MUSSOLINI’S RISE

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 25, Issue 3766, 8 June 1936, Page 3

MUSSOLINI’S RISE

ONCE AN ERRAND BOY. FORMER EMPLOYER’S DEATH. M. Charles Depaulis, a pork butcher and trader in Italian foodstuffs, who in 1905 employed Signor Mussolini as an errand boy, died at Laussane last month. In 1905 M. Depaulis had a small shop where he made macaroni and sold salami and mortadella. He attended the lectures of the local Socialist Party, and there one night a comrade recommended to him a destitute young man who had been expelled from Geneva. The young man was Benito Mussolini. M. Depaulis engaged him as errand boy and gave him 30 francs a month plus lodging, food and laundry. Mussolini was taking a course at Lausanne University. He read in the shop whenever he had leisure, and when in the streets he had a parcel in one hand and an open book in the other. He also contributed some articles to an Italian Socialist newspaper in Switzerland. The pork butcher and his errand boy discussed political questions, and Mussolini was much the more ardent Socialist of the two. In 1906 Mussolini left M. Depaulis and was employed by another Italian trader in Lausanne, MTedeschi, but he was soon deported from Switzerland owing to his extremist theories.

M. Depaulis and Signor Mussolini did not meet again until 1922, at the time of the Lausanne Peace Conference, when they had a short and cordial conversation on the Lausanne railway platform.