Alexander, the first Yugoslav

Before Tito, another man had devoted his life to the project of holding together Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and the other South Slavs: Alexander I.

Prince of the victory of 1918, he proclaimed the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, then imposed a royal dictatorship in 1929 and the name « Yugoslavia ».

Assassinated in Marseille in 1934, he was forgotten. Through Rémy Queney’s book, a portrait of the first Yugoslav.

by Gil Mihaely

The contemporary reader knows the rest of the story. He knows Tito, the Partisans, communist Yugoslavia, non-alignment, and then the country’s bloody collapse in the 1990s. Alexander I, for his part, has almost vanished from our memory. Yet before Tito, another man had devoted his life to the same — for the time being impossible — project of holding Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and the other South Slav peoples together in a single state. Irony would have it that Tito, who in 1942 denounced monarchical Yugoslavia as a system of « social and national oppression », then spent thirty-five years trying to solve the very problem against which Alexander had broken himself. Each of them wanted to erect a coherent system. Both ended up becoming indispensable to the edifice they had built, and neither found the formula that would allow his work to outlive him for long.

Rémy Queney, Alexandre Ier de Yougoslavie. L’unification inachevée (Alexander I of Yugoslavia: The Unfinished Unification), Perrin, 2026, €25.

Tito, however, was granted an altogether different posterity. Victor of the war at the head of the Partisans, master of a country that managed to carve out a singular place for itself between the two blocs, he made Yugoslavia an international actor out of all proportion to its demographic weight and himself became a world celebrity. Alexander, assassinated in Marseille in 1934 at only forty-five, was gradually relegated to the shadows: condemned by communist historiography, eclipsed by his successor, and finally associated with a first Yugoslavia whose failure seemed to foreshadow that of the second. It is perhaps precisely this difference in memorial destiny that makes the comparison so fruitful today: Tito has remained famous even though his Yugoslavia has disappeared, while Alexander has been forgotten even though Tito, in many respects, had to take up his problem where the king had left it.

« Alexander has been forgotten even though Tito, in many respects, had to take up his problem where the king had left it. »

In his book devoted to Alexander I of Yugoslavia, Rémy Queney therefore does not merely recount the fate of a sovereign assassinated in Marseille. He reconstructs the formation of a political world born of the collapse of empires, worked over by national ambitions, secret societies and the irruption of new elites into societies brutally thrust into technical, economic and political modernity. To understand Alexander — and perhaps also to understand why Tito had to rebuild another Yugoslavia after him — one must begin well before his reign and consider the Balkans as a vast zone of friction between several geopolitical plates.

The Balkans, a friction zone between plates

For centuries, the Balkans were the main fault line separating the Ottoman Empire from that of the Habsburgs. The Ottoman retreat, begun well before the nineteenth century but by then unmistakable, played out to a large extent in the region. The peoples hitherto subjugated to or integrated into the Empire gradually emerged from beneath the Ottoman plate. This movement gave birth to states, but also to geopolitical « volcanoes » whose successive eruptions would continue to convulse the region.

The Greeks opened one of the first great breaches with the war of independence begun in 1821. It was not confined to the territory of present-day Greece, for its beginnings and its battles also involved the Danubian principalities, Macedonia, Epirus and other regions of the Empire. Its outcome also depended on the intervention of the European powers and on the ambitions of Muhammad Ali, the Albanian who had become governor of Egypt, whose army came to the sultan’s rescue before turning against him. Thus a Balkan insurrection produced consequences as far away as the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt.

At the same moment, the South Slavs embarked on their own process of emancipation. In Serbia, the uprising led by Karađorđe from 1804 inaugurated a long struggle for autonomy, then independence. But the gradual disappearance of Ottoman authority did not make the conflicts disappear: on the contrary, it released competing ambitions. Borders remained uncertain, populations intermingled, and national projects often incompatible.

From the middle of the nineteenth century, the Austrian Empire entered in its turn a period of fragility. The Compromise of 1867, which gave birth to the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, slowed its decline without resolving its contradictions. Above all, it introduced Hungary as a major political actor. Budapest intended to preserve its authority over the Slavic populations of the kingdom and opposed any project likely to strengthen the Serbs, the Croats or, more broadly, the idea of a union of the South Slavs. Ottoman weakening thus opened a space that Vienna and Budapest sought to control, while Belgrade aspired to become the centre of a wider national gathering.

