One evening in June, half a year after d’Annunzio had ignored Mussolini’s initial request for a rendezvous, the two of them met face to face for the first time. They sat in the Grand Hotel in Rome talking at length about how the Italian state should be restructured. That same month a police report on Mussolini was delivered to Nitti. It described him as very intelligent, with a gift for swiftly divining men’s strengths and weaknesses, and as an orator who could hold audiences gripped.
D’Annunzio saw the fascists as crude imitators of himself. They were potentially useful supporters, but they were lamentably brutal in their methods and unrefined in their thinking. Mussolini was a “companion in faith and violence,” but he was a subordinate partner, when he was included at all, in the conspiracies of those months. Those conspiracies’ aims were variously to seize Spalato and/or the rest of Dalmatia, or to stage a coup against the insufficiently irredentist government in Rome and form a revolutionary assembly with d’Annunzio at its head.
That summer of 1919 was perhaps d’Annunzio’s political apogee. Every intrigue and conspiracy made use of his name, every projected coup d’état was to lead to his installation as dictator. In Paris, when Orlando told Lloyd George he foresaw his own downfall, perhaps as a result of a parliamentary rebellion, perhaps as the result of a popular revolt, Lloyd George asked who he imagined would assume power. “Perhaps d’Annunzio,” he replied.
There were plenty of people seeking to destabilise the Italian democracy. Few would have guessed by whom, just over three years later, the thing would be done. “The Italian people is a mass of precious materials. It needs to be forged, cleaned, worked. A work of art is still possible. But a government is needed. A man. A man who, when the situation demands it, has the delicate touch of an artist and the heavy fist of a warrior … A man who knows the people, loves the people, and can direct and bend it—with violence if necessary.” The author of those words was Mussolini, but in 1919 the man with the miracle-working charisma, and the enormous popular following which might make a regime-change possible was not him, but Gabriele d’Annunzio.
D’Annunzio was still living in flamboyant style. He made time to visit Luisa Casati on Capri, where he hung all the bushes in her garden with flowers made of Murano glass, but Venice was still his base. Everywhere he went he was fêted. When the statue of Colleoni was returned to its position, d’Annunzio was there, batting away applause with studied modesty as he permitted the assembled enthusiasts to draw parallels between himself and the legendary warrior. When he returned to Venice after a brief absence the railway station was mobbed by his admirers. War veterans, students, the mayor and his officials, all crowded round him, while the sky filled with aircraft: the pilots of d’Annunzio’s squadron were flying spirals in his honour.
In Rome, when he wanted to meet the King, one telephone call secured him an audience that very afternoon. Poet and monarch—two small men with a shared taste for small metal objects (the King was as keen on old coins as d’Annunzio was on Renaissance medals)—paced the paths of the royal Villa Savoia’s gardens for three-quarters of an hour while d’Annunzio talked. The King was quieter—a British ambassador once said of him: “He is thought to have ideas but has never propounded them to anyone”—but he probably enjoyed the conversation. Unlike his father and grandfather, who each boasted of having never read a book, he liked poetry. As they parted he pressed d’Annunzio’s hand warmly and said something about how the constitution constrained his freedom, words which d’Annunzio and his followers interpreted as meaning that Victor Emmanuel would have appointed him president if only he had had the power to do so.
The young Belgian poet Léon Kochnitzky met d’Annunzio for the first time at a party in Rome in July, and has left a vivid description of his sitting in an armchair at the centre of a room crowded with his hushed and reverent admirers, talking ceaselessly of Shelley, Rasputin, Renaissance painting and his preferred routes for nocturnal strolls around Rome. He was—as he had been when he sat, a tiny child, on a little stool at the centre of a circle of his mother’s friends—the centre of attention. His voice was melodious. He used little hand gestures and smiles to keep each listener entrapped and they all, old and young, obscure or very powerful, sat silently listening while he talked and talked and daintily ate ice cream—first strawberry-flavoured, then banana, then strawberry again.
There was an American-born princess at the party who claimed to be clairvoyant. She offered to read the cards for d’Annunzio. He accepted. They were highly auspicious. “Then,” d’Annunzio said lightly, “I shall march on Fiume.”
