The troubled relationship between Mussolini and his son-in-law

Like those of his wartime ally Joseph Goebbels, the diaries of the Italian fascist foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano (1903-44) have proved a mainstay of academic research into the frequently banal inner workings of the Axis dictatorships. Both men were entirely aware of their journals’ historical and commercial value.

In 1937, Goebbels struck a lucrative deal with Max Amman, the Nazi Party publisher, for the release of his warped musings on race and politics twenty years after his death, which in the event came sooner than he might have imagined. Ciano in turn used his diaries to barter unsuccessfully for his life when arrested on charges of treason. His widow Edda, who happened to be Benito Mussolini’s daughter, went on to smuggle the five thick notebooks across the Swiss frontier strapped to her body under her skirt. The border guards mistakenly thought she was pregnant. In 1945, the Chicago Daily News bought the diaries’ serialization rights for $75,000, or about $1.2 million in today’s money.

Before his marriage to Edda in 1930, Ciano was regarded as a curious minor contributor to the Italian fascist movement, in early accounts of which he is referred to only briefly or disparagingly. Bull-necked and pompous, with a high-pitched nasal voice, he vied with his German counterpart Joachim von Ribbentrop (whom he loathed) as the tyrannical Axis minister from Central Casting. Like his father-in-law, Ciano had a gift for marrying cruelty with buffoonery. When not propping up the bar of his local golf club, or out testing the limits of his wedding vows, the man who was then his country’s press and propaganda chief liked to personally accompany the largely unopposed bombing raids that helped to pummel Ethiopia into submission during Italy’s 1936-37 assault on that unfortunate nation. Returning to base in Rome after one sortie, Ciano flew his plane too close to the city airport and was fired at by Italian ground defenses. The interview in Mussolini’s office the following morning could have gone either way, but il Duce rewarded his son-in-law with a silver medal and a seat on the Fascist Grand Council.

Ciano’s troubled relationship with Mussolini is the central focus of Andrew Sangster’s book. “Dysfunctional” almost qualifies as a cliché to describe much of modern family life, but it seems richly merited here. By late 1942, Ciano was aware of separate anti-Mussolini plots, both within the army and the regime itself, to depose the dictator and take Italy out of the war. Though not an active conspirator himself, he failed to mention the matter to his boss, whom he presumably hoped to succeed in office. One of the curious revelations in Sangster’s book is how little the two men communicated, and also how similar they were. Assessing the Italian leadership earlier in the war, the British MP “Chips” Channon confided in his own diary:

Given up to the practices of love, [Mussolini] is losing touch with reality and depending more and more on Ciano, who has become impossible … Ciano is an erotic too, and the whole Italian government has become a sort of brothel, and is losing touch rapidly with the population which by and large is pro-English

The whole Mussolini family edifice reached a crisis in July 1943, when Ciano was one of those on the Grand Council who voted Mussolini out of office. Ciano himself then fled to Germany, but was extradited to face trial following his father-in-law’s return as the head of a Nazi puppet regime in northern Italy. Mussolini was unmoved by his daughter’s pleas for mercy on behalf of her husband, who was swiftly found guilty and sentenced to death, to be comforted even in his condemned cell by a comely female SS officer.

Perhaps nothing in the life of this vain, hedonistic, but not entirely unprincipled figure became him like the leaving of it. Tied alongside four other prisoners to chairs with their backs to the firing squad, Ciano managed to twist his head at the last moment to look his executioners in the eye. The shooting itself was not efficient. Mussolini survived his son-in-law by just fifteen months, although Edda escaped with her three children and died in her bed at the age of eighty-four.

Sangster relates the whole tragicomic saga competently, with an eye for the telling detail, if also with the occasional fumble — “As mentioned earlier, Zog of Albania was preparing for his marriage to the Hungarian Countess Geraldine Apponyi, who was not Italian,” he writes, among one or two other infelicities. But these are minor reservations to set against the book’s merits. There have been many fine biographies of Mussolini over recent years, notably by Nicholas Farrell in 2003, but few with Sangster’s gift of bringing scenes alive. When Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in March 1939, he somehow forgot to mention the fact in advance to his Italian allies. Ciano first heard the news while standing at the bar of his golf club, and even Mussolini was not told, let alone consulted. “Every time that man takes a country he sends me a message,” he was left to lament.

If Ciano isn’t the most captivating subject in terms of the sheer belligerent troublemaking of his time in office — for that we go to the bovine von Ribbentrop — his career is surely uniquely revealing as an insight into the perils of joining the family business. Even the makers of Succession couldn’t contrive a climax like this one.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s July 2023 World edition.