Violet jibson

[Xilon_x]

At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, April 7, 1926, a woman stepped out of the crowd on Rome’s Campidoglio Square, a 50-year-old Violet Gibson, wearing a shiny old black dress, carried a revolver wrapped in a black veil. Less than a foot in front of her stood Benito Mussolini. As he raised his arm to give the Fascist salute, the woman raised hers and shot him at point-blank range.

Mussolini escaped virtually unscathed, cheered on by practically the whole world. Violet Gibson, who expected to be thanked for her action, was arrested, labeled a “crazy Irish spinster” and a “half-mad mystic”—and promptly forgotten.

Now, in an elegant work of reconstruction, Frances Stonor Saunders retrieves this remarkable figure from the lost historical record. She examines Gibson’s aristocratic childhood in the Dublin elite, with its debutante balls and presentations at court; her engagement with the critical ideas of the era—pacifism, mysticism, and socialism; her completely overlooked role in the unfolding drama of Fascism and the cult of Mussolini; and her response to a new and dangerous age when anything seemed possible but everything was at stake.

Mussolini was aghast at being shot. “Fancy, a woman!” he’s reported to have said.
He was ready, he said, for “a beautiful death”, but Violet, one of the “old ugly repulsive women who come from abroad in groups”, was not the kind of person he wanted to be killed by.

There was also an article by Lucy Hughes-Hallett on the story of the woman who tried to kill Mussolini, The Hon Violet Gibson, whose father was Lord Chancellor of Ireland. In 1926, Hughes-Hallett explains, at the time of their “bathetic encounter,”

Mussolini was a splendid figure of a man who liked to display his muscled torso shirtless. Violet was tiny, emaciated and not much loved. She was 50 years old but looked 60, and was odd enough in her behaviour to have been twice admitted to sanatoria for the mentally ill.

After her attempt on his life, Violet was again admitted, this time for 20 years. Once that time had past, Hughes-Hallett says, “history might have endorsed [Violet's] political judgement,” the Duce having been defeated and lynched in his turn, but …

… two decades in an asylum had done nothing for her sanity. She belaboured fellow patients with a broom handle. She believed her moods created the weather. She never came out."

THIS WOMAN TRIED TO KILL BENITO MUSSOLINI


Violet Gibson is the Irish woman who tried to kill Mussolini in 1926. She shot the Duce at close range at a public rally in Rome and wounded him on the nose, narrowly missing his assassination.

Her attempt started one of the lengthiest investigation of the fascist regime, that involved hundreds of witnesses and followed dozens of trails. This documentary recomposes a fascinating and intricate chapter of history.