The scientific discourse circulated during a national-populist commemoration: Dannunzian Fiume and the ‘Italo-cosmopolitan’ field of history

Abstract

In today's Europe, commemorations can be times at which to affirm international reconciliation, based notably on the knowledge produced by historians who are becoming progressively cosmopolitan. However, commemorations are also used by national-populist political parties for electoral purposes and can lead to tensions with neighbouring states. This was the case in Trieste in September 2019, when the city council executive (controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition) decided to erect a statue of Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 years after he had occupied the nearby city of Fiume (now Rijeka) in Croatia. This commemoration led to a series of debates among historians, especially in Italy. Based on a critical discourse analysis and an interdiscursive approach to narratives produced by historians for colleagues and for the broader society, the current research investigates the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history when in parallel a commemoration is coordinated by national-populist forces in a public space.

Nell'Europa di oggi, le commemorazioni possono essere momenti in cui affermare la riconciliazione internazionale, basandosi in particolare sulle conoscenze prodotte da storici che stanno diventando sempre più cosmopoliti. Tuttavia, le commemorazioni sono anche usate da partiti politici nazional-populisti a fini elettorali e possono portare a tensioni con gli Stati vicini. È quanto accaduto a Trieste nel settembre 2019, quando l'esecutivo comunale (controllato da una coalizione nazional-populista di destra) ha deciso di erigere una statua di Gabriele D'Annunzio, 100 anni dopo l'occupazione della vicina città di Fiume (oggi Rijeka) in Croazia. Questa commemorazione portò a una serie di dibattiti tra gli storici, soprattutto in Italia. Sulla base di un'analisi critica del discorso e di un approccio interdiscorsivo alle narrazioni prodotte dagli storici per i colleghi e per la società in generale, la presente ricerca indaga il ruolo del cosmopolitismo nel campo della storia quando, parallelamente, una commemorazione è coordinata da forze nazional-populiste in uno spazio pubblico.

Introduction

Historians form one of the key scientific communities that can intervene during commemorations involving Western nation states. These scientists may be mobilised as experts by politicians and the media, with the aim of legitimising or criticising the sense given to past events (Ashplant, Dawson and Roper 2000; Noiret 2009). Historians are themselves part of a community characterised by a two-sided nature. First, the ability to organise themselves within a semi-autonomous field, where the members do not all possess the same capital to fix and control the norms of the milieu (Bourdieu 1977, 2005). Second, a late-modern tendency to reprocess their embeddedness within nation states by taking a reflexive attitude towards otherness, or to put it differently, by incorporating cosmopolitanism (Beck 2002; Calhoun 2003) as a set of ideas to interpret the past and interact with each other. The increasing meaningfulness of cosmopolitanism in the field of history comes at a time when the field of politics, which includes notably political parties and governmental executives, is becoming more and more polarised by right-wing national-populist agents. These political stakeholders promote a combative vision of society, with a national, positive and people-centred in-group set against a globalised, negative and elite-powered out-group (Mudde 2004). Public history is then used by some of these stakeholders to structure the antagonism (Manucci 2020; Noiriel 2019).

In Italy, a key denominator of the existing right-wing national-populist political parties (Forza Italia, Lega and Fratelli d'Italia) is their shared reverence for Gabriele D'Annunzio, the early twentieth-century poet and soldier. D'Annunzio, also known as Il Vate, occupied Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) for 16 months in 1919–1920, in contravention of international agreements and the authority of the liberal democratic Italian state. On 12 September 2019, the city executive of Trieste – at the time controlled by a right-wing national-populist coalition including the three previously mentioned political parties – decided to inaugurate a statue of D'Annunzio in one of the main squares of the city, a century after his unlawful entry into nearby Fiume. This commemoration was described as ‘scandalous’ by Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic, the president of Croatia, reaffirming on this occasion that Rijeka ‘has been and will remain a proud part of her Croatian homeland’ (ll Corriere della Sera 2019). In parallel, in late 2019, historians met in Italian cities, including Trieste and Gardone Riviera (D'Annunzio's last place of residence, and the location of a museum dedicated to him, Il Vittoriale degli Italiani), to present their work concerning Dannunzian Fiume. The intent was to interact around the interpretation of the past and to discuss the controversial statue.

The aim of the present work is to examine what the discourse produced by the assembled historians in Trieste and in Gardone Riviera can reveal about the use of cosmopolitanism in the field of history. The first part of the article offers a review of the literature on cosmopolitanism and the Bourdieusian field theory, with a specific focus on the scientific field. The hypothesis and methodology are presented in a second part. The results are then structured in two main sections. The first explores the use of cosmopolitanism within the field of history. The second investigates the circulation of the historians’ cosmopolitan discourse outside their field and aimed at the broader society in Trieste. The research is concluded by discussing cosmopolitanism as a disposition of the mind held by historians during a commemorative time driven by national-populist politics.

