Gabriele D'Annunzio

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

The economy was as volatile as the public mood. The cost of living was four times what it had been before the war. In May there were violent demonstrations in Turin. “Workers’ councils” took over factories. Moderates were as alarmed as the nationalist right: these workers’ councils were seen as versions of the Russian soviets. Nitti called on the army, sending 50,000 soldiers into the city. The fascist squads were not the only people reacting with violence to the perceived threat of a red revolution.

  While at home in Italy politics became ever more polarised, in Fiume d’Annunzio embraced any idea that took his fancy. “Do not be surprised at anything; tomorrow he could be celebrating a fakir’s ritual or dancing the light fantastic with the most civilised Arabs of Egypt,” wrote Carli. “It is the privilege of genius, this transition into a thousand forms, and it is his secret how he remains immutably and miraculously himself.”

  Others, less privileged by genius, grew alarmed. The Charter of Carnaro was not made public until September, but rumours about it spread: that it was shockingly egalitarian, and that it described an independent republic, implying that d’Annunzio was no longer holding Fiume for Italy, but for himself. General Caviglia, observing from Abbazia through the eyes and ears of his numerous informers, heard that many of d’Annunzio’s “finest officers” were moved to leave him, “disgusted with the revolutionary attitudes of the Command.”

  Fiume’s intellectual life was becoming ever more active and unconventional. The “Union of Free Spirits Tending Towards Perfection” met under their fig tree to debate alternatives to prison and “the beautification of the city.” There were nationalists calling for a purer Italianità; there were internationalists borrowing doctrines from the farthest reaches of the earth. Like their Californian counterparts half a century later, the thinkers of Fiume’s counterculture looked to India for enlightenment. YOGA, an association motivated by “ardour of action … genius and mystic ire,” was the brainchild of a Venetian officer with an enthusiasm (shared by d’Annunzio, who had been reading the Bhagavad-Gita in the 1880s) for Hinduism. For the members of YOGA, the Nietzschean division between supermen and slaves could be formalised according to a Hindu model. They proposed the adoption of the caste system, people to be allotted their status according to their “spiritual potency.” There were the Brown Lotuses, proto-hippies who reviled capitalism, money, modern industry and the city, exalted Eastern mysticism and aspired to get back to nature and live a simple life following the rhythms of the earth. There were the Red Lotuses, modern Dionysiacs who proclaimed the advent of a new world transformed by sexual love. There was a group whose markedly homoerotic manifesto announces their oneness in “Sacred Love” and their dedication to “squandering it like saints and madmen.”

  Guido Keller, who knew how to throw a party in tune with the Nietzschean spirit abroad in Fiume, organised a Festa Yoga. The invitation promised “a dance in the abyss of the profound sea. A dance in the African forests. A dance beyond good and evil. Rally! Free spirits.”

  · · ·

  In June 1920, Nitti fell from power. D’Annunzio celebrated with a mock funeral and a paean to the God of Vengeance, reprising all the insults he had hurled at Cagoia, the “putrid blown-out windbag” who had “used our dead as manure for turnips.” But Nitti’s loss of office was a disaster for him.

  Giolitti, whom d’Annunzio had denounced in 1915 as a traitor, was recalled from retirement (he was now seventy-eight years old) to head the government. In Paris, the Allied powers had finally decided not to decide anything about Fiume, leaving it to the Italians and the Yugoslavs to arrive at a settlement between themselves. Ignoring d’Annunzio, Giolitti, a more confident statesman than Nitti, entered into negotiations with Yugoslavia.

  In Fiume the atmosphere of carnival was turning darker. “It is impossible,” said Kochnitzky, “to be sublime for so many months without danger.” On that summer’s hot nights, the shouts of “Eia, Eia, Eia! Alalà!” rising from the public gardens and the waterfront were as threatening as they were jubilant. Fiume reeked of violence. Father Macdonald describes it: “Cries of Fiume o Morte, frightfulness, bomb-throwing in the streets, imprisonment of respectable people for no other reason than because they are suspected of not being supporters of d’Annunzio—such are the methods by which Fiume is governed. How long will the disgusting comedy last?”

