Alexander I of Yugoslavia

Alexander I abolished the parliament of a country invented to hold three peoples together, and was shot in Marseille ten years later. He was a Serbian prince, regent from 1914, and became king of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in 1921 - a state assembled from the southern provinces of a dissolved Austria-Hungary and the pre-war kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro, with no common legal system, currency, railway gauge or literacy rate. The constitution of that year, passed on the feast of St Vitus, made it a centralised state governed from Belgrade. That was the argument of the next seventy years in one sentence: the Serbs, the largest group and the one with the army and the pre-war state apparatus, understood the country as an enlargement of Serbia, and the Croats and Slovenes had expected a federation. The Croatian Peasant Party boycotted the assembly. In 1928 a Montenegrin deputy shot five Croat members on the chamber floor and killed their leader, and Alexander responded in January 1929 by dissolving parliament, banning parties organised on ethnic lines, and renaming the country Yugoslavia - the land of the south Slavs - to legislate a nationality into existence. The royal dictatorship suppressed the Croatian movement and produced the Ustase, an exiled terrorist organisation funded by Mussolini and Hungary. In October 1934 one of its Macedonian allies shot him during a state visit to France, in front of newsreel cameras that caught the assassination itself - among the first ever filmed. His son was eleven. A regency governed until 1941, conceded Croatian autonomy too late, and was overthrown days after signing with Germany.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history