8: The Era of Dualism
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THE Compromise placed Hungary in a position which in many ways was more favourable than
she had enjoyed since Mohács; in some respects, the nation had never before in its
history been so truly master of its own destinies. From Pozsony to the Iron Gates, from
the Tatras to Nagykanizsa, a single law reigned, administered by one government, which was
able to express its will, and that of the parliament to which it was answerable, in a far
wider field and with far fewer limitations than ever before. In all internal affairs - and
that term included the Hungaro-Croat relationship and the nationalities question - the
Crown retained only those limited powers of intervention which the central European
political philosophy of the day commonly allowed to a constitutional monarch. These
included the right to appoint the Minister President and to dissolve or prorogue
parliament, but not to rule indefinitely without a parliament, nor to veto legislation
enacted by it; although this last omission was largely rendered superfluous by his power
to choose the Minister President of his will and by a right conceded to him by convention
to give or refuse 'preliminary sanction' to a Bill before it was introduced.
It was true that Hungary was not autonomous in the conduct of her foreign relations, or
her defence. For these purposes, she still formed only a part of the indissolubly and
inseparably interlinked complex of the Habsburg Monarchy, and her interests in these
fields had to be coordinated with those of its other components, through 'common
institutions'. Yet even here the improvement in her position was enormous. While the
conduct of foreign affairs was still the monarch's prerogative, he now had to exercise it
through a responsible minister, who, by convention, was chosen alternately from the
'Austrian' and Hungarian halves of the Monarchy. Moreover, any likelihood that Hungary's
interests would in the future be sacrificed, as they had been so often in the past, in
causes which did not interest her, was much diminished by the pragmatic fact that after
the loss of Lombardo-Venetia, Hungary was larger in area than the rest of the Habsburg
dominions put together and by far the largest single unit in them. It was easily arguable
that the protection afforded her by the Austrian connection now far outweighed its
dangers.
She had an equal voice, in law, in the tariff policy of the Monarchy and in other
questions affecting its economic and financial interests as a whole. The customs union
with Austria could be denounced; for the present, it met the interests of the leading
Hungarian circles. The quota of 30 per cent which she had agreed to pay towards the common
expenditure was, again, subject to revision; meanwhile, it could not be regarded as
inequitable.
The real and large benefits which the Compromise conferred on Hungary were, however,
half-hidden from the eye of the nation by the mists of suspicion engendered by the
centuries in which the Austrian connection had brought it so much disadvantage; whereas
there were certain points on which it was difficult for it to feel itself truly
independent, even now. Easily the most conspicuous of these were those connected with the
common army, over which, as has been said, Francis Joseph had retained a large a measure
of control. It was psychologically impossible for him to regard this force otherwise than
as the instrument of his personal rule, which must place loyalty to himself above any
other consideration, including that of national sentiment. This was also the spirit of his
senior officers, who continued to regard all national feelings, and especially Hungarian
national feeling, as a threat to the integrity of the Monarchy. Flagrant proof of this was
given by the prolonged resistance offered by them - which it took all Andrássy's personal
influence with the monarch to overcome - to the dissolution of the Military Frontier. In
the course of this controversy Francis Joseph also sanctioned the establishment of a
secondline force, the Honvédség, in which Magyar was the language of command;
but he refused absolutely to admit any language but German in the central army, and this
the Hungarians regarded as another proof that in this field they were still regarded as
mere subjects, and potentially rebellious ones at that.
A large measure of central control had survived also -partly, perhaps, because neither
Deák nor Andrássy was well versed in the subject - in the finances of the Monarchy.
There was only a single Bank of Issue, and Hungary had little control over its operations.
In the numerous other questions which the Compromise left unclear, and over which Austria
and Hungary soon clashed, it was not always the Hungarians who had the bigger grounds of
complaint, but they had some grievances which were real.
Yet for all its imperfections, the Compromise still created a situation which was
replete with possibilities for constructive work. Unfortunately, the political evolution
of the country took from the outset a line which precluded the full utilisation of those
possibilities by concentrating on the 'question of public law', i.e., the question whether
the Compromise was to be accepted, altered, or completely overthrown.
It was on this question that the parties aligned themselves as soon as Hungary's
parliamentary life proper began. Deák's followers, the men who had voted the Compromise
and were now prepared to work on the basis of it, organised themselves in a party known by
their leader's name. The view diametrically opposite to theirs was represented in
parliament by a group known as the 'Party of '48', or 'Extreme Left', who rejected
anything short of the position established by the April Laws. A third group, led by
Kálmán Tisza and Kálmán Ghyczy, constituted itself under the name of the 'Left
Centre'. Its programme, formulated in the so-called 'Bihar Points', emphasised its
devotion to constitutional methods, but was tantamount to a complete repudiation of the
Compromise, since it rejected any institutions which it described as incompatible with the
nation's independence, as established in Law X of 1790, and consequently demanded an
independent army and complete autarchy in the fields of finance and commercial policy.
This alignment was perhaps inevitable at the time, in view not only of the natural
difficulty experienced by the national spirit, accustomed as it was by long habit to see
politics exclusively in the terms of the struggle against 'Austrian' oppression, now to
adapt itself to a new outlook, but also when the composition of the parliament itself is
remembered; for new elections were not held when the Compromise was made law, so that the
parliament of 1867 was, in membership, simply the Diet of 1865, whose sole raison d'
etre had been the settlement of the question of public law, and the two main parties
were merely the successors of the groups which had formed in the course of the earlier
discussions. But what were initially natural interests hardened afterwards into
obsessional fixations. The evolution was fatally facilitated by the withdrawal of the
Crown from its traditional role of protector of national and social minorities, and by
failure to redress the grave social-political imbalance thus created, by introducing a
franchise wide enough to enable those classes to speak for themselves. Sheltered by a
franchise which was already narrow, and which an amendment which became law in 1874
restricted still further(1)
, the two great groups into which the 'political nation' fell simply ignored, by tacit
agreement, social and (once the Law of 1868 was passed) national questions; or if these
did raise their heads, combined to repress them; concentrating instead on barren
constitutional issues in which prestige all too often played a larger part than real
interest.
The Deák Party got off to a good start. It negotiated successfully the Nagodba
and the Nationalities Law, and enacted a number of Laws consequent on the Compromise and a
whole number more bringing the administrative, judicial, confessional and economic system
of the country up to date. It was able, moreover, to sun itself in an air of prosperity.
The harvests were good, and the big landowners flourished. Foreign capital scented
opportunities, and poured into the country. There was a banking and business boom in which
speculators made quick fortunes, and a big programme of railway construction, most of it
financed by foreign capital on which the state guaranteed the interest, was undertaken.
