by Philipp Blom
Revolutionary satyr: The Italian poet and war hero Gabriele d’Annunzio was famous for his scented words and his countless affairs. Almost as an afterthought, he also invented the aesthetics of fascism.
D’Annunzio was an incurable romantic. He designed a constitution for his statelet that was corporatist, but also progressive in many ways: it declared the full equality of men and women and of religion and atheism, guaranteed a free and nonreligious education for children, established the strict separation of powers within the state, and provided for a strong democratic base. Many influences had shaped this work, not least the presence of the trade unionist and anarchist Alceste de Ambris, but in the end it was the poet-potentate who put his stamp on the entire work, supplementing the useful but pedestrian nine corporations (workers, teachers, seamen, and so on) with a tenth one, which he named energia and which was to consist entirely of artists entrusted with giving inspiration to society. One of the most important constitutional principles became music—very appropriate for a duce who had brought his current lover, a moody Italian pianist, plus piano to his palace and who liked to do his political work while listening to late Beethoven sonatas.
Increasingly, however, art and reality clashed unmelodiously. Once they did so literally as D’Annunzio staged a mock battle in honor of a visiting orchestra to keep his soldiers entertained. Osbert Sitwell recounts that the list of casualties after the battle included several musicians. More frequently, however, poetry and prose were painfully at odds in the administration of the city, whose duce was not a man to settle down to the detailed and dull work of administration. Sometimes he would vanish into his apartments for days on end to think and seek inspiration, hardly eating and not to be spoken to under any circumstances. He was also given to sudden and grand gestures. None of this addressed the situation of a small town without an income and with a large force of bored mercenaries kicking the dust in the town square. Italy had instituted a blockade, and little food or other goods were coming in through regular channels. As lootings became more common and rapes occurred, the townspeople learned to hate their liberators. To feed the many hungry mouths and give the men something to do, the rebel state resorted to piracy.
D’Annunzio had conceived of his coup as a stepping-stone on the way to Rome, no doubt envisaging himself as a literary governor of Italy on a par with Marcus Aurelius. But his allies had other ideas. One of them, the rising fascist leader Benito Mussolini, had pledged his support but now refused to let actions follow his fraternal words. He was learning from the poet’s sense of pathos and grandezza and began to imitate the uniforms, the Roman salute, and the rhetoric, but he had no intention whatsoever of installing his comrade-in-arms on a throne that he himself intended to occupy one day. D’Annunzio, unwilling to admit the failure of his enterprise, was stuck on his rocky outpost on the Adriatic coast, moored in the town hall built in a style as grandiloquent as its inhabitant.
In the end, the Italian government put an end to the farce in 1920. It tightened its blockade by sea and by land, drew together an invasion force, and began bombarding the city, injuring the lonely duce in his grandiose palace and giving him a welcome excuse to call the whole thing off. He moved out in style, as he had arrived. There was no indictment; on the contrary, Mussolini, who had been unwilling to support D’Annunzio in his political ambitions, made great use of the poet as a fighter for la patria. Exhausted but relieved, the author returned to his previous passions for writing, women, and increasingly the political language and style he had helped invent: Fascism.
The priapic D’Annunzio had long been smitten with virile strength, much like the futurists, though he was not as boorishly predictable as they were, with their hymns to manly violence and fast machines. His own contributions were the plot and script for the epic film Cabiria (1914), the most expensive made to date. The hero of this sand-and-sandals extravaganza was the immensely strong Maciste, a latter-day Hercules; the character appears in twenty-six additional films.
FIUME WAS THE COMIC-OPERA OVERTURE to what was to become one of the dominant and devastating tragedies of the twentieth century. Via his ally Mussolini, D’Annunzio’s short-lived foray into politics was to leave a stylistic mark on many if not all dictatorships that were to follow. But beyond the salutes and the uniforms, beyond the marching and speechifying, the sense of bitterness and betrayal that was so pervasive in Europe after 1918 bred a related revolution that was far less visible but if anything more influential—a conservative revolution.
It was a backlash against disorder and disillusion, against strikes and street fighting, against the threat of Bolshevism, against the endless and dispiriting compromises of democracy and the seeming decline of morals. The inner war was reaching more deeply into societies rocked by years of bloodshed. “Citizens be prepared!” the poet had shouted at his followers in preparation for the occupation: “The battle is now beginning against everything and everybody, on behalf of our rights and our dead. We write this with blood on our banners.”4
D’Annunzio’s seductive rhetoric is a fine example of the kind of poetry that was built up as an opposition to the harsh reality of postwar Europe. The revolution he and his comrades-in-arms preached was expressed in contradictions. It was a matter of life against death, health against sickness, beauty against ugliness, youth against age, honesty against mendacity, authenticity against artificiality, strength against weakness, country against city, pure and noble nature against corrupt and corrupting city life—in short, a remedy for all the ills of modern civilization.
