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Gabriele D'Annunzio is an Italian poet, writer, and nationalist. Head of Associazione Nazionalista Italiana (ANI), the National-Populist Italian party.
History[]
Early life[]
Gabriele was a student at Cicognini High School in Prato, Tuscany. At the age of sixteen, he published his first poetic collection, entitled Primo Vere. In 1881, he entered the University of Rome "La Sapienza", where he attended various literary circles, including that of the magazine Cronaca Bizantina, and wrote articles of literary criticism for the local press.
In 1883 he married Maria Hardouin di Gallese (1864-), who gave him three sons. D'Annunzio and Maria Hardouin divorced in 1891. D'Annunzio began three years later a tumultuous relationship with the actress Eleonora Duse, he plays in his plays. They broke up in 1910. In 1897, D'Annunzio was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for a three-year term.
On March 3, 1901, he was inaugurated with Ettore Ferrari, Grand Master of Italian Freemasonry of the Grand Orient of Italy, the People's University of Milan, where he gave several conferences. The friendship with Ferrari brought him closer to Freemasonry, where he reached the 33rd degree of the old and accepted Scottish Rite.
The Weltkrieg[]
After the start of the Weltkrieg, D'Annunzio returned to Italy and made public speeches in favour of Italy's entry on the side of the Entente. Since taking a flight in 1908, D'Annunzio had been interested in aviation. With the war beginning he volunteered and achieved further celebrity as a fighter pilot, losing the sight of an eye in a flying accident.
In February 1918, he took part in a daring, if militarily irrelevant, raid on the harbour of Bakar, helping to raise the spirits of the Italian public, still battered by the Caporetto disaster. On 9 August 1918, as commander of the 87th fighter squadron "La Serenissima", he organised one of the great feats of the war, leading nine planes in a 700-mile round trip to drop propaganda leaflets on Vienna.
Italian civil war[]
In 1919, Italy collapsed following an offensive by the central powers. Refusing the idea of an Italian Federation and rejected the monarchy for a long time, D'Annunzio joined the paramilitary forces of the ANI, a far-right organisation created in 1910 that proclaimed the Italian Republic with other republican parties.
While the nationalists of the ANI did not want to work with the Austrians, they were forced because of the advance of the Italian Socialist Republic, stopped at the edge of the Po thanks to Austrian help arriving in time. D'Annunzio distrusted the Austrian influence on the young Republic but accepted the arrival of the Austrians by pragmatism.
Role in the Italian Republic[]
After the end of the war, D'Annunzio devoted himself exclusively to the development of the ANI of which he became the leader in the early 1920s. He reorganized the party and became the Duce (Leader). The reorganization goes through the standardisation of the party but also by a total militarisation and the end of all opposition within the party towards D'Annunzio. The main points of this reorganization are:
- The address of the balcony
- Roman salvation
- The cries of "Eia, eia, eia! Alala!" extract of Achilles' cry in the Iliad
- Nationalist public rituals
- A cult around the Duce D'Annunzio
Over the years D'Annunzio has developed a political program based on irredentist Italian nationalism with a strong anti-Austrian feeling as well as the replacement of the parliamentary system by a corporatist and centralized national state dominated by the Duce. His ideas and his desire to install an Italian Legionary State comes from the Romanian Iron Guard and its leader Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
Literature Works[]
- L’Armata d’Italia (1888)
- Il piacere (1889)
- Le vergini delle rocce (1895)
- Per la più grande Italia (1915)
- Orazione per la sagra dei Mille (1915)
- La riscossa (1917)
- Lettera ai Dalmati (1919)