Belle Époque

In the book’s account, the Belle Époque is not simply a vanished age of refinement. It is the setting for a sharp transformation: Gabriele D’Annunzio turns aesthetic distinction into a public language of war, while mass demonstrations and factory occupations expose conflicts that the old order cannot contain.

An age of aesthetic ambition

Born in 1863, D’Annunzio spent the first fifty years of his life seeking pre-eminence as Italy’s poet, and the narrative presents him as having achieved it. His poetry and prose, especially the novel Il piacere, shaped a generation’s tastes and won admiration beyond Italy. He claimed to have brought Italian literature to Europe; the account treats that boast as justified by the praise of the continent’s leading intellectuals.

His life, too, was fashioned as an aesthetic undertaking. A celebrated dandy and sensual, theatrical seducer, he pursued pleasure with the same intensity that he brought to literary reputation. At the height of the Belle Époque, however, this cult of aestheticism gave way, almost abruptly, to a cult of violence. The narrative makes the transition personal and political: the appetite for conquest that had marked his private life is redirected toward territorial expansion, and the poet becomes a prophet of national glory.

From literary celebrity to wartime figure

D’Annunzio’s change of role was enacted through public action as well as writing. He celebrated colonial enterprise in Canzoni d’Oltremare and urged Italy toward war in a speech at Quarto. When the Great War began, he sought to become a prominent soldier despite being near the age at which many men would expect to retire from public life. After securing permission to enlist as a liaison officer with the Novara lancers and obtaining a pilot’s license, he took part in air raids on Trieste, Trent, and Parenzo and served on the Karst front.

After being wounded in an emergency landing, D’Annunzio composed Notturno during convalescence. He later returned to the front against medical advice and conceived an assault on Quota 28, across the Timavo River. Giovanni Randaccio, his close friend, died in the attack. D’Annunzio then pursued further highly visible exploits: an attack on the port of Kotor, a flight over Vienna in which his squadron dropped propaganda leaflets, and a raid by small assault boats in Buccari Bay. The last, undertaken after the defeat at Caporetto, was described as raising the morale of Italian troops. The former aesthete had become, in the book’s formulation, a name among the nation’s victors and heroes.

The crowd as a challenge to the old order

The Belle Époque’s ending is also represented through mass politics. In Milan, a procession of forty thousand striking workers, accompanied by thirty bands and thousands of red flags, denounced the recently concluded war. The demonstrators called for land to be divided and deserters to receive amnesty. For the city’s nationalist and petit-bourgeois public, the march appeared not as a peaceful return to normality but as evidence that the social order itself had been unsettled.

The presence of women and children at the head of the procession sharpened that anxiety. The narrative connects their anti-militarist and unpatriotic slogans to the fear of an authoritarian, patriarchal future being displaced by people previously excluded from political authority. Shopkeepers and hoteliers shut their windows, lowered their shutters, and barred their doors. The image turns the city’s retreat indoors into a refusal to face the future implied by the march. The following day, Benito Mussolini answered with an editorial promising to defend the war dead against the protesters, showing how the memory of war could be made into a weapon in the struggle over the postwar public sphere.

Competing visions of mass politics

A later scene on the Bridge of the Sirenette gives the opposing view of the socialist crowd through the perspective of Albino Volpi, who watches a procession celebrating an electoral victory. He interprets its singing, red flags, and disordered movement as signs of a mob rather than a people. His response reveals the gulf between the crowd’s internationalist political symbols and the nationalist definition of Italianness against which he measures them; it also shows how contempt can prepare the ground for violence.

Other scenes show that mass politics could involve discipline and practical organization as well as spectacle. During the factory occupations, workers kept production going for thirty days without bank financing, raw materials, or the usual direction of technicians and engineers. They prohibited drinking during shifts, organized surveillance to prevent theft, and guarded machinery and supplies. Yet socialist leaders deferred a wider revolution, fearing that workers who left the factories would be defeated by forces they could not withstand. The contrast between workers’ self-organization and their leaders’ decision to postpone action captures a central tension in the book’s account of the age: the old order was under pressure, but the forces challenging it did not share a settled path forward.