For all that, the position of the party was never easy. It kept its position owing to
its good organisation, the support of the Transylvanians, and, in no small measure, the
great personal prestige enjoyed by its leaders. But it never had more than a minority of
the country behind it. The Nagodba had been got through the Sabor only by packing that
body with the help of an electoral Law especially devised for the occasion, and Croat
public opinion was unmistakably against it. The nationalities of Inner Hungary were
equally discontented. When the Law had first been discussed in draft in 1861, the Slovak,
Serb and Roumanian representatives had opposed even the idea of a politically - unitary
state, however great the freedom enjoyed in it by a member of a national minority. The
Slovaks had wanted an autonomous 'Slovak Territory of Upper Hungary', the Serbs, a
near-independent Voivodina, and the Roumanians,. at least the maintenance of Transylvanian
autonomy, with corporate rights in it for themselves. In 1868 they had repeated these
demands, and alternatively had proposed that Hungary should be constituted as a
multinational state with six official languages, and corresponding administrative
electoral divisions. The Law had been imposed on them by force majeure, and its
enactment had been followed by wide spread unrest in several districts.
But the defenders of the Compromise were also under constant fire from the other flank.
Kossuth, still the most popular Hungarian, had from his exile addressed to Deák an
impassioned 'Cassandra Letter', prophesying woe to the instrument and accusing its author
of having sacrificed the
honour and vital interests of the country to a short-lived and illusory expediency. Few
Hungarians at that time were prepared to follow Kossuth the whole way; even the Extreme
Left, which went no further than 1848, could muster only seven representatives in the 1867
Parliament. But the feeling that Hungary had not made a good enough bargain was
widespread. The Left Centre had a large parliamentary representation, and much popular
support. A free vote in the Magyar districts would probably have gone heavily against the
Compromise. As it was, when elections were held in 1869 they brought the 'national
Opposition' considerable gains, and that although the government had resorted to a good
deal of pressure.
The Deák Party, however, still commanded a comfortable majority, and for another year
or two things still went well. Andrássy, in particular, was able on two notable occasions
both to demonstrate in striking fashion the strength of Hungary's position, and to
reinforce it. In 1870, while still Hungarian Minister President, he was yet able to veto a
plan, strongly urged by the Austrian war party, to intervene in the Franco-Prussian War in
the hope of recovering for Austria the hegemony in Germany. In 1871, when Austro-Hungarian
Foreign Minister, he thwarted a plan for reorganising the western half of the Monarchy on
a federalist basis more favourable to Czech wishes.
But already matters were taking a turn for the worse. The personal composition of the
Party deteriorated. Deák grew old and ill; Eötvös died; Andrássy moved to the
Ballhausplatz. The government found that it had overreached itself financially, especially
on the railways programme; there were big budgetary deficits, and ugly rumours of personal
corruption. The 1872 elections brought both the Left Centre and the Extreme Left large
gains, while the Deák Party lost further members to a new Conservative Party. Then came
the great financial crash of 1873, which pricked the bubble of the boom and swept away
many insecurely-founded fortunes.
People were talking hopelessly of 'collapse' when the situation was transformed by a
volte-face on the part of Tisza (Ghyczy had already crossed the floor), who announced
himself ready to put the Bihar Points into cold storage until a more favourable moment;
pending the arrival of this he would, in order to avert complete collapse, work on the
basis of the existing Compromise. His motives were, of course, much discussed, and he was
widely accused of having sold his principles for the sake of office, but the truth seems
to be that he had come to realise that Hungary was simply not strong enough to challenge
the Crown and the nationalities simultaneously, and had decided that the only practicable
course was to suspend hostilities on the one front while consolidating the other. However
this may be, he fused his followers with the remnants of Deák's in a new 'Liberal Party',
pledged to the maintenance of the Compromise, and that Party thereafter remained
continuously in office for thirty years, during sixteen of which (1887 - 1890) Tisza
himself held the Minister Presidency.
The strength of the Left Centre had lain in the Magyar squires and squireens of the
Alföld. When Tisza changed sides, many of these men followed their leader, so that,
taking them together with the old Deákists, the Liberal Party now included a substantial
proportion of Hungary's propertied classes. It still, however, had against it not only
those factors in the country, such as the non-Magyars, who were against the Compromise for
giving Hungary too much independence, but also those stalwarts who continued to oppose it
for giving too little. The Magyar farmers and civites of the Alföld towns
persisted in swearing by Kossuth and '48, and in rallying behind those who claimed to
represent these magic traditions. Against both these forces the Liberal Party maintained
itself by a brilliant internal organisation and by electoral devices. As the Magyar masses
were difficult to dragoon, Tisza in 1879 carried through a redistribution of
constituencies, the effect of which was that the Magyar districts of the Alföld elected
only one deputy to several thousand constituents. In the non-Magyar districts, the
educational qualifications confined the number of voters to what was sometimes no more
than a handful, and they were quite simply coerced by administrative pressure into
returning the government's nominees. By these means the party regularly secured
comfortable parliamentary majorities, but its rule was simply that of a clique, and it was
the achievements, good and ill, of that clique, not the free interplay of social and
national forces, which made Hungary what it was at the end of the nineteenth century.
It is impossible to deny that those achievements were impressive in many fields. By the
end of the period, financial order had been restored and although the national debt was
still heavy, the most exorbitant loans had been paid off or funded on better terms.
Budgets were balanced and the national credit was good. Foreign, as well as Austrian,
capital had continued to find the country an attractive field of investment. With this
help the grandiose programme of railway construction had been completed, the main rivers
had been made navigable, and roads improved. This all~important first step had made
possible further modernisation in almost every field. Agriculture still employed over 65
per cent of the population, but other occupations were gaining on it. The nascent industry
of the first years had been set back by the crash of 1873, which ruined a great number of
enterprises, and the customs union with Austria had retarded its rebirth; but after about
1890 the state had begun to encourage it by loans, subsidies, government contracts and
similar devices, and by 1900 nearly a million men and 200,000 women (13 per cent of the
gainfully employed population) were employed in mining and industry; the proportion in
central and northern Hungary was considerably higher. The vast majority of the 'industrial
enterprises' were, indeed, still tiny establishments of the village blacksmith or suburban
cobbler class, but the larger establishments of 'factory' status were growing fast in
number and size. The most firmly based were those which utilised the local natural
resources: flour-mills, breweries, sugar refineries, sawmills, tanneries, but there was a
growing metallurgical industry, and the mining of both coal and iron employed a
considerable number of workers. Trade, too, had expanded largely, and the growing
complexity of the new society had brought with it a big expansion of both the
administrative and the professional classes. The 1900 census gave over 200,000 persons
gainfully employed in the public services (excluding the army) and the professions.
Agriculture itself had made big advances: methods had been improved and yields raised.
The area both under cereals and under intensive crops had risen sharply, and the national
production of agricultural products had nearly doubled between 1870 and 1890.
The growth of the non-agricultural occupations had brought with it that of the towns. A
quarter of the population still lived in scattered farms or small hamlets and only some 20
per cent in 'towns', but the latter figure was rising year by year. Budapest (now a single
city) alone had a population of nearly 800,000, having doubled since 1880. Szeged had
102,000, Szabadka over 80,000, Debrecen 75,000, and a dozen more towns were on or near the
50,000 mark. The civic pride of many of these was attested by imposing public buildings.
