The Perfect Fascist
A Story of Love, Power, and Morality in Mussolini’s Italy
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Through the story of one exemplary fascist—a war hero turned commander of Mussolini’s Black Shirts—the award-winning author of How Fascism Ruled Women reveals how the personal became political in the fascist quest for manhood and power.
When Attilio Teruzzi, Mussolini’s handsome political enforcer, married a striking young American opera star, his good fortune seemed settled. The wedding was a carefully stage-managed affair, capped with a blessing by Mussolini himself. Yet only three years later, after being promoted to commander of the Black Shirts, Teruzzi renounced his wife. In fascist Italy, a Catholic country with no divorce law, he could only dissolve the marriage by filing for an annulment through the medieval procedures of the Church Court. The proceedings took an ominous turn when Mussolini joined Hitler: Lilliana Teruzzi was Jewish, and fascist Italy would soon introduce its first race laws.
The Perfect Fascist pivots from the intimate story of an inconvenient marriage—brilliantly reconstructed through family letters and court records—to a riveting account of Mussolini’s rise and fall. It invites us to see in the vain, loyal, lecherous, and impetuous Attilio Teruzzi, a decorated military officer with few scruples and a penchant for parades, an exemplar of fascism’s New Man. Why did he abruptly discard the woman he had so eagerly courted? And why, when the time came to find another partner, did he choose another Jewish woman as his would-be wife? In Victoria de Grazia’s engrossing account, we see him vacillating between the will of his Duce and the dictates of his heart.
De Grazia’s landmark history captures the seductive appeal of fascism and shows us how, in his moral pieties and intimate betrayals, his violence and opportunism, Teruzzi is a forefather of the illiberal politicians of today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Columbia University history professor de Grazia (Irresistible Empire) delivers a fascinating exploration of Italian fascism through the career and intimate relationships of Attilio Teruzzi (1882 1950), one of Benito Mussolini's closest allies. A career soldier, Teruzzi took part in the 1922 March on Rome that brought Mussolini to power and served under him as a colonial administrator in Africa, where he betrayed native allies and slaughtered insurgents. De Grazia uses Teruzzi's relationships with women, particularly his marriage to Jewish-American opera singer Lilliana Weinman, to explore fascism's international appeal in the 1920s, as well as the movement's use of romantic tropes to normalize and humanize its leaders. The dissolution of the marriage over hypocritical allegations of Lilliana's infidelity, and Teruzzi's quest for annulment, reveal the complex dynamic between the Catholic Church, fascism, and the Italian public. De Grazia also examines the stakes of Teruzzi's relationship with another Jewish woman (who bore him a much beloved daughter) as Mussolini forged a closer alliance with the Nazis in the 1930s, and assails the myth that Italian fascism was somehow a "more humane and lenient totalitarianism." Her laser-focused account offers both incisive scholarship and juicy biographical details, though generalists may be overwhelmed by unfamiliar names and events. Those with a background in the subject will be deeply rewarded, however.
