Hi all, first post in a while! Is nice to be back...
At the stroke of midnight on September 11 1919, a group of 193 men met in an Istrian graveyard. It was the beginning of one of the odder escapades in 20th century history. The gathering had been organised by a small group of mutinous Sardinian grenadiers, furious at the orders they had received to withdraw from the Adriatic city of Fiume. The 'Ronchi Seven', as they soon became known, could not let such a humiliation stand; they plotted to launch a private invasion of Fiume so that the city could be forcibly incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. They soon gathered a small group of like-minded troops, mostly veterans of the feared 'Arditi' stormtrooper regiments, to their cause; to give their mission legitimacy and publicity, they also invited the renowned poet, playwright and demagogue Gabrielle D'Annunzio to join them.
At this point in 1919, D'Annunzio was at the height of his fame and influence within Italy. His exploits during the Great War had made him wildly popular amongst the soldiers whose deaths he lauded, while his inflammatory rhetoric neatly matched the angry, bitter and frustrated mood of much of the Italian public. D'Annunzio had been at the forefront of the Italian campaign to acquire the eastern shore of the Adriatic in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had whipped domestic opinion into such a fury over the issue that when the Italian delegates in Paris were told that Dalmatia would be given to the newly-formed kingdom of Yugoslavia, Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, promptly burst into tears, shouted that he was sure to be assassinated and had to be consoled with a big hug from a sheepish Woodrow Wilson.
The invasion of Fiume got off to a rocky start- when the conspirators gathered in Ronchi they realised they had forgotten to sort out transport and had to steal some trucks from a nearby army base- but by morning, the column was speeding across Istria. D'Annunzio was at its head, driven in a red Fiat so full of flowers that many observers thought it was a hearse. He was practically comatose with fever, but still managed a stirring speech that has presumably lost a little in translation, given that he told the men that they were now 'entirely his' and offered them 'only death'.
Between D'Annunzio and Fiume were thousands of troops, all ordered to shoot anyone who approached the city without authorisation. Unfortunately their Commanding Officer, General Pittaluga, was new to the role, utterly unqualified to handle the complex diplomatic balancing act that the occupation of Fiume had become, and in any case had (entirely unfounded) suspicions that the Italian government had secretly supported the conspiracy. When D'Annunzio and his column approached the army lines, he begged the poet to stop, and when he refused, announced that he would not shed Italian blood, meekly letting the column pass; in the next few hours, the entire Italian army in the region deserted en masse and joined the conspirators.
By the afternoon, with cheering crowds filling the streets (the women of Fiume came out heavily armed, but wearing their finest evening dress), D'Annunzio entered the city on top of an armoured car and at the head of a column of thousands of mutinous Italian soldiers. He gave a speech at the Governor's palace where he proclaimed "Ecce Homo"- 'here is the man', and rapturously announced the reunification of Fiume and Italy. "Behold," D'Annunzio said, "A beacon has been lit at the end of the Adriatic!" Fiume was a "sacred fire" whose sparks would set first Italy aflame then the rest of the world. D'Annunzio had always been fond of the image of the sacrificial pyre; he recalled this, and unintentionally foreshadowed the ultimate direction of the political movement whose birth he was presiding over when he grandly announced that Fiume would be the "City of the Holocaust".
Over the next few days whole battalions of Italian troops deserted to join the revolutionaries in Fiume, and thousands of civilians also made the journey, to the extent that the new authorities were forced to close the city to new arrivals to prevent starvation. Most of these incomers had larger aims, and for them Fiume was only a first step. Some wanted to export the revolution to the rest of Italian Dalmatia; others wanted to make the city a utopian state as the vanguard of a world revolution. The majority, however, saw the capture of Fiume as the necessary first step in a nascent Italian revolution. D'Annunzio was one of them. Boasting that he could invade Rome with 300,000 troops, he published addresses and manifestos calling for Italy to be "set ablaze".