Thought and money had been lavished on the endeavour to make Budapest, in particular, a
capital worthy of a great, and independent country and the peer of Vienna. Besides the
famous Suspension Bridge, the child of Széchenyi's inspiration, four more bridges for
road traffic and one for rail now spanned the Danube. An immense new royal palace crowned
one end of Buda Hill; the other was laid out as a public garden, behind cunningly
reconstructed bastions. From its walls the eye looked across the great river on to the
'corso' on which society strolled in front of a long row of fashionable
hotels and cafés; behind these were the luxury shopping streets, and a forest of roofs
above which there rose the great contours of the National Museum, the University, of the
Opera House, the Court Theatre, the Palace of the Academy. Upstream the waters washed the
feet of the vast Gothic Parliament, architecturally inspired by that of Westminster;
beyond it again, the green pleasure-gardens of the Margaret Island. Behind all this
stretched huge quarters of humbler buildings, and away to the south, a forest of chimneys
indicated Csepel Island, the site of Hungary's most important heavy industry.
In 1900 Inner Hungary had two universities, and Croatia one. Besides these there was a
big polytechnic, afterwards promoted to university status, and a large number of colleges
of law, theology, agriculture, mining, etc. Intellectual life was active. The contribution
made by Hungary during this age to European civilisation was more than respectable: the
names of the great physicist, Loránd Eötvös, and of Ignác Semmelweiss, alone suffice
to attest this. The generation which succeeded it tends to rank its achievements in the
creative arts, qualitatively, below those of its predecessor and its successors: it is
true that the men who first made Hungary glorious in these fields - Vörösmarty, Petôfi,
Arany, Madách, Jókai, Liszt, Erkel - were either dead before the era opened, or had
their best work behind them, and Bartók, Kodály, Ady were yet to come. But
quantitatively, its production both in literature and in music was very big, and Hungary
also produced exponents of the visual arts who achieved world fame.
Yet pride in these achievements - and the celebrations of its millennium in which the
nation indulged in 1896 were the occasion of extraordinary self-congratulation -could not
alter the truth that the era had failed to solve a whole series of problems inherited from
the past, and had even seen the creation (not always through its own fault) of new ones.
Its proud structure concealed weaknesses which were destined, only a few years later, to
bring everything which it had built up, indeed, the whole edifice of Historic Hungary
itself, toppling to the ground.
Among these unsolved problems, the most conspicuous were those of the non-Magyar
nationalities, and of Croatia.
The history of Hungary's relations with the nationalities after 1867 is the same dismal
hen-and-egg story as before 1848, embittered on both sides by the memories of the
intervening years. As we have said, the nationalities had accepted the Law of 1868 only
under force majeure, and few of them thereafter showed any wish to make a success
of it; the majority continued to hope openly for a situation to arise in which at least
their old programmes could be revived.
But neither had many Magyars accepted in their hearts the notion that the primacy which
the Law allowed the Magyar language was simply a pragmatic concession to administrative
convenience, and that Hungary was no more the Magyars' state than that of the Ruthenes or
Roumanians. For them, the Magyar national character of the state was axiomatic, and the
conduct of the nationalities in and after 1848, and the attitude of Vienna towards them,
had only confirmed their conviction that the very survival of the Hungarian state depended
on the maintenance of its Magyar character.
While Deák and Eötvös were still there to exercise a restraining influence, the Law
was still, up to a point, observed, but even then the national character of the
administration was complete; that is to say, the officials might deal with the public in
the local language - and indeed, local administration was so conducted up to the last, of
necessity and not, as a rule, reluctantly but they did so as the representatives of a
state which identified itself with Magyardom, and were seldom admitted to the service of
the state unless they accepted the identification. Any cultural aspirations on the part of
the nationalities, above the humblest level, even where permitted, were eyed with
suspicion. The advent of the Liberal regime brought a further change for the worse. Now
the whole public atmosphere at the centre of affairs (it is fair to make this
qualification, for there were many localities which took their own multi-lingual character
as natural and harmless;
it was a case of the higher, the worse) became charged with poison. Parliamentary
demagogues, and the national press which aped their tone, treated as treasonable even
protests against non-fulfilment of the Law itself, and those daring so to protest were
overwhelmed with the most intemperate abuse.
The Magyarisation of the educational system, of which so much has been written, was at
first justified by its authors, as it had been in the 1830s, as the necessary means of
producing a Magyar administrative class, but the target was soon enlarged as, by a natural
transition, it came to be assumed that all members of society above the peasant-worker
level should at least speak and understand Magyar, and before long chauvinists were again
dreaming of a day when the whole population should be Magyar. When the era opened, the
hands of the state were tied by the fact that nearly all primary and secondary education
was then in the hands of the churches, whose autonomy the Nationalities Law expressly
recognised. In fact, the only measures of Magyarisation imposed by law on the churches,
for many years, were that in 1879 the teaching of the Magyar language, as a subject,
during a number of hours to be prescribed by the minister of cults and education, was made
compulsory in primary schools, whose teachers had to be qualified to give this
instruction, and that in 1883 Magyar language and literature were made compulsory subjects
in the two top forms of secondary schools. These provisions did not greatly alter the
nature of the instruction given in the schools maintained by the two Orthodox churches
(Serbian and Roumanian) or by the Transylvanian Saxons; the less so, as they remained
largely on paper. The Serbs and Roumanians, however, possessed few establishments above
the primary level, and permission to add to their number was regularly refused. The higher
direction of the Roman Catholic and Greek catholic churches; and the Lutheran outside
Transylvania, not to mention the Calvinist (which was purely Magyar in any case) was
Magyar even where the congregations belonged to another people, and their own authorities
saw to it that all secondary education in their schools, with trivial exceptions, should
be in Magyar, and Magyar was also represented far above its due even in their primary
schools. The schools which the state began to found itself in the 1705 - originally, and
ostensibly, where the local church or commune was too poor to look after its own needs -
were from the first deliberately used as instruments of Magyarisation, and although most
of them were founded in non-Magyar districts, the language of instruction in them was
almost always exclusively Magyar. The Hungarian Statistical Annual for 1906-7 listed
16,618 elementary schools in Inner Hungary, of which 2,153 were state, 1,460 communal,
12,705 confessional and 300 private. The language of instruction in 12,223 of these,
including all the state schools, was Magyar; in 492 it was German, in 737 Slovak, in 2,760
Roumanian, in 107 Ruthene, in 276 Serb or Croat, in 10 Italian, and in 19 another. In the
400 burgher schools, the languages were: Magyar 386, German 5, Roumanian 4, Serb 3,
Italian 2; in the 205 secondary schools, Magyar 189, German 8, Roumanian 6, Italian 1; one
was mixed Magyar-Roumanian. The Slovaks had none at all: one of Tisza's first acts had
been to close the three secondary schools which they had founded in the 1860's, under the
pretext that they had been teaching Pan-Slavism, and they had been refused permission to
open another. Their cultural association, the Slovenská Matica, suffered the same fate.
Among other measures of Magyarisation may be mentioned the Kindergarten Act of 1891 -
instruction here, again, was almost exclusively in Magyar - and two other Laws which
perhaps served to give more of the appearance than the reality of Magyarisation. One
bestowed on every place in Hungary an official Magyar name; the other made it cheap and
easy for the bearers of non-Magyar names to exchange them for Magyar ones. Officials were
strongly urged to avail themselves of the facility.
