It should be noted that the San Sepolcro programme appeared at the time that the Paris peace conference was entering a crucial phase as regards Italy. Italy was represented in Paris by Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Foreign Minister Sidney Sonnino. Sonnino was a key architect of the Pact of London, a secret agreement signed with Britain, France and Russia on 26 April 1915 as the basis for Italian intervention into the war. In the event of an allied victory the Pact promised Italy the Trentino and Upper Adige as far as the Brenner pass; Trieste; Istria as far as the Quarnaro to include Volosca and the Adriatic islands of Lussin and Cherso; Dalmatia as far down as Cape Planka; the port of Valona and a protectorate over Albania. The Pact also recognized Italy’s control of the Dodecanese Islands, and granted her compensation in North Africa if England and France increased their influence in that region. Fiume, however, was to remain in the Austro-Hungarian Empire as part of Sonnino’s strategy of containing ‘pan-Slav’ influence in the Balkans and using a territorially reduced Austro-Hungarian Empire as a guarantee against the union between Croatia and Serbia (Albrecht- Carrie, 1938: 334-9; Vivarelli, 1991, I: 172-3).
Despite the fact that the two main pillars of the Pact no longer existed at the end of the war (Austria-Hungary was no more, and Russia had withdrawn from the conflict following the October Revolution), Sonnino continued to defend the accord. Indeed, Orlando and Sonnino used the dissolution of Austria-Hungary to increase Italy’s territorial claims. Orlando was prepared to sacrifice elements of the Pact in exchange for a line along the Alps and the annexation of Fiume and Zara, while Sonnino continued to downplay the annexation of Fiume in favour of full recognition of the Pact of London. The compromise position was a claim for the Pact of London territories plus Fiume, and even a hint at the annexation of Splate. All this amounted to only slightly less than the demands of the nationalist imperialists, whose congress of 15 December 1918 had demanded Italy’s annexation of the whole of Dalmatia plus Fiume (Albrecht-Carrie, 1938: 370-87; Vivarelli, 1991, I: Ch. 2).
For reasons which are unclear, but which are probably linked to his status as a political journalist and owner of a Milan-based newspaper, Mussolini was a guest at the gala dinner given in honour of American President Woodrow Wilson on 5 January 1919 in the Scala Opera House in Milan. Wilson received a tremendous popular reception during his visits to Rome and Milan on 3, 4 and 5 January and during his brief stopovers in Genoa and Turin on his journey back to Paris (Mayer, 1968: Ch. 7). On 3 January Mussolini wrote: ‘It is not being adulatory towards the President of the great Republic of the stars if we say that today he is our guest and that Italy, by spirit, tradition and temperament is the most Wilsonian nation of all.’ Mussolini linked this pro-Wilson discourse to Italy’s fallen soldiers: ‘The people of the dead, which has tied a terrifying inheritance to the living, and the living, who propose to be deserving of the people of the dead, all today gather in body and spirit in the streets of the Eternal City to greet Wilson and recognize themselves in him’ (OO, XII: 106-9). Wilson’s visit to Italy came at an important moment in Italian political life following the resignation from government of reformist socialist Leonida Bissolati on 28 December 1918. This was occasioned by a disagreement with Sonnino over the Foreign Minister’s insistence on pursuing the Pact of London. Bissolati argued for a policy of friendship with Yugoslavia and Italy’s full insertion into Wilson’s New Diplomacy. He discussed these views personally with the American President in a meeting of 4 January 1919. At that encounter, and later during a speech at the Scala on 11 January, Bissolati outlined what he considered the necessary Italian territorial concessions to achieve alignment with Wilson. He argued that Italy should forgo its claims to the Upper Adige beyond Bolzano, leave Dalmatia to the Dalmatians, and renounce control of the Dodecanese Islands (Bissolati, 1923: 392, 394-414; Colapietra, 1958: 272-9; Mayer, 1968: 213). Correspondence between Mussolini and Bissolati in late November and early December 1918 had been extremely cordial (OO, XII: 37-8, 50). One would assume, therefore, that Mussolini’s support for Wilson’s mission in Italy also meant that he sided with Bissolati in his disagreement with Sonnino, and that the territorial claims of the programme of San Sepolcro emerged later and for reasons which need to be explained.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth. On 29 December Mussolini affirmed that, like Bissolati, he accepted Wilson’s proposals for the League of Nations and disarmament, but added that this was also Sonnino’s position. His point was that Sonnino was no more or less Wilsonian than France (which would never consider a plebiscite in Alsace-Lorraine), or Britain (which would never give back Gibralta, Malta or Cyprus, or consider reducing its fleet), or even America itself (which while calling for arms reduction was going ahead with its own naval programme; OO, XII: 88-90). On 1 January Mussolini accused Bissolati of causing ‘extreme humiliation’ for Italy in the run-up to the Paris conference (OO, XII: 100-103). Mussolini was present at the Scala on 11 January and was among those who shouted the speaker down when he began to discuss territorial issues (De Felice, 1965: 487-8). On 12 January Mussolini explained that he had not mentioned Mazzini recently because Mazzinians like Bissolati had been dishonouring his name (OO, XII: 134-6). Two days later he affirmed that Bissolati had become ‘the “leader” of the Germans, their man, their banner, their evangelist’ (OO, XII: 141-3).
