Seeing the footage of a bloodied Donald Trump this last weekend, as he narrowly survived an attempted assassination in Pennsylvania, had me thinking about another of history’s near-misses.
On April 7 1926, Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was moving through the crowd in Campidoglio Square in central Rome, having just addressed a meeting of Italian surgeons, when a shot rang out. Falling to the ground, Mussolini was surrounded by his bodyguards and swiftly came under the care of some of those very medical professionals to whom he had just been speaking. Fortunately for him, he was found to have only a glancing wound across the bridge of his nose, as it was thought that he turned his head just at the moment that the assassin fired. Indeed, he would later quip that the greatest danger he was in that day was that he risked suffocation from all the doctors trying to help him.
His would-be assassin, meanwhile, was in rather greater peril. Wrestled to the ground by the crowd, before she could get a second shot away, she was found to be a rather dishevelled, grey-haired, 49-year-old woman. Whisked away by police, she thus avoided the fate of another of Mussolini’s would-be assassins – Anteo Zamboni – who would be lynched by the mob. But the story that emerged would be stranger than fiction.
Her name was Violet Gibson. Born in Dublin, she was the product of Edwardian high society. Her father, Baron Ashbourne, had been Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and she had been presented as a debutante at the court of Queen Victoria, becoming a stable of the court circulars and the society columns.
Gibson, however, was emotionally and physically fragile. She suffered from Paget’s disease, and had had her left breast surgically removed. More than that, a case of peritonitis in 1916 had left her with acute abdominal pain. She had also wrestled with her mental health; converting to Catholicism in 1902 – thereby causing a rift with her family – and dabbling in the mystical Theosophy movement of Madame Blavatsky. By the early 1920s, having suffered a nervous breakdown, she was declared insane and entrusted to the care of a succession of mental institutions, where her morbid ideation appears only to have crystallised still further. A medical file from 1923 described her as “homicidal”, and added that, though she showed no signs of violence, she has said that she might “try to kill someone.”
After moving to Italy with a nurse-maid in November 1924, with the intention of joining a convent, her delusions only deepened. The following spring, she shot herself in the chest declaring that she “wanted to die for God”, but, remarkably, sustained only minor injuries. Then, she became obsessed with targeting Mussolini, martyring herself in the process.
On the morning of 7 April 1926, she left the convent in which she was staying to walk into central Rome. In her handbag, she was carrying a French-made Lebel revolver and a rock – with which, she later told police, she would have smashed the window of Mussolini’s car. She had intended to head to the Fascist Party headquarters in the Palazzo del Littorio, but when she happened across a crowd on the Piazza Campidoglio, she discovered that Mussolini was due there and so changed her plans. As he walked through the crowd, some minutes later, she took her chance and pulled out the revolver and levelled it at him from close range, as she had practiced – but fate intervened; Mussolini moved his head at the critical moment, and she failed.
Remarkably, Mussolini reacted with no little sang froid at his attempted murder. Even in the moment, as Gibson was being wrestled to the ground, and as the crowds were screaming and fleeing the scene, he showed remarkable composure, calling for calm and declaring “Don’t be afraid! I am here. This is a mere trifle.” Later that same afternoon, indeed, he appeared in public again to give another speech, this time with a large white plaster covering the wound on his nose.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the assassination attempt – and the others that followed, such as Zamboni’s – galvanised public support for Mussolini, with many – including the Pope – publicly condemning the attack and giving thanks for the Duce’s survival. Unsurprisingly, too, Mussolini made considerable political capital from the episode, coining a number of catchy slogans about it, such as “Shots pass, Mussolini remains”, and “If I go forward, follow me. If I retreat, kill me. If I die, avenge me.” In due course, he would also authorise the establishment of the OVRA, the Italian secret police, to root out dissent; a key building block of the Fascist totalitarian state.
And what of Gibson? In the aftermath, Italian police and the British authorities were content for her to be declared insane and quietly repatriated to the UK, so Mussolini said that he would not press charges, and in the spring of 1927, she was returned to Britain, where she was confined to a residential mental institution; St Andrew’s hospital in Northampton. She would spend the remainder of her life there, writing to all and sundry, including Winston Churchill, to plead her case, not knowing that the hospital authorities confiscated the letters before they could be sent. She died, alone and forgotten, in 1956. But, of all Mussolini’s would-be assassins, she came closest to changing the course of history.