Fiume (now called Rijeka), which was about to become the setting for the climactic act of the drama of d’Annunzio’s life, was a city with a staccato history and a mongrel population. Dramatically sited at the northern end of the Adriatic, in the crook of the angle formed by the Istrian peninsula’s meeting with the Dalmatian coast, it is backed by mountains and overlooks the island-dotted Gulf of Carnaro. Badly damaged by subsequent wars, its centre is now patched with ruins, but Alexander Powell, an American who visited it just after d’Annunzio got there in 1919, described it as “shaded by double rows of stately trees” with “numerous surprisingly well-stocked shops; and rising here and there above the trees and the housetops, like fingers pointing to heaven, the graceful campaniles of fine old churches.”
One of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s two great Adriatic ports, Fiume had been, for the previous two centuries, Budapest’s outlet to the sea, as Trieste was Vienna’s. Roads and rail tracks converged on it from Budapest, Prague, Belgrade and Zagreb. Alongside it the river from which it takes its name hurtles down a ravine, powering the mills which were among the sources of the city’s prosperity. In the mid-nineteenth century, Fiume’s industrial output constituted half of all Croatia’s. By 1914 it boasted an oil refinery, a British-owned torpedo works, foundries, chemical plants, tanneries, timber yards, factories producing soap and candles, pasta and sail cloth. Most important of all were the docks and shipyards. “Miles and miles of concrete moles and wharfs,” reports Powell, “equipped with harbour machinery of the most modern description, and adjacent to them rows of warehouses as commodious as the Bush Terminals in Brooklyn.”
As it had increased in prosperity, so Fiume became a more desirable prize and its political status more controversial. The eighteenth-century Empress Maria Theresa had granted it the status of a corpus separatum, a quasi-autonomous free city. Thereafter it was ruled in turn by Hungary, by Napoleonic France, by Austria, by Hungary again and then, after 1848, by Croatia, before the Hungarian monarchy once again gained control of it in 1867. From that time onward, it was a Hungarian outpost, some 300 kilometres from the capital, ruled directly from Budapest by a Hungarian governor resident in the city.
On all its landward sides it was closely surrounded by Croatia, which had a measure of constitutional independence within the Empire. Uncomfortably conscious of how vulnerable Fiume was, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century the Hungarian authorities encouraged Italian merchants to settle in the city, partly in order to facilitate trade across the Adriatic, partly to provide a counterbalance to the restive Croat population. By 1915 Italians formed the majority in the inner city.
Over twenty years the population of the city had doubled, and the traffic passing though its ports had increased sixfold. Banks opened. Fiume was flourishing. The narrow alleys of the Venetian-built old town were now encircled by suburban boulevards with neo-classical villas and gardens filled with roses. But the Italian Fiumans proved no more docile than the Croats. They formed the great majority of the city’s middle class: they were prosperous and successful, but they were governed and policed by Hungarians. Soon they were nearly as discontented as the Slav communities. In 1892 they tore down a statue of the Emperor Franz Joseph.
Fiume was a city obsessed with its own destiny, and known for its crowded cafés, where people sat arguing all day long, and for the multiplicity of its printing presses. During the w
ar years there were 346 journals published in the city. A visitor describes it: “The public life of the city centres on a broad square on which front numerous hotels, restaurants, and coffee houses, before which lounge, from mid-morning until midnight, a considerable proportion of the Italian population, sipping caffè nero, or tall drinks concocted from sweet, bright-coloured syrups, scanning the papers and discussing, with much noise and gesticulation, the political situation and the doings of the peace commissioners in Paris. Save only Barcelona, Fiume has the most excitable and irritable population of any city that I know.”
In the autumn of 1918, as the defeat and dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire came to seem inevitable, the people of Fiume faced encompassment by the brand new state of Yugoslavia. There were those in the city (most of them Croatian or members of the smaller but vocal Serbian community) who welcomed the prospect, but they were opposed by the Autonomists (mainly socialist, and including members of all ethnic groups), who wanted Fiume to be once more a corpus separatum, and by the Italian or Italophile “annexationists” who hoped it would become part of a Greater Italy.
A small place with a strategic importance disproportionate to its size, and a highly politicised, mixed-race population, Fiume posed problems for the peacemakers in Paris. It had not been one of the territories promised to Italy in the Treaty of London: its future was not predetermined.
