Essay – How a Charismatic Populist Destroyed Christmas: One Hundred Years Ago, Italian Nationalists Went to War With Their Own Country, Bringing the Border City of Fiume a ‘Christmas of Blood’
By Dominique Kirchner Reill | December 14, 2020 | Zócalo Public Square
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In 1920, in a small town outside Turin, Italy, 17-year-old Luigi De Michelis was everything his middle-class parents could have asked for. His teachers liked him, which was important to his father, a teacher. His priest liked him, which was important to his mother, who wrote Catholic children’s books.
But soon Luigi started following the news a little too avidly. Then he started going to meetings on the sly. Suddenly the De Michelis’ good boy was more interested in the man the newspapers called “Comandante” than in the approval of family and teachers. Before his parents realized what was happening, Luigi ran away from home, without finishing high school, to join the movement that had won his heart and mind.
Late in 1920, Luigi sent a letter home to prepare his parents for the imminent reckoning, an armed clash between Italian nationalists (of which Luigi was one) and the Kingdom of Italy’s army, a battle which would come to be called “The Christmas of Blood.” Luigi warned: “Soon there will be battle, maybe soon I shall be no more. Console yourselves in thinking that I died for the purest of Causes …”
How does populist, political charisma change the world and how can we hold it in check? The story of how the De Michelis family lost hold of a child—the history surrounding “the Christmas of Blood”—offers enduring answers to those questions.
Charismatic, populist politicians can have the pull of a cult. The Comandante to whom Luigi was in thrall was not Mussolini, but his precursor, Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was the most famous living Italian in 1920. By the end of World War I, D’Annunzio had created a craze around his own personality in ways only a much-loved celebrity can.
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