This revolution was to be carried out by a small, spiritual elite, but it would also be of the people and for the people, with strongly socialist traits. It was to restore the natural order and the brutal strength of primordial life forces and superior “races,” wiping away the sickly veneer of weak and degenerate pleasures with which the big city lured men and women away from their racial and natural destiny, and shattering the socialist dreams of solidarity and equality. It sought to realize a utopian dream, knowing, even willing, that the way to redemption would be awash with blood.
Stories of Decline
D’ANNUNZIO AND OTHER conservative revolutionaries were determined to defend the heroic individual against the cold rule of technology and technocrats that had manifested itself beginning in 1900, and which had characterized the war. It was an attempt to rescue an idea of what it means to be human that had been rendered obsolete by modern life—if indeed it had ever existed. From his perspective the problem was not technology but decadence, the fruit of the unmanly and unnatural life now lived by tens of millions of city dwellers.
The maverick Italian poet was not alone in this opinion, which was also defended by a seductively erudite two-volume work written by a socially awkward, sickly, and myopic former high school teacher and occasional journalist, Oswald Spengler, who lived in Munich off a small inheritance and had dedicated ten years of his life to writing his magnum opus, Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Decline of the West). Spengler was an eccentric polymath, with formal and informal training in a wide range of sciences and humanities, who had set himself the prodigious task of explaining history in its totality—of creating, as it were, a physiology of human life and the fate of civilizations at all times and in all regions of the globe.
His method was as eccentric as Spengler himself, and it borrowed liberally from Nietzsche, Goethe, the biologist Ernst Haeckel, and other thinkers. When the first volume of the work was published toward the end of the war, in the summer of 1918 (the second volume would appear in 1922), it received little notice, and that mainly hostile; the book seemed destined to be forgotten. Then, however, a broader public discovered it, and as sales rose steadily the influence of Spengler’s ideas multiplied to a spectacular degree, spreading across languages and countries with every new translation and edition.
Decline of the West appeared in Soviet Russia in 1923; the popularity of the book had been such that in 1922, a year before the Russian translation appeared, a
collection of critical articles by renowned Russian thinkers (among them the religious philosophers Nikolai Berdiaev and Semen Frank) was published in Moscow. English-speakers had to wait until 1926 to read the master’s oracular prose. Even where translations were not immediately available, however, educated readers often knew German sufficiently well to understand the book. Italian intellectuals, who would not be able to read a translation until 1957, were fascinated by it and used it as a key for understanding Goethe’s play Faust. By 1926, the book had sold a hundred thousand copies in Germany alone.
Decline of the West is not an easy read. It feels rather ponderously “German”: professorial and convoluted, with rambling sentences and a parade of famous names on every page. It ranges from ancient China to twentieth-century Chicago, from Moses to Marx, and from Greek art to Goethe—not the kind of work to become a staple of everyday conversation across the Western world. But sometimes a big book carrying an apparent Big Explanation will exude a curious attraction for a particular readership, and Spengler’s oracular and often opaque language ironically guaranteed that the book could be read in various ways by various people and impressively quoted even without being understood. More important, perhaps, its publication, in two parts in 1918 and 1922, resonated opportunely with readers whose postwar feelings of disillusion and resentment demanded encapsulation.
Drawing on Plato’s Republic, Spengler divided the life span of every civilization into seasons or ages—childhood, youth, maturity, old age—to which he ascribed particular characteristics. The present, he wrote, was the dotage of the Western world, which had run the full gamut of manifestations of its genius, and which could find greatness once again only if it entered a period of “Caesarism,” in which a man of destiny would emerge to eradicate the symptoms of decadent decline, namely, the rule of money, of the press, and of democracy, which Spengler regarded as mechanisms used by soulless capitalist powers to manipulate and enslave entire populations and to pervert the natural course of history.
The true nature of every civilization, Spengler thought, was determined by its “blood,” a term he used freely and metaphorically to denote not so much ethnicity as the unique characteristics of a culture within a given landscape and surroundings: “A boundless mass of human Being, flowing in a stream without banks; up-stream, a dark past wherein our time-sense loses all powers of definition and restless or uneasy fancy conjures up geological periods to hide away an eternally unsolvable riddle; down-stream, a future even so dark and timeless.”5
No individual and no civilization can escape fate, Spengler wrote, and every “strong race” would look to impose itself on others, led by an exceptional man who would maintain his power “for the duration of his personal existence or, beyond it, for that of his blood streaming on through children and grandchildren.”6 This was the fate of men, for “the Woman as Mother is, and the Man as Warrior and Politician makes, History.”7
With the victory of contemporary Anglo-American politics, the strong and natural life force of civilization had been subdued by a huge opinion-forming machine: “Man does not speak to man; the press and its associate, the electrical news-service, keep the waking-consciousness of whole peoples and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year, so that every Ego becomes a mere function of a monstrous intellectual Something.”8 This great system, Spengler believed, was doomed to fail because it would undermine itself. In the end, the “will to power” (a term borrowed from Nietzsche) would assert itself: “Through money, democracy becomes its own destroyer. . . . In the Late Democracy, race bursts forth and either makes ideals its slaves or throws them scornfully into the pit.”9
This “conflict between money and blood” would lead to another revolution, a great rising of the naturally strong against everything that was weak and perverted. “Men are tired to disgust of money-economy,” wrote Spengler. “They hope for salvation from somewhere or other, for some real thing of honour and chivalry, of inward nobility, of unselfishness and duty. And now dawns the time when the form-filled powers of the blood, which the rationalism of the Megalopolis has suppressed, reawaken in the depths . . . Caesarism grows on the soil of Democracy, but its roots thread deeply into the underground of blood tradition.”10
For a great many readers, this curious mixture of romanticism and idealism, of acute observation and wild generalization, became a bible for the postwar age. It appeared to explain why urban life in particular felt emptied of its moral core and why Western civilization more generally seemed to be spinning senselessly around on itself, producing (apart from money) millions of wasted lives and moral decadence.
