Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Fiume’s economy was foundering. What had been a busy port and manufacturing town found itself cut off from its suppliers of raw material and its markets. The port was closed, the docks were silent, the factories were abandoned. No rice arrived to be milled. No seed came to be pressed for oil. Increasing numbers of the Fiuman working class were unemployed.

  Money was unstable and confusing. Nobody knew to which political entity, if any, Fiume now belonged. Nobody knew therefore, which of the several currencies (Hungarian, Italian, Yugoslav) circulating in the city was valid. The Command issued their own notes, but these were so easily forged that shopkeepers soon refused to accept them. Taxes were paid in one currency, prices paid in another. Exchange rates fluctuated wildly. A satirical journal summed up the situation. “The moneychanger will give 7.10, the café 6.50, the hat store 6, the stationer’s store 5, the pizzeria 4, and so on. This is all done with the noble intention of enabling the youth of Fiume to learn mathematics without going to school.”

  Tradesmen were desperate. The price of bread was fixed, but bakers demanded the right to raise it and threatened to go on strike. Giuriati put legionaries on standby to run the bread ovens. The bakers backed down and returned to work, but they began producing two grades of bread: the expensive white and the gritty, grey “economic.” Giuriati was photographed munching an “economic” loaf for public relations purposes, but nobody ate it out of choice.

  Mussolini had kept his distance from d’Annunzio’s adventure. In September he wrote with a five-part plan for the overthrow of the monarchy by “faithful” (i.e. mutinous) troops and announced that he would get up a subscription in support of d’Annunzio’s Fiume. (A large sum was raised but there is no record of Mussolini ever having handed the money over.)

  On 7 October he finally flew in, remaining closeted with d’Annunzio for two hours, but two days later (still in his aviator’s outfit) he was attending the first National Congress of the Fasci in Florence. Since its inception in March, his movement had spawned 150 local branches, with some 40,000 members. He publicly announced the fascists’ solidarity with the Fiuman legionaries, but his mind was not on the Adriatic. It was on the imminent elections.

  On 15 November 1919, Italy went to the polls. Defiantly acting as though Fiume was a constituency entitled to return a member to the Italian parliament, d’Annunzio staged a ballot. Luigi Rizzo, gold-medal-holding war hero, who had been with d’Annunzio on the night of the Buccari prank, was elected the “member for Fiume.” More celebratory marches, more dancing in the streets. Rizzo never went to Rome to take his seat.

  The outcome of the national elections was a shock to d’Annunzio and his associates. Mussolini and Marinetti had joined forces to oppose Nitti’s administration. Mussolini campaigned vigorously, loudly singing Giovinezza at repeated rallies, but to no avail. The fascist-futurist alliance received derisorily few votes. Not a single one of their candidates was elected. The socialists paraded through Milan carrying a coffin with Mussolini’s name on it. The six-month-old fascist movement appeared to be dead and done for. When the results were announced there was fighting on the streets in Rome and Milan. Police searched Mussolini’s lodgings and found an illegal cache of weapons. Both Mussolini and Marinetti were briefly jailed.

  Nitti was confirmed in power with an increased majority. It looked as though the Italian people had decisively rejected fascism and, incidentally, had turned its back on d’Annunzio and a blind eye to his beacon. It was a severe blow.

  After the election, Nitti, feeling secure with his greatly increased mandate, offered d’Annunzio terms. His proposal, known as the Modus Vivendi, stopped short of any firm promise that Fiume would be annexed to Italy, but it guaranteed the people of Fiume’s right to decide their own destiny. The city was to be an independent corpus separatum under Italy’s protection. Italian troops would resist any Yugoslav attempt to take over the city by force and the government undertook “not to welcome or agree to any solution which separated Fiume from the motherland.”

  For most Fiuman-Italians the proposal was entirely satisfactory. The National Council were ready to accept it. So was Giuriati, so was Major Reina, foremost among the “Ronchi Seven.” So was Rizzo, Fiume’s supposed MP. D’Annunzio was not. For him acceptance of the terms would be bleakly bathetic. The Legion of Fiume was to be disbanded forthwith and he himself was to leave the city, handing it over to a garrison of regular Italian troops. His mystic City of the Holocaust would dwindle back into a moderately important industrial port and he himself would lose his city-wide theatre, his worldwide audience and his leading role. He wrote, “a beautiful thing is about to end. A light is going out.”

