Dictionary of Literary Influences

Monnet, Omer Marie Gabriel Jean

over the traditional and figural in his art. Mondrian was not interested in the formal design aspects of his work or in achieving correct mathematic proportions in painting. His principles of neoplasticism clearly reflected the ideas of contemporary religious writers such as Jan Greshoff, Martinus Nijhoff, and Adrian Roland Holst as well as the popular poets T. S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats. These authors’ more mystical and supernatural outlook on the universe and man’s relationship to his environment filled a vacuum in the Western psyche that the numerous attacks on conventional religious belief, issued by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, had left barren.

Archives

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA1366111-A.

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW211732-A.

Printed Sources

Holtzman, Harry, and Martin S. James (eds.). The New Art–the New Life: The Collected Writings of Piet Mondrian (New York: Da Capo, 1993).

Janssen, Hans et al. Piet Mondrian (Toronto: Bulfinch Press, 1994). Milner, John. Mondrian (London: Phaidon, 1994).

Gregory L. Schnurr

MONNET, OMER MARIE GABRIEL JEAN (1888–1979)

Jean Monnet was born at Cognac, France, the son of a small brandy grower and freethinking radical socialist who advised his son to think for himself rather than read books (Brinkley and Hackett 1991, 123). Despite a devoutly religious mother and later a wife who was a nominal Roman Catholic, Monnet rarely if ever demonstrated substantial interest in religion. Educated locally near Pons and in Cognac, he left school at sixteen after passing his first baccalauréat, joining his father’s business. Monnet spent World War I in the inter-Allied economic bureaucracy, and from 1919 to 1923 was deputy secretary general of the new League of Nations, subsequently resuming his business career with a New York–based investment bank. A Free French economic expert during World War II, he devised the postwar Monnet Plan to facilitate France’s recovery. Convinced that only full-scale European cooperation would prevent future devastating wars, from 1945 onward Monnet quietly but relentlessly crusaded for this, playing central roles in establishing the 1951 European Coal and Steel Community, of which he became first president, and its 1957 successor, the European Economic Community, which ultimately evolved into the European Union. For 20 years beginning in 1955, Monnet—vir- tually universally considered unified Europe’s preeminent founder—headed the Action Committee for the United States of Europe, working constantly to strengthen existing institutions.

Notoriously unintellectual, possessing no university degrees and indifferent to theory, Monnet was “no great reader, except of newspapers,” rarely made literary allusions (Brinkley and Hackett 1991, 122–23), and disliked metaphors and studied stylistic effects (Témoignages 1989, 182, 355). While Monnet’s activities effectively

370

Moore, Henry

exemplified many of their precepts, friends believed him unfamiliar with the philosophical works of René Descartes or Immanuel Kant or such contemporaries as Raymond Aron (Brinkley and Hackett 1991, 40; Bossuat and Wilkens 1999, 484). Yet Monnet frequently quoted his favorite writer, the nineteenth-century Swiss diarist Henri-Frédéric Amiel, on the necessity to preserve individuals’ accomplishments by establishing appropriate permanent institutions (Monnet 1976, 393). Similarly influential was the prominent French poet-essayist Paul Valéry, whose warning against being constrained by historical precedents Monnet cited approvingly, marking up and frequently rereading his Regards sur le monde actuel (Roussel 1996, 21; Témoignages 1989, 573). An inspirational anthology, The Spirit of Man (1916), its compiler British poet laureate Robert Bridges, was his favorite bedside book, and though he supposedly “never read novels,” Monnet relaxed with Peter Cheyney’s hard-boiled detective stories (Duchêne 1994, 401; Brinkley and Hackett 1991, 13, 121–22, 124). Although he was incapable of memorizing Corneille’s verse, he apparently did recognize the plot of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (Brinkley and Hackett 1991, 21, 119). More broadly, an associate believed the Judeo-Christian tenets of European history, Greek philosophy, and the Bible implicitly pervaded Monnet’s efforts for European unity (Bossuat and Wilkens 1999, 484).

Archives

Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, Ferme de Dorigny, Lausanne, Switzerland: the great bulk of Monnet’s surviving personal papers, though many pre-1940 materials disappeared during World War II.

French National Archives, Paris, France: Ministry of Foreign Affairs records include portions of Monnet’s private papers for 1939–40.

Printed Sources

Bossuat, Gérard, and Andreas Wilkens (eds.). Jean Monnet, l’Europe et les Chemins de la Paix (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999).

