The Emergence of a Modern Symbol

The city of Fiume received its coat of arms from Emperor Leopold I in 1659, featuring a double-headed eagle, with both heads looking in the same direction, under the Habsburg imperial crown, perched atop a pot wedged between a rock formation, out of which water flows. At the base, the inscription reads ‘Indeficienter’, that is, ‘Unending’. Though this coat of arms was an invention of the seventeenth century, the history of the municipal flag is more recent, dating back to the beginning of the so-called Springtime of Nations. In 1846, the civic municipal magistrate of Fiume, following the example of other Hungarian committees, proposed to use the colours of the city's coat of arms (deep red-yellow-violet) instead of the Hungarian colours (green-white-red) in the fashioning of their police uniforms. Despite the patrician municipal council's rejection of the proposal – for fear it would provoke a negative response in the rest of Hungary – Fiume's local population started to wear cockades with the city's colours in 1848 when the Springtime of Nations knocked on Fiume's door. With Milan, Venice, and Pest in revolt against the Habsburg Empire, but with Croatia-Slavonia remaining loyal to Vienna in opposition to Hungary, the power structures of the Habsburg lands changed, and Fiume found itself under Croatian control. That year, the municipal council was ordered by the new superior Croatian authorities to change the Hungarian-colour police uniforms. As a response, the councillors decided that the new police uniforms and pom-poms adorning the policemen's hats would employ the municipal colours. The superior Croatian authorities then overruled the city council's decision and made the police wear the Croatian national colours (red-white-blue). Furthermore, the Croatian administration decided that the city must use the Croatian tricolour, including the city's coat of arms, as its official flag.Footnote ¹⁷

The municipal council's attempt to adopt the municipal colours, instead of the previously-used Hungarian colours, was made to mark the distinctiveness of the city from the Croatian crownland and to oppose symbolically the Croatian national movement. It was a symbolic struggle between a local elite that wanted to maintain civic privileges against another elite that viewed the city as its integral historical and national part.

The empire's war effort against Prussia and Italy in 1866 again reshuffled the balance of power inside the Habsburg lands, providing the Hungarian elite with a stronger negotiating position against the Habsburgs. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise (1867) gave the Kingdom of Hungary semi-independence, while Croatia-Slavonia could only negotiate its position inside Hungary. With the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement (1868), Croatia-Slavonia achieved a considerable degree of autonomy, while Fiume's elite obtained its detachment from the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia and direct connection to the Kingdom of Hungary as a corpus separatum. Obviously, this meant that symbols were changed. From 1870 onward, the deep red-yellow-violet tricolour became the Fiume municipality's official flag. Its use was limited to official local and state ceremonies, such as the visit of King Franz Josef to Fiume in 1875,Footnote ¹⁸ or the Hungarian millennium celebrations in the city in 1896.Footnote ¹⁹ When the king-emperor visited the city, the Fiumian flag waved alongside the black-yellow imperial and red-white-green Hungarian flags; when the millennium was celebrated the same flag hanged alongside the state (i.e. Hungarian) flags on governmental, municipal, associational, as well as private buildings.

Along with the flag, another widely deployed symbol became the Fiume's coat of arms, sanctioned in numerous municipal buildings commissioned and owned by the economic and demographically expanding city, such as the municipal theatre, the entrance to the city park, a municipal boys’ school, and the fish market.Footnote ²⁰ The double-headed eagle and the flag became the symbolic elements of a ‘banal nationalism’,Footnote ²¹ or, more precisely in this case, a banal local patriotism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new political generation transformed this civic-municipal symbol into that of an imagined political community. The city's symbols were displayed on almost all public municipal notifications, on city offices’ stamps – ranging from the municipal police to the local hospital – and even at the highest level as part of the extended Hungarian coat of arms.Footnote ²² The coat of arms was also used for advertisements, for instance on the cover of the Guida di Fiume from 1898 (Figure 1), which was a collection of all the city's institutions and businesses, and then inside the same edition, by the local chocolate factory and a local pasta company.Footnote ²³ It was a symbol ready to be used, and its presence became ubiquitous.

Figure 1.

Cover of Guida di Fiume 1898 (Fiume: Premiata Libreria Editrice M. Polonio-Balbi). Courtesy of Sveučilišna knjižnica Rijeka, Collection Biblioteca Civica.

As an everyday civic symbol, the coat of arms became an imperceptible element of local patriotism, pushing locals to internalise the fact that they lived in a world of imperial, national, regional and local loyalties. As such, the coat of arms was reconfigured into a political symbol for and of the masses. In a local Habsburg society that was industrialising, and with an increasing number of immigrants and consequently an increasing number of potential voters – or at least politically and socially active individuals – the political elite found it necessary to construct and obtain the consent of wider social strata.Footnote ²⁴ This role was fulfilled by the Autonomist Party.

The Autonomist Party was established at the end of the nineteenth century, when Fiume's elite was set on a collision course with the central state authorities in Budapest on issues regarding the degree of the city's self-government. It was not a conflict against the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hungary, but rather a contention about how institutionally homogenised and autonomous Fiume should be.Footnote ²⁵ One of the issues concerned was the usage of the Italian language by state authorities, an element which became the battle horse of Fiumian autonomism. To obtain support from locals, the autonomists had to explain what the ‘Italian character’ was and who might be a threat to it. The ‘Italian character’ referred to the privileged position of the Italian language at local level, and it implied opposition to Croatian historical and national claims on Fiume. By the late nineteenth century it included resistance to the Hungarian government's attempts to make the city's administration uniform with the rest of Hungary. In this economically and demographically expanding city, the need to create consensus with a larger public at the local level increased rapidly. By 1900, Fiume was the second-fastest growing city in the Kingdom of Hungary. As more people moved to and got engaged in local Fiumian society, they also required a greater amount of service from the city administration. To maintain their special administrative and legal situation as a corpus separatum, Fiume's elite needed to include these wider social strata and convince them of their alleged specificity by political propaganda that emulated other nationalist movements, giving a sense of sacredness and unity to their cause.

