The Rest Is History - 194. The First Fascist

Episode Date: June 9, 2022

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss the 'first' fascist, Gabriele D'Annunzio, with historian Lucy Hughes-Hallett. D'Annunzio was a key figure in Italian literature before becoming a political figure later in his life. Although never personally identifying with fascism, his ideas were hugely influential on Mussolini.  Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Jack Davenport *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Steeped in sensuality and sadism and cold-blooded dilettanteism. talking about the equally celebrated Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio, one of the greatest figures in modern Italian literature, a poet, a playwright, a novelist. And I suppose really in the, how would you describe him? In the last, well, the last two decades of the 19th century, perhaps he was, I mean, kind of faint echoes of Oscar Wilde. He was a dandy. He was a man who made a drama out of his own life. But far more than Wilde, he became a figure at the heart of seismic historical events. So in 1915, for instance, he engaged in incendiary speeches in the very heart of

ancient Rome in the capital, persuading Italy to enter the Great War. In 1918, he led a dramatic air raid over Vienna. And in 1919, he set up effectively a city-state in the Croatian port of Fiume that was admired by both Lenin and Mussolini. And Mussolini, in fact, would go on to describe D'Annunzio as the John the Baptist of fascism. And Dominic, do you think is Mussolini onto something there in describing D'Annunzio, this extraordinary writer turned political leader as as the john the baptist of fascism i think he i think he was personally and i think um denunzio is um who you look to um if you want to find kind of exhibit a and how terrible writers often are as one of your favorite themes one of your favorites in particular

sort of um romantic individualists with an idea of their own greatness. I think D'Annunzio is exhibit A. I think D'Annunzio, as we will discuss in the podcast, he does have this incredible life full of adventure and incident and eroticism and bad behavior and all this sort of stuff. But in his emphasis on the great man and his love of modernity, of speed, his worship, his exaltation of blood and sacrifice and violence, his belief in conquest, his belief that his native country has been mutilated, his hatred of parliamentary democracy. All of these things, and not least the black uniforms.

I think he looks very much like the first fascist. Well, so we are actually calling this episode The First Fascist. So we're pretty much nailing our colours for the last there. But you know what we need is someone who can perhaps answer that question more conclusively. And we have a wonderful question

from Sam the Burgundian Wang, who says very simply, who is he and why have I never heard of him? And I would say that if people in this country, in Britain, have heard of him, it's because they have read the brilliant, brilliant, prize-winning biography of him by Lucy Hughes Hallett, The Pike, Gabriele D'Annunzio, poet, seducer and preacher of war, which I think, Lucy, you're with us, won the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2012 and really put D'Annunzio on the kind of the literary and historical map,

certainly for readers in the Anglophone world. And Lucy, thank you so much for joining us. And I wonder if I could welcome you to the show by repeating Sam the Burgundian Wang's question, who is he and why has Sam the Burgundian Wang's question, who is he? And why has Sam the Burgundian Wang never heard of him? Well, I repeat my subtitle. He was a poet, a seducer and a preacher of all. He was, in his own opinion, the greatest Italian poet since Dante. And actually, I mean, he was not slow in blowing his own trumpet. But there were a lot of people who agreed with him. And I think maybe I'm one of them. He was a great poet, which is very

disturbing to a lot of people who would like to think that great art can only be produced by nice people. And D'Annunzio was not a nice person in all sorts of ways, but he was a brilliant writer. And, you know, it's not just me and him who says it. James Joyce thought that he was the greatest writer of the 19th century after Kipling, interesting choice, and Tolstoy. And then Proust loved him as well, didn't he? Proust loved him. He has a lot in common with Proust. And he spent some time in Paris. And very frustratingly, I couldn't find any occasion when they actually met. But we know that Proust was in the audience when one of Donizio's plays was being put on, sitting

next to their great mutual friend, Robert de Montesquieu, and coming over a bit faint, as Proust rather tended to do, and retiring to the Caulkland Room. So he didn't get out and about enough to meet D'Anoncier, but they were moving in the same circles. But yes, so he was a poet, much admired. Henry James thought he was terrific as well. And he was a seducer. I mean, he was a real star of the celebrity gossip columns. And he saw the fascists as rather cheap, vulgar, fake versions of himself. Certainly, they took a great deal from him, including an understanding that, you know, politics is all about publicity.

And D'Annunzio was working the press almost from the moment that Italy got a press. When Sam says, why has he never heard of him? Do you think that D'Annunzio's fame, which he was so obsessed by, has to a degree been blotted out by Mussolini and by the emergence of fascism? Well, one of the reasons that Sam hasn't heard of him as a writer is that his novels were so sexually explicit that when they were translated into English, they were so heavily burglarized that they almost make no sense whatsoever because 75% of the action gets left out. So that's kind of maybe a less serious reason. And his poetry doesn't translate very easily. There are translations, but frankly, none of them are much good. You've got to learn

Italian if you want to understand the genius of Donizio as a poet. And so as a literary figure, he doesn't travel very easily. But then it's true that his political persona was eclipsed by Mussolini, by the fascists, and by the fact that Mussolini was not keen actually to acknowledge his debt to Donizio. Donizio wrote to Mussolini in the mid-twenties saying, isn't it true that all that is best the substance, the militarism, the extreme nationalism, the elitism, the anti-democratic views, but also the kind of the manner of fascism politics is a performance art. All of that is something that D'Annunzio was onto back in the 1890s, when Mussolini was scarcely thinking about politics. And if he was, he was a socialist. Can we put D'Annunzio Lussi into his original context a bit? So he's born in 1863, two and a half years after the unification of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies and the northern Italian Piedmont kingdom, so basically the creation of the kingdom of Italy.