In late September 1919, everyone, from the Italian General Command to the British Ambassadors expected the Italian government to be toppled in revolution.Yet the moment never came. Angrily denouncing the Italian people as idle and craven, D'Annunzio remained in his new possession as Fiume's "commandant". Gradually, the momentum behind his revolution faded, and people began to drift away from Fiume. Just over a year after D'Annunzio's rapturous arrival, with his glorious utopian experiment mired in interethnic conflict, brutality and starvation, the Regia Marina bombarded Fiume and reasserted control over the city. D'Annunzio slunk back to Italy. He was still influential, but nowhere near as much as he was at his peak; his dalliance in Fiume had allowed Benito Mussolini to supplant him as Italy's putative saviour.
So, what if?
The difficult part of the PoD is spurring D'Annunzio into action in the first place. His inaction once installed as Fiume's "commandant" was entirely characteristic; he'd actually been asked to lead the march on Fiume back in May 1919 and had spent the entire summer dithering over whether to join the conspiracy or go on holiday to Japan. It's also quite possible that he wasn't expecting to be put in a leadership role; when he was told that he would rule Fiume, D'Annunzio allegedly replied "who, me?", and while this reaction doesn't match his often messianic rhetoric, a certain amount of cold feet at the prospect would be understandable. Aside from self-doubt (and D'Annunzio certainly had a lot of self-knowledge), his failure to march on Rome was also down to the doubts of some of those close to him; the Istrian irredentist Giovanni Giuriati, D'Annunzio's chief minister in Fiume, deliberately prevented his boss from meeting delegations begging him to launch a wider Italian revolution because he had misgivings about the Commandant's suitability as dictator.
Luckily for the purposes of the discussion, these issues can be swept aside by events without too much trouble. D'Annunzio had been convinced to head to Fiume by the simple expedient of dressing up a pretty girl in a tricolour ribbon and getting her to give him a bouquet of flowers; perhaps one of the patriotic, famously promiscuous women of Fiume could be stretchered in (D'Annunzio had a fetish for ailing women, particularly if their hands were injured) and beg him with her dying breath to launch his revolution? The other means would be simple luck; in what really is a gift for alternative history, D'Annunzio liked to make decisions based on chance, and IOTL elected to surrender rather than martyr himself at the end of the Fiume adventure on the basis of a coin toss. He even had a set of dice inscribed "Alea jacta est", which would seem perfect for the occasion!
Either way, let's say that in late September 1919 D'Annunzio and his supporters decide to, as one newspaper put it, "annex Italy to Fiume" and march on Rome. What happens next?
It's almost inconceivable that if D'Annunzio had marched on Rome in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Fiume, he'd have failed to topple the Italian government. Everyone in Italy thought this was going to happen, and it's difficult to see what could have stopped him had he made the decision. The Army would have supported him, the combatants associations would have raised men to join the putsch attempt, and King Victor Emmanuel had previously implied that he would like to appoint D'Annunzio as Prime Minister had he the opportunity. The rebels would also have had considerable, though by no means universal, support amongst the Italian people.
It seems very likely then that OTL's "Sacred Entry" into Fiume gets a larger, more elaborate sequel; what begins as a determined military operation turns into a carnival as more and more people join the revolutionaries, with every military force sent to stop D'Annunzio either defecting or standing aside until the government flees Rome and the King appoints him Prime Minister.
So amidst scenes of frenzied joy and general national jubilation, D'Annunzio is acclaimed Il Duce (Nothing exclusive to Mussolini of course, Cadorna often got described this way during the war). What then?
One big change will be in foreign policy terms. A D'Annunzio putsch would drop a brick in the diplomatic pond; at the very least Italy will annex Fiume in direct contravention of the wishes of Britain and France, as well as Zara, the Dalmatian Islands and anywhere else along the Adriatic littoral that they still occupy. There will be no Treaty of Rapallo, and Italy will demand everything it was promised in the 1915 Treaty of London. This means, at the very least, skirmishes with the newly formed Yugoslav Kingdom; my guess is that war will be averted (much to D'Annunzio's frustration) and that Italy will get most of what it wants, at the cost of Yugoslav antipathy and Anglo-French fury.