Cosmopolitanism, field theory and history

Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a disposition of openness towards the ‘other’, and the capacity to distance oneself from the community of origin (Calhoun 2003). It does not imply the negation of nations, but can be conceived as a way of dealing with difference based on the internalisation of otherness rather than its rejection (Beck 2002). Cosmopolitanism is a key frame to deal with the complex reality of the late-modern era, in which the ‘other’ is an everyday reality to deal with to manage challenges on multiple spatial scales, rather than an abstract concept left in the realm of ideals (Beck 2011). Cosmopolitanism is about being mobile across spatial and cultural borders (Conley 2002) and it implies two types of cross-border connections. The first is aesthetic, and can be associated with what Beck (2002, 28) presented as a ‘banal cosmopolitanism’; a cosmopolitanism associated with the everyday acceptance and consumption of globalised mass cultural industries (Lamour and Lorentz 2019a; Molz 2006; Urry 1995). Aesthetic cosmopolitanism can also be developed, for instance, in the world of museums, where otherness is consumed. Museums have long been places that target the elite, in the process, securing their social distinction (Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper 1991; Lamour and Lorentz 2019b). Nevertheless, museums have developed a policy of enlarging their public, requiring new aesthetic strategies and topics to attract a broad audience (Lamour 2019a; Moore 1997). The second form of cosmopolitanism concerns ethical principles: a moral commitment towards otherness. Ethical and aesthetical cosmopolitanism are not opposed, as the consumption of artefacts can lead to self-reflection by consumers concerning moral commitment to strangers (Skrbiš and Woodward 2011). However, ethical cosmopolitanism is more often associated with an ability of the elite (Kofman 2005), whose members can be included in specific fields of power in interactions, such as the fields of politics, the arts, the sciences and journalism.

Bourdieu's field theory starts off from the principle that specific professions have become able to structure themselves in relative autonomy from the rest of society by fixing the norms of entry for participants. Thus, these professions diffuse a discourse of authority, which is mobilised by other fields and circulated in society. The participants in a particular field need to possess a habitus: a set of practices and dispositions of the mind linked to incorporated experiences, strategies and past socialisation that are meaningful to interact with and be accepted in a specific field (Bourdieu 1977, 214). In parallel, each participant may not possess the same combination of economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital determining their more or less central position in each field and the struggle for dominance in it (Lamour 2019b). Scientific capital is a form of symbolic capital that is in particular a determinant of the asymmetry between the different stakeholders in the field of science. It can be defined as the differentiated recognition of each participant based on their perceived positive contribution to the milieu; a contribution that can, for instance, be apparent through citations among the sources of knowledge used (Bourdieu 1998, 2004). Strategies can exist among agents from different fields to structure competition and struggles within their respective fields (Champagne and Marchetti 2005). In parallel, each field can have the tendency to become heteronomous. The field of history is notably more heteronomous and opened to external norms and values than others, as academic historians cannot have the monopoly of investigating the past.

As scientists, historians are also members of a field, the nineteenth-century professionalisation of which was structured within nation states and with nationalism as a background ideology. In parallel to print capitalism (Anderson 1983), the profession has been used in the building-up of national imagined communities, and currently still refracts the world through national perspectives. Nevertheless, cosmopolitanism can be considered as a contemporary disposition of the mind for historians, enabling them to participate in the struggle within the field of history. This disposition includes the idea of nation without nationalism (Kristeva 1993), making it possible for historians to develop their careers within national academic systems while promoting an openness towards other nations – both as a past community to be investigated or as contemporary cultural groups that include foreign colleagues. The process transforms Italian, French, German, etc. historians, into Italo-, Franco-, Germano-, etc. cosmopolitan historians. This mental disposition is the basis of the most recent turn in the field; that is, world history and, more precisely, the global history about historical process related to globalisation. This in turn implies an ability to investigate the past across structuring national borders without necessarily negating the existence of nation-state territories, imbricated geographical scales and the importance of places where processes and ideas are nurtured and spread globally, as suggested by Dipesh Chakrabarty in his book Provincializing Europe (2007). The interest in such a global turn in the field of history can be seen for instance in Italy, with recent publications such as the Storia Mondiale dell'Italia by Andrea Giardina.

The latest global history publications in Europe come at a time of the mainstreaming of right-wing national populism in the field of politics, including political parties and governmental executives (Bale and Rovira Kaltwasser 2021; Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013). Right-wing national populism circulates two main types of antagonism: vertical (between the positively-defined people and the negatively-defined elite) and horizontal (between the threatened people and the threatening minorities jeopardising the cohesion of the people) (Lamour 2021, 2022a; Lamour and Carls 2022; Serventi Longhi 2022). This national-populist trend has already been studied in Italy, notably at the national level (Castelli Gattinara and Froio 2021). Differences can exist between Italian right-wing populist parties with regard to Italian history, and especially fascism. As populists, they nevertheless all have in common an eagerness to plan sensationalist and controversial events to attract attention (Lamour 2020, 2022b, 2022c; Mazzoleni 2008), together with a political positioning and competition between themselves at different geographical scales (Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone 2018; Tarchi 2018). The sensationalist events can take place in cities these parties control. For example, Gabriel D'Annunzio's actions in Fiume were celebrated in 2019 in two cities ruled by a right-wing national populist coalition including Forza Italia, Lega and Fratelli d'Italia: Pescara (D'Annunzio's place of birth, where a ‘feast of the revolution’ was planned) and Trieste (the border city located near Fiume/Rijeka where D'Annunzio's statue was inaugurated exactly 100 years after he had occupied Fiume, while a large exhibition was sponsored by the city council).