  He struggled to find a way of refusing the deal. He made unrealistic counter-proposals. He repeatedly declared that he would never leave Fiume until it was a part of Italy. He told one of his ministers: “I am ready for anything, including a new coup in the Adriatic.” His emissaries went back and forth to Badoglio’s headquarters and to Rome. They got no further concessions.

  The atmosphere in Fiume was becoming increasingly edgy. For months the legionaries had been chanting “Italy or Death!” at d’Annunzio’s prompting. They didn’t want to be robbed of their adventure and returned to the dreariness of peacetime unemployment. Meanwhile the Fiumans were impatient to make peace. People were accusing each other variously of cowardice or of stupidity. In the overcrowded encircled city there were shouted altercations, brawls, injuries, near riots. Giuriati foresaw the imminent onset of a “popular cyclone.”

  On 12 December, d’Annunzio told Nitti’s representative that he would accept the Modus Vivendi if it was approved by the National Council of Fiume. On 15 December the councillors met to deliberate. While they did so d’Annunzio, never happier than when on stage, interrupted a performance in the town’s main theatre. Striding down to the footlights he shocked the audience by announcing that he and the Legion of Fiume were about to be ordered out of the city. His supporters carried the news through the streets. D’Annunzio was deliberately inciting the people to riot in an attempt to intimidate the Council. “People talked of killing,” wrote Giuriati, “as though human life had lost all value.”

  The Council, staunchly ignoring the uproar, voted by forty-eight to six to accept the Modus Vivendi. By the time they announced their decision some 5,000 people had crammed into the square outside the Governor’s Palace, crying out for d’Annunzio. He appeared on his balcony, holding the text of the agreement. He read it out, pausing histrionically after each point to ask: “Do you want this?”—a question expecting, and receiving in a massive yell, the answer “No!” Yet again Randaccio’s banner was unfurled. D’Annunzio declared that the Council’s decision must be tested by a plebiscite. The people must decide. Once again, as in Rome in 1915, he was defying constitutional authorities and appealing directly to the masses.

  The Arditi launched into their battle songs. Throughout the night and into the following morning the square and surrounding streets were full of people shouting, singing, fighting. The President of the Council was waylaid in the street and beaten up by a gang of Arditi. A mob burst into the Governor’s Palace. The next day d’Annunzio issued a proclamation: “Never of my own free will shall I abandon this city nor you my brothers-in-arms and in faith.” Later in the day he softened—in this crisis he was simultaneously stubborn and wavering—and a new series of posters announced his willingness to allow the people of Fiume to “release” him and his legionaries from the oath by which they had bound themselves to the City of the Holocaust. “We came to serve the Cause of Fiume. We will leave to serve the same Cause … We only await your word.”

  The plebiscite took place on 18 December. During the preceding two days d’Annunzio’s cooler, more realistic associates had pleaded with him to concede defeat. Meanwhile the legionaries had taken over the printing presses, destroying any pamphlets or posters advocating acceptance of the Modus Vivendi. Citizens who dared declare themselves in favour of it were roughed up in the
street, or their houses were staked out. On the eighteenth the officials in charge of the voting were threatened and forced out and the polling stations were manned—menacingly—by Arditi, the blackshirted warriors whom Kochnitzky called “the dark seraphim of another Apocalypse.”

  As the people of Fiume went to vote, d’Annunzio was in the Ornitorinco (“Platypus”), the restaurant where he took his favoured officers to eat crayfish and drink a cherry brandy cocktail which he called “blood.” The place had got its name when Guido Keller stole a stuffed platypus from the natural history museum, and placed it as a tribute on the Commandant’s table because, said Keller (in his role of licensed jester), its horny bill was as smooth as d’Annunzio’s ivory-coloured pate.

  On the night of the ballot, young Comisso, the patisserie-eating poet, was for the first time one of those privileged to sit at the Commandant’s table. D’Annunzio’s bared head glimmered pale in the dim light of red-shaded lamps. His face looked as lifeless as wax. He took Comisso’s hand in his own, which was icy cold, and invited the younger man to sit beside him. His command was perhaps about to be terminated, the room was full of his officers, their nerves strung to breaking point, making a great anxious hullabaloo. But d’Annunzio chatted serenely. Noticing Comisso’s engineer’s badge he flattered him, praising engineers in general and reminiscing about the heroism of those who had set up telephone lines in battle, working steadily under “homicidal” enemy fire.

