D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume

D’Annunzio’s seizure of Fiume made the occupied city both a challenge to the postwar settlement and a political spectacle of national renewal. In the book’s account, its promise of a freer, youthful future collides with the loss of support, the failure to secure Fascist intervention, and the threatened destruction of the city; the occupation ends in surrender and the demobilization of its legionnaires.

Seizure and the promise of Fiume

D’Annunzio cast 1919 as the year of Fiume rather than the year of the Versailles negotiations. Against Versailles, which he associated with a fearful and exhausted Europe, he set Fiume as youth, beauty, light, and life: a place that carried the dead behind it and the unborn future ahead. The occupation’s significance thus lay not only in control of a city but in the rival meaning attached to it. Fiume was presented as a living alternative to the settlement made by the victorious powers.

D’Annunzio chose to remain there, believing it to be the place on earth where the soul was freest, even as the narrative stresses that Italians did not follow him in the numbers or spirit his vision required. His high language of renewal therefore stood against a political reality in which the cause was already losing its wider audience.

Rule, spectacle, and diminishing support

On the first anniversary of the march on Fiume, D’Annunzio addressed his legionnaires and celebrated the year as one of passion rather than peace. Yet the image of a heroic new political community was undercut by reports from the city. After Pietro Nenni returned from Fiume, he described its displays of princely and medieval grandeur as farce; police reports depicted abundance and vice, while district hospitals reported cases of bubonic plague. The contrast was sharp: the city that D’Annunzio made a symbol of vitality was also marked by squalor and disease.

The occupation’s political isolation became explicit as the Treaty of Rapallo approached. Benito Mussolini urged D’Annunzio to accept it, arguing that the Italian public had largely accepted the outcome and was abandoning the Fiuman cause. Others who had supported D’Annunzio also withdrew: Admiral Millo renewed his loyalty to the king, while General Ceccherini and Colonel Siani left, citing the legionnaires’ lack of discipline. D’Annunzio would not surrender absolute power, describing the prerogative as his one joy amid boredom. His refusal preserved his authority but could not restore the coalition around him.

The appeal to Mussolini

As an attack on Fiume seemed imminent, D’Annunzio sent a handwritten appeal to Fascist supporters. Captain Balisti carried the letter to Milan after travelling through the night; it asked them to honor their promise to rise if the government launched what D’Annunzio called a fratricidal attack. The message exposed the limits of the political connection between the two men. Mussolini called D’Annunzio a great man but judged him reckless, and refused to commit the Fascists, warning that the police could arrest them immediately.

That refusal reflected a widening divergence in political priorities. Mussolini was turning toward cooperation with Giovanni Giolitti and concentrating on national political opportunities; Fiume, in his view, could not justify risking the Fascist organization. D’Annunzio’s appeal therefore failed to turn the occupation into a broader uprising, leaving the city to face the approaching military pressure largely on its own.

Surrender and demobilization

After two days of continued bombing, General Ferrario rejected negotiations over the legionnaires’ surrender and threatened to intensify the attack. Representatives of Fiume urged D’Annunzio to give up his powers. He did so, saying that he could not impose ruin and absolute death on the city and transferring authority to its mayor and people. The narrative also notes the distance between his symbolic role as warrior and his conduct during the fighting: he remained in his study and did not join his legionnaires on the firing line.

At 4:30 p.m. on December 31, an agreement was signed at Abbazia for the legionnaires’ total demobilization from Fiume. The seizure’s end reversed its founding promise. A city celebrated as the beginning of a freer future became a place from which its armed followers had to withdraw, while the political solidarity D’Annunzio had sought never materialized.