Do you think he – so he's growing up in the shadow, I suppose, of the Risorgimento and of Garibaldi and so on. Do you think he felt as a young boy – because you say in your book how he's obsessed with glory. I mean, lots of little boys are obsessed with battles and cavalry charges and things, but they don't then become proto-fascists. Do you think he felt that he'd missed out

and that his life was compensating for that a little bit? There may be a bit of that, but I think also he might have felt, he did feel that he was in the right place at the right time. So yes, as you say, 1860, Italy begins to be unified. And then that process is completed in 1870, when the French leave Rome, and Italy becomes a nation state. And Donizio, aged seven, very quickly began to see that he might have a great part in the creation of the new Italy. So there was a kind of catchphrase that

was going around at the time. I've tried, but I can't be sure who said it first, but certainly Denuncia was one of the people who said it afterwards, that the Risorgimento made Italy, and the next task was to make Italians. And in order to make Italians, in order to give this great sort of hodgepodge of peoples with very different languages even. I mean, you know, Tuscan was to become the, the Tuscan dialect would become the official Italian. But, you know, people in the Deep South and people in the Far North

could barely understand each other. Communications were very poor and slow. There really wasn't much connection and somehow people the people who lived in the Italian peninsula had to be taught to think of themselves as being a part of this new glorious Italy that had just come into being and Donizio saw his opportunity a nation it needs a culture, it needs a poet. And this is part of what he meant when he said he was the greatest poet since Dante. He thought that Dante, in his writing, had a vision of Italy, of a great country called Italy.

And Lucy, he's thinking this when he's at school. Oh, yes, yes. He didn't hang about. And he was thinking this when he's at school. Oh, yes, yes. He didn't hang about. And he was fantastically clever. I mean, when he was 11, he was sent off to a boarding school. And the first Easter that he was there, he wrote a letter to his parents, kind of just for fun, in Spanish, Latin, ancient Greek, Italian, naturally, and English and French. You know, he was already fluent in all those languages. He was frighteningly clever. And he would steal the other boy's lamp oil so that he could stay up all night studying. He had voracious intellectually. He wanted to read everything.

And once he'd read absolutely all the literature that was available to him, he thought he could do better. And so, age 16, he published his first volume of verse. It did all right, but he was getting good reviews on the book pages, but that wasn't enough for him. He wanted to be a real super duper front page celebrity. So when he had his second book ready to come out, he was still only just 17 and still at boarding school, he informed a newspaper editor of the tragic death in a riding accident of that brilliant young prodigy, Gabriele D'Annunzio himself. And the editor fell for it, the story ran,

was picked up and repeated. And it made him famous. There were long pieces about this brilliant lad, this tragic prodigy. And so when, two weeks later, Donatio knew when to kill the story. He sent a second telegram saying how outraged he was, how deeply distressed. But he had, after long and careful thought, decided that he wasn't going to sue the editor who published it. So he would have been a genius on social media. Oh, yes. I mean, absolutely bossed it. And he was very, I mean, he was very quick to, he went to Rome aged 18 already, author

of two acclaimed volumes at first. And he became a hack. I mean, he wrote fashion copy. He went along to parties and wrote the notes about what the Duchess of so-and-so was wearing and so on and so forth. And his sort of highbrow young friends were very shocked. They said, you know, you're prostituting, what are you doing? And he said, I'm speaking to the people. He said, you can write, you can plant an idea in a book, and a few people are going to read it. If you plant it in a popular journal, it's going to flourish.

It's going to grow. And all of that, Lucy, makes him sound, well, I mean, people make their own minds up, but you could say makes him sound quite an admirable person. But at the same time, he's monstrously egotistical but also there is this um erotomania i mean no one who reads your book could fail i think to draw that conclusion the endless stream of of mistresses and lovers the but his obsession with it the notes that he makes and all this but also there's an element of there's only a couple of times that

it comes up of him boasting of having raped peasant girls or having forced himself on working class women. And you don't know whether this is wish fulfillment, a kind of fantasy, or whether it really happened. So what's going on with all that sort of stuff? Well, I think the first thing to say is he behaved deplorably to women. There's absolutely no way to defend it. As you say, there are only a few mentions in the notebooks about the way he would force himself on or rape working class women, servants or women he came across. I don't think he did that very often. I think that was when he was a boy. And by the time he was kind of 17, 18, he was a star. And he was very interested, actually, in the way that he could get women

because he wasn't good looking. He was small. He went bald very early. He had lovely sort of dark curls in his teens and very early 20s. But nothing wrong with being bald, by the way. Yeah, I'm glad you say that. But, you know, he really wasn't a beauty. One of his many, many mistresses said that he was the only person she'd ever met who had teeth in three different colours.

White, yellow and black. Very British. colours white yellow and black very british but he and he had um he had an affair with the most famous um actress of her day in italy eleanor aduse yes and actually the majority of his his known lovers um apart from you know the odd people he bedded in the afternoon and never saw again kind of thing. And there were many of those. And we just noticed them down in his notebooks without even giving names. But the lovers that stayed around

and who were important to him were nearly all women either of great talent or they were very grand. He liked women he could respect, whether first of snobbish social reasons or because he did admire their talent. And he and Dusser were partners. She'd been playing the Lady of the Camellias over and over and over and over again.

