
the incense”, the “colors of the sacred vestments”, the “long-drawn-out singing
of the congregation” and the “sound of the organ”.8 In short, the child, up until
that moment, was on the right road to becoming a good Catholic. But then
he arrived at the boarding school. To Margherita the statesman Mussolini di-
vulged the most lacerating of the various humiliations he had suffered at the
hands of the strict Salesian masters. One such experience was the occasion
on which, for some “grave infraction”, he had been deprived of recreation for
twelve days:

Four hours per day, relegated to a corner, he remained motionless, on

his knees, under the surveillance of a teacher, while the other boys were
enjoying themselves. He doesn’t remember too clearly, but it seems to
him that to make the punishment even harsher, they scattered kernels of
maize on the floor.
What is certain is that at the end of the twelve days, he had two deep
wounds on his joints.
‘Mussolini, you have a conscience black as hell’, the rector of the col-
lege whispered in a somber voice into his ear. ‘Go to confess yourself
tomorrow’.

5 A. Beltramelli, L’uomo nuovo, Milano: Mondadori, 1923, 70.

6 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 222.
7 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1925, 31.
8 Ibid.
14 chapter 1

But the spirit of the little boy, in a state of quivering revolt, did not
let itself be cowed. To escape the obligation of confession, so vilely im-
posed on him, he spent the night in the open, interminable hours of dark-
ness, crouched behind a pillar in the courtyard. Two dreadful guard dogs
barked at him; the ten-year-old boy trembled; if they attacked him, they
would tear him to pieces. But, however much he trembled, he didn’t want
to give in.
‘No, no! They humiliated me too much. I was determined to have my
revenge!’9

Admittedly, Sarfatti, the “female dictator of culture”10 who was dedicated to

investing the fledgling Duce with powerful emotions, so that the Italians could
more easily identify with him,11 omitted to point out that the ‘infraction’ in
question was the attempted stabbing of a classmate.12 That doesn’t alter the
fact that the two years that Mussolini spent at the Don Bosco were the tough-
est of his childhood and adolescence.
In the boarding school, religion was part of an educational system based
on punitive methods, close surveillance, and treatments differentiated on the
basis of the different social status of the boarders: “In conformity with the
evangelical equality preached by Christ, the Salesians had divided us into three
tables: noble, middle and common. The first paid sixty lire per month, the sec-
ond forty-five and the last, thirty. I, naturally, sat at the common table, which
was the most numerous”.13 Such humiliations would be recalled anew in his
Conversations with Emil Ludwig, in the spring of 1932: “Could I ever forget the
ants in the bread of the third class? But the fact that we children were divided
into classes is something that still makes my blood boil!”14 Religious services
and prayers punctuated, as in every Catholic boarding school, the main mo-
ments of the day. The day began with mass, celebrated every day before break-
fast, immediately after the reveille bell had rung at six in winter and at five in
summer. All the lessons began and ended with a prayer, while during lunch
one of the older pupils would read out aloud the Bollettino salesiano. Then, in
the evening, the boarders, before re-entering their dormitory, would go with

9 M.G. Sarfatti, Dux, Mondadori, Milano 1926, 39 (omitted from the original English edition).
10 Thus Ph.V. Cannistraro and B.R. Sullivan, Margherita Sarfatti, 364.
11 On the application of these rhetorical procedures to Mussolini see A. Gibelli, Il popolo
bambino. Infanzia e nazione dalla Grande Guerra a Salò, Torino: Einaudi, 2005, 256–257.
12 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 231.
13 Ibid., 224–225.
14 E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (1932), Milano: Mondadori, 1965, 195.
Religion, War, Nation 15

their teachers, divided into teams, to the theatre room. There they would re-
cite a collective prayer of thanksgiving, then one by one they would kiss the
headmaster’s hand. Having reached their dormitory, the boys would then get
undressed in silence, so as not to disturb the reading (again!) of the Bollettino
salesiano.
Discipline and formal respect for religion were the two components that
Mussolini found most insufferable to bear. Of the third component, fear, he
only became fully conscious years later. The young Benito was certainly not
original in denouncing the long-consolidated mainstays of religious educa-
tion; nor was he particularly acute. For instance, he later described the fear
instilled in him by preparation for First Communion:

In the week before the day fixed for my First Communion, I did not go to
school. They had placed me together with the other communicants and
had entrusted us to a friar whose job it was to prepare us to receive Jesus
in a worthy and holy way. From morning to evening – catechism, rosaries,
sermons, sacred history. They made us learn by heart two or three psalms
in Latin, which we repeated aloud, without any of us understanding a
thing. On the evening before the event, the friar addressed us with a men-
acing exhortation. “Beware – he told us – lest any of you present yourself
to receive the host unless you have a soul complexly pure of every sin.
Confess everything! Don’t try to hide yourselves. God sees you and can
strike you. At Turin a young boy came to take the Eucharist in a state of
mortal sin, but no sooner had he knelt at the balustrade of the altar than
he was struck by a grave illness and fell dead to the ground, as if struck
by lightning”.
This episode filled us with terror. I thought it was true. I believed that
this youth had been reached by the finger of God. I feared for myself. The
friar gave us some other useful instructions. He told us to observe the
strictest fast; he warned us that if the particle [of the host] were stuck to
our palate we should not put our finger into our mouth to remove it, and
other exhortations of this kind.
I was very worried. I confessed myself on Saturday evening. I kept
nothing back: the sins I had committed, those I had not committed, but
thought of, and those I had neither thought of nor committed. Melius
erat abundare quam deficere. The image of the boy struck dead never
left me for a minute. At night, I made another diligent examination of
conscience. I rummaged, and rummaged again, I searched like a thief
through all the furniture and fittings of my “interior world”, I turned it all
upside-down and discovered other pardonable sins that I had f­orgotten
16 chapter 1

on my first interview with the confessor. In the morning, I hastened to

ask for a “supplement” of confession, which was granted to me: new peni-
tence and new absolution.15

Once the first year had passed, however, Mussolini was ever less willing to
accept the strict religious regimen imposed by the Salesians. He decided no
longer to attend morning mass, pretending on several occasions to be ill, and
undergoing frequent and harsh punishments as a result. Finally, dejection, in-
discipline and rebellion exploded in the episode of violence mentioned above,
which precluded any chance of continuing his education at the Don Bosco.
On leaving the boarding school at Faenza in June 1894, Mussolini com-
pleted his studies at Forlimpopoli, at the Istituto Giosuè Carducci, whose
­headmaster was the brother of the poet. There he remained until July 1901. In
this transfer, too, some biographers have wished to see a sign of predestination.
A ­fellow-student of Mussolini later recounted to Silvio Bertoldi the spontane-
ous i­ntuition vouchsafed to the Bard of the goddess Roma when faced by a
barely sixteen-year old Mussolini during a visit Carducci paid to the institute
in 1899: “a very talented youth who could cause a lot of good or a lot of harm
to Italy”.16
It would of course be an exaggeration to suggest that the years of childhood
and adolescence prefigured Mussolini’s political career, as the hagiographers
of the regime claimed to demonstrate during the ventennio and apologists of
the illustrated magazines in the post-war period. No less exaggerated is the
­importance attributed by the peddlers of pseudo-folklore to his alleged rom-
agnolità, to the fact of having been born and bred in a region seething with
­agitators of every kind.17 It was not the Romagna, but quite different circum-
stances, that helped to shape the political culture of Mussolini, beginning with
his voluntary exile in Switzerland, which marked the beginning of his real ac-
tivity as a political agitator in the circles frequented by Italian working-class
and socialist emigrés. Above all, it was the ten years that he spent in Milan from
1912 to 1922 that were to prove decisive in his political formation. Nonetheless,
it is difficult to imagine, in fin-de-siècle Italy, a region more shot through with
political ferments than was the Romagna: anarchists, republicans, M ­ arxists
(both orthodox and heterodox varieties), internationalists, anti-clericalists

15 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, in Opera omnia, vol. 33, 230–231.

16 On Carducci’s brief encounter with the adolescent Benito: S. Bertoldi, Mussolini tale e
quale, Milano: Longanesi, 1975, 26–27.
17 R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 1883–1920, Torino: Einaudi 1995 (1st edition 1965), 4.
Religion, War, Nation 17

and garibaldini were thick on the ground, and what they all had in common
were revolutionary prospects, variously formulated, variously expressed.
Just such a revolutionary political culture had been inculcated in Musso-
lini by his father Alessandro: beginning with the name he chose for his son,
in honour of Benito Juárez, the Mexican revolutionary of Zapotec origin who
had studied law and who, having risen through the ranks of the judiciary to
become President of Mexico in 1861, had placed the fight against ecclesiasti-
cal privileges at the center of his own government programme. He closed the
convents and nationalized their property.18 The internationalist blacksmith
of Dovia was a born anarchist who became a socialist, rather like another
­Romagnole ­anarchist, the Imola-born Andrea Costa, who had renounced his
anarchist principles in 1879, espoused the socialist cause, and was later elected
to Parliament in 1882, an election to which Alessandro too had contributed. His
­socialism never coincided with Marxism; it always remained interlaced with
anarchist ferments.19 This meant inter alia that the violent action against reli-
gion and against priests – tools of repression in the hands of the bourgeoisie –
was an essential ingredient in the struggle for the triumph of the good, the
beautiful and the true. “O priests – he wrote in May 1889 – the day is not far dis-
tant on which you will cease to be useless and false apostles of a lying religion
and on which, abandoning the past of falsehood and obscurantism, you will
embrace truth and reason, and consign your cassock to the purifying flames of
progress and don instead the honorable jacket of the manual laborer”.20
The influence of Carducci, on the other hand, was recalled by Mussolini
himself many years later. That was on 21 June 1921 when he made his debut
in Parliament and pronounced his first speech in the chamber in Palazzo
­Madama on the occasion of the traditional debate on the policy of response
to the speech of the Crown that had opened the 26th legislature. Mussolini’s
speech was important, even epochal, and it is one to which we shall have to
recur. It suffices here to cite the allusion to the spell cast on the young Benito
by the author of the Inno a Satana, undoubtedly mentioned by the new mp to
attenuate the much-rumored atheism of his youth, but nonetheless plausible:

18 Juárez: historia y mito, (ed.) J. Zoraida Vázquez, México: El Colegio de México, 2010. On the
conflict between Church and State under Juárez see M. Savage Carmona, “Cultura católica
y modernidad liberal”, in La cruz de maiz. Política, religión e identidad en México: entre
la crisis colonial y la crisis de modernidad, (ed.) M.I. Campos Goenaga, M. De Giuseppe,
México: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 2011, 133–162.
19 V. Emiliani, I tre Mussolini. Luigi, Alessandro, Benito, Torino: Baldini e Castoldi, 1997, 25ff.
20 The passage is quoted in R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 7.
18 chapter 1

All of us, between the ages of 15 and 25, drank at the well of the literature
of Carducci. We hated the “old and cruel Vatican wolf” of which Carducci
spoke, I think, in his ode To Ferrara. We had heard him speak of “a pope
shrouded in mystery” to which he had opposed a poet as bard of the true
Augustus and of the future. We had heard him speak of a Tiberina “sated
[sic] with black tresses” who would teach the pilgrim adventuring to-
wards St. Peter’s about the rubble of a nameless ruin.21

However effective, Mussolini’s quotations from Carducci were somewhat gar-

bled and had no little malice, especially the last – not only because Tiberina
was not “sated”, but a “virgin” with black tresses, and said to the pilgrim “I am
the ruin/Of a nameless infamy”, but also because Mussolini forgot to men-
tion that the verses in question came from another ode written by C ­ arducci,
namely the one dedicated to the memory of Giuseppe Monti and Gaetano
Tognetti Martyrs of Italian Law, the two young Roman patriots arrested in the
autumn of 1867 for having participated in the civic insurrection in support
of the ­garibaldini marching towards Rome, and guillotined on the Velabrum
on 24 November 1868 (when Pius ix was Pope). This, for Carducci and many
contemporary observers was the Vatican infamy that had made such a deep
­impression on public opinion and in the press, and had fomented popular un-
rest in the streets of Rome.22
Even though it was not at Forlimpopoli that Mussolini was trained as a
political activist, it was there, during his years of study at the Istituto Gio-
suè ­Carducci, that he had first erected his anticlerical barricade against the
Church. As he would write in his autobiography of 1911–1912, following this pe-
riod of study and of life, concluded with his graduation in the summer of 1901,
he had abandoned “ecclesiastical practices […] for some considerable time”.23
It would however be the years spent in Switzerland – from 1902 to 1904 –
that would mark in a decisive way the essential traits of the political personal-
ity of the young socialist and characterize their anti-Christian stamp. It was
at Lausanne, in particular, that Mussolini was introduced into the Italian so-
cialist circles in the city, consisting mainly of unskilled workers, bricklayers,

