[I]n the negotiations preceding Italy\u2019s entry into the war, Great Britain \nand France promised to transfer Istria to the Italian government. \nInstead, the Versailles conference of 1919 sanctioned the formation of a\n new nation\u2014the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later \nYugoslavia\u2014whose territory, it now seemed, would include Istria. For the\n Italians in Fiume, this awful prospect was due to the incompetence and \nweakness of the Italian negotiators and had to be immediately corrected \nby the use of force. For the demobilized soldiers who roamed the country\n without any particular destination or place in bourgeois society, and \nfor men like Gabriele D\u2019Annunzio, Benito Mussolini, and Filippo Tommaso \nMarinetti, this denial of the fruits of victory was the most intolerable\n of humiliations. Talks started between the Italianists in Fiume and \nsome of the new political leaders emerging in the ruins of postwar \nItaly. This is where D\u2019Annunzio enters the story…
It seemed to Fiume\u2019s Italian elite that they had found their leader. D\u2019Annunzio had developed connections with the arditi\n in Venice during the war and had shown himself perfectly capable of \neliciting extraordinary enthusiasm in his followers. In September 1919, a\n band of a few hundred ex-combatants marched under his command toward \nFiume. No one stopped them; on the contrary, the Italians among the \nAllied troops charged with guarding the city joined their cause. They \nentered Fiume, whose non-Slavic population initially received with \neuphoria the arrival of this strange leader who had never governed \nbefore, who had the vaguest political ideas, and who seemed to be mostly\n occupied in the tiring task of self-glorification…
"}From the beginning, the coexistence of the diverse groups that \ngravitated around D\u2019Annunzio had been difficult. There were the citizens\n of Fiume and the Italian troops (the arditi, the carabinieri),\n but also Bolsheviks who rushed to the city (in a Moscow speech, Lenin \nsaid he and D\u2019Annunzio were the only authentic revolutionaries of \nEurope); anarcho-syndicalists; futuristic, fascist Dadaists; and \noddities like the curious war hero Guido Keller, whose mascot was an \neagle, who slept naked in the tops of trees, and who was one of the new \ncommander\u2019s main lieutenants. The universe around the leader quickly \nfragmented into factions. Forced to take sides, D\u2019Annunzio came to rely \nmostly on the young artists, anarchists, and arditi who \nconstituted the radical wing of the grand alliance of Fiume, and who \nformed the \u201cUnion of Free Spirits Tending Toward Perfection\u201d (or, as \nthey nicknamed it, \u201cYoga\u201d). The group shared an enthusiasm for Hinduism,\n spiritual aristocracy, nudism, and for building an agrarian utopia \nwhere preindustrial forms of life would be restored. Subgroups were \nformed: the Brown Lotuses, who wanted to lead a simple life and \nprofessed a return to nature; the Red Lotuses, who proclaimed the \narrival of a new world transfigured by a renewed sexuality; and a group \nwho identified themselves as the followers of a still-undefined \u201cSacred \nLove.\u201d