How, then, did Mussolini’s pro-Wilson stance, given symbolic expression in a pro-nationalities unification of the living and the dead, fit with this public attack on a key Italian representative of Wilson’s position? Italy’s territorial ambitions stood in sharp contrast to the claims brought to the Paris conference by the Yugoslav delegation headed by Nicola Pasic and Ante Trumbic, a Serb and a Croat respectively. The Yugoslav state had been proclaimed on 29 October 1918, and on 1 December King Alexander had announced the existence of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. While Yugoslavs were confused as to which territorial claims they should make as a unified state, they had no doubts about their desired borders in relation to both Italy and Austria. They traced a line ranging from Pontebba in the north right down to the Adriatic. This stretched fifteen kilometres beyond the west side of the river Isonzo and went down as far as Monfalcone, which, however, was to remain in Italy. Into Yugoslav territory were to go the counties of Gorizia and Gradisca, Trieste, the whole of the Istria peninsula, Fiume, the islands of the Quarnaro and all of Dalmatia with its Archipelago (Lederer, 1966: 57-9, 101, 119, 129). Working in the Yugoslavs’ favour was the fact that one aim of Wilson’s fourteen-point speech to congress on 8 January 1918 (Wilson, 1969: 88-93) had been to reduce the import of Italy’s war. Following the October Revolution in Russia, the ideological struggle had intensified, rendering more urgent a reaffirmation of the democratic and anti-imperialist ideals for which, it was claimed, the Entente and America were fighting. Italian imperialism clashed with this strategy (Rossini, 1991: 488). In short, Italy was heading for a collision with the United States.
Immediately after the cessation of hostilities the Italian Army occupied the whole of the Pact of London territory and on 17 November 1918 moved into Fiume. Admiral Enrico Millo declared himself Governor of Dalmatia, and American observers in Fiume got the distinct impression that the Italians were there to stay (Lederer, 1966: 79-82, 91-2). On 22 November Mussolini dealt with Yugoslav animadversion to the Italian military occupations. In particular he rejected Croat disapprobation, the most vociferous in as much as Fiume had been occupied. He claimed that the Croats were ‘heroes of the last hour’ who had defected to the anti-Austrian side in 1918 ‘only when the die was cast’. He specified that ‘nobody contests the right of the Yugoslav people to unite and live in freedom’, once it did so in those territories left over after Italy had occupied Fiume and the territories promised by the Pact of London. At this point Italy’s fallen soldiers were again invoked:
Would Italy have made 42 months of war, would it have sacrificed the flower of ten generations (all Italian blood, since we didn’t put coloured or colonial troops in the line!), would it have subjected itself to the hardest of Calvaries, would it have slashed its veins, only to then hand over Trieste and Gorizia, which are Italian, to the Slovenes; Fiume and Zara, which are Italian, to the Croats? This is the most absurd of absurdities. It cannot and will not be. (OO, XII: 22-4)
In early to mid-December 1918 Mussolini initiated a collection campaign for the mother of Nazario Sauro (OO, XII: 61). Sauro, from Capodistria, had been an officer in the Austrian Merchant Navy, but had fought with the Italian Navy during the war. He was captured by the Austrians while attempting to enter Fiume with the submarine Pullino in late July 1916 and hanged for treason in August. Mussolini aimed for contributions of 25,000 lire, but claimed to have received more than three times that amount. He asked whether there was anything behind the generous donations and answered:
Yes. There is. Nazario Sauro is the martyr of our sea [the Adriatic]. The consecrator and claimant of its two shores. On the sea that is Sauro’s there is no place for other flags which are not those of peaceful commerce. Where there is the martyr, there is uncontested and incontestable right. Where there is heroism there is no place for bargaining. The sea of Sauro is the sea of Italy. (OO, XII: 67-8; Mussolini’s emphases)
The dead revivified were not only those from the Great War. In Trieste on 20 December Mussolini called up the ghost of the local patriot Gugliemo Oberdan, hanged by the Austrians in 1882 for possession of a bomb with which he intended to assassinate Emperor Franz Josef. Mussolini remarked that ‘death cannot end with death itself’. Italy had to arrive in Trieste ‘not only because 200,000 suffering living men are waiting, but because that Dead Man is waiting’ (OO, XII: 71-3). Nine days later Mussolini was in Leghorn for the unveiling of a memorial plaque to Sauro, Oberdan and Cesare Battisti. Battisti, a Trentino socialist and member of the Austrian parliament, had campaigned for the annexation of the Trentino to Italy. He returned to Italy in 1915 and subsequently enlisted. He was captured by the Austrians on 10 July 1916 and hanged two days later for treason. On unveiling the monument to the three national heroes Mussolini said: ‘We must have the religion of memory, not to remain locked in the past, but to set out on the triumphal march and to prepare for the difficult tasks that await us’ (OO, XII: 91-5).