If the British and French criticise him, D'Annunzio likely follow his path IOTL of posing as the worldwide revolutionary, announcing his support for "the indomitable Sinn Fein of Ireland" and "the Egyptian Red banner where cross and crescent are united". The creation of something similar to the "League of Fiume", intended as a direct, anti-imperialist competitor to the League of Nations, seems likely ITTL too, and could quite possibly transmute into a sort of fascist international. One potential further avenue to advance this cause would be Turkey, where Italian troops had been deployed in Southern Anatolia. IOTL the infant Turkish Republic received quite a lot of Italian arms; ITTL I could see D'Annunzio fully throwing his weight behind Attaturk as a way of discomfiting the British, French and Greeks and taking a first step along the road to reclaim Venice's old possessions in the Aegean. The implications of this are interesting; perhaps a *Chanak Crisis comes several years early? There's a final wrinkle, and that's Russia. Perhaps counter-intuitively, D'Annunzio tried very hard to cultivate good relations with the Soviets IOTL, and given Italy's likely diplomatic isolation ITTL I can see him doing the same.
In terms of form, ceremony and language, D'Annunzio's Italy looks a fair bit like Mussolini's. It probably won't be called 'fascism' ITTL though, although as D'Annunzio never really came up with an 'ism' for his creed, that might work as a stand in. More likely we'll hear a lot about 'life' and 'Italianism'. 'Holocaustism' is a tasteless suggestion really, but might catch on ITTL, given Italy's status as nation host to the sacrificial pyre.
OTL's fascist iconography will look very watered-down by comparison to D'Annunzio's, however; there will be all sorts of weird stuff going on. I'm sure that ITTL the Feast of St Sebastian, one of D'Annunzio's favourites, will seriously sour relations with the church, as a priest reverently presents Il Duce with a bayonet and asks him to use it to "carve the word victory in the living flesh of our enemies". IOTL the Vatican hated D'Annunzio and him being in charge will make things even worse; a concordat and Lateran Treaty seem rather unlikely ITTL.
Internally, things will initially be very different from Mussolini's OTL coup of 1922. For a start, D'Annunzio and Mussolini were very different propositions. D'Annunzio makes Mussolini look like an administrative genius; as Giovanni Giuriati, who acted as his chief minister in Fiume, pointed out, he was financially incontinent, indecisive, governed by superstition, impulsive and entirely uninterested in the day-to-day grind of politics. His time as a deputy in the Italian parliament had been brief and undistinguished- after having campaigned vigorously for his seat, D'Annunzio lost interest in it entirely and spent most of his term in office touring Egypt and Greece. What he cared about was politics as performance art rather than policy.
This has all the makings of a complete disaster, but Italy is a more robust entity than Fiume, and the overall effect is probably to make the D'Annunzio regime far more collegiate than the OTL equivalent. IOTL D'Annunzio relied on subordinates like Giuriati and Ceccherini to do most of the donkey work; ITTL he'll have them on hand as well as many of the OTL fascists, most notably Mussolini himself, who will be lurking around the place and doubtless causing enough trouble to make it worth bringing him inside the tent. They are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting though, and the longer things go on, the more D'Annunzio will act more as a figurehead for the regime than as it's driving force.
So what's the role for D'Annunzio in the long run? IOTL in the Charter of Carnaro, which envisaged a corporatist government for Fiume, the nine occupation-based 'Corporations' would be complemented by a additional one "reserved for the mysterious forces of the people a figure of offering to the unknown genius, to the appearance of the new man, to the ideal transfiguration of the works and if the days, to the fulfilled liberation of the spirit". D'Annunzio frequently identified himself with the Nietzschian superman and this role in the charter was clearly earmarked for him; it seems sensible that after a discreet interval as Prime Minister of Italy, he'd embark on his apotheosis to father of the nation and guardian of the Italian national genius while leaving all the boring governmental stuff to his subordinates, who will then have to clear up a lot of the mess that he created.