21 Camera dei Deputati, Atti Parlamentari, Legislatura xxvi, Discussioni, 21 June 1921, 89–98.
22 G. Carducci, Giambi ed epodi (1906), libro 1/6. Per Giuseppe Monti e Gaetano Tognetti Mar-
tiri del Diritto Italiano. The last stanza reads: “E tra i ruderi in fior la tiberina/Vergin di nere
chiome/Al peregrin dirà: Son la ruina/Di un’onta senza nome”. See G. Verucci, L’Italia laica
prima e dopo l’unità 1848–1876, Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1996, 284–285.
23 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 242.
Religion, War, Nation 19

carpenters and blacksmiths, all of them involved in one way or another in the
building trade and regarded with little sympathy by the Swiss population. It
was at Lausanne – where the Federazione Italiana in Svizzera and the Sindacato
Italiano Muratori e Manovali, had their offices – that Mussolini got to know
Giacinto Menotti Serrati in 1903. With this revolutionary socialist, who had
only recently returned from New York, and with the Russian agitator Angelica
Balabanoff, Mussolini shared both political experiences and Bohemian life.24
Balabanoff (for whom Margherita Sarfatti would reserve some rather unflat-
tering epithets: ‘ugly’, ‘small, misshaped, hunch-backed’, a ‘freak’ of Slavic na-
ture, ‘hysterical’, ‘ostentatiously shameless’, even if ‘extraordinarily intelligent’
and endowed with a brilliant and ‘infectious’ oratorical style)25 was to remain
close to Mussolini for a decade. And it was her Benitočka, whom she would
elect to have at her side as assistant editor-in-chief of Avanti! (daily of the Ital-
ian Socialist Party) in 1912.26 It was to him that she would reveal the holy grail
of historical materialism, showering him with books on history and political
economy, and opening up for him new horizons in German philosophy.27
The revolutionary Mussolini presented by Renzo De Felice acquired a
particular component of his socialism from Serrati: namely, an aggressive
­anti-religious activism that identified tolerance with reformism.28 This was a
far from orthodox position for an Italian socialist to hold at the turn of the cen-
tury, committed on the contrary to a partial rectification of the anticlericalism
that had represented an essential component of its own educational action to-
wards the masses.29 At least since the 1890s, an approach of more direct Marxist-
Engelsian derivation, tending to downplay, or reduce to a secondary level, the
theoretical implications of the religious problem and privilege instead the real
needs of political action, began to be asserted in the Socialist Italian Party (psi).30
The reform of the party’s anticlericalism had been prompted not only by the
German Social Democratic Party, which in its Erfurt Programme of 1891 had
defined religion as a “private affair”, but also by the wish to stem the anarchic-
Bakuninist component by overcoming the pitfalls of its simplification in the

24 See A. La Mattina, Mai sono stata tranquilla. La vita di Angelica Balabanoff, la donna che
ruppe con Mussolini e Lenin, Torino: Einaudi, 2011.
25 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 114–115.
26 See A. La Mattina, Mai sono stata tranquilla, 51 ss.
27 Y. De Begnac, Taccuini Mussoliniani, (ed.) F. Perfetti, Bologna: il Mulino, 1990, 4–6.
28 See R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 39.
29 S. Pivato, “L’anticlericalismo ‘religioso’ nel socialismo italiano fra Otto e Novecento”, Italia
contemporanea 154 (1984): 29–50.
30 On the attenuation of anticlericalism in the Italian Socialist Party see G. Zunino, La
­questione cattolica nella sinistra italiana (1919–1939), Bologna: il Mulino, 11–22.
20 chapter 1

religious field. Towards the end of the century, the need to demolish the con-
stricting walls within which Italian socialism had cultivated its own attitude
to Catholicism also inspired the reflections of the Italian Marxist theoretician
Antonio Labriola. At the same time, Gaetano Salvemini began to make his
­appeals, altogether new in tone, to Italian socialism, urging it to take seriously
the Catholic forces in the country and abandon the triviality and superficiality
that had characterized the anticlerical activism of previous decades.31
In the rhetoric of the psi’s painstaking work of propaganda, aimed in the
first place at redeeming the peasant masses from their immemorial poverty
and deprivation, “the dialogue – formal and substantial – with Christianity is
constant”.32 Much of the socialist propaganda linked to the rural world focused
on the egalitarian themes of the primitive Church, and dissociated itself ex-
plicitly from anticlericalism, which it regarded as a product of bourgeois cul-
ture. For example, a strong commitment was made, at the turn of the century,
by personalities like Camillo Prampolini in the rural world of Reggio Emilia
and of Francesco Paolini in that of Lazio and Umbria; they helped to develop
a socialist educational strategy enriched with references to the Gospels and,
as such, easier for peasants to understand and accept.33 Pamphlets, periodi-
cals and handbills thus preached a form of socialism committed to recovering
some aspects of primitive Christianity without renouncing the critique of the
ecclesiastical institution, indeed by attributing characteristics of spiritual re-
birth precisely to the social revolution. Moreover, the modernist ferment itself
had produced a first direct rapprochement between Socialists and Catholics,
which may not have produced any startling results but had helped to dissolve
the image of Catholicism as a compact and impervious doctrinal bloc.34
In an article published at Christmas 1902, the then nineteen-year-old Musso-
lini had himself insinuated the motif of the proletarian Jesus, betrayed through
the course of centuries by men of the Church.35 But within the world of Ital-
ian socialism he began to follow, indeed to promote, the more decidedly and

31 Ibid., 15–20.
32 Thus G. Turi, “Aspetti dell’ideologia del Psi (1890–1910)”, Studi storici 21 (1980): 61–94. On
aspects of the propaganda of the psi between the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century see M. Ridolfi, Il Psi e la nascita del partito di massa, 1892–1922, Roma-Bari: Laterza,
1992, 181ff.
33 A. Nesti, “Gesù socialista”. Una tradizione popolare italiana (1880–1920), Torino: Claudiana,
1974, and S. Dominici, La lotta senz’odio. Il socialismo evangelico del “Seme” (1901–1915), Mi-
lano: FrancoAngeli, 1995.
34 P. Scoppola, Crisi modernista e rinnovamento religioso, Bologna: il Mulino, 1969, 311.
35 B. Mussolini, “Il Natale umano”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (27 December 1902), now in
Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 25–26.
Religion, War, Nation 21

violently atheist, anti-religious and anti-Catholic agenda.36 In doing so, he fol-

lowed not so much in the footsteps of Serrati, as an outlook that was prevalent
in the circles of Italian socialism in Switzerland. Thus, in the pages of Avvenire
del Lavoratore, the organ of the Italian Socialist Party in Switzerland (psis),
a line of programmatic and relentless anticlericalism had begun to be imple-
mented since 1900, as a direct response to the spread among Italian workers
of the Opera Bonomelli, a charity founded by Monsignor Geremia Bonomelli
and aimed at providing welfare to disadvantaged emigrants. Antonio Vergna-
nini, writing from Berne, had described its various ramifications, all of them
Catholic: clubs, beer halls, soup kitchens, amateur dramatic societies, bands
and fanfares, even evening dances. This explains why the ‘campaign against
clerical propaganda’ was a policy guideline adopted by the psis at its Lugano
conference in February 1902. It was aimed at propaganda different from that
in use in Italy, and founded on public discussion of every economic, political
or religious question with conferences, debates and schools.37 Free thought
was in any case the obligatory currency among Italian exiles and intellectuals
in Switzerland, most of them congregated in Geneva. It was here that a long-
standing member of the psis, the printer Luigi Piazzalunga, had founded the
‘Biblioteca Internazionale Razionalista’, a series of books and pamphlets on
which Serrati and Mussolini both collaborated – the former by acting as edi-
tor and by publishing two pamphlets, La Bibbia è immorale and La dottrinetta
razionalista, which enjoyed considerable diffusion and proportionate confis-
cation; the latter by publishing the text of a lecture entitled L’uomo e la divinità
(1904), which we will return to later.
When in 1906 Serrati was prosecuted for defamation by the Opera Bono-
melli, he found himself having to defend himself from the accusation of ­being
anti-Italian: – a charge conducted through the well-known thesis, propagated
especially among Italian emigrants and colonists, which identified ­Catholicism
as one of the distinctive traits on which the Italian identity was founded. “Who
speaks of Italy here? – Serrati is said to have replied – I’m the son of a fervent
follower of Garibaldi, who taught me the love of freedom; you are the priests
who have always struggled against freedom and the integrity of Italy”.38 Serrati
presented, in short, quite different credentials of italianità. He thus sought to
justify his conduct by linking himself with the main democratic protagonist of
the Risorgimento – involved in a constant polemic against the Catholic Church

36 P. Scoppola, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, Bologna: il

­ ulino, 1966, 363.
M
37 A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione 1899–1911, Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1972, 76.
38 Ibid., 76–77.
22 chapter 1

and the papacy after 186039 – and by alluding to the idea, of Machiavellian
origin and still widespread in the average Italian culture and opinion of the
time, that the Papal State had historically represented the major obstacle to
the achievement of the unity of the Italian peninsula. However, Serrati’s battle
against priests and Catholicism did not have its root in the liberal anticlerical-
ism of the Risorgimento. Serrato thus expressed his dislike of what he called
“the new philistines of homeopathic politics who have invented a cure for an-
ticlericalism, anti-alcoholism, and secular morality”.40 In his view, the struggle
of labour against capital was the priority. His battle against the clerical army
was thus focused on other issues: the secular propensity towards a resigned
acquiescence which was translated into non-involvement in the working-
class struggle, or even into strike-breaking, supported, in his view, by priests
and more particularly – in the context of Swiss emigration – by the Opera
Bonomelli.
Yet, in the anti-religious campaign, Musssolini was closer to another Italian
socialist than he was to Serrati, namely Angelo Oliviero Olivetti. This was a
man in whose house he was a guest on several occasions and who was distin-
guished in Lugano for the centrality he attributed to the anti-religious struggle
in political and trade-union action. He was one of the few whose role in the
creation of fascism Mussolini, reluctant to mention those who had contrib-
uted to his political ascent and ideological formation, would recognize pub-
licly once the regime was fully established.41 The Piedmontese lawyer, who had
been pressured into crossing the frontier in 1898, formed part of the executive
committee of the psis since 1902, but his interests were predominantly cultur-
al and very soon had come to be concentrated on propaganda for free thought.
In dispute with the positions by now adopted by the Socialist Parties of the
main European countries, Olivetti asserted, also in opposition to Serrati, that
socialism was, in the first place, anti-religious: “The wish to insist on the im-
moral and Jesuitical formula that religion is a private affair, is an aberration”.42
The question was particularly close to Olivetti’s heart. In September 1904, he
intervened with Angelica Balabanoff in one of the most important interna-
tional congresses on Free Thought, held in Rome, and dedicated to ‘the work