It cannot be said that all this was waste labour. By the end of the century the state
apparatus throughout the whole of Hungary was exclusively Magyar in feeling, and
practically so in speech. Professional and business life on the higher levels had followed
suit. Figures of the joint-stock companies in 1915, based on the language used by the
boards or 'the names of the leading men' showed that 97.4% of them, with 99.5% of their
total assets, were in the hands of Magyar-speaking persons. The Magyarisation of the towns
had proceeded at an astounding rate. Budapest, three quarters German-speaking in 1848, was
79.8% Magyar in 1900 (when its population was three times the size). Pécs had changed
from three quarters German to almost purely Magyar, and the same process had taken place
in nearly all the formerly German towns of central Hungary, in the mixed towns along the
ethnic frontiers, and in some of those lying deep in the 'nationalities' districts. During
this process, moreover, the greater part of the German intelligentsia (outside the Saxons)
and of the Slovak and Ruthene, had joined the ranks of Magyardom, simultaneously enriching
it and leaving their own nationalities the poorer. The rural districts had not kept pace
with the towns; nevertheless, the proportion of the population of Inner Hungary giving
Magyar as its mother-tongue had risen from 46.6% in 1880 to 51.4% in 1900, the rise in
absolute figures being about 2,200,000. The proportions of all the non-Magyar languages
(except those grouped under the rubric 'others') had sunk, and their increase in absolute
figures had been relatively small.
But these figures, impressive as they were, did not mean that the danger to Hungary
from her multinational composition had been banished, or even seriously diminished. The
increase in Magyardom had taken place chiefly in central Hungary, above all, in Budapest
and its surroundings, the contributors to it coming from three main sources: the old
German burgher population of the towns, plus a considerable contingent from the well-to-do
German peasantry, who usually contrived to save enough to 'make a gentleman' of at least
one of their sons: the Jews, who were arriving in the capital in increasing numbers -in
1900 they already formed nearly a quarter of its whole population - and finally, the
overspill from the congested districts of the periphery, especially the north, who came to
central Hungary in search of work in the factories. But central Hungary was Magyar by
majority already.
The effect of all the efforts on the ethnic map of Hungary, regarded in broad terms,
was practically nil. It is doubtful whether the Magyarisation of the schools changed the
ethnic character of a single village. The little Slovak or Ruthene who spent his
schooldays painfully acquiring a few scraps of Magyar (and often acquiring precious little
else) forgot them happily and completely as soon as the school doors closed behind him.
Where changes did occur, it was as the result of some special cause: large-scale
emigration, or the establishment of a factory; and those changes were by no means always
favourable to the Magyar element. A writer who investigated the question in 1902 reported
that during the Liberal period the Magyars had actually lost 465 communes to the
nationalities while gaining only 261 from them. Their chief gains had been from the
Slovaks (chiefly in central Hungary), their chief losses to the Roumanians and Germans. Of
all the nationalities of Hungary, the Ruthenes had been the biggest losers (chiefly to the
Slovaks), then the Magyars, then the Serbs (chiefly by emigration to Serbia). The biggest
gainers on balance had been the Roumanians, then the Slovaks, then the Germans.
Broadly, the ethnic frontiers in the west, north and east remained stationary on almost
the exact lines on which they had been stabilised at the end of the impopulatio.
Only in a few, exceptional cases, of which Kassa is the best example, did the growth of a
Magyar- speaking town in a non-Magyar environment alter the local balance. Behind the main
lines, the losses suffered by the Magyar element at least balanced its gains.
The Hungarians had thus been unable to obliterate the multinational character of the
ethnic map of their country. They had failed, partly by their own intolerant insistence on
complete Magyarisation, to create what alone should have been able. To save the integrity
of their state in 1918 (although as things turned out, it would not have done so), a
substantial body of non-Magyar, but activist, feeling among any of the nationalities.
Neither had they eliminated discontent and irredentist feeling. The degree of acuteness of
the nationality question varied with conditions inside the Monarchy, and around it. A
certain lull had set in after 1870, when it became obvious that the Compromise was there
to stay for a long time. The secret treaties concluded by the Monarchy with Serbia and
Roumania, in 1881 and 1883 respectively, had a considerable effect in damping down
irredentist agitation by those countries. For a while, the Slovak national movement
dwindled into insignificance, and the Serbian was seriously weakened. But neither quite
disappeared; if the Slovaks' enthusiasm for Pan-Slavism had grown dim, the idea of
Czecho-Slovak unity gained strength. The Roumanian national movement was always active.
Here a large proportion of the people, particularly among those belonging to the Orthodox
church, were more or less openly disaffected and their leaders, even at this date, were
dreaming of union with their brothers across the Carpathians.
The development of the Croat situation was very similar. Croat nationalist opinion
remained bitterly resentful, not only of several of the specific provisions in the
Nagodba, but above all, of the fact that it relegated Croatia to a mediate position. This,
of course, was irremediable, and it is hard to see what would have happened if a Sabor had
repudiated the Nagodba, as its extreme nationalists were always urging it to do; as it
was, the position was kept from reversal chiefly by the narrowness of the franchise, which
gave an artificial weight to the officials, many of whom were Magyars.
It was the intemperate folly of the Croat national extremists themselves which proved
Hungary's best ally. Their most prominent figure, Ante Starcvevic, leader of the so-called
Party of Right', behaved towards the Serbs of Slavonia, who, after the incorporation of
the Military Frontier, formed a full quarter of the total population, with such gross
intolerance that when a new Ban, Count Khuen-Héderváry, was appointed in 1883, they
sought his protection, and their support enabled him to maintain what was essentially a
dictatorship, and even a measure of order, until the end of the century. But it goes
without saying that his rule did not satisfy the Croats - a people which has, indeed,
developed the habit of opposition for opposition's sake further than any in Europe. After
Starcvevic died in 1897, most articulate Croat opinion still followed one or the other of
two parties, whose differences of principle were little larger than the difference in
their titles (one kept the old name, Party of Right; the other, led by J. Frank, called
itself the Party of Pure Right), both being extreme nationalist. The genuine supporters of
the Union had dwindled to a handful.
An aspect of the Magyarisation campaign which was little considered at the time - or if
questions concerning it were raised, they were brushed aside impatiently - was what effect
this great addition to their ranks was having on the Magyar people itself. Had the new
recruits become Magyars at all, in any real sense, when they entered their names in the
rubric as Magyar by mother-tongue? Could the earlier stock assimilate so large an influx,
and if it did achieve the feat without manifest symptoms of indigestion, had it thereby
altered, for better or worse, its own nature?
The poor upland peasant turned factory worker in a suburb of Pest melted into his
environment imperceptibly enough; his habits, his religion, probably even his family tree,
if traced far enough back, differed little from those of his 'Magyar' mates; when his
children grew up speaking Magyar, that mere fact made them Magyars, just like any others.
