An attempt on the life of someone like Benito Mussolini definitely doesn't go unnoticed.
However, one woman by the name of Violet Gibson wasn’t noticed until 2010. This is her story.
Born in 1883, Mussolini was a difficult child. According to Britannica, he was
a bully who was expelled from several schools for stabbing classmates with
his penknife. Despite his unruly past, he grew into a young man with charisma
and great rhetorical skill. Born just seven years before him was Violet Albina Gibson,
the woman who would attempt on Mussolini’s life and go largely unnoticed.
In his rise to power, Mussolini read philosophers like Kant, Nietzche,
Hegel, and others, but he didn’t absorb the information like most. Instead he
picked and chose what he liked and disliked from them to form his own political ideology.
He worked as a political journalist and propagandist and made a name for himself among
the Italian working class. Although he initially opposed Italy's involvement in World War I,
he ended up changing his philosophy, becoming staunchly nationalist, and went off to fight.
When he returned in 1918, Italy was facing terrible economic and political crises,
and he called for the advent of a dictator who could put the country
back on its feet. He soon said in a speech that he'd gladly volunteer for the job.
“Mussolini loved big rallies, and from his balcony, offering big promises and
simple solutions to complex problems, he whipped his followers into a mass frenzy.”
His magnetism and rhetoric united everyone, from republicans to unionists to disenchanted
socialists to outright anarchists. Ultimately, they came together to form fascist militias.
In October 1922 he spoke before 40,000 fascists in Naples. He threatened to march on Rome if the
government didn't hand over power to them. When the government didn't yield, he and
25,000 fascists did just that, forcing King Victor Emmanuel III to hand power over to Mussolini.
People like Violet Gibson could tell where such an ideology was headed,
or at least had a bad feeling about it. But that wasn't necessarily the
case with people in power across the globe. Everyone from the U.S. President
Calvin Coolidge to King George of England to the heads of state of Ireland, France,
and Germany — even Pope Pius XI — all sent Mussolini news of their relief that he was okay.
Mussolini himself wasn't too happy that a woman — and a foreign woman,
at that — had gotten so close to killing him. He appeared in public
with a bandaged nose just hours after the attempt on his life.
Wanting to avoid any and all publicity on the matter, he forwent trying Gibson in Italy and
sent her to England. He played up the fact that Gibson had suffered from mental health issues in
an attempt to nullify any claims she may have had to a legitimate political opinion. The
reception she got from her family and British and Irish authorities was not much different.
According to biographer Frances Stonor Saunders,
author of the 2010 book The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, the would-be assassin's family
was not happy about what she had done. Violet came from a privileged family.
Her father was lord chancellor of Ireland, the highest-ranking legal authority in the
country. He was also a protestant, and he was already miffed at his daughter for
having converted to Catholicism and gone to France to champion pacifist causes.
In 1913, when Gibson moved to Paris to help support pacifism,
she suffered from Paget’s disease on her chest. Despite the operation to help her,
she ended up with a nine-inch scar on her chest from a mastectomy. Eventually,
she had to leave Paris behind and return to England because of a
botched surgery during an appendicitis attack according to Belfast Telegraph.
In 1922, Gibson was sent to a mental institution for a nervous breakdown and found solace in a
convent upon her release. It was at this time, according to Belfast Telegraph,
that Gibson became enamored with religion and believed she, quote, “wanted to die for God.”
“Why did I shoot Mussolini? I did it for love.”
Both of her attempts on Mussolini’s life during his speech on April 7th
were misfires. A violent mob captured and beat her. Upon her arrival in England,
Gibson was met by British doctors who quickly deemed her "lucidly insane,"
which was pretty much a made-up mental illness that families and husbands used
at the turn of the century to get rid of women they considered to be troublemakers.
Although she wrote to authorities like Winston Churchill and the-then
Princess Elizabeth to ask for help with her release, they were replied,
and she died in the institution in 1956. She was 79 years old.
The headstone at her grave bore only her name and dates of her birth and death,
and not one family member went to her funeral. As Stonor Saunders told PRI:
"Even in her death, she was a great embarrassment.”
Gibson's attempt on Mussolini's life was actually the second in what would end up
being four. Historian J. Bowyer Bell recounts the first of these attempts in his 1979 book Assassin:
Theory and Practice of Political Violence. It occurred on November 4,
1925, when a former deputy of the Socialist party, Tito Zaniboni,
planned to snipe Mussolini from a hotel room during a speech he was to give.
Zaniboni was betrayed by a friend who was actually a double agent,
though historians believe he may have been set up by Mussolini's administration in order
to justify its move to consolidate power afterwards. In September 1926,
anarchist Gino Lucetti tried to take out the dictator by tossing a bomb at his limo.
According to Executed Today, the fourth unsuccessful attempt came in October of
that same year, when 15-year-old Anteo Zamboni tried to shoot Mussolini while he was riding in
a motorcade. He was brutally beaten and stabbed to death by fascist supporters of Mussolini just
after the failed attempt. The city of Bologna honored his act by naming a street after him.
Mussolini was executed by partisans on April 28, 1945, in a small town north
of Milan. His body was taken to Milan the following day and hung by the feet alongside
that of his mistress Claretta Petacci and several other fascists in a public square.
Stonor Saunders and other historians believe that the reason Violet Gibson's
assassination attempt went under the radar for so long is because she was a woman.
She only became aware of Gibson from a one-sentence mention of an Irish woman
shooting the dictator in a biography of him. According to Stonor Saunders:
"She should be celebrated as a brave woman, as a political radical,
as an anti fascist. And if she was mad, well, she still saw something before anyone else did."
Now authorities in Ireland are making moves to right that wrong. In December 2020,
Dublin City Councilman Mannix Flynn put forth a motion that would make Gibson's
act more widely known and give her, as he said:
"Her rightful place in the history of Irish women and the rich history of the Irish nation."
He compared the silencing of her story in the 20th century to what he called the
"cancellation generation" of today. Irish filmmaker Barrie Dowdall has also tried to
honor Gibson's legacy with the film Violet Gibson, the Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini,
released in March 2020. Dowdall aims to tell Gibson's story in theaters across the globe,
and says that's what her family now wants, as well, stating:
"They want her to be seen as a woman who stood up against the sins of fascism."