Cannes serves both as the elegant setting of an international conference on Europe’s postwar reconstruction and as the meeting place of Benito Mussolini and Pietro Nenni, former comrades whose political paths have sharply diverged. Their nighttime walk along the Croisette places Italy’s escalating conflict within a city temporarily occupied by the business of diplomacy.

Conference and Setting

In January 1922, the French prime minister Aristide Briand had chosen the Côte d’Azur’s opulent surroundings for a conference intended to advance Europe’s economic and diplomatic reconstruction after the war. The British prime minister David Lloyd George was staying at Villa Valletta, Briand at the Carlton Hotel, and journalists and film cameramen gathered near the nautical club. Delegates were discussing reparations and the possibility of reconciliation among the major European powers; a German delegation was expected to attend. Yet Briand’s effort unfolded amid political strain: news arrived from Paris that he had encountered a vote of no confidence, while nationalist violence remained a threat in the background.

The conference setting contrasts with the conflict Mussolini and Nenni bring to Cannes. The book presents Italy as a country repeatedly marked by bloody political events, while the resort hosts discussions in many languages about rebuilding Europe. Cannes therefore holds two scales of postwar tension at once: the international effort to restore relations between nations and the domestic struggle over political authority and workers’ rights.

Mussolini and Nenni on the Croisette

The two Italians walking along the Croisette are described as men from the same town who had once been friends and could not easily avoid one another. They had shared a prison cell during their opposition to the imperialist war. Their families had also been close: their wives became friends through prison visits, and Nenni had held Mussolini’s young daughter, Edda, in his arms. Mussolini later employed Nenni as managing editor of his newspaper, keeping him at his side until 1919.

Their subsequent break is traced through Nenni’s changing political commitments. In 1919 he founded the first Fascist groups in Bologna and welcomed the destruction of the socialist newspaper Avanti! By March 1921, however, he was defending that same paper during another Fascist attack. The account marks this reversal as his passage from republican Fascist sympathizer to socialist; in Cannes he was reporting for the newspaper whose destruction he had once cheered. Their walk is described as perhaps their last face-to-face conversation, now conducted from opposing political sides.

The Argument and Cannes’s Narrative Role

During the walk, Mussolini defended the civil war as a tragic necessity, claiming responsibility for it and justifying it as a means of stopping the Bolshevik threat, restoring authority, and saving the nation. Nenni challenged the terms of that defense: for the bourgeois classes, he argued, workers’ right to organize in defense of their gains was itself labeled Bolshevism. The exchange makes the city’s diplomatic purpose an implicit counterpoint to the unresolved conflict between the two former comrades.

Mussolini’s visit also carries a personal detail that binds the public encounter to his passage through Cannes. It was only his second trip abroad; the first had been as an emigrant seeking work in Switzerland. Before going to interview Briand, he stopped at the casino, lost, and bought white spats to conceal the worn seams of his shoes. Cannes thus frames both the formal business of international politics and a brief, revealing glimpse of the visitor’s private circumstances.