The Italian and German unifications meanwhile provided powerful models. The example of Piedmont-Sardinia was particularly important: a relatively modest monarchy could become the crystallising nucleus of a nation scattered across several states. For Serbian leaders and nationalists, the comparison was tempting: why should Serbia not play, for the South Slavs, the role Piedmont had played in Italian unification? This ambition was so openly claimed, Queney reminds us, that a nationalist newspaper founded in Belgrade in 1911, close to the circles that would give birth to the Black Hand, took the name Pijemont (« Piedmont »). But that same unified Italy nurtured its own ambitions on the eastern shore of the Adriatic, notably in Istria and Dalmatia.

Officers and students: a new generation

In this unstable universe a new category of actors appeared: the young officers. The modernisation of armies opened to the sons of peasants, artisans and minor civil servants a new avenue of social ascent. Military school gave them an education, a discipline, connections and, above all, the means to act. In the Ottoman Empire, this milieu gave birth to the Young Turks. Ahmed Niyazi Bey, born in 1873 into a family of Muslim notables in Macedonia; Enver Bey, born in 1881 into the empire’s petty bourgeoisie; and Cemal Bey, born in 1872, the son of a military pharmacist — all found in the army the instrument of their political rise. Mustafa Kemal, born in 1881 in Salonika to a father who was a customs clerk turned timber merchant and a mother of rural origin, followed a comparable trajectory.

In Serbia, this generation produced men such as Dragutin Dimitrijević, known as Apis, future leader of the Black Hand, and Vojislav Tankosić, an officer involved in the nationalist networks and clandestine operations in Macedonia. Others, like Petar Živković, first took part in the military conspiracy of 1903 before drawing close to Prince Alexander and forming around him the White Hand, rival to the Black Hand. Alexander himself, though crown prince and thus from an altogether different background, was formed in this military culture. He built his legitimacy within the army, which had become a great equaliser, and relied on the officers loyal to him to neutralise rival networks.

These officers constituted a group of ambitious, educated and organised young men, possessing both a method and an instrument of power. Facing them, as Queney shows so well, the state — notably in Serbia — remained fragile. The administration was recent, the institutions lacked deep roots, and countervailing powers remained weak. The Radical Party, the country’s main political force, rested above all on the peasantry, which made up the immense majority of the population, and on networks of local notables, schoolteachers, priests, lawyers and small shopkeepers. It had educated leaders — Nikola Pašić, founder and principal leader of the Serbian Radical Party and several times head of government, was himself an engineer — but far less of a coherent corps of technical, administrative and economic cadres capable of governing a state in full modernisation. The army partly filled this void: it did not merely defend the country, but became a place of training and political socialisation, a network of influence, and sometimes a direct actor in the appointment or overthrow of governments.

A second force appeared at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century: the growing mass of secondary-school pupils, students and young apprentices. Better educated than their parents, but often deprived of prospects to match their aspirations, these young people were particularly receptive to nationalism, to revolutionary romanticism and to its cult of sacrifice. Many had left their villages to study in town, lived in boarding houses or modest rooms, and thus escaped, at least in part, from family authority.

The small group of young Bosnian Serbs who organised and carried out the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 — Gavrilo Princip foremost among them — embodied this generation. Born in 1894 in a Bosnian village, Princip came from a family of poor Serbian peasants. Having left to study in Sarajevo and then Belgrade, he led a precarious existence marked by poverty, illness and a sense of national humiliation. He was only nineteen when he fired the two shots that would plunge Europe into the First World War and turn this almost unknown young man into one of the most consequential assassins of contemporary history.

His companions had comparable profiles. Nedeljko Čabrinović, nineteen at the time of the attack, son of a Sarajevo café owner, left school early, became an apprentice printer and frequented working-class and anarchist circles. Trifko Grabež, son of an Orthodox priest, was an eighteen-year-old schoolboy. Cvjetko Popović, aged eighteen, was preparing to become a teacher, while Vaso Čubrilović was still a seventeen-year-old pupil. Older, Danilo Ilić, a former schoolteacher, bank clerk and journalist, and Muhamed Mehmedbašić, a Muslim carpenter, provided the link between this rebellious youth and the clandestine networks already in place, formed essentially by young officers.

