Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  General Caviglia, who became Minister for War in February 1919, judged that in the current state of unrest, such a body of fighters might be useful “because they were greatly feared for their inclination for swift and violent action.” If they were disbanded on the other hand, “they would reinforce the revolutionary parties.” He was right to fear it. The Arditi were seen as potential recruits by activists of right and left alike. Mussolini flattered and wooed them, inciting them to “break the fetters of decrepit institutions,” and make of themselves a political “advance guard.”

  D’Annunzio had great respect for the Arditi, and the Arditi in turn admired him. Whenever he made the transition from speech to action he would be able to count on their support. Like them, he was intolerant of all the argy-bargy of negotiated settlements and democratic debate. He represented, as Carli wrote that they did, “the true Italy, the young Italy, the Italy which marches in the vanguard and cuts through diplomatic labyrinths with a good dagger-blow.”

  In January 1919, cabinet minister Leonida Bissolati addressed a meeting at La Scala. Bissolati was proposing a compromise. Italy would renounce its claims to the predominantly Croatian region of Dalmatia, asking only for the cities of Zara and Fiume, each of which had Italian majorities. Bissolati’s proposal had the backing of General Diaz, who, like his predecessor Cadorna, believed that Italian bases elsewhere on the Dalmatian coast would be “militarily useless and dangerous.” But despite the endorsement of these unimpeachably patriotic and militarist figures, the plan was too modest to please those assembled in La Scala. Marinetti and his futurist cronies led the heckling from their box. An “infernal symphony … Squeaks, shrieks, whistles, grumbles … A patriotic cry became distinguishable now and then, and ruled the inarticulate mass with the rhythm of a brutal march.” Elsewhere in the auditorium Benito Mussolini, with a “pale, spade-like face,” added to the hullaballoo with an “unmistakable voice, dishearteningly wooden, peremptorily insistent, like the clacking of castanets.”

  Mussolini was not yet sufficiently influential for d’Annunzio to have taken much notice of him, but his power base was growing. On 23 March 1919 he invited the leaders of the Fasci di Combattimento, along with some like-minded nationalists, futurists, and Arditi, to a meeting in a rented hall overlooking Milan’s Piazza San Sepolcro. Over the next two decades this assembly was to assume, in fascism’s myth of origin, the haloed significance of a nativity. At the time, though, it was just an incoherent gathering of some hundred widely assorted malcontents.

  All those present had been interventionists, all believed ardently that warfare was glorious, and that those who had fought were being denied the honour that was their due. Beyond those shared tenets, they had little in common. Marinetti was there, so was Ferruccio Vecchi, leader of a movement he called Arditismo Civile. So were spokesmen from almost every point on the political spectrum, republicans and monarchists, anarchists and authoritarians calling for the strong leadership of a charismatic dictator. In a great deal of fiery talk, their differences remained unresolved. The first task must be the creation of a new ruling class. There would be time later on to think about “administration, the law, the schools, the colonies and so on.” Mussolini said: “We have the luxury to be aristocrats as well as democrats. Reactionaries as well as revolutionaries, defending legality while committing illegal acts.” Such a movement, lacking internal coherence, needed a leader, a Duce. There were better-known people at the San Sepolcro meeting, but Mussolini already saw himself in the role.

  Three weeks later, Marinetti and Ferruccio Vecchi met up in a fashionable pastry shop in Milan’s galleria—the splendid glass and wrought-iron shopping mall in the heart of the city—and, with a group of their followers, moved on to break into the offices of the socialist newspaper Avanti!, smashing machines and furniture. Mussolini was not present, but after the raid a stolen Avanti! signboard was carried as a trophy to his office. Two days later he declared in print that he “accepted the whole moral responsibility for the episode,” adroitly laying claim to an exploit (or outrage) with which he had actually had nothing to do.