The autonomists functioned as a local mass party and spread the colours of the Fiumian flag on promotional material – in one instance even on the covers of their own matchbooks (Figure 2) – just as other modern nationalist and workers’ parties deployed their political symbols in Austria-Hungary and in Europe in general.Footnote ²⁶ In another case, the autonomists’ followers distributed the city's flags during the festivity of the city's patron saints, Vitus and Modestus, in 1902. Furthermore, the autonomists promoted the construction of a double-headed eagle statue to be placed on the city tower – the town's former main gate – so that the Hungarian state flag would not be placed there. The event was memorialised by the publication of a postcard with the Fiumian tricolour and the double-headed eagle.Footnote ²⁷ Finally, the 1913 song contest organised by the local literature circle deemed the composition La mia bandiera (My Flag) the winner. The flag for whom the ‘soul was proud, made the heart beat strongly, resisting the worst of times’ was not a national, Hungarian, or Italian flag, but the Fiumian tricolour.Footnote ²⁸

Figure 2.

One side of the Autonomist Party's matchboxes, featuring the city's coat of arms and the colours of the Fiumian flag. Source: La Voce del Popolo (Fiume), 31 January 1904, 4. Courtesy of Sveučilišna knjižnica Rijeka.

By making these symbols almost constantly visible and available for the public to discuss, choose, perform, consume, or dislike, the autonomists had created an ‘everyday local patriotism’Footnote ²⁹ among the Fiumian Italian cultural and linguistic community. A consequence of this expansion of local patriotic sentiment was the potential for ambivalence toward the Hungarian state itself, which manifested itself in the hierarchy of self-identifications among Fiumians during the First World War.

Fighting for our Beloved Homeland

During the First World War, young Hungarian citizens, mainly with pertinency (Heimatrecht)Footnote ³⁰ in Fiume, were enrolled in the 4th Fiume Battalion, part of the 19th Honvéd (Territorial Army of the Kingdom of Hungary) Infantry Regiment. In September 1914, the soldiers of the 4th Fiume Battalion settled in Nagykanizsa in southwestern Hungary were subsequently sent to fight in Serbia, on the Balkan Front. Before leaving for the front, these soldiers requested permission to bring the flag of their hometown with them.Footnote ³¹ The letter, written in Italian, reached the mayor of Fiume, who responded positively to the soldiers’ request. The mayor sent the flag and paid tribute to the soldiers, reassuring them that they would know to defend ‘our flag’ with honour, and that they would bring it back from where they were fighting for the homeland (patria). In a paternal, patriotic and emotive tone, the mayor added: ‘I embrace you with blessings in the name of Fiume, which thinks of You and pulsates’.Footnote ³² The soldiers, thankful for the flag, replied to the mayor, pledging loyalty to ‘our dear Fiume and our flag’, promising to fight as heroes – to die, if need be – for the flag and for ‘our beloved homeland’, and to return victorious with ‘our tricolour’.Footnote ³³ Across the correspondence, devotion was directed above all to a humanised and feminine city. As the local autonomist newspaper wrote, the young Fiumians of the battalion wanted to be united, to create around themselves an environment that allowed them, in some way, to recall their faraway birthplace (paese) and to obtain strength, courage and consolation in the shadow of the familiar Fiumian flag.Footnote ³⁴ This attachment to a locality was quite common in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and France, and at first glance one can say that these sentiments were merely instrumentalised to encourage wartime engagement.Footnote ³⁵ In this case, however, there is another element to point out.

The written exchange between the soldiers, the mayor and the local press reveals features defined by Alberto Mario Banti as ‘deep images’ of the morphology of national discourse, that is, the nation as kinship/family, a sacrificial and profoundly gendered community.Footnote ³⁶ In these letters, ‘our flag’ had to be defended with honour and provided a sense of familiarity; the homeland was worth fighting and dying for and the (grammatically female) subject – ‘our dear Fiume’ – pledged loyalty, thought, and concern for her heroic (male) warriors.

In short, this seems to be exactly what we have come to expect from nationalist discourse at the beginning of the twentieth century, with one big difference: there was no ‘nation’ on which all of this gendered and romantic patriotism was centred. Instead, local patriotism and state patriotism were intertwined, demanding and deserving sacrificial respect, left interdependent thanks to the ambiguities of the concepts of ‘homeland’ (patria) and ‘birthplace’ (paese). As pointed out by Siniša Malešević, the strength of national ideology and its contemporary grounding derives from coercive organisational power, ideological penetration, and the envelopment of micro-solidarities.Footnote ³⁷ Again, what we are seeing in imperial Hungarian Fiume is not a successful national ideology. Rather, the notion of Fiumian local patriotism created and maintained by the city's specific self-governing institutions, framed as ‘face-to-face intimacy’, was accepted by the population. In 1914, at the start of the conflict, this self-identification was successfully exploited for Hungary's – and the empire's – war effort.

