Francesco Saverio Nitti

Francesco Saverio Nitti appears as a prime minister navigating a state under pressure from revolutionary unrest, fascist violence, and Gabriele D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume. His decisive significance lies in the contradictions of his response: his government sought to retain authority over armed organizations, yet invited fascists to help maintain public order; it tried to contain the Fiume rebellion through blockade and negotiation, but neither course restored political stability.

Prime Minister and Public Order

On July 14, 1919, Nitti issued a confidential circular to prefects addressing the limits of relying on the state and police alone. It called for fascist groups and combatants’ associations to make themselves available to the authorities in places where they existed, provided they accepted official direction. Cooperation could extend to repressing revolutionary attempts, including by force. The circular thus placed an emerging political movement inside the state’s public-order response, while insisting that authority over it should remain with government officials.

The arrangement was already being put into practice in Milan. Acting on Benito Mussolini’s instructions, Michele Bianchi had reached an agreement with the prefect to make local fascist groups available for maintaining order. Nitti’s circular gave this local cooperation national authorization. The episode presents a liberal government attempting to use fascist organization as an instrument against revolutionary mobilization, even as that decision gave armed political actors a role within the state’s own efforts.

That policy did not mean Nitti simply tolerated every fascist formation. On November 18, following a telegram from him that treated possession of hand grenades as presumptive criminality, authorities raided the Arditi Association’s headquarters in Milan. They seized bombs, grenades, pistols, daggers, maces, and ammunition, and arrested Ferruccio Vecchi and others. Further raids reached the fascist headquarters and the offices of Il Popolo d’Italia, where police found revolvers, cartridges, and a recently used flare gun. Benito Mussolini was arrested and taken to San Vittore Prison. The operation exposed the armed character of the organizations the government had previously sought to enlist.

Mussolini remained in prison for only twenty-four hours. On November 19, Luigi Albertini telephoned Nitti and argued for his release, reasoning that imprisonment could turn Mussolini into a martyr. Nitti agreed. The rapid reversal sharpened the ambiguity of the government’s position: it had authorized a hard line against weapons and armed groups, but its effort to contain fascism also depended on political judgment about how far to pursue its leader.

Fiume: Blockade and Compromise

Nitti’s conflict with D’Annunzio developed around the occupation of Fiume. After the seizure, Nitti remained in office and convened the Crown Council, bringing together senior politicians, former presidents, and military leaders. The council did not support annexation. Nitti then dissolved parliament and called new elections, choosing a political route that would leave the occupied city increasingly isolated rather than immediately authorize its incorporation into Italy.

The government also imposed an embargo that restricted supplies to Fiume. The narrative presents the blockade as a means of exerting pressure on D’Annunzio’s regime, tightening the city’s isolation while the wider country remained politically deadlocked. At the same time, the government proposed a modus vivendi: in exchange for ending the occupation, D’Annunzio’s legionnaires would receive military honors, and regular troops would defend the city with a view toward its eventual annexation. The offer combined a demand for withdrawal with concessions intended to make an orderly settlement possible.

The proposal was put to a popular plebiscite. On December 15, after several meetings, the Fiume National Council accepted it by 46 votes to 6. The vote suggested that the city’s governing body was prepared to end the rebellion through compromise. But acceptance by the council did not settle the matter in the streets: legionnaires and civilians gathered in protest, and D’Annunzio read the terms aloud to the crowd, which responded to each clause. Nitti’s proposal therefore became both a diplomatic instrument and a test of competing claims to political consent.

Political Enmity and the Government’s Fall

D’Annunzio’s hostility toward Nitti was personal in tone as well as political in substance. The poet accused Benito Mussolini of failing to support Fiume and threatened to act against Nitti himself once his own position was consolidated. Mussolini censored the letter before publishing it in Il Popolo d’Italia, a detail that places Nitti within the struggle over how the Fiume crisis was represented to the public. Despite D’Annunzio’s demands and the fundraising launched for Fiume, Mussolini remained in Milan. Nitti’s government had weakened, but it had not yet fallen, and Mussolini had not committed himself to D’Annunzio’s project.

In June 1920, Nitti’s government finally collapsed amid hunger and political conflict over the price of bread. Fiume celebrated his fall, while the city itself was becoming more disorderly: forces of order were departing, clashes broke out among armed units, and efforts to reach an agreement with the socialists failed. The government’s collapse did not resolve the crisis that had shaped its policy. Instead, it removed the prime minister whom D’Annunzio had opposed while leaving Fiume increasingly isolated and its political future unsettled.

Nitti in the Later Political Crisis

By the crisis of 1922, Nitti had become one of several former leaders with whom Mussolini’s circle explored possible arrangements. Cesare Rossi describes Mussolini’s negotiations with Nitti alongside contacts with Antonio Salandra, Luigi Facta, and Giovanni Giolitti. The offers held out the possibility of a coalition presidency and ministerial posts for fascists, but they formed part of a broader delaying strategy: Mussolini sought to keep alternatives in play while moving the political crisis toward a point at which a fascist government would appear unavoidable.

Mussolini continued to receive Nitti’s representatives and to suggest that a renewed appointment might be possible, although the account describes that prospect as already untenable. Nitti’s appearance in these negotiations marks a change in position: once the head of government whose administration had tried both cooperation and coercion, he was now one of the figures whose name could be used in a proposed settlement. After the March on Rome, fascists ravaged his small villa in Rome, extending political violence to the former prime minister’s property.

Narrative Significance

Nitti’s arc is defined less by a single decisive victory than by repeated attempts to manage forces that exceeded the government’s control. His circular made fascist assistance conditional on state direction, while the Milan raids demonstrated that the same movement possessed weapons and organization that the state might need to restrain. In Fiume, the blockade and the proposed compromise offered different means of pressure, but the council’s vote and the crowd’s resistance revealed that government terms alone could not settle the conflict.

The later negotiations complete this portrait of weakening authority. Nitti reappears as a possible participant in a coalition even as the account portrays Mussolini’s bargaining as a way to delay and narrow the alternatives to fascist power. His career in the narrative thus connects the liberal state’s practical reliance on its opponents with its inability to control the political consequences of that reliance.