  The authorities seemed incapable of maintaining order: some overtly condoned the violence. After the raid on Avanti! the Minister of Defence went so far as to congratulate the aggressors, warning the socialists: “You are up against men who for four years risked their lives every day, a thousand times a day.” The government, desperate to prevent the socialist revolution they feared, were sanctioning the erosion of the law. It was a fatally dangerous strategy. Soon the Fasci were effectively at war with the socialists, in a conflict which the civil powers did nothing to halt.

  On Easter Sunday 1919, Frances Stevenson, secretary and lover of the British Prime Minster David Lloyd George, was watching the window of American President Woodrow Wilson’s apartment in Paris. Inside the apartment the Council of Four, the heads of state of the victorious Allied powers, were attending an emergency session called in a final attempt to reach agreement on Italy’s demands. Stevenson was hoping it would be over in time for the picnic Lloyd George had promised her. “Suddenly [the Italian premier] Vittorio Orlando appeared at the window, leaned on the bar which runs across it, and put his head in his hands. I thought it looked as though he was crying, but I could not believe it possible until I saw him take out his handkerchief and wipe his eyes and cheeks.” Lloyd George’s valet, watching beside her, asked: “What are they doing to the poor old gentleman?”

  What they were doing was flatly refusing to grant what he demanded: all the concessions promised in the Treaty of London, and Fiume as well. Orlando, and his Foreign Minister Sonnino, were as intent as d’Annunzio on claiming territory for Italy, but they had failed to make their case. Orlando was convinced that a secret society of nationalists was pledged to assassinate him if he returned from Paris without having gained Dalmatia for Italy. He warned the other delegates that if he could not bring back terms that his electorate would accept Italy was likely to collapse into civil war (he was not exaggerating). Waxing extravagant, he declared that denying him Fiume would be fatal to the peace of the world. He would not modify his demands. He would face the consequences of his inflexibility “up to and including death.” He wrung his hands and wept. Clemenceau and Lloyd George looked on stonily. (Sir Maurice Hankey, the conference secretary, said afterwards he would have spanked his son if the boy had behaved in such an unmanly fashion.) Woodrow Wilson offered Orlando a consoling arm across the shoulder, but no concessions.

  Orlando was a lawyer and a skilled politician who had held his country together through a difficult war and the first months of an almost more difficult peace, but in Paris he was outclassed. Lloyd George patronisingly described him as “attractive and amiable,” but the young British diplomat Harold Nicolson thought him “a white, weak, flabby man.” Sonnino, described as “hawk-like and ferocious” by Wilson’s aide Edward House, might be less flabby, but his obstinacy was no more useful than Orlando’s wheedling. The two of them had allowed the question of Italy’s entitlement to new territories to be postponed until the peace talks were already well advanced. When the discussion at last began they were dismayed to find how reluctant their allies were to grant their demands.

  They had failed to allow for the other peacemakers’ low opinion of them. The British ambassador in Paris reported that the general attitude to Italy among the delegates “has been contempt.” The British and French had bought Italy’s support with the concessions made in the Treaty of London, and—greatly though they had benefited from the deal—the representatives of both countries despised a nation that would so sell itself. Their distaste was powered as well by simple irrational prejudice. When Clemenceau described Orlando as “very Italian” he intended a racist insult. Lloyd George agreed, calling Italy “the most contemptible nation.” Sir Charles Hardinge, Permanent Under-Secretary at the British Foreign Office, referred to his Italian counterparts as “the beggars of Europe,” well known “for their whining alternated with truculence.”
Italian seamen, said the British First Sea Lord, were useless “organ-grinders.” American attitudes were scarcely more positive. President Woodrow Wilson brought to Versailles the preconceptions of a nation receiving, with increasing reluctance, an enormous influx of Italian immigrants. In America—a polyglot society where divisions of class and race, rather than intersecting at right angles as they do in Europe, run parallel—Italians were seen as being among the lowest of the low: untrustworthy, if not downright criminal.

