However, other processes are at work in the diary which suggest that Mussolini’s portrayal of a fraternal warrior community is somewhat forced. For example, Mussolini’s claim to the effect that the soldiers had finally come to recognize themselves as part of Italy can be seriously questioned. As Antonio Gibelli has argued in his analysis of peasant soldiers’ letters, the likelihood exists that a peasant soldier’s reference to ‘Italy’ was decidedly confused. ‘High Italy’ was used by peasants for areas close to or beyond the old pre-war border, while the term ‘Italy’ was applied to that part of the country which was not the front (Gibelli, 1998: 148ff). Moreover, in the handful of diary entries preceding the Isonzo baptismal ceremony we find little or nothing corresponding to an ideal fraternal order. At most we have a declaration that the morale of the troops in the barracks is ‘not negative’ (9 September); a court martial (11 September); a pep talk by the lieutenant colonel which was so paternalistic that it even offended Mussolini (12 September); and a near fight among the soldiers themselves (16 September). An examination of this fight reveals that it was over the fact that two gunners were telling other soldiers that the war was going badly for Italy and the Entente. Mussolini wrote that the two soldiers ‘shut up in time’, thus avoiding ‘an energetic beating’. Actually, they avoided not only that: a relatively minor case of diffusion of ‘false and alarming news’ could warrant, say, four months’ hard labour in a military prison (Forcella and Monticone, 1998: 138). The point, at any rate, is that the incident revealed a lack of internal harmony and hinted at physical violence. In this regard it is important to note that rites of passage can be interpreted as the symbolic means through which a society makes sense of, and controls, the danger inherent in the transition from one social state to another (Brain, 1977). A reassessment of the central role of Mussolini in the rite of passage underlines the full implications of this ‘danger’ for understanding the ideological character of the war diary.
To begin with, there are a number of important divergences between Mussolini’s charismatic community and persona on the one hand, and Weber’s typology on the other. For example, the description of a court martial in the entry of 11 September demonstrates a legal-rational structure, whereas for Weber a charismatic community ‘is specifically irrational in the sense of being foreign to all rules’ (Weber, 1968, I: 244). Moreover, missing from the relationship between Mussolini and the peasant soldiers portrayed on 17 September as recognizing his heroic qualities is a fundamental component which renders that relationship charismatic in the strictest Weberian sense. For Weber, in genuine charisma the recognition by a following does not constitute the foundation of legitimacy; rather, the recognition is a duty for those who have been called, by virtue of the appeal and the proof, to recognize the genuineness of the charismatic authority and to act accordingly (Weber, 1968, I: 242). With the peasant soldiers we see only faith in the heroic leader. On 2 November Mussolini noted that the peasant soldiers accepted the war ‘as a duty not to be discussed’. He mentioned also that he had ‘never heard them speaking of neutrality or intervention’ and was convinced that ‘they are unaware of the existence of these words’. In short, the soldiers’ response to the call up was no doubt that of anti-war peasants unable to give an organized response to the State’s imposition of universal military service. Their sense of ‘duty’, if one can call it that, was decidedly passive and was not connected to Mussolini’s charisma.
It might be argued that we are stretching Weber’s model beyond its limits, in that for him the charismatic leader is an ‘ideal type’, an abstract amalgam of the characteristics of any number of individuals which serves not as a reflection of social reality but as a heuristic means against which reality can be measured (Weber, 1968, I: 4ff). However, the above inconsistencies may derive from the anachronistic nature of Weber’s model itself. It has been argued that the German sociologist too readily applied his pre-industrial and anti-bureaucratic abstract model to what he himself considered rational and bureaucratic capitalist times, thus overstressing the potentially revolutionary character of modern charisma (Ake, 1966/67; Oomen, 1967/68). For Gramsci, individual leaders, however charismatic, are subordinated to the political organizations in and through which modern day social forces pursue their interests. This means that, when they do appear, charismatic individuals function to keep their following within politically controllable confines (Gramsci, 1979: 129-30). Arthur Schweitzer argues that it is through the perception of a modern charismatic leader’s ‘revolutionary’ heroic gestures and actions that the basis for political stabilization or even reaction is laid (Schweitzer, 1974); meanwhile according to Carl Friedrich charisma is not a type of leadership at all, but a type of power (Friedrich, 1961), whereas Weber’s methodological idealism led him to focus on the charismatic individual as distinct from the message conveyed through charisma (Ratnam, 1964; Cohen, 1972).