The ideology of local patriotism was widespread throughout the divided local political spectrum, at least among its Italian-speaking sections. It was the autonomist newspaper that emphasised elements of local bonding and the soldiers’ need to maintain ties with Fiume. While they remained in other parts of Hungary, Fiumian locals would thus maintain foremost their Fiumian self-understanding, avoiding or diminishing other royal, regional and national forms of identifying that the front and war experience could have triggered. Yet, the pro-government newspaper, by publishing the same article, also encouraged such practices. These messages were consumed by the local Italian readership. For them, the Hungarian homeland was not opposed to Fiume. The two imaginary figures were complementary. Nevertheless, Fiume and Hungary did not possess equal value. In the letters there is no mention of the Hungarian state flag, while the Fiumian flag is the one that has to be defended with honour. It was the local flag that highlighted distinctiveness from the rest of the state and was a source of secular devotion.

Two months later, the separation between Fiumians and Hungarians was publicly displayed by another letter. In November 1914, a third Italian-language daily published a letter by a Fiumian soldier, serving in the Honvéd, who wrote the following to his father: ‘Fiume can be proud of her battalion and the Fiumian mothers can be proud of their sons, of the Fiumians that fight side-by-side with the good Hungarians’.Footnote ³⁸ For the young soldier, Fiumians and Hungarians were jointly fighting for a common patriotic cause, yet they were separated in semantic and imaginary terms. In the imagination of this Fiumian fighter, the Fiumian mother, Fiumian sons, and indeed Fiume herself were conceived as distinct from the Hungarians. They were members of the same state and shared the same citizenship, but Fiumians and Hungarians were imagined as divergent concepts, and yet still bound together by their common patriotic effort.

Local patriotism was questioned in May 1915 with the Italian proclamation of war on Austria-Hungary. Half a year after the letter sent by the Fiumian soldier, Fiume's mayor declared to his fellow citizens that Italy, ‘to whose nationality by language and habits we were proud to belong’, was now the new enemy of ‘our Kingdom’. A dramatic call to be united under the common flag – without specifying which flag – was preceded by the phrase: ‘Sons of Fiume, we have to follow the road already outlined by our fathers; that of loyalty to the Throne Augustissimus which distinguished our city with the adjective “most loyal” – loyalty to Hungary with whom we are and want to be united forever’.Footnote ³⁹ The mayor's speech further advocated gratitude to the king and appealed to the sacrifice of lives on the ‘Altar of the Homeland’. Surely, the new events of the war challenged the previous form of local patriotism and redefined it, yet local patriotism did not disappear altogether.

For instance, in October 1915, for Franz Josef's name day, some municipal buildings only hung Fiumian flags, while others placed both Fiumian and Hungarian state flags on their façades. The episode generated many comments, and for the sake of not eliciting ‘false interpretations’, the freshly-elected mayor ordered that, from that point onward, on all solemn days, both flags should be displayed. One ethnic Hungarian city councillor praised the mayor's words, claiming that the decision would have been applauded by the local (ethnic) Hungarians and would produce a positive echo across the whole motherland.Footnote ⁴⁰ Fiume's flag was thus not forbidden as a symbol of disloyalty to the state during the war, but now alone was not sufficient to express loyalty to the Hungarian state. As is evident from the voices of commentators mentioned in the municipal council discussion, there was a political group that deployed the same flag with another political agenda.

In 1908, some years before the onset of the war, young Italian irredentists from Fiume brought both the Fiumian flag and the Italian flag to the celebration of Dante in Ravenna. The presence of the local flag, an unknown banner to the other participants, served to symbolically connect Fiume with other Italian irredentist towns (that is, Trieste, Trento, Gorizia, Pola, and Zara) in the empire. It was used to show that Fiume adhered to the struggle of liberation of their ‘enslaved’ Italian brothers in Austria, as well as re-consecrating the municipal flag as a national one. The municipal flag, according to the local Italian irredentist leaders, lost its sacred value when as a ceremonial flag it appeared in the parade of Hungarian cities at the Hungarian millennium celebration in 1896. Thus, according to Fiume's Italian irredentists, by bringing the Fiumian flag to the death place of the greatest Italian poet, the banner would regain its sacredness.Footnote ⁴¹ This proved once more the significance of that flag and how Italian national loyalty was expressed and mediated through symbols of local identification.

The nationalistic reading of Dante's celebrations has a counterpart. The flag used in Ravenna was a municipal ceremonial banner (‘gonfalone’), and since people from Fiume, and not only local Italian irredentists, participated in the organised trip, it also meant that the autonomist-led municipality recognised Dante's celebration as a cultural rather than a political event.Footnote ⁴² At that time, the city's banner was an undisputed civic-religious symbol both for Italian irredentists and political formations loyal to the Kingdom of Hungary. What was disputed was the symbol's belonging since its sacred value was related to whether it belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary or the Kingdom of Italy.

The flag's sacred nature did not signify it was immutable; a feature of the flag was redesigned during the war by local Italian irredentist leaders. A redesigned Fiumian flag first appeared at Quarto, near Genova. It was a highly symbolic historical place and a highly significant nationalistic event. There, Garibaldi's volunteers sailed for Sicily in 1860 to unify Italy, while in May 1915 Gabriele d'Annunzio gave a famous speech to a mass audience inciting Italian intervention into the First World War. Fiumian Italian irredentists eagerly made their presence at the D'Annunzio demonstration known by waving their Fiumian tricolour, yet, with the banner's traditional double-headed eagle supplanted with a single-headed Roman one. The fervid Italian irredentist Riccardo Gigante redesigned the central symbol: the double-headed eagle was too ambiguous, as associated with the Habsburgs, for a flag representing a city to be ‘redeemed’ by Italy.Footnote ⁴³ The decapitated Habsburg eagle could survive as an Italian symbol since its origin was reinterpreted. The eagle was now Roman, and originally one-headed, given by the Habsburg Leopold as the Holy Roman Emperor. The motto Indeficienter (Unending) now referred to the city's water source and not to unconditional and eternal fidelity to the Habsburg dynasty. Thus, the local Italian irredentists, a political minority, wanted a more radical caesura with the imperial past. However, the Habsburg legacy did not disappear overnight.