These Dannunzian events were planned with the support of Bruno Guerri, the libertarian president of the foundation in charge of the museum dedicated to the memory of D'Annunzio (Il Vittoriale degli Italiani based in Gardone Riviera)i (Serventi Longhi 2022). The Dannunzian libertarian revolution portrayed by Guerri is represented as a global one, due notably to the presence of a few avant-garde foreign people supporting D'Annunzio's cause in Fiume. It is an important contemporary myth associated with Dannunzian Fiume (Simonelli 2020, 2021), showing the complex reading of events that took place in this city 100 years ago (Manenti and Todero 2021; Serventi Longhi 2019). The libertarianism promoted by Guerri could be in contradiction with the DNA of right-wing populist parties defending law and order and traditional cultural values for the preservation of the national people. However, libertarianism and populism are two sets of ideas that can intersect in their shared vision of an unbearable process of dominance exercised by an illegitimate authority over the people. Guerri has been involved in the representation of the Dannunzian public history. But it is unknown how academic historians – who have the professional legitimacy to develop a discourse of authority on Dannunzian Fiume – reacted, interacted and imposed authoritative narratives in relation to these national-populist supported commemorations.

Hypothesis and methodology

It is argued that individuals participating in the field of history will probably show a collective rejection of a national-populist commemoration of the past, in the process revealing the semi-autonomy of their field of power (Bourdieu 1977, 2005), characterised by cosmopolitan thinking (Beck 2002; Calhoun 2003). However, we can expect that the use of cosmopolitanism to address the past can also involve the disposition of the historian's mind to structure debates within the field between its peripheral and its more dominant agents. Furthermore, it is suggested that agents with the greatest symbolic capital in the field of history can control this field when Dannunzian Fiume is addressed. These agents may nevertheless be less able than other ones to circulate a cosmopolitan discourse in society, due to having fewer meaningful alliances with key agents located in other fields of power (Champagne and Marchetti 2005).

The methodology here is based on a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of three types of public texts, mostly in Italian, produced by historians and partly related to a Dannunzian commemoration orchestrated by the national-populist city council executive of Trieste:

1. 1) Narratives circulated in a round table setting, bringing together five historians and organised in Trieste following the controversial commemoration of D'Annunzio's statue – the round table Fiume cent'anni dopo (‘Fiume 100 Years Later’), published in the academic review Memoria e Ricerca (Gori and Cuzzi 2020).

2. 2) Narratives produced by the same historians in two publications that brought together a set of scientific contributions after a series of conferences. The first, held in Trieste, was L'impresa di Fiume. Memorie e nuove prospettive di ricerca (‘The Fiume Enterprise. Memories and New Research Perspectives’) published in the academic review Qualestoria (Todero 2020). The second, held in Gardone Riviera, was Fiume 1919–2019. Un centenario europeo tra identità, memorie e prospettive di ricerca (‘Rijeka 1919–2019. A European Centenary between Identity, Memories and Research Perspectives’), coordinated by the foundation in charge of the Museum dedicated to D'Annunzio, Il Vittoriale degli Italiani (Guerri 2020).

3. 3) Narratives involving two of the five historians, aimed at the broader society and circulated in the ‘Fiume exhibitions’ in Trieste in which they were involved: Disobbedisco (‘I Disobey’) and Un Fiume di Storie (‘A River of Stories/Histories’), including texts published in the Trieste daily newspaper Il Piccolo.

Using CDA, the more precise scope here is to investigate the use of cosmopolitanism by historians. Following the integration of background information about the trajectories of historians and the expression of their scientific capital, five discursive strategies associated with CDA are explored with a focus on cosmopolitanism as an ideology incorporated in the historians’ habitus: nomination, aimed at categorising in-groups and out-groups involved in Dannunzian Fiume and its commemoration; predication, consisting of positively or negatively labelling in-groups and out-groups; argumentation, the scope of which is to justify this labelling; perspectivation, helping the speaker to take a position on an issue; and intensification/mitigation, which modifies the epistemic status of propositions by intensifying or mitigating the illocutionary force of statements (Wodak 2001, 73). This analysis also takes into consideration interdiscursivity (Fairclough 2010); that is, the dialogical dimension of narratives produced by historians and how the discourse of a given intellectual is related to other discourses circulated by other academic participants, repeated/adapted/completed by the same person in different milieux or linked to the narratives of other individuals in different or similar contexts. Interdiscursivity is an important framework to address interactions among historians, the multi-faceted academic meaning given to Dannunzian Fiume and the diffusion of this meaning into the broader society.

Cosmopolitanism in the field of history: the multiple visions of Dannunzian Fiume

The different narratives produced by historians show a clear willingness to distance themselves from the right-wing national-populist Trieste executives and their celebration of Dannunzian Fiume. However, this distance can mean different things depending on the historians, their position in the field of history and their mobilisation of cosmopolitanism in order to be accepted and to interact in their professional sphere. The results are structured around two circles of interactions: the ‘in-field’ circle of the historians’ interactions, made visible in academic publications (published round-table discourse and communications in conferences), and the ‘off-field’ interactions among historians forging alliances with stakeholders belonging to other fields of power to circulate a discourse in the broader society.

