Le parfait fasciste

Attilio Teruzzi, a valiant and decorated soldier retired from the First World War, embraced Fascism, of which he would become one of the most perfect dignitaries: protagonist of the March on Rome, member of parliament, leader of the Blackshirts, governor and viceroy, general, minister of the Italian Empire. With Mussolini as his best man, he married a young Jewish woman from New York on the cusp of a brilliant career as an opera singer. Three years later, he repudiated her, accusing her of having compromised his male honor, but Fascist and Vatican laws forbade any divorce, just as Fascist Italy was about to introduce its racial and anti-Jewish laws... The only possible outcome: an annulment of the marriage by the Vatican, against which Liliana would defend herself tooth and nail. However, it is with another young foreign Jewish woman that Teruzzi will marry and have a child...

Through the intimate story of a boisterous courtship and a disastrous marriage, The Perfect Fascist invites us to the grand spectacle of Mussolini's rise and fall. In this major historical study, Victoria de Grazia reminds us that the private is always political in the Fascist quest for virility and power. With Teruzzi, an unscrupulous conceited man of fanatical loyalty, we penetrate the intimacy of an exemplary specimen of the Fascist New Man, an unbridled pleasure-seeker who was also a refined promoter of Italian design and urbanism. Through his self-interested conformism, violence and opportunism, he embodies political phenomena that we readily recognize.