She was looking for new material. And de Monceau wrote plays for her. And she was an international celebrity long before he was. So by taking his works on tour around the world, and she went to Russia, she went to America, she came to England, et cetera, she greatly expanded his reach. And she was the boss.

You know, she wasn't just the actress. She was the producer of these shows that she took around the world. So she was a considerable person in her own right. I hesitate to say that D'Avanzio respected women because he treated them abominably. But he liked them to be his intellectual equals. He liked to be able to talk to them. And Lucy, on the subject of his intellectual life, one of the things that's really striking reading your book is how alert he is to all the kind of big intellectual trends

that will roll over the 20th century, you know, when they're just very kind of not widely known. So he's very alert to the writings of Nietzsche early on. He is alert to all the kind of stuff that will explode with the rites of spring kind of you know pagan ritual and all that kind of thing um and he's very very into modernity so he's he's writing kind of odes to torpedoes and things like that he does that when he's a teenager doesn't he i think the torpedo ode very early on yes is that one of the things that i mean that really distinguishes him is that he has a kind of incredibly advanced antennae for things that are going to be big in the 20th

century? Absolutely. Yes, you put it perfectly. And that's why my book is called The Pike because I'm not a fisher person, but apparently what pike do is they lurk in the shallows. And just when something comes drifting past on the current, they snap. And D'Onozio was great at that. He could pick up a trend. I mean, it might be a hairstyle, or it might be an intellectual trend, long before anyone around him had really kind of picked up on it. And so, yes, certainly, I mean, he was a futurist, you know, when Marinetti was still in the nursery. And he loved motorcars, telephones, aeroplanes. He became an aviator.

And yes, there's the early ode to the torpedo. He was very excited by modern weaponry and by big ships and later by airplanes. And he was always just a few steps ahead of everybody else. He had fantastic capacity to absorb ideas. And I say absorb because he seemed to be able to suck a book dry without actually reading it. He was coming up with Nietzschean ideas and crediting Nietzsche long before he'd actually got a copy of any of Nietzsche's works in his hands because they weren't translated into Italian for a long time. He was reading Nietzsche in French.

He had a kind of secretary come personal shopper come Leparello who was his sort of his aid his aid to camp throughout a lot of his life tom antongini who later wrote a book about him um who described donanzio kind of flicking through a book in let us say five minutes and then talking about it for over an hour without a moment's pause. We could get him on this podcast, Tom. But he's also very good, isn't he, Lucy? Well, not very good. That's completely the wrong phrase. But he's very, it's not just intellectual trends,

it's also political trends. Because quite early on, he is in that sort of, I don't know, 40-year period where Italy is trying to find itself. They have something like 35 administrations in 40 years, don't they? It's a real kind of parliamentary shambles, the Italian state after it's been unified. He is calling it foul. He's saying parliamentary democracy is vulgar, it's depraved, the parliament is a sewer, all of these themes that we're very familiar with from the 1920s and 1930s that are kind of proto-fascistic. And do you think that in that respect, is he reflecting a wider, you know, a general Italian context? Or is that something in him?

Because he also obviously has this kind of very romantic or post-romantic worship of the great man, which runs counter to kind of parliamentary democracy and the-romantic worship of the great man, which runs counter to kind of parliamentary democracy and the kind of pluralism of the modern democratic age. Absolutely, yes. And he was an elitist, not just in the rather vague way the word is often used nowadays, but because he really believed there were some people who were better than others,

and those were the people who should be ruling. And they wouldn't necessarily be aristocrats. He had very hard words to say about the spineless offspring of exhausted aristocracies. I mean, he read Darwin or absorbed Darwin's ideas in the way that he did. And he drew the same sort of conclusions from Darwin that Nietzsche was to do, but separately, before he came across Nietzsche. If you think about evolution, it doesn't happen uniformly, he thought. In every generation, there will be some people who have evolved further than others. And he saw himself in that light. Oh, you bet. Yes, yes, yes. So the Superman. He was you bet. Yes, yes, yes. So the superman.

He was the superman. He definitely was. And the superman should rule. And so he did briefly sit in parliament. He was in the 1890s. The seat for his birthplace, Pescara e Neobruti, came up and it was offered to him. And because he never liked to say no to anything, he thought he'd give it a go.

But already he'd sort of gone into print by then to describe the Chamber of Deputies as a mephitic sewer, the stable in which the filthy beast... So he's a kind of populist, as we now describe him. But he's not a populist if he's an elitist. Well, he's an elitist populist. It's so confusing. He didn't like the people much,

but he did want them to buy his books. He believed in this elite, which was not socially determined. It was a grouping of the great. And quite how you knew whether you were part of this group is a little unclear. D'Annunzio was absolutely clear that he was one of the saved, one of the elite.

But when he joined Parliament, he didn't sit in the House very often, which was normal. Over half the deputies never took their seats at that point, which was one of the problems with Italian democracy. But after a bit, he sat on the right wing with the kind of the nationalists, militarists, monarchists. And then after a bit, he crossed the house and went and sat with the socialists. Not because he in any way approved of socialism, but because he thought they had a bit of, you know, a

bit of life to them. And what he was looking for always, and actually this is also, I think, true of a lot of Mussolini's fascism. It's not about the doctrine. It's about the energy. Yeah, the swagger, the show, the the dazzle and splendor yeah the spectacle and what's that there's that virility element to yes to it isn't there that was obviously i mean it's so interesting how that's there so early on with him i mean he's obsessed with his own manliness

isn't he and again was that something do you think that's rooted in his own psychology or do you think it's generally it's in the air in late 19th century Italy? I think it's very much in the air. He was an extreme version of it in a way that's quite paradoxical, given that he loved flower arranging and pretty clothes. He's very stylish, isn't he? All the photos, he always looks tremendously cool. Yes, yes.