The interacting cosmopolitan and differentiated agents

The round table on Dannunzian Fiume in Trieste was organised around four matters, orientating the interdiscursive dimension of academic narratives (Fairclough 2010). First, the historic analysis of Dannunzian Fiume. Second, the influence of the relationship between leaders and the masses, initiated by D'Annunzio, on future political actions. Third, the long-term echo of the tension between international agreements between victorious countries, the issue of national sovereignty and the appeal to the ‘oppressed peoples’ formulated by D'Annunzio. Fourth, the reasons for the long-term impact of Dannunzian Fiume on the public memory and national narratives, with a focus on the controversy around his statue in Trieste (Gori and Cuzzi 2020).

Available background information about the career paths of the speakers shows that the five historians involved in the debate are people who occupy different positions in the field of history. Three types of stakeholders are visible. First, the young American female researcher Dominique Kirchner Reill, who specialises in the socio-cultural and intellectual history of Southern Europe. She is fluent in many languages (including Italian and Croatian), has studied at prestigious US universities (Berkeley and Colombia) and is employed in the department of history at Miami University. Her institutional academic webpage and her personal one both highlight the many awards she has already been given for her work. She is an up-and-coming newcomer in the international field of history. Second, Bruno Giordano Guerri, whose particularity is to belong to (at least) four Italian fields of power: literature, journalism, museum curating and history. Guerri has academic training in modern literature with a contemporary history angle. He has previously worked as a journalist, including holding the post of director of the monthly popular history magazine Storia Illustrata. In 2019, he was president of the foundation in charge of Il Vittoriale degli Italiani, the place dedicated to the memory of Gabriele D'Annunzio at his last residence. One can also note that Guerri is a self-proclaimed libertarian, whose aim is to offer another and less repulsive perspective on the poet-soldier as a father of global revolution, rather than of Mussolini's fascism (Serventi Longhi 2022). Third, the members of Italian academia, Marco Mondini, Giuseppe Parlato and Raoul Pupo, trained and/or employed in Northern Italian universities. They have knowledge related to the period, with a focus on prestigious topics in history: politics, diplomacy and wars. The Trieste-born Pupo occupied the highest relative position in this group during the round table, as a professor at Trieste University at the instigation of the event. This relative strength is illustrated by the historian being the last to answer each question, as well as commenting on answers from colleagues.

The publications of the round table reveal the previously mentioned asymmetric organisation of the field. Kirchner Reill, the rising agent in the internationalised profession, always spoke first. Guerri, the heteronomous agent, intervened in second place in between the four academic historians. His speeches were followed in turn by the youngest of the Italian academics (Marco Mondini), the senior among them (Giuseppe Parlato) and the senior coordinator (Raoul Pupo). The answers to the questions enable one to see that cosmopolitanism – that is, the ability to develop a reflective openness and engagement towards ‘otherness’ beyond nations (Beck 2002; Calhoun 2003) – is central in the discussion. Cosmopolitanism is used both to shape the in-groups and out-groups of contemporary historians, and to qualify the individuals to be investigated in Dannunzian Fiume.

First, one can clearly isolate Kirchner Reill, who represents an international in-group of historians investigating the cosmopolitan dimension of Fiume's inhabitants in 1919–20. This group is distinguished from an out-group of historians developing a national and Italian-centred vision of the situation, together with a focus on the key stakeholders involved in Dannunzian Fiume and major Italian political or ideological issues such as fascism. The nomination of this in-group includes a series of Croatian and Italian historians plus Kirchner Reill herself, but none of the other historians present at the round table. A second key dimension backing her vision of cosmopolitan reflexivity appears in Kirchner Reill's discourse, and concerns gender. She cites a series of female historians outside the room capable of a cosmopolitan reflexivity on Fiume, but also women in Fiume in 1919–20, as ‘units’, around whom the reflexive cosmopolitan research should be carried out, in particular dominated women (housewives and prostitutes). In parallel, she labels the appeal of D'Annunzio as based largely on xenophobia and sexism, as proved – according to her – in academic works in international publications by fellow US and English peers (Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Mark Thompson). Third, she also contests the direction of the investigation on D'Annunzio as a potential cosmopolitan stakeholder evocated in the round table, as shown in the text below. Her discursive strategy consists of reorienting the debate to transfer the poet-soldier from a potential cosmopolitan ‘in-group’ to an ‘out-group’ of negatively labelled nationalism (‘imperialism’, ‘Italian superiority’) notably by producing an intensification of the illocutionary force of the utterance, when quoting D'Annunzio saying ‘Italy is great’ and later ‘filthy Croat … a monkey in a rage’. This transfer and intensification justify the necessity for the members of the historians’ field (‘we’) to see D'Annunzio as a negatively nominated person (‘conveyor of national oppression’ and not the hero of the ‘oppressed peoples’). (Emphases in all quotations in this article are mine):

Yes, some faint traces of cosmopolitanism can be traced in the D'Annunzio period in Fiume. But I wonder what the motivations were, when the vast majority of D'Annunzio's words and actions reveal a more explicit nationalist and imperialist project, which envisaged Italian superiority over any other actor. D'Annunzio's first speeches, in which he argued that the territories of the eastern Adriatic should be annexed, could not have been clearer: ‘Let us affirm it, exalt it. Italy is great, and wants to be greater’; the claims against the legitimate Italian control of Dalmatia and Fiume were to be considered the work of the ‘filthy Croat … a monkey in a rage’. Rather than striving to find echoes of D'Annunzio's lecture in aid of the oppressed peoples of the world, we should discuss how he himself was a powerful promoter and conveyor of national oppression. (Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 542)