The young Josip Broz, the future Tito, belonged in many respects to the same generation as Princip. Born in 1892 into a modest peasant family of Croatia-Slavonia, he too left his village very young — not to become a student, but an apprentice locksmith and then a metalworker. The city, mobility and distance from the family framework exposed him to new political ideas. But where Princip turned to South Slav nationalism and revolutionary romanticism, Broz discovered the workers’ movement and socialism.

These militants shared the same situation: educated enough to conceive of another political order, but too young, too poor or too marginal to gain access to the ordinary places of power. They did not have the might of the army, but their new autonomy, their mobility, their determination and their school, professional and clandestine networks made them a breeding ground for agitation and recruitment.

The seedbed of secret societies

It was in this seedbed that the secret societies flourished. They answered the weakness of institutions as much as the impatience of the rising new social groups, for whom a modern nation-state was the promise of social advancement. The Young Turk organisations and the Serbian Black Hand present, despite their different objectives, striking resemblances: recruitment among officers and intellectuals, clandestine operation, oaths of loyalty, rigorous discipline, and the conviction that an organised minority can force the course of history. Between the barracks, the university, the secondary school and the secret society was thus formed the world in which Alexander I would have to conquer, exercise and then defend his power.

From prince to victorious regent

Born in 1888 in Montenegro, Alexander Karađorđević was not destined to reign: he was the second son of King Peter I of Serbia. His elder brother George, a crown prince of violent and unstable temperament, nevertheless renounced his rights in 1909 after a scandal caused by the death of a servant he had beaten. Alexander then became heir to the throne. Trained in an almost exclusively military world, notably in Saint Petersburg, he very early developed close ties with the Serbian officer corps. For him, the army was the monarchy’s principal instrument of modernisation, unification and authority.

Between 1912 and 1918, Alexander acquired the essence of his prestige. During the First Balkan War, he formally commanded the Serbian First Army, engaged in the victories of Kumanovo and Monastir against the Ottomans. During the Second Balkan War, in 1913, that army again played a central role against Bulgaria. The preparation and operational conduct of the campaigns rested largely, it is true, on chief of staff Radomir Putnik and on experienced officers, but Alexander nonetheless proved courageous, present with the troops and able to embody their victories. His talent was less that of a great theoretician of war than that of a leader who knew how to bind his destiny to that of the army.

In June 1914, the illness and age of Peter I led Alexander to become regent. From then on he exercised the reality of royal power. During the First World War he was supreme commander of the Serbian army, even if military decisions continued to be shaped by the general staff. After the Serbian victories of 1914, however, came the disaster of autumn 1915. Attacked simultaneously by Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, Serbia was overrun. Alexander accompanied the army, the government and tens of thousands of civilians in the terrible retreat across the mountains of Albania. This ordeal, followed by the reconstitution of the Serbian army on Corfu and then on the Salonika front, contributed powerfully to his legend.

In September 1918, the breakthrough on the Salonika front allowed the Serbian and Allied forces to drive rapidly north towards Belgrade. It was made possible by the offensive conceived and directed by the French general Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, commander-in-chief of the Allied Armies of the Orient. Despite the initial reluctance of some Allies, he concentrated the main effort in the mountainous sector of Dobro Polje, where the Serbian divisions, supported notably by French units, broke the Bulgarian front from 15 September. The Serbian armies then exploited the breach with remarkable speed. Bulgaria sued for an armistice, signed on 29 September, while the Franco-Serbian troops continued their march northwards and liberated Belgrade on 1 November.

The victory was thus both Serbian and French. Franchet d’Espèrey provided the strategic conception and took the decision to launch the offensive, while the Serbian army, rebuilt after the Albanian retreat, formed its principal spearhead. Alexander thenceforth appeared as the prince of liberation and victory, closely associated with the French alliance. In six years, Serbia had fought almost without interruption and suffered enormous human losses, but it found itself in the victors’ camp. The regent’s military prestige was at its peak: it gave him the authority needed to accomplish a project far more ambitious than the mere restoration of the Kingdom of Serbia — the unification of the South Slavs.

