Antonio Scurati closes his Mussolini cycle, and warns that democracy defends itself or dies
With the fifth and final volume of his biographical novel "M" now out, the Italian writer tells Le Monde that Mussolini remains the model for today's populists.
The fifth and last book in Antonio Scurati's "M" series, a biographical novel tracing the life of Benito Mussolini, has just been published, according to Le Monde. The paper marks the occasion with a long interview in which Scurati steps back from the narrative to draw lessons for the present.
Scurati tells Le Monde that Mussolini is "véritablement l'archétype du populiste" — genuinely the archetype of the populist — a figure whose rhetorical and political methods, in his reading, prefigure much of what recurs in contemporary politics.
His central argument, as reported by Le Monde, is that democracy is not self-sustaining: it survives only if people actively commit to defending it. Without that engagement, he warns, it will not hold.
The interview gives no further detail on the content of this fifth volume itself, nor on how the series concludes; Le Monde's piece is framed as a conversation about history and its present-day resonance rather than a review of the book.
Sources
This article was written from these reports.
