D'Annunzio seizes Fiume

Late on the morning of 12 September 1919 a column of lorries carrying Italian grenadiers, arditi and volunteers drove into the port city of Fiume, today’s Rijeka in Croatia. At its head was the fifty-six-year-old poet and war hero Gabriele D’Annunzio, with decorations on his uniform and a fever. The Allied troops who had been guarding the disputed city since November 1918 offered no resistance, and the Italian general who was supposed to stop the column stepped aside. In the afternoon D’Annunzio spoke from the balcony of the governor’s palace and proclaimed Fiume’s union with Italy. He did so in defiance of the government in Rome, of the Allies conferring in Paris and of military discipline, for most of his men were soldiers who had deserted their units. For sixteen months the poet ruled the city like a sovereign principality. For Italy it was one of the first signs that the liberal state was disintegrating; for Benito Mussolini it was a lesson he put to use three years later.

A city disputed in Paris

Fiume was an anomaly within Austria-Hungary. Since the eighteenth century it had been a separate body of the Hungarian crown, Hungary’s main port on the Adriatic, with its own self-government. Within the city itself Italian speakers predominated: in the 1910 census about 24,000 of its almost 50,000 inhabitants gave Italian as their mother tongue and about 13,000 Croatian or other Slavic languages, the rest being chiefly Hungarians, Slovenes and Germans. Across the little river Rječina, however, lay Sušak, a suburb that already belonged to Croatia and was inhabited almost exclusively by Croats, and the city’s entire hinterland was Slavic. Anyone who counted the population together with the suburbs found a slight Croat majority; anyone who counted only within the city limits found an Italian one.

When Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente in 1915, the Treaty of London promised it Trentino, South Tyrol, Trieste, Istria and a large part of Dalmatia, but not Fiume. The foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, assumed that the port would remain with a reduced Hungary or go to Croatia. Nobody then foresaw that Austria-Hungary would vanish from the map. In the autumn of 1918 two authorities emerged in Fiume. A commissioner of the National Council in Zagreb took over the offices in the name of the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, while on 30 October the Italian National Council, headed by the physician Antonio Grossich, proclaimed the city’s union with Italy. In November Italian warships entered the port, and on 17 November units of the Italian army marched in. The Croats were removed from power, but the city did not become Italian. Formally it was placed under inter-Allied occupation, with small French, British and American detachments alongside the predominant Italians.

The dispute moved to the Paris Peace Conference. Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Sonnino demanded the fulfilment of the Treaty of London and Fiume on top of it, which they now justified by the principle of nationality. President Woodrow Wilson stood against them. He did not consider himself bound by a secret treaty the United States had not signed, and he defended the interests of the new Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, for which Fiume was the natural port. The British and French, although formally bound to Italy by the treaty, in practice backed the Americans. On 23 April 1919 Wilson issued a message to the Italian people over the heads of their government. The next day Orlando and Sonnino left the conference and returned to Rome, where crowds greeted them. Two weeks later, however, they had to go back to Paris empty-handed, because in their absence the Allies had divided up Germany’s colonies without Italy. On 19 June Orlando’s government fell, and on 23 June the former treasury minister Francesco Saverio Nitti became prime minister – an economist whose priority was to rescue the public finances and keep good relations with America, on which Italy depended for credit and grain.

The mutilated victory

Italy emerged from the war as a victor, but victory had cost it some 600,000–650,000 dead soldiers, and the country was sinking into crisis: inflation, unemployment among demobilised soldiers, strikes and peasant land occupations. For the nationalists the disappointment in Paris proved that allies and weak politicians were robbing Italy of the fruits of its bloody sacrifice. The slogan of the “mutilated victory” had been coined back in the autumn of 1918 by none other than D’Annunzio, the country’s most famous poet, who in 1915 had stirred crowds with speeches for war, then lost an eye as an airman, flew over Vienna dropping leaflets and won fame with a torpedo-boat raid on the Austrian bay of Bakar. In the spring and summer of 1919 he toured Italy speaking about the Italian character of Fiume and Dalmatia, and around him gathered former members of the arditi assault units, nationalists, Futurists and revolutionary syndicalists.

In Fiume itself the situation grew ever more tense. Between 29 June and 6 July 1919 there were clashes between Italian residents and soldiers on one side and French soldiers, seen as friends of the Yugoslavs, on the other. Nine Frenchmen were killed. An inter-Allied commission that investigated the incidents decided to disband the local volunteer legion, reduce the Italian garrison and remove from the city the units most involved; order was henceforth to be kept by British and American police. The main target was a battalion of the 2nd Sardinian Grenadier Regiment. On 25 August the grenadiers left Fiume, seen off by weeping crowds, and were stationed at Ronchi near Monfalcone, a few dozen kilometres from the city. There seven young officers swore an oath of “Fiume or death” and wrote to D’Annunzio asking him to lead them.

