Elections in the Free State of Fiume

On 24 April 1921 the people of Fiume elected the Constituent Assembly of their new state. For the first time since Gabriele D’Annunzio’s legionaries had marched into the city in 1919, they could express their will in a vote that nobody annulled while the ballots were being counted. Two lists faced each other. Riccardo Zanella’s Autonomist Party wanted the independent Free State provided for by the Treaty of Rapallo. The National Bloc, in which the fascists and former legionaries played the leading role alongside liberals and democrats, wanted the city joined to Italy. The autonomists won 6,558 votes and the Bloc 3,443 – roughly two-thirds against one-third. The losers refused to accept the result. Soon after the vote their squads raided the courthouse, seized the ballot boxes and voting papers and burned them in the square. So began the story of Fiume’s only democratically elected government, which the fascists overthrew less than a year later.

These elections are sometimes described as the moment when voters “endorsed the idea of the Free State of Fiume”. It was not a referendum. The Free State had formally existed since the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo on 12 November 1920, and on 24 April voters were electing a parliament that was to adopt its constitution. But since the central issue of the campaign was precisely independence or annexation, the autonomists’ victory was widely read as a vote for the Free State.

After Bloody Christmas

The elections took place four months after the Italian army had forcibly removed D’Annunzio’s legionaries from Fiume. After his departure in January 1921 power passed to a provisional government headed by Antonio Grossich, a physician and the elder statesman of the city’s pro-Italian camp – the same man who on 30 October 1918 had proclaimed the city’s union with Italy. Formally the city was independent; in practice order was kept by Italian troops and carabinieri. The Free State comprised the former district of Fiume, a small area of about 28 square kilometres, together with a narrow coastal strip linking it to Italy. It had a population of several tens of thousands, mostly Italian-speaking, with a Croatian-speaking minority.

Riccardo Zanella was the most popular politician in the city. Before the war, as leader of the autonomists, he had defended Fiume’s rights against Budapest; he was elected to the Hungarian parliament and, in 1914, mayor, although the Emperor did not confirm his election. During the war, conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, he gave himself up to the Russians, made his way to Rome and campaigned for Fiume’s union with Italy. After returning, however, he fell out with the Italian National Council, and when D’Annunzio began to rule the city like a dictator, Zanella placed himself at the head of the opposition and had to leave. He concluded that independence, economically tied to its hinterland, would give the city more than annexation, and that the Italian language and culture would survive without it.

The campaign was unequal. The National Bloc had the press, the street and the legionaries who had stayed behind in the city and gone over to the fascists. According to the memoirs of one of the autonomist deputies, Giovanni Dalma, Benito Mussolini himself came to Fiume to speak for the Bloc. The autonomists could hold only a few meetings, and those indoors. The socialists and communists, whose freedom of assembly and of the press had not been restored, boycotted the vote.

The vote and the burned ballot boxes

Even so, the autonomists won clearly. According to the most commonly cited figures, they took 6,558 votes and the National Bloc 3,443. The losers claimed that the Croats had decided the result, and indeed most Croatian voters did back Zanella. His supporters replied that the autonomists had also won among the Italian-speaking population, and that the Bloc had put on the electoral rolls many newcomers from Italy and former legionaries who had been hastily granted Fiume citizenship. The result showed one thing: after a year and a half of D’Annunzio’s rule and the bloody fighting of December, most inhabitants were tired and preferred peaceful independence to a continuing struggle for annexation.

The reaction came quickly. Fascists and nationalists led by Riccardo Gigante, mayor in D’Annunzio’s day, raided the courthouse where the election materials were kept, seized the ballot boxes and voting papers and burned them in Piazza Dante. They hoped this would invalidate the vote. But the electoral commission’s report had already been signed, and its chairman managed to hide it and pass it to the authorities. The squads, backed by fascists from nearby Trieste, also besieged Zanella’s house for several hours; he escaped with his life by fleeing across the rooftops. Grossich’s government resigned. Hundreds of residents, intimidated by the squads, took refuge on Yugoslav territory.

Zanella’s government

For several months Fiume was in chaos. Rome, which under the Treaty of Rapallo was responsible for the city’s security, sent one commissioner after another: first Captain Antonio Foschini of the navy, then General Luigi Amantea. The election result was recognised only five months later. The Constituent Assembly held its first sitting on 5 October 1921, under what amounted to a state of siege, and appointed Zanella provisional head of state. The Free State won recognition from many countries, but it had no police of its own, and the carabinieri who kept order sympathised with the fascists. Attempts on Zanella’s life disrupted the assembly’s subsequent sittings.

On 1 March 1922 one of the former legionaries was killed in unexplained circumstances. The fascists seized on it as a pretext. At dawn on 3 March, led by the engineer Attilio Prodam and the fascist deputy for Trieste Francesco Giunta, they attacked the government palace, which was also shelled by a torpedo boat seized in the harbour. After several hours of fighting Zanella was forced to sign his resignation. Most of the assembly’s deputies secretly crossed the border and continued to meet in exile at Kraljevica in Yugoslavia. In the city power was taken over by the annexationist minority of the assembly, and in mid-March Italian troops marched in. It was one of the first cases of fascists overthrowing a lawful, elected government by force – seven months before the March on Rome.

Significance

The elections of 24 April 1921 were the only moment when the people of Fiume freely decided their own fate – and they decided otherwise than the nationalists wished. What followed foreshadowed the methods fascism would soon use throughout Italy: burned ballot boxes, squad terror, police inaction and, finally, a coup that the authorities in Rome simply accepted. After Mussolini came to power, Italy forced Yugoslavia to agree to the partition of the Free State, and in 1924 annexed the city.

Zanella never reconciled himself to this. In exile in Belgrade and Paris he was active among the anti-fascists, and in 1945 he appealed to the victorious powers to restore the Free State. He called Fiume the first victim of fascist aggression, before Ethiopia and Albania. Nobody listened. In May 1945 the city was taken by Josip Broz Tito’s partisans, who murdered several leaders of the local autonomists, and in 1947 Fiume, now Rijeka, passed to Yugoslavia. Most of its Italian inhabitants left.