There was a time when he went off on a on a boat trip a friend of his had a yacht and they set off around the adriatic denuncio took on board 40 white linen suits to the group's care of his his friends who were just thinking they were going to be you know chilling on deck not wearing very much at all so he'd wear the right shoes on on a yacht he would do tom he would do very important but but lucy so we've conveyed the sense of a man who is convinced of his own greatness and of his own destiny but it would be fair to say wouldn't it that say by his late 20s he's still essentially just a literary figure would that be would that be reasonable to say and then in 1910 he gets so heavily into debt that he actually has to run away to Paris. Absolutely, yes. I mean, so he really in his 30s, he begins to take an active interest in politics,

at which point I have to say that the quality of his literary output deteriorates. It becomes more and more polemical, his poetry becomes more ranting, and he loses the sort of the delicacy of his earlier writings. But he's, you say, just a literary type, and all the hackles of the literary types listening to this podcast are rising because... We hope there are no such people listening to this podcast. But anyway, he thought that too. There came a point in his life when he thought that to be just a scribbler wasn't enough. He wanted to set nations ablaze. He used the word holocaust a lot. It didn't have the connotations that it now has. He was taking it from his reading of Flaubert's Salambo, in which there is a holocaust, a human sacrifice, and a holocaust is a kind of sacrifice

in which the sacrificial victim is entirely consumed. Anyway, D'Arnozio wanted to light a great holocaust, a great fire from which the sparks would fly all over Italy and all over Europe and encourage the people to rise up, get rid of their boring, feeble, mediocre, insufficiently virile, liberal rulers, and become much more bloodthirsty, more aggressive, and more nationalist. And so when, in 1914, he's in Paris, war breaks out, he's very excited by this. And he goes to the front, doesn't he, to kind of see what's going on? Yes, he does. And he's in Paris and he's sort of excited because he's been waiting for this war. He believes, and the most shocking thing

about this is that he's not alone. There are a lot of Italian nationalists who also believe it, that what Italy needs is a war. And it doesn't really matter who the enemy is or what the cause of war might be. The point is that Italy is a new nation, only been around for 30 years, 40 years by now. It hasn't yet had what he called the baptism of blood. And so he thinks, great, this is it. This is where we must join and we must show that we are great people. He's living in France. He's in the wrong place. And that's a worry to him. But he starts writing really bellicose editorials, features for newspapers, both in Italy and in France, calling on the Italian government to get involved on the side of their Latin brothers, the French.

He's not at all interested in the British or the Russians, but the French and the Italians should band together because they are the kind of the heirs to the great civilizations of ancient Rome and medieval Italy. But yes, he goes to the front while he's still in France. He's developing a kind of a really appalling kind of mythology of the earth as a mother who wants to suck down the blood of her sons. So a kind of vampire, maternal vampire. This wretched young soldier has been killed in the trenches. Their blood is seeping into the trenches, into the land. It's all horrifying, but he finds it very exciting.

But then he goes back to Italy in May 1915. The Italians are still, ostensibly anyway, staying out of the war. And he wants to go back. He returns to Italy, by which time these very bellicose features he's been writing have made him a great hero of the kind of nationalist, militarist right. And his train is stopped repeatedly as he comes across the Italian frontier, and then he embarks on his great series of speeches.

We should take a break here for some capitalist advertising, which we always like to do. I don't know what Derncier would make of that. He really liked publicity, so he'd probably love it. And then we'll come back, Tom. Yes.

And we'll get into the Great War. And the aftermath. And the aftermath, exactly. The most extraordinary, most extraordinary story. So the best is yet to come. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

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Blessed are the young who hunger and thirst for glory, for they shall be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be called upon to staunch a splendid flow of blood and dress a wonderful wound. Blessed are they that have most, because they can give most, dare most. Blessed are they who return with victories, for they shall see the new face of Rome. So that's a parody of the Sermon on the Mount. A parody is the wrong word, a sort of twisted reworking of the Sermon on the Mount, a parody is the wrong word, a sort of twisted reworking of the Sermon of the Mount delivered by Gabriele D'Annunzio on his return, I think, to Genoa, Lucy, when he made this great train journey that you were talking about back into Italy. And this is, I mean, there's lots of horrific things in your book about D'Annunzio's behavior. But to me, this is one of the worst, that he returns to Italy, to a country that's sort of trembling on the brink of entering the Great War. And he delivers these speeches that, to any sane reader, I would say,

are utterly repulsive, all about young men sacrificing, you know, pools of blood will, there'll be rivers of blood will flow, it'll be wonderful. And, you know, he is received with rapture by this tremendous crowds when he's shouting, you know, we'll make lists of people who oppose the war and prescribe them. People are sort of weeping for joy and stuff. I mean, what's going on? Is it Donizio's celebrity that's, or is he tapping something? Basically, there are lots of people that think like him, do you think, in 1915? Absolutely. And that's really, I mean, as you say, there are lots of people that think like him, do you think, in 1915? Absolutely. And that's really, I mean, as you say, there's so much that's appalling about D'Annunzio.

