page_title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia
section_title: King of Yugoslavia
hierarchical_section_title: Alexander I of Yugoslavia / King of Yugoslavia
caption_attribution_description: English: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the Republic of Turkey with Alexander I of Yugoslavia.Türkçe: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk ile Yugoslavya kralı I. Aleksandar.
context_page_description: Alexander I, also known as Alexander the Unifier, was a prince regent of the Kingdom of Serbia from 1914 and later a King of Yugoslavia from 1921 to 1934. He was assassinated by the Bulgarian Vlado Chernozemski, during a 1934 state visit to France.
context_section_description: On 1 December 1918, in a prearranged set piece, Alexander, as Prince Regent, received a delegation of the People's Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, an address was read out by one of the delegation, and Alexander made an address in acceptance. This was considered to be the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One of Alexander's first acts as Prince Regent of the new kingdom was to declare his support for the widespread demand for land reform, stating: "In our free state there can and will be only free landowners". On 25 February 1919 Alexander signed a land reform degree breaking up all feudal estates over the size of 100 cadastral yokes with compensation to be paid for the former landowners except for those who belonged to the House of Habsburg and the other ruling families of enemy states in the Great War. Under the land reform decree some two million hectares of land was handed over to a half million peasant households, though the implementation was very slow, taking 15 years before land reform was complete. In both Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina the majority of the landlords who lost land were Muslims (mainly of Bosniak or Albanian ethnicity) while the majority of their former tenants who received the land were Orthodox Christians (mainly Serbs), and in both places land reform was seen as an attack on the political and economic power of the Muslim gentry. In Croatia, Slovenia, and the Vojvodina, the majority of the landlords who lost their land were Austrian or Hungarian nobility who usually did not reside in those places, meaning that however much they might have resented the loss of their land it did not have the sort of political repercussions it did in Macedonia and in Bosnia where the Albanian and Bosniak landlords lived.
  In August 1921, on the death of his father, Alexander inherited the throne of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which from its inception was colloquially known both in the Kingdom and the rest of Europe alike as Yugoslavia. The historian Brigit Farley described Alexander as something of a cipher to historians as he was a taciturn and reserved man who loathed to express his feelings either in person or in writing. As Alexander kept no diary or wrote no memoirs, Farley wrote that any biography of Alexander could easily be titled "In search of King Alexander" as he remains an elusive and enigmatic figure. The British historian R.W. Seton-Watson, who knew Alexander well, called him a soldiery man most comfortable in a military milieu who was very quiet and surprisingly modest for a king. Seton-Watson described Alexander has having an "autocratic" personality, a man who was first and foremost a soldier who spent "six of his formative years" in the Serbian Army, which left him with a "military outlook which unfitted him to deal with the delicate problems of constitutional government and which made compromise hard for him". Seton-Watson wrote that Alexander "...was very courageous, though not ever a man of strong physique or robust health. He had a strong fixity of purpose, great devotion to duty, powers of sustained work. He had great charm and simplicity of manner. He was accessible and very open to opinions-though he rarely acted on them, and though occasionally he reacted with positive violence, as in the case of the Slovene Zerjav who fainted in his presence."  One of the things that historians can be certain about Alexander was his belief in keeping Yugoslavia as a unitary state and his consistent opposition to federalism, which he believed would lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia and perhaps his own assassination. In turn, Alexander's opposition to federalism related to his belief that in a federalised Yugoslavia, the prečani Serbs would be discriminated against by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims, once telling a Serb Orthodox priest that federalism would be "stabbing the Serbs in the back".
  As a Karađorđević, Alexander was very conscious of the long blood-feud between the Houses of Obrenović and Karađorđević that had disfigured Serb politics in the 19th century and
caption: King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of Republic of Turkey, in 1933.
exif: {}