39 See G. Verucci, Cattolicesimo e laicismo nell’età contemporanea, Milano: FrancoAngeli,

2001, 214–222.
40 A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione, 77.
41 B. Mussolini, La dottrina del fascismo (Enciclopedia Treccani, 1932), in Idem, Opera omnia,
vol. 34, 122.
42 L’Avvenire del lavoratore (10 September 1904).
Religion, War, Nation 23

of confessional charities’. The Russian intellectual spoke on what had by now

become a classic theme of Marxism: the Church at the service of capital. But
Olivetti tackled a new and quite specific question, linked to the present-day
militancy of the Church among Italian manual workers in Switzerland: Priests
and emigration.43
The breach between Olivetti and Serrati would however take place on the
terrain of trade-unionism, which became for the former so central as to force
him to abandon the psis and to found Le Pagine Libere at Lugano in 1906. This
fortnightly review of ‘politics, science and art’ was destined to become one of
the most important organs of Italian revolutionary trade unionism. Its con-
tributors included Paolo Orano, Arturo Labriola, and, as we shall see, Mussolini
himself.
Among Italian emigrants in Switzerland Mussolini speedily made a name
for himself for his brilliance as a public speaker and especially for his ability
to conduct public debates. His favorite subjects, during this period, were anti-
religious and anti-militaristic.44 He moved between Berne, Lausanne, G ­ eneva,
Basel and Zurich, earning his keep by working as an unskilled labourer and
jack-of-all-trades. It was on one of these occasions that he tackled the religious
question in a more specific manner. Already in February 1903, ­Mussolini had
taken the floor during a conference held by Alfredo Taglialatela in Lausanne.
Member of the Methodist Episcopal Church and pastor in Rome, Tagliala-
tela was in Switzerland for a series of missionary conferences among Italian
emigrants.45 Some questions had remained open in the debate, and so it was
­decided to organize a subsequent debate dedicated to the existence of God.
­After some postponements, the debate between Mussolini and Taglialatela
took place in the Grande Salle of the Maison du Peuple on the evening of 26
March 1904.46 In a hall packed with thousands of people who had paid to wit-
ness the debate, Mussolini launched his personal challenge to God. It was
­perhaps the first great public debate in which he engaged as protagonist, and
the pressure was on him to make an impression on his comrades. According
to Balabanoff,

43 Congresso internazionale del Libero Pensiero (Roma, 20, 21, 22 September 1904). Contributo
al tema delle opere di carità confessionali, Lugano: Coop. Tip. Sociale, 1904.
44 A. Balabanoff, Il traditore Mussolini. Piccole curiosità non del tutto inutili a sapersi, (ed.)
M. Giudice, Milano: Casa editrice Avanti!, 1945, 18.
45 R. Bassanesi, “Il contraddittorio di Mussolini sulla divinità”, Protagora 33 (1964): 51–66.
46 In his autobiography of 1911–1912 Mussolini reported, erroneously, the date of 23 March
for the public debate: B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 254.
24 chapter 1

Benito Mussolini began by saying: “Give me a watch. I’ll give ten minutes’
time to the Almighty. If he fails to strike me down within this period of
time, that means he doesn’t exist. I challenge Him”.47

Each of the two speakers spoke for one hour. Each had the right to an extra
half-hour to reply to his adversary. The whole meeting took place in an at-
mosphere of mutual respect and ended just short of midnight. Four months
later Mussolini summed up his argument in the pamphlet L’uomo e la divinità,
a pocket-sized booklet of 47 pages, the first of the ‘Biblioteca Internazionale
­Razionalista’ publications.48 It’s now a bibliographical rarity, since Il Duce,
during his first years in government, seems to have ordered the withdrawal
of the few copies that had entered Italian public libraries.49 It consists of four
parts: Mussolini’s intervention at the conference in Lausanne, revised and
supplemented; a résumé, with commentary, of the main passages of Tagliala-
tela’s reply; Mussolini’s further refutation, which is only found in the written
text, since the Methodist pastor had obtained the privilege of being the last to
speak; and a brief appendix on evangelism. Mussolini’s arguments were not in-
spired by the historical materialism of Marxist inspiration, but were developed
from some cobbled-together postulates, ultimately positivistic in derivation.
The task that confronted Mussolini at the debate, moreover, was to show him-
self well prepared and convincing to a largely uneducated public. The thesis
was epitomized by Mussolini in these terms: “God does not exist. – Religion in
science is absurd, in practice immoral, in man a disease”.50 The demonstration
of the non-existence of God revolved around the affirmation of matter as the
only existing reality proved by science; on the contradictions between the vari-
ous conceptions of God; on the negation of every form of creationism; and on
the idea that religion was the result of man’s fear and ignorance.
In socialist and anarchist circles, Mussolini’s intervention was considered
a great success. The anarchist weekly in Genoa, L’Allarme, spoke enthusiasti-
cally about it, hailing its author as “our dear friend B.M.”, and underlining the
contrast between him and the “sinister face of the illustrious rascal Serrati”
who poked his head down from the gallery, “wishing, he too, this shameless

47 A. Balabanoff, Il traditore Mussolini, 18. The episode inspired the incipit of the film Vincere
(2009), even though, for screenplay purposes, the director Marco Bellocchio placed it at
Trento.
48 B. Mussolini, L’uomo e la divinità, Lugano: Biblioteca internazionale di propaganda
­razionalista, 1904.
49 R. Bassanesi, Il contraddittorio di Mussolini sulla divinità, 64.
50 B. Mussolini, L’uomo e la divinità, 1.
Religion, War, Nation 25

man, to make his presence known”.51 Henceforth Mussolini was considered

the expert on the question.52 For the ‘Biblioteca Internazionale Razionalista’
he also translated from the French, and annotated, A.H. Malot’s I ciarlatani
neri!.53 The psis branch in Geneva commissioned him to conduct a campaign
against religious ‘sects’, including the one in Lausanne in June where he par-
ticipated in a public debate with a major personality of European socialism,
Émile Vandervelde. The Belgian evangelizer was among the 23 interlocutors
of an international inquiry on socialism and anticlericalism, launched by the
review of the French Gauche Le Mouvement socialiste between 1902 and 1903,
as a contribution to the formulation of the stance to be adopted on the pro-
posed legislation on the separation between State and Church: the famous Loi
de séparation des Églises et des État, which was to be finally approved on 6 De-
cember 1905.54 Margherita Sarfatti would recall the episode in her biography
of Mussolini, reserving for Vandervelde the role of ‘bête noir of revolutionaries’.
He was, she says, “not a man of turbulent spirit or of sanguine, nervous, dispo-
sition”, and had a crude, old-fashioned notion of socialism, ‘at once scientific
and evangelical’, even comparing him with the Emilian santone Prampolini:

Vandervelde came to Geneva, just for the purpose of speaking of Jesus

Christ, a theme of evangelical propaganda close to the heart of the ‘san-
tone of Reggio Emilia’ ever since the time of [Mussolini’s] pamphlet La
predica di Natale, on the subversive Jesus Christ and the communism of
the apostles.55

However it was Vandervelde who emerged victorious from this contest.56

­ ussolini, indeed, in his autobiography of 1911–1912 would admit so much,
M
saying that the meeting had been ‘disastrous’.57 The Belgian parliamentar-
ian has defended the Erfurt thesis of religion as a private affair – a thesis
already ­expounded in some of his writings and in his replies to a question-
naire of 1902–1903. He supported the notion that socialists had to fight for the
­separation of the Church from the State, accept all those who had decided

51 A. Rosada, Serrati nell’emigrazione, 79.

52 R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 36.
53 A.H. Malot, I ciarlatani neri!, Lugano: Biblioteca internazionale di propaganda razionali­
sta, 1904.
54 É. Poulat, “Socialisme et anticléricalisme. Une enquête socialiste internationale (1902–
1903)”, Archives des sciences sociales des religions 10 (1960): 109–131.
55 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 104–105.
56 Ibid.
57 B. Mussolini, La mia vita, 257.
26 chapter 1

to combat capitalism, and defend in any case the freedom of religious con-
viction. Mussolini opposed Vandervelde with a line of uncompromising athe-
ism, maintaining that the struggle against the Church was an essential com-
ponent of the socialist battle. He had written so already in his article on ‘the
horrors of the convent’, published in the journal Proletario on 30 August 1903
– an article in which he had presented a report on the survey conducted by
the socialist Arbeiter Zeitung on the Sisters of the Good Shepherd, which had
brought to light the atrocious system of physical punishments inflicted on the
­convent girls: “­ Making the sign of the cross on the ground with their tongue;
kept kneeling on two sharp stones; blindfolds and asses’ ears; fasting to the
point of starvation; straightjackets; vigils over the corpses of companions who
had died following the infamies subjected on them; beatings over the palm of
the hand with iron rods; long religious exercises, interminable days of work”.58
The disciplinary regimen – which doubtless excited some autobiographical
­resonance – was not considered an exception, but was, in his view, but a fur-
ther confirmation that “torture lies hidden in the intimate spirit of religion”. It
was a demonstration that religion emerged from the restricted sphere of the
‘private affair’, to reveal itself blatantly as an “institution that tends to political
power to perpetuate ignorance and economic exploitation”. Against it, conse-
quently, there remained nothing but disdain and repudiation.59

1.2 Political Anticlericalism, Pornographic Anticlericalism

The anticlerical agenda long remained the fil rouge of Mussolini’s political and
journalistic activity. When, on returning to Italy, he stopped at Oneglia (Ser-
rati’s hometown), after a couple of years spent between Dovia and Tolmezzo,
he obtained, thanks to his contacts with Serrati, the de facto editorship of the
local socialist weekly La Lima. He then proceeded to sign almost all his articles
with the pseudonym ‘Vero eretico’ (True Heretic). In his articles the religious
theme erupted often and sometimes in a tasteless way: for instance, when on
21 March 1908, in an anecdotic interjection, he told a joke about crocodiles and
missionaries:

Some African explorers, having recently returned to London, say that the
crocodiles have formed the wise habit of only eating missionary priests
and friars!

58 B. Mussolini, “Gli orrori del chiostro”, Il Proletario (30 August 1903), now in Idem., Opera
omnia, vol. 1, 37–39.
59 Ibid.
Religion, War, Nation 27

Strange! At the same time they have lost their other bad habit of crying
after their meal.60

In other cases, the vulgarity went to more violent extremes, but at least was
prompted by political questions of greater moment. For instance, in an arti-
cle published in La Lima on 4 April 1908 the ‘Vero eretico’ directed some of
his most rabid darts, Carduccian in inspiration, against ‘the old wolf’ of the
Vatican:

Through the empty modern phraseology borrowed for the occasion, the
old wolf has tried to dissimulate its reactionary nature, but failed in the
attempt. […]
We have to recognize that the Catholic phalanxes lack shame, but not
daring. But your game is up, O black microbes, as lethal for the human
being as the microbes of tuberculosis. History will condemn you! You
are the pale shadows of the Middle Ages. Don’t profane the word free-
dom, you who set alight the bonfires round the stake. Don’t speak to us of
Christianity. The old dirge no longer moves us.61

And he concluded with a profession of anti-Christian faith which seemed, be-

cause of his use of the first person plural, to extend to socialism as a whole or,
at least, to the local section of the psi: “We are decidedly anti-Christian and
consider Christianity as the immortal stigma of contempt for humanity”.62
The volte-face operated by Pius x in Vatican policy towards the Kingdom of
Italy, and the repercussions of the French conflicts between State and Church
following the secularizing measures of 1905, had given renewed strength, in
the language of Italian Socialists, to the notion of the ‘clerical peril’.63 The
threat was now perceived to be all the stronger, because an initial rapproche-
ment with the Church had been improvised at the elections for the ­Chamber
of Deputies in October, called by the Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti to
­exploit the wave of emotion generated by the first general strike in Italy’s

60 Vero eretico, La Lima (21 March 1908), now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 110.
61 Vero eretico, “La libertà nera”, La Lima (4 April 1908), in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1,
111.
62 Ibid.
63 See the two papers of E. Decleva, “Anticlericalismo e lotta politica nell’Italia giolittiana”,
1, “L’‘esempio della Francia’ e i partiti popolari (1901–1904)”, 2 “L’estrema sinistra e la
formazione dei blocchi popolari (1905–1909)”, Nuova rivista storica 52 (1968): 291–354, and
53 (1969): 541–617.
28 chapter 1

