Pertinents, Residents, and Citizens: Fiume’s Three-Way Post-imperial Policy to Count Everyone and Exclude Almost Everyone, 1918–21

In 1919, Paris peacemakers wrestled with assigning a national character to the post-imperial map of Europe. Among the territories in dispute was the semi-independent city-state of Fiume, an Adriatic port town which had been administered by the Austro-Hungarian Kingdom and counted (if including its suburbs) approximately 48% Italian-speakers, 48% Slavic-speakers, and 7% Hungarian-speakers. Religion was not a category used for determining the “national” make-up of the city.

With the fall of Austria-Hungary, Fiume’s municipal government was transformed into a state government and its leaders pledged to uphold their right to autonomy as well as push for Fiume’s incorporation to the Kingdom of Italy. This paper analyzes how the city-state government employed former Habsburg imperial layered sovereignty designations to limit the number of Fiume burghers with full legal rights, while simultaneously increasing the number of people said to live within its disputed borders. Particularly of interest is how the city-state retained the Habsburg classification “pertinent” to leave way for future incorporation into an Italian imperial corpus. Pertinents were full “citizens” of the city-state and simultaneously “subjects” of the umbrella empire to which the city-state was associated. Residents were subjects of both city-state and empire. After 1919, Fiume locals worked to supplant the Habsburg imperial umbrella with a new Italian imperial mantle. Natives of the Kingdom of Italy were encouraged to join the roster of Fiume residents to give a more “Italian” impression of the port-city-state. But only “locals,” regardless of their ethnolinguistic identity, counted as “pertinents.” Census figures sent to Paris to support national self-determination arguments included data on the ethnonational designation of residents, while in day-to-day administration, opportunities were limited to pertinents. As such Fiume’s postwar world-on-paper boomed with more resident nationals getting counted, but in a world-in-practice the Habsburg legacy of imperial citizenship norms were what mattered.