  An officer arrived with news. There were violent scenes at the polling stations. Officials announcing the results were being shouted down by angry legionaries. The urns in which the votes were cast were being smashed or seized. But it was impossible to obscure the fact that the people of Fiume were voting by approximately four to one in favour of the Modus Vivendi, and therefore for d’Annunzio’s expulsion. There was much loud indignant talk in the Ornitorinco, in which d’Annunzio himself took no part. Some of his people were saying angrily that the wording of the proposition to be voted upon was ambiguous. An officer suggested they should all embark at once on a destroyer and leave the “ungrateful” city. Others were in favour of sending out more Arditi to close down the polling stations.

  D’Annunzio listened quietly. Other messengers arrived, confirming the news of defeat. Eventually he got up, smiling, and remarked pleasantly that he felt like a French littérateur waiting to hear whether he had been admitted to the Académie Française. Then he left, to return to the palace, walking alone through the alleys of the old town, jotting in his notebook as he went: “Officers singing in the lower room.” “Weeping women … Sense of tragedy in the city … The atrocious song.”

  The “electoral beast” had rejected him, but since he had never had any respect for it, he would not be discomposed by its decision. On his balcony again the following morning he declared: “We came here to win, we have sworn to win. If this agreement is signed, we will leave without a true victory.” He prayed. He lamented. “Must we part? Must we bid each other farewell? Must we leave the axe embedded in the trunk of destiny?” His answer to his own questions was “No!”

  He had called the plebiscite: now he chose to ignore it. He declared the vote null and void. The future of Fiume was to be decided by him and him alone. He would never abandon the city (however clearly it might express its wish that he should do so). He was more steadfast than Christ. “I will not say, Let this cup pass from me.” He would drink it (and force all Fiume to drink it with him) without wavering, to the last drop.

  The Fifth Season

  IN THE FIRST WEEK of January 1920, d’Annunzio wrote to Dante, his gondolier and factotum at the Casetta Rossa, asking for a further supply of his favourite Fiat chocolates and a pot of lotion for his fingernails. He was staying put.

  On New Year’s Eve he proclaimed the beginning of a new season, one hitherto unknown in human history, “the fifth season of Fiume.” In this time out of time, anything was possible. The true Italy might turn out to be a beleaguered little city in Croatia. A one-eyed man in late middle age might be a Prince of Youth.

  The fifth season was celebrated with a nighttime festival on the Field of Mars, with bonfires blazing and d’Annunzio haranguing the crowd, his voice competing with crashing waves and the rattle of machine guns. His language was incantatory, his images biblical. “As the new year begins, before the cock crows, let us all spring to our feet shouting out ‘I believe!’ ” He told his legionaries that together they would build a new city. The blood and sweat of hundreds of thousands of war dead would anoint it. The sun would gild it, and feed them with its honey-sweet light. They would live a new life, singing perpetually, brothers united in daring. He was calling into being a Never Never Land, an unregulated space out of the continuum of cause and effect, where lost boys could enjoy dangerous adventures untrammelled by good sense.

  He records the occasion: “The blue black winds snatched away my voice … Fists raised flames to the incorruptible stars and the machine guns opened their formidable fans over the contested sea.”

  Giuriati wept when he failed to persuade d’Annunzio to accept the Modus Vivendi. The morning after the plebiscite he resigned as his chief minister, and left Fiume. Major Reina, the man who could claim to have launched d’Annunzio on his great adventure, followed him out of town in early January. D’Annunzio now ruled Fiume in direct contravention of its people’s proclaimed wishes, and Reina was one of many who refused to support his doing so. Reina had never wished—as he now believed d’Annunzio did—to draw the whole army into insubordination. He had no patience with the Uscocchi’s “idiotic colpi de mano.” He detested wild talk of a coup d’état in Rome and he wanted no part in the flummery about the “fifth season.” Many other officers, no longer willing to defy their own government after the offer of such reasonable terms, left Fiume too, among them Luigi Rizzo. So many of the legionaries went with them—some 10,000—that d’Annunzio, who in September had had to turn away volunteers, was obliged to begin recruiting again.