The second type of speaker, Guerri, uses cosmopolitanism as an instrument to rehabilitate D'Annunzio, who is still viewed as an Italian nationalist and proto-fascist ‘fathering’ Mussolini (Serventi Longhi 2022), in a large part of public opinion, politics and segments of the history. For Guerri, the reflexivity that should be promoted consisted of circulating a cosmopolitan counter-discourse around D'Annunzio and his followers’ values. Guerri shaped his demonstration around the complex and contradictory figure of D'Annunzio, involved in damage to the liberal democracy in Europe by his illegal deeds in Fiume, but whose intellectual engagements – such as the definition of Fiume's Charter of Carnaro, respecting all nationalities – show that he was able to develop in parallel an ethical openness towards other nationalities. One of the key terms used by Guerri to label Dannunzian Fiume more positively was ‘revolution’, to emphasise the libertarian visions of D'Annunzio inspiring movements other than Italian fascism, such as the future decolonisation wars and the ’68 European youth liberation movement. By promoting this vision of Dannunzian Fiume, Guerri circulated the international dimension of the city's occupation (Simonelli 2020, 2021). Guerri also implicitly distinguished himself by following Kirchner Reill's narratives from two perspectives. First, the value of cosmopolitanism to address history (the contested leader vs. the invisible locals). Second, the reflexivity around sex and women beyond national thinking. The international ‘revolution’ initiated by the poet-soldier according to Guerri involved an argumentation partly around the perceived sexual liberation of women in Fiume, and not around the dominated prostitutes, housewives and sexism evinced by Kirchner Reill to present D'Annunzio negatively. Similar to Kirchner Reill, Guerri feels he belongs to an in-group, an ‘avant-garde’ (in the text), but a different one and with a longer imprint in time.

Guerri's disquisition on Dannunzian cosmopolitanism in Fiume, however, shows his difficult position as a man involved directly in the controversial inauguration of the statue of D'Annunzio in Trieste, exactly 100 years after he took control of Fiume. Guerri's narratives concerning the erection of the statue show equivocation, but also his willingness to distance himself from the Trieste city council. The poet-soldier is exclusively nominated by Guerri as an intellectual (and not a soldier, which he was in 1919) and his labelled deeds (not military, but ‘artistic and political’: Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 549) are associated with an unnamed city, which could potentially be Trieste and not the occupied Fiume (‘the city symbol of the eastern border’: Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 549). Guerri's position is correct, when we see the D'Annunzio statue installed in Trieste as representing a small, bent, seated, rather old person in a bourgeois outfit, leaning on a pile of books and reading one of them in the manner of Rodin's thinker and poet – a replica of a statue that is currently in Gardone Riviera. However, the national-populist city council executive of Trieste inaugurating this statue on 12 September 2019 did not celebrate D'Annunzio as an elderly poet taking a hypothetical subscription to a Trieste library 100 years earlier.

The three academics intervening after Kirchner Reill and Guerri developed another critical analysis of D'Annunzio in his time and across state borders. Mondini notably deconstructed the cosmopolitan dimension of D'Annunzio and his Charter of Carnaro, articulated by Guerri through the topos of reality (‘Like the Carnaro Charter, none of the more or less political projects that matured in the ‘City of Life’ [Fiume] between 1919 and 1920 ever had any impact on reality’: Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 546) while rejecting any progressive roots in Dannunzian Fiume by negatively labelling D'Annunzio's projects (‘The main consequence of these fanciful and unfeasible projects is the “mendacious” reputation of progressivism … the Regency of Carnaro continues to enjoy, extraordinarily, even today’: Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 546). The criticism of Italian academics was oriented towards the approach to the poet-soldier as the father of international progressive revolutions. Pupo also underlined the necessity to avoid any ‘first impressions’ of D'Annunzio's nationalism against the Croats evocated by Kirchner Reill. The following text shows the structure of his opposition organised around the marker ‘but’, used three times to nuance his agreement with Kirchner Reill. This was accompanied by more precise and nuanced insights, ending with the nomination of D'Annunzio as a possible cross-national Simon Bolivar-like leader, the ‘liberator of the [Croat] nation’ in the world of Dannunzian dreams:

It would be extremely easy to accompany these observations with those regarding D'Annunzio's anti-Slavism, which certainly existed, but with respect to which, once again, I believe it is appropriate to go beyond the first impressions. For example, the insults publicly addressed by the Vate [D'Annunzio] to the Slavs were bloody, but relatively significant in that they were no harsher than those dedicated to any other adversary, be it Clemenceau or Nitti. Much more concrete was the anti-Croatian repression in Fiume with the expulsions from the city and the free course left to the pogrom of 13 and 14 July 1920, but at the same time D'Annunzio negotiated with some Croatian leaders in an anti-Yugoslavian function and dreamed of entering Zagreb as a liberator of the nation oppressed by the Serbian yoke. (Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 547)

Pupo also showed his high-level position in the field of history by recalling the values of the semi-autonomous profession distanced from other negatively labelled fields of power. These included the field of journalism (‘the media … are consequently tempted by sensationalism and the polarization of positions, rather than by interpretive balance’) and that of politics (‘simplification and instrumentalization … small-minded needs’):