The Downfall of Empire and the Downfall of Local Patriotism?

At the end of October 1918, with the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the departure of the last Hungarian governor from Fiume, two rival national councils vied to establish control over the city. The National Council of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs (SHS) in Zagreb considered the Adriatic port as an integral part of the newly proclaimed South Slav State – made of former Habsburg lands – while the local Italian National Council demanded the town's annexation to Italy. For both groups, it seemed that the city's future could only be imagined within a future nation-state, regardless of the fact that no prior treaties had delineated any such thing. Meanwhile, the contested future of the city was solved by the arrival of the Italian army, officially leading an Interallied occupation regime which discharged the SHS National Council and recognised the Italian National Council as the only legitimate local authority. In one fell swoop the key ingredients of Fiumian local patriotism seemed to have been eradicated from the political life of the city. Habsburg fidelity and Hungarian loyalty were now excised from the list of approved adherences just as quickly as the Hungarian governor had vanished from the city.

By 1919, redefining pillars of the Fiumian local patriotism became a main concern of members of the city's new Italian National Council. Around the first months of 1919, the local high school teacher and press secretary of the Italian National Council, Edoardo Susmel, published a pamphlet titled Fiume Italiana.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his brief propaganda work, issued by the Italian irredentist Associazione nazionale Trento e Trieste (National Association of Trento and Trieste), Fiume is portrayed as a city of centuries-old Italianity. The town's pro-Italian manifestations during October and November 1918 are described as outbursts of enthusiasm, with Italian flags waving everywhere.Footnote ⁴⁵ No traces or explicit references to Fiumian flags are to be found. Aside from omitting symbols of the former local patriotic heritage, Susmel also erased the Hungarian loyalist past of Fiume. Instead, the efforts of local volunteers in the Italian army, a minority, were highlighted, which deliberately neglected the pro-Habsburg efforts of most of the population. Only the Croats, the biggest potential threat to an Italian Fiume, were labelled as Habsburgophiles.Footnote ⁴⁶

Susmel's propaganda work was accompanied by the Italian National Council's wide-ranging Italianisation policies – whose press secretary member was Susmel himself. In March 1919, the Italian National Council enacted two laws that affected the symbolic Italianity of the town. According to a law issued by the Italian National Council, the Hungarian state flag was substituted by the Italian flag, while the Hungarian state coat of arms was replaced by the five-pointed star, considered one of the oldest Italian national symbols, in state offices.Footnote ⁴⁷ The change did not represent a complete rupture with the past, since only former Hungarian state offices, now controlled by the Italian National Council, were ‘Italianised’. Adopting the five-pointed star can be explained by the city's limbo situation in international affairs, the rupture with the Habsburg past and recalling the local Italian irredentist experience. The part of Fiume's elite that wanted the city to be annexed to Italy could not simply use Italian state official symbols, as it was not officially part of Italy yet, and the use of Hungarian state symbols was out of the question after late October 1918, so the five-pointed star that had been deployed by the local Italian irredentist association Giovine Fiume (Young Italy) before the war was adopted.Footnote ⁴⁸

Yet, in January 1919, some members of the Italian National Council's Directorate also proposed a change to the city's coat of arms. Inside the Italian National Council's Directorate, the high school teacher Silvino Gigante – brother of Riccardo, who redesigned Fiume's flag along Italian irredentist lines – proposed that Fiume should reuse its ancient coat of arms instead of modifying the existing ones, representing instead the figure of St. Vitus, the city's main patron saint. The proposal was met with positive reactions by those gathered, and the decision was made to bring it to the Italian National Council while immediately informing the population through the newspapers.Footnote ⁴⁹ In April, however, the Italian National Council's Directorate considered that such a change was not within their competence, but that of the municipality.Footnote ⁵⁰

Beneath this allegedly uncontested Italianising façade, much more was going on. On 29 October, when the members of the local SHS National Council briefly replaced the office of the Hungarian governor, both the Yugoslav tricolour and the Fiumian flag waved on the city's central administrative palace. Specifically, the Fiumian flag was positioned over the Hungarian coat of arms, covering up the regime that had just crept out.Footnote ⁵¹ According to the same Croatian sources, in those days the town was flooded by flags: Croatian, Slovene, Serbian, Italian, and Fiumian.Footnote ⁵² Since the SHS National Council's High Sheriff (veliki župan) promised to maintain the city's privileges, the Fiumian flag served as a symbol of a continued commitment to local self-government and was not antithetic to the newly forming sovereignty of the South Slav state.