The Magyarisation of the Germans had more important sociological consequences, for nearly
all these recruits went into the expanding middle classes, in which they soon came to
constitute a component of the first importance. They flocked into the new ministries, in
some of which, especially the technical and financial services, they came to outnumber the
Magyars themselves. They were strongly represented in the church, and even more strongly
in the army, a service which the true Magyars tended to shun, on both sentimental and
linguistic grounds. They did not venture much into big business, for which they were
perhaps too cautious, or had absorbed too much of the national psychology, but they
comprised a large proportion of the small shopkeeper, artisan and skilled labour classes.
At one period they almost dominated some of the professions: nearly all the architects who
built the new Budapest were of local German origin, and so were many of the period's
leading figures in literature, painting and academic life.
The Magyarisation of these elements, too, seemed both to themselves and to others
complete and sincere, and the Magyar people of the day neither regretted this accession,
nor had cause to do so. The recruits filled gaps in the nation's social and economic
structure which must otherwise have remained unfilled for at least two more generations,
and if the dilution impoverished the original product by a little of its slap-dash charm,
perhaps by a touch of its brilliancy, this was more than compensated by the diligence,
sobriety and common sense which it brought with it.
The Jews presented a more difficult problem. Their numbers had been increasing rapidly
ever since the annexation to Austria of Galicia, and the removal by Joseph II of the
restrictions which had previously hampered their movements. From a mere 12,000 (0.1 % of
the total population) in 1720, they had already increased to 83,000 (1.0%) in 1787,
247,000 (2.2%) in 1840, 366,000 (3.2 %) in 1850, and 542,000 (4.0%) in 1869. In 1880 they
numbered 625,000 (4.6%), and in 1900, 830,000 (4.9%). Their numerical increase was now
slowing down, but the importance of their role in the national life had become enormous.
They had become an almost exclusively urban and middle-class element. In the towns of
north-eastern Hungary, which lay on their main immigration route, they formed a proportion
which was often as high as 35 or 40 percent, and in Budapest itself there were in 1900
nearly 170,000 Jews, a little under a quarter of its total population.
The capitalist development of the new Hungary, in so far as it had been carried out by
'native' resources at all, had been almost entirely of their making, and the results of it
were to an overwhelming extent in their hands. The occupational statistics for 1910 show
that 12.5% of the 'self-employed industrialists' and 21.8% of the salaried employees in
industry, 54% of the self-employed traders and 62.1% of their employees, 85% of the
self-employed persons in finance and banking (283 out of 333) and 42% of their employees,
were Jewish; and these figures, which do not distinguish between enterprises by their size
and importance, ranking the head of a great business equally with a village cobbler or
shopkeeper as a self-employed man, give but a faint idea of the real position. This was
that practically all banking and finance, and the great majority of trade and industry
above the humblest level, was run and staffed by Jews, into whose pockets also went most
of the money so earned, whether in the form of direct profits, of dividends or of
salaries. Even among the larger categories of landowners the Jews were now strongly
represented: they owned 1.9% of the properties of 1,000 hold+
and 19% of those between 1,000 and 200 hold and constituted 73% of the lessees in
the former bracket and 62% of those in the latter.
Their position in the intellectual life of the country was almost as strong. They were
rare in the ministries and even rarer in the army, and were naturally confined to their
proportionate numbers in the churches and the church schools, but 11.5% of the teachers in
the burgher schools were Jewish, and a substantial number of the university professors.
26.2% of the persons entered under the rubric 'literature and the arts', including 42.4%
of the journalists, were Jewish, 45.2% of the advocates and 48.9% of the doctors. Hungary
owed to her Jews a considerable proportion of her most boasted achievements in the fields
of science and the humanities.
The Jews were not yet entering parliament on a large scale, although all the later
Liberal parliaments contained some Jewish members, but their predominance in the Press
gave them an important influence over public opinion, and the leadership of both the
Social Democrat Party and the various radical groups which were emerging at the turn of
the century was largely in their hands.
The Jewish recruits to the new Hungarian society had thus achieved a position far
stronger than the German, and even one which in many fields was stronger than that of the
Magyars themselves. It was, however, undeniable that their integration into the nation had
remained incomplete. Many of them were still newcomers of the first or second generation,
for if their increase had slowed down, this was not because the immigration had slackened,
but because it was now being partly balanced by emigration westward. The emigrants, of
whom 110,000 left Hungary between 1870 and 1910, were precisely those who had acquired
European characteristics - and, usually, some wealth -while the new-comers entered with
their national characteristics undiminished.
Not all the Jews themselves wanted to Magyarise; of the two great bodies into which
most of Hungarian Jewry divided, the Orthodox and the Neologs, the former opposed
assimilation on principle and the latter discouraged changes of religion, which were, in
fact, rare: between 1896 and 1907 only 5,000 conversions took place. The 'Magyarisation'
of those whose spiritual allegiance belonged to their ancestral faith could clearly never
be complete, however enthusiastically it was expressed in some directions, and it was not
easy for the Magyars themselves to feel that their new brothers in statistics were
brothers indeed. An anti-Semitic party, founded by a certain Istóczy, which returned
seventeen members to the 1884 Parliament, was crushed out of existence, but even after
this, and despite all official disapproval, many Magyars felt uneasily that the situation
was dangerous which placed so many of the country's power-positions in the hands of an
element which still appeared to them alien.
The social and economic picture, too, was far from healthy. The contrast drawn by so
many writers between the wealth and luxury prevailing at one end of the social scale, and
the destitution at the other, is fallacious in this sense, that it gives far too
favourable a picture of the conditions of the rich. Some big fortunes were made in Hungary
during the period, but many of them were made by foreign entrepreneurs - much of the new
industry was in the hands of holding banks, which were themselves subsidiaries of Viennese
or other non-Hungarian concerns; most of the others by the new industrialists. The great
landed magnates formed an apparent exception; indeed, the quick and relatively generous
compensation received by them after 1848 for such of their acres as they had lost, had
enabled them to take advantage of the difficulties of their weaker brethren, so that the
share of the mammoth and big estates in Hungary's soil hardly diminished. In 1895 over 12
million hold, nearly one third of the entire area of the country, was owned by
under 4,000 proprietors (not all of them, it is true, private individuals)(2).
The 128 largest estates covered between them more than half of this. In the first decades
of the Compromise their estates brought the great agrarian interests real wealth, but when
the competition of overseas wheat made itself felt, they got into great difficulties, and
by the end of the century, many of them were mortgaged up to the ears. The 'gentry' class,
as a whole, never recovered from the disastrous years after the reform, and the
agricultural depression was another blow. Many of them were then saved only by the action
of the state in taking them over into its new services. Here they carried on in new forms
their traditional role of governing the country, and enjoyed sufficient social prestige,
but their lives, although decent, were far from luxurious.
A few medium landowners, of course, weathered the storm, and there was a reasonably
large class of smaller farms which afforded their cultivators a comfortable existence. But
below these again, an alarming situation had developed. Population increased, very fast
after the cholera decade of the sixties, and industrialisation was proceeding far too
slowly to take up the surplus; nor did the Magyar peasant take kindly to the idea of
leaving the land. The current usage among the Magyars was that when the head of a family
died, his holding was divided equally between all his children, and this process was
repeated until in 1895, when the last pre-war agricultural survey was taken, over two
million of the 2,800,000 holdings in the country were of 10 holds or less, three
quarters of these being under 5 hold and 600,000 of them under one. Many of these
last were, indeed, vineyards or market gardens, or belonged to persons whose main
occupation was not agriculture; but against these must be set the smaller holdings in the
5-10 hold group. The minimum on which a family could exist was generally put at 8
hold, so that it appears that nearly half the landowning population of the
country was existing on plots insufficient to meet their necessities.
