Week 116

 

It's safe to say that D'Annunzio's march caught Prime Minister F.S. Nitti off guard. Not only he had received reassurances from the local authorities – even if these were, due to the typical character of the exchanges between Nitti and military commands, rather circumstantial and, in their specific form, such as to warrant perhaps a more concerned attitude – the news had reached him almost at the end of the day (and five hours after D'Annunzio's volunteers had entered Fiume), as the Italian Chamber was completing, at least from a parliamentary perspective, its rumination of the “Relation of the inquest Committee instituted with Royal Decree of January 12^th 1918”, which is to say, the “Caporetto inquest”, and, even then, not by the proper channels at first, but thanks to the publication of a letter from D'Annunzio in the afternoon edition of the Giornale d'Italia, of which Nitti had been informed, a few minutes to 18.00 pm and over half an hour before the first official confirmation of the events, by the Undersecretary to the Interior, Gino Grassi.

Even more shockingly, the new developments in Fiume were coming at the end of what Nitti could regard, and arguably with some good reason, as a period of parliamentary successes; when, after the troublesome beginnings of his Ministry, the ministerial boat had begun to navigate what appeared to be safer and more calm waters. Constituted in a state of diplomatic disarray, at the peak of two weeks of price riots and called to face a critical financial and economical situation as well as an imminent general strike, met with public manifestations led by the “national” forces and more active groups of combatants, and surrounded by rumors of conspiracies, radical subversion at both ends and supposed plans of an “order” military coup, troubled by the impossible definition of a “satisfactory” settlement of the Adriatic question, his Ministry had appeared to make its early steps in that political consolidation which accompanied and paralleled the normalization and stabilization of Italy's internal life, that “return to peacetime”, which offered, both in Nitti's mind and inaugural speech, a challenge just as difficult as the Great War had been.

Indeed Nitti had profused most of his efforts in the pursuit of this ultimate goal, while at the same time laboring to hold together his composite coalition – which was as diverse and often sheepish as the expression of an expiring parliament could be – where “national” elements and interventionists coexisted with neutralists and Catholics, as he laid the ground for the transition into a new parliament and prepared for his new post-electoral ministerial formation. Yet the Italian Prime Minister could also claim to have achieved certain immediate and more concrete goals.

In the eighty days between June 21^st and September 11^th 1919, besides the reestablishment of cordial, albeit of little consequence, relations with the Allies, and the less fortunate attempts to bring the US President to reconsider his stance on the Adriatic question – in consequence of which fact, the issue of Fiume remained, despite the Italian efforts, very much open to an unsatisfactory solution – Nitti had managed to work through the electoral reform with the introduction of proportional representation (September 2^nd 1919), to prepare the difficult ratification of the Treaty of Versailles (effected by decree, October 6^th 1919) and to open the examination of the Treaty of St.Germain (also, by decree, October 6^th 1919) as well as to keep the critical discussion of the responsibilities of Caporetto under control (concluded on September 13^th 1919), despite the somewhat controversial choice of a public debate. The prices situation had stabilized, albeit with the troubling return to a political price for bread, and the concurrent but mostly unrelated land seizures had received some form of normalization with the decree of the Minister of Agriculture, Achille Visocchi (September 2^nd 1919). As for the situation of the veterans returning from the front, Nitti had already contributed to the formation of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti (December 10^th 1917 – as Minister of the Treasury), which was supposed to provide them with assistance and to facilitate their reemployment.

This conferred to Nitti's political action at least the appearance of effectiveness (something which was noted even by his critics in subsequent years, albeit with a particular stress on the “appearance”), and may have contributed to earn him a measure of respite even from some of his most irreducible opponents (for instance, notable, if brief, the armed truce offered by Mussolini's Popolo d'Italia through the end of July and early August). More pragmatically, it was somewhat difficult to find a clear angle of criticism against Nitti's political action, when the Prime Minister appeared not only committed to the satisfaction of the many diverging needs of the composite national political landscape, but also surprisingly able to hold it together while moving the early steps in those different directions. That said, the opposition certainly didn't disarm, but rather withdrew to a more favorable ground, where they could wait out the Ministry which was destined, sooner or later, to ball. This was, of course, the international situation and the definition of the Adriatic question, where the intransigent demand for Fiume remained a central part of the “national” anti-ministerial opposition and where Nitti's hopes, more than to an unlikely satisfaction of the “national” field, were directed towards a neutralization of the public sensitivity allowing him to weather the expected political storm.

Yet, the opposition to Nitti, while still rising from the Adriatic, wasn't destined to take the form of a parliamentary crisis, or of a mounting press campaign – forms which the Italian Prime Minister would have been more prepared, and appeared confident, to handle – but appeared, initially at first, in a somewhat unprecedented fashion. That is, if we listen to Nitti.

Indeed there is no doubt that the Prime Minister, from a parliamentary perspective, had taken a few steps to overcome the early signs of that “parliamentary paralysis” which, far from apparent yet, was destined to become a central feature in the progressive deterioration and ultimate crisis of the liberal State: a process which had begun already during the vacancy of Orlando and Sonnino, when the two main political figures of the Executive had left Italy for Paris in the unfortunate pursuit of Italy's rightful compensations. His choice to press on with the electoral reform, and his intention to limit to a minimum the intervention of the government in the election process, managing to oversee what was often regarded, even by contemporaries (and not without a hint of criticism), as the “first truly democratic” elections in the history of Italy (aside for the women vote thing, that is), as well as his apparently earnest attempts at a liberalization of social and political life after the war, despite his idiosyncrasies of character, all seem to confirm this picture. At the same time, one should be careful in accepting acritically Nitti's retelling of the events, where D'Annunzio's action appears to be promoted and supported directly by those groups and interests which wanted to resist this “democratic” transformation; since there were more concrete reasons to doubt the feasibility of Nitti's approach as well as the effectiveness of his measures of normalization, as showcased first by the events of Fiume and then by the unfortunate (at least from a ministerial perspective) results of the 1919 elections.

Anyways, the news of D'Annunzio's action entered the Italian Parliament as a reminder, a striking contrast to the apparent successes of Nitti's parliamentary activity, that there was a part – whether large or small, fringe or majority – of the nation which rejected any identification, not only with Nitti's “anti-national” government, but with the institutions of the State where they were supposed to find their representation. A part which, unlike the “official socialists” with their “maximum program”, whose rejection of the institutions followed from a rejection of the nation, could subordinate their allegiance to the liberal State to its ability to embody a greater and higher idea, a truer and more natural form of representation. This was – while, understandably, the most immediate focus of the Ministry and political establishment went to the danger of these new developments and yet uncertain situation compromising an international landscape which Nitti and Tittoni had spent much effort in clearing up during the previous three months – destined to constitute a further element of that aforementioned degeneration of Italy's parliamentary system, as it came to signify and represent, for anyone to see, that the Nation, or the part which claimed to embody it, could, if circumstances of supreme urgency demanded it, choose to sort matters out by herself. And it mattered little whether the initiative was actually successful in producing its desired outcome (internal or external it might have been), whether the political world, nationalists included, was willing or not to embrace this new form of action in its concrete developments, since its result was to open a season where the State was stripped of more than its mechanical monopoly of public force, of its monopoly of the idea of nation.