Academic historians are adept at distinguishing between critical revision and re-evaluation, while the media are a little less so, also because their objectives are different and they are consequently tempted by sensationalism and the polarization of positions, rather than by interpretive balance. Moreover, the character of D'Annunzio easily arouses extreme feelings: great love – even posthumous – and great disgust. On this insidious terrain, … politics has also entered the field in its most boorish version, showing once again its distorting potential, in terms of simplification and instrumentalization. … Small-minded needs prevailed within the local government forces. Hence the absolutely specious idea of placing a statue of D'Annunzio in the centre of a city like Trieste, which remained on the fringe of the enterprise and which has already dedicated a very popular avenue to the poet: a decision that, since it was taken by a local authority with evidently political rather than cultural intentions, has also provoked political reactions, frankly exaggerated, in the Croatian Republic. (Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 552–553)

The texts published after the conferences on Dannunzian Fiume that took place in Trieste and Gardone Riviera in late 2019 reveal the same asymmetric positioning of historians and the different use of cosmopolitanism as a disposition of the mind to shape interactions in the field of history. One can first see the clear dominance of Pupo's symbolic capital, apparent through his co-authorship of the conclusion to the academic communications published in the academic journal QualeStoria (Todero 2020) and the number of times he is quoted by colleagues in this publication, notably 22 mentions of his latest book, Fiume, città di passione (Fiume, City of Passions). By comparison, Marco Mondini's latest book on Fiume, Fiume 1919. Una guerra civile italiana (Fiume 1919. An Italian Civil War) is referenced four times (with a dedicated critic's note); the latest book by Kirchner Reill on Fiume published by Harvard University Press, The Fiume Crisis, five times (but only by two post-doctoral researchers) and Guerri three times, but exclusively for an article published in the Italian broadsheet newspaper Il Giornale, rather than for his recent book published on Dannunzian Fiume, Disobbedisco. Cinquecento giorni di rivoluzione. Fiume 1919–1920 (I Disobey. Five Hundred Days of Revolution. Fiume 1919–1920). The high position of Pupo can also be perceived in the published details of the three-day conference held in Gardone Riviera and coordinated by Guerri (Guerri 2020). Pupo's academic paper on Italian geopolitics in its eastern border region is first in line in the 512-page publication, whereas Kirchner Reill's article is among the other 25 papers, but differentiated as the sole contribution in English. Guerri also introduced the conference report. Guerri's cosmopolitan openness is made quite clear by his description of the commemorated centenary as ‘European’ rather than ‘Italian’, and by his reference to a coordinated three-day conference in which Italian, as well as Croatian, scholars were invited to exchange their views. Nevertheless, he was not as recognised as Pupo, again quoted 22 times, while Kirchner Reill reaffirmed her cosmopolitan vision, the aim of which was to investigate the social and economic condition of ordinary people (such as the cabbage sellers and buyers described in her contribution) rooted in a specific place (Fiume), but having to organise their daily lives in a period of transition of the state apparatus and legal borders, requiring in fine an everyday cosmopolitan savoir-faire to be investigated by historians. This is an inward-looking ‘provincializing of Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2007) beyond state containment, but within a city where a European sense of place existed across fuzzy borders.

Pupo did not address this everyday cosmopolitan savoir-faire among locals. He preferred instead to mention the hard reality of the dominant states’ realpolitik across borders, crushing the desire for autonomy of the Fiume-rooted people without any reference to cabbage markets or sympathy for the Italian or the Yugoslav states. This distance, considering nation states without personal expression of nationalism (Kristeva 1993), was also visible ‘off-field’.

Exhibiting cosmopolitanism … with a difference

Pupo and Guerri are the two individuals who were directly involved in the Dannunzian commemoration taking place in Trieste in late 2019 and 2020. They took part in the coordination of two exhibitions, the background information for which reveals the intertwined relations between fields of power (Champagne and Marchetti 2005), and in this case the fields of history, politics and journalism to circulate a commemorative discourse in society.

The exhibition titled Disobbedisco (I Disobey, henceforth D) was linked to the erection of the controversial statue of D'Annunzio. It was structured around a collaboration between the promoter of the memory of the poet-soldier in Italy (Il Vittoriale degli Italiani directed by Guerri) and the executive power of the city council of Trieste ruled by a right-wing populist coalition founded at the national level and aiming for control of the Italian state (Albertazzi, Giovannini and Seddone 2018; Castelli Gattinara and Froio 2021; Tarchi 2018). The second exhibition, entitled Un fiume di storie: documenti, immagini e libri dell'impresa fiumana (A River of Stories/Histories: Documents, Images and Books of the Fiuman Enterprise, henceforth FdS) was coordinated around other stakeholders in the Italian state, such as the Ministry of Culture, the state archive and the Regional Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Friuli Venezia Giulia (IRSREC FVG). This in turn is associated with the National Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in Italy, established after the Second World War and with a clear anti-fascist orientation. The FdS exhibition was curated partly by Pupo, and also organised in the framework of a specific European Union cultural event (the European heritage days). Last, it was located in the State Library Stelio Crise, Stelio Crise being a twentieth-century Trieste academic, novelist and literature critic, the archetype of the European intellectual recognised beyond Italy. The FdS exhibition was held in the crucible of the longue durée ‘Europeanness’ of Italian elites, whereas the Disobbedisco (D) was organised in a city council-managed former fishmarket that has been transformed into a professional exhibition and conference centre, Il Salone degli Incanti.