  One of d’Annunzio’s most often-repeated arguments for Italy’s entering the war had been that by fighting the nation could prove its valour and so earn the respect of others. To him, and to all his fellow patriots, it seemed that the Italian servicemen’s fortitude throughout the terrible conflict, and their ultimate success, had demonstrated that this was a nation of heroes, as courageous and virile as any other. The world had failed to take the point. The defeat of an empire, the hundreds of thousands of men killed on the Italian Front, had not been enough to prompt the delegates in Paris to re-examine their prejudices.

  Four days after that emotional Easter morning Orlando and his foreign secretary walked out of the peace talks. D’Annunzio hailed their intransigence. “Italy is not afraid to stand alone against everyone and everything … And so I say that today only Italy is great, and only Italy is pure.” Diplomacy had failed to bring back Italy’s lost left lung. There were some prominent militarists, including more than one high-ranking general, who were saying that Italians should seize by force what the peacemakers in Paris refused to grant them. D’Annunzio agreed.

  That April he embarked on a series of speeches as bellicose and incendiary as those he had made four years before. In Venice he spoke in St. Mark’s Square. Venetians, he declared, were still being denied what was theirs. Italy was victorious, but her ignoble representatives were allowing her to be cheated of her prize. He appealed to the people to prepare to fight to renew the greatness of Venice’s mediaeval empire.

  Moving on to Rome, and tailoring his message to suit his audience, he called for the revival of the Empire of Rome. Speaking on the Capitol, he played at being Mark Antony, who had there displayed Caesar’s torn and blood-stained garments to the susceptible crowds. On the spot where, four years earlier, he had reverently raised aloft Nino Bixio’s sword, d’Annunzio now unfurled the flag which had covered Randaccio’s coffin, and which was stained with his blood. He spoke fervently of the debt that all survivors owed to the “glorious martyrs” of the war. Repeatedly he kissed the stained and tattered flag and then released it, now bordered with a black ribbon, sign of mourning for the still-unredeemed territories. As though intoning the creed of his new sect, he called out, slowly and sonorously, the names of all the cities and territories for whose “redemption” he was now calling. His listeners trembled and wept.

  In May, Orlando and Sonnino returned to Paris, the former looking, according to an American delegate, “very white and worn … without much pep … and ten years older.” D’Annunzio was speaking repeatedly, his rhetoric becoming increasingly seditious. He preached that it was no sin to take up arms against elected politicians, the “parasites” whose “weakness, ineptitude, idleness and egoism” threatened to compromise Italy’s victory. On 26 May, the anniversary of Italy’s entry into the war, he was due to speak in the Theatre of Augustus, but he was forbidden to do so. Within days his speech was published instead. It was a great drum roll of prose about how Italy’s smoking blood had been offered up as a sacrifice to the greatness of its promised future, how the sky over the battlefield had glowed with courage and sacrifice, yearning and fire.

  Increasingly now d’Annunzio was using religious rhetoric, drawing on the hypnotic rhythms of the liturgy by which, in his youth, he had seen peasants worked into states of frenzy. He claimed to see visions. He told his public 80,000 dead soldiers were flying over Rome transporting the mountain on which they died. “I see it. Don’t you see it too?” He saw the “Christ of our battles.” He said that Christ was calling out to the Italians to “rise up and be not afraid.” He led his listeners in chants in which the word “blood” tolled repeatedly—the blood shed already, the blood which yet must flow to cleanse Italy of the filthy shame of a negotiated peace. He was blasphemous, unreasonable, electrifying.

  The military authorities ordered him out of Rome, and back to Venice. As an officer he was bound to obey. He resigned his commission. He would take orders from no one.

  The conjunction of a war hero and a returning army is a danger to any civilian state. As one of d’Annunzio’s most perceptive biographers remarks: “the Rubicon has never really been forgotten in Italy.” The Italian authorities placed d’Annunzio under close surveillance. The watchers found plenty to occupy them.