The march from Ronchi

D’Annunzio hesitated for several days. He promised to come on 7 September, but doubts and illness held him back, and he reached Ronchi only on the evening of 11 September, feverish. Before setting out he wrote to Mussolini, then editor of the Milan daily Il Popolo d’Italia and founder of the small Fasci di combattimento movement, that the die was cast and that the next day he would take Fiume by force of arms. The conspirators commandeered several dozen lorries from nearby military depots. At about midnight fewer than two hundred grenadiers under Major Carlo Reina set out from Ronchi – 186 or 187 men, according to the figure most often given. Along the way further units joined them: arditi, bersaglieri, cavalrymen, volunteers from Fiume. The commanders who were supposed to stop them either joined the column or stood aside.

On the morning of 12 September the column halted at the checkpoint at Cantrida, on the outskirts of Fiume. General Vittorio Emanuele Pittaluga, the Italian commander of the Allied forces in the city, who had orders not to let the rebels in, came out to meet it. According to participants’ accounts, he warned D’Annunzio that he would ruin Italy and ordered him to turn back. The poet opened his coat, showed his medal ribbons and told the general that all he had to do was order the soldiers to fire on those medals. Pittaluga gave no such order. The arditi who were meant to defend the checkpoint rushed to embrace the newcomers. The column entered the city before noon without a single shot being fired. How many men entered with D’Annunzio is not known precisely; studies give figures of between about two thousand and two and a half thousand soldiers.

The city went wild with joy. The Italian population welcomed the legionaries with flowers and flags, and church bells rang. D’Annunzio, exhausted by fever, first lay down for a few hours in the Hotel Europa. In the afternoon he addressed the crowd in the square from the balcony of the governor’s palace. He called Fiume the only truth and the only love in a “mad and vile world” and asked those assembled whether they confirmed their vow of 30 October 1918. The crowd answered with cheers. Then the poet, as a “soldier, volunteer and war invalid”, proclaimed in the name of “the sound people of Italy” the union of Fiume with the kingdom. The Italian National Council handed him power in the city. He later named the day of his entry the “Holy Entry”, after the name Venetian tradition had given to the Venetians’ entry into Zadar in 1409.

To avoid bloodshed, the French and British soldiers left the city over the following days. General Pittaluga handed over authority and departed. More deserters from the troops stationed along the new border flocked to D’Annunzio, along with volunteers from all over Italy and adventurers. Within a few weeks he had several thousand men under his command – according to some studies as many as eight or nine thousand. He took the title of Commandant.

Rome powerless

For Nitti’s government it was a disaster. A state that was negotiating the fate of the eastern Adriatic in Paris suddenly found that it did not control its own army. On 13 September the prime minister condemned the mutiny in the Chamber of Deputies as a military rebellion that undermined Italy’s credibility with the Allies and called on the soldiers to obey orders. He appointed General Pietro Badoglio extraordinary commissioner for Venezia Giulia. Leaflets were dropped over Fiume from an aircraft in which Badoglio ordered the legionaries back to their units and declared them deserters. It had no effect. The government proclaimed a blockade of the city but let food for the population through via the Red Cross, and nobody dared give the order to open fire on Italian soldiers.

Nitti believed that using force against a war hero backed by a large part of public opinion and many officers could provoke civil war. He preferred to wait for the adventure to burn itself out, while using it in Paris as an argument that without concessions to Italy the mood at home could not be controlled. D’Annunzio answered with hatred. He nicknamed the prime minister “Cagoia”, a name used in Trieste to mock a servile coward, and accused him of starving the women and children of Fiume. Mussolini opened a public collection for Fiume in his newspaper, which raised almost three million lire. Only part of it reached D’Annunzio; the rest went, with his later public consent, to the fighting squads in Milan.

The government tried to settle the matter by agreement. In December 1919 it put forward a so-called modus vivendi: Italy undertook not to allow the city to be handed to the Yugoslavs, and the legionaries were to leave. On 15 December the National Council of Fiume accepted the proposal by 48 votes to 6. D’Annunzio then announced a plebiscite. On 18 December the inhabitants voted under pressure from the legionaries, and when the first results began to show that the majority wanted to accept the government’s offer, the Commandant’s men seized the ballot boxes and he himself annulled the vote on account of “irregularities”. His chief of cabinet, the nationalist Giovanni Giuriati, resigned and was replaced by the revolutionary syndicalist Alceste De Ambris.