The two exhibitions differed massively. First, one can note a clear distinction between D and FdS with regard to the number and diversity of artefacts and their enhancement (the former exhibition being better funded than the latter). D outranked FdS in that regard, with the notable presence at the entrance of the exhibition of the Fiat T4 used by D'Annunzio to reach Fiume. This exhibition also used the services of a professional company specialising in cultural events – Contemplazioni – while the FdS graphics were managed with the support of the training centre Enaip. D comprised a 3D version of the popular colour magazine Storia Illustrata – directed in the past by Guerri – with a profusion of diverse artefacts benefiting from chiaroscuro lighting. It was at one with the new trend of museum exhibitions eager to enlarge their audience (Moore 1997). By comparison, the FdS was limited to texts, pictures (mostly black-and-white) and original documents – a representation that we expect to find in traditional historic exhibitions structured by the elite and in some ways for the elite (Bourdieu, Darbel and Schnapper 1991). This broad public vs. elite representation of Dannunzian Fiume is also visible if we pay attention to the texts themselves. FdS displayed 20 panels of long texts, and only in Italian, while D had only six panels, with relatively long texts but in Italian and English. The texts in D were accompanied by artefacts, and presented emotional quotations and narratives mixing war, sacrifice, heroism, revolution, love, passion and feast, notably with pictures of many women enjoying life – a representation able to attract the interest of a wide audience. In FdS, the texts were instead the archetype of traditional elite pedagogy, with most narratives organised in the form of a dialogue between a student-like person making shrewd demands and a professor-like connoisseur providing nuanced answers illustrated by borderlands maps, grave soldiers and men in power.

The exhibitions presented two different visions of cosmopolitanism, with different capacities to attract attention. D was visited by 12,000 people (equivalent to 5 per cent of the population of Trieste), while the FdS exhibition that took place in Trieste in 2020 was planned in a deserted state library because of Covid-19. D dwelt on the heroism of Italian soldiers and of D'Annunzio, and the remembrance of the fallen, linking the representation of Dannunzian Fiume to the prolongation of the First World War and its national Italian commemoration. However D was also an exhibition to appeal to an aesthetic cosmopolitanism, and was about Fiume as a place of the urban feast, cultural avant-garde and multi-faceted emancipation encompassing an exploration of ‘otherness’ beyond the nation and nationalism within the history of arts and culture. This decentred and parallel emancipatory world also occurs in an urban context, where ‘Italianness’ is nominated as a cosmopolitan identity defined by its interactions with other nations (‘the Slovenes and the Croats’) and constituting a cross-national sense of being in the city (the ‘Fiumanity’):

In Trieste and Fiume, Italian identity was also strongly influenced by centuries of cultural, economic and sentimental exchanges with the Slovenes and the Croats who lived in the city and inland. The Fiumanity was a sentiment that involved Italians, Croats, Hungarians and Germans so strongly that it resisted all attempts at submission. Fiume, with its complicated history and identity, became the symbol of diplomatic and political tensions that shook up Italy after the First World War. (Disobbedisco's exhibition panel)

FdS also mentioned the feast and the artistic avant-garde in Fiume, but as a part of a more complex context in which the feast is based on a mixture of ideologies and processes (patriotism, nationalism and revolution), while the revolution is also labelled as ‘national’ rather than global. The shrewd questions and the nuanced answers in the dialogue and its annexed texts concerned the portrayal of D'Annunzio, the biographies of his key contemporaries and geopolitics in the Italian eastern borderlands after the First World War. There was a noticeable emphasis on D'Annunzio's anti-Croat and anti-Yugoslavia quotations, but also the anti-Italian diatribe of a Croat polemist (in Spanish). FdS was an exhibition in which cosmopolitanism was not a message about an urban avant-garde revolution beyond nations in 1919–20, but a 2020 Italian awareness without nationalism (Kristeva 1993) of a complex and conflictual past involving individuals and nation states in a post-First Word War Fiume. These two different visions did not have an equal ability to attract the interest of Il Piccolo, the Trieste newspaper reaching the local urbanites.

Il Piccolo gave far more emphasis to D than to FdS. This can be explained by the fact that FdS took place at a time when Covid-19 was strongly affecting Northern Italy, with the closure of cultural sites. More importantly, D was associated with a controversy orchestrated by national-populist parties in Trieste that was likely to attract the media, as seen in other case studies (Lamour 2020, 2022b, 2022c; Mazzoleni 2008) – the inauguration of D'Annunzio's statue, a statue that had been vandalised, and against which a petition had been launched. Il Piccolo circulated many articles about D, voicing the vision of Guerri and promoting his book. However, the daily newspaper also circulated criticism of the statue, as well as the fact that the exhibition had been a financial failure, costing the city council nearly half a million euros (138 euros per visitor), the popular exhibition of ‘Lego World’, in the former fishmarket, being a far greater attraction (Modugno 2019). The press reproduced Guerri's narratives on Dannunzian Fiume as an emancipatory political and cultural revolution (with a focus on the Charter of Carnaro), without negating the parallel issue of nationalism, while his perspectivation of the exhibition showed a willingness to detach himself and the poet-soldier from right-wing politics (‘In Trieste … I will tell [about] the true D'Annunzio that will disturb the right’) (Marcolin 2019a). The narratives of Guerri were often a counter-discourse to suggest that D'Annunzio (and indirectly Guerri himself) was not a fascist, even though the reporters’ questions were not about this issue. The following text shows how Guerri's perspectivation of the commemoration was structured around an ‘I’ opposed to a combined out-group nominated negatively (‘Lovely people … with disparaging words’ and ‘Neo-fascists … angry with me’). From an inter-discursive perspective, one can see that Guerri, the heteronomous agent of the field of history, maintained his support for the erection of the statue when interacting in the field of journalism he came from. However, he added to it the personal conflictual dimension expected in the journalistic field, while the tensions tended to stay at the ideological level in the field of history:

