d’Annunzio, the Charter of Carnaro, and the crisis of the liberal State, between representation and antiparliamentarianism

Abstract

The seventeen months spent in Fiume by the legionaries under d’Annunzio’s guide in 1919 were a unique opportunity to suggest a cultural and social model able to overcome the critical aspects of the classic liberal state, which inexorably started its decline since World War I. The Charter of Carnaro represents this desire to suggest a new man and a new city in which revolutionary categories of rights with universal flavour could be introduced, eliminating the mediation of political parties and, at the same time, devoting the highest guarantees to labour. Precisely the labour question becomes the symbol of this constitutional experience, the ambition of which is to fuse together the “citizen” with the “worker”, thereby reducing the economic differences between social classes. The utopia of a labour that could be “labour without struggle” provides the Charter with an evocative spirit and eternal flavour.