On 28 October 1918, as Italian troops chased the Austrians past Vittorio Veneto, the last Hungarian governor of Fiume informed the mayor that Magyar rule was over, and that he was leaving the city. Over the next three days rival groups tussled for control. The pro-Yugoslav Popular Committee, backed by Croatian troops with Hapsburg-issue machine guns, claimed that power had been transferred to them. They took over the Governor’s Palace and hoisted the Croatian flag. At the same time the Fiuman-Italians formed the National Council, electing the septuagenarian Dr. Antonio Grossich as their president, and announced they were the city’s de facto government. A third would-be administration, a workers’ council, challenged them both. There were rowdy demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. The rival groups fought it out in the streets.
On 30 October the National Council conducted a plebiscite which resulted, so they claimed, in an overwhelming vote by the city’s people in favour of annexation to Italy. Some pro-Yugoslav sources deny this plebiscite ever took place; if it did it was probably more of a noisy rally, with a resolution arrived at by shouting, than an orderly democratic process. But for the Fiuman-Italians and their supporters on the Italian mainland it was to become a key moment in their story.
As the war ended the city was occupied by Allied forces, most of them Italians who heartily agreed with d’Annunzio that Fiume was, and forever after should be, Italian. An Italian warship appeared in the harbour on 4 November. The admiral in command ordered that the Croatian flag flying over the Governor’s Palace be taken down. Soon matters were complicated by the arrival of a battalion of the Allied Army of the Orient, made up of French and Serbian forces, who had been fighting the Turks on the Eastern Front. On 15 November they moved into the suburb of Susak, just across the river from Fiume. The Serbs (allies whom d’Annunzio had described two years earlier as “our future enemies”) were not welcome to the Fiuman-Italians. Nor were the French contingent, most of their troops being actually Vietnamese or North African; in contemporary accounts suspicion of the French, as being likely to support Yugoslav claims, is overlaid by simple racist hostility to the “chinks” and “niggers.”
The atmosphere in Fiume became so explosive that the Serbian troops were rapidly withdrawn. An hour after they left more Italian troops began to pour into the city, disembarking from ships or walking over the inland frontier. Croatian and Serbian flags were torn down and the Italian tricolore hoisted in their place. Croatian shop signs were defaced and the sale of all Slav newspapers banned. British and American ships arrived in the harbour in a belated attempt to impose some kind of neutral interim government, but they were unable to annul the fact that Fiume was well on the way to becoming a de facto Italian enclave.
It was an edgy time, but an exciting one. One of the Italian soldiers with the Allied force occupying Fiume was the young poet Giovanni Comisso. He liked the place at once. “Americans, English, French crowded the streets: it seemed that every day there was a victory celebration.” After months on the battlefields, Fiume seemed to him a garden of earthly delights: beautiful girls, shops full of perfumes, marvellous cakes; cafés with deferential waiters; illustrated magazines, coffee with cream, delicious zabaglione (Comisso, who dedicates a whole page of his memoirs to a custard tart he once ate in Trieste, had as sweet a tooth as d’Annunzio himself). Best of all was the way the Fiuman-Italians welcomed the Italian troops. Every night officers were invited to parties in the locals’ houses, where they ate and drank and danced until morning.
Over the next months, Fiume’s Italian inhabitants became ever more clamorous in their appeals to the Italian government to offer them its protection. Meanwhile the Yugoslavs appealed to the Allied leaders to cede the city to them. Geographically it seemed naturally to form a part of their new country. The French were sympathetic: a strong new state would help to contain Germany, and to keep Italy (which Clemenceau considered an untrustworthy ally) from dominating the eastern Mediterranean.
The Italians of Fiume turned to d’Annunzio. Within a week of the armistice in November 1918 he had received a letter from the President of the National Council full of assurances of the “burning faith” of the Fiuman-Italians in their imminent “liberation” by their great Mother, and asking for his help in hastening on the happy day. Initially he temporised, but on 14 January 1919, he published his “Letter to the Dalmatians” in which he publicly and fervidly dedicated himself to the cause of the Italianissimo (very, very Italian) city.