For the same reason, on 13 November, the local Croatian-language newspaper wrote against the Italian flag:

From the Croatian/Yugoslav perspective, the city's self-government was not to be confused with nationalism, specifically Italian nationalism. For the members of the Italian National Council, the Fiumian flag was likewise a symbol of local self-government and not antithetic to loyalty to the Italian nation-state. For instance, in one of the most famous photographs of the day before the 30 October 1918 plebiscite – which for the Italian National Council sanctioned the unification of Fiume with Italy – the largest flag hanging from the balcony of the building of the Filarmonico-Drammatica (Philharmonic Dramatic) society was the Fiumian flag, not the Italian. Again, it was a Susmel propaganda pamphlet that published this photograph in a moment when the local flag was neither problematic nor unknown, as it had been a few months before.Footnote ⁵⁴ In another episode, the Fiumian ceremonial flag, which had been used at the Hungarian millennium celebration in Budapest, was donated by a committee of Fiumian ladies to the first Italian warship that reached the city in November 1918.Footnote ⁵⁵ Therefore, the Fiumian flag was still a reference point for the Italian-speaking population in 1918, but it had lost its prominence in favour of Italian national symbols. As written by the aforementioned Croatian-language newspaper, from 29 October onward, the Italian flag and not the Fiumian flew from the city tower, signalling Fiume's desired annexation to the Italian nation-state – a decision that did not sit well with a new figure on the local political scene.Footnote ⁵⁶

On 15 November, the day that Serbian troops entered the city, Ruggero Gotthardi, a former Austrian officer, member of the local patriciate and a merchant, published an open letter advocating a free-state solution for Fiume.Footnote ⁵⁷ Though Gotthardi did not preclude the idea of a Yugoslav protectorate over Fiume, for him Fiume's autonomy was of the utmost importance and national ideas had much to do with his arguments. In his public letter to ‘All the True Fiumians’, Gotthardi referred to the Fiumian flag as an emblem under which ‘real Fiumian patriots’ – Italians, Slavs and Hungarians of Fiumian fathers – should declare themselves united. These ‘free citizens of the Italian language’ should use the Fiumian cockade as a symbol of brotherhood, freedom and equality, and be united for the autonomy of ‘our Fiume’ and the defence of ‘our Italian language’.Footnote ⁵⁸ Furthermore, Gotthardi publicly attacked the Italian National Council because of the mentioned flag substitution, a removal of the ‘sacred symbol for us Fiumians […] our beautiful Fiumian flag, the honour of our fathers’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The exclusion of the Fiumian flag from the town's most representative building was something that Gotthardi, as a self-fashioned Fiumian patriot, could not digest. An Italian national symbol overtook the Fiumian local patriotic symbol, demonstrating that Italy was becoming more significant than Fiume.

In his letter, Gotthardi set as his goal the city's full independence. Citing the motto of the French Revolution which Gotthardi ordered as ‘fraternity, freedom, and equality’, he advocated national sovereignty for the people as a goal to be achieved in the Adriatic port. This reinterpretation of a symbol from autonomism to independentism and the reshaping of symbols was new, and yet there was no clash between local and Italian nation-state symbols since the Fiumian flag was not repudiated.

On the day of the city's patron saints, on 15 June 1919, the Italian National Council decided that the Fiumian tricolour should be displayed on the Municipal Palace, as well as all municipal and state buildings.Footnote ⁶⁰ However, the situation became somehow paradoxical. The Fiumian tricolour was left on the city tower for a few weeks longer, raising complaints from one councillor – a former Fiumian volunteer in the Italian Army – who argued that only the Italian tricolour should remain on the tower to symbolise the city's union with its motherland. But another councillor stated that ‘it would be dangerous to remove that flag from the tower, as that could provoke an open dispute between that part of the citizenship that partially does not sympathise anymore with the annexation, and instead advocates for a free state’. In addition: ‘Being, on the other hand, the banner dear to all citizens, since it recalls their battles sustained for Italianity, he opposed its removal’. As a result, all the delegates, besides the former Italian Army volunteer, agreed to leave the flag in its place.Footnote ⁶¹

What the population understood in this time of transition is quite difficult to grasp. Yet, a far more violent episode suggests that there were substantial tensions between Fiumian and Italian symbols. On the night of 10 March 1919, in the suburbs of Fiume, near the former border with the Austrian Littoral, animosities between Italian soldiers and a few locals boiled over in an osteria. The final outcome of this conflict was bloody: Giuseppe Kobal, a 28-year-old mechanic, died. According to the police investigation, symbols played a crucial role in the tragic events. As for one side of the story, reported by Kobal's widow, the friction started because one Italian soldier accused her husband of stripping off his Italian national badge. However, it seems that the problem was not caused by the removal of an Italian symbol but rather by the attempted removal of a Fiumian one. According to the police and other testimonies, a Fiumian flag was hanging on the osteria's wall and a drunken Italian soldier wanted to destroy it. The reason? For the Italian soldier, this was an ‘Austrian flag’. Some civilians, hearing this information, asked for satisfaction against the perpetrators, including the ‘completely drunken’ Kobal. The two groups were separated, and the dispute appeared to be resolved, but on the road towards the city there were shots fired, and the soldiers, apparently responding to revolver fire, shot and killed Kobal.Footnote ⁶² This episode, while offering a glimpse into the circulation of weapons and violence in the period of postimperial transition, testifies to the difference in symbolic understandings among the soldiers of the Kingdom of Italy and presumably Italian-speaking locals.

For most Italian citizens, Fiume was an almost unknown place, to be claimed for Italian irredentists only after the war had begun (Figure 3). Even then, the city was not included as a territorial gain in the Treaty of London.Footnote ⁶³ Local Hungarian-Habsburg symbolic specificities, such as the double-headed eagle on the Fiumian flag, could be understood as not Italian enough, not properly Italian or simply unfamiliar and therefore foreign and Habsburg by Italians from the Kingdom of Italy. What, for the locals, was a much-beloved civic symbol of the Italian character of the city inside Hungary, for the Italian soldiers was an emblem of much-hated Austria. The existence of such a potential conflict at the symbolic level was probably evident to the members of the local Fiumian elite. As Gotthardi pointed out in his open letter, the Italian National Council decided to uncork the bottle and release the pressure within by pushing the Fiumians to be as Italian as possible.

Figure 3.