All of which means that after a turbulent few years with lots radical pronouncements, odd ceremonies and diplomatic isolation, a D'Annunzio regime seems likely to settle into something broadly similar, and similarly oppressive, to OTL. The big difference however is that unlike OTL, where D'Annunzio lived in relative seclusion and Mussolini paid lip service to him while carefully ensuring he couldn't pose any sort of political threat, ITTL he's the father of the nation and the revolution, and free to casually throw grenades at the government whenever he sees fit in the form of ranting speeches to his rapturous supporters. I suspect this means that he ends up being a constant headache to whoever ends up in charge (and given D'Annunzio's frequently-expressed view on Mussolini as a idle windbag, it might not be OTL's Duce), especially if he follows his pattern IOTL of becoming increasingly supportive of the workers. This constant pressure and use of the public as a means to influence the government probably means that Italy takes a more radical tinge; this is a TL where Mussolini is able to pose as the moderate.
Will things end well for Italy ITTL? Probably not, but D'Annunzio is unlikely to live to see it. IOTL his syphillis was increasingly a problem as the 1920s went on, and ITTL I could see his pronouncements getting increasingly bizarre until either he goes too far and severely embarrasses the government, or himself. Either way, Il Duce will likely withdraw from public life towards the end of the decade, beloved by the nation and regarded by most other people as Italy's mad uncle in the attic. His death, either of a brain haemorrhage as IOTL, syphillis or possibly suicide (D'Annunzio contemplated taking his own life many times and might even have attempted it on a few occasions, including his infamous defenestration in 1922), will be the cause for frenzied mourning.
In some ways, D'Annunzio as Il Duce seems a bit of a counter factual damp squib from a counterfactual perspective. Sure, things are different and the butterflies will be interesting, but are things really that divergent from OTL? You'd expect somebody as flamboyant and exciting as D'Annunzio do more ITTL somehow. Yet in my view, examining the consequences of D'Annunzio marching on Rome in 1919 is a classic example of how alternative history can help you come to useful conclusions about OTL. The truth is that D'Annunzio didn't need to rule Italy to transform it; as the Italian Communist Angelo Tasca noted, "D'Annunzio under fascism was the victim of the greatest piece of plagiarism ever seen." He had already laid the intellectual, spiritual and iconographic foundations of fascism; as Il Duce, he could hardly do that much more.
At the stroke of midnight on September 11 1919, a group of 193 men met in an Istrian graveyard. It was the beginning of one of the odder escapades in 20th century history. The gathering had been organised by a small group of mutinous Sardinian grenadiers, furious at the orders they had received to withdraw from the Adriatic city of Fiume. The 'Ronchi Seven', as they soon became known, could not let such a humiliation stand; they plotted to launch a private invasion of Fiume so that the city could be forcibly incorporated into the Kingdom of Italy. They soon gathered a small group of like-minded troops, mostly veterans of the feared 'Arditi' stormtrooper regiments, to their cause; to give their mission legitimacy and publicity, they also invited the renowned poet, playwright and demagogue Gabrielle D'Annunzio to join them.
At this point in 1919, D'Annunzio was at the height of his fame and influence within Italy. His exploits during the Great War had made him wildly popular amongst the soldiers whose deaths he lauded, while his inflammatory rhetoric neatly matched the angry, bitter and frustrated mood of much of the Italian public. D'Annunzio had been at the forefront of the Italian campaign to acquire the eastern shore of the Adriatic in the wake of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He had whipped domestic opinion into such a fury over the issue that when the Italian delegates in Paris were told that Dalmatia would be given to the newly-formed kingdom of Yugoslavia, Vittorio Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, promptly burst into tears, shouted that he was sure to be assassinated and had to be consoled with a big hug from a sheepish Woodrow Wilson.
The invasion of Fiume got off to a rocky start- when the conspirators gathered in Ronchi they realised they had forgotten to sort out transport and had to steal some trucks from a nearby army base- but by morning, the column was speeding across Istria. D'Annunzio was at its head, driven in a red Fiat so full of flowers that many observers thought it was a hearse. He was practically comatose with fever, but still managed a stirring speech that has presumably lost a little in translation, given that he told the men that they were now 'entirely his' and offered them 'only death'.