Reporter: But what are D'Annunzio's ties with Trieste? Guerri: He was there many times and it is a city closely linked to the Fiume issue …. In the Piccolo newspaper, I have read many opinions of lovely people from Trieste who contest the idea of the statue with disparaging words that go hand in hand with the wrath of neofascists who are angry with me because I say that he was not a fascist. In short, I have made enemies on both sides. (Marcolin 2019a)

Pupo was less visible in Il Piccolo. He used the opportunity offered by the press to reaffirm the norms for the field of history, rather than to be an emotional promoter of D'Annunzio's heritage or to enunciate a personal conflict with ‘enemies’. As proved by the following newspaper article, the nominated Pupo (‘historian’) is labelled by his scientific distance (‘the serenity of a scientific reflection’), justifying Pupo's perspectivation of the commemoration as a renewed professional investment in broader issues (‘there is nothing to celebrate … a good opportunity to get to the bottom of issues … to talk about more general problems’):

For those who practice the profession of historian, such as Professor Raoul Pupo, the judgement on the Vate [D'Annunzio] has the serenity of a scientific reflection. Historians do not like anniversaries - and in this case, adds Pupo, there is nothing to celebrate – but the centenary of the Fiume enterprise may be a good opportunity to get to the bottom of issues that allow us to talk about more general problems. (Marcolin 2019b)

Pupo did not oppose the D exhibition coordinated by Guerri, even though Il Piccolo presented FdS as a counter exhibition (Marcolin 2020). As shown in the following answers to the reporter from Il Piccolo, Pupo's scope was to use the same argumentation deployed in the academic round table, with a focus on the distinction between re-visitation and re-evaluation of the past (Gori and Cuzzi 2020, 552–553). This stable position reveals his role as a guardian of the semi-autonomy of the field:

Reporter: Have you visited the exhibition at the Salone degli Incanti, Disobbedisco, curated by Giordano Bruno Guerri?

Pupo: Yes, it presents fabulous memorabilia, rightly attracts public attention and arouses curiosity and interest, but with our initiative, we want to take the opportunity to go deeper.

Reporter: In what sense?

Pupo: By distinguishing between revisiting and re-evaluating. The Fiume enterprise deserves to be revisited at a distance of a century …. (Marcolin 2019b)

Conclusion: chasing the Dannunzian dragon in the midst of Istria

Reflecting on his profession, Eric Hobsbawm mischievously observed that historians were to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan were to heroin addicts: suppliers of the essential raw material for the market (1996, 255). Commemorations in Europe are key times at which representatives of the fields of politics and journalism use historians as suppliers of raw material to continuously reprocess the sense of being together within national ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). This takes place in a constantly evolving modern context, in which the sense of community is not necessarily defined in radical contrast to ‘otherness’ within or beyond nations. Cosmopolitanism – as the ability to reflect on and accept this otherness (Beck 2002; Calhoun 2003) – is, as shown in the current research, a key structural parameter for agents working in the contemporary scientific field of history. Cosmopolitanism is on the one hand a set of ideas that can distance historians from a commemoration orchestrated by national-populist parties. On the other hand, it is a reflexive frame fixing the narratives, interactions and– in some ways – struggles between historians who do not all have the same symbolic capital to produce and circulate an authoritative discourse on the complex reading of Dannunzian Fiume.

By developing social interactions among themselves, historians use a cosmopolitan common ground to secure the transfer of scientific messages and their shared acceptance in a debate. Cosmopolitanism is included in the habitus of these communicative agents to circulate discourse. Nevertheless, the most authoritative ‘in-field’ discourse is not necessarily the most performative one in the broader society if it is not in tune with the ‘horizon of expectation’ of dominant stakeholders in the other two determinant professional fields engaged in the commemorative process: the political and the journalistic ones. The most peripheral cosmopolitan discourse in the field of history – in this case the libertarian one concerning the Dannunzian global revolution – circulated more widely in the broader society because it could be absorbed into the agenda of the right-wing national populist executive power orchestrating the commemoration in Trieste. Adopting this libertarian discourse also made more sense for the most central media outlet in Trieste, Il Piccolo, eager to attract or retain its readership by controversial storytelling at a time of overall difficulties for the press in the digital age. Il Piccolo is not a tabloid newspaper; nevertheless – as shown in other case studies (Lamour 2020, 2022b, 2022c; Mazzoleni 2008) – it could not avoid reporting the sensationalist events and episodic references at the time to Guerri's unconventional libertarian position and involvement in the right-wing populist commemoration. Therefore, Pupo, with his more elite-driven exhibition, non-sensationalist discourse and revered expertise, became a peripheral actor in reprocessing the controversial national-populist commemoration; a supplier of ‘soft’ and yet essential raw material for the multi-faceted circulation of national-populism in the media.