Mussolini and Marinetti: Performing Citizenship in Fascist Italy

Close your eyes and imagine, if you will, Benito Mussolini, the infamous “first dictator.” Picture him emphatically placed above an audience, speaking from a pedestal, striking an iconic pose—his arm struck forcefully out, his hand closed in a fist or perhaps thrusting a fascist salute, his barrel chest reverberating the echoes of his impassioned speech, his strong jaw lifted toweringly above all onlookers. This, Mussolini’s public persona, was the “new Italian” citizen incarnate. Now, figuratively open your eyes, step back, and realize that you are not staring at Mussolini the orator himself, but rather at one of millions of postcards of his likeness—postcards purposefully hung around the homes of countless Italians. This act was one of many layers of Italy’s communal performance of “new Italian” citizenship during the Fascist regime. However, Italy’s final act of performed citizenship before the onset of its Republican era—the public display and mutilation of Mussolini’s corpse—was its most iconic and, perhaps, its most definitive. Comparing the iconography of these two actions, specifically the positioning of Mussolini’s body in each (strong and tall in postcards and photographs versus dangling from a service station in the end), serves to demonstrate the complete reversal of Italy’s performed citizenship from the beginning to the end of Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

The fledgling authoritarian government of Italy embraced Futurism because the artistic form meticulously defined, policed, and performed citizenship in both an artistic and sociopolitical sense—and Futurism’s leader, Filippo Marinetti, did so according to a strict hierarchy. In defining and exploring the etymology of the term “avant-garde,” Hans Magnus Enzensberger explains, “Every guard is a collective. . . . First the group, and only then the individual, whose decisions are of no consequence in the undertakings of the guard, unless he be its leader. For every guard is most rigorously divided into the one who issues the commands and passwords of the day and the many who receive them, pass them on, and obey them.”¹

As Enzensberger clarifies, the forms of the historical avant-garde mimic the structure of authoritarian forms of government—membership is strictly curated and guided by an individual with power. Benito Mussolini in particular harnessed the potency of the avant-garde by aligning himself with Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists, and he embraced the Futurist ideology, rhetoric, and definitions of citizenship accordingly. Mussolini carefully crafted his image through specific iconographic management— much in the way Marinetti curated the public perception of Futurism through membership control and advertising—and the Italian populace embraced that image during the first half of his reign, as evidenced by contemporaneous postcard collections. I’m particularly fascinated by the revelations these postcards offer regarding Italy’s performance of citizenship during Mussolini’s Fascist regime. In this essay, I explore the icono-graphic evolution of Italy’s communal performance of citizenship. After explaining Futurism’s foundations in themes of citizenship, I detail the iconography of Mussolini’s performed citizenship, the “new Italian,” replete with Marinetti’s apparent influence. With this guide, I chronicle the iconographic evolution of Italy’s performance of citizenship, defined by the populace’s approbation or disapprobation of Mussolini’s model, drawing from the aforementioned postcards and the public desecration of Mussolini’s corpse as case studies.

As Mussolini’s performed iconography as leader and paragon of “the New Italian” was directly inspired by the forms of Futurism and the art of Marinetti, it’s crucial that we detail the relationship between the two and define the importance of citizenship to the forms of the historical avant-garde, especially Futurism. The earliest political usage of the term “avant-garde” is accredited to Henri de Saint-Simon, a French political theorist and early Socialist thinker, writing at the cusp of the nineteenth century. In his essay On Social Organization, Saint-Simon presents a utopia in which humanity “marches” toward “the well-being and happiness of all mankind”; he writes that “in this great undertaking the artists, the men of imagination will open the march: they will take the Golden Age from the past and offer...