Between D'Annunzio and Fiume were thousands of troops, all ordered to shoot anyone who approached the city without authorisation. Unfortunately their Commanding Officer, General Pittaluga, was new to the role, utterly unqualified to handle the complex diplomatic balancing act that the occupation of Fiume had become, and in any case had (entirely unfounded) suspicions that the Italian government had secretly supported the conspiracy. When D'Annunzio and his column approached the army lines, he begged the poet to stop, and when he refused, announced that he would not shed Italian blood, meekly letting the column pass; in the next few hours, the entire Italian army in the region deserted en masse and joined the conspirators.
By the afternoon, with cheering crowds filling the streets (the women of Fiume came out heavily armed, but wearing their finest evening dress), D'Annunzio entered the city on top of an armoured car and at the head of a column of thousands of mutinous Italian soldiers. He gave a speech at the Governor's palace where he proclaimed "Ecce Homo"- 'here is the man', and rapturously announced the reunification of Fiume and Italy. "Behold," D'Annunzio said, "A beacon has been lit at the end of the Adriatic!" Fiume was a "sacred fire" whose sparks would set first Italy aflame then the rest of the world. D'Annunzio had always been fond of the image of the sacrificial pyre; he recalled this, and unintentionally foreshadowed the ultimate direction of the political movement whose birth he was presiding over when he grandly announced that Fiume would be the "City of the Holocaust".
Over the next few days whole battalions of Italian troops deserted to join the revolutionaries in Fiume, and thousands of civilians also made the journey, to the extent that the new authorities were forced to close the city to new arrivals to prevent starvation. Most of these incomers had larger aims, and for them Fiume was only a first step. Some wanted to export the revolution to the rest of Italian Dalmatia; others wanted to make the city a utopian state as the vanguard of a world revolution. The majority, however, saw the capture of Fiume as the necessary first step in a nascent Italian revolution. D'Annunzio was one of them. Boasting that he could invade Rome with 300,000 troops, he published addresses and manifestos calling for Italy to be "set ablaze".
In late September 1919, everyone, from the Italian General Command to the British Ambassadors expected the Italian government to be toppled in revolution.Yet the moment never came. Angrily denouncing the Italian people as idle and craven, D'Annunzio remained in his new possession as Fiume's "commandant". Gradually, the momentum behind his revolution faded, and people began to drift away from Fiume. Just over a year after D'Annunzio's rapturous arrival, with his glorious utopian experiment mired in interethnic conflict, brutality and starvation, the Regia Marina bombarded Fiume and reasserted control over the city. D'Annunzio slunk back to Italy. He was still influential, but nowhere near as much as he was at his peak; his dalliance in Fiume had allowed Benito Mussolini to supplant him as Italy's putative saviour.
So, what if?
The difficult part of the PoD is spurring D'Annunzio into action in the first place. His inaction once installed as Fiume's "commandant" was entirely characteristic; he'd actually been asked to lead the march on Fiume back in May 1919 and had spent the entire summer dithering over whether to join the conspiracy or go on holiday to Japan. It's also quite possible that he wasn't expecting to be put in a leadership role; when he was told that he would rule Fiume, D'Annunzio allegedly replied "who, me?", and while this reaction doesn't match his often messianic rhetoric, a certain amount of cold feet at the prospect would be understandable. Aside from self-doubt (and D'Annunzio certainly had a lot of self-knowledge), his failure to march on Rome was also down to the doubts of some of those close to him; the Istrian irredentist Giovanni Giuriati, D'Annunzio's chief minister in Fiume, deliberately prevented his boss from meeting delegations begging him to launch a wider Italian revolution because he had misgivings about the Commandant's suitability as dictator.
Luckily for the purposes of the discussion, these issues can be swept aside by events without too much trouble. D'Annunzio had been convinced to head to Fiume by the simple expedient of dressing up a pretty girl in a tricolour ribbon and getting her to give him a bouquet of flowers; perhaps one of the patriotic, famously promiscuous women of Fiume could be stretchered in (D'Annunzio had a fetish for ailing women, particularly if their hands were injured) and beg him with her dying breath to launch his revolution? The other means would be simple luck; in what really is a gift for alternative history, D'Annunzio liked to make decisions based on chance, and IOTL elected to surrender rather than martyr himself at the end of the Fiume adventure on the basis of a coin toss. He even had a set of dice inscribed "Alea jacta est", which would seem perfect for the occasion!
