Carnaro: A Test Run for Fascism
How A Small Croatian City Laid the Foundations for Fascism
Our story begins with a man: Gabriele D’Annunzio, an Italian playwright, poet, journalist, author, aristocrat, army officer and war hero. In 1919…D’Annunzio became a dictator.
When World War One began, D’Annunzio, a self-proclaimed ‘Superman’ (having been inspired by Nietzsche’s Ubermensch), started to give speeches in favour of Italy’s entry on the side of the Triple Entente. With the war beginning, he volunteered and achieved further celebrity as a fighter pilot, losing sight in one eye during a flying accident. It was in the First World War that perceptions of D’Annunzio transformed from literary figure to national war hero, as he was also associated with the elite Arditi storm troops of the Italian Army, and took part in “il Volo su Vienna”, translating to Flight over Vienna, where he lead nine planes in a 700-mile round trip to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna.
The war strengthened D’Annunzio’s ultra-nationalist views, and he campaigned widely for Italy to assume a role alongside her wartime allies as a first-rate European power. During World War One, Italy had made a pact with the Allies, the Treaty of London 1915, in which it promised all of the Austrian Littoral, but not the city of Fiume. After the war, the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 confirmed this delineation of territory, with Fiume (or Rijeka, Croatia as it is referred to today) remaining outside of Italian borders and amalgamated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia). Outraged by this proposed handing over of the city, whose population, outside the suburbs, was mostly Italian, on the 12th of September 1919, D’Annunzio led a seizure. The force behind D’Annunzio was about 2,600-strong and drawn mostly from former or serving members of the Granatieri di Sardegna brigade of the Royal Italian Army, as well as Italian nationalists.
D’Annunzio and his army forced the withdrawal of the Allied occupying forces, successfully seizing Fiume. On the same day, D’Annunzio announced that he had annexed the territory to the Kingdom of Italy, having been enthusiastically welcomed by the ethnic Italian portion of the population of Fiume (people started to call him the Soldier King, in opposition to the Photographer King, that is to say the Italian king Vittorio Emanuele). However, D’Annunzio’s seizure was not so enthusiastically welcomed by the Italian government itself, which attempted to pressure him to withdraw, initiating a blockade of Fiume and demanding he and his goons surrender.
On December 8th of 1919, the Italian government proposed a modus vivendi (a peace agreement) recognising Fiume’s desire for annexation and promising they would “only consider acceptable a solution consonant with that which Fiume declared to desire.” Three days later, D’Annunzio met with the Italians to try and obtain more concessions, which they refused. D’Annunzio promised he would submit the modus vivendi to the Italian National Council of Fiume, which the National Council accepted on December 15th.
However, after the National Council’s decision, D’Annunzio addressed a crowd of five thousand people and incited them to reject the modus vivendi, promising to put the issue to plebiscite. Despite violence and irregularities, the results of the plebiscite were overwhelmingly in favour of the modus vivendi. In what would foreshadow D’Annunzio’s later proto-fascist tendencies, he nullified the results, blaming the violence at the polls, and announced he would be making the final decision himself. Doubting the Italian government and their ability to deliver on their promises, as well as a desire to stay in power, D’Annunzio rejected the modus vivendi.
On the 8th of September 1920, D’Annunzio declared Fiume an independent state, which he called the “Italian Regency of Carnaro” (after the Golfo del Carnaro where the city is located). The constitution of Carnaro foreshadowed many of the features of the later Italian Fascist regime, that wouldn’t officially come to power until 4/5 years later. The Charter of Carnaro saw D’Annunzio be crowned Comandante, essentially a dictator, and combined anarchist, proto-fascist, and democratic republican ideas. The Constitution setup a corporatist state with nine corporations to represent the different sectors of the economy, as well as a tenth corporation to represent the “superior individuals” (e.g. poets, heroes, and supermen). Benito Mussolini was influenced heavily by D’Annunzio’s style of leadership, with the historian Michael Ledeen going so far as describing D’Annunzio as “John the Baptist of Italian Fascism”. D’Annunzio pioneered the balcony address, the Roman salute, the corporate state, the large emotive nationalistic public rituals, and the black-shirted followers, the Arditi — inspiring Mussolini and all fascist dictators who came after him.
Eventually the state of Fiume would come to an end when D’Annunzio decided to declare war on Italy itself (even though the Treaty of Rapallo on the 12th of November 1920 granted Fiume independence). The Italian army attacked Carnaro, and after only 5 days of fighting, D’Annunzio surrendered the city. Remarkably, D’Annunzio survived the incident, and perhaps even more strangely, was never directly involved in the fascist government of Mussolini (though he did meet with Mussolini on several occasions). D’Annunzio’s life after Fiume was a series of rather strange events: he was pushed out of a window by an unknown assailant in 1922 (or perhaps he simply slipped and fell while intoxicated), and then two years later he became a prince (King Victor Emmanuel III, the King of Italy, gave him the hereditary title of Prince of Montenevoso), then died of a stroke in 1938 and received a magnificent state funeral from Mussolini where he was interred in a marble tomb.
Gabriele D’Annunzio was a rather eccentric and aesthetic character who led a rather strange life (he notably created an Italian word for sandwich — tramezzino — and established that the gender for “car” had to be feminine: “the car — la macchina — is feminine , for sure. Isn’t it? It is gracious and seductive, vivacious and slender like a woman?”), and so it is a wonder that given his intriguing personality and his significance to the rise of fascism, he and the story of Carnaro are not more widely reported on in the annals of history.