The birth of the kingdom (1 December 1918)

On 1 December 1918, in a Belgrade devastated by war, Alexander proclaimed the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The new state brought together the Kingdom of Serbia (already enlarged by Kosovo and Macedonia in the aftermath of the Balkan wars), Montenegro, whose incorporation took place in contested circumstances, and the South Slav territories of the former Austria-Hungary (Slovenia, Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Vojvodina). It thus assembled populations that had lived under very different administrations, legal and fiscal systems, political traditions and land regimes, shaped by the Ottoman, Austrian and Hungarian legacies. To these historical differences were added deep economic disparities between the weakly developed rural regions of the South and the more urbanised and industrialised territories of the North-West. His throne thus rested on a fault line between historical, religious, national, institutional and economic tectonic plates that political unification was not enough to weld together.

« His throne rested on a fault line between historical, religious, national, institutional and economic tectonic plates. »

Alexander conceived this monarchy as the culmination of the movement of national unification. In his eyes, Serbs, Croats and Slovenes were not three nations called to cohabit in a federation, but three branches of a single « Yugoslav » people. The kingdom was therefore progressively to erase the old historical and provincial borders in favour of a common identity. This conception, later called « integral Yugoslavism », justified a unitary state, a single army and a monarchy centralised around the Karađorđević dynasty.

This orientation was particularly strong in the army, the new state’s main instrument of centralisation — and of its « Serbianisation ». The army issued from the very unequal fusion of the roughly 145,000 men of the Serbian army with some 15,000 soldiers assembled by the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs in the formerly Austro-Hungarian territories. Serbian cadres were automatically integrated, while the former Austro-Hungarian officers, among whom Croats and Slovenes were numerous, were often demoted or retired. Serbian became the language of command, and regulations and uniforms were largely taken over from the army of the Kingdom of Serbia. Though Croat and Slovene conscripts were numerous, the decision-making posts remained overwhelmingly Serbian: in 1938, of 165 generals, only two were Croats and two Slovenes. This disproportion fed the feeling that the Yugoslav army was less the army of a new state than the Serbian army extended to the territories of the former Austria-Hungary.

The circumstances in which the kingdom was born reinforced this imbalance. At the end of 1918, the representatives of the South Slavs of the former Habsburg monarchy (Slovenes and Croats) found themselves in an emergency: their provisional state was threatened by Italian territorial claims, social disorder and the absence of an army able to defend its borders. They needed victorious Serbia and its military forces. The union was therefore proclaimed in haste, before any precise agreement had been reached on the distribution of powers or on the federal or centralised character of the future kingdom. Once the emergency had passed, the divergences that victory had momentarily pushed into the background would reappear in broad daylight.

From Vidovdan to the royal dictatorship

After the death of Peter I in 1921, Alexander officially became king. The same year, the so-called Vidovdan Constitution established a unitary and centralised parliamentary monarchy. It was adopted in an already conflictual climate, without the support of a large part of the Croat representatives. Nikola Pašić’s Radical Party defended centralisation, which allowed it to preserve the structures and political practices of the old Kingdom of Serbia. Stjepan Radić’s Croatian Peasant Party demanded, on the contrary, recognition of Croatia’s historic autonomy, or even a federal organisation.

Alexander did not reign as a constitutional sovereign entirely effaced behind his ministers. He intervened in the formation of governments, relied on the army and the court, arbitrated partisan rivalries and maintained his own networks of officers and officials. Petar Živković and the members of the White Hand provided him with essential support against the Black Hand and against all those he suspected of contesting dynastic authority.

The elimination of Apis at the Salonika trial in 1917, indeed, preceded the creation of the new state. Accused of having prepared an attempt on the regent’s life, Dragutin Dimitrijević was sentenced to death and executed along with two other officers. The reality of the plot remains controversial, but his elimination allowed Alexander to break the principal military network capable of limiting his power. The prince who owed part of his rise to the army now sought to subject it to his personal authority.

The functioning of the new kingdom proved extremely difficult. Governments were unstable, coalitions fragile, and parliamentary debates dominated by the national question. The Serbian leaders feared that federalisation would lead to the dismantling of the state for which Serbia had made immense sacrifices. The Croats, for their part, denounced the domination of Belgrade, the weight of Serbian officials and the refusal to recognise Croatia’s political individuality. The Slovenes, the Muslims of Bosnia, the Macedonians and the other populations pursued their own objectives.

Alexander saw in these divisions less the expression of durable historical realities than a product of the old empires and of the parties’ ambitions. He believed that the monarchy, the army and education could bring forth a common identity. But the more the government tried to impose unity, the more it fed the national resistances it intended to make disappear.