Spengler’s sweeping analysis, as well as his conclusion that only a dictator could save Western civilization from its self-destruction by making it listen once more to the voice of its “blood,” had many admirers and imitators, not so much among historians as among high school teachers, journalists, and politicians eager to present a coherent image of world history and national greatness to their audiences. What entranced his readers was less the intoxicating profusion of names and his forays into economics, art history, biology—wrong in many details—than a subliminal message of fate, health, and strength, which was open to many interpretations. Adolf Hitler, convinced that he was the man of destiny demanded by Spengler’s theory of history, was to pay the aging author a visit in 1933. But Spengler, who abhorred violence (other than in theory) and who detested the Nazis for their plebeian manners, responded coolly. When in the same year the new regime offered him a professorial chair at the prestigious University of Leipzig, he declined.
The proponents of this conservative revolution were many, and their backgrounds were as varied as the interpretation and emphasis they gave these ideas. They included veterans of the battlefield such as writers Ernst Jünger in Germany and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle in France; Jünger’s 1920 Stahlgewittern (Storm of Steel) was seen as glorifying the experience of war, and Drieu La Rochelle was to turn increasingly toward fascism and anti-Semitism and eventually espouse the collaborationist cause after the German invasion of France. There were philosophers, such as the existentialist and phenomenologist Martin Heidegger, later to be compromised by his links with the Nazis. Nor was D’Annunzio by any means the only poet: the influential Stefan George in Germany, the expatriate Americans T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, self-anointed “scientists” and prophets such as Spengler himself, and political figures such as the Frenchman Charles Maurras, a leader of the Catholic, monarchist, and nationalist Action Française; in England, the aristocratic veteran of the trenches and future founder of the British Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley; and in Italy, the poet Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini himself.
Red Scare, Black Bolsheviks
THE CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION was rallying its troops. On the streets, however, ideas were already clashing violently and bloodily. In Italy, fighting between militias inspired by D’Annunzio’s feats of heroism and loyal to their duce Benito Mussolini were engaged in an intense struggle with communists and trade unionists. Violent demonstrations, strikebreaking, gun battles, and political assassinations dominated the news of the staggering state. Germany seemed practically in a state of war; Hungary saw two coups within the year and was finally subjugated to the iron fist of the winner, Admiral Miklós Horthy; Armenia was soaked in blood and the Levant was in uproar; Russia was still a vast battleground on which the Red and White armies fought a bitter war.
Among so much uncertainty, ideas took on an existential importance that they are denied during easier times. The incipient fight between the rival dreams of fascism and socialism bore hallmarks of every other social conflict, in that ideological proclamations were often used as masks for fear, greed, and envy. But at the same time this genuinely was a conflict of ideas, cultures, and aspirations. Not since the Thirty Years’ War had beliefs been so vital—and so deadly.
The conservative revolution, however, with its conviction of impending con
flict based on “blood” and race, was being preached not just in Europe. Indeed, in 1919, most observers forecasting racial unrest and even mass murder would have been thinking primarily of the United States. During the war the reformist and high-minded president Woodrow Wilson had promised “to make the world safe for democracy,” and many of his constituents had hoped that their wartime sacrifices would advance their causes. For countless women who had to replace men in factories and businesses, that cause was suffrage; to blacks who risked their lives at the front, it was full civil rights; to Irish Americans, northern Irish independence; to Italian Americans, a recognition of Fiume as an Italian city (D’Annunzio became a hero for them); to social reformers, the end of child labor.
But the war had not made these dreams a reality. True, the demands of a war economy and the greater involvement of government in industry had bolstered workers’ rights, and having to supply an entire army on foreign soil had given a boost to agriculture, but at the same time the climate in the country had turned and radical conservatives were beginning to win the argument over where society should go.
Wilson’s engagement during the negotiation of the Versailles Treaty, for which he had personally traveled to Paris, was ridiculed, and the treaty he had so painstakingly put together was rejected by the Senate. This moment marked the greatest defeat in Wilson’s life. The high-minded, internationalist, and somewhat Victorian president was devastated. In addition, before the treaty was voted down in the Senate, he had suffered a breakdown of his health that effectively made him an invalid. The country was turning inward, and other forces were on the rise.