Bloody Christmas in Fiume

On the afternoon of 24 December 1920 units of the regular Italian army went into the attack on Fiume, today the Croatian city of Rijeka. Facing them, in trenches and behind barricades in the suburbs, were also Italians: the legionaries of the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who for sixteen months had been ruling the city in defiance of the government in Rome. The fighting, halted on Christmas Day and resumed on 26 December, lasted until 29 December. Warships shelled the palace from which the Commandant governed, and on 28 December he gave up power. Some fifty people were killed, including several civilians. D’Annunzio called those days “Bloody Christmas” (Natale di sangue), and that is the name under which they passed into history. The liberal state used force against armed nationalists on this occasion. Two years later, faced with the Fascists’ March on Rome, it could no longer bring itself to do so.

It is often stated that Italy took Fiume “after five days of resistance” by the legionaries. This is a shorthand: on 24 December the fighting was only just beginning. The five days are the period from 24 to 28 or 29 December, with a pause on Christmas Day. The capitulation agreement was signed on 31 December, and the army took over the city at the turn of the year.

The Treaty of Rapallo

After marching into Fiume in September 1919, D’Annunzio proclaimed the city’s annexation to Italy, but no government in Rome could recognise it. Fiume, before the war a separate body of the Hungarian crown, was the subject of a dispute between Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and the Powers in Paris wanted to make it a free city. Hungary renounced its rights to it in the Treaty of Trianon in June 1920. Prime Minister Francesco Saverio Nitti did not dare to disarm the legionaries, and when in June 1920 he was replaced by that old master of compromise, Giovanni Giolitti, it became clear that Rome meant to come to terms with Belgrade without regard for the poet. D’Annunzio responded on 8 September 1920 by proclaiming the Italian Regency of Carnaro, a state with its own constitution that was to await union with Italy. In the autumn there was even talk, in his entourage and among nationalists in Rome, of an expedition from Fiume against the capital to overthrow the government. Giolitti nipped the idea in the bud, winning over the generals and drawing the more cautious away from the conspiracy, Benito Mussolini first among them.

The Foreign Minister, Carlo Sforza, who during the war had been envoy to the Serbian government, quickly reached an understanding with the Yugoslavs. On 12 November 1920, at the Villa Spinola near Rapallo, Giolitti, Sforza and the War Minister, Ivanoe Bonomi, signed a border treaty with the delegation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Italy received the whole of Istria, with the border along the crest of the Julian Alps, Zadar and several islands, including Cres, Lošinj and Lastovo. The rest of Dalmatia went to the Yugoslavs. Fiume, with a small surrounding district, was to become an independent Free State, linked to Italy by a narrow strip of coast. Both sides undertook to respect its independence “in perpetuity”. The Free State was immediately recognised by the United States, Britain and France.

In Italy the treaty was received with relief. All the major parties supported it, as did Mussolini, who argued in Il Popolo d’Italia that it was a sensible compromise. This broke the old alliance between the Fascists and the Commandant. Many legionaries regarded Mussolini’s stance as betrayal. D’Annunzio declared the treaty illegal and ordered his legionaries to occupy the islands of Krk and Rab, which under the treaty belonged to Yugoslavia. According to some accounts, the Regency even declared a state of war with the Kingdom of Italy.

The ultimatum

Once parliament had approved the treaty, the government decided to enforce it. The task was entrusted to General Enrico Caviglia, who had commanded the Eighth Army at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto and at the turn of 1919 and 1920 had succeeded Pietro Badoglio as Extraordinary Commissioner in Venezia Giulia. Caviglia surrounded the city with a cordon of troops, demanded that D’Annunzio recognise the treaty and withdraw the legionaries from Fiume and the islands, and around 21 December proclaimed a blockade of the city by land and sea. He gave the legionaries forty-eight hours to submit and the civilian population the same time to leave the threatened districts. D’Annunzio rejected all negotiations. The legionaries, still several thousand strong, dug trenches and built barricades on the roads leading into the city, especially from the west, from the suburb of Cantrida, where the government troops were positioned.

Some historians draw attention to the choice of date. Over Christmas no newspapers appeared in Italy, and the country’s attention was elsewhere. The government is said to have counted on settling the matter quickly, before public opinion – still largely sympathetic to the poet – had time to react. According to the surviving text of his order, Caviglia instructed his troops to “advance along the whole line, breaking with fire the resistance of anyone who tries to obstruct obedience to our soldiers”.

Five days of fighting

The attack began late in the afternoon of 24 December. The regular troops struck at the legionaries’ positions in the suburbs. The legionaries, many of them former Arditi – soldiers of the wartime assault units – defended themselves fiercely with machine guns and grenades. On both sides fought men in the same uniforms who only two years earlier had been fighting the Austrians together. After several hours of bitter fighting, a truce was declared for Christmas Day.