“Why they have set their hearts on a town of 50,000 people, with little more than half of them Italians, is a mystery to me,” wrote Edward House, Woodrow Wilson’s adviser. But as months passed with no good news from Paris for Italian nationalists, Fiume became a symbol of all that Italy aspired to, and all that it was being denied. Orlando promised the Italian parliament he would be true to “that most Italian city, the jewel of the Carnaro.” D’Annunzio took up the theme. Hitherto Fiume had been, for him, just one of the many cities for whose redemption he called. Now, in the mesmeric sequences of call and response with which his speeches climaxed, he began to include the new slogan: “Fiume or death!”
In the spring of 1919, a Fiuman Ardito officer, Captain Nino Host-Venturi (who was to become one of d’Annunzio’s most important associates over the next two years), assembled a fighting troop which he initially described as a “gymnastic club” but which was soon openly referred to as the Legion of Fiume. Men and women alike began to wear red, white and green rosettes. Streets were given new Italian names. The atmosphere is described by Father J. N. Macdonald, a Jesuit priest living in the city. Unlike the great majority of the other foreign visitors who left descriptions of the next two years’ events in Fiume, Father Macdonald spoke Croatian and sympathised with the city’s Slavic peoples. He saw “postboxes, lampposts, house doors … daubed with liberal quantities of red, white and green paint. Wherever one looked the word Italia struck one in the eye and even at night it was outlined with electric lamps.” Host-Venturi’s Legion of Fiume kept growing (one recruiting trip to Rome raised another 400 volunteers).
When Orlando and Sonnino withdrew from the peace talks in April, the Fiuman-Italians shouted: “Down with Wilson! Down with redskins!” Meanwhile, back in Rome, Orlando was greeted with cries of “Viva Fiume!” and in Turin students tore down the street signs along the Corso Wilson, exchanging them for new ones reading Corso Fiume. Mussolini came to Fiume and gave an inflammatory speech. The newly formed association of Young Fiume issued a declaration. “Citizens be prepared! The battle is now beginning against everything and everybody, on behalf of our rights and our dead. We write this with bloo
d on our banners.”
The battle against everybody took the form of racist bullying. Father Macdonald describes gangs twenty strong roaming the streets at night, terrorising non-Italians and beating them up. They muscled their way into the cafés and ordered the musicians to play the Italian national anthem, while the customers were forced to stand up. One night in May the legionaries went out in force, defaced non-Italian shop signs with tar, and daubed the doors of the Slav population with skull and crossbones, or black crosses. In June, the National Council declared its intention of raising an army, and decreed that it was high treason to question Fiume’s “political union” with Italy.
There were numerous high-ranking Italian officers willing to serve the Fiuman-Italians’ cause. Giuriati put the resources of his irredentist Trento-Trieste Association at Fiume’s service, organising a recruitment drive across Italy for a “National Fiuman Army.” But while Wilson and the other peacemakers were inclined to recognise the independence of communities who had risen up against their former rulers, they were far less likely to acknowledge a regime imposed by an invading force. The Fiumans had to stage their own coup. Before they could get up the nerve to do so they had need of a inspirational leader. They cast around for one among the prominent nationalists. Peppino Garibaldi, the Duke of Aosta and the futurist poet Sam Benelli were among the people Host-Venturi and his associates considered. But their choice was for d’Annunzio. On 29 May he received a telegram from one of the leaders of the National Council of Fiume. “We look to the only firm and intrepid Duce of the Italian people. Command us. We are ready.”
Here at last was d’Annunzio’s chance to play the condottiero. He sent a telegram accepting the role of Fiume’s liberator with characteristic portentousness: “Await me with faith and discipline. I will fail neither you nor destiny. Long live Italian Fiume!” On Whit Sunday, 8 June, he published a polemic entitled “Italian Pentecost,” calling Fiume “the only living city, the only ardent city, the only city of the spirit, all wind and fire … the most beautiful holocaust which has ever, throughout the centuries, been offered up.” Two days later posters appeared overnight in public places all over Fiume announcing: “Gabriele d’Annunzio the fervid assertor of your rights is today the symbol of the mind and soul of Italy,” and “Tell the faithful that their faith will be rewarded.”
Gabriele D'Annunzio Page 46