Gabriele D'Annunzio

Gabriele D'Annunzio: The Poet Who Rehearsed Fascism

On 12 September 1919 a fifty-six-year-old poet, blind in one eye, marched into the Adriatic port of Fiume at the head of some two thousand nationalist irregulars, threw out the Allied garrison and installed himself as its ruler. Within a year he had declared an independent state with himself as Duce, written it a constitution, and worked out most of the choreography that the twentieth century would come to recognise on sight: the balcony, the call-and-response with the crowd below, the black shirts, the Roman salute. Benito Mussolini was watching closely. Fiume happened three years before the March on Rome.

The Boy Who Renamed Himself

He was born Gabriele Rapagnetta at Pescara on 12 March 1863; his father added the name d'Annunzio, and the son spent a lifetime demonstrating that a name could be an artwork. He was schooled at the Liceo Cicognini in Prato, in Tuscany, and published his first collection of verse, *Primo Vere*, in 1879, at sixteen, in open imitation of Carducci. In 1881 he entered the University of Rome and slid immediately into the literary journalism of *Cronaca Bizantina*. He was famous before he was twenty-five, and he was never anything else again.

The Novels of Excess

*Il Piacere* — published in English as *The Child of Pleasure* — appeared in 1889 and created a profound impression: a novel of aesthetic self-absorption whose hero pursues sensation as a vocation. *L'Innocente* followed in 1891 and *Il Trionfo della Morte* in 1894. The verse ran alongside — *Il Poema Paradisiaco* and *Odi Navali* in 1893, the *Laudi* from 1900, of which *Alcyone* is the volume that survives best. The critical consensus, then and now, is on the surface: the writing is notable, as Britannica has it, for its "fluent and melodious style," and it displays linguistic virtuosity of a kind Italian had not seen since Carducci's generation. He drew on Nietzsche, on French symbolism and on the classical past, and he is the central Italian figure of Decadentism. His prolific output across genres showed "considerable linguistic and formal innovation."

Duse

From 1894 he conducted the most public love affair in Europe with the actress Eleonora Duse, and wrote her the roles that made his theatrical reputation — *La Città morta* (1898), *Francesca da Rimini* (1901). The relationship ended in 1910, the same year his creditors caught up with him. He fled to France, where he collaborated with Claude Debussy on *Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien* (1911). He had already sat in parliament, elected in 1897, and by 1910 he had joined the Italian Nationalist Association. The aesthete was arming himself.

Radiant May

In 1914 D'Annunzio was in Paris, reporting on the French front and campaigning for Italian entry into the war. He came home in 1915 and turned himself into the loudest voice of Italian interventionism, speaking at Quarto in the name of Garibaldi and conducting what one scholarly account calls "a high-profile campaign of demagogic speeches and pamphleteering" during the weeks known as Radiant May. Italy went to war. It is one of the few occasions in modern history when a poet can be credibly said to have helped push a country into a war.

The One-Eyed Aviator

He was fifty-two and volunteered as a fighter pilot. A botched raid on Zara injured him and cost him the sight of one eye. His actual combat record was limited and his mythologising of it was not: on 9 August 1918 he led nine aircraft of the 87th Squadron on a seven-hundred-mile round trip to Vienna to drop tricolour propaganda leaflets on the enemy capital from eight hundred metres. It achieved nothing militarily and everything else. It remains the perfect D'Annunzio gesture — enormous risk, exquisite staging, no bombs.

Fiume

When the Paris Peace Conference denied Italy the Adriatic territories nationalists believed they had been promised, D'Annunzio seized the resulting fury. His volunteers took Fiume in September 1919. The Italian state blockaded the city while much of the Italian public cheered. In September 1920 he proclaimed the Italian Regency of Carnaro and named himself Duce, promulgating a Charter of Carnaro written with the anarcho-syndicalist Alceste de Ambris — a corporatist constitution organising society into nine corporations, to which D'Annunzio added a tenth, representing superior human beings. It is a document that reads as half utopian syndicalism, half proto-fascist mysticism, and it foreshadowed much of the later Italian Fascist system. The Treaty of Rapallo made Fiume an independent republic; the Italian army evicted him in December 1920.

Mussolini took the toolkit. The blackshirted Arditi, the Roman salute, the theatrical relationship between leader and mass, and the practice of forcibly dosing political opponents with large quantities of castor oil all pass from Fiume into Fascism.

The Gilded Cage

He was pardoned and then neutralised. Mussolini preferred him as a myth rather than a rival, and D'Annunzio spent his last years at Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, the vast villa-museum-mausoleum complex he built above Lake Garda between 1923 and 1938 and stuffed with relics of himself, including the prow of a warship. He was created Prince of Monte Nevoso in 1924 and made president of the Italian Royal Academy in 1937. He never held office in the Fascist state. He died of a stroke on 1 March 1938 at Gardone Riviera and was given a state funeral by Mussolini.

Why Gabriele Is Called a Genius

His gift was for making language do physical work. In the poems — above all *Alcyone*, and the still-recited "La Pioggia nel Pineto" — Italian is bent into rhythms that reproduce weather and skin and rain in a pine wood, and the effect is not decorative but sensory. Britannica calls him "Italy's leading writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries," and the technical assessment is that he brought "considerable linguistic and formal innovation" to poetry, the novel and the theatre alike. There is a second, uglier form of genius here too, and it needs naming: he understood before anyone else that mass politics is a theatrical medium and that a crowd can be composed like a poem. Every dictator of the following fifty years was working in a form he invented.

The counter-case is heavy in both directions. Aesthetically, the fluency is also the weakness — the novels of the 1890s can read as sustained self-admiration, and a style so entirely about surface has dated harder than the leaner work of his contemporaries. Politically, there is no way to make this come out clean. His "ardent fascism was rewarded by Mussolini"; his reputation is, as one reference work puts it flatly, "clouded by his fascist associations"; and the castor oil was his idea. The most that can honestly be said in mitigation is that he never joined the Fascist government and that Mussolini kept him decoratively caged. That is not a defence, only a detail.

Legacy

D'Annunzio remains a live problem in Italy: read at school for *Alcyone* and "La Pioggia nel Pineto," and studied by historians as the man who wrote the first draft of Fascist political style. The Vittoriale, still open above Lake Garda, is the closest thing Europe has to a monument built by a man to his own myth. He is the rare figure whose literary reputation and historical reputation have to be judged separately — and the historical one is worse than the poems deserve, but not unfairly so.