­history, organized by the Socialists in the previous month. Authorized by par-

tial exemptions to the non expedit, the first Catholic deputies had thus entered
Parliament.64 These first modest experiments in rapprochement with moder-
ate Catholics, strengthened by the spectre of the ‘red peril’, had led to a silent
collaboration between a significant part of the Italian political class and the
Catholic movement. Having abandoned their former demand for a material
restitution of all the State’s ill-gotten gains, Italian Catholics, in turn, now ac-
cepted the ‘hypothesis’ of the Liberal State, and sought to maneuver within it
to ensure that the Church and the papacy in Italy enjoyed sufficient clout and
influence in the political institutions, in legislation and in society.
This was the climate in which the Minister of Public Instruction Luigi Rava
published a regulation on 6 February 1908, which obliged local authorities
to ­ensure religious teaching in primary schools, if the majority of c­ ounselors
­declare their support for it. Consequently, the question of the non-­confessional
nature of state schools once again came to the fore and inflamed public
­debate.65 In February 1907, Leonida Bissolati, together with other Socialist and
Radical deputies, had presented a motion to the Chamber in which the govern-
ment was asked to abolish every form of religious education. But only in the
last week of September, when the Rava regulation was already in force, did
Parliament examine the motion. Two political alignments clashed during the
debate: that of the opposition parties of the left which aimed at the total secu-
larization of public education, and that of the majority Liberal forces in Parlia-
ment, favorable to guaranteeing religious education in the form prescribed by
the new regulation – not because they recognized the intrinsic value of reli-
gion, but because they thought that the ideals of the Catholic tradition could
help to protect the social order against the dangers of subversion represented,
in their eyes, by the advance of the worker movement.66
The Catholic Unions, which had succeeded the dissolved Opera dei Con-
gressi, had met for their national congress in Genoa from 28 to 30 March 1908
to establish a unified policy on schools to be adopted in the political situation
of the day. The delegates voted for a motion in support of the widest possible
restoration of Catholic education in school curricula. Discussion also focused
on what tactic should be followed in the imminent general elections. Some,

64 G. Formigoni, I cattolici deputati (1904–1918). Tradizione e riforma, Roma: Studium, 1988.

65 L. Pazzaglia, “Stato laico e insegnamento religioso in alcuni dibattiti del primo Novecento
(1902–1904)”, Pedagogia e vita 42 (1980–1981): 379–416.
66 L. Pazzaglia, “Cultura religiosa e libertà d’insegnamento nella riflessione di Tommaso
­Gallarati Scotti”, in Rinnovamento religioso e impegno civile in Tommaso Gallarati Scotti,
(eds.) F. De Giorgi and N. Raponi, Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 1994, 91–136.
Religion, War, Nation 29

such as the Count Edoardo Soderini, suggested that candidates be posed the
question of religious education in schools as the essential condition for ob-
taining the vote of Catholics.67 It was this that, in April 1908, aroused the fury
of Mussolini – the man who some fifteen years later would, with the Gentile
reform, designate the teaching of the Catholic religion as the cornerstone of
primary education. He now attacked the Catholics of Italy gathered for their
congress in Italy, dismissing their claim to invoke “the freedom […] to kill
­liberty” and obtain from the State the authorization “to poison the children of
the people with Christian teaching”.68 In the meantime, the socialist Musso-
lini was busily strengthening his formulation of an anti-Christian conception
through the study of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose influence
he acknowledged for the first time in a three-part essay published in the Pen-
siero romagnolo between 29 November and 13 December 1908 as a response to
a lecture on the German philosopher given by the socialist activist and journal-
ist Claudio Treves at Forlì some time previously.69 As the familiar theme went,
variously treated in previous years, of an obscurantist, repressive and liberti-
cide Christianity, a further accusation was now added to the charge-sheet: the
religion of the Nazarene had opened the way to the triumph of the “morality of
renunciation and resignation”. As a consequence, the right of the strongest, the
rock-bed of Roman civilization, had been subverted by the Christian precepts
of love for our neighbor and compassion.70
Mussolini’s attack on the Church animated all his activity as a journalist and
agitator during the months he spent in Trento. He arrived in the irredentist
city on the evening of 6 February 1909, to assume the twin posts of secretary
of Trentino Secretariat of Labour and of editor-in-chief of its organ, L’Avvenire
del lavoratore. His appointment had probably been supported by Serrati and
Balabanoff. It was based, at least in the official motivations, on the particular
ability demonstrated by Mussolini in anticlerical propaganda. On 29 January
1909, the Secretariat’s executive committee had in fact announced news of the
arrival of the ‘comrade’ Benito Mussolini in the following terms:

Finally our new Executive Committee at its last meeting was able to close
the competition for the post of Secretary of the Trentino Secretariat by
the appointment of comrade Benito Mussolini from Forlì.

67 Atti del congresso per la istruzione ed educazione cristiana del popolo italiano, Firenze:
Ufficio centrale dell’Unione popolare fra i Cattolici d’Italia, 1908, 35.
68 Vero eretico, La libertà nera, cit.
69 B. Mussolini, La filosofia della forza (Postille alla conferenza dell’on. Treves), in Idem, Opera
omnia, vol. 1, 174–184.
70 Ibid., 179–180.
30 chapter 1

The choice could not be better, because Benito Mussolini, apart from
being a proven fighter, is a fervent propagandist, experienced especially
in the field of anticlericalism; he is a cultivated young man, and perfectly
understands the German language, something of great advantage to our
movement.
He will be with us in the early days of February. Sure as we are of inter-
preting the sentiment of all our comrades, we therefore extend a broth-
erly welcome to him and express our hope that he will be able to bring to
our life a new influence and conviction, by which to weaken the arrogant
obduracy of the clerical hydra which still reigns supreme everywhere,
spreading a thick veil of obscurantism over minds and yoking its miser-
able serfs to the vilest servitude.71

In Trentino, which was then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the con-
tention between Socialists and Catholics was long-standing. Catholics formed
the most influential political force in the region. In the regional capital, Trento,
they controlled two newspapers: La Squilla, a weekly edited by Father Costan-
tino Dallabrida, and especially Il Trentino, the most read daily in the region.
Its editor-in-chief since 1905 was Alcide De Gasperi, who, despite being still in
his early twenties, was one of the major exponents of political Catholicism in
Trentino.72 More generally, Catholics exerted major leverage over the econom-
ic and cultural life of the region, not least because in the field of cooperation,
agricultural credit, and professional and cultural associations they enjoyed the
support of the Austrian authorities. The attack against the clerical majority
formed part of the policy of the Italian Socialist Party of Cesare Battisti, with
which Mussolini had almost daily contacts.73
In Trento, Mussolini certainly did not become an irredentist, even though in
contrast to his comrades in the psi he acknowledged the reasons that had led
to irredentism in the first place (in this case to wrest Trentino from its A
­ ustrian
yoke). On the other hand, he radicalized the struggle against the Catholic
­hegemony that had been pursued in previous years by Battisti, by whom he
was invited to contribute to Il Popolo and its weekly supplement Vita Trentina.
Mussolini’s diatribe against the Catholics was virulent and extreme. The past

71 “Cronaca cittadina: il nostro nuovo Segretario”, L’Avvenire del lavoratore (29 January 1909),
now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 1, 282.
72 P. Pombeni, Il primo De Gasperi. La formazione di un leader politico, Bologna: il Mulino,
2007, 79–118.
73 R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 64, and A.J. Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intel-
lectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley- Los Angeles-London: University of California Press,
1979, 80–81.
Religion, War, Nation 31

of the Church, the private life of priests, the excommunication of modernizers,

the political action of De Gasperi, the election of the first ‘Catholic deputies’ –
every occasion and every argument was seized upon to attack the ‘old and
cruel Vatican wolf’.74
That this was to be the leitmotif of comrade Mussolini in Trento was clear
right from his first public intervention in the city. When on the evening of
17 February he met for the first time male and female workers at the Work-
ers’ Association, he seized the occasion to commemorate the anniversary of
the death of Giordano Bruno (burnt at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori on
17 February 1600). And he succeeded in capturing the attention and sympathy
of his auditors who, according to the report published in Battisti’s daily on the
following day, formed the idea that they had before them “an excellent pub-
lic speaker, a persuasive propagandist, a scholar, a man of conviction, and an
enthusiast”:

Yesterday evening, at 8:00 pm, a large number of male and female work-
ers gathered in the Workers’ Association where comrade B. Mussolini,
new secretary of the Secretariat of Labour, was to speak for the first time
to the public, commemorating the anniversary of the death of G. Bruno.
And – it has to be admitted – this first meeting of Mussolini with our
workers could not have been more congenial or had greater success. He
was listened to with the greatest attention and was able to make himself
understood by his auditors, who grasped that they had before them not
only an excellent public speaker and persuasive propagandist, but also –
and especially – a scholar, a man of conviction, an enthusiast able to instil
his excellent lecture with the result of his serious studies, with the force
of his convictions and with the enthusiasm of a man who has a faith, who
defends it and who wishes to inculcate it in others.75

The focus on the dissident Dominican friar Giordano Bruno, on his life and his
theories, was clearly aimed at launching the final assault against churchmen
of every age and making the “irrefutable affirmation” that socialism had no op-
tion but to be the “adversary” of clericalism:

Comrade Mussolini first examined, on the basis of historical records

and appropriate quotations, the whole history of Christianity and

74 The quotation of Carducci is once again that of B. Mussolini, “Vecchia vaticana lupa
­cruenta”, (Il Popolo, 9 August 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 206–208.
75 “Cronaca di Trento”, Il Popolo (18 February 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 283.
32 chapter 1

­ atholicism. He then drew an effective picture of the period that preced-

C
ed Giordano Bruno and that in which the Grande Nolano lived. He then
detailed the phases of his life, and of his trial, and described, in eloquent
terms, the tortures inflicted on the martyr. After presenting his audience
with this vivid and moving biographical outline, he went on to describe
Bruno’s theories, the accusations brought against them at the time and
the reasons that led the Church of Rome to wage war against the great
philosopher. After that, briefly but with expert and often entertaining
touches, he tackled the work of the church ‘in less graceful times’ and
that of the work of the church in our own time, and explained the histori-
cal, philosophical and political reasons why socialism was and must be
the adversary of clericalism: the clericalism which would – if it could –
revive also in our own day […] the age of the stake and of the sentences
of the Holy Office.76

Within a month, the reference to the Holy Office (antecedent of the Inqui-
sition) would pass from the history books to current affairs. For the eagerly
awaited decree of the Holy See’s Supreme Court, which confirmed the excom-
munication of the priest Romolo Murri, arrived on 22 March 1909. The Vatican
intervention was prompted by mainly disciplinary questions. Murri, founder
of the Christian Democratic Movement, had succeeded in the space of a few
years in involving the new Catholic generations, urging them to live in their
own century. That meant jettisoning the theocratic projects of which the eccle-
siastical organization was the tenacious proponent. It meant not allowing the
Church to be paralyzed by the Roman Question and positively accepting the
values and institutions of democracy. But it also meant paying attention to
the social question, the problems of workers. It meant reaching deals with the
­Socialist Party on this terrain.77 In the Italy of Giolitti, and at just the same time
as political alliances were being forged between Liberals and moderate Catho-
lics, the Christian Democratic Movement inspired by Murri had succeeded in
making a breakthrough in various areas: in the North as in the South, but espe-
cially in Emilia Romagna and in the Marche.78 The first ecclesiastical censure