The lower brackets of the dwarf-holders merged into the still more unfortunate class of
the true agricultural proletariat, the men who had neither land of their own nor regular
employment on that of others. Such a class had, of course, always existed in Hungary, as
in every country, and the statistics, such as they are, show that it had been growing with
some rapidity during the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1848 the class ranking
as 'peasants' (i.e., villein holders of a quarter sessio or more) certainly
comprised less than half the total rural population. The other half, however, equally
certainly contained many persons not entirely destitute, and the residue were in any case
not so numerous as to force themselves on the attention either of the Hungarian reformers
of 1848 or of their Austrian successors. Even for several years after the Compromise there
was a large demand for labour on the construction of the railways and the regulation of
the Tisza, and wages for those who remained on the land were comparatively high. But after
the public works ended, wages sank rapidly and many could find no work at all. Emigration
began in the1870's, soon reaching a figure of 50,000 a year, most of them from the
congested rural districts. Nevertheless, in 1890 the totally landless agrarian population
numbered about 1,700,000 (wage-earners), over 48 per cent of the total agrarian population
and over a quarter) of the gainfully employed population of Hungary. Of these, about one
third were in regular employment as farm-hands; most of the rest lived from seasonal or
casual labour. The seasonal labourers literally existed during half the year in a state of
semi-starvation, or worse; there were several epidemics of pellagra and hunger typhus, and
cases of madness induced by starvation were not unknown.
The crisis of this class reached its peak in the 1890's, when there was severe unrest,
especially on the Tisza, where a strange prophet named Várkonyi appeared, preaching a
kind of agrarian socialism. In 1897 the labourers in several counties
struck just before the harvest.
The authorities put down the movement with troops and gendarmerie, and a draconic law
was enacted which dissolved all existing combinations among agrarian workers and made it a
penal offence to address, or even attend, a meeting called for the purpose of founding a
new one. It was also made a penal offence for an agricultural worker to default on his
contract without reasonable cause; if he did so, he could be escorted back to his work by
gendarmes. This Law naturally did not remedy the discontent, nor even quite put an end to
strikes, but emigration, which in the peak year of 1907 exceeded 200,000, and the
increased tempo of industrialisation, now began at least to retard the advance of the
rural congestion. Wages rose slightly, and the state, while seeing to it that the
agricultural workers remained without any organisation of their own, or any possibility of
creating one, began itself to show some modest interest in their welfare. Even a few
settlements were founded, but all of them on state land. The expedient of turning over
parts of the big, extensively cultivated private estates to peasant colonists was never
attempted.
Industrial labour fared little better than agricultural. The lateness of her
industrialisation and its modest scale saved Hungary from the most extreme of the horrors
of the industrial revolution in England, but the philosophy of the day allowed her
capitalists as free a hand as their English counterparts enjoyed, and they were quite as
greedy. Moreover, the state agreed that only low costs of production would enable
Hungarian industry to compete against Austrian within the customs union, while the
landlords opposed high wages in industry which tempted labour off the land. Their scarcity
value often enabled the skilled craftsmen to command relatively good terms, but the mass
of unskilled workers, refugees from the congested rural districts, were at the mercy of
whoever offered them employment. Wages were always low, and protective legislation, which
was generally copied from German or Austrian models, lagged behind its originals. In 1900
28% of all male industrial workers were earning between 14 and 20 crowns(3)
a week, 48% between 6 and 14 and 15% under 6. Women's and children's wages were
proportionately lower. While some limitation had been placed in the exploitation of child
and juvenile labour, the adult was practically unprotected. The commonest factory working
day was 12 hours, including breaks; the usual working week ranged between 60 and 66 hours.
Housing conditions in Budapest were said to be worse than in any other large city of
Europe.
Political pressure on the workers was always heavy. Inflammatory speeches made at the
time of the Paris Commune engendered in the authorities a panic fear which led to
exaggerated repressive measures. A Law enacted in 1872 and re-enacted in 1884 legalised
association and even strikes, but incitement to strike was a punishable offence, and any
form of association had to be strictly non-political. Nevertheless, a political movement
gradually developed, and in 1890 a Social Democratic Congress was held, which adopted
bodily the Hainfeld Programme drawn up by the Austrian Social Democrats in the preceding
year. The forbidden link with the Trade Unions was maintained by a surreptitious device
and was in fact very close, and after this the industrial unions made considerable
progress, although the authorities were able to prevent either the Party or the unions
from expanding outside industry. Even so, the workers' movement now became a perceptible
political force. It was, however, still regarded with extreme aversion by the 'national'
politicians, partly out of the usual economic motives and partly because of its Marxian
tenets and its almost wholly non-Magyar leadership (the Trade Union leaders were mostly
German and the intellectuals Jewish), which earned it the repute of an 'inter-national'
and even an anti-national force.
Finally, it had not proved possible to induce in Hungarian national opinion itself
sincere acceptance of the Compromise as the answer to its aspirations. The idea of 1848
maintained its popularity among the Magyar masses, and all governmental pressure was
unable to prevent the regular return to parliament of a number of representatives of the
extreme left, whose programme, as reformulated in 1874 (when the name of 'Party
of Independence' was adopted) and 1884 would have reduced the link with Austria to the
purely personal one of the common Monarch. But even among those who accepted the necessity
of common institutions, there were always many. who thought the terms of the Compromise
unsatisfactory. When the economic clauses came up for revision in 1876, Tisza himself
pressed for a number of concessions, and obtained some of them, but had to renounce
others, including the independent National Bank, and after this several groups of deputies
seceded from the Liberals to form a "United Opposition" (the name was changed in
1891 to 'National Party') with a programme of revision of the Compromise by constitutional
methods in the direction of more independence, especially in the financial and economic
fields.
To the eye of Vienna, the programme of the National Party was little more compatible
with the spirit of the Compromise than that of the Party of Independence itself; and in
fact, the developments of the situation drove the two parties increasingly into one camp.
Revision of the economic clauses of the Compromise was a legitimate demand, within the
terms of the Compromise itself, although each discussion revealed differences of interest
between the Austrian and Hungarian parties which left them mutually irritated. But in the
1880's nationalist opinion, provoked by some acts of supreme tactlessness on the part of
the central military authorities, began to concentrate its resentment against the joint
army. Even the moderate Opposition, although not asking for a fully independent army,
joined the agitation for 'national' concessions in this field. This touched Francis Joseph
on the raw, and his refusal to make any concessions in the field left public opinion, in
its turn, more convinced that the Compromise was incompatible with true national
independence.