In 1919, a series of postcards of Italian Irredentist towns, including their flags, was published to familiarise the Kingdom of Italy's population with local symbols. The postcard representing Fiume is an interesting case of the alteration of postwar symbols: the publisher used the Fiumian tricolour with the double-headed eagle, removing the Habsburg imperial crown and the inscription ‘Indeficienter’. Giuseppe Mazzoni, Redazione de ‘LA TRADOTTA’. Author's collection.

As we have seen, the radical political trajectory some local Italian irredentists wanted was not shared by the local elite after October/November 1918. The city's coat of arms remained unchanged until the end of 1919. The breakthrough occurred thanks to D'Annunzio. Following clashes between Italian and French troops and the locals, the Italian military presence was heavily reduced and the city's annexation to Italy seemed quite unlikely. This all changed in September 1919 when Gabriele D'Annunzio entered the city.

In a speech given on 4 November 1919 – the anniversary of the Italian war victory – D'Annunzio suggested that a head should be removed from Fiume's ‘Habsburg eagle’. His suggestion was carried out by two legionnaires. The eagle on the city tower lost one head, and the Italian flag was lodged in the open neck. Yet, the local Italian nationalist newspaper was not exactly enthusiastic about the decapitation, and the population was at least slightly surprised by the event. Following the decapitation, at its first meeting at the end of November 1919, the municipal council decided to redesign the city's coat of arms, Romanising what was now a single-headed eagle.Footnote ⁶⁴ D'Annunzio was heavily committed to Fiume adopting a Venetian heritage, a heritage that was translated as a symbol of (proto-)Italian centuries-old dominance over the Adriatic. References to Roman heritage recalled the Roman Empire's historical experience as another (proto-)Italian continuity element.Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet, the Fiumian flag and its colours not only survived but in fact became part of the occupation legacy. In the memories of an Italian army officer quartered in Fiume and later among the first of D'Annunzio's followers, the four Fiumian flags given to soldiers ordered to depart from Fiume in August 1919 are remembered as ‘a symbol of faith and warning to superiors’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Immediately upon D'Annunzio's arrival in town, a Fiumian tricolour ribbon was designed to honour his legionnaires, a reward later redesigned as a medal with a ribbon of the same colours, extending it to many followers.Footnote ⁶⁷ In September 1920, the Fiumian municipal flags hung on newly inaugurated flagpoles, significantly placed below the Italian flags.Footnote ⁶⁸ At the beginning of that year, the same flag decorated the town's main church during the festival of St. Sebastian, a ceremony that ‘staged the patriotic communion between women and men, soldiers and civilians, secular and clerical authorities’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Local patriotism was being shaped in an Italian, D'Annunzian direction, a symbol of the legacy of his venture. The Fiumian flag was even among the flags deployed by Milan's fascists to celebrate the first anniversary of D'Annunzio's entry into Fiume.Footnote ⁷⁰ But Fiume's postimperial transitions, and those of the flag, did not end there.

Flag of Fiume, Can You Preserve Your Dazzling Colours Only in the Shadow of the Italian Flag?

Following the Treaty of Rapallo (November 1920), the Free State of Fiume was established as a compromise solution between Italy and Yugoslavia – the two contenders for the territory. At the end of December 1920, a conflict between the Italian state and occupying legionnaires ended D'Annunzio's presence in the city. A new political moment started in April 1921 when elections for a Constituent Assembly were scheduled. The Constituent Assembly of the newly established state was populated by two factions: the Italian nationalist annexationists, led by prominent figures of the Italian National Council, and the autonomists. The two rival groups embraced quite divergent local patriotic symbols. The annexationists, united in the National Bloc, used the image of the city's Roman arch (an ancient Roman entrance to a Late Antiquity fort in the old town) as the emblem of their coalition, stressing the city's Roman heritage to enhance Fiume's bonds with a Latin and imagined ancient Italian past.Footnote ⁷¹ Other local patriotic symbols, such as the city's double-headed eagle, were discarded and not deployed as elements of their own political heritage. On the other side, the autonomist faction entirely embraced the local patriotic heritage, using the city tower with the double-headed eagle as its emblem.Footnote ⁷² These local patriotic symbols, from loyalty to Hungary and passing through Italian nationalism, were then adapted as emblems of Fiumian independentism.

The Fiumian flag, however, was not spared from symbolic contestation. It was evoked by a prominent Italian annexationist at an electoral speech in April 1921, recalling his donation of the city's flag to an Italian warship in Venice at the beginning of November 1918. This episode allowed the speaker to conclude that while the warship was still sailing with a real Fiumian flag, the flag's image was now in the hearts of every ship, soldier, sailor, as well as in that of the great homeland (that is, the Kingdom of Italy). The complete Italianisation of a local patriotic symbol was further enhanced by describing the flag's colours in nationalistic tones: blue as the sea coming from Italy, red as the blood of Italian martyrs of the war and gold yellow as ‘the chalice of faith where we keep the consecrated host of our soul’. Yet the Fiumian flag – whose colours were as strong as ‘Fiume's Italian faith that you, flag, preserved for many centuries of subjugation’ – needed to be augmented by the Italian tricolour in this new historical moment. ‘Flag of Fiume, only in the shadow of the Italian flag can your dazzling colours be preserved’, and, in a reformulation of Dante's verses, the annexationist claimed that by losing the Italian flag, Fiume and its flag would lose herself.Footnote ⁷³

