When Signs Became Crimes: Flags, Portraits, Gestures, and the Legal Semiotics of Political Disloyalty in Two Yugoslavias

Abstract A missing mourning flag, a torn portrait, a green tie, or a swastika painted on an Easter egg could bring an ordinary person before a Yugoslav criminal court. This article examines how such everyday objects and gestures became grounds for accusations of political disloyalty under the monarchy and socialism. Drawing on thirty-two criminal files from north-eastern Slovenia, it compares prosecutions involving flags, royal and presidential portraits, Nazi symbols, clothing, and public rituals between 1921 and 1972, together with later reviews of convictions. The cases include the removal of a red star from a flag in a Catholic procession, a Nazi flag raised above Ptuj, and factory workers prosecuted for drawing swastikas. They show how witnesses, police, prosecutors, and judges turned damage, display, and refusal into allegations of insult or hostile propaganda. Yet the same sign did not always produce the same result: courts sometimes accepted explanations of accident, drunkenness, joking, or personal hostility behind a denunciation. Using legal semiotics, the article distinguishes a sign’s recognised political associations from evidence that its user intended and committed a criminal offence. Regime change replaced the symbols entitled to protection, but left a recurring problem: when did disrespect towards an image or emblem amount to an attack on the authority it represented?