It was the outcry raised by the Opposition against an army Bill introduced in 1889,
which strengthened (although only very slightly) the centralist features of the army, that
was the real cause of Tisza's resignation (although he only tendered it a few months
later),. and this can probably be taken as the turning-point after which the monarch and
the "political nation' alike recognised the impossibility of complete and sincere
reconciliation. The Liberal Party continued in office, indeed, for another fifteen years,
during the first part of which public attention was partially diverted from the 'question
of public law' by social and religious problems (which produced the phenomenon of the
foundation of a major party - the Christian People's Party - on a social basis) and by the
millenary celebrations. Meanwhile the revision of the economic clauses of the Compromise
in 1887 had gone through without too great difficulty, and that of 1897 brought Hungary
the great concession of equal partnership in what was now the Austro-Hungarian Bank.
But in 1903 another army Bill evoked such unbridled agitation and parliamentary
filibustering that in the end the Minister President of the day (Kálmán Tisza's son,
Count István Tisza) appealed to the country, and was heavily defeated by a coalition
mainly composed of the Party of Independence and 'national' sympathisers.
Francis Joseph, indeed, dealt with the situation easily enough. He appointed a cabinet
of officials, under the minister of defence, General Fejérváry, which threatened to
introduce universal suffrage. The Coalition capitulated and agreed, in return for office,
to renounce all its more far-reaching demands and itself to introduce a suffrage Bill.
After it had spent four inglorious years doing little but evade the latter promise (it did
produce a Bill, but weighted the voting by complicated devices to maintain Magyar
supremacy), Tisza reorganised his followers in a new party, known as the Party of Work,
and duly recovered the parliamentary majority in the elections of 1910. But there was no
concealing that by now the Compromise had lost all its popularity; those who, like Tisza,
supported it, did so because, in their view, although objectionable, it yet offered
protection against worse dangers.
And those dangers were mounting visibly. The twentieth century had seen a steady growth
in Hungary itself of the forces which challenged the class-national supremacy which was
the common basis of the '67 and the '48 parties alike. The agrarian crisis had been
repressed rather than resolved. The industrial workers' movement had visibly gathered
strength. A Trade Union Congress had been instituted in 1904. When the Fejérváry
government raised their hopes, and again later, the workers had staged big demonstrations
in favour of universal suffrage. The nationalities had emerged from their relative
passivity. In the 1905 elections they had gotten deputies into parliament and in those of
1906 (held by the Coalition after it had agreed with the Crown) no less than twenty-six,
who had formed an alliance between themselves and with the deputies from Croatia. There,
in 1905, a Dalmatian politician named Supilo had succeeded in persuading a number of the
Croat and Serb parties to form a coalition. This had at first offered to support the
Hungarian Coalition against Austria, but had soon swung round to bitter opposition to
Budapest. In the 1908 elections for the Sabor, the Coalition had secured 57 seats, the
Party of Pure Right 24, the Unionists none at all. The new Ban, Baron Rauch, was reduced
to ruling without a Sabor.
The danger of these developments was immensely enhanced by the developments which were
taking place in the Monarchy itself, outside Hungary, and in Europe at large. The real
basis on which the Compromise should have rested in the Monarchy had been swept away long
since when the German centralists, whose supremacy west of the Leitha should have been the
counterpart to that of the '67 parties east of it, had proved unable to maintain their
position. Since then, Austrian Governments had balanced uneasily between Germans and
Slavs, who had never renounced their hopes of remodelling the Monarchy. While Francis
Joseph lived, this, at least, would not happen, but he was growing old, and it was
notorious that the heir presumptive, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand, meant on his
succession to carry through radical changes. In military and economic respects, the
Monarchy was to be strictly unitary, but, politically, it was to be reorganised either as
a trialist state (by forming a third component out of its Southern Slav areas) or as a
more complex federation of national units. Either solution would have meant the end, not
only of Dualism, but even, in practice, of Historic Hungary. The Archduke was in close
contact with the nationality leaders in Hungary, and also with the new forces among the
Austrian Germans, notably the Christian Socials, who were also bitterly hostile to
Hungary.
Outside the Monarchy, Russia was in alliance with France, had reached a modus
vivendi with Britain and since 1906 had again redirected its expansionist drive
southwestward. Russian agents were at work in Galicia and even among the Hungarian
Ruthenes, and in touch with the neo-Slavs in Prague. Above all, Russia had developed an
intimate understanding with Serbia, where the replacement of the Obrenovic dynasty by that
of Karageorgevic in 1903 had soon been followed by the emergence of an anti-Austrian
feeling which almost reached hysteria when the Monarchy annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in
1908. Roumania was still technically allied to the Monarchy, but its most popular
politicians were openly proclaiming the annexation of Transylvania as the supreme
objective of the nation's policy.
Tisza may have been too optimistic in thinking that in this situation any policy at all
could ensure the survival of a Hungary recognisable to him as such. He was at any rate
convinced that if it could be saved at all, this could only be by close adherence to the
Austrian connection and to the German alliance, and by keeping political power out of the
hands of the centrifugal forces in Hungary. Under pressure from the Crown itself, the
Party of Work passed a franchise act, but it was as restrictive as the Coalition's had
been. When the murder of Francis Ferdinand, on 28 June 1914, brought the European crisis
to a head, Tisza, who had returned to the Minister Presidency a year before, was
personally against war with Serbia, which he thought could only bring harm to Hungary,
whether it were won or lost. But his logic bound him to submit to, and publicly to
espouse, the decision of the Crown Council which declared for war, and Hungary thus found
herself involved, as a part of the Monarchy and as Germany's ally, in a conflict with the
Entente, and presently also with the U.S.A., on whose side stood also Serbia, after 1916
Roumania, and in 1918 a shadow Czecho-Slovakia. As this international alignment took
shape, it became increasingly probable that if Hungary lost the war, she would be
dismembered in the name of national self-determination; and various secret treaties and
agreements to this effect were in fact made in the course of the war. The details of these
were not always known to the Hungarians but their existence was either known to them, or
could be inferred, and they came to realise that their only hope lay in victory. Tisza
held the country unswervingly on her course so long as Francis Joseph lived, and when the
old monarch died, on 21 November 1916, prevailed on his successor, Charles, to accept
immediate coronation, thereby making it impossible for Charles to realise the intention
with which he was credited, of offering the Slavs and Roumanians of the Monarchy
concessions a la Francis Ferdinand at the expense of its Germans and Magyars. All
Charles could do was to insist on further franchise reform, and Tisza's refusal to sponsor
this brought his resignation, but the tragi-comedy of the Coalition period repeated
itself; his successors evaded fulfilling the condition, and haggled over 'national'
concessions at the expense of Austria, while the military situation deteriorated,
war-weariness and social unrest grew, and disaffection spread among the nationalities and
in Croatia.
