In the aftermath of the Great War, among the numerous issues facing the post-world war peacemakers was what to do about the status of Fiume, which had been part of the (dissolved) Austro-Hungarian Empire. Both the newly established Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (KSCS), and Italy, laid claims to the city whose population included significant numbers of Italians as well as Croats and Slovenes. While the Paris Peace Conference deliberated over Fiume’s fate❈, an Italian poet-adventurer named Gabriele d’Annunzio took advantage of the city’s state of flux to invade with a small private force in the name of Italian irredentism.
The “Poet-Warrior”
D’Annunzio was an international celebrity in his time, an unconventional, physically small but larger-than-life, multi-faceted character, an Italian man of letters who also saw himself as un uomo d’azione (‘a man of action’)⌖. Having seized the disputed Adriatic port of Fiume, d’Annunzio offered his prize to the Italian government who not wanting to endorse d’Annunzio’s dubious coup, rejected the offer [‘An Irishman’s Diary on Gabriele d’Annunzio — the “John the Baptist of Fascism” and would-be IRA quartermaster’, (Mark Phelan), The Irish Times, 07-Mar-2018, www.irishtimes.com]. Spurned, d’Annunzio reacted by declaring Fiume’s independence as the “Italian Regency of Carnaro”, AKA Impresa di Fiume (‘Endeavour (or Enterprise) of Fiume’).
Progressive reforms and a repudiation of the Versailles Treaty
The constitution (la carta del Carnaro) of d’Annunzio’s unrecognised enclave contained an idiosyncratic “grab-bag” of ideas, including elements from both the Left and Right. The charter included many progressive articles – calling for the full equality of women in society, tolerance for both religion and atheism, a social security system, medical insurance and age pensions✪[Michael A Leeden, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume, (1977)]. D’Annunzio’s regime was the first to recognise the Soviet Union and pitched the idea of a kind of “anti-league of nations” for (select) oppressed peoples of the world—which in d’Annunzio’s thinking was those countries which fared badly in the post-WWI territory carve-up and were holding a grudge—including offering assistance in the form of arms to the IRA in its struggle to free itself from British colonialism (🔺photo: d’Annunzio and some of his supporters in Fiume).
Culture, ‘counterculture’, plus proto-fascism
La carta del Carnaro made music a key principle of the state, the arts flourished with daily public poetry readings and concerts. Impresa di Fiume established a corporatist state along anarcho-syndalicalist lines. The Adriatic city exuded a veritable bohemian buzz, becoming, as Hughes-Halley notes, a “political laboratory” for all manner of political persuasion including anarchists, syndicalists, socialists and ultimately, fascists. It wasn’t all politics either…all manner of perceived ‘subversives’ and outliers, including the socially marginalised, the unorthodox and the disenfranchised, flocked to d’Annunzio’s enclave – fugitives, drug dealers (and takers), prostitutes, discontented idealists, ‘pirates’, dandies, homosexuals, artistic “drop-outs”, runaways, and so on⊞ [Lucy Hughes-Halley, The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War, (2013)].
Although the Fiuman duce wasn’t a fully-fledged fascist himself, his political ideas and his aesthetics in inspired an imitator in Benito Mussolini and informed the blueprint for the future Italian corporatist-fascist state – d’Annunzio’s legacy which prompted many to see him as a kind of “godfather of Italian Fascism” includes the staging of mass rallies, demagogic speechifying, black-shirted vigilantism and Roman salutes (Phelan). Moreover, d’Annunzio’s adventurism in the Regency of Carnaro contributed to a weakening of Italian democracy and paved the way for the Fascist takeover and consolidation of the corporatist state (Hughes-Hallett).
D’Annunzio’s exile and defenestration
Under a deal between Italy and KSCS (Treaty of Rapallo, 1920), the enclave’s name was changed to the Free State of Fiume. D’Annunzio refused to acknowledge the agreement and having failed to reach a modus vivendi with the Italian government, impetuously and unwisely declared war on Italy – with predictable, disastrous results. Fiume was bombarded and d’Annunzio was forced to flee—relocating in exile to Lake Garda in the eastern Lombard region—leaving his Reggenza and his schemes for a new world order in tatters. A later agreement (Treaty of Rome, 1924) sealed Fiume’s full annexation by Italy. Injuries sustained by the still popular d’Annunzio in 1922 when he mysteriously fell from a window (possibly an assassination attempt) worked to Mussolini’s favour, whether he was implicated or not. D’Annunzio withdrew from politics and Mussolini secured his continued inactivity through the payment of inducements. D’Annunzio however characteristically did not remain entirely mute, proffering advice to Mussolini whenever he felt the inclination◰, such as his warning, unheeded, in the 1930s to Il Duce not to enter into an axis pact with Hitler.
Topnymic end-note: Flume, Fiume, Rijeka
Fiume today is the city of Rijeka (‘River’ in Croatian) within the Republic of Croatia (post-Yugoslavia space)… roughly, a bit over twice the size of Fiume in d’Annunzio’s day, it comprises the most important deep-water port on the Croatian coast.
⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜ ∘ ⋄ ⏦ ∝ ⧜
❈ the Allies’ (and US president, Wilson’s) preference had been to make Fiume into a buffer state, a prime candidate for the headquarters of the soon-to-be created League of Nations
⌖ d’Annunzio was many more things as well — decadent artist and musician, aesthete, war-monger and war-hero, necromancer, pioneering aeronautist, serial debt-defaulter, libertine and cad, above all perhaps, an indefatigable self-publicist (Hughes-Halley)
✪ progressive platform aside, Comandante d’Annunzio retained an elitist perception of his own role in national affairs, inspired by Nietzsche, that of the Übermensch or superuomo (the “superior man” who rises above society’s mediocrity)
⊞ it would be interesting to know if the Fiume Enterprise had any influence on the creation of contemporary Užupis, the bohemian “independent republic” of artists ensconced within the city of Vilnius, Lithuania 🇱🇹 – see blog Vilnius I, Senamiestis & Užupis: From Old Town to Artistocrazy? (06-November 2015)
◰ Mussolini and d’Annunzio exchange some 578 letters and telegrams until the latter’s death in 1938 [Peterson, Thomas E. “Schismogenesis and national character: the D’Annunzio-Mussolini correspondence.” Italica, vol. 81, no. 1, 2004, p. 44+. Gale Academic OneFile, Accessed 21 Sept. 2020].