Either way, let's say that in late September 1919 D'Annunzio and his supporters decide to, as one newspaper put it, "annex Italy to Fiume" and march on Rome. What happens next?
It's almost inconceivable that if D'Annunzio had marched on Rome in the immediate aftermath of the capture of Fiume, he'd have failed to topple the Italian government. Everyone in Italy thought this was going to happen, and it's difficult to see what could have stopped him had he made the decision. The Army would have supported him, the combatants associations would have raised men to join the putsch attempt, and King Victor Emmanuel had previously implied that he would like to appoint D'Annunzio as Prime Minister had he the opportunity. The rebels would also have had considerable, though by no means universal, support amongst the Italian people.
It seems very likely then that OTL's "Sacred Entry" into Fiume gets a larger, more elaborate sequel; what begins as a determined military operation turns into a carnival as more and more people join the revolutionaries, with every military force sent to stop D'Annunzio either defecting or standing aside until the government flees Rome and the King appoints him Prime Minister.
So amidst scenes of frenzied joy and general national jubilation, D'Annunzio is acclaimed Il Duce (Nothing exclusive to Mussolini of course, Cadorna often got described this way during the war). What then?
One big change will be in foreign policy terms. A D'Annunzio putsch would drop a brick in the diplomatic pond; at the very least Italy will annex Fiume in direct contravention of the wishes of Britain and France, as well as Zara, the Dalmatian Islands and anywhere else along the Adriatic littoral that they still occupy. There will be no Treaty of Rapallo, and Italy will demand everything it was promised in the 1915 Treaty of London. This means, at the very least, skirmishes with the newly formed Yugoslav Kingdom; my guess is that war will be averted (much to D'Annunzio's frustration) and that Italy will get most of what it wants, at the cost of Yugoslav antipathy and Anglo-French fury.
If the British and French criticise him, D'Annunzio likely follow his path IOTL of posing as the worldwide revolutionary, announcing his support for "the indomitable Sinn Fein of Ireland" and "the Egyptian Red banner where cross and crescent are united". The creation of something similar to the "League of Fiume", intended as a direct, anti-imperialist competitor to the League of Nations, seems likely ITTL too, and could quite possibly transmute into a sort of fascist international. One potential further avenue to advance this cause would be Turkey, where Italian troops had been deployed in Southern Anatolia. IOTL the infant Turkish Republic received quite a lot of Italian arms; ITTL I could see D'Annunzio fully throwing his weight behind Attaturk as a way of discomfiting the British, French and Greeks and taking a first step along the road to reclaim Venice's old possessions in the Aegean. The implications of this are interesting; perhaps a *Chanak Crisis comes several years early? There's a final wrinkle, and that's Russia. Perhaps counter-intuitively, D'Annunzio tried very hard to cultivate good relations with the Soviets IOTL, and given Italy's likely diplomatic isolation ITTL I can see him doing the same.
In terms of form, ceremony and language, D'Annunzio's Italy looks a fair bit like Mussolini's. It probably won't be called 'fascism' ITTL though, although as D'Annunzio never really came up with an 'ism' for his creed, that might work as a stand in. More likely we'll hear a lot about 'life' and 'Italianism'. 'Holocaustism' is a tasteless suggestion really, but might catch on ITTL, given Italy's status as nation host to the sacrificial pyre.
OTL's fascist iconography will look very watered-down by comparison to D'Annunzio's, however; there will be all sorts of weird stuff going on. I'm sure that ITTL the Feast of St Sebastian, one of D'Annunzio's favourites, will seriously sour relations with the church, as a priest reverently presents Il Duce with a bayonet and asks him to use it to "carve the word victory in the living flesh of our enemies". IOTL the Vatican hated D'Annunzio and him being in charge will make things even worse; a concordat and Lateran Treaty seem rather unlikely ITTL.