76 Ibid. Giordano Bruno’s nickname, the Grande Nolano, derives from his birthplace, Nola in
Campania.
77 D. Saresella, Romolo Murri e il movimento socialista (1891–1907), Urbino: QuattroVenti,
1994.
78 G. Vecchio, “I seguaci e i sostenitori di Murri in Italia: geografia e identità di un movi-
mento”, in Romolo Murri e i murrismi in Italia e in Europa cent’anni dopo, (eds.) I. Biagioli
et al., Urbino: Quattro Venti, 2004, 299–349.
Religion, War, Nation 33

was imposed on the priest in 1907, following the accentuation of the anti-
clerical tones in his many interventions pronounced during conferences and
­meetings or published in the press. Murri was suspended a divinis on 14 April
1907, ­after Pope Pius x had condemned the National Democratic League,
founded by the Marchigian priest in 1905 as an alternative Christian politi-
cal movement to that of clerical moderatism, with his encyclical Pieni l’animo
(28 July 1906).79 Then, in September 1907, came the banning of the ‘heresy of
the 20th c­ entury’80 with the publication of the encyclical Pascendi dominici
gregis in which Pius x, apart from formulating a detailed condemnation of
modernism, had issued a wide range of disciplinary measures aimed at eradi-
cating its presence in the Catholic Church. Murri however was not discouraged
by such condemnations. He moved forward and presented himself in the gen-
eral elections of 1909 as candidate of the National Democratic League in the
electoral college of Montegiorgio (Marche) in opposition to Arturo ­Galletti,
the candidate supported by orthodox Catholics and by the Archbishop of Fer-
mo. The priest, all too conscious how important it was to capture the vote of
the electorate of the left, based his whole electoral campaign on anticlerical
issues and succeeded in gaining the support of the psi and of its most impor-
tant exponents.81 Murri’s election, proclaimed to the sound of the workers’ an-
them and to cries from the crowd of ‘Down with the Vatican!’,82 was hailed with
enthusiasm by the most important exponents of the psi. But in the Church
his position became untenable. It led to his excommunication a vitando on 22
March 1909, followed by constant attacks from the Catholic press.83
In spite of Socialist support for Murri’s candidacy, Mussolini had not failed
to turn him into a polemical target, though rushing to his defense at the time
of his excommunication. During his first public debate with De Gasperi, held
in the Birreria Corona at Untermais on the afternoon of 7 March, Mussolini
indifferently lumped together – as exponents of clericalism – intransigent
Catholics, moderate Catholics, and social-democratic Christians. All of them

79 P. Scoppola, “Cattolicesimo e democrazia nelle vicende della Lega democratica nazio-

nale”, in Idem, Coscienza religiosa e democrazia nell’Italia contemporanea, 110–169, and G.
Vecchio, Alla ricerca del partito. Cultura politica ed esperienze dei cattolici italiani del primo
Novecento, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1987.
80 G. Verucci, L’eresia del Novecento: la Chiesa e la repressione del modernismo in Italia, ­Torino:
Einaudi, 2010.
81 A. Botti, Romolo Murri e l’anticlericalismo negli anni de “La Voce”, Urbino: Quattro Venti,
1996, 34–36.
82 D. Saresella, “Murri deputato e il mondo socialista (1909–1913)”, in Romolo Murri e i mur-
rismi in Italia e in Europa cent’anni dopo, 185.
83 M. Guasco, Il caso Murri dalla sospensione alla scomunica, Urbino: Argalia, 1978.
34 chapter 1

were united, in his view, by the wish to set aside the struggle against the roots
of social injustice – in other words, the dualism between workers and the own-
ers of the means of production.84 The aim was clear: to eliminate once and for
all any prospect of collaboration between Christian Democrats and Socialists.
The “socially-minded Christian Father Romolo Murri who is presenting
himself at Porto San Giorgio [sic] with a programme that is almost socialist-
like” was placed on the same level as the giornali neri that had attributed
the Messina earthquake to the hand of God.85 Christian democracy was dis-
missed as “a wretched attempt destined to failure”, “an organism bristling with
contradictions”:

Modifying, or attempting to modify what divine providence has es-

tablished is tantamount to committing a sacrilege. […] The Christian
­Democrats admit the partial improvements of the working class, but they
don’t tolerate the disappearance of patronage: they don’t dare to elimi-
nate the bourgeoisie: their action is a compromise, just as their theory is
an equivocation and pretence.86

News of the excommunication of Murri was published by Mussolini himself

(under the pseudonym ‘Verdiano’) in the pages of the Avvenire del Lavoratore
on 27 March. The tone of his announcement, at once solemn and derisive,
tended to dismiss the consequences of the Vatican intervention. The piece as a
whole betrays a very superficial understanding of what was happening in the
Catholic world in this crucial moment of transition:

The newly elected member of parliament in the electoral college of Porto

S. Giorgio [sic] has been officially excommunicated by the Vatican.
We don’t have any difficulty in believing that he will be the first to
laugh over the pontifical decree. Today a papal Bull of excommunication
has the value of a soap bubble.
All of us, for one reason or another, have been excommunicated and
not one of us takes the Vatican sentence seriously. Tempora mutantur.
Once upon a time an excommunicated king came to Canossa in the mid-
dle of winter, spent three days kneeling in the snow between the castle’s

84 R.A. Webster, “Il primo incontro tra Mussolini e De Gasperi (marzo 1909)”, Il mulino
(­ January 1958): 51–55.
85 B. Mussolini, “Perché ci organizziamo”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (11 March 1909), now in
Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 25–26.
86 Ibid.
Religion, War, Nation 35

second and third circuit of walls and, were it not for the Countess Matil-
de, the pope would never have pardoned the reprobate.
Today the secular arm no longer exists or, in other words, there’s no
longer a gendarmerie, an army at the service of the pope. There are ad-
mittedly a few hundred Swiss Guards, but they are the laughing-stock of
all the urchins of Rome!
Luther burned the papal excommunication in the presence of a huge
crowd; will Romolo Murri present the spectacle of a little paper bonfire
to his faithful electors at Porto S. Giorgio?
For the sake of completeness, we recall that the papal document ends
literally with the following words:
‘From the House of the Holy Office, 22 March 1909. Signed Aloisio
­Castellano, notary of the Holy Roman Universal Inquisition’.87

The conclusion, typically Mussolinian/Carduccian in style, was to say the least

irreverent:

Ah! ah! ah! So there’s still a Holy Office and a Holy Roman Universal In-
quisition. But for whom? Go on! Old scarecrows of the Middle Ages, hide
yourself away once and for all! In the age of enlightenment, you continue
to regale us with the language of shadows and we homerically continue to
laugh in your face. And to you Signor Aloisio Castellano, to you notary –
no less! – of the Holy Roman Universal Inquisition we say the word pro-
nounced by Cambronne at Waterloo: report it, if you like to your master…
Do you remember it? M[erde]….88

In the same edition of the workers’ paper Mussolini made fun of the bigots
and went so far as to jeer at the sacrament of the Eucharist, with heavy-handed
comparisons between the particle of the host and the ‘good beefsteak’ which
priests and Catholics were said to prefer.89 In the weeks that followed ten-
sions mounted. Mussolini’s attacks on the clergy and the Church intensified.
The Catholic press dredged up Mussolini’s penal record and threw it onto the
scales. It accused the L’Avvenire del lavoratore of pursuing an impious and
anti-religious line. Il Trentino attacked Mussolini and his friends for having

87 Verdiano, “Don Romolo Murri scomunicato”, L’Avvenire del lavoratore (27 March 1909),
now in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 47.
88 Ibid.
89 Spazzino, “Dedicato ai bigotti”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (27 March 1909), now in
B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 48.
36 chapter 1

transformed public life into a contest of fisticuffs and insults. The judiciary
also entered the field. The State prosecutor Carlo Tranquillini tried to order
the closure of the Avvenire del Lavoratore and the seizure of the editions so
far published with the motivation that it was the most dangerous paper of the
region because it preached anarchy, atheism, war against the clergy, and class
hatred. Nevertheless, his request was blocked by the central authorities, wor-
ried by the repercussions such a measure might have, but also because the first
demonstrations in defense of the newspaper of the Labor Secretariat and its
editor had already taken place.90 However, the political consequence of Mus-
solini’s frontal assault on religion and the clergy were before everyone’s eyes;
he had succeeded in transforming anticlerical agitation into an attack on the
government and in persuading an ever-growing part of the hitherto somnolent
public opinion in Trentino to turn against Catholics and against the govern-
ment authorities that supported them.
In Mussolini’s contributions to the paper insults continued to be the order
of the day. Apart from the recurrent epithets of ‘black charlatans’91 and ‘cleri-
cal sewers’,92 one priest, don Barra, was even described as a ‘rabid dog’ and a
‘poor fool’ for having criticized the moral conduct of socialists in Trentino.93
Another priest, don Chelodi, was showered with such defamatory epithets as
‘microbe’, ‘miserable’ and ‘liar’ for having resuscitated Mussolini’s penal record
in the Voce Cattolica.94 References were also made to this or that provincial
priest guilty of financial irregularities, or more particularly of obscene acts,
an argument designed especially to titillate the prurience of readers. It was
thus that ‘comrade’ Mussolini went to the alpine village of Susà, in Valsugana,
to ‘interview’ a ‘saint’, Rosa Broll. The article in question appeared in the so-
cialist paper Il Popolo on 12 June 1909. The peasant woman, now in her fifties,
recounted the sad story of her life to Mussolini. At the age of sixteen, she had
been seduced by the local curate and had become his mistress. The priest had
staged a fake marriage, making the young girl believe he had been dispensed
from his vows. The two had lived together for several years in the priest’s house,
procreating several children who had either died within a few months or been
abandoned. The discovery of the last to be born on the threshold of a church
in Levico had triggered the public scandal and the trial, in which efforts were

90 R. De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario, 72–73.

91 B. Mussolini, “Un cane idrofobo”, L’Avvenire del Lavoratore (10 June 1909), now in Idem,
Opera omnia, vol. 2, 150–151.
92 Ibid.
93 Ibid.
94 B. Mussolini, “A don Chelodi”, Il Popolo (4 June 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2, 138.
Religion, War, Nation 37

made, but in vain, to convince the woman to confess that the abandoned child,
who later died in its twentieth month, was not that of the curate but of a vaga-
bond. The invention of ‘sainthood’, backed up with a rigmarole of miracles and
apparitions, deposed Broll, was all the work of the ingenious curate, as a way of
justifying her fixed presence in the priest’s house.95
The article, as was to be expected, met with considerable public success,
so much so that in the following month it was published as a separate pam-
phlet “at the repeated insistence of comrades who don’t read or can’t read daily
newspapers”.96 It was, according to its author, a publication that served the so-
cialist cause, because it revealed the lies, superstitions, and colossal deceptions
practiced by the clergy, profiting from the ingenuousness of peasants.
In the follow-up to this fortunate Boccaccesque vein, comrade Mussolini
gave the best of himself in the novel L’amante del cardinale. Claudia Particella.
To Emil Ludwig, who in 1932 asked him for his judgement on the books he
had written in his youth, Il Duce replied: “the story of the cardinal is a horrible
piece of pulp fiction; […] I wrote it with political intentions, for a paper. At that
time, the clergy was really vitiated by corrupt elements. It’s a book of political
propaganda”.97 According to Margherita Sarfatti, this story was no more than a
feuilleton, “a hodgepodge, without beginning or end”. It revealed “a great relish
for the tragic, as well as for vivid colors and heavy shades”, and might almost
“have been written as the basis for a future film”.98 Its motivations were not so
much politically induced as prompted by the needs of marketing. The novel
was in fact serialized; it appeared in 57 instalments in an appendix to Il Popolo
between 20 January and 11 May 1910 with Battisti’s support:

The idea of writing a historical novel in the vein of Dumas père, with
the aim of defaming the Church and the clergy, was born in Mussolini
in Trento. He spoke about it with Cesare Battisti, who suggested the real
historical episode on which it was based; and, since he liked Mussolini’s
romantic prose, he encouraged him to write the novel.99

Mussolini penned the novel at Forlì, where he had settled after his expulsion
from Trentino by Austria following his arrest in September 1909. “The reality

95 B. Mussolini, “La Santa di Susà”, Il Popolo (12 June 1909), now in Idem, Opera omnia, vol. 2,
153–159.
96 B. Mussolini, La Santa di Susà (intervista), Trento: Soc. Tipografica Ed. Trentina, 1909.
97 E. Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini, 190.
98 M.G. Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, 151–152.
99 E. and D. Susmel, Nota informativa, in B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, vol. 33, viii.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 "Yes!" he said, "what about the expert? If there had been two they would
have disagreed. And mind you at a distance of twelve years a signature
would be difficult of absolute identification. Every one's handwriting
undergoes certain modifications in the course of years. Experts," he
reiterated. "Bah!"