  One of his slogans was “Ardire non Ordire” (To Dare Not to Plot), but plot he did. He had new friends. One was Giovanni Giuriati, a prominent figure in the irredentist movement who had been twice wounded and twice decorated in the war. Giuriati was as passionately committed to the creation of a Greater Italy as d’Annunzio was, and as impatient with the Italian government’s caution. His power base was the National Association of Trento and Trieste. An energetic administrator and a subtle diplomat, Giuriati saw that he could make use of d’Annunzio’s charisma, and—himself no showman—he was content to play the modest grey eminence in d’Annunzio’s brilliant drama.

  In June the peace conference ended with the question of Italy’s claims unresolved. Orlando returned from Paris for the second time to be voted out of office on 23 June and was replaced by Francesco Nitti, not a warrior, not a superman, but a professor of economics. Nitti was to become d’Annunzio’s prime hate figure, the butt of his grossest humour, the target of his most excoriating verbal abuse. A canny politician, Nitti had entered parliament as a radical, and held ministerial posts under Giolitti and Orlando. Giuriati described him as “anti-war, anti-victory, our enemy by definition.” He was a pragmatist who preferred negotiation to warfare, and who saw the restoration of Italy’s economy as being more useful than the defence of its honour. He had no sympathy with the new political order of which d’Annunzio was to be the harbinger. In 1924 he would leave Italy, going into exile after courageously opposing the fascist regime.

  Seven months after the armistice, the expensive and dangerously recalcitrant army still numbered over a million and a half men. The majority of them were deployed along the northern frontiers, the high command believing, as d’Annunzio did, that fighting there might, and perhaps should, soon resume. The rest were stationed around the country, supposedly to guarantee public order. Nitti made his first priority the reduction of men under arms to pre-war levels. The Italian army was top heavy. By the end of the war there were over a thousand generals, and they all now vehemently protested against their own enforced retirement. Those plotting to destabilise the civilian government, or to lead an unauthorised invasion of the unredeemed territories, could now count on the sympathy of a considerable proportion of the military hierarchy.

  An enquiry into the catastrophe of Caporetto ended with Nitti declaring a general amnesty for deserters. Given the vast numbers of men involved, it was the only feasible outcome. Nitti wasn’t interested in hunting the deserters down. He wanted them back home, working, supporting their families, paying tax. The trenchocracy was outraged. Were cowards and traitors to be treated the same as those who had valiantly risked death? It was to this amnesty that d’Annunzio was later to trace his determination to rebel. If the law protected “the booty of deserters” then he would have no compunction about breaking it.

  D’Annunzio now had followers very different from the earnest young scholars who used to crowd around his table in Venice in the 1890s. One night in 1919 in the Caffè Greco, a young poet and admirer of d’Annunzio saw a group of people arguing loudly, among them Arditi with bushy beards and great falls of black hair. He was told they were “d’Annunzians.” The Arditi might not fit with that part of d’Annunzio’s life which included Goth
ic bibelots, Murano glass and china tea, but he prized them as he had prized his greyhounds, for their physical splendour and their appetite for killing. He flattered them by giving them a new mythopoeic character. If the Carso was Inferno, he announced, they were its demons: if the sky above the battlefields was Heaven, they were its angels. He made innumerable puns on the words ardire (to dare), ardore (ardour) and ardere (to burn). He dined in their mess and told them “to be among you is to enter the fiery furnace.” He admired the medal which showed an Ardito, grenade in each hand, enveloped in flame. He told them that he had carried with him on all his wartime exploits a dagger, which had been given him on the battlefield by one of their number, still dripping with Austrian blood.

  · · ·

  The day after Nitti assumed office d’Annunzio published an article entitled “The Command Passes to the People.” He was now openly inciting Italians to reject their elected government.

  The police files for the spring and summer of 1919 report that d’Annunzio was involved in a series of conspiracies with a varying combination of allies—with senior army officers, with the Duke of Aosta, Peppino Garibaldi and other assorted nationalists, with futurists, irredentists and anarchists, with Arditi, and with Mussolini and his fascists.