The effective end of Historic Hungary, when it came, did so swiftly, although another
eighteen months passed before the treaty which legalised its demise was signed. As the
situation grew worse, one prominent Hungarian politician, Count Mihály Károlyi, who had
recently succeeded to the leadership of a fraction of the Party of Independence, came
forward with the proposal that Hungary should sever her connection with Austria and
Germany, conclude a separate peace, and at the same time introduce social and political
reforms, and concessions to the nationalities. In this way, he argued, the nationalities
would be reconciled to Hungary and the victors be deprived of any reason to attack her
integrity; the other reforms were desirable per se. The popular appeal of this
programme grew apace as conditions deteriorated, and on 25 October 1918, when it was plain
that the end was imminent, Károlyi's own Party followers, the Social Democrats, and a
group of bourgeois Radicals set up a National Council in Budapest. On 31 October Budapest
was in a state of dangerous turmoil, and Charles, to save bloodshed, appointed Károlyi
Minister President. The National Council transformed itself into a cabinet. Károlyi
opened negotiations with the nationalities and went to Belgrade to ask the French
commander, General Franchet d'Espérey, for a separate armistice. Unhappily for his
theories, most of the nationalities had by now lost the wish to stay in Hungary on any
terms, and where the willingness did exist, it was irrelevant in view of the wishes of
Hungary's neighbours, and the Allies' commitments to them. Croatia had already proclaimed
her independence and union with Serbia in a new state; a meeting of the Roumanians of
Transylvania declared for union with the Regat, and a meeting of Slovaks, for union with
the Czechs. The demarcation line drawn by Franchet d'Espérey allowed Serb and Roumanian
troops to occupy all south and east Hungary, and immediately thereafter, Czech forces
entered northern Hungary and occupied it up to a line which, in most of its extent,
corresponded to the full claims of the Czecho-Slovak provisional government. The de
facto dismemberment of Hungary was already near-complete, and was brought nearer in
the next weeks, as the Roumanian troops edged their way westward.
On 13 November Charles 'renounced participation' in the affairs of state, declaring
that he recognised in advance whatever decision Hungary might take regarding its future
form of state. On the 16th the National Council dissolved parliament and proclaimed a
republic, with Károlyi as provisional President. The separation from Austria was popular,
as was the prospect of peace, but the chief basis of Károlyi's appeal was destroyed and
his programme discredited by the complete failure of either the nationalities or the
Allies to behave as he had promised. Meanwhile, complete confusion reigned at home. There
was mass unemployment in the factories and near-starvation in Budapest. Károlyi prepared
to introduce a land reform and a democratic franchise, but did not get beyond
preparations. Extremist agitation increased; the bourgeois elements in the government were
pushed back by the Social Democrats, who were themselves outbid by the agitation spread by
Béla Kun, a communist agent of Hungaro-Jewish origin whom Lenin had entrusted with the
mission of bolshevising Hungary, and all central Europe.
On 20 March 1919 a representative of the Allies in Budapest handed Károlyi a Note
ordering him to evacuate a further area of central Hungary for the benefit of the
Roumanians. Károlyi understood that the new line was to constitute a political frontier,
and resigned; as did the bourgeois members of the cabinet. Kun, on the other hand,
promised Russian help, and the next day the Social Democrats fused with the Communists and
proclaimed a dictatorship of the proletariat. A red regime under Kun now followed
Károlyi's pink one, but it only re-enacted its predecessor's faults, in aggravated form,
with none of its redeeming virtues. Kun turned the entire peasantry against him by
announcing that the land was not to be distributed, but nationalised. He set the urban
population, including the industrial workers, against him in innumerable ways, and
inaugurated a red terror under the vile Szamuelly. Withal, he proved as unable to defend
Hungary against her enemies as Károlyi had been. He undertook an offensive against the
Czechs in Slovakia, but the Entente stepped in and vetoed it. The Russians never produced
the promised help against the Roumanians, and when Kun nevertheless attacked the latter,
his armies melted away. On 4 August he fled, with most of his associates, to Vienna; two
days later, the Roumanian troops entered Budapest.
The draft peace terms were ready by this time; indeed, except in the west, where
Austria put in a belated claim for the German-speaking fringe across the Leitha, most of
the new frontiers had been in existence, de facto, since soon after the
armistice. The Allies had, however, been unwilling to recognise Kun, and the presentation
of the Treaty had therefore been deferred. There was now another delay until a new
Hungarian regime was formed. which the Allies were prepared to treat as stable; then a few
weeks more, for discussion of the terms. It was thus only on 14 June that the Treaty was
signed at Trianon which constituted the death certificate of Historic Hungary.
This was hard indeed. The Allies had entirely accepted the view that the 'principle of
self-determination' called for the 'liberation' from Hungary, so far as this was
practicable, of all its non-Magyars. Thus the Slovak, Roumanian and all Southern Slav
areas had to go; and satisfaction was given also to Austria's claim.
Furthermore, it was not genuine self-determination that was applied at all, but a sort
of national determinism which assumed that all peoples in Hungary of the same or kindred
stock as their neighbours ought to be transferred; their wishes were taken for granted.
More, it was assumed that any non-Magyar should, where at all possible, be taken away from
Hungary, even if the state to which he was transferred had no ethnic claim on him. Thus
the Ruthenes of the north-east were attached to Czecho-Slovakia although they were neither
Czechs nor Slovaks, simply because they were not Magyars, and in the mixed districts of
the south the Germans - not to mention the Bunyevci and Sokci - were counted to show that
the local majority was non-Magyar, whereas another calculation, which would have accorded
far better with the wishes of these peoples, would have given the answer that the majority
was non-Serb.
Finally, even where the claimants could produce no sort of ethnic case, the frontiers
of all of them, except Austria, were extended to satisfy economic or strategic claims,
often of very exaggerated nature. The final result was that of the 325,411 sq. km. which
had comprised the area of the Lands of the Holy Crown, Hungary was left with only 92,963.
Roumania alone had received 103,093; Czecho-Slovakia 61 ,633; Yugoslavia the 42,541
sq. km. of Croatia-Slavonia and 20,551 of Inner Hungary; Austria 4,020; and even
Poland and Italy small fragments. Of the population of 20,886,487 (1910 census), Hungary
was left with 7,615,117. Roumania received 5,257,467, Czecho-SIovakia 3,517,568,
Yugoslavia 4,131,249 (2,621,954 + 1,509,295), and Austria 291,618. Of the 10,050,575
persons of Magyar mother-tongue, according to the 1910 census, no less than 3,219,579 were
allotted to the Successor States: 1,704,851 of them to Roumania, 1,063,020 to
Czecho-Slovakia, 105,948 + 441,787 to Yugoslavia and 26,183 to Austria. While the homes of
some of these, e.g., the Szekels, had been in the remotest corners of Historic Hungary,
many of them were living in compact blocs immediately across the frontier.
In addition, the Treaty required Hungary to pay in reparations an unspecified sum,
which was to be 'the first charge upon all her assets and resources', and limited her
armed forces to a long-service force of 35,000 (officers and men), to be used exclusively
on the maintenance of internal order, and on frontier defence.
1. This reduced the number of voters from 6.7 per cent of the
population (1870) to 5.9 per cent by raising the property qualification. It is true that
this change was not aimed against the proletariat or the non-Magyars, most of whom were
already excluded under the earlier franchise, but against the Magyar opponents of the
Compromise.
2. Some of the largest estates belonged to the Church - so the See
of Nagyvárad owned 330,000 hold, that of Esztergom, over 170,000, etc. Some of the
municipalities of the A1föld owned estates almost as large. These were mostly let, at low
rents, to the local citizens.
3. 24 crowns = 1 sterling.
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