  Most of those victimised were non-Italian. In the charter, d’Annunzio and de Ambris had allowed for the existence of Croatian citizens, fully integrated into their visionary state, but allowed—if they so wished—to create Croatian communes enjoying equal rights and freedoms with their Italian counterparts. In practice, though, d’Annunzio, raging against Yugoslavia (“a Balkan pigsty,” or a “beast” born from the vomit of the dying Austrian vulture) allowed his fury to spill over onto the ethnic groups of which the new state was made up. Serbs were “ferocious,” they “cut off women’s breasts and kill babies in their cradles.” He referred to his Croatian neighbours pejoratively as “Croataglia,” while he sneered at Slavs in general as “swineherds.”

  Croatian or Serbian citizens were arrested on the street and locked up in the theatre before being expelled to Susak. Their homes, thus brutally vacated, were allotted to Italians. Unemployment and hunger fuelled racial tensions. Industrial disputes between Slav labourers and Italian employers merged with ethnic conflicts. The legionaries crossed the river into Susak and swaggered through the streets, terrifying the Croatian citizenry. Showing forged papers and claiming to be members of the secret police, they barged into people’s homes and “confiscated” their valuables. Zanella, observing from Trieste, wrote that Fiume “groans under the yoke of a domination which is mediaeval, absurd and ridiculous. Citizens are no longer safe in their own homes … peasants have to guard their animals in their bedrooms.”

  An Italian officer and his driver were attacked and killed by Serbian troops in Spalato (Split), provoking angry demonstrations in Fiume, and invective from d’Annunzio directed at the Serbian filth sullying the halls of Diocletian’s palace. Another ceremony: the dead men were buried in Spalato, but that didn’t prevent d’Annunzio ordering funerals for them in Fiume.

  Primed for violence, told insistently by their adored “capo” that their neighbours were their enemy, the legionaries went on the rampage, wrecking and burning Croats’ shops and houses. D’Annunzio ordered them back to barracks, but announced that the Command would be practising “special vigilance” in regard to “politically suspicious persons”—by which was meant, almost invariably, Slavs.

  If most of the city’s pre-war industries were temporarily defunct, one form of production was still lively: the manufacture of hand grenades. Military exercises were conducted with real ammunition, and real injuries. The legionaries fought duels with flame-throwers, returning from exercises bloodied and singed. The tenth month of d’Annunzian Fiume was celebrated with a massive military exercise with shelling from batteries at sea, on the mountains and along the shore. D’Annunzio reviewed the entire Legion, taking hours over it, passing along the lines, holding the eyes of each man in turn, telling them they were as beautiful and violent and swift as tawny beasts, as impenetrable as a wall of flame.

  More anniversaries celebrated with rallies and shouting, with legionaries marching with laurel branches in their rifles, and with d’Annunzio on his balcony whipping up a storm of hero worship and martial ardour. More fanfares. More flags: the red, white and green of Italy; the violet, yellow and crimson of Fiume. Awards ceremonies. Welcome parties at the railway station, with women pinning rosettes on the lapels of newly arrived volunteers.

  In June, for the festival of San Vito, Fiume’s patron saint, the streets were brilliantly illuminated and the harbour was crowded with boats garlanded with flowers and hung about with lanterns. “They danced everywhere,” recorded Kochnitzky, “in the piazzas, in the streets, on the dock; by day, by night, they danced and sang.” There were fanfares and fireworks. “One’s gaze, wherever it was fixed, saw a dance: of la
nterns, of sparks, of stars.” It was an orgy (a word d’Annunzio used approvingly and often). Kochnitzky “saw soldiers, sailors, women, citizens in bohemian embraces.” It was also a danse macabre. “Starving, in ruin, in anguish, perhaps on the verge of death in the flames or under a hail of grenades, Fiume, brandishing a torch, danced before the sea.”

  D’Annunzio was preparing for a decisive move. “Patience has no more to say: I cut her throat last night. Now courage speaks.”

  On 30 August, to an audience of Fiuman citizens, and again next day to officers of the Legion, he read aloud the new constitution, the Charter of Carnaro. These addresses were made, not from his balcony, but in Fiume’s Teatro Fenice. Crammed to capacity, the theatre was swelteringly hot. Making a metaphor of adversity, d’Annunzio described it as the furnace in which a new order would be smelted. He told his listeners: “These pages are yours … Your spirit has written them with an eagle’s feather, trimmed and sharpened with the edge of your short sword.”