Brinkley, Douglas G., and Clifford P. Hackett (eds.). Jean Monnet: The Path to European Unity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

Duchêne, François. Jean Monnet: The First Statesman of Interdependence (New York: Norton, 1994).

Monnet, Jean. Mémoire (Paris: Fayard, 1976).

Monnet, Jean, and Robert Schuman. Correspondance, 1947–1953 (Lausanne: Fondation Jean Monnet, 1986).

Roussel, Eric. Jean Monnet 1888–1979 (Paris: Fayard, 1996).

Témoignages à la mémoire de Jean Monnet (Lausanne: Fondation Jean Monnet, 1989).

Priscilla Roberts

MONTINI, GIOVANNI BATTISTA

See Paul VI.

MOORE, HENRY (1898–1986)

Henry Moore was born in the coal-mining town of Castelford, Yorkshire, England, where he attended elementary and secondary school. Moore began a

371

Moore, Henry

teaching career in 1915, but was called to war at the age of 18 where he served with the Civil Service Rifles and suffered a gas attack at the battle of Cambrai, France. Moore returned to study art as the only sculpture student at the newly inaugurated Leeds University and at the same time attended informal evening pottery classes. On scholarship, Moore traveled to London to study at the Royal College of Art and became a frequent visitor to the Victoria and Albert Museum. He also toured Italy on a six-month traveling scholarship, studying the work of the old masters. In 1928 Moore was granted his first public sculpture commission and held his first one-man exhibition at the Warren Gallery in London. He later accepted a seven-year appointment as instructor at the Royal College of Art and for an additional seven years held the position of department head at the Chelsea School of Art, during which time he produced monumental works such as his Reclining Figure (1936). Moore became a master of such materials as wood, stone, bronze, and marble, producing works centered around specific and recurring themes such as the mother and child. In 1941 Moore served as an official war artist and was recognized for his drawings of the London citizenry huddled in air raid shelters. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leeds (1945), won international sculpture prizes at the Venice, Tokyo, and San Paulo Biennales, and was a trustee of both the Tate and National Galleries in London. He became a Companion of Honor in 1955, received the British Order of Merit (1963) and the Erasmus Prize (1968), and produced commissioned works for the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, the Lincoln Center of Performing Arts in New York, Toronto City Hall, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Moore’s monumental figures have been stylistically compared to the reclining figures of Chac-mool, Toltec-Mayan sculptures that would have been familiar to the artist through his readings of Frans Blom and Oliver LaFarge’s Tribes and Temples (1926). Moore also read D. H. Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent and was fascinated by the harshness of execution and truth to materials inherent in South American sculpture. As a youth, Moore read an abundance of classic literature, including the works of William Shakespeare, the French poet Charles Baudelaire, and contemporary authors such as T. S. Eliot and Lawrence. As an art student, Moore read Roger Fry and Clive Bell’s Vision and Design, which contained numerous essays on ancient American and African sculpture that influenced the artist in his handling of material and expressive exaggeration of form. The writings of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Vassily Kandinsky’s The Art of Spiritual Harmony stated that sculpture should serve to express the emotions of the artist and need not be adjunct to existence. Moore adhered to these ideas as well as to those of the constructivists, who advocated that art, through transmission of meaning, is positive and enriching to its viewers.

Archives

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., control no. DCAW212069-A.

Museum of Modern Art, New York, control no. NYMX92-A2.

Printed Sources

James, Philip (ed.). Henry Moore on Sculpture: A Collection of the Sculptor’s Writings and Spoken Words (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992).

372

Morrison, Toni

Moore, Henry, and John Hedgecoe. Henry Moore—My Ideas, Inspiration and Life as an Artist

(New York: Collins and Brown, 1999).

Parker, William. Henry Moore: An Illustrated Biography (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1985).

Gregory L. Schnurr

MORRISON, TONI (1931– )

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931, the second of four children. She was named Chloe Anthony Wofford, a name she changed to Toni in college when people could not pronounce her first name. Her father, George Wofford, migrated from Georgia to Lorain. He worked as a welder, often holding three jobs to support the family. Her mother, Rahmah, was the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers who had migrated north in search of a better life. She ran the home and worked at what Morrison called “humiliating jobs” to help support the family. Her parents’ views of white people influenced Morrison during her youth. Her father did not trust or believe any white person while her mother hoped that the white race would improve. The Woffords taught their children to rely on their own race and not to trust the society at large.