Hence with reference to Italy’s fallen, Mussolini presented the victorious powers with an incontestable past, present and future Italian right to expansion to the north and east of its actual frontiers. As regards the League of Nations, he concurred that this was necessary for dealing with problems of national rights, but defined Italian expansionist claims as precisely that, namely ‘clear and legitimate [national] rights’, which again were non-negotiable since ‘460,000 dead men don’t permit [negotiation]’ (OO, XII: 110-12). It was not, however, until April 1919 that Mussolini felt he had enough evidence with which to assail Wilson. Prior to this he had limited himself to dealing with British and French demurral over the Italian military occupations and what he defined as their ‘complicity’ with the ‘Yugoslav imperialist thesis’ (OO, XII: 25-6, 42-4, 47-9, 62-3). Even on 9 March his invective was still aimed primarily against these two allied powers (OO, XII: 278-81). The shift occurred because on 14 April Wilson accepted the Pact of London in the north and a division of Istria between east and west, the so-called ‘Wilson line’. He also conceded to Italy the island of Lussin, control of Valona, the demilitarization of the other Adriatic islands, and the transformation of Fiume into a free city under the Yugoslav customs system (Lederer, 1966: 225-6). This, however, was insufficient for the Italian delegation in Paris, which merely reiterated its demand for the Pact of London plus Fiume. Mussolini agreed, and on 15 April invoked the dead ‘from the trenches beyond the Isonzo and the Piave’. Fiume was Italian ‘through a plebiscite of the living and the dead’. For Mussolini, Wilsonism was revealing itself to be ‘the idealism of business dealings’ (OO, XIII: 57-9).
Despite the placatory tone of Wilson’s 23 April appeal to the Italian people (over the heads of its rulers) for a reasonable position on territory, the Italian delegation took it as an affront. Orlando’s response, published in the Italian press alongside Wilson’s message, was a diplomatically worded but nevertheless sharp rebuttal (Albrecht-Carrie, 1938: 498-504). By 24 April the Italian delegation was on its way home. This withdrawal from the Paris conference received Mussolini’s support. He urged the parliamentary sitting of 29 April to proceed towards decreeing the annexation of Fiume and Dalmatia (OO, XIII: 85-7, 90, 101-3). However, the government merely sought (and received) parliamentary approval for its conduct at the negotiations. Ten days later it was back in Paris, cap in hand. On 9 May Mussolini declared that Italy, ‘the “Great Proletariat”’, was ‘ready to take up the class struggle once more’ against ‘an exquisitely plutocratic and bourgeois alliance’ of France, Britain and America (OO, XIII: 107-9). On 20 May he wrote that ‘if we are “betrayed” - and the word isn’t a big one - by the Anglo-American coalition, we will fall, fatally, in spite of all the moral and physiological repugnance that the Germans inspire in us, into the block of anti-English forces’. In order to arrive more quickly at the Italo-German realignment, he urged Germany to sign the peace terms imposed by the allies (OO, XIII: 140-41). On 29 May, when the German Foreign Minister, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, presented further objections to the conditions, Mussolini implored him to ‘not get lost in note upon note’, to accept that Alsace-Lorraine had to be returned to France and to get on with the signing (OO, XIII: 157-9). On 19 June Mussolini assured Germany that ‘the roads of the future are still open’ (OO, XIII: 195-7). As had been promised in the lead up to San Sepolcro, the ‘revolution’ was continuing, and new battle lines were being drawn.