"But," I went on, impatiently, "I don't see the object of the whole
scheme."

"The object was blackmail," the whimsical creature retorted, "and it has
succeeded admirably. Already we read that Messrs. Shap and Lloyd are
staying at expensive hotels in London, that they have granted interviews to
pressmen and written articles for half-penny newspapers. We shall hear of
them as cinema stars presently. They have had the most gorgeous, the most
paying publicity, and presently Sir David Carysfort will have had enough of
them and will put a few more hundreds in their pockets just to be rid of
them. That was the object of the whole scheme, my dear young lady! And
see how well it was carried out.

"Of course the fuddle-headed Dutchman never thought of it. I imagine

that the whole scheme originated in the fertile brain of Mr. Julian Lloyd.
And it was thoroughly well thought out from the manufacture of the
documents and letters down to the assault on the silly old country attorney.
And, mind you, the rascals originally went to a silly country attorney; they
would have been afraid to go to a London lawyer, lest he be too sharp for
them.

"The only mistake they made were the letters purported to be written to
Berta Shap by the husband who is supposed to have disappeared, and the
copy of Berta's marriage certificate. It is those letters that gave me the clue
to the whole thing; old Stonebridge was too dull to have seen through those
letters. If they were genuine why should Felix Shap have brought them over
to England? They had nothing whatever to do with any contract about the
Shap Fuelettes. If they were genuine, how could he guess that he would
have to disprove a story of a secret marriage and of young Alfred being the
son of Sir Alfred Carysfort? By wanting to prove too much, he, to my mind,
gave himself away, and one can but marvel that neither lawyers nor police
saw through the roguery.
 "Of course the moment one understands that one set of papers was
spurious, it is easily concluded that all the others were forgeries. And the
late Sir Alfred Carysfort, anxious only to obliterate every vestige of that
early marriage of his, unwittingly played into the hands of those two
scoundrels by destroying all the correspondence that he had ever had with
Shap.

"Think it all over, you will see that I am right. Look at this paragraph
again in the Evening Post, does it not bear out what I say?"

The paragraph in the evening paper to which the Old Man in the Corner
was pointing read as follows:

"Among the passengers on the Dutch liner Stadt Rotterdam is Mr. Felix
Shap, the hero of a recent celebrated case. He is returning to Batavia,
having, through a misadventure which has remained an impenetrable
mystery to this day, been deprived of all the proofs that would have
established his claim to a substantial share of the profits in the Shap
Fuelettes Company. Fortunately Mr. Shap had enlisted so many sympathies
in England that his friends had no difficulty in collecting a considerable
sum of money which was presented to him on his departure in the form of a
purse and as a compensation for the ill-luck which has attended him since
he set foot in this country. Mr. Shap will now be able to take abroad with
him the assurance that British public opinion is always on the side of the
victims of an adverse and unmerited fate."

"Yes!" the funny creature concluded with a cackle, "until the victims are
found out to be rogues. Mr. Felix Shap and his friend, Mr. Julian Lloyd, will
be found out some day."

The next moment he had gone with that rapidity which was so
characteristic of him, and I might have thought that he was just a spook who
had come to visit me whilst I dozed over my cup of tea, only that on the
table by the side of an empty glass was a piece of string adorned with a
series of complicated knots.
 VIII

THE MYSTERY OF BRUDENELL COURT

§1

"Did you ever make up your mind about that Brudenell Court affair?"
the Old Man in the Corner said to me that day.

"No," I replied. "As far as I am concerned the death of Colonel Forburg

has remained a complete mystery."

"You don't think," he insisted, "that Morley Thrall was guilty?"

"Well," I said, "I don't know what to think."

"Then don't do it," he rejoined, with a chuckle, "if you don't know what
to think, then it's best not to think at all. At any rate wait until I have told
you exactly what did happen—not as it was reported in the newspapers, but
in the sequence in which the various incidents occurred.

"On Christmas Eve, last year, while the family were at dinner, there was
a sudden commotion and cries of 'Stop, thief!' issuing from the back
premises of Brudenell Court, the country seat of a certain Colonel Forburg.
The butler ran in excitedly to say that Julia Mason, one of the maids, was
drawing down the blinds in one of the first-floor rooms, when she saw a
man fiddling with the shutters of the French window in the smoking-room
downstairs. She at once gave the alarm, whereupon the man bolted across
the garden in the direction of the five-acre field. The Colonel and his
stepson, as well as two male guests who were dining with them,
immediately jumped up and hurried out to help in the chase. It was a very
dark night, people were running to and fro, and for a few moments there
was a great deal of noise and confusion, through which two pistol-shots in
close succession were distinctly heard.

"The ladies—amongst whom was Miss Monica Glenluce, the Colonel's

stepdaughter—had remained in the dining-room, and the dinner was kept
waiting, pending the return of the gentlemen. They straggled in one by one,
all except the Colonel. The ladies eagerly asked for news; the gentlemen
could not say much—the night was very dark and they had just waited
about outside until some of the indoor men who had given chase came back
with the news that the thief had been caught.

"This news was confirmed by young Glenluce, Miss Monica's brother,

who was the last to return. He had actually witnessed the capture. The thief
had bolted straight across the five-acre meadow, but doubled back before he
reached the stables, turned sharply to the right through the kitchen garden,
and then jumped over the boundary wall of the grounds into the lane
beyond, where he fell straight into the arms of the local constable who
happened to be passing by.

"Young Glenluce had great fun out of the chase; he had guessed the
man's purpose, and instead of running after him across the meadow, he had
gone round it, and had reached the boundary wall only a few seconds after
the thief had scaled it. There was some talk about the gunshots that had
been heard, and every one supposed that Colonel Forburg, who was a
violent-tempered man, had snatched up a revolver before giving chase to
the burglar, and had taken a potshot at him; it was fortunate that he had
missed him.

"The incident would then have been closed and the interrupted dinner
proceeded with, but for the fact that the host had not yet returned. Nothing
was thought of this at first, for it was generally supposed that the Colonel
had been kept talking by one of his men, or perhaps by the constable who
had effected the capture; it was only when close on half an hour had gone
by that Miss Monica became impatient. She got the butler to telephone both
to the stables and the lodge, but the Colonel had not been seen at either
place, either during or after the incident with the burglar; communication
with the police station brought the same result; nothing had been seen or
heard of the Colonel.
 "Genuinely alarmed now, Miss Monica gave orders for the grounds to be
searched; it was just possible that the Colonel had fallen whilst running, and
was lying somewhere, helpless in the dark, perhaps unconscious.... Every
one began recalling those pistol-shots and a vague sense of tragedy spread
over the entire house. Monica blamed herself for not having thought of all
this before.

"A search party went out at once; for a while stable-lanterns and electric-
torches gleamed through the darkness and past the shrubberies. Then
suddenly there were calls for help, the wandering lights centred in one spot,
somewhere in the middle of the five-acre meadow near the big elm tree.
Obviously there had been an accident. Monica ran to the front door,
followed by all the guests. Through the darkness a group of men were seen
slowly wending their way towards the house; one man was running ahead,
it was the chauffeur. Young Glenluce, half guessing that something sinister
had occurred, went forward to meet him.

"What had happened was indeed as tragic as it was mysterious; the

search party had found the Colonel lying full-length in the meadow. His
clothes were saturated with blood; he had been shot in the breast and was
apparently dead. Close by a revolver had been picked up. It was impossible
to keep the terrible news from Miss Monica. Her brother broke the news to
her. She bore up with marvellous calm, and it was she who at once gave the
necessary orders to have her stepfather's body taken upstairs and to fetch
both the doctor and the police.

"In the meanwhile the guests had gone back into the house. They stood
about in groups, awestruck and whispering. They did not care to finish their
dinner, or to go up to their rooms, as in all probability they would be
required when the police came to make enquiries. Monica and Gerald
Glenluce had gone to sit in the smoking-room.

"It was the most horrible Christmas Eve any one in that house had ever
experienced."

§2
 "Murder committed from any other motive than that of robbery," the Old
Man in the Corner went on after a moment's pause, "always excites the
interest of the public. There is nearly always an element of mystery about it,
and it invariably suggests possibilities of romance. In this case, of course,
there was no question of robbery. After Colonel Forburg fell, shot, as it
transpired, at close range and full in the breast, his clothes were left
untouched; there was loose silver in his trousers pocket, a few treasury
notes in his letter-case, and he was wearing a gold watch and chain and a
fine pearl stud.

"The motive of the crime was therefore enmity or revenge, and here the
police were at once confronted with a great difficulty. Not, mind you, the
difficulty of finding a man who hated the Colonel sufficiently to kill him,
but that of choosing among his many enemies one who was most likely to
have committed such a terrible crime. He was the best-hated man in the
county. Known as 'Remount Forburg,' he was generally supposed to have
made his fortune in some shady transactions connected with the Remount
Department of the War Office during the Boer War, more than twenty years
ago.

"His first wife was said to have died of a broken heart, and he had no
children of his own; some ten years ago he had married a widow with two
young children. She had a considerable fortune of her own, and when she
died she left it in trust for her children, but she directed that her husband
should be the sole guardian of Monica and Gerald until they came of age;
moreover, she left him the interest of the whole of the capital amount for so
long as they were in his house and unmarried. After his death the money
would revert unconditionally to them.

"Of course it was a foolish, one might say a criminal will, and one
obviously made under the influence of her husband. One can only suppose
that the poor woman had died without knowing anything of 'Remount
Forburg's' character. Since her death his violent temper and insufferable
arrogance had alienated from the children every friend they ever had. Only
some chance acquaintances ever came anywhere near Brudenell Court now.
Naturally every one said that the Colonel's behaviour was part of a scheme
for keeping suitors away from his stepdaughter Monica, who was a very
beautiful girl; as for Gerald Glenluce, Monica's younger brother, he had
been sadly disfigured when he was a schoolboy through a fall against a
sharp object that had broken his nose and somewhat mysteriously deprived
him of the sight of one eye.

"Those who had suffered most from Colonel Forburg's violent tempers
declared that the boy's face had been smashed in by a blow from a stick,
and that the stick had been wielded by his stepfather. Be that as it may,
Gerald Glenluce had remained, in consequence of this disfigurement, a shy,
retiring, silent boy, who neither played games nor rode to hounds and had
no idea how to handle a gun; but he was essentially the Colonel's favourite.
Where Forburg was harsh and dictatorial with every one else, he would
always unbend to Gerald, and was almost gentle and affectionate toward
him. Perhaps an occasional twinge of remorse had something to do with this
soft side of his disagreeable character.

"Certainly that softness did not extend to Monica. He made the girl's life
almost unbearable with his violence which amounted almost to brutality.
The girl hated him and openly said so. Her one desire was to get away from
Brudenell Court by any possible means. But owing to her mother's foolish
will she had no money of her own, and the few friends she had were not
sufficiently rich, or sufficiently disinterested, to give her a home away from
her stepfather, nor would the Colonel, for a matter of that, have given his
consent to her living away from him.

"As for marriage, it was a difficult question. Young men fought shy of
any family connection with 'Remount Forburg.' The latter's nickname was
bad enough, but there were rumours of secrets more unavowable still in the
past history of the Colonel. Certain it is that though Monica excited
admiration wherever she went, and though one or two of her admirers did
go to the length of openly courting her, the courtship never matured into an
actual engagement. Something or other always occurred to cool off the
ardour of the wooers. Suddenly they would either go on a big-game
shooting expedition, or on a tour round the world, or merely find that
country air did not suit them. There would perhaps be a scene of fond
farewell, but Monica would always understand that the farewell was a
definite one, and, as she was an intelligent as well as a fascinating girl, she
put two and two together, and observed that these farewell scenes were
invariably preceded by a long interview behind closed doors between her
stepfather and her admirer of the moment.

"Small wonder then that she hated the Colonel. She hated him as much
as she loved her brother. A great affection had, especially of late, developed
between these two; it was a love born of an affinity of trouble and sense of
injustice. On Gerald's part there was also an element of protection towards
his beautiful sister; the fact that he was so avowedly the spoilt son of his
irascible stepfather enabled him many a time to stand between Monica and
the Colonel's unbridled temper.