Morrison attended integrated schools in Lorain. She was the only Black child in her first grade class and the only one who could read. Morrison graduated with honors from Lorain High School in 1949. She then went to Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she earned a B.A. in English and classics in 1953. Following her graduation, she attended Cornell University, where she earned an M.A. in English. Her thesis explored suicide in Virginia Woolf’s and William Faulkner’s literature.

Morrison pursued a teaching career following college. She taught at Texas Southern University and Howard University. At Howard she met her husband, Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect. They had two sons but the marriage ended in divorce. Morrison went on to work in publishing for Random House. She rose to the position of senior editor and shepherded writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayle Jones through the editing process. Morrison has been Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of Humanities at Princeton University since 1989.

Numerous awards have been granted for Morrison’s work. The Bluest Eye was her first novel, followed by Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Tar Baby, Jazz, and Paradise. Sula won the National Book Award in 1974. Beloved was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and was made into a film. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the first African American woman to win it.

The roles of storyteller and listener are important to Toni Morrison. Stories, myths, folk tales, and family stories shaped Morrison’s feeling for language at a young age. From these stories she gained an understanding of the importance of narrative structure. By the time she entered first grade she could read. As an adolescent she read Jane Austen, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Gustave Flaubert. Morrison recalls the specific details of culture and experience that the authors used in their books. She imitated that trait in her work when she became a writer. Her research on William Faulkner was also valuable, and Faulkner’s style often can be seen in Morrison’s work. In interviews Morrison frequently comments on the

373

Mosley, Oswald Ernald

importance of reading and research. The seeds of history often appear in her work. For the Black Book, she collected materials that ranged from the period of slavery through the 1940s. These included accounts from newspapers, bills of sale, sheet music, letters, photographs, and other artifacts. The first-hand documents that she read for this project influenced other books as well. Researching a town, a history, or an era is often an important part of writing a novel for Morrison.

Archives

None available.

Printed Sources

Heinze, Denise. “Toni Morrison.” In James R. Giles and Wanda H. Giles (eds.), American Novelists Since World War II (Third Series). Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 143. (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, Gale Research Inc., 1994).

Morrison, Toni. Toni Morrison—Nobel Lecture. December 7, 1993. http://www.nobel.se/ literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html (accessed June 30, 2002).

Samuels, Wilfred D., and Clenora Hudson-Weems (eds.). Toni Morrison (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990).

Taylor-Guthrie, Danielle (ed.). Conversations with Toni Morrison ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994). A collection of the major interviews with Toni Morrison.

Millie Jackson

MOSLEY, OSWALD ERNALD (1896–1980)

Oswald Mosley was born at Rollaston Hall, Staffordshire. He studied at Winchester (1909–13) and was there confirmed as a member of the Church of England. Entering Sandhurst in 1914, he was commissioned into the cavalry before transferring to the Royal Flying Corps. Invalided out of active service, Mosley spent the rest of the war at the Ministry of Munitions and the Foreign Office. Beginning his political career as a Conservative MP in 1918, he broke with that party to sit first as an Independent before joining the Labour Party and becoming an MP and then a junior minister in the government of 1929–31. Following the rejection of his proposals to mitigate the effects of the Slump, Mosley founded the New Party, which failed at the polls in 1931. After this he took the step which would make him notorious, founding the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932, which he led until interned as a security risk in 1940. Although framing innovative solutions for Britain’s problems, Mosley became most associated in the British public mind with violence and anti-Semitism. This view of him ensured that his attempts to re-enter politics after 1945 were doomed to failure.

The pattern of Mosley’s reading reflected the vicissitudes of his career. During times of intense commitment he relied on the research of assistants but periods of enforced idleness were seized upon for personal study. He described his reading whilst recuperating from wartime injuries—including Thomas Macaulay, Edward Gibbon, and theosophist works—as “omnivorous and voracious.” Having decided to enter politics, he read the speeches of great parliamentarians. The hiatus in his parliamentary career in the 1920s and the year before the founding of the BUF were similar periods of concentrated study. In this respect at least, Mosley lived up to his ideal of the man of thought and action. His thought is distinctive in his attempt to synthesize a reasoned critique of liberal capitalism and proposals for its

374

Muhammad, Elijah

transformation with the stress on authoritarianism and vitalism more commonly associated with fascism. During the 1920s his economic ideas were influenced by John Maynard Keynes’s Tract on Monetary Reform (1923) and the “underconsumptionist” thesis of J. A. Hobson espoused by the Independent Labour Party. The other side of Mosley’s thinking was influenced in the 1920s and after by George Bernard Shaw, in particular The Perfect Wagnerite (1898), Caesar and Cleopatra

(1901), and Back to Methuselah (1921). Shaw remained an intellectual hero for Mosley throughout his life, but Mosley also read more widely during the 1930s, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883–91), and he was strongly influenced by Oswald Spengler’s critique of European society, The Decline of the West (1918–22). During his wartime internment (1940–43), Mosley learned German and immersed himself deeply in modern and classical philosophy, drama, and literature—although, apart from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (1831), he never cared much for the novel. Of his wartime reading, Carl Jung and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe probably had the most influence on him. He committed many passages from Goethe’s Faust (1808, 1832) and Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) to memory and later wrote an introduction for a translation of the former.

