Malta and the Fascists (1922-1926)

Abstract

In Italy, where the constitutional monarchy of King Victor Emmanuel III survived the I World War, political and social conditions were no more conducive to the working of democratic institutions than in Germany. Although Italy was one of the victorious powers, she had played a minor role in the war and in 1919 failed to exact from the peacemakers of Paris all the benefits of the bargains she had made with the Allies in her secret treaties. She gained the Tyrol, Trieste, part of the Dalmatian coast, and certain islands in the Aegean and Adriatic seas. She did not gain Fiume, and she was not given under mandate any of the former German colonies. Being weaker in natural resources and industrial development, Italy felt the burden of war more acutely than Britain and France. After World War I her parliamentary governments were unstable, and in 1919 while brigandage broke out in the Mezzo Giorno (South), strikes and industrial revolt broke out in the north. Of all the older parliamentary states in Europe, she was perhaps the weakest to extremist attacks from left or right. The Italian counterpart of the Kapp Putsch was the raid on Fiume, carried out in September, 1919, by the poet-aviator D'Annunzio in order to claim it for the Italian Kingdom. The dashing romanticism of the escapade - D'Annunzio garbed his men in cloaks, crested them with eagle's feathers, armed them with daggers, and flew them to Fiume in airplanes. This romantic episode stirred memories of the heroic days of Garibaldi and the Risorgimento. The Italian government of Giolitti had the unhappy task of driving him out on Christmas Eve, after three months of wild heroics, and of restoring Fiume to the inter-Allied authorities, who later made it a "free city". [.....]