Books: Two Views of a Little Caesar

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MUSSOLINI by Denis Mack Smith; Knopf; 429pages; $20

MUSSOLINI by Anthony James Joes; Watts; 405 pages; $18.95

May 1938: the Duce was entertaining the Führer with a grand show of Italy's naval might. Dozens of warships steamed across the Bay of Naples, and, like precision swimmers, 85 submarines dived beneath the water, resurfacing eight minutes later in perfect formation to fire an eleven-gun tribute to their Nazi guest. It was a dazzling display from a master of spectacle, but like most other things Benito Mussolini did, this muscle flexing was little more than an act: two years later, after a few disastrous encounters with Britain's Royal Navy, his impressive-looking fleet cowered in port, all but useless to the Germans.

If Hitler has gone down in history as the personification of evil, Mussolini has won his own immortality as the archetypal thug. But the founder of Fascism was a complex thug who could never make up his mind whether he wanted to be a fearsome breaker of the peace, like his neighbor to the north, or a geopolitical showman, the P.T. Barnum of international politics. Judging from Denis Mack Smith's study, by far the more solid and persuasive of these two new biographies, the Duce (chief) was a bit of both.

Born in 1883 in the Romagna, a region south of Venice, Mussolini was a hereditary rebel; both his father and his grandfather had been imprisoned for their political beliefs. Papa Alessandro, a blacksmith with intellectual aspirations, was one of the earliest proclaimed socialists in Italy. Young Benito was a loner with what would now be called sociopathic tendencies, a street fighter who looked on violence as the natural way to get what he wanted. Yet he was unquestionably intelligent. He read extensively in German, French and English and even wrote a novella in the style of Edgar Allan Poe. It is history's loss, if not literature's, that it was never published. Another work of fiction, an anticlerical novel, was printed and achieved some success.

His zeal for scribbling led to journalism; he became a major socialist writer and editor, with a talent for extremist invective. "The national flag is for us a rag to plant on a dunghill," he wrote in the years before World War I when he was a strong internationalist. But Mussolini could believe almost anything passionately, and not long after a dispute led him to split with the Socialists, he established a new party, the Fascists, molding it along the lines of his own erratic and opportunistic temperament. As he described it, the party was "super-relativist," with only one guiding light: Italy. "Our myth is the greatness of the nation," he said, adding that it was the historical mission of an antiliberal elite to build and maintain that greatness. When he became Prime Minister in 1922, after the famous March on Rome, he made it clear that to him greatness meant conquest. He vowed "never to leave the Italians in peace," and, so far as he was capable, he kept his promise.