It might be further objected that we are not privy to what went on in the minds of the peasant soldiers in relation to Mussolini’s charisma and a sense of ‘duty’. But the significance of social relations represented in a text lies not in their historical truth or falsity, ‘but in how they contribute to the fashioning and perpetuation of a particular process of signification’ (Eagleton, 1976: 74). Crucial here is the concept of ideology, as defined in the Introduction, and its relation to the representation of lived relations. According to Louis Althusser, ‘the form in which we are made to see ideology . . . has as its content the “lived” experience of individuals’ (Althusser, 1971: 204-5). From this point of view, Mussolini’s war diary is a mythopoeic construction of charismatic power presented as a real life relation with the peasant soldiers, while IL Popolo d’ltalia is the vehicle through which the message conveyed through charisma - that is a politically passive form of popular mobilization which does not impinge upon dominant social and political relations - entered the social realm in more or less real time (the section of the dairy under examination was published in six batches, on 28, 30 December 1915 and 1, 3, 5, 9 January 1916). Is this how Mussolini understood his charismatic function?
An examination of the 21 September diary entry suggests that it was. On that occasion Mussolini transcribed a letter he had received from a worker soldier whom he had met while marching to the front. Clearly politically self-mobilized, the worker (who described himself as such) wrote about the struggles between neutralists and interventionists and claimed that when the war broke out he consciously linked ‘“thought to action”’. Recalling his meeting with Mussolini he concluded: ‘“You left me your signature, but more than that I feel in my heart and in my soul a living light and happiness which I will never forget and which will accompany me until the completion of the Nation’s destiny.”’ The worker’s duty- bound recognition of Mussolini’s charismatic qualities was clearly more in line with Weber’s understanding of the charismatic relationship. However, what the soldier said about ‘the struggle between neutralists and interventionists’ remains a mystery, since Mussolini edited it out of his transcription. Mussolini also skipped over what had been discussed at their encounter. Furthermore, the worker soldier’s literacy, his expressed thirst for knowledge and his awareness of political and class consciousness were of little concern to Mussolini who when speaking of him used the same paternalistic terms adopted for the peasants on 17 September when they asked to be led by him, that is ‘Sancta simplicitas!’ (Mussolini’s italics). Mussolini referred to the ‘moving simplicity’ of the worker soldier’s letter, which he described as typical of the ‘humble soldiers of Italy’. In short, the politics of social class in relation to the war was removed by Mussolini so as to arrive at the real point of this diary entry: his own charisma and its mesmerizing but politically innocuous effect on the worker soldier.
Another example is the entry of 31 October 1915 in which Mussolini reported a conversation he had with a soldier who had been abroad and since returned to Italy. He did not say why or when this soldier returned. He may have been one of the approximately 5,800,000 counted in the 1911 census as living in the Italian diaspora (Salvetti, 1987: 287, n. 23) and who had since returned home for one reason or another. Alternatively, he may have been among the approximately 500,0 men who between August and November 1914 returned to Italy following the 6 August 1914 decree which demanded that those subject to call up make their way home. However, almost all of the latter were from Europe (Salvetti, 1987: 283), whereas the soldier mentioned by Mussolini had spent six years in North America. In any case, despite writing on 1 November that among the soldiers in general ‘there are those who are more alert and cultivated. They are those who were abroad, in Europe or America’, Mussolini did not accredit this prodigal son of Italy with any such intelligence. The soldier in question declared himself republican and Mussolini asked why. ‘“Because I was in New York”’, replied the exemigrant. Mussolini commented: ‘The fact of the matter is that he doesn’t even know the meaning of the word “republic”. He’s also almost illiterate.’ Yet Mussolini did not explain the meaning of republicanism to that soldier. He merely added that the soldier was courageous and that ‘his slanging matches with his stretcher bearer colleague keep the rest of the brigade’s spirits up’.
It does not matter that this latter example does not involve the effects of Mussolini’s personal charisma on the ‘republican’ soldier. What counts is that this incident confirms the nature of the message transmitted via charisma when it does appear: namely Mussolini was not concerned to encourage the political self-mobilization of soldiers from the labouring classes having assumed their passivity in advance. In particular, his own ambiguous position on the Monarchy (see Chapter 2) meant that he was not going to get bogged down in discourses about republicanism. His charisma served as a mobilizational substitute for discussion with worker and peasant soldiers about the war’s social and political significance for them as peasants and workers. Hence while the war diary represents social relations as spontaneously lived, they are in fact a construct of ideology. To what degree did this ideological project find resonance in the liminal phase of the rite of passage?