"Latterly, however, some brightness and romance had been introduced

into the drab existence of Monica Glenluce by the discreet courtship of her
latest admirer, Mr. Morley Thrall. Mr. Thrall was a wealthy man, not too
young and of independent position, who presumably did not care whether
county society would cut him or no in consequence of his marriage with the
stepdaughter of 'Remount Forburg.'

"Subsequent events showed that he had observed the greatest discretion

while he was courting Monica. No one knew that there was an
understanding between him and the girl, least of all the Colonel. Mr. Morley
Thrall came, not too frequently, to Brudenell Court; while there he appeared
to devote most of his attention to his host and to Gerald, and to take little if
any notice of Monica. She had probably given him a hint of rocks ahead,
and he had succeeded in avoiding the momentous interview with the
Colonel which Monica had learned to look on with dread.

"Mr. Morley Thrall had been asked to stay at Brudenell Court for
Christmas, the other guests being a Major Rawstone, with his wife and
daughter, Rachel. They were all at dinner on that memorable Christmas Eve
when the tragedy occurred, and all the men hurried out of the dining-room
in the wake of their host when first the burglary alarm was given.

§3
 "Thus did matters stand at Brudenell Court when, directly after the
holidays, Jim Peyton, a groom recently in the employ of Colonel Forburg,
was brought before the magistrates charged with the murder of his former
master. There was a pretty stiff case against him too. It seems that he had
lately been dismissed by Colonel Forburg for drunkenness, and that before
dismissing him the Colonel had given him a thrashing which apparently
was well deserved, because while he was drunk he very nearly set fire to the
stables, and an awful disaster was only averted by the timely arrival of the
Colonel himself upon the scene.

"Be that as it may, the man went away swearing vengeance.

Subsequently he took out a summons for assault against Colonel Forburg
and only got one shilling damages. This had occurred a week before
Christmas. There were several witnesses there who could swear to the
threatening language used by Peyton on more than one occasion since then,
and of course he had been caught in the very act of trying to break into the
house through the French window of the smoking-room.

"On the other hand, the revolver with which 'Remount Forburg' had been
shot, and which was found close to the body with two empty chambers, was
identified as the Colonel's own property, one which he always kept, loaded,
in a drawer of his desk in the smoking-room. And—this is the interesting
point—the shutters of the smoking-room were found by the police
inspector, who examined them subsequently, to be bolted on the inside, just
as they had been left earlier in the evening by the footman whose business it
was to see to the fastening of windows and shutters on the ground floor.

"This fact—the shutters being bolted on the inside—was confirmed by

Miss Monica Glenluce, who had been the first to go into the smoking-room
after the tragic event. Her brother joined her subsequently. Both of these
witnesses said that the room looked absolutely undisturbed, the shutters
were bolted, the drawer of the desk was closed: they had remained in the
room until after the visit of the police inspector.

"After the positive evidence of these two witnesses, the police

prosecution had of necessity to fall back on the far-fetched theory that
Colonel Forburg himself, before he hurried out in order to join in the chase
against the burglar, had run into the smoking-room and picked up his
revolver, and that, having overtaken Peyton, he had threatened him; that
Peyton had then jumped on him, wrenched the weapon out of his hand and
shot him. It was a far-fetched theory certainly, and one which the defence
quickly upset. Gerald Glenluce for one was distinctly under the impression
that the Colonel ran from the dining-room straight out into the garden, and
the young footman who was watching the fun from the front door, and saw
the Colonel run out, was equally sure that he had not a revolver in his hand.

"Peyton got six months hard for attempted house-breaking, there really
was no evidence against him to justify the more serious charge; but when
the charge of murder was withdrawn, it left the mystery of 'Remount
Forburg's' tragic end seemingly more impenetrable than before.
Nevertheless the coroner and jury laboured conscientiously at the inquest.
No stone was to be left unturned to bring the murder of 'Remount Forburg'
to justice, and in this laudable effort the coroner had the able and
unqualified assistance of Miss Glenluce. However bitter her feelings may
have been in the past towards her stepfather while he lived, she seemed
determined that his murderer should not go unpunished. Nay more, there
appeared to be in all her actions during this terrible time a strange note of
vindictiveness and animosity, as if the unknown man who had rid her of an
arrogant and brutal tyrant had really done her a lasting injury.

"It was entirely through her energy and exertions that certain witnesses
were induced to come forward and give what turned out to be highly
sensational evidence. The police who were convinced that James Peyton
was guilty had turned all their investigations in the direction of proving
their theories; Miss Monica, on the other hand, had seemingly made up her
mind that the murderer was to be sought for inside the house; it even
appeared as if she had certain suspicions which she only desired to confirm.
To this end she had questioned and cross-questioned every one who was in
the house on that fatal night, well knowing how reluctant some people are
to be mixed up in any way with police proceedings. But at last she had
forced two persons to speak, and it was on the first day of the inquest that at
last a glimmer of light was thrown upon the mysterious tragedy.

"After the medical evidence which went to establish beyond a doubt that
Colonel Forburg died from a gunshot wound inflicted at close range, both
balls having penetrated the heart, Miss Glenluce was called. Replying to the
coroner, who had put certain questions to her with regard to the Colonel's
state of mind just before the tragedy, she said that he appeared to have a
premonition that something untoward was about to happen. When the butler
ran into the dining-room saying that a burglar had been seen trying to break
into the house, the Colonel had jumped up from the table at once.

"'I did the same,' Miss Monica went on, 'as I was genuinely alarmed; but
my stepfather, in his peremptory way, ordered me to sit still. "I believe," he
said to me, with a funny laugh, "that it's a put-up job. It's some friend of
Thrall's giving him a hand." I could not, of course, understand what he
meant by that, and I looked at Mr. Thrall for an explanation. I must add that
Mr. Thrall had been extraordinarily moody all through dinner; he appeared
flushed, and I noticed particularly that he never spoke either to my step-
father, to my brother, or to me. However at the moment I failed to catch his
eye, and the very next second he was out of the room, on the heels of
Colonel Forburg.'

"This was remarkable evidence to say the least of it, but nevertheless it
was confirmed by two witnesses who heard the Colonel make that strange
remark: one was Rachel Rawstone, the young friend who was dining at
Brudenell Court that Christmas Eve, and the other was Gerald Glenluce. Of
course, by this time the public was getting very excited: they were like so
many hounds heading for a scent, and the jury was beginning to show signs
of that obstinate prejudice which culminated in a ridiculous verdict. But
there was more to come. Thanks again to Miss Monica's insistence, the
footman at Brudenell Court, a lad named Cambalt, had been induced to
come forward with a story which he had evidently intended to keep hidden
within his bosom, if possible. He gave his evidence with obvious reluctance
and in a scarcely audible voice. It was generally noticed, however, that Miss
Monica urged him frequently to speak up.

"Cambalt deposed that just before dinner on Christmas Eve, he had gone
in to tidy the smoking-room before the gentlemen came down from
dressing. As he opened the door he saw Mr. Morley Thrall standing in the
middle of the room facing Colonel Forburg who was seated at his desk.
Young Mr. Glenluce was standing near the mantelpiece with one foot on the
fender, staring into the fire. Mr. Thrall, according to witness, was livid with
rage.

"''E took a step forward like,' Cambalt went on, amidst breathless silence
on the part of the public and jury alike, 'and 'e raised 'is fist. But the Colonel
'e just laughed, then 'e opened the drawer of the desk and took out a
revolver and showed it to Mr. Thrall and says: "'Ere y'are, there's a revolver
'andy, any way." Then Mr. Thrall 'e swore like anything, and says: "You
blackguard! You d—— scoundrel! You ought to be shot like the cur you
are." I thought he would strike the Colonel, but young Mr. Glenluce 'e just
stepped quickly in between the two gentlemen and 'e says: "Look 'ere,
Thrall, I won't put up with this! You jess get out!" Then one of the
gentlemen seed me, and Mr. Thrall 'e walked out of the room.'

"'And what happened after he had gone?' the coroner asked.

"'Oh!' the witness replied, 'the Colonel 'e threw the revolver back into the
drawer and laughed sarcastic like. Then 'e 'eld out 'is 'and to Mr. Gerald, and
says: "Thanks, my boy. You did 'elp me to get rid of that ruffian." After
that,' Cambalt concluded, 'I got on with my work, and the gentlemen took
no notice of me.'

"This witness was very much pressed with questions as to what

happened later on when the burglary alarm was given and the gentlemen all
hurried out of the house. Cambalt was in the hall at the time and he made
straight for the front door to see some of the fun. He said that the Colonel
was out first, and the other three gentlemen, Mr. Gerald, Mr. Rawstone and
Mr. Morley Thrall went out after him; Mr. Thrall was the last to go outside;
he ran across the garden in the direction of the five-acre field. Major
Rawstone remained somewhere near the house, but it was a very dark night,
and he, Cambalt, soon lost sight of the gentlemen. Presently, however, Mr.
Thrall came back toward the house. It was a few minutes after the shots had
been fired and witness heard Mr. Thrall say to Major Rawstone: 'I suppose
it's that fool Forburg potting away at the burglar; hell get himself into
trouble, if he doesn't look out.' Soon after that Mr. Gerald came running
back with the news that the burglar had fallen into the arms of a passing
constable and Cambalt then returned to his duties in the dining-room.
 "As you see," the Old Man in the Corner went on glibly, "this witness's
evidence was certainly sensational. The jury, which was composed of farm
labourers, with the local butcher as foreman, had by now fully made up its
silly mind that Mr. Morley Thrall had taken the opportunity of sneaking into
the smoking-room, snatching up the revolver, and shooting 'Remount
Forburg,' whom he hated because the Colonel was opposing his marriage
with Miss Monica. It was all as clear as daylight to those dunderheads, and
from that moment they simply would not listen to any more evidence. They
had made up their minds; they were ready with their verdict and it was:
Manslaughter against Morley Thrall. Not murder, you see! The dolts who
had all of them suffered from 'Remount Forburg's' arrogance and violent
temper would not admit that killing such vermin was a capital crime.

"What I am telling you would be unbelievable if it were not a positive

fact. It is no use quoting British justice and dilating on the absolute fairness
of trial by jury. A coroner's inquest fortunately is not a trial. The verdict of a
coroner's jury, such as the one which sat on the Brudenell Court affair,
though it may have very unpleasant consequences for an innocent person,
cannot have fatal results. In this case it cast a stigma on a gentleman of high
position and repute, and the following day Mr. Morley Thrall, himself J.P.,
was brought up before his brother magistrates on an ignominious charge.

§4

"It is not often," the Old Man in the Corner resumed after a while, "that
so serious a charge is preferred against a gentleman of Mr. Morley Thrall's
social position, and I am afraid that the best of us are snobbish enough to be
more interested in a gentleman criminal than in an ordinary Bill Sykes.

"I happened to be present at that magisterial enquiry when Mr. Morley

Thrall, J.P., was brought in between two warders, looking quite calm and
self-possessed. Every one of us there noticed that when he first came in, and
in fact throughout that trying enquiry, his eyes sought to meet those of Miss
Glenluce who sat at the solicitor's table; but whenever she chanced to look
his way, she quickly averted her gaze again, and turned her head away with
a contemptuous shrug. Gerald Glenluce, on the other hand, made pathetic
efforts at showing sympathy with the accused, but he was of such
unprepossessing appearance and was so shy and awkward that it was small
wonder Morley Thrall took little if any notice of him.

"Very soon we got going. I must tell you, first of all, that the whole point
of the evidence rested upon a question of time. If the accused took the
revolver out of the desk in the smoking-room, when did he do it? The
footman, Cambalt, reiterated the statement which he had made at the
inquest. He was, of course, pressed to say definitely whether after the
quarrel between Mr. Morley Thrall and the Colonel which he had
witnessed, and before every one went in to dinner, Mr. Thrall might have
gone back to the smoking-room and extracted the revolver from the drawer
of the desk; but Cambalt said positively that he did not think this was
possible. He himself, after he had tidied the smoking-room, had been in and
out of the hall preparing to serve dinner. The door of the smoking-room
gave on the hall, between the dining-room and the passage leading to the
kitchens. If any one had gone in or out of the smoking-room at that time,
Cambalt must have seen them.