Archives

Mosley Papers, Special Collections, University of Birmingham Library.

Printed Sources

Mosley, Diana. Loved Ones: Pen Portraits (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985).

Mosley, Nicholas. Beyond the Pale: Sir Oswald Mosley and Family, 1933–1980 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1983).

———. Rules of the Game: Sir Oswald and Lady Cynthia Mosley, 1896–1933 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1982).

Mosley, Oswald. My Life (London: Nelson, 1968).

Ritchel, Daniel. The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997).

Skidelsky, Robert. Oswald Mosley [1975] (London: Papermac, 1990).

Philip M. Coupland

MUHAMMAD, ELIJAH (1897–1975)

Muhammad was born Elijah Poole in Sandersville, Georgia, to a family of former slave sharecroppers. His father was a Baptist preacher. He received only two years of formal education, and left home at age 16. He married Clara Evans in 1919. Muhammad moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1923, where he worked as a manual laborer until he was laid off in 1929. During the Great Depression he was forced to live on government relief for two years. In 1931 he met Wali Fard Muhammad (Wallace D. Fard), founder and leader of the “Lost-Found Nation of Islam in the Wilderness of America” (NOI). He joined the organization and soon became Fard’s most trusted lieutenant. In 1932 he was sent to Chicago and successfully established Temple No. 2 of the NOI. After Fard’s mysterious disappearance in 1934, Elijah assumed leadership of the NOI. Because of internal schisms, he relocated the headquarters to Chicago. In these years Fard was deified as Allah. Elijah Muhammad was instituted as the messenger of Allah and was always addressed with the title “the Honorable.” In 1942, at the age of 45, he was arrested for dis-

375

Muhammad, Elijah

couraging young Black men from serving in the armed forces, but was acquitted. In the same year he was imprisoned for four years for refusing to comply with the Selective Service Act. As a leader he had his best and most difficult moments with Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz), who played a crucial role in the NOI from 1952 until his resignation in 1964. Under Elijah Muhammad’s leadership, the NOI established more than a hundred temples. In accordance with its slogan “Build Black, Buy Black,” the NOI created and operated a wide range of businesses, including farms, supermarkets, and a newspaper and even ran its own educational system. His radical message, which equated Christianity with racist oppression, shook the foundations of the Black Christian community and created a distinct voice outside of the mainstream civil rights movement. His message of Black liberation and self-awareness and his principled abstention from politics influenced the lives of numerous African Americans. At the popular level he became an inspiration for many Blacks who were suffering economic and social inequalities. His leadership is known for nurturing pride, self-sufficiency, and solidarity among African American Muslims. The NOI promoted a strong work ethic, banned criminal activity, and required members to be clean-cut and wear suits. Alcohol, tobacco, narcotics, and adultery were prohibited, and unhealthy food was derided as “slave food.” In the final years of his life he toned down his criticism of Christianity, which encouraged dialogue among the major faiths, especially in the urban centers. Elijah Muhammad died in Chicago on February 25, 1975.

Muhammad’s traumatic childhood during one of the harshest periods of Southern segregation played an important role in shaping his worldview as did his deep discussions on religion with his eldest brother, Billie, while he was unemployed during the Great Depression. His thinking was also shaped by various faiths, doctrines, and social movements that challenged the segregated, discriminatory social environment of the country. These included Bishop Henry McNeal Turner’s International Migration Society and its later incarnation, the Universal Negro Improvement Association of Marcus Garvey; a mythical notion of history called Ethiopianism; and Noble Drew Ali’s Moorish Science Temple Movement, with its “home made” Holy Koran of the Moorish Science Temple. Muhammad was also influenced by the self-help and solidarity-based Peace Mission Movement of Father Divine (George Baker), sundry eschatological and millenarian doctrines, and the Harlem Renaissance, which fostered an earnest sense of Black pride and resistance. The greatest influence upon his teaching and philosophy was Fard Muhammad’s “The Supreme Lessons.”