Internally, things will initially be very different from Mussolini's OTL coup of 1922. For a start, D'Annunzio and Mussolini were very different propositions. D'Annunzio makes Mussolini look like an administrative genius; as Giovanni Giuriati, who acted as his chief minister in Fiume, pointed out, he was financially incontinent, indecisive, governed by superstition, impulsive and entirely uninterested in the day-to-day grind of politics. His time as a deputy in the Italian parliament had been brief and undistinguished- after having campaigned vigorously for his seat, D'Annunzio lost interest in it entirely and spent most of his term in office touring Egypt and Greece. What he cared about was politics as performance art rather than policy.
This has all the makings of a complete disaster, but Italy is a more robust entity than Fiume, and the overall effect is probably to make the D'Annunzio regime far more collegiate than the OTL equivalent. IOTL D'Annunzio relied on subordinates like Giuriati and Ceccherini to do most of the donkey work; ITTL he'll have them on hand as well as many of the OTL fascists, most notably Mussolini himself, who will be lurking around the place and doubtless causing enough trouble to make it worth bringing him inside the tent. They are going to have to do a lot of heavy lifting though, and the longer things go on, the more D'Annunzio will act more as a figurehead for the regime than as it's driving force.
So what's the role for D'Annunzio in the long run? IOTL in the Charter of Carnaro, which envisaged a corporatist government for Fiume, the nine occupation-based 'Corporations' would be complemented by a additional one "reserved for the mysterious forces of the people a figure of offering to the unknown genius, to the appearance of the new man, to the ideal transfiguration of the works and if the days, to the fulfilled liberation of the spirit". D'Annunzio frequently identified himself with the Nietzschian superman and this role in the charter was clearly earmarked for him; it seems sensible that after a discreet interval as Prime Minister of Italy, he'd embark on his apotheosis to father of the nation and guardian of the Italian national genius while leaving all the boring governmental stuff to his subordinates, who will then have to clear up a lot of the mess that he created.
All of which means that after a turbulent few years with lots radical pronouncements, odd ceremonies and diplomatic isolation, a D'Annunzio regime seems likely to settle into something broadly similar, and similarly oppressive, to OTL. The big difference however is that unlike OTL, where D'Annunzio lived in relative seclusion and Mussolini paid lip service to him while carefully ensuring he couldn't pose any sort of political threat, ITTL he's the father of the nation and the revolution, and free to casually throw grenades at the government whenever he sees fit in the form of ranting speeches to his rapturous supporters. I suspect this means that he ends up being a constant headache to whoever ends up in charge (and given D'Annunzio's frequently-expressed view on Mussolini as a idle windbag, it might not be OTL's Duce), especially if he follows his pattern IOTL of becoming increasingly supportive of the workers. This constant pressure and use of the public as a means to influence the government probably means that Italy takes a more radical tinge; this is a TL where Mussolini is able to pose as the moderate.
Will things end well for Italy ITTL? Probably not, but D'Annunzio is unlikely to live to see it. IOTL his syphillis was increasingly a problem as the 1920s went on, and ITTL I could see his pronouncements getting increasingly bizarre until either he goes too far and severely embarrasses the government, or himself. Either way, Il Duce will likely withdraw from public life towards the end of the decade, beloved by the nation and regarded by most other people as Italy's mad uncle in the attic. His death, either of a brain haemorrhage as IOTL, syphillis or possibly suicide (D'Annunzio contemplated taking his own life many times and might even have attempted it on a few occasions, including his infamous defenestration in 1922), will be the cause for frenzied mourning.
In some ways, D'Annunzio as Il Duce seems a bit of a counter factual damp squib from a counterfactual perspective. Sure, things are different and the butterflies will be interesting, but are things really that divergent from OTL? You'd expect somebody as flamboyant and exciting as D'Annunzio do more ITTL somehow. Yet in my view, examining the consequences of D'Annunzio marching on Rome in 1919 is a classic example of how alternative history can help you come to useful conclusions about OTL. The truth is that D'Annunzio didn't need to rule Italy to transform it; as the Italian Communist Angelo Tasca noted, "D'Annunzio under fascism was the victim of the greatest piece of plagiarism ever seen." He had already laid the intellectual, spiritual and iconographic foundations of fascism; as Il Duce, he could hardly do that much more.
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