The Mariátegui Project

D’Annunzio is not a fascist. But fascism is D’Annunzian. Fascism assiduously employs D’Annunzian rhetoric, technique, and form. The fascist cry of “Eia, aia, alala!” is taken straight from a D’Annunzian epic. The spiritual origins of fascism are in D’Annunzio’s life and literature. D’Annunzio, therefore, can disown fascism, but fascism cannot disown D’Annunzio. D’Annunzio is one of the creators, one of the architects of the state of mind in which fascism has been incubated and expressed.

Furthermore, all of the most recent chapters of Italian history are steeped in D’Annunzianism. Adriano Tilgher, in a substantive essay on the Tersa Italia, or the Third Italy, defines the pre-war period of 1905-1915 as “the uncontested kingdom of D’Annunzian thought, raised on memories of imperial Rome and the Italian communes of the Middle Ages, shaped in pseudo-pagan naturalism, averse to Christian and humanitarian sentimentalism, a cult of heroic violence, scornful of the crude rabble bent over in toil, possessing an infectious dilettantism with a vague mania for big words and magnificent gestures.” During this period, Tilgher says, the Italian petty and middle bourgeoisie fed on the rhetoric of a press written by failed literati drunk on D’Annunzianism and imperial nostalgia.

In the war against Austria, a D’Annunzian endeavor, fascism was born — itself a D’Annunzian endeavor. All of fascism’s leaders and captains come from the faction that crushed the neutral government of Giolitti and led Italy to war, and the fascist brigades initially called themselves fasces of combat. Fascism was born of the war. The Fiume endeavor and the organization of the fasces were twin phenomena, synchronous and symphonic. Mussolini’s fascists fraternized with D’Annunzio’s arditi. Each undertook their enterprises with the cry of “Eia, aia, alala!” Fascism and Fiumanism suckled from the same wolf’s teat, like Romulus and Remus. However, being the new Romulus and Remus, fate deigned for one to kill the other. Fiumism fell in Fiume, drowned in its own rhetoric and poetry, and fascism developed, unencumbered by a peer movement, at the cost of Fiumanism’s blood and immolation.

Fiumanism resisted its descent from the astral and Olympic world of its utopia to the contingent, precarious and prosaic world of reality. It felt itself above class struggle, above conflict between the individualist and socialist ideas, above the economy and its problems. Isolated from Earth, lost in the ether, Fiumanism was condemned to go up in smoke and pass away. Fascism, on the other hand, took a position in the class struggle, and exploiting the middle class’s grudge against the proletariat, pulled them into its ranks and sent them off to the battle against revolution and socialism. All the reactionary elements, all the conservative elements, more eager for a captain resolved to combat revolution than for policies inclined to cooperate with it, fell into the fascist ranks, and there grew their numbers. On the outside, fascism retained its D’Annunzian airs; but on the inside, its new social content, its new social structure, uprooted and suffocated the gaseous D’Annunzian ideology. Fascism has grown and conquered not as a D’Annunzian movement, but rather as a reactionary movement; not as a player above class struggle but as a player from one of its belligerent classes. Fiumanism was more a literary phenomenon than a political one. Fascism, though, is an imminently political phenomenon. Fascism’s condottiero had to be, as a result, a politician, a tumultuous, plebiscitary, demagogic strongman, and fascism found this figure in its duce, its architect, Benito Mussolini, and not in Gabriele D’Annunzio. Fascism needed a leader prepared to wield the revolver, the baton, and castor oil against the socialist proletariat, and poetry and castor oil are two dissimilar and irreconcilable substances.

D’Annunzio’s personality is a fickle and versatile one, which does not fit within a party. He is a man without ideological affiliation and discipline who aspires to be a great historical actor. He is not concerned with the role, but with its grandeur, its prominence, its aesthetic. However, D’Annunzio has shown, despite his elitism and aristocratic bent, a frequent and instinctive tendency towards the left and revolution. In him, there is no theory, doctrine, or concept. In D’Annunzio there is, above all, a rhythm, a music, a form. But this rhythm, this music, this form, have had, at times, in the more profound episodes in the history of the great Poet, a revolutionary hue, a revolutionary sense. The reason is that D’Annunzio loves the past, but he loves the present even more. The past provides and equips him with decorative elements, with an ancient varnish, strange colors and mysterious hieroglyphs, but the present is life, and life is the source of all art and fantasy. And while reaction is the instinct towards conservation, the agonizing death rattle of the past, revolution is the painful gestation and bloody birth of the present.

