**Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had an ambivalent relationship with Switzerland.** Wikimedia

Mussolini and Switzerland

In the early 20th century, Benito Mussolini caused a stir in Switzerland as a rebellious socialist. Some decades later, he became a threat to the country as a fascist dictator.

Noëmi Crain Merz

Noëmi Crain Merz is a historian, university lecturer and curator.

In July 1902, a Lausanne policeman on early morning patrol found a youth asleep in a box under the Grand-Pont bridge. He abruptly woke the man and brought him to the station on charges of vagrancy. The person in question was called Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini and he had come to Switzerland two weeks earlier via Chiasso. He was a trained primary school teacher and socialist, whose parents had named him after Mexican reformer Benito Juárez and Italian socialists Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa. Mussolini’s first two weeks in the curiosa repubblica (the strange republic), as he called the Swiss Confederation, were a disappointment. He lasted a few days doing heavy manual work at the Peter chocolate factory in Orbe with 11-hour shifts for an hourly wage of 32 centimes. He then went to Lausanne, where he ended up in a police cell shortly before his 19th birthday with just his passport, an authorisation to study and 15 centimes to his name.

**In 1902, a vagrant called Benito Mussolini spent the night beneath Grand-Pont bridge in Lausanne.** e-pics

The story of the future Duce’s extreme poverty as a hungry and homeless person in Switzerland has been retold many times, mainly by the man himself. He wrote in his autobiography ‘La mia vita’, that his stay in Switzerland was not very long but hard – fraught with difficulty and with many trying episodes. However, serious poverty only afflicted him briefly. Following his release from prison, he met up with Italian socialists and joined the Sindacato muratori e manovali, the Italian bricklayers’ union, of which he became branch secretary at the end of August. He then started writing articles for L’Avvenire del Lavoratore, an Italian socialist newspaper published in Lausanne. That marked the start of a successful career in journalism. He also quickly became a sought-after speaker. The first time he spoke in front of Italian construction workers was in Montreux in August. He borrowed a good pair of trousers and a hat for the occasion; appearance was as important to him as the content of his message.

Sent to prison in Bern

European socialism was riven with schisms in the early 20th century, with reformists demanding that socialist politicians join right-of-centre governments to push through social reforms, while the revolutionary camp advocated all-out class war. The reformists’ dilemma presented itself during the Basel bricklayers’ strike, which was called in April 1903 and led by Italian workers. The cantonal government, which for the first time ever included a social democrat member, called for the army to intervene against the workers. Mussolini went to Basel and spoke to his striking countrymen. There was no doubt in his mind: only revolution would lead to the victory of socialism. He also saw violence as a legitimate means to an end. He had already come to the attention of the police in Bern, where he had lived and worked from early March 1903, as a firebrand speaker. He was summoned to a police station there in June and, following ten days of detention, sent back to Italy on the pretext of his identity papers not being in order. He returned to Switzerland, hoping to attend university in Geneva, and was arrested again. He was better received in Lausanne, where he attended lectures at the university during his last months in the country. He devoured – as he put it – “an entire library”, wrote articles, translated socialist texts from French into Italian and travelled through Switzerland on speaking engagements. By then he had been a well-known figure in Italian socialist circles for quite some time. The months Mussolini spent in Lausanne were far from boring; he had affairs and led a bohemian lifestyle in revolutionary circles.

**Mussolini’s file as created by the Bern police in 1903. The authorities applied anthropometric methods, which he found demeaning.** Wikimedia

After 27 months in Switzerland interspersed with brief absences, the future fascist Duce left the country in November 1904. In Italy, his career in the Socialist Party quickly took off. He ruthlessly enforced his agenda and steamrolled the reformist wing of the party into oblivion. He also visited Switzerland, where thousands of Italian workers lived, on a number of occasions over the ensuing years to deliver speeches. When the 29-year-old took to the stage in Zurich on 1 May 1913, he was among Italy’s leading socialists as editor-in-chief of the socialist party newspaper Avanti.

