Dominique Kirchner Reill. The Fiume Crisis

Following World War One, the future status of the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia) was in question. Now that the Habsburg Empire had ended, would Fiume be annexed by Italy or by the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes? Or would it become a Free State under the League of Nations? Rather than exploring the so-called Fiume crisis through diplomatic disputes and dispatches or through nationalist parades and pamphlets, Dominique Kirchner Reill tells the city’s history between 1919 and 1920 via an exploration of its local administration and the everyday experiences of its people. In light of Italian poet and nationalist activist Gabriele D’Annunzio’s takeover of Fiume in 1919, the city’s vicissitudes would seem to bear out a well-worn story of nationalism’s inalienable march to ideological and political supremacy. Yet Reill succeeds in offering a very different kind of history. Chapter 1 reviews the three prevailing narratives about Fiume—a diplomatic one discussing the city’s central and destabilizing role at the Paris peace conference, an on-the-ground story of competing factions vying for international endorsement, and the tale of D’Annunzio’s propagandistic feats and his vision for a different Italy. The rest of the book seeks to recover how the city council (the Italian National Council) and the citizens of Fiume navigated an uncertain transition to an uncertain future. Fiume had been an autonomous city inside the Hungarian portion of the Habsburg Empire since 1867; by the outbreak of the war, the substantial influx of money and migrants into Hungary’s most important port had turned the predominantly Italian-speaking city into a linguistically mixed one. Though Italian speakers continued to dominate city politics and the city council actively pursued Fiume’s annexation to Italy, its policies were neither uniformly pro-Italian nor particularly nationalist.

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