And this is perhaps the most appalling thing, is that he was so a kind of, you know, the baptism of blood, the blood that purifies, the blood that energizes, blood that is, has to be poured out in order to make a nation great, is something that, you know, we find, you know, in France, and certainly in Italy, in this country as well, even, you know, Daryl Tennyson was writing poems about the compromised, how pale civilian life was compared with the kind of the glitter and the glory of the battlefields. And so that goes back into the 19th century. And by the time we get to just before the outbreak of the First World War, it's as though ordinary civilian life with all its compromises, its commercial considerations, it's grubby, it's ignoble, and war offers a level of experience which is somehow purer. And the fact that it's also likely to be lethal is exciting. It's exciting. People like thinking about danger. So Lucy, there's a question from Tom at Coal,

who asks how much influence did D'Annunzio have in bringing Italy into the First World War? So how influential was he in what ultimately happens, namely Italy entering on the side of the Allies? Well, disappointingly for D'Annunzio, the answer is much, much less than it appeared. Because actually, the Italians were negotiating throughout the first months of the war from September 1914 through to May 1915. They were negotiating with both sides. They were officially part of a triple alliance with Austria and Germany, which meant that they couldn't, without breaking that alliance treaty, enter the war against Austria and Germany. But actually, most of Italians hated the Austrians in particular, because the Austro-Hungarian Empire had dominated Italy for many centuries. It was mainly they who were being kicked out during the Risorgimento. They were seen as the hereditary enemy. The Italians would have been reluctant to go into the war on that side. But there was no obvious advantage for the Italians going into

war on the side of the Allies. But deals were being cut very secretly. And there was a Treaty of London, which had been secretly agreed before Donizio got off his train, that French and British were offering Italy territory along the Dalmatian coast. And that would be their reward if they came in on the side of the allies of the French and British. And that treaty had actually been signed before Donizio came back. He didn't know that, and nor did anybody else. It was being kept very, very secret. And the Prime Minister was going to have to get it through Parliament, through the Chamber of Deputies, which was going to be hard because there were a lot of anti, the anti-war party was very strong.

It was led by Giulietti, who was five times prime minister, terrific, charismatic, grand old man of Italian politics. So what was badly needed by the Italian government at that time was someone to sway public opinion and to kind of put the frighteners on the anti-war party until they were prepared to vote this treaty through. And that's what Donizio did. He didn't realize that that was all he was doing. He thought that he was, when he was standing on the Capitol or on the stage of the Opera House or at Quarto, he was calling on the government to stop being so lily-livered and, you know,

brace up and be proper men and declare war. But in fact, secretly, they'd already agreed to do so. He sees himself as a kind of Nietzschean superhero bending history to his will in that kind of scale so he's finally measuring up to his own sense of what his role in history should be in his opinion absolutely no it I think it was probably the most exciting week of his life that week in May when he was giving speeches two or three speeches a day thousands of people roaring carrying him away from the podium it was extraordinary that he didn't get trampled by the crowd. He was a huge public hero to some people, obviously detested by others. And he was inciting the people of Rome to become a lynch mob. And he was actually telling them, go out, track down those deputies who you know are going to vote against intervention in the war,

do what you like with them. He said, if it is a crime to incite a crowd to murder, I am guilty of that crime. He really was. He was completely shamelessly going way beyond proper behavior, way beyond legality. He was calling for violence, even while he was doing that. In the evenings, he would go for lovely walks in the forum and write poems about the fireflies. The two sides of him, this ranting, bloodthirsty demagogue and the very sensitive erudite poet coexist in a way I simply can't explain. And then Italy does enter the war. And Italy's experience of the war is probably, well, certainly as bad as anybody's. So it's, you know, hundreds of thousands of people are thrown into this kind of charnel house of the caste,

I guess is the border between Italy and Slovenia, isn't it, where they're fighting the Austrians. It's pointless. It's basically all for nothing. The condition's absolutely horrendous, arguably more horrendous even than the Western Front. They're kind of blowing the tops off mountains, aren't they? Yeah, and people are being killed by sort of bits of rock

that are flying for a mile before hitting them on the back of the head, and that's the end of them. You know, it's just horrific. But I suppose to D'Annunzio's credit, I mean, I hate to give D'Annunzio credit for anything because I think he's so loathsome. But he does risk his own life, doesn't he, time and again? I mean, particularly with these – because he's so fascinated by modernity, he goes up in these pioneering flights and he loses the sight of his right eye. Is that right?

And he basically is nearly blinded. Well, he is blinded for a while, isn't he? Yes, he is. Yes, he was unquestionably very brave. And I think that he was also prone to bouts of extreme depression, one of which overtook him in the sort of last weeks of the war when he saw it was about to end. And he really, really did not want to live in a post-war world.

You know, the excitement of the war, the adrenaline, the kind of rush he got from danger was, and he'd become, I suppose, addicted to it, as a lot of fighting people do. And he wrote repeatedly that he wished he'd been killed, and I think he meant it. But yes, his flying was amazing. He was very brave.

