Rapallo Border Historical Society rapalskameja.si
Rapallo Border · 1918–1921

The Occupation Regime

Twenty-six months of emergency decrees, internments and waiting for the peace conference

Between 3 November 1918 and 5 January 1921 the Littoral was neither Austrian nor Italian: it was occupied territory whose fate the peace conference was to decide. The Italian authorities used that time to prepare the annexation in advance.

Vittorio Emanuele Orlando to General Diaz · November 1918

“We must prove that we come as liberators and not as oppressors.”

A month later the internments began

Who governed

Until August 1919 the territory was administered by the General Secretariat for Civil Affairs at the Italian Supreme Command. General Carlo Petitti di Roreto served as governor in Trieste, and civil commissioners, mostly officers from the Italian interior, ran the districts. From March 1919 civil commissioners also took over most Slovene and Croatian municipalities; as a rule they did not understand the language of the people they governed.

When Orlando's government fell in June 1919, the new prime minister Francesco Saverio Nitti replaced the military administration with an extraordinary civil one. A Central Office for the New Provinces was created at the prime minister's office, headed by Senator Francesco Salata, born on Cres, an advocate of regional autonomy and at the same time a determined opponent of the national rights of Slovenes and Croats. A General Civil Commissioner sat in Trieste: first Augusto Ciufelli, from December 1919 Antonio Mosconi. From then on official documents spoke of “new provinces” instead of “occupied territories”.

The name Julian March (Julijska krajina) is a Slovene rendering of the Italian Venezia Giulia. It was coined by the Gorizia linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli in the article Le Venezie, published in August 1863 by the Milan newspaper L'Alleanza. The Kingdom of Italy was then two years old and reached only as far as Lombardy: Verona, Venice and all of Venetia were still Austrian, and the border ran along the Mincio and Lake Garda.

The article had a political purpose. Ascoli bound all the Austrian lands from Lake Garda to the Kvarner into one whole, “the three Venetias”: Venezia Propria (Venetia proper), Venezia Tridentina (Trentino and South Tyrol) and Venezia Giulia (Gorizia, Trieste and Istria, after the Julian Alps). With a name that tied these lands to Venice and to the Roman tradition, he presented them as a natural part of Italy still waiting to be won. The name did not describe an existing land; it announced a claim. It annexed Gorizia, Trieste and Istria in language before armies annexed them on the ground. When Josip Vilfan told the Rome parliament in 1921 that it was not a historical name, the right shouted back: “Since Julius Caesar!” What the land was called before, from the Histri onwards, is shown in the timeline Names of the Land.

Slovenes at first used the literal translation “Julijska Benečija” (Julian Venetia); Josip Vilfan established the term Julijska krajina because it stresses that this is a border territory, not an Italian region.

Badoglio's circular

Article 6 of the armistice provided that the occupied territory would be administered provisionally by local authorities under the control of the occupying commands. On 29 November 1918 General Pietro Badoglio explained in a confidential circular how to avoid this obligation. In his reading, “provisionally” meant “almost as much as saying that this territory is destined for annexation to Italy”; the National Councils were arbitrary bodies of an unrecognised state; the army could not only supervise local authorities but replace them.

The circular laid down eight principles. Among them: no recognition of the Yugoslav state or its organs; anyone holding contrary views was to be treated as an enemy; hostile demonstrations were to be prevented by censorship and, if necessary, dangerous persons removed from the territory; judgments were to be pronounced “in the name of the authority conferred by the Supreme Command”. The measures were to be introduced gradually, so as not to attract attention abroad.

On the same day Governor Petitti signed a decree under which anyone who “in any way harmed the interests” of the occupation or insulted its symbols in words faced up to five years in prison or a fine of up to 5,000 lire, and in serious cases up to eight years.

Orders and prohibitions

Internments

In mid-November 1918 all men who had served in the Austro-Hungarian army had to report to the authorities. They were declared prisoners of war and sent to camps at Gradisca, Cormons, Cividale and elsewhere; at Cormons alone there were about 3,000. Men returning from Russian captivity were held in “political quarantine” for fear of Bolshevism; the camp at Grdol held about 30,000 of them from the whole occupied territory, many until the end of 1920.

The main wave of civilian internments swept the Julian March in February and March 1919. Reports by carabinieri and commissioners gave reasons such as “ardent supporter of Yugoslav aspirations”, “rabid Italophobe” or “furious Yugoslav”. Those interned were above all people who could influence others: teachers, priests, lawyers, doctors, mayors, railwaymen. Some cases from the archive of the General Secretariat:

Internees were sent to Sardinia and, from June 1919, to the island of Ventotene. There was no fixed term; the daily allowance of 2.40 lire, later 4 lire, was not enough to live on. Lavo Čermelj estimated that more than a thousand Slovenes and Croats were interned; Milica Kacin-Wohinz counts about 500. Most came from Istria. Even on their return, those released were held in the castle of San Giusto until the local authorities issued a nulla osta.

~500–1,000civilians interned 1918–1920
5,000Trieste children without schooling in 1918/19
123 of 250Croatian primary schools in Istria open in January 1920

Schools

Petitti's proclamation in Slovene promised: “Italy gives you schools in your language, more than Austria gave you.” In reality about 5,000 children from Trieste and its surroundings had no lessons in the school year 1918/19, because the authorities did not allow Slovene schools in the city. In 25 Gorizia municipalities there was no teaching until January 1920. The Slovene commercial school, the Gorizia grammar school and the Gorizia teacher-training college were closed; the teachers organised clandestine lessons. Instead of secondary schools in Gorizia and Trieste, the authorities opened a lower grammar school in Idrija and a teacher-training college in Tolmin, and moved the Pazin grammar school to Volosko.

How the countryside experienced the occupation

The reports of the Italian commands agree: Slovenes received the army politely but coldly and with reserve, and regarded the occupation as temporary. Major Romero reported from the Soča valley that “demonstrations of sympathy are rare, obviously feigned and forced”. An officer wrote from the Vipava valley that in Gorizia one Italian flag flew for every ten Yugoslav ones.

At the same time the author points out that for the countryside the occupation did not bring horrors like those of the Second World War. After the war the villages were ruined and hungry; the Italian soldier was often friendly and generous, field kitchens handed out food and canteens sold it cheaply. In the Tolmin area army doctors treated people free of charge. Flour, salt and a roof over their heads mattered more to people than flags. Two Gorizia girls, Zora and Jelica, wrote that since Yugoslav emblems had been banned they wore French cockades, with ribbons on their hats reading “Yugoslavia, SHS, Dr Korošec and Wilson”.

War damage and money

According to the Office for the Occupied Territory in Ljubljana, of 107 Slovene municipalities in the Gorizia region 33 had been completely destroyed in the war, 35 damaged and 50 plundered. 8,994 buildings lay in ruins, almost 6,000 of 8,000 hectares of vineyards were destroyed, and barely a fifth of the livestock remained. After the occupation the Austrian crown fell from 160 to 250 crowns per 100 lire; a Trieste worker earned barely half an Italian wage. In November 1919 the rate was fixed at 60 lire per 100 crowns, and many savings of Slovene cooperatives deposited beyond the demarcation line were never exchanged.

Report of the naval command in Pula · 25 February 1919

The Slav peasant is “unreliable until he sees his leaders beheaded”.

Governor Petitti rejected the proposal to remove the leaders

Sources