Italian irredentism

Italian irredentism in the Adriatic is presented as both a territorial demand and a political language through which postwar Italy argued over national belonging, sacrifice, and power. The Treaty of Rapallo made those tensions concrete: Italy secured Trieste and Zadar, relinquished Dalmatia, and accepted Fiume’s independence. The response split Mussolini from some of his own followers and from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s cause, revealing how irredentist aspiration could be invoked, revised, or set aside as political circumstances changed.

Postwar claims and national purpose

The book places Adriatic claims within a country emerging from war and confronting the return of five million veterans. Its account describes a political landscape in which older leaders and liberal institutions seemed exhausted, while the veterans’ mass represented a new force pressing on Italy’s borders. In that setting, territorial claims were bound to a larger promise of national renewal: the nation was to overcome its postwar crisis, regain strength, and take its place in the world. Irredentism therefore carries more than a map’s worth of meaning. It helps connect the memory of wartime sacrifice to a future of national greatness, even as the means of realizing that future remain disputed.

The competing meanings are clearest in the contrast between Versailles and Fiume in D’Annunzio’s address to his legionnaires. He cast the peace negotiations as symbols of a weary, fearful Europe and Fiume as youth, life, faith, and a future extending beyond the dead to those yet unborn. In this rhetoric, possession of Fiume becomes a sign of historical vitality, not simply a question of diplomatic borders. Yet the narrator notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio as he had hoped, and that the poet’s standing was already diminishing. The gap between an emotionally powerful territorial ideal and its uncertain political constituency is part of the concept’s story.

Rapallo and the disputed Adriatic settlement

The Treaty of Rapallo, announced on November 12, 1920, sought to resolve the Adriatic question between Italy and Yugoslavia. Italy’s eastern border was moved to Monte Nevoso, leaving Trieste secure. Italy gave up Dalmatia; Zadar alone was assigned to it, without an inland hinterland or the adjacent islands. The settlement made Zadar an Italian foothold surrounded by Croatian territory. Fiume, meanwhile, was granted full independence, while Sussak, its eastern coastal suburb and the location of Port Baross, went to Croatia. Fiume was thus neither Italian nor Croatian under the arrangement, and it was cut off from maritime trade with the East.

The consequences were immediately political. The settlement struck at D’Annunzio’s hopes for Fiume and at the larger irredentist expectation that Adriatic territory would be brought under Italian control. Mussolini, writing in Il Popolo d’Italia on the same day, declared himself frankly satisfied and judged the arrangement the best of those previously proposed. His approval was qualified: he objected to the outcome in Dalmatia and maintained that the possibility of revising its status should not be treated as permanently closed. But he endorsed the compromise reached by Giovanni Giolitti. The paper describes this as a direct blow to the Fiume fascists, whose response made the political cost unmistakable: even fascists in Fiume joined a bonfire of copies of the newspaper in Piazza Dante and sent it a bitter telegram. The charge of betrayal became openly audible.

A movement divided over the claims

At the November 15 meeting of the Central Committee of the Fasci di Combattimento, Mussolini argued that Rapallo should be accepted as a fait accompli in the name of national discipline. The new borders in Venezia Giulia and the settlement for Fiume were, in his account, broadly acceptable, though Dalmatia was not. He warned that the country was tired and that socialists could exploit a crisis. He also argued that D’Annunzio’s spectacular initiative had become gangrenous and needed to be cut away. The metaphor gave territorial maximalism a political limit: a claim might be defended as patriotic, but pursued without regard for the country’s condition it could threaten the movement and nation it claimed to serve.

The opposition came from within the fascist ranks. Pietro Marsich, a leading Venetian fascist and ardent supporter of D’Annunzio, denounced the agreement as nefarious and insisted that the Fiume movement would continue. The Dalmatian delegates made the disagreement harder to contain. They asserted their Italian identity and protested that the treaty subjected them to Croatian rule. Mussolini repeatedly asked them to specify their political objective, raising alternatives that included annexation as far as the Bay of Kotor, an Italian-Yugoslav republic, or full autonomy. His interventions attempted to move the discussion from shared emotion toward a defined program; he insisted that the question concerned the nation’s fate, not feeling alone.

After two hours, Mussolini withdrew his proposed agenda and accepted a compromise. The approved position praised the new borders, strongly objected to the loss of Dalmatia, and reiterated that Fiume should be Italian. Even Cesare Rossi, who had stood by Mussolini during the debate, did not support this reversal and voted against the agenda. The episode shows that irredentism was not a settled doctrine within the movement: claims could be scaled back under pressure, but concessions risked alienating adherents who regarded them as a betrayal of Italian communities and wartime purpose.

From the Adriatic to imperial ambition

Mussolini’s letter to D’Annunzio that evening continued to solicit the Commander’s view, asking whether efforts should seek all of Dalmatia from Zadar to Kotor or focus on preserving the territory promised by the Treaty of London. The letter’s conciliatory posture did not repair the relationship. D’Annunzio did not answer, and no further letter from him reached Milan. High-ranking military figures gradually left the poet, and D’Annunzio was left isolated. The narrative thus records not only a diplomatic settlement but the narrowing of the coalition behind the most expansive Adriatic claims.

Mussolini’s subsequent appeal was for peace and national recovery. He argued that Italy needed time to rebuild and that new wars, unless forced by sudden aggression, would be madness or crime. This did not amount to abandoning expansionist ambition. In the argument that followed, he urged Italians to look beyond the Adriatic, treating it as only a small gulf within the Mediterranean and pointing instead to broader possibilities for Italian expansion. The shift distinguishes a specific irredentist claim from a wider imperial project: the former could be relinquished or deferred while the latter remained an organizing aspiration.

That larger program appears explicitly in Mussolini’s later account of fascism’s future. He presented the movement as a force for making Italians into a unified national people, erasing regional identities within the borders, while looking beyond them toward an imperial ideal. Irredentism’s emphasis on territory and Italian belonging therefore sits within a more expansive political vision. The book’s treatment of the concept is defined by this tension: the promise of recovering lands and honoring sacrifice could inspire commitment, yet its claims competed with diplomatic compromise, movement discipline, and ambitions extending well beyond the Adriatic.