Mussolini's Ghost: The Afterlife of a Dictator

Summary

The Italian Fascist dictator Mussolini was killed in 1945, his body exhibited upside down in Milan before an angry crowd. The repudiation by the people of the dictator who had led them to disaster was complete. But his story did not end there. The Duce continued to live on thanks to a legacy that was multi-faceted and complex.

In Mussolini's Ghost Stephen Gundle explores the many aspects of Mussolini's strange afterlife, be it through the fate of his statues and the places that Mussolini was most associated with, his impact on political life, his treatment in public history, and his place in popular culture. Gundle argues that the root causes of Il Duce's disturbing persistence lie in the way Italians negotiated the transition from war to peace and from Fascism to democracy. Instead of acknowledging the enthusiastic backing many had given to a criminal dictatorship, many Italians behaved as though Fascism had never really existed. The dictator was instead recast as a flawed but well-meaning family man. Thanks to this and other strange reconfigurations, the grip Mussolini established over the popular mind was never properly dismantled. Gundle uses psychoanalysis and collective psychology to explore a bold new interpretation of the causes of Mussolini's posthumous persistence, and compares his and Italy's fate to that of Germany.