The Hon Violet Gibson: The Irishwoman Who Shot Mussolini
On 7 April 1926, a slight, grey-haired Irishwoman in a black shawl fired a revolver at Benito Mussolini, the strutting, bare-chested dictator of Italy. She missed—just barely. Had Mussolini not turned his head at that precise moment, history might have unfolded quite differently. Instead, the bullet grazed his nose, leaving him with little more than a scratch and an excuse to wear a sticking plaster while embarking on a triumphal visit to Libya. Violet Gibson, however, was immediately set upon by the crowd, half-lynched, then dragged away—badly battered—to a room containing the colossal marble foot of the Emperor Constantine, where she was revived with brandy before being sent to prison. That was the end of her life in the world.
Early Life: Knives and Bibles
Violet Albina Gibson was born in Dublin in 1876 into the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. She was the daughter of Lord Ashbourne, a Conservative peer and former Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Her privileged upbringing, however, was far from conventional. While her siblings moved easily through society, Violet was often seen clutching a knife in one hand and a Bible in the other—a striking image of contradictions that foreshadowed her later life. She was drawn to religious mysticism and underwent a personal conversion to Catholicism, embracing an ascetic life that bewildered her peers. Despite being surrounded by wealth and status, she remained unmarried and largely unloved, retreating into a world of private devotion and, increasingly, instability.
By her thirties, she had begun to display signs of mental illness. She suffered from bouts of religious mania and was twice admitted to sanatoria for the mentally ill. In 1922, in what was either a suicide attempt or a desperate cry for help, she shot herself in the chest. The bullet, miraculously, bounced off a rib, leaving her wounded but alive. Rather than returning to Ireland, she moved to Italy, settling into the quiet routine of a convent in Rome, where she passed the time doing jigsaws with her Irish maid. That routine lasted until the day she tucked a revolver into her pocket and set off for the Piazza del Campidoglio.
The Assassination Attempt
At the time of their fateful encounter, Mussolini was at the height of his power—a splendid figure who relished displaying his muscular torso to admiring crowds. Violet, in contrast, was small, frail, and emaciated, barely five feet tall and aged beyond her years. She was fifty but looked sixty, her health and mind worn down by years of spiritual torment. Yet, on that April afternoon, she was clear in her purpose. She had come to kill Mussolini.
Armed with a Modèle 1892 revolver concealed beneath her shawl, and a rock in case she needed to break the dictator’s car window, she positioned herself in the crowd as Mussolini emerged from addressing the International Congress of Surgeons. She fired at point-blank range, but at that precise moment, Mussolini turned his head, and the bullet merely grazed his nose. She fired again, but the gun misfired. Before she could try a third time, the crowd descended upon her in fury.
The would-be assassin was nearly torn apart on the spot. Only the intervention of the police saved her from the mob. As Mussolini, ever the showman, played down the incident—calling his wound "a mere trifle"—Gibson was taken into custody. In the following days, she was interrogated, revealing that she had acted alone and had shot Mussolini "to glorify God," believing that an angel had steadied her aim.
Aftermath: Institutionalisation For The Woman Who Shot Mussolini
Despite the uproar, Mussolini himself was surprisingly lenient. Rather than putting her on trial, he allowed her to be deported to Britain at the request of the British government, which thanked him for his generosity. The failed assassination attempt, far from weakening his grip, bolstered his popularity, giving him the excuse to pass new pro-Fascist legislation that further solidified his rule.
Violet, meanwhile, was quietly committed to St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton, a psychiatric institution where she would spend the remaining thirty years of her life. Though she pleaded for her release on multiple occasions, her letters were ignored. Her aristocratic family, embarrassed by her actions, ensured that she was never freed, and she gradually faded into obscurity. She died in 1956 and was buried in Kingsthorpe Cemetery, far from the world of politics and revolution she had once briefly shaken.
Legacy: The Forgotten Assassin
Violet Gibson’s story is one of paradoxes. A woman of privilege who rejected her class, a religious zealot who sought to commit an act of violence in the name of God, a would-be assassin whose failure only strengthened the man she wished to destroy. Unlike other famous assassins, she is barely remembered—overshadowed by the grandeur of Mussolini’s later downfall. Yet in her strange, determined way, she had seen through the pomp of Fascism before many others did. She remains an enigma: the tiny Irishwoman who almost changed the course of history with a single shot.
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