Violet Gibson, Irish Woman Shot Italian Fascist Dictator Mussolini, Almost Altered History: New Film

- Trailer, 'Violet Gibson: The Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini,' (2020). The true and forgotten story of Violet Gibson, daughter of the Lord Chancellor to Ireland, who shot fascist dictator Benito Mussolini. Chicago Irish Film Festival 2021.
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- 'The Little-Known Story of Violet Gibson, the Irish Woman Who Shot Mussolini.' A free radio documentary tells the tale of the long-overlooked individual who nearly killed the Italian dictator in 1926. Smithsonian Magazine, March 22, 2021. -Ed.

In his lifetime, just 4 people managed to launch successful assassination attempts against Benito Mussolini (1883- 1945), the infamous fascist dictator who brought Italy into World War II and inspired Adolf Hitler. Of those 4, just one—Anglo-Irish woman Violet Gibson—ever came close to succeeding. The 50-year-old made headlines on April 7, 1926, when she fired on Mussolini and almost altered the course of history forever (below). But in the years after her bold attack, Gibson was consigned to an asylum, and her story was all but forgotten. Nearly a century later, Gibson’s home country of Ireland is hoping to belatedly recognize her legacy, reports Orla Barry for public radio program the World.

The Dublin City Council recently passed a motion giving initial approval for the installation of a plaque in Gibson’s honor. As Michael Sheils McNamee writes for BBC News, officials are considering her childhood home in the Merrion Square neighborhood of Dublin for the memorial. Gibson’s story first attracted international attention in 2014, when journalist Siobhán Lynam produced a major radio documentary that brought her remarkable life to a wider audience.. Lynam’s radio program drew on The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, a 2010 book by Frances Stonor Saunders. The journalist’s husband, Barrie Dowdall, is currently screening a documentary based on Gibson’s life at international film festivals.

Born in 1876, Gibson hailed from a wealthy family headed by her father, Lord Ashbourne, a senior judicial figure in Ireland. As a young woman, she served as a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria. Growing up in Dublin and London, Gibson was a sickly child who suffered from physical & mental illness—then termed “hysteria,” per the Irish Post. In her mid-20s, she converted to Catholicism; later, she moved to Paris to work for pacifist organizations. Gibson’s passionate political & religious beliefs drove her to attempt to murder the Italian dictator in April 1926. That day, Mussolini had just finished giving a speech to a conference of surgeons in Rome. He was walking through the Piazza del Campidoglio, a square at the top of the Italian city’s Capitoline Hill, when Gibson—a small, “disheveled-looking” woman—raised a gun & fired at him at point-blank range.

Two chance events prevented Gibson from succeeding: First, Mussolini happened to turn his head to look at a group of nearby students who were singing a song in his honor. This caused the bullet to graze the bridge of his nose rather than hit him square in the face (below), 2nd, though Gibson fired another bullet, it lodged in her pistol. By then, she had already been dragged to the ground by a mob. Despite a cool façade, Mussolini was embarrassed to have been injured by a woman. “He was very misogynistic, as was the entire fascist regime,” “He was shocked to be shot by a woman. And he was shocked to be shot by a foreigner. It was a kind of injury to his great ego.”...

Read More,
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/1926-irish-woman-shot-benito-mussolini-and-almost-altered-history-forever-180977286/



- Violet Gibson, an Irish woman, attempted to assassinate Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1926.



- Benito Mussolini on May 13, 1926, with a bandaged nose- the result of Gibson's April 7 assassination attempt.