The Regency of Carnaro and Bloody Christmas

Fiume under D’Annunzio was a place without precedent. The city lived from one ceremony to the next: parades, balcony speeches in which the Commandant conducted a dialogue with the crowd as it answered him in chorus, torchlight processions, services in honour of the fallen. The legionaries wore the black shirts and daggers of the arditi, greeted each other with an outstretched arm and raised the cry the poet had introduced during the war: “Eja, eja, alalà!”. Artists, Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, anarchists and adventurers from all over Europe descended on the city. The legionaries raided ships and seized their cargoes, helped by the seamen’s union. Political opponents were intimidated, and some studies attribute to the legionaries the practice of dosing them with castor oil, later taken up by the Fascists. Supplies were unreliable, and in 1920 several thousand children were sent for a time to cities in northern Italy.

When Giovanni Giolitti replaced Nitti in June 1920, it became clear that Rome intended to reach an agreement with Yugoslavia regardless of Fiume. On 12 August D’Annunzio announced the creation of a state of his own, and on 8 September he proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro, named after the gulf on which the city stands. Its constitution, the Charter of Carnaro, written by De Ambris and polished by the poet, combined the slogans of revolutionary syndicalism with corporatism: citizens were to belong to nine professional corporations, while a tenth, symbolic one was reserved for “new men”, heroes and creators. The charter gave women the vote, declared music a social and religious institution and, in an emergency, provided for a dictator with full powers on the Roman model. Most of it remained on paper.

On 12 November 1920 Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes signed the Treaty of Rapallo. Italy received all of Istria, Zadar and several islands, and gave up the rest of Dalmatia to the Yugoslavs. Fiume was to become an independent Free State. All the major Italian parties, Mussolini included, welcomed the treaty with relief. D’Annunzio rejected it and ordered the occupation of the islands of Krk and Rab, which had been awarded to Yugoslavia. General Enrico Caviglia surrounded the city and issued an ultimatum. On Christmas Eve, 24 December, the regular army attacked. After a pause for Christmas the fighting resumed on 26 December, and the battleship Andrea Doria shelled the palace where the Commandant had his seat. On 28 December D’Annunzio resigned his powers, and on 31 December a capitulation agreement was signed. According to various tallies, the fighting the poet called “Bloody Christmas” killed about fifty people: more than twenty legionaries, somewhere between a dozen and twenty-odd regular soldiers, and several civilians. On 18 January 1921 D’Annunzio left Fiume. The government amnestied the legionaries, and the poet settled in a villa on Lake Garda.

The Free State of Fiume knew no peace. The autonomists of Riccardo Zanella won the 1921 elections, but in March 1922 local Fascists and former legionaries overthrew his government. After Mussolini came to power, Italy and Yugoslavia signed the Treaty of Rome on 27 January 1924: Fiume went to Italy and Sušak to Yugoslavia. The annexation was proclaimed in March 1924.

The first Duce

The seizure of Fiume was more than a dispute over a port. A band of soldiers and volunteers led by a poet took away the state’s monopoly on the use of force and governed a city for sixteen months, and the government did not dare disarm them. Historians, among them Roberto Vivarelli, see this as a turning point in the crisis of liberal Italy: the state proved weak, the army unreliable, and the gesture of an armed minority acting in the name of the nation effective. As early as October 1919 Antonio Gramsci wrote that D’Annunzio’s expedition showed the disintegration of the Italian state. The lesson was not wasted. When the Fascists set out on the March on Rome on 28 October 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare a state of siege, and Mussolini took power. Many former Fiume legionaries were among the activists of the new party, and in 1930 Giuriati became its secretary.

Style mattered even more. Balcony speeches, the dialogue between leader and crowd, the cry “Eja, eja, alalà!”, the outstretched-arm salute, black shirts, daggers, the cult of the fallen, the liturgy of secular ceremonies: almost the entire ritual of Fascism was first tried out in Fiume. The American historian Michael Ledeen called D’Annunzio “the first Duce”. Mussolini took the form from him, but not the poet himself. After 1922 D’Annunzio, showered with honours by the regime, lived in seclusion on Lake Garda and never returned to politics. Fascist Italy nonetheless surrounded Fiume with a cult, and former legionaries were among the few who could be exempted from the racial laws in 1938.

The myth of the “mutilated victory” outlived the Regency. Fascism made it the core of its foreign policy: Italy would take by force what its allies had denied it in Paris. Revisionism drew Rome closer to the other losers and malcontents of the Versailles order, and in the end to Germany. On the very day D’Annunzio drove into Fiume, Adolf Hitler attended a meeting of the German Workers’ Party in Munich for the first time. When he came to power over a decade later, he modelled himself on Mussolini, and Mussolini had modelled himself on the Commandant of Fiume. In April 1941 Italy joined Germany in attacking Yugoslavia, and Rome annexed a large part of Dalmatia, which the legionaries had claimed. The dream of an Italian Adriatic ended with the war. The peace treaty of 1947 gave Fiume to Yugoslavia, and most of the city’s Italian inhabitants left.