Archives

None known to exist.

Printed Sources

Clegg, Claude Andrew, III. An Original Man: The Life of and Times of Elijah Muhammad

(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997).

Evanzz, Karl. The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad (New York: Pantheon Books, 1999).

Gardell, Mattias. In the Name of Elijah Muhammad: Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam

(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

Lee, Martha F. The Nation of Islam: An American Millenarian Movement (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

376

Munch, Edvard

McCloud, Aminah Beverly. African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995). Muhammad, Elijah. History of the Nation of Islam, Nasir Makr Hakim (ed.), (Cleveland: Sec-

retarius, 1994).

Turner, Richard Brent. Islam in the African American Experience (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1997).

White, Vibert L. Inside the Nation of Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

Yücel Demirer

MUNCH, EDVARD (1863–1944)

Edvard Munch was born in Loten, Norway, and moved to present day Oslo with his family in 1867. Both his mother and sister Sophie died prematurely, and in 1879 Munch escaped his traumatic childhood and entered college to study engineering. After a year of study, Munch’s interests turned to art history, and he entered the Oslo School of Design, supervised by the academician Christian Krohg. This was followed by informal study at Frits Thaulow’s open-air academy, wherein Munch became one of the “Christiania Boheme,” a group of slightly radical students with a shared interest in modern art. In 1895 Munch painted The Sick Child and was awarded a grant from the Finne Bequest to travel to Paris and Antwerp. He held his first one-man show in 1889 and received a second and third scholarship to study European art in 1890 and 1891 respectively. During this time Munch initiated his Frieze of Life, a series of intimately symbolic and expressive paintings that portrayed the fragile cycle of life, death, and love. His best-known work, The Scream (1893), was part of this extensive grouping, and prints of Munch’s work were popularized throughout Europe following its production. Munch exhibited at the Paris Salon des Independents (1898), participated in the 1899 Venice Biennale, and became associated with the Berlin succession painters in 1904. Suffering a nervous breakdown, Munch entered a Copenhagen clinic in 1908 but the following year began work on a series of three large murals for the assembly hall at Oslo University. By the time of his death at his home in Ekely, Munch’s prodigious output had paved the way for German expressionism.

Munch’s use of art as therapeutic self-presentation was linked to the beliefs of authors such as Emile Zola who espoused that art must not simply convey nature but existentially reveal the essence of its creator, offering a form of salvation in the process. Munch turned to Zola’s work L’Oeuvre (1886) as justification for abandoning his naturalistic approach to painting in favor of a more expressionist style. Charles Henry’s theories on the emotive power of color were also read by the artist, whose use of poignant hues and symbolist subject matter expressed his experiences transformed by time, emotions, and memory. This externalization of mood and experience was paralleled by the literature of Munch’s era, including the Norwegian Knut Hamsun’s novel Sult, which externalized the internal suffering of the urban poor and destitute. Authors such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Herman Bang also portrayed the often weary and hopeless mood of their era in dark and numinous novels and poems. The mystical content of much of Munch’s art was influenced by monism, a spiritual viewpoint shared by many of his contemporaries including Ernst Haeckel and the Swedish author August Strindberg. Contributing to Munch’s diversion from traditional Christian theology was his study of various neospiritual works of literature such as the novels of Stanislaw

377

Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea

Pryzbyszewski, Hans Jaeger’s Homo Sapiens, and Theodor Daubler’s Northern Lights. Munch was also known to have studied Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophie der Kunst and Søren Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread, as well as Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1860) and Descent of Man (1871).

Archives

The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Special Collections, control no. CJPA86-A173.

Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Special collections, control no. PAUR93-A1088.

Printed Sources

Heller, Reinhold. Munch: His Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). Hodin, J. P. Edvard Munch (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972).

Stang, Ragna Thiis. Edvard Munch: The Man and His Art (New York: Abbeville, 1979).

Gregory L. Schnurr

MUSSOLINI, BENITO AMILCARE ANDREA (1883–1945)

Benito Mussolini was born at Verano di Costa near Forlì, Italy. His father was a blacksmith and ardent socialist internationalist in a rural community near Bologna, then the focus of violent revolutionary spirit. From socialist roots and internationalism, Mussolini turned to nationalism, the extreme manifestation of which was the Fascist dictatorship for which he was assassinated.