The fighting resumed on 26 December. Since the infantry could not break the resistance, Caviglia turned to naval artillery. In the afternoon the battleship Andrea Doria closed to less than a kilometre from the shore and opened fire with her secondary guns on the governor’s palace, the Commandant’s headquarters. A shell struck the room in which D’Annunzio was working, and the poet was slightly wounded. The bombardment from the sea, in which her sister ship Caio Duilio also took part, continued until 29 December. Shells destroyed houses, bridges and railway viaducts, and civilians were killed. Legionaries were also killed outside the city, on Krk and in the area around Fiume.

On 28 December D’Annunzio convened the Regency council and agreed to negotiate. He handed his letter of resignation to the commander of the legionaries, Giovanni Host-Venturi, and to the mayor, Riccardo Gigante. Authority in the city reverted to the city council. As his opponents later bitterly remarked, he then replaced the oath “Fiume or death” with a new and less heroic motto: “Italy and life”. On 31 December, in Opatija, a resort near Fiume, representatives of the city and Caviglia’s officers signed an agreement that ended the fighting. It provided for the departure of the legionaries from the city, the entry of the regular troops and Fiume’s acceptance of the terms of the Treaty of Rapallo.

Casualties and the Commandant’s departure

The number of victims is given variously. The figures most often cited are 22 legionaries, 17 regular soldiers and 5 civilians killed, about fifty people in all. Other tallies give slightly higher losses on the government side. One of the local autonomists, Giovanni Dalma, wrote years later of 53 dead and more than two hundred wounded. Some of the legionaries were killed not in the city itself but on the islands and in the surrounding area. Among the dead were many very young men, in their teens or early twenties.

In January 1921 the legionaries left Fiume on trains provided by the army. D’Annunzio left the city on 18 January and went to Venice, then settled in a villa on Lake Garda, at Gardone Riviera, which he later turned into his mausoleum during his own lifetime, the Vittoriale. The government did not put him on trial, and the legionaries were covered by an amnesty. Power in Fiume passed to a provisional government headed by the physician Antonio Grossich, which was to prepare elections to the Constituent Assembly of the Free State.

The country that did not come to the rescue

D’Annunzio had counted on Italy not allowing its troops to fire on his legionaries. He miscalculated. The country was exhausted. Behind it lay two years of strikes, land occupations and riots, later dubbed the “Red Biennium”, and in September 1920 workers in Milan, Turin and other cities of the industrial North had occupied hundreds of factories. Giolitti had sat out that wave without using the army, and in the autumn the tension began to subside. The middle classes wanted above all peace and quiet, and many of the Commandant’s former supporters believed that the Treaty of Rapallo had given Italy what mattered most: Istria, Zadar and a secure border in the east.

The nationalists protested and there were demonstrations in some cities, but there was no mass movement in defence of Fiume. Mussolini confined himself to protests in his newspaper and did not call the Fascists to action. The Socialists, who had from the outset regarded D’Annunzio as an adventurer and an enemy of the labour movement, had no reason to defend him. The army, despite some officers’ sympathy for the poet, carried out its orders. The poet felt this isolation as betrayal, and from then on remained distrustful of Mussolini, who had stood aside in December 1920.

Significance

Giolitti achieved what Nitti had been unable to: he restored the authority of the state over the army and honoured an international commitment. Antonio Gramsci wrote in January 1921 that the liquidation of Fiume had strengthened the bourgeois state. But it was a hollow victory. The nationalists and many officers regarded the firing on the legionaries as a crime, and “Bloody Christmas” as a betrayal of the fallen. The legionaries dispersed across the country with a sense of grievance, taking with them the black shirts, rituals and songs of Fiume, and many of them swelled the ranks of the Fascist squads which, precisely at that time, at the turn of 1920 and 1921, began attacking Socialists on a large scale in northern Italy. In the spring of 1921 Giolitti took the Fascists onto the joint electoral lists of his “National Bloc”, hoping to tame them. That was how Mussolini entered parliament.

Most important of all, Mussolini drew a lesson from Fiume. The poet had lost because he had rebelled against the state without the backing of the army, the king or a mass party. Mussolini did not support him in December 1920, and two years later he seized power using the method D’Annunzio had tried out in Fiume, but in a better-prepared form: he built a mass movement, secured the goodwill of the generals and the court, and in October 1922, during the March on Rome, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to declare a state of emergency. The army, which in 1920 had still fired on nationalists, received no such order in 1922.

The Free State of Fiume, for which blood had been shed in December 1920, never began to function normally. In 1922 local Fascists and former legionaries overthrew its elected government, and Mussolini, as prime minister, forced Yugoslavia to agree to the partition of the city. In 1924 Fiume was annexed to Italy, and D’Annunzio, whom the Duce preferred not to confront, was given a princely title. The dream of an Italian Adriatic, in whose name the legionaries had fought their own army, led Italy in April 1941 to attack Yugoslavia alongside Germany, and after the war to the permanent loss of Fiume.