There was really no reason for him to take any kind of active service in the war. He was into his 50s by now. But he insisted, rather against the wishes of the high command, who saw that although he could be very useful for propaganda as long as he stayed alive, if he got killed, that was going to be a problem. But he said, no, no, he must be allowed to um to do whatever he wanted and he went down in a submarine he went out on campaigns on cruisers and then he became an aviator he first flew at the brescia air show in 1910 at which point the only flying machine in italy that could leave the ground all, could only rise one meter off the ground. In the ensuing four years, you know, technology had come on by leaps and bounds. So there were fighter planes. And Donizio never learned to pilot his own plane, but he would go

up in these little two-seaters with a pilot. And Donizio would be the man who dropped the bombs over the side. And it was literally a question of dropping them. You pick this thing up and you chuck it over the side. When he goes on this famous raid over Vienna, he drops pamphlets, doesn't he? Yes. But written in Italian, so nobody can understand them. Yeah, I mean, he believed in writing was a martial art. He believed that the word could be weaponized. And so he did.

First of all, he overflew Trieste, which was occupied by the Austrians, dropped pamphlets there saying, you know, rise up against your oppressors. You know, we Italians are coming to rescue you. And then in the last months of the war, which was a pretty desperate time for Italy, there'd been the terrible defeat at Caporetto. The Italians had been driven back almost to where you could hear the guns in Venice. But one of the few things that cheered Italians up was Donizio's flight over Vienna, the Austrian capital, of course. And Venice to Vienna is a very short hop for a modern plane,

but it was a very long flight then. And presumably a risky flight. Oh, so risky. I mean, the great fear was, could you make it back? Because, you know, to do the round trip without being able to land for refueling was nobody really knew whether it could be done. And amazingly, they did make it back. But yes, he dropped these pamphlets over Vienna,

which possibly, as you say, nobody read the pamphlets or didn't understand them. But it certainly had a huge effect on Italian morale. It seemed such a kind of a bold, brave sort of up you to the Austrians. Look, here we are. And what the pap said was, this time I'm dropping words. Next time I come, I'll be dropping bombs. And so presumably this kind of exploit, it's dashing, it's militaristic, it's patriotic, it's swaggering, it's uber masculine, is what then enables him to carry off probably the most famous episode in his life which is the occupation of fiume so what's the story around that because really this is the heart of the story isn't it this was his his great moment on the world stage absolutely and uh so

fiume which is now called riecha it's in cro Croatia. Both Fiume and Rijeka mean river in their different languages. And it was the great port of the Hungarian half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, you know, Vienna had Trieste and Budapest had Fiume as their access to the sea. So it was strategically important, although it's not very big. And it had a large Italian population because Italian merchants and seamen from the east coast of Italy would trade across the Adriatic to the cities on the Adriatic coast, on the Dalmatian coast. So D'Annunzio thought that all of those cities, but most particularly, if you may, should become Italian, because Italy had been on the winning side in the war. And really, that's what the Allies had promised Italy, that

those Dalmatian territories would become a part of what Donizio called the Greater Italy. But it all got more complicated than that. You know, I'm sorry to say that the Allies behaved appallingly. I mean, they went back on their agreement, largely because they just didn't take the Italians seriously. As Dominic said, you know, the Italians had gone through a terrible war and actually been extremely brave, self-sacrificing. But still, you know, in Whitehall and in Paris, you know, diplomats were making jokes about ice cream salesmen.

I mean, the correspondence between the non-Italian participants in the Treaty of Versailles are shocking, the way they talk about the Italians. There's another way of telling that story, though, surely, which is that the Italians had themselves behaved disgracefully in stabbing their own previous partners in the back. Admittedly, they'd signed a deal with the Allies. But at the end of the war, particularly after the Americans got involved with Wilson and his 14 points and self-determination, there was always going to be a very difficult decision to be made there

because obviously the newly created, what was it called then, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, I think they called it, which became Yugoslavia, that they wanted the Dalmatian seaboard as well. So Italy was probably never going to get everything that it wanted. And there was this sort of, maybe because its pre-war culture had been so neurotic and in a sort of nationalist way, that reaction in 1919, where everybody sort of says, oh, golly, we've been completely mutilated and humiliated. And there's an irrationality to that, isn't there?

Or am I being too pro-Slav? No, no, it's completely irrational. There's absolutely no reason why Dalmatia should have been Italian. But D'Annunzio thought it should, and so did his fellow irredentists, the people who thought those territories were the unredeemed parts of the old great Italy. But yes, you're quite right. There is this awkward new state, Yugoslavia, and Woodrow Wilson is rather in favor of them. And so Donizio sees that Italy is not going to get what it wants. From the armistice in late 1918 through the spring and summer of 1919, he's in touch with a lot of the sort of irredentist, nationalist, militarist Italian groups who are not happy at all about what's going on

and the way they feel that Italy has been shortchanged. And so eventually, in August, the history of Fiume is very, very complex, and I don't think we can go into it, but there's a group of people in Fiume who decide that they would like to make it Italian, and they want a frontman. So this isn't initially Donizio's idea. And they think of, you know, various people they might invite, and then they decide, no, you know, Donizio's our guy. And they come to see him in Venice, where he's living, where he's been living throughout the war. And they say, come to Fiume, come and lead us. And he dithers

for a few days. And he's been invited to a rather wonderful party, which he doesn't want to miss. And he goes to the party. It's a musical soiree. And he seduces the pianist, who actually then remains his mistress for the next few years. So that was an evening well spent. But then the next day he says, all right, I'm coming. And he sets off and there are some mutineers from the Italian army, 200 of them based at Ronchi, which is just north of Venice. And he meets up with them in the middle of the night and they drive through Istria and down towards Fiume and they finally arrive there. Donizio by this time is running a very high temperature and remember this is 1919 Spanish flu people are dying in their millions and he could he actually can't stand up he has to be helped out of his car so what's supposed to be this dashing sort of advance is actually a very sick man.