  The nature of d’Annunzio’s Command was changing, and so was the atmosphere in the city. New arrivals were wilder than those who had left. General Caviglia (who had taken over from Badoglio as commander-in-chief for the region) reported that it had become “a refuge for foreign adventurers and agitators and shady people who had unfinished business with the police of their own countries.” In his notebook d’Annunzio wrote: “The feeling that we are acting at the very heart of the world. The remoteness, the anxiety, the hostile nations.”

  The legionaries, erstwhile liberators, became enforcers. Ruling now without the consent of the ruled, d’Annunzio governed his city-state by intimidation. According to Father Macdonald, “the prisons were full to overflowing. The Carabinieri proved admirable spies and secret detectives and ‘adjustments’ were nightly carried out by the Arditi.”

  D’Annunzio issued an ambiguously worded proclamation which seemed to threaten the death penalty for anyone who “professes sentiments hostile to the cause of Fiume.” No executions are recorded as having taken place, even though the local socialist journal continued to publish articles critical of d’Annunzio’s Command; but censorship became rigid and hostile foreign journalists were expelled from the city. At the end of January 1920, d’Annunzio had over 200 socialists deported. According to a persistent oral tradition, it was d’Annunzio’s Arditi in Fiume who first made punitive use of castor oil, a powerful laxative. The “golden nectar of nausea,” as a leading fascist later called it, caused severe diarrhoea and dehydration. Forced to drink it, helplessly soiling themselves, victims were sickened and grossly humiliated. It was a technique of which the fascist squads would make extensive use over the next few years.

  As d’Annunzio had once sprung like a mountain goat across the parliament chamber towards the socialists—“the Party of Life”—so now, deserted by monarchists and military men, he looked to radicals and revolutionaries for support. His finite political ambitions (the unseating of Nitti, the annexation of Fiume to Italy) seemed, for the
time being anyway, to have failed. He reacted by enlarging the scope of his enterprise. He was no longer in Fiume to redeem a bit of Italian territory. He was building Utopia. The man whom he invited to succeed Giuriati as his first minister and to help in its construction was Alceste de Ambris, a revolutionary syndicalist, and the secretary of the Italian Union of Labour.

  Syndicalism represented a supposedly pacific third way between capitalism and socialism. In a syndicalist world, instead of unending conflict between workers and bosses, there would be association and consensus. Employers and employees alike would belong to “corporations” working for the prosperity of all. Everyone’s interests would be fairly represented. The theory was attractive to both left and right. It was only a few years later, under Mussolini, that the potential repressiveness of a state so constituted became evident. The “corporate state” was necessarily totalitarian—if all were to be included, then no one could be allowed the right to secede. De Ambris was seen as a socialist. But, like Mussolini, he had been strongly in favour of intervening in the war, and he was a follower of Georges Sorel, whose thinking was soon to be appropriated by the extreme right.

  Sorel proclaimed the subordination of all ideologies to the pure, transformative power generated by violent struggle, by general strikes and terrorism. Industrial society was corrupt and democracy had failed. What was needed to replace it was a free association of heroic individuals. (“You are all heroes!” Randaccio had told his troops, and d’Annunzio in turn had told the people of Fiume.) Sorel stopped short of the anarchism to which logic seemed to be leading him. The people were noble, yes, but they needed leaders, great men untrammelled by irrelevant morality or outdated conventions; leaders with the swagger of condottieri and the charisma of a messiah, men like the imaginary dictator Corrado Brando in d’Annunzio’s Gloria.

  D’Annunzio invited de Ambris not only to help him run the city, but to assist him in drafting its new constitution. Father Macdonald—who disliked everything about d’Annunzio—intended only to express his disapproval when he wrote that in their plans he and de Ambris seemed to “depart from time-honoured methods and to aim at the production of something akin to the cubism or futurism of modern art.” But his observation was accurate. The “charter” on which d’Annunzio was now working was a product, not of practical thinking, but of the artistic imagination. Long ago d’Annunzio had promised a “politics of poetry.” Now he and de Ambris would produce its manifesto.