When, in 1900, D’Annunzio entered the Italian parliament, his lack of affiliation and ideology led him to a conservative seat. But a day of emotional polemic between the bourgeois, dynastic majority and the revolutionary and socialist far left, D’Annunzio, clueless to the theoretical controversy and receptive only to the emotion and the heartbeat of life, felt pulled into the gravitational field of the minority, and said as much to the far left: “in today’s spectacle, I have seen, on one side, many screaming corpses, and on the other, a handful of living and eloquent men. As a man of intellect, I march towards life.” D’Annunzio did not march towards socialism, nor towards revolution. He knew nothing, nor wanted to know anything, about theories or doctrines. He simply marched towards life. Revolution held for him the same natural, organic attraction as the sea, the countryside, woman, youth, or combat.

After the war, D’Annunzio approached revolution several more times. When he occupied Fiume, he claimed that Fiumanism was the cause of all damned and oppressed peoples, and sent a telegram to Lenin. It appears that Lenin wanted to respond to D’Annunzio, but the Italian socialists opposed the Soviets taking seriously the Poet’s movement. D’Annunzio invited all the unions of Fiume to collaborate with him in its constitution. Some men from socialism’s left wing, inspired by his revolutionary instinct, supported coming to an understanding with D’Annunzio. But the socialist and union bureaucracy refused and forbid this heretical proposition, labeling D’Annunzio a dilettante and adventurist. His heterodoxy and individualism offended their revolutionary spirit. D’Annunzio, deprived of all cooperation with theory, presented Fiume with a constitution of pure rhetoric, one with an epic tone that is, without a doubt, one of the most curious documents of political literature in recent times. On the title page of the Constitution of the Regency of Carnaro are written the words: “Life is beautiful and worthy of being lived magnificently.” And in its chapters and parenthetical remarks, the Constitution of Fiume guarantees to the citizens of the Regency of Carnaro bountiful, generous, and infinite assistance for their bodies, souls, imagination, and flesh. There are communist touches in the Constitution. Not of the modern, scientific, and dialectic kind, that of Marx and Lenin, but of the utopian and archaic variety of Plato’s republic, Campanella’s City of the Sun, and John Ruskin’s San Rafael City.

With the liquidation of the Fiume endeavor, D’Annunzio had a period of contact and negotiations with some leaders of the proletariat. In his villa in Gardone, he held meetings with D’Aragona and Baldesi, secretaries of the General Confederation of Labor. He also received a visit from Chicherin on a stopover while returning to Russia from Genova. At that moment, an agreement between D’Annunzio and the unions and socialism seemed imminent. Those were the days when the Italian socialists remained disconnected from the communists and appeared close to parliamentary collaboration. But the fascist dictatorship was underway, and, instead of D’Annunzio and the socialists, it was Mussolini and the “blackshirts” who would conquer the Eternal City.

D’Annunzio lives in good relations with fascism. The dictatorship of the “blackshirts” flirts with the Poet. D’Annunzio, from his retreat in Gardone, observes it without rancor or disapproval. But he remains aloof and retiring from any communion with it. Mussolini has backed the naval pact written by the Poet, who is a sort of patron of the people of the sea, whose workers submit themselves willingly to his direction and reign. The poet of “The Ship” holds over them a patriarchal and theocratic authority. Forbidden from legislating for the land, he contents himself with the sea. The sea understands him better than the land.

But the land, not the sea, is history’s stage, and its central issue is politics, not poetry, which demands of its actors constant and methodical contact with reality, with science, with the economy, with all those things that the megalomania of poets ignores and disdains. In a normal and quiet period of history, D’Annunzio would not have been a political protagonist, because in normal, quiet times, politics is a set of administrative and bureaucratic negotiations. But in this period of neo-romanticism, of the rebirth of the Hero, of Myth, and of Action, politics ceases to be a systematic office of bureaucracy and science. That is why D’Annunzio holds a position in contemporary politics. But D’Annunzio, undulating and fickle, cannot remain still within one sect or join the ranks of one band. He is incapable of marching with reaction or with revolution. Less still is he capable of affiliating himself with the eclectic and prudent intermediary realm of democracy and reform.

And so, while D’Annunzio is not consciously or specifically reactionary, reaction is paradoxically and emphatically D’Annunzian. Reaction in Italy has taken from D’Annunzianism its expression, pose and accent. In other countries, reaction is more sober, brutal, and naked, but in Italy, land of eloquence and rhetoric, reaction has had to stand tall on a pedestal sumptuously decorated with the friezes, volutes and bas-reliefs of D’Annunzian literature.