Mussolini was born within two years of the deaths of Giuseppe Garibaldi and Karl Marx. At different stages of his life both influenced him. His father was a staunch atheist, his mother a devout Catholic schoolteacher. There are contradictory myths about Mussolini’s childhood: the boy tearing apart live chickens; the reclusive bookworm. Fascist supporters later embroidered stories of his violent youth, the brutality and aggression, when probably he had a normal, happy childhood, though under the influence of his father’s lessons on social injustice. He had a good education in church and secular schools and excelled academically despite his growing violence. He read Robert Ardigo’s Positivist Morality, Francesco Fiorentino’s History of Philosophy, and Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

At 18 he became a schoolteacher, later traveling to Switzerland in pursuit of socialists and anarchists and avoiding military service. He became f luent in French and German. He read the works of Angelica Balabanoff, a socialist lecturer at the University of Lausanne. He did manual jobs like bricklaying but eventually concentrated on study, reading socialist and anarchist literature including Marx, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Rugnd Bebel, and Gustave Hervé, some of whom he translated into Italian. His favorite author was Georges Sorel because of his contempt for parliamentary compromise and reformism. He returned to military service in Verona in 1904, later saying a man must learn to obey before he can command. From 1909 he edited the socialist newspaper L’Avvenire del Lavoratore in Trentino, still under Austrian rule and torn between Italian nationalism, supported by the bourgeoisie, and socialism, represented by the Austrian Social

378

Mussolini, Benito Amilcare Andrea

Democrats. Suspected as an anarchist, he was returned to the Italian authorities. In Forlì he wrote Claudia Particella, a novel about an ambitious courtesan who seduces a cardinal, and Il Trentino veduto da un socialista. He edited an extremist local newspaper, La Lotta di Classe, writing and acting in opposition to Italy’s invasion of Libya and war with Turkey in 1911. He was imprisoned. Working out his philosophy from his reading, he embodied a strange mixture of pacifism and interventionism, socialism and totalitarianism, idealism and realism, romanticism and opportunism.

From 1912 he edited Avanti!, the Italian Socialist Party’s daily newspaper published in Milan. During riots and strikes he called for mob violence to fight state violence, in the cause of proletarian power. He was disillusioned at socialists willing to engage in skirmishes but ultimately afraid to overthrow authority. In 1914 when many socialist parties in Europe turned from international ideals toward their individual states and war, the Italian party firmly opposed war. Mussolini wrote that the situation demanded flexibility and favored Italian intervention with the Allies against Germany, not least because the majority of Italians wanted it. Forced to resign from Avanti!, he established his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia, calling for Italy to join what he described as a just, democratic war. He was conscripted in 1915, fighting on the Austrian front until he was wounded. He supported continuing war to absolute victory, calling the socialists traitors. As the Italian army collapsed, resigned, and deserted, Mussolini condemned pacificism and blamed weak government. He believed the crisis called for dictatorship as the only route to democracy. More than any other writer, Mussolini admired Machiavelli. But his interpretation of The Prince was narrow and personal and selectively peppered with Marx, Max Stirner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sorel, Vilfredo Parreto, Gustave Le Bon, Giuseppe Prezzolini, Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, and Arthur Schopenhauer, reinterpreted into the cocktail that became fascism. In 1919 he founded the national Fasci di Combattimento, uniting groups in existence since their call for intervention in the war in 1914. They demanded universal suffrage, proportional representation, abolition of the Senate, and creation of national economic councils. In the 1919 election Fascist candidates, including Mussolini, were defeated by the Socialists, winning no seats. Fascism as a political force appeared dead. But the threat of Bolshevism alarmed Europe. As workers’ action spread through northern Italy, the economy declined. The middle classes turned to fascism to fight the threat of anarchy.

From this time Mussolini was less influenced by literature than himself influential. He followed no one, acting on an ad hoc basis without a single guiding philosophy. His unselective interpretation of socialist and anarchist writers created an unpredictable mixture of violence, jargon, and personal aggrandisement. He successfully fought the 1921 election in the name of nationalism, citing the lives and work of Dante, Galileo, Giuseppe Verdi, Garibaldi, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Gabriele D’Annunzio. Clashes with socialists continued in and out of parliament, Mussolini alternating between skillful parliamentarian and mob supporter. He founded an intellectual paper, Gerarchia, promoting overthrow of democracy in favor of state control. He encouraged violent fascist squads organized on military lines to put down socialism and strikes. In 1922, under threat of a fascist siege of Rome, the king invited Mussolini to form a government. The Fascists had no majority, but Mussolini as prime minister held all necessary power. By 1924 he had

379