2023-05-02 19:29:03
On the evening of March 26, 1904 at the People’s House in Lausanne, Switzerland, the evangelical pastor Taglialatela and the future dictator, then twenty years old, challenged each other in an oratory contest on the existence of God
After the article dedicated to Benito Mussolini’s April 25th, we are inaugurating a series to tell the story of the dictator through some of the most important dates of his life.
Today perhaps it would seem bizarre to organize a debate between two opposing speakers on the subject of the existence of God. But at the beginning of the twentieth century the socialist movement had one of its most marked traits in atheism. And so it was that at the People’s House in Lausanne, Switzerland, on the evening of March 26, 1904, they competed in one oratorical dispute about the Creator the evangelical pastor Alfredo Taglialatela and a young subversive agitator just twenty years old (he was born on July 29, 1883), Benito Mussolini.
It was then that the future Duke, in front of an audience made up mainly of Italian emigrants, he used a rhetorical device that remained famous and was also taken up by the director Marco Bellocchio in the film WIN. According to Angelica Balabanoff, a Russian exile then linked to him, Mussolini said: Give me a watch. I give ten minutes of time to the Eternal Father. If he doesn’t hit me in this time limit, he means he doesn’t exist. I defy him.
Apparently the ploy was successful, not only because the combative orator survived the test, but also because overall those present, some five hundred people, had the impression that the atheist position had prevailed in the duel. So much so that the text of Mussolini’s speech it was printed shortly after in a booklet in Lugano with the title Man and God, as the first publication of an international library of rationalist propaganda directed by the socialist Giacinto Menotti Serrati. In 2019 it was revived by the Fede & Cultura editions, edited by Francesco Agnoli, with the title God does not exist.
But why was Mussolini like this hostile to religion, although his mother, teacher Rosa Maltoni, was a fervent believer? And what was he doing so young in Switzerland, already on his way to a career in journalism and politics?
On the atheism of the future dictator Perhaps the influence was his father Alessandro, a socialist blacksmith from Predappio (Forl), but certainly much more the traumatic experience as a child in the Salesian college in Faenza. Little Benito (named after the Mexican revolutionary Benito Jurez) had stayed there for two years, between 1892 and 1894, which had been hell for him. Restless and abusive brat, as he himself would have defined himself, he found himself having to consume a bad food and observe a very rigid discipline, between humiliations and privations, also because he was considered the son of a popular leader.
Particularly odious was the master Agostino Bezzi, whose abominable image he would later describe in his memoirs: He could not bear me and I execrated him, I still execrate him if he is alive and if he is dead, let him still be cursed. I don’t know, I can’t forgive those who diabolically poisoned me the best years of my life. This unease helped produce his detachment from religion. He called in sick not to go to mass every morning. But at the same time he was frightened by the thought of the divine punishments with which the Salesians obsessed the little pupils.
When he wounded a companion in the hand with a knife and was severely punished, his parents decided to transfer him elsewhere, to the Giosu Carducci lay college in Forlimpopoli, where he found himself much better and achieved elementary school diploma. He wasn’t cut out for that job though. In 1902 he obtained the appointment as teacher in the municipality of Gualtieri (Reggio Emilia), but here he intertwined a love affair with a married woman and the consequent scandal forced him to change his surroundings.
Mussolini so he emigrated to Switzerland, where he immediately discovered he was denied for manual work, but very inclined for political activity. For some time he had been a voracious reader of books and newspapers, an autodidact who was far from inexperienced. And so he entered the socialist circles of Italian emigration, then quite numerous, in the Swiss Confederation, becoming a collaborator of the newspaper L’Future of the Worker. He remained in Switzerland, despite various problems with the local authorities, until 1904.
Very close to him in that period were two personalities already mentioned, with whom he would later enter into strong contrast. Angelica Balabanoff, who was also his mistress, but always remained faithful to socialist ideals, draws a vitriolic portrait of the Duce in the book The traitor from 1942. Shut up took over from Mussolini in the direction of the socialist newspaper Avanti! after the interventionist turn of the future dictator. And the controversy between the two became heated: in 1920 Serrati was also physically attacked by the fascists. He died in 1926 after joining the Communist Party. Instead the shepherd Tagliatela, Mussolini’s rival in the Lausanne debate, he became a staunch admirer of the Duce and the lictorian regime. History full of paradoxes.
May 2, 2023 (change May 2, 2023 | 1:59 pm)
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