  Some of his ministers protested that the charter’s Article Nine (which implied that property rights were not absolute) must be dropped, or farewell to any hope of outside investment in Fiume. The corporations, which sounded alarmingly like trade unions, would “give the city into the hands of the workers.” D’Annunzio didn’t care. In the midst of a landscape scored with trenches, he told his legionaries: “We have established the foundations of a city of life.”

  He ended his address to the citizens with a rousing cry for “annexation to Italy, sooner or later, but certain. Eia, Eia, Eia, Alalà!” There were those who wondered, as the ululating drowned out criticism, why, if Fiume was to become a part of Italy, it needed its separate constitution? In de Ambris’s first draft the charter described Fiume as a “Republic.” To soothe the monarchists among his supporters d’Annunzio subsequently changed the word to “Regency,” but he was moving further and further from the state to which he claimed he wished his city to be joined. To think “Italianly,” he now said, was to think ignobly, deviously, cravenly.

  There were people around him urging him to rebel. Carli’s “Iron Head” announced that Fiume was an “island of wonder” and its people were “the advance guard of all nations on the march to the future … a handful of … mystic creators, who will sow through the world the seed of our force.”

  That force might be figurative. It might be actual. For de Ambris, as for many of those who stayed with d’Annunzio into its fifth season, the political transformation of Fiume was a try-out for a larger revolution. De Ambris told d’Annunzio that Fiume should “annex Italy,” and establish there a new society organised along the lines of their visionary charter. “In Italy a saviour is demanded and awaited, and the most illuminated identify him as Gabriele d’Annunzio.” Only d’Annunzio could unite the proletariat, the bourgeoisie and the military. Guido Keller agreed; he was barely interested in Fiume per se. For him it was simply the first step towards an Italian revolution “and after Italy, the world.”

  For decades d’Annunzio had been toying with visions of dictatorship: his admiration of Plato, whose republic is ruled by all-powerful philosopher-kings; his poetic reinvention of Garibaldi as a marmoreal figure, master of the elements and of the mob; his play Glory, whose hero Flamma is “a true man suited to the great emergency, a vast free human spirit.” Glory was subsequently much admired by fascists for its apparently miraculous prescience, but d’Annunzio, in writing it, was not prophesying the coming of Mussolini: he was creating a role for himself. In France before the war he had visited a sorceress who had told him (or so he maintained) he would become “a kind of king.”

  Despite urging from his supporters though, he was not ready to cross his Rubicon. De Ambris proposed a pact with Mussolini for a joint uprising in Italy in which d’Annunzio would provide the “genius” and Mussolini the manpower. But Mussolini, more confident now of his own authority, wasn’t interested in raising a revolt on someone else’s behalf, and d’Annunzio, true to form, couldn’t make up his mind.

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  The National Council of Fiume was not pleased with the Charter of Carnaro. Nervous of confronting d’Annunzio and his Legion directly, its members resorted to legalistic temporising. On 8 September the Council dissolved itself, and reformed as a “directive committee” with the declared intention of calling for a new election within six weeks for members of a “constituent assembly” which would “consider” the Charter of Carnaro. D’Annunzio was having none of this pussy-footing. He issued a proclamation through La Vedetta requiring all the people of Fiume to gather that very evening beneath his balcony. “Today you will decide the fate of the city!” Alarms sounded, bells rang, Randaccio’s banner was unfurled. The piazza filled. D’Annunzio called out that it was a “decisive hour” for the future of Fiume. There and then, on his own authority, he proclaimed the inception of the “Italian Regency of Carnaro.” The “act of life” for which he had been calling turned out to be a coup d’état.

  Grossich, representing the National Council, protested. D’Annunzio answered him defiantly:

  The party of slaves dissents and opposes us.

  Excellent.

  Let fighting begin.

  We will fight.

  The Council, helpless to oppose his Legion, acquiesced. But the charter never made the transition from words to action. From this time on, d’Annunzio called his administration the Regency, but nothing else materialised, no corporations, no immense concert hall, no “palpitating fact.”