It's a bit like Byron going to Missolonghi. Yes. It's the name. I mean, Byron was sick and Danunzio was sick, but it's just the glamour of his name. Well, Danunzio possessed a ring, which he claimed rather probably had belonged to Byron. He liked to see himself as the new Boweren, so well spotted, yeah. I've skipped the fact that he had to advance through an Allied army, which was sort of, as it were, lying across the road in the Istrian peninsula.

And they were under strict orders because the Allied hide command had got wind of the fact that Donizio was about to try and take over Fiume in this sort of maverick operation. And that was seen as being very disruptive and, you know, couldn't be allowed. So this Allied army was all under orders, if they saw Donizio and his followers, to shoot him dead. But it was an Italian army, although under Allied high command, and of course a large proportion of the Italian military were very much in favor of what D'Orenzio was doing. So as he arrived, sort of lying on the back seat of his enormous red motor car, and instead of shooting him dead, they just laid down their weapons and a lot of them followed him to Fiume.

So he set off with 200 people, arrived there with over 2,000, which was soon augmented by many more thousands of volunteers. People from all over Europe wanted to join in Fiume. It seemed like a very exciting adventure that was going on there. And it wasn't just an Italian nationalist adventure. Donizio, when he arrived, declared that this was going to be a kind of, not just a piece of disputed territory, it was going to be an ideal state, a state of poetry, a state of beauty, where people would be freer and more loving and more beautiful than ever before. So there's a group of people, the Union of Free Spirits, tending towards perfection.

That's right. Oh, yes, they were great. They believed in free love and no money. They were going to abolish money. I'm not quite sure what they were going to put in it. But there were all these political sects. And so there are the less well-known ones like that one. But there were there were all these political sects and so there are the less well-known ones like that one but there were also of course Bolsheviks Lenin was very much in favor of what Donizio was doing he sent him caviar doesn't he yes yes because of course if you're a Russian dictator you send caviar but he also said Donizio was the only true revolutionary in Europe but isn't there an argument that's what what he sets up in Fiume for the next 15 months or so? So he ignores all attempts to get him out, even the Italian government basically want him out. They organize a plebiscite, which he ignores.

And he basically calls himself the Commandant. He spends his time either taking loads of coke or standing on the balcony kind of addressing and he's got the black uniform hasn't he and there's black uniforms he's called the commandant i mean so in some ways this looks like i mean it's funny that you said he arrived feverish because it's like a kind of fascistic fever dream isn't it of what an ideal sort of state but it's like it looks like a kind of 1970s visconti film about fascism where everybody's naked and having orgies and taking national play at the national theater yeah exactly that's exactly what it is isn't it i mean i mean so should we see the fumé story as this comic opera interlude or is it something much

more sinister because it's obviously anticipating and it's contempt for kind of legal norms it's obviously contemptuous of the slavs but also the worship of kind of its contempt for kind of legal norms. It's obviously contemptuous of the Slavs, but also the worship of kind of the contempt for sort of established institutions, but the belief in creating new ones, the worship of violence and of action and spectacle and all that. I mean, this all feels immensely fascistic to me. Definitely, I quite agree. And it's not comic opera, but it's certainly theatre. And Donizio would come out onto the balcony. He'd taken over the old Habsburg governor's palace in the centre of the town, just this sort of fan-shaped square. So it's like an amphitheatre. He would stand on the balcony

and he would launch into these speeches, which weren't exactly speeches, they were dialogues with the crowd. So he'd be going, you know, what do we want? We want Fiume, what do we want? Fiume or death, and so on and so forth. And he would be working the people up into a frenzy of excitement. And he would lead them around the city and up into the mountains behind in great processions, and they'd be singing,ting out uh giovannetta which became the great fascist anthem giovannetta meaning youth donizio is by this time 57 but he called himself the prince

of youth and then they would go down onto the waterfront where there was sort of open space by the docks where he would uh review his his legion as he called them. He saw himself as a new Julius Caesar by this point. And they were, a lot of them were ex-Arditi. And the Arditi were the kind of the Italian shock troops during World War I. They would go ahead, you know, before the regular troops tried to march on an enemy trench or defensive post, the Arditi would go ahead with just their bayonets, not carrying guns. And they died very fast. I mean, they were almost sort of sacrificing themselves. But those who survived saw themselves as absolutely the creme de la creme of the Italian army. And they weren't really subject to the usual rules because they were being asked to take such risks.

And they had this very distinctive black uniform with the silver lightning flash. During the war, D'Annunzio often spoke specially to the Aditi. He was very excited by them, admiring of them. And they liked him. I mean, they felt that he got the point of them and he liked the way that he addressed them as the heroes of the war. And a lot of them followed him into Fiume. They didn't want to go home and be farm boys after the war ended. And so they were, as it were, his honor guard. And he would line them up down by the docks and review them. And it was there that he taught them the straight-armed salute,

which would become the fascist salute. And a lot of those rituals became a part of fascism. And it wasn't just the rituals. There was a lot of ethnically determined bullying. So Fiume was a very divided city. There was a prosperous Italian merchant class, and there was a Slav working class who tended to live on the outskirts of the city and most of them the other side of the river. And as the months, Terenzio's era in Fiume lasted astonishingly for 15 months, but just because it didn't suit any of the great powers to

get themselves together to boot him out, really. And in the course of that time, the city was partially blockaded by the Italian government, who were deeply embarrassed by what he was doing. And so they began to get very hungry. And of course, when people are hungry, they get angry and there are riots. And those riots became racially divided. And so the Slavic population of Fiume was being barred from getting food. It was becoming very, very ugly indeed. So that, yes, what may have started off as seeming rather romantic and idealistic. It was idealistic, but like a lot of idealistic ventures, it ended in a very ugly way.

