Gabriele D’Annunzio: The War Hero… and Fascist

By Luciano Mangiafico
Excerpted from "Nine Ways of Looking at D’Annunzio"
Originally Published at Open Letters Monthly

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938

On 24 April 1915, Italian customs officers at the Italian-Austrian border engaged in a firefight with Austrian reservists who were burning a small river-crossing bridge. The news that the Italians had suffered casualties prompted the D’Annunzio to address a frenetic crowd with fiery words, spurring the country to enter World War I:

Our vigil is ended. Our exultation begins … The cannon roars. The earth smokes …Companions, can it be true? We are fighting with arms, we are waging our war, blood is spurting from the veins of Italy! We are the last to join this struggle and already the first are meeting with glory … The slaughter begins, the destruction begins … All these people, who yesterday thronged in the streets and squares, loudly demanding war, are full of veins, full of blood; and that blood begins to flow … We have no other value but that of our blood to be shed.

D’Annunzio’s rhetoric was rousing, and he continued his campaign for war with several other speeches in Rome. Mussolini, the former Socialist agitator, also continually beat the war drums from the newspaper, Il Popolo D’Italia, (The Italian People), which he had founded with French money after he was kicked out of the Socialist Party for advocating war.

In the war, which Italy entered on 24 May 1915, D’Annunzio served in the army, the navy, and the air corps. He lost sight in one eye in a plane crash, but this did not deter him from continuing to fight.

On 10–1 February 1918, D’Annunzio participated in hit and run raid against the Austrian Navy. The raid, by three anti-submarine motorboats (each with a crew of thirty) led by Captain Costanzo Ciano, had infiltrated the Bay of Buccari and launched six torpedoes against Austrian ships at anchor; nets around the ships had stopped five torpedoes, while the sixth exploded prematurely and raised the alarm. Tactically, the raid was a bust, but the attendant publicity about the daring action reinvigorated the Italians, who were still demoralized by their 1917 defeat at Caporetto.

In August of the same year, D’Annunzio led a flotilla of seven unarmed airplanes over Vienna, carrying only his violin, and dropped 50,000 handbills (his own composition, naturally), urging Austrians to surrender. After the end of the war, he agitated for a “greater  Italy.” On 12 September 1919, D’Annunzio organized his own small army made up of 2000 discharged soldiers and deserters and led a motorized column into the city of Fiume, whose status was to be the subject of negotiation with Yugoslavia. He made himself, Garibaldi-style, the dictator of what he called The Regency of the Carnaro, organizing a totalitarian republican government, calling himself Duce (Leader), overprinting stamps, issuing some with his own likeness, and otherwise acting as ruler. His soldiers wore black shirts, pledged allegiance to him, and became convinced that they were defending civilization against “a flood of Slav barbarians.”

Mussolini Visiting D'Annunzio in 1935

Evidently, D’Annunzio’s ego was thus satisfied for 15 months, and while the Italian government ordered the city blockaded, it did not prevent the Red Cross from keeping it well supplied. Thus the “legionnaires” were able to enjoy their moment in the spotlight, with endless mass meetings in the public squares, replying to the Duce cry, “To whom Italy?” with “To us!”. One of his “legionnaires wrote: “The city abounded with beautiful girls; the pastry shops were bursting with extraordinary sweets. One ate, one danced, one drank; indeed, it truly seemed that this city, with its life overflowing with gifts, was the reward for all our exertions during the war.”

In November 1920, Italy signed a treaty with Yugoslavia making Fiume for the moment a free city. The new Italian prime minister, Giovanni Giolitti, ordered D’Annunzio to leave and disband his “soldiers.” When D’Annunzio refused to do so, Giolitti had the Italian army and the navy blockade the city. D’Annunzio then declared that he would resist. When Italian army units attacked on 24 December, nearly 50 lives were lost, including five civilians. D’Annunzio knew the game was up when a shell from the battleship Andrea Doria hit his palace and wounded him slightly. He made one final speech about the “Christmas of Blood” and, convinced that he could no longer milk his exploits for publicity, left the city and retired to a villa on Lake Garda, while his “soldiers” evacuated Fiume and returned home.

D’Annunzio’s actions and the failure of the state to stop him promptly and prosecute him afterward provided the behavioral example that Mussolini learned well on his ascent to power: violence and illegality could be used with impunity to accomplish one’s political aims.

D’Annunzio was a supporter of Mussolini and championed his rise to power, although he did not like Germans and Nazism and warned Mussolini against an alliance with Hitler. Perhaps because he was a mountebank himself, although a more refined and cultured one, he could see through the dangerous histrionics of the former Austrian corporal. In 1934 he wrote in pencil on the inside cover of his copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “The converted Jew Adolph Hitler with the ignoble face darkened by indelible splashes of the paint or glue that he held in his brush… which has became the scepter of a ferocious clown…”

For his support of (or acquiescence to) fascism, D’Annunzio was handsomely rewarded: at Mussolini’s recommendation the king made him Prince of Monteneveso and gave him a substantial pension. He was made an honorary general in the air force, and an integral edition of his writings was published at state expense. In 1937, after the death of sitting president of the Academia d’Italia Guglielmo Marconi, D’Annunzio was appointed to the post, and he was provided with funds to restructure and enlarge the villa he had purchased in Gardone Riviera on the shores of Lake Garda.

Also see Roads to the Great War articles on:

D'Annunzio's Vittoriale

D'Annunzio's Flight to Vienna