  12 SEPTEMBER. The first anniversary of the Sacred Entry. D’Annunzio raised a new standard, a purple flag with gold stars framed by a serpent eating its own tail, and announced the issue of a new set of Fiuman postage stamps.

  20 September. The fiftieth anniversary of the unification of Italy. More bedecking of the streets with flowers and strewing of the cobbles with laurel branches.

  22 September. A city-wide demonstration-cum-street-party to celebrate the visit of Guglielmo Marconi. D’Annunzio gave his old friend a solemn public welcome, addressing him as a “dominator of cosmic energies,” and lauding him for having spread the genius of Italy through the universe at the speed of starlight. Marconi had come to build a radio mast, so that the voice of Fiume could sound out over the world’s airwaves. D’Annunzio went aboard Marconi’s ship, the Electra, and from its little onboard studio made his first broadcast to the world.

  Kochnitzky’s adoration cooled. D’Annunzio was no longer interested in his League of Fiume, and he was losing his place in the inner circle (Osbert Sitwell, a privileged visitor, called him “the only bore in Fiume”). He still had the glove he had stolen on his first meeting with d’Annunzio but sometimes he was tempted to use it as a pen wiper, just to vent his exasperation.

  There came a day when Kochnitzky’s deputy and friend, Henry Furst, criticised another of d’Annunzio’s protégés and the Commandant—still fit, still a boxer—put his fists up as though to strike him. There came another day when, on bidding goodbye to Kochnitzky, d’Annunzio gave him his hand briefly and then swivelled to the right and abruptly turned his back. Everyone knew what that meant. His favour had been withdrawn. The Office for External Affairs was closed.

  As Kochnitzky and Furst were packing up their files they heard Luisa Baccara playing one of Bach’s fugues in d’Annunzio’s apartments on the next floor up, and then, the final indignity, his bath water began to drip through their office ceiling. Over their heads their erstwhile idol, distracted by his mistress, had left the tap running. Kochnitzky went straight to the railway station, so anxious to leave that he ran down the tracks after the train he had just missed, and mounted it as it stopped at the armistice line.

  In September 1920 a miniature civil war began. Rival officers of the Legion, in competition for new recruits, ordered their men into battle against each other. One of d’Annunzio’s ministers told the Commandant the officers were behaving like drunken looters. D’Annunzio took heed, but the reforms he instigated were hardly designed to rei
nforce discipline.

  One of the topics for discussion under the YOGA group’s fig tree through the summer had been the idea that in Fiume, the city of youth and fire, military hierarchy was absurd and military discipline oppressive. YOGA’s members vowed “to attack senior officers publicly and violently.” Keller drew up some resolutions: the uniform to be redesigned, abandoning the prissy stand-up collar and the useless sword still worn by officers. The Ardito, a heroic individual operating alone, would be taken as the model for all soldiers. Keller was envisaging a fighting force made up of insubordinate individual warriors, something like the bands of armed knights who had made mediaeval battlefields such scrimmages.

  D’Annunzio agreed. On 27 October he published his plans for his army. He described his ideal troops, few but each man as fit for lethal action as a torpedo. A legionary must be able to run, leap, swim, ride, lift weights, throw stones, climb trees. He must be ready to break down a door with his shoulder, or to fling himself from a cliff. He must be able to sing, dance, whistle and “imitate the voices of men and of beasts.” Killers and performers at once, the legionaries would be the star actors in d’Annunzio’s ideal theatre of war and they would operate, as the heroes envisioned by Sorel would do, as individuals, violent, noble and grand.

  There would be no more officers. Every intermediate rank between the Commandant and the troops was abolished. The entire army answered directly and exclusively to d’Annunzio. “To the Commandant alone is reserved the power to deliberate … He alone has the right to declare war.” D’Annunzio was setting his men free: each one was entitled to a vote in a military council in which the most junior recruit had as good a voice as the most senior officer. But he was also binding them tightly to him. “To him is owed obedience without limit, and total faith.”

  The military reforms, like the Charter of Carnaro, remained unimplemented. All the same, after the publication of the new military code, many of the officers remaining in Fiume defected.