In the end, it's the Italians who kick him out. Yes. And he goes back to Venice and then he ends up on Lake Garda. Essentially, he goes into retirement while Mussolini is then leading the fascists. And we've had loads of questions on the relationship between D'Annunzio and fascism. So just a few of them. Stefan Jensen, did D'Annunzio invent fascism? Harrison Pee, how closely does D'Annunzio's variety of fascism relate to the later fascism imposed by Mussolini and Brecht? Do you think there are any arguments to suggest he wasn't actually a fascist after all? I mean, just to kind of round things off,

what do you see D'Annunzio's relationship to fascism as being? I think that they took his ideas. He never endorsed fascism publicly, or he, in 1919, he went out onto the balcony in Milan, and he thought that was, afterwards he felt that was a great mistake. He was invited by the fascists to join them, but he never spoke in favor of them. After Fiume, Mussolini was very well aware that he, Mussolini, had a very small following by comparison with Donizio's. Donizio was a big, big public figure. And Donizio withdrew. He went to live on Lake Garda in a house that he, which was a perfectly ordinary, rather lovely Italian farmhouse when he bought it. And then he proceeded to turn it into this extraordinary mausoleum and a piece of installation art in celebration of himself.

And Mussolini was always aware that Donizio might suddenly reappear on the political stage. And there were certainly moments when people approached him suggesting that he might wish to do so but he didn't i think that he's kind of lost his nerve after fume he was very very distressed by the fact that it was he saw himself as an italian hero but it was an italian warship that suddenly appeared in the harbor at fume and fired a missile into the city at at which point it took a few days, but he capitulated and agreed to leave. And that really destroyed his confidence in himself as the embodiment of the Italian race.

I would say that D'Annunzio wasn't a fascist, but fascism was definitely D'Annunzio. It's my catchphrase on that. Do you think he... One of the other questions is, Douglas Andrews, if D'Annunzio rather than Mussolini had led the fascists into power in Italy in the 1920s, what would have been different? I mean, there is a moment, isn't there,

in the story about 1919, 1920, when Italy is in such an economic mess at the end of the First World War, it's torn apart by the fighting between the kind of squadristi and Bolsheviks and stuff. And lots of people, there's lots of talk of D'Annunzio becoming a dictator. by the fighting between the kind of squadristi and Bolsheviks and stuff. And lots of people, there's lots of talk of Donizio becoming a dictator. Do you think that was a possibility? And if he had done so, do you think it would have gone in a kind of Mussolini-like direction?

Or was he too much of a dilettante for that to happen? I think it could easily have happened. And there were certainly people who wanted it to happen, who were, you know, inviting him to step forth on both sides. I mean, people who thought that he would be, well, a bit more civilized than Mussolini anyway, more moderate. And other people who thought he might be more extreme. I mean, when Mussolini tried to distance himself from the squadristi and the, you know, the extreme violence of the first fascist years. And there were some people who thought Mussolini was getting too soft and thought maybe the Nazi could come back and be more violent. But the truth is, I don't think he was ever interested. I think he loved arriving in Fiume at the head of his legion

and all the drama of it and and the singing, and the theatre, and the excitement. But actually, he wasn't at all interested in government. You know, he didn't want to have to think about taxes and... Boring. Boring. Yeah. Yeah. So he lives all the way through the 30s. He dies in um and obviously what happens in the second world war fascism is is irredeemably seen as something wicked and evil and sinister and so i'm very interested question that harold stassen asks which is how is denuncio thought of in italy today whenever i've been on a trip to italy i seem to find myself walking down a street named after him. So Donizio has not been cancelled, as it were, in Italy. No, absolutely not. But he was, actually. In the kind of late 40s, 50s, Italians had a difficult

legacy to cope with after the end of the fascist regime and the end of the Second World War. And there was a time when Donizio was much less visible than he is now. But now certainly his early poems, which are beautiful, very much part of the curriculum. Every school child who is studying Italian literature beyond a certain point will have read some of Donizio's early lyrics. He's remembered like that. You know, when I was researching my book and I first went to his house on Lake Garda, I was quite startled to realise to what extent it was and still is a place of pilgrimage for the extreme right.

So he's still admired by people who share his political views, which is alarming. Lucy, thanks so much. That was absolute prize winning, brilliant book. I mean, just compulsively readable. It is. And actually, what we haven't said about it is that it's what makes it such a wonderful book, apart from all the other things, is that it's not boring, you know, page one to page 600, cradle to grave biography. It's a book that kind of reinvents the art of biography, isn't it, Tom? It really is. So that's The Pike. Yeah.

Lucy Hughes Hallett. Lucy, thanks so much. Thanks to everyone for listening. And we'll be back soon. Bye bye. Thank you, Lucy. Bye bye. Thank you. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.