These powerful rhetorical images displayed the ongoing process of the Italian nationalistic appropriation of the flag as well as the intensity and perseverance of the image of the Fiumian flag. But it was not purely rhetoric. Fiumian flags were registered on town buildings following an annexationists procession the same month. These flags were described as old tricolours first displayed on the ‘redeemed’ shores on 30 October 1918 to ‘testify to the program of liberty and the Italian future that still today has to be defended against more greedy enemies and sorrowful renegades’.Footnote ⁷⁴

And yet, despite the efforts of Italian nationalists to alter this local patriotic symbol to represent loyalty to Italy, it was being adapted as an emblem of autonomism. Flag incidents during and after the 1921 elections were omnipresent. In a published and highly detailed account of fascist and legionary violence against pro-independence forces and the general civil population, the Fiumian flag appears several times. On the day of the April 1921 Constituent Assembly election, Fiumian flags were used by those supporting the autonomistsFootnote ⁷⁵ and these flags or flag colours were targeted and destroyed by annexationists. For instance, a truck with a Fiumian flag that had been driving on the city's main promenade was attacked by fascists and arditi (Italian assault troops) who tore down and burned the flag, allegedly screaming: ‘Long live beautiful Italy, down with the traitors, death to the Fiumians, down with the Fiume of the Croatians!’. Furthermore, local police forces that had been recruited among legionnaires native to the Kingdom of Italy took off the Fiumian colours from their uniforms’ decorations, ripped off their colleagues’ decorations and in turn joined the fascists in perpetuating violence. Even the municipal employees’ hats – adorned with the double-headed eagle and decorations with Fiume's colours – were removed by fascists.Footnote ⁷⁶ Other citizens singing and waving the Fiumian flag were attacked by fascists and, more importantly, the fascists searched houses for a Fiumian flag that had been made by female workers from the local tobacco factory for the Constituent Assembly.Footnote ⁷⁷ The final example shows the flag's importance for both groups for diverging reasons: a symbol to be destroyed by the annexationists, and a symbol to be celebrated by the autonomists.

In October 1921, some pro-Italian municipal employees decided to remove the Fiumian tricolour from the Filarmonico-Drammatica palace, the place where a large Fiumian banner was hung on October 1918 alongside a smaller Italian flag. As the autonomist newspaper wrote, the clerks had offended the symbol of ‘their land (paese)’, which had to remain sacred to everyone, an emblem that, in difficult times, marked ‘our Italianity’ and ‘our national diversity in the large Austro-Hungarian conglomerate’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The article took a step forward, arguing that the Fiumian tricolour was considered with honour by fascists, legionnaires, and (Italian) nationalists alike. As plainly put by the columnist, some ‘think that they can prove their Italianity, their love of the patria [amor patrio] by disowning and spitting on anything that tastes Fiumian, as if Fiumian was a synonym of . . . ostrogothic’, that is, barbarian.Footnote ⁷⁹ The alleged absurdity for the autonomists was that the same figures trampling on Fiumian symbols at home deployed them in Italy, like the municipality of the newly annexed Monfalcone, which used a Fiumian flag in the celebrations of its annexation to Italy in April 1921.Footnote ⁸⁰

There was nothing inconsistent about what the Fiume tricolour represented for all those involved. The municipal symbols were an emblem of self-government and Italianity, which, for the irredentists and annexationists, meant proto-national belonging to an Italian nation-state, while for the autonomists the same symbol indicated cultural and not political belonging to Italy. The local patriotic symbols were contested, and the autonomists tried to monopolise them in the local political arena. It is rather telling that the clerks who orchestrated the removal from the Filarmonico-Drammatica building later publicly apologised.Footnote ⁸¹

Apparently, Italian nationalists and the autonomists oriented toward a cultural Italianity were not the only ones deploying the Fiumian tricolour. During the same days, allegedly, some Croats used Fiumian flags, since they could not use Croatian symbols. The idea that the banner of Fiumian local patriotism could represent Croatian national aspirations provoked the local Italian nationalist newspaper to demand an end to political speculation over the flag:

Despite Italian nationalists’ attempts at appropriating the flag, its colours could and were still perceived as a symbol opposing annexation. In September 1922, a group of young fascists, led by a 17-year-old boy born in Fiume, saw a six-meter-tall antenna of Fiumian colours and removed a Fiumian tin emblem from it. The antenna was previously erected by some women on their property, so the youngsters’ vandalism was accompanied by the shouting of an 84-year-old Istrian woman domiciled in Fiume. The fascists intimidated the old lady, firing a few gun shots in the air and left, taking the antenna to the fascist headquarters.Footnote ⁸³ Two very different generational, gendered, social (Fiumian-born versus naturalised Fiumian) and probably political trajectories faced each other, bound up with their respective national and/or local patriotic conceptions. What they shared was the belief that the flag and its colours had significance, a higher moral value, which for some had to be cherished and for others repudiated and destroyed.

A Never-Ending Transition (of Symbols)

Unsurprisingly, when Fiume was annexed to Italy in 1924, the tradition was again reinvented. The Fiumian tricolour was not officially changed, but a new ceremonial flag was widely used. Contrary to the municipal council's flag deliberation of 1919, on the celebration of Fiume's annexation to Italy in March 1924, a ‘light blue, damask gold’ ceremonial banner, featuring the Romanised single-headed eagle, was donated to the Italian king. The new ceremonial flag deployed from the immediate annexation period was probably used to create distance from the Fiumian tricolour's independentist connotations and was used in public ceremonies in the Italian period until 1935. The inconsistency between norm and praxis was solved in 1935 when a new ceremonial banner was adopted. On the rear, the Fiumian tricolour was featured; on the front, the colours recalling the tradition of D'Annunzio's rule.Footnote ⁸⁴ Yet, the Fiumian tricolour was still used as an Italian symbol in the interwar period (Figure 4). In the 1930s, the Municipal Council Hall was adorned by a triptych painting with Romanised figures, displaying in one section D'Annunzio as a liberator and on another Fiume represented as a young woman (with its single-headed eagle) set behind another allegorical female representing Italy. Within the D'Annunzio section of the painting, the Fiumian tricolour was featured alongside the Italian tricolour.Footnote ⁸⁵ Fiume's Italian character was thus heavily linked to D'Annunzio's occupational episode, and this local patriotic symbol was preserved, though altered to fit the new fascist narrative.