"At this point Miss Glenluce was seen to lean forward and to say
something in a whisper to the Clerk of the Justices, who in his turn
whispered to the chairman on the Bench, and a moment or two later that
gentleman asked the witness:

"'Are you absolutely prepared to swear that no one went in or out of the
smoking-room while you were making ready to serve dinner?7

"Then, as the young man seemed to hesitate, the magistrate added more
emphatically:

"Think now! You were busy with your usual avocations; there would
have been nothing extraordinary in one of the gentlemen going in or out of
the smoking-room at that hour. Do you really believe and are you prepared
to swear that such a very ordinary incident would have impressed itself
indelibly upon your mind?'
 "Thus pressed and admonished, Cambalt retrenched himself behind a
vague: 'No, sir! I shouldn't like to swear one way or the other.'

"Whereat Miss Monica threw a defiant look at the accused, who,

however, did not as much as wink an eyelid in response.

"Presently when that lady herself was called, no one could fail to notice
that she, like the coroner's jury the previous day, had absolutely made up
her mind that Morley Thrall was guilty, otherwise her attitude of open
hostility toward him would have been quite inexplicable. She dwelt at full
length on the fact that Mr. Thrall had paid her marked attention for months,
and that he had asked her to marry him. She had given him her consent, and
between them they had decided to keep their engagement a secret until after
she, Monica, had attained her twenty-first birthday, when she would be free
to marry whom she chose.

"'Unfortunately,' the witness went on, suddenly assuming a dry, pursed-

up manner, 'Colonel Forburg got wind of this. He was always very much set
against my marrying at all, and between tea and dinner on Christmas Eve he
and I had some very sharp words together on the subject, at the end of
which my stepfather said very determinedly: "Christmas or no Christmas,
the fellow shall leave my house by the first available train to-morrow, and
to-night I am going to give him a piece of my mind."'

"Just for a moment after Miss Glenluce had finished speaking, the
accused seemed to depart from his attitude of dignity and reserve, and an
indignant 'Oh!' quickly repressed, escaped his lips. The public by this time
was dead against him. They are just like sheep, as you know, and the verdict
of the coroner's jury had prejudiced them from the start, and the police,
aided by Miss Glenluce, had certainly built up a formidable case against the
unfortunate man. Every one felt that the motive for the crime was fully
established already. 'Remount Forburg' had had a violent quarrel with
Morley Thrall, then had turned him out of the house, and the latter, furious
at being separated from the girl he loved, had killed the man who stood in
his way.

"I should be talking until to-morrow morning were I to give you in detail
all the evidence that was adduced in support of the prosecution. The
accused listened to it all with perfect calm. He stood with arms folded, his
eyes fixed on nothing. The 'Oh!' of indignation did not again cross his lips,
nor did he look once at Miss Monica Glenluce. I can assure you that at one
moment that day things were looking very black against him.

"Fortunately for him, however, he had a very clever lawyer to defend

him in the person of his distinguished cousin, Sir Evelyn Thrall. The latter,
by amazingly clever cross-examination of the servants and guests at
Brudenell Court, had succeeded in establishing the fact that at no time, from
the moment that the burglary alarm was given until after the two revolver
shots had been heard, was the accused completely out of sight of some one
or other of the witnesses. He was the last to leave the dining-room. Mrs.
Rawstone and her daughter testified to that. He had stayed behind one
moment after the other three gentlemen had gone out in order to say a few
words to Monica Glenluce. Miss Rawstone was standing inside the dining-
room door and she was quite positive that Mr. Thrall went straight out into
the garden.

"On the other hand Major Rawstone saw him in the forecourt coming
away from the five-acre meadow only a very few moments after the shots
were fired, and gave it absolutely as his opinion that it would have been
impossible for the accused to have fired those shots. This is where the
question of time came in.

"'When a man who bears a spotless reputation,' Major Rawstone argued,

'finds that he has killed a fellow creature, he would necessarily pause a
moment, horror-struck with what he has done; whether the deed was
premeditated or involuntary he would at least try and ascertain if life was
really extinct. It is inconceivable that any man save an habitual and
therefore callous criminal, would just throw down his weapon and with
absolute calm, hands in pocket and without a tremor in his voice, make a
casual remark to a friend. Now I saw Mr. Morley Thrall perhaps two
minutes after the shots were fired; in that time he could not have walked
from the centre of the field to the forecourt where I was standing; and he
had not been running as his voice was absolutely clear and he came walking
towards me with his hands in his pockets.'
 "As was only to be expected, Sir Evelyn Thrall made the most of Major
Rawstone's evidence, and I may say that it was chiefly on the strength of it
that the charge of murder against the accused was withdrawn, even though
the Clerk to the Magistrates, perpetually egged on by Miss Glenluce, did his
best to upset Major Rawstone. When the lady found that this could not be
done, she tried to switch back to the idea that accused had abstracted the
revolver out of the smoking-room before dinner and immediately after his
quarrel with Colonel Forburg. The footman Cambalt's evidence on this
point had been somewhat discounted by his refusing to state positively that
no one could have gone into the smoking-room at that time without his
seeing them. But against this theory there was always the argument—of
which Sir Evelyn Thrall made the most as you know—that before dinner
the accused could not have known that there would be an alarm of burglary
which would give him the opportunity of waylaying the Colonel in the open
field. With equal skill, too, Sir Evelyn brought forward evidence to bear out
the statement made by the accused on the matter of his quarrel with Colonel
Forburg.

"'Just before dinner,' Mr. Thrall stated, 'Colonel Forburg told me he had
something to say to me in private. I followed him into the smoking-room,
and there he gave me certain information with regard to his past life, and
also with regard to Miss Glenluce's parentage, which made it absolutely
impossible for me, in spite of the deep regard which I have for that lady, to
offer her marriage. Miss Glenluce is the innocent victim of tragic
circumstances in the past, and Forburg was just an unmitigated blackguard,
and I told him so, but I had my family to consider and very reluctantly I
came to the conclusion that I could not introduce any relation of Colonel
Forburg into its circle. Colonel Forburg did not stand in the way of my
marrying his stepdaughter; it was I who most reluctantly withdrew.'

"Whilst the accused was cross-examined upon this statement, and he

gave his answers in firm, dignified tones, Miss Monica never took her eyes
off him, and surely if looks could kill, Mr. Morley Thrall would not at that
moment have escaped with his life, so full of deadly hatred and contempt
was her gaze. The accused had signed a much fuller statement than the one
which he made in open court; it contained a detailed account of his
interview with Colonel Forburg, and of the circumstances which finally
induced him to give up all thoughts of asking Miss Glenluce to be his wife.

"These facts were not made public at the time for the sake of Miss
Monica and of the unfortunate, Gerald, but it seems that the transactions
which had earned for the Colonel the sobriquet of 'Remount Forburg' were
so disreputable and so dishonest that not only was he cashiered from the
army, but he served a term of imprisonment for treason, fraud, and
embezzlement. He had no right to be styled Colonel any longer, and quite
recently had been threatened with prosecution if he persisted in making
further use of his army rank.

"But this was not all the trouble. It seems that in his career of improbity
he had been associated with a man named Nosdel, a man of Dutch
extraction whom he had known in South Africa. This man was
subsequently hanged for a particularly brutal murder, and it was his widow
who was 'Remount Forburg's' second wife, and the mother of Monica and
of Gerald, who had been given the fancy name of Glenluce.

"Obviously a man in Mr. Morley Thrall's position could not marry into
such a family, and it appears that whenever there was a question of a suitor
for Monica, 'Remount Forburg' would tell the aspirant the whole story of his
own shady past and, above all, that of Monica's father. Sir Evelyn Thrall
had been clever enough to discover one or two gentlemen who had had the
same experience as his cousin Morley; they, too, just before their courtship
came to a head had had a momentous interview with 'Remount Forburg,'
who found this means of choking off any further desire for matrimony on
the part of a man who had family connections to consider. But it was very
obvious that Mr. Morley Thrall had no motive for killing 'Remount
Forburg'; he would have left Brudenell Court that very evening, he said,
only that young Glenluce had begged him, for Monica's sake, not to make a
scene; anyway, he was leaving the house the next day and had no intention
of ever darkening its doors again.

"Poor Monica Glenluce or Nosdel, ignorant of the hideous cloud that

hung over her entire life, ignorant, too, of what had passed between her
stepfather and Mr. Morley Thrall, felt nothing but hatred and contempt for
the man whose love, she believed, had proved as unstable as that of any of
her other admirers. For charity's sake one must suppose that she really
thought him guilty at first, and hoped that when the clouds had rolled by he
would return to her more ardent than before. Presumably he found means to
make her understand that all was irrevocably at an end between them as far
as he was concerned, whereupon her regard for him turned to bitterness and
desire for revenge.

"And, indeed, but for the cleverness of a distinguished lawyer, poor

Morley Thrall might have found himself the victim of a judicial error
brought about by the deliberate enmity of a woman. Had he been committed
for trial, she would have had more time at her disposal to manufacture
evidence against him, which I am convinced she had a mind to do."

"As it is," I now put in tentatively, for the Old Man in the Corner had
been silent for some little while, "the withdrawal of the charge of murder
against Morley Thrall did not help to clear up the mystery of 'Remount
Forburg's' tragic death."

"Not so far as the public is concerned," he retorted dryly.

"You have a theory?" I asked.

"Not a theory," he replied. "I know who killed 'Remount Forburg.'"

"How do you know?" I riposted.

"By logic and inference," he said. "As it was proved that Morley Thrall
did not kill him, and that Miss Monica could not have done it, as the ladies
did not join in the chase after the burglar, I looked about me for the only
other person in whose interest it was to put that blackguard out of the way."

"You mean——?"

"I mean the boy Gerald, of course. Openly and before the other witness,
Cambalt, he stood up for his stepfather against Thrall who was not
measuring his words, but just think how the knowledge which he had
gained about his own parentage and that of his sister must have rankled in
his mind. He must have come to the conclusion that while this man—his
stepfather—lived, there would be no chance for him to make friends, no
chance for the sister whom he loved ever to have a home, a life of her own.
Whether that interview on Christmas Eve was the first inkling which he had
of the real past history of his own and Forburg's family, it is impossible to
say. Probably he had suspicions of it before, when, one by one, Monica's
suitors fell away after certain private interviews with the Colonel. Morley
Thrall must have been a last hope, and that, too, was dashed to the ground
by the same infamous means.

"I am not prepared to say that the boy got hold of the revolver that night
with the deliberate intention of killing his stepfather at the earliest
opportunity; he may have run into the smoking-room to snatch up the
weapon, only with a view to using it against the burglar; certain it is that he
overtook 'Remount Forburg' in the five-acre field and that he shot him then
and there. Remember that the night was very dark, and that there was a
great deal of running about and of confusion. The boy was young enough
and nimble enough after he had thrown down the revolver to run across the
field and then to go back to the house by a roundabout way. It is easy
enough in a case like that to cover one's tracks, and, of course, no one
suspected anything at the time. Even the sound of firing created but little
astonishment; it was so very much on the cards that the Colonel would use
a revolver without the slightest hesitation against a man who had been
trying to break into his house. It was just the sort of revenge that a man of
Gerald's temperament—disfigured, shy, silent and self-absorbed—would
seek against one whom he considered the fount of all his wrongs."

"But," I objected, "how could young Glenluce run into the smoking-
room, pick up the revolver out of a drawer, and run back through the hall
with servants and guests standing about? Some one would be sure to see
him."

"No one saw him," the funny creature retorted, "for he did it at the
moment of the greatest confusion. The butler had run in with the news of
the burglary, the Colonel jumped up and ran out through the hall, the guests
had not yet made up their minds what to do. In moments like this there are
always just a few seconds of pandemonium, quite sufficient for a boy like
Gerald to make a dash for the smoking-room."