Italy annexes Fiume

On 16 March 1924 King Victor Emmanuel III arrived in Fiume. Thousands of people with flags gathered in the streets and in front of the governor’s palace, from whose balcony Gabriele D’Annunzio had proclaimed the city’s annexation to Italy four and a half years earlier. Now it was the monarch who did so, and this had been made possible by the Prime Minister, Benito Mussolini. For four years Fiume had formally been an independent Free State, whose independence Italy and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had in 1920 promised to respect “in perpetuity”. In January 1924 the two states divided it between themselves. For Mussolini it was his first success in foreign policy and Fascist Italy’s first territorial gain. For the nationalists it was the fulfilment of a dream that had been fought over since 1919 in Paris, in Rome and in the streets of Fiume itself.

Popular chronologies state that on this day Italy annexed the “Free State of Fiume”. Two qualifications are needed. First, Italy did not take the whole Free State: it received the city and a strip of coast, while ceding to Yugoslavia Port Baross, the delta of the Rječina river and the Croat-inhabited hinterland. Second, in legal terms the annexation took place earlier. On 22 February 1924, after the exchange of ratifications, the agreement came into force, and that same day the King signed one decree-law annexing Fiume and another creating the new province of Carnaro with Fiume as its capital. 16 March was the day of the formal proclamation of the annexation in the King’s presence.

From coup to governor

The Free State never began to function normally. In April 1921 the elections to the Constituent Assembly were won by Riccardo Zanella’s autonomists, who opposed annexation, but on 3 March 1922 local fascists and former legionaries, backed by squads from Trieste, overthrew his government by force. Zanella and most of the deputies fled to Yugoslavia and sat in exile at Kraljevica. Italian troops entered the city, and power passed to the annexationist minority of the assembly led by Attilio Depoli. The liberal governments in Rome, first under Ivanoe Bonomi and then under Luigi Facta, could neither restore the lawful authorities nor resolve the question. An Italo-Yugoslav commission that was to settle the issues of the port and the border made no progress.

Everything changed when Mussolini became Prime Minister at the end of October 1922. He also took the Foreign Ministry for himself. For the fascists Fiume was a matter of honour, and the new Prime Minister needed a success that would show that fascism could win what the liberals had failed to obtain. He acted, however, more cautiously than his rhetoric suggested. The ministry’s secretary-general, the experienced diplomat Salvatore Contarini, conducted negotiations with Belgrade in the spirit of the old policy of accommodation in the Balkans. At the same time Mussolini was creating faits accomplis. On 17 September 1923 he appointed General Gaetano Giardino military governor of Fiume, which in practice meant Italy taking over the city. This happened in the very weeks in which the Italian fleet shelled and occupied Corfu, and Mussolini showed Europe that he would not shrink from using force against a weaker neighbour.

The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes had little say in the matter. It was a young state, torn by the conflict between Serbian centralism and Croatian aspirations to autonomy, and on Fiume it could not count on the support of France and Britain, which had no intention of quarrelling with Italy over a single city. Prime Minister Nikola Pašić preferred an agreement that would bring Yugoslavia at least part of the territory and peace on the border to a fruitless dispute with a stronger neighbour.

The Rome agreements

On 27 January 1924 in Rome, Mussolini, Pašić and the foreign minister, Momčilo Ninčić, signed two documents. The first was the agreement on Fiume. The parties stated that the creation of the Free State envisaged in the Treaty of Rapallo had proved impossible and decided to settle the matter differently. Italy received the city of Fiume with a strip of coast that gave it a land connection with the rest of the kingdom. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes received Port Baross and the Rječina delta, already promised to it in a letter from Foreign Minister Sforza attached to the Treaty of Rapallo, together with the inner, Slav-inhabited part of the district. The border ran along the Rječina channel, which henceforth separated Italian Fiume from Yugoslav Sušak. Italy leased one of the port’s basins to Yugoslavia, and the details concerning the port, the railways and cross-border traffic were to be settled by special conventions. A mixed commission demarcated the border on the ground, and its findings were adopted in conventions signed at Nettuno in July 1925.

The second document was a pact of friendship and cordial cooperation, concluded for five years. For Belgrade it was the indispensable price of its concession over Fiume, as Mussolini acknowledged in a confidential memorandum to the King. The pact bound the two states to cooperate in upholding the order established by the peace treaties and to consult each other. For a short while it seemed that Italy and Yugoslavia, rivals on the Adriatic, would become partners. The agreement was registered with the League of Nations in April 1924. The Free State’s government-in-exile declared it null and void as concluded without the participation or consent of the inhabitants, but nobody took any notice of the protest. Many members of the assembly in any case came to regard union with Italy as an acceptable solution and returned to the city.

Fiume became the capital of the province of Carnaro, which also included the district of Opatija. D’Annunzio, who watched everything from his villa on Lake Garda, was honoured by the regime. In 1924 the King conferred on him the hereditary title of Prince of Montenevoso, after Mount Snežnik (Italian: Monte Nevoso), which after the Treaty of Rapallo lay on Italy’s new border.

A city without a hinterland

For Fiume itself, annexation did not fulfil its promises. Before the war it had been Hungary’s main port, handling a large share of the whole Hungarian kingdom’s seaborne trade. Now it found itself at the very edge of Italy, cut off by a border from its own hinterland and from the suburb of Sušak, which Yugoslavia was developing as a port of its own. Traffic in the port fell, and the city never regained its former position. The Croat and Slovene minority in the province, as in the whole of Venezia Giulia, came under the pressure of Fascist Italianisation: Slav schools and associations were closed, and surnames and place names were changed to Italian ones. Fascist Italy, on the other hand, surrounded Fiume with a cult as the birthplace of its style and its myth.

Significance

The annexation of Fiume was the Fascist government’s first territorial gain, achieved by pressure on a weaker neighbour. The powers that in 1919 had refused to give the city to Italy took note of it in 1924. Mussolini learnt that a fait accompli, backed by the threat of force and wrapped in a bilateral agreement, was enough to change the provisions of a treaty that was supposed to last for ever. Hitler later used a similar method on a far larger scale.

The friendship with Yugoslavia proved short-lived. As early as 1926–1927 Mussolini bound Albania to Italy and hemmed in Yugoslavia from the south, and the 1924 pact was not renewed when it expired in 1929. Italy gave refuge to Ante Pavelić’s Croatian Ustaše, who in 1934 organised the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseille. A brief détente came only with the agreement concluded in 1937 by Galeazzo Ciano and Milan Stojadinović. In April 1941 Italy, together with Germany, invaded the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Sušak and a long stretch of the Croatian coast were then added to the province of Fiume, and the Governorate of Dalmatia was created from occupied Dalmatia. After Italy’s capitulation in September 1943 the city was occupied by the Germans, and on 3 May 1945 by Yugoslav partisans. The peace treaty of 1947 gave Fiume to Yugoslavia. Little remained of twenty years of Italian rule beyond the name the exiles remembered: most of the city’s Italian inhabitants left, and Fiume became Rijeka.