Figure 4.

Italian postcard from 1924, published to celebrate Fiume's annexation by Italy. Italy and Fiume are allegorically portrayed as a mother and a daughter; the daughter is wrapped in a Fiumian tricolour with a single-headed eagle, while Fiumian and Italian tricolours are waving on warships. ‘Fiume all'Italia!’ Ediz. ‘CLAMOR‘ di D. Gualtieri, Milano. Author's collection.

As Vanni D'Alessio has pointed out, Italian nationalists and fascists used the Fiumian eagle – here we can clearly include the municipal flag and its colours – as a symbol representing the historical continuity of Italian presence in the town. The emblem and colours of this former Habsburg-Hungarian municipality were once more interpreted as symbols of a centuries-long maintenance of Italianity. Fiume's regionalism was thus mainly reframed to function as an element bonding the city (and consequently its inhabitants) with Italian nationalism. Throughout the years of Mussolini's reign, Fiume's population and the visual representation of its loyalties were arranged to cohere with fascist imperial protocols, papering over the Habsburg ones that had preceded it.

The city experienced another radical change in sovereignty and regime after the Second World War, when it became part of socialist Yugoslavia and its Croatian name, Rijeka, became official.Footnote ⁸⁶ The South Slavic, working-class-oriented state erased the eagle and the Fiumian tricolour as symbols of an adverse imperial, national and bourgeois past. The statue of the single headed eagle was not spared either and was removed from the city tower altogether.Footnote ⁸⁷ Perceiving the new state authorities as foreign, anti-Italian and experiencing political and economic pressures, most Italian inhabitants left the city. The Fiumian tricolour was preserved mainly in the Italian emigrant community, but with the single-headed eagle, maintaining its interwar Italianised character, distanced from the Habsburg past.

With the breakup of Yugoslavia and the socialist regime, the city's heritage was again discussed. In 1992, a regionalist party in Rijeka began an initiative to adopt the use of Fiume's historical tricolour, as well as the coat of arms, as the city's symbols. Three years later, the municipal council organised an open call for a redesign of the city's flag and coat of arms. Distancing itself from historical symbols, the call explicitly asked for incorporation of the Croatian chequerboard as one element in the coat of arms of new, post-socialist Rijeka. The blue and white colours used in the socialist period were to be maintained and the tricolour was not to be reused. However, a year later the advanced proposals were not approved by the municipality, and in 1998 the municipal council of Rijeka opted to use the historical tricolour as the municipal flag. The decision was overturned by the Ministry of Public Administration as, among other reasons, the ministry considered the Fiumian tricolour an Italian irredentist symbol since it was used by an Italian exile organisation. Thus, Rijeka adopted a single-colour blue flag, featuring the historical double-headed eagle, but without the imperial crown or the municipality's motto.Footnote ⁸⁸ The ministry's decision, as well as the municipality's initial concept of integrating Croatian national symbols, are an exemplar of the nationalistic politics and Croatian nation-building efforts of the 1990s. At the same time, the 1992 regionalist party initiative is telling of an emerging political faction identifying with and advocating for a local Habsburg heritage. And debates around the Fiume flag did not end there.

Nearly two decades after the 1998 decision, in 2016, on the initiative of another regionalist party, the still centre-left municipal council of Rijeka again deliberated over the usage of the tricolour. The Ministry of Public Administration disapproved of the decision, stating that the Fiumian tricolour was not Rijeka's solely historical flag and that a flag with three strips should be exclusively the Croatian state's banner. This time, however, the city found a work-around, declaring the historical tricolour as the city's ceremonial flag.Footnote ⁸⁹ Ironically, the Croatian public authorities’ evaluation wound up matching the aspirations of wartime Italian irredentists who had wanted to transform the Habsburg-Hungarian local patriotic banner into a symbol of genuine Italianity.

As noted by Péter Techet, the recent rediscovery in present day Rijeka of local Habsburg symbols, the Fiumian flag being one of them, is a political response to Croatian nationalist tendencies. The Fiumian tricolour is no longer associated with the Habsburg period and postimperial political conflicts. Rather, its meaning is now that of a symbol of an imagined idyllic golden age of unproblematised multiculturality, contrasting with today's homogenising nationalism and state centralising policies.Footnote ⁹⁰

Though an account of a local symbol, this story is truly a post-Habsburg history which displays the significance of not taking for granted contemporary nationalisms as necessary and expected outcomes at the end of the nineteenth century and during the empire's dissolution. In a sense, this story is also unequivocally European. As Dominique Kirchner Reill pointed out in her study of members of the Adriatic multi-national elite, understandings of attachment to a locality and regional identifications have been lost by reading history backwards, by maintaining a hegemonic historiographic focus on the nationalist political movements that have taken centre stage in historical narratives.Footnote ⁹¹ Locals throughout Europe imbued their lives with senses of loyalty from below, from within, and from beyond the nation and the nation-state, and we can see by comparison how strong the efforts by nationalist movements were to address, eradicate and integrate these alternative forms of collective identification.