From socialist to fascist dictator

Mussolini broke with the party in the First World War. When hostilities commenced in the summer of 1914, he was a resolute antimilitarist and used Abasso la guerra (down with the war) as the headline of an article in which he argued for full neutrality. However, shortly afterward he reversed this position. The party leadership was firmly against Italy entering the war and removed him from his post as editor-in-chief of Avanti. Mussolini responded by starting his own newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (the people of Italy). As a natural-born journalist, he was all too familiar with the power of the written word. This sealed his fate with the socialists, and he was banned from the party following a tumultuous conclusion to the party meeting in November 1914. His founding of the fascist movement after the war marked the start of Benito Mussolini’s rise to Italian dictator. Il Popolo d’Italia was to remain the party newspaper until 1943 and it served to disseminate fascist propaganda among the people. He mercilessly pursued his former socialist contemporaries during his more than 20 years of tyranny, and thousands of them went into exile, with some seeking refuge in Switzerland.

**The newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia was the fascists’ main propaganda instrument until 1943. It was founded in 1914 as a socialist newspaper.** Wikimedia

Mussolini came to power in 1922 and embarked upon a series of provocations, border violations and press campaigns against Switzerland, which continued for as long as he remained in power. Nonetheless, the Federal Council sought to maintain good diplomatic relations with Italy, even as the fascist dictator relentlessly purged internal opposition, used poisonous gas in a war against Ethiopia, joined forces with Hitler and introduced race laws. The admiration for the founder of fascism among conservative and catholic Swiss declined during the 1930s. The University of Lausanne’s decision to award their former student an honorary doctorate in 1937 caused outrage. But no-one intervened, either at the cantonal or federal level. In the summer of 1943, as defeat in the Second World War loomed on the horizon, the Duce was deposed by his own people. German troops then occupied the north of the country and installed Mussolini as leader of the fascist Italian Social Republic by Lake Garda. The official Italian government fled to southern Italy. Switzerland established diplomatic relations with the official government, but also maintained informal ties with Mussolini’s republic. The country’s economic interests in northern Italy were too great to sever relations entirely. During the last two years of his life, the Duce and his new regime supported Germany’s cruel treatment of his own people until the partisans gained the upper hand when the Allies arrived in April 1945.

**Benito Mussolini was admired in parts of Switzerland, but he also inspired great fear, especially following his pact with Adolf Hitler.** Wikimedia

Mussolini flees north towards Switzerland

On 25 April, recorded in the history books as ‘Liberation Day’, Mussolini was in Milan. All his hopes of political asylum in another country had come to nothing. When Archbishop Ildefonso Schuster made a last attempt at mediation between the fascists and the National Liberation Committee, the insurgents were already in control of many parts of the city. Mussolini, mentally and physically exhausted by then, had no alternative but to surrender unconditionally. However, he was not prepared to do that. He slipped away from Milan unnoticed with his mistress Clara Petacci and a few loyal fascists and headed towards Switzerland. As the road to Como was controlled by partisans, the fugitives moved north along the lake shore until they encountered German troops near Menaggio. When communist partisans stopped the convoy, the Italian dictator was wearing a German uniform. Following a trial by an improvised court, Mussolini and Petacci were summarily shot on 28 April. Pictures of their ravaged corpses hanging upside down the following morning from the roof of a petrol station on Piazzale Loreto square in Milan, circulated the globe. The Duce, who had exploited the media as a tool for his regime, would have been spared this posthumous humiliation if he had made it to Switzerland. He would have been extradited and put on trial. But he didn’t make it to the border – a fate he shares with countless others who tried to escape his former henchmen.

Benito Mussolini (fourth from the right) was shot and strung up in Milan beside his mistress Clara Petacci and leading fascists. A post-mortem humiliation. — **Benito Mussolini (fourth from the right) was shot and strung up in Milan beside his mistress Clara Petacci and leading fascists. A *post-mortem* humiliation.** Swiss National Museum

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