Odd this day
Poet, fascist and cocaine-and-sex addict Gabriele D’Annunzio marched into the city of Fiume (now in Croatia) and declared it Italian, establishing a regime renowned for yoga, cocaine, venereal disease, organised crime, and for inspiring Mussolini.
Our story starts four years earlier, when, during WWI, Italy decided to fight on the side of the Allies, having signed a treaty in 1915 which guaranteed them a fair amount of what had been the Austrian coast on the Adriatic when the conflict was done — with other bits going to what would eventually be Yugoslavia.
In 1919, however, Fiume was not included, even though around half of its population was Italian, and Italian nationalists were not happy. D’Annunzio had been born into aristocratic money in 1863, and become a celebrated nationalist/poet. During WWI, he was decorated for such stunts as leading a daring propaganda raid over Vienna, during which 11 planes had dropped 50,000 leaflets, at least some of which he’d handwritten. (Although he had omitted to have any of them translated into German.)
Before the war, young Gabriele had “had hundreds of love affairs — and would tip off journalists when he was about to break one of them off, in the hope that the subsequent scene would make the tabloids”. As well as poetry, he’d spent some of his youth writing celebrity gossip columns, and “used them to cultivate myths about his own history”. In 1911, for example, when someone temporarily relieved the Louvre of the Mona Lisa (which was what kicked off the period of fame it still enjoys), he wrote a piece hinting heavily that he had it. He didn’t. But he had once had one of the characters in his work say “One must make one’s life into a work of art”, which seems to have been a guiding philosophy.
By 1919, he was middle-aged, and Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of 2013’s The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, says someone described him as
a dwarf of a man, goggle-eyed and thick-lipped, truly sinister in his grotesqueness, like a tragic gargoyle.
…which doesn’t seem kind, but is not entirely contradicted by a contemporary photograph:
…but still, he wasn’t big on self-doubt. This does seem to have been innate, but the already significant cocaine habit might have been a factor.
Anyway, D’Annunzio gathered a few hundred men who were loyal to him, rather than the army, and marched on Fiume. There was a garrison, but there wasn’t a lot they could do against several hundred blackshirts, who’d nicked army trucks along the way, and attracted many followers — and in any case, there were sympathisers in the garrison.
So, one of the strangest regimes ever instituted came into being. For a start, a close adviser, Italian pilot Guido Keller, was made Secretary of Action, and brought in
There were karate classes, too, with Japanese poet Harukichi Shimoi, aka ‘Comrade Samurai’. For his part, D’Annunzio gave
There were futurists, Irish republicans, Flemish nationalists — “artistic and political oddballs” of all kinds, in fact, so it wasn’t altogether surprising to read that Osbert Sitwell pitched up at one point. (Lenin was invited, but declined, although he did send a flattering letter and a pot of caviar, apparently.) As one source says:
The whole thing would have felt like a fever dream to an outsider
…and cocaine became a
national pastime … The most fashionable residents of Fiume carried little gold containers of the powder, and D’Annunzio himself was said to have a voracious habit for it. Sex was everywhere one turned and the city had seen a huge inward migration of prostitutes and pimps within days of D’Annunzio’s arrival. Almost every day was a festival, and it was an odd evening if the harbour of Fiume did not see dozens of fireworks burst above it, watched on by D’Annunzio’s uniformed paramilitaries.
To this litany, the New York Times adds:
Venereal disease outstripped any other malady by a factor of 10.
Now, I don’t mean to shock you, but: it didn’t last. (I know! Extraordinary.) It was only December 1919 when the Italian government — which had blockaded the port, anyway — insisted on a plebiscite to see what the population actually wanted.
D’Annunzio, the ultimate small man in search of a balcony, speechified, but
So, of course, he respected the mandate? Well… I did mention that Mussolini was a fan, didn’t I? D’Annunzio may have been ludicrous, but sadly that is not an impediment to power. It wasn’t for Mussolini, and it wasn’t for… WELL, NO — NONE OF US KNOWS OF ANYONE LIKE THAT ANY MORE, DO WE? THANK GOODNESS.
Anyway, the situation dragged on, with the blockade leaky but hitting trade, the currency devaluing, and D’Annunzio retreating more and more from public life and further and further into addiction. Finally, in December 1920, the Italian government
Apparently, the timing was careful, because the Italian media would have been distracted by Christmas, otherwise there would have been more publicity for the threat to D’Annunzio, because he made for good copy. (NO, NO — I CAN’T SEE ANY CONTEMPORARY RESONANCE HERE. MOVE ALONG, PLEASE.)
There were lessons in all this, according to historian Charles Emmerson — but not necessarily the right ones:
Mussolini, always more of a schemer than the poet, learned from D’Annunzio’s failure. The rise of Italian fascism owed much to D’Annunzian flair. But it was better organised.
He adds that D’Annunzio and all the “drugs and sex and booze involved” mean this is sometimes seen as a comic bit of history — and it is, but…
it deserves to be taken more seriously as a harbinger of things to come, as an emblem of wider European processes, when the state ceased to exercise a monopoly on violence … The idea that a coup d’état might conceivably be launched with a coup de théâtre … proved ill-founded [but] Fiume served as an example of what could be achieved by a bravura act, by performative politics. The fact that D’Annunzio did not succeed just meant that others had to do a better job.