« The more the government tried to impose unity, the more it fed the national resistances it intended to make disappear. »

The crisis reached its paroxysm in June 1928, when a Serbian Radical deputy opened fire in Parliament and mortally wounded Stjepan Radić. At the time of his death, Radić was the leading Croat political figure: at the head of the Croatian Peasant Party, by then a powerful mass movement, he embodied the refusal of Belgrade’s centralism. His death provoked a major political crisis and parliamentary life became practically impossible. On 6 January 1929, Alexander suspended the Constitution, dissolved the Assembly, banned parties organised on a national basis and established a royal dictatorship. A few months later, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (SHS) took the name of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.

The change of name summed up his project: there were no longer to exist, politically, any Serbs, Croats or Slovenes — only Yugoslavs. The old territorial divisions were replaced by banovinas whose borders, like the French departments, were deliberately drawn so as not to correspond to the historic regions. Alexander thus hoped to disarm the nationalisms and to create directly, through the state, the nation that was still lacking.

Failure and the Marseille assassination

This attempt largely failed. The dictatorship reduced the public expression of the conflicts without removing their causes. Repression radicalised part of Croatian nationalism and favoured the rise of Ante Pavelić’s Ustaše. In 1931, Alexander granted a new Constitution, but retained tight control over the institutions. In the final years of his reign, he seems to have understood that absolute centralisation was untenable and sought certain accommodations. But he did not have the time to make his system evolve: on 9 October 1934, he was assassinated in Marseille by Vlado Chernozemski, a militant of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation acting in cooperation with the Ustaše.

The plot recalls, in certain respects, the one that had led to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. A handful of nationalist militants, cross-border clandestine organisations and external backers used terrorism to shatter a political order judged oppressive. Twenty years after Sarajevo, Alexander thus fell victim to a conspiratorial mechanism quite similar to the one that had favoured his own rise to power and the birth of his kingdom. In 1914, the perpetrators belonged to Young Bosnia and benefited from the help of members of the Black Hand; in 1934, the operation resulted from direct cooperation between Macedonian and Croatian nationalists, encouraged and protected notably by Fascist Italy and Hungary.

The first Yugoslav

The current state of the region seems to vindicate those who regarded the unity of the South Slavs as a romantic chimera. Yugoslavia did not erase the borders inherited from the empires: it enclosed them within a single state before they resurfaced, often violently. From Slovenia to North Macedonia, seven states today occupy the space that Alexander’s kingdom claimed to unify, while the tensions around Kosovo and the fragilities of Bosnia-Herzegovina show that the process of fragmentation is perhaps not entirely over. The Yugoslav idea lacked neither grandeur nor coherence in the face of the threats of 1918, but it rested on the hope that linguistic proximity and the experience of common enemies would suffice to produce a nation. Alexander wanted to turn that dream into reality through the monarchy, the army and centralisation. He discovered that a state can unite territories without necessarily uniting the peoples who inhabit them.

« He discovered that a state can unite territories without necessarily uniting the peoples who inhabit them. »

Yet Rémy Queney’s book reveals to us a genuine epic. Alexander was only twenty-one when he became crown prince and not yet twenty-four when the First Balkan War broke out. Of rather frail constitution, as his photographs attest, he proved intelligent, cultivated, hard-working and, above all, skilful enough to survive the violent rivalries of Serbian politics — even to place them in the service of his rise. During the First World War, he preserved his power despite invasion and exile, then turned defeat into Serbian military victory. As king, he attempted to build a common state uniting peoples separated by their religions, their memories and several centuries of history. He manoeuvred, not without success, between the weakening of France, the ambitions of Mussolini’s Italy and the return of German power, before being assassinated in Marseille, at the age of forty-five, in the course of a journey devoted precisely to these geopolitical upheavals.

His task was probably impossible, but he pursued it with remarkable energy and constancy, very well described by Queney. Is Alexander forgotten, as is often said? No doubt — but rare are the sovereigns who are not, nearly a century after their death. Did he deserve better? Probably. Dead before he could consolidate his work, Alexander remained in the shadow of the state he had helped to create. That oblivion takes nothing away from the scale of his enterprise or the exceptional character of his destiny. Despite the long shadow of the last Yugoslav, the first therefore deserves to be rediscovered. The first was called Alexander. The last, Tito.

« The first was called Alexander. The last, Tito. »

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© Photo: Alexander I, Wikipedia