The Creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy

A Hungarian Perspective

Gábor Gyáni

• Publisher: Routledge
• Edition: 1
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• Print ISBN:
  9781032049168
  9781032049144
• Subtopic: European History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000441062
• Index: History

Recent collection of essays discusses the historical event and the multifarious consequences of the 1867 Compromise (Ausgleich, Settlement), conducted between the Habsburg monarch, Francis Joseph and the Hungarian political ruling class. The whole story has usually been narrated from a plainly Cisleithanian viewpoint. The present volume, the product of Hungarian historians, gives an insight into both the domestic and the international historical discourses about the Dual Monarchy. It also reveals the process of how the 1867 Compromise was conducted, and touches upon several of the key issues brought about by establishing a constitutional dual state in place of the absolutist Habsburg Monarchy. The emphasis is laid not on describing and explaining the path leading to the final and "inevitable" break-up of the Dual Monarchy, but on what actually held it together for half a century. The local outcomes of self-maintaining mechanisms were no less obvious in the Hungarian part of the Dual Monarchy, despite the many manifestations of an overt adversity toward it. The Creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy will appeal to historians dealing especially with 19th-century European history, and is also essential reading for university students.

Part I
Experience, Memory and Historiography

1 Towards a Catastrophe with a Compromise?

On the Connection of the 1867 Compromise and the Treaty of Trianon

Iván Bertényi Jr.

Research Centre for the Humanities, Institute of History, Budapest

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195160-1

What led to Trianon? A great number of historians and thinkers have been engaged in one of the most important problems in 20th-century Hungarian history. Naturally they have had different approaches and reached different conclusions.¹ The viewpoint represented by László Németh² and István Bibó,³ that the Compromise of 1867 had much to do with the collapse brought about by World War I and the dissolution of the historical Hungarian Kingdom, still makes its influence felt. My study examines to what extent the failure of the dualist system created by the Compromise can be linked to the Compromise itself. Did the national catastrophe of the Trianon Treaty result directly from the Compromise of 1867? Was it possible to suspect already in 1867 that the deal concluded with the Habsburgs could end only in that way?

Yet with respect to the connections of the Compromise and Trianon there is a more significant viewpoint than the opinions of 20th-century Hungarian thinkers who had an effect on each other and who debated the issue with one another.⁴ As is known, with an open letter on 22 May 1867 Lajos Kossuth, perhaps the most popular figure of modern Hungarian history, the former leader of the War of Independence, who lived in exile from 1849, at the last minute tried to hold back parliament and the addressee, Ferenc Deák, from voting for the Compromise, which, according to him, would set Hungary off towards a catastrophe.⁵ In the guise of contemporary rhetoric, the document its author called the Cassandra Letter brought up serious reasons and predictions against the deal, which by then could already be regarded as done and finished.⁶

When you read the gripping, masterly constructed text you can still fall under its influence. Looking back, Kossuth may seem to have been right and he indeed partly shared the destiny of Cassandra,⁷ the Trojan princess whom, although predicting the ensuing future, no one believed. After all, Hungary perhaps became a greater loser than the Habsburg Monarchy that ceased to exist in 1918.

But if Kossuth was right, why was he not believed? Why did Hungarian MPs including such noted people as Deák, Eötvös and Andrássy turn a deaf ear to his reasons? Would they have been intoxicated by the proximity of power? Would they have foolishly sacrificed the nation’s future for short term, partly personal advantages?⁸

But let us pause here for a moment, since this future not only included the catastrophe of Trianon but also the peaceful post-1867 decades. It included the period of dualist construction which – as is rather well-known today – produced the fastest pace of development in modern Hungarian economic history so far.⁹ Albeit rather different data can be found about economic growth and the per capita sum of the gross domestic product in the international literature on economic history, it is certain that Hungary’s “economic growth and pace of structural transformation were both essentially faster than” in Austria “in the period of Dualism. This statement is true for the entire national product, all the main branches of the economy, labor, efficiency and capital stock, in brief, for the most important macro-indicators characterizing the condition and dynamism of the national economy.” That is, the Hungarian economy gradually caught up with the more developed Austrian and Czech regions.¹⁰

Economic modernization and the decades of quantitative and qualitative growth of production also provided the opportunity for cultural prosperity. The system of educational and cultural institutions, which trained and supported scientists and artists of the future, strengthened and broadened in the decades of the Compromise. The school network expanded, Baron József Eötvös – who was in charge of the ministry of religion and public education in 1848 and from 1867 – and his successors were able to make really effective steps towards actually establishing general, compulsory schooling, which had been long-expected.¹¹ The expanding network of secondary schools¹² and institutions supporting the high arts and sciences (museums, universities, academies, etc.)¹³ largely contributed to the fact that talented people of the time could indeed pursue careers, due to which they became significant figures in the canon of Hungarian literature and art.

The system starting with the Compromise also included the “good times of peace” which, although not being at all either easy or perhaps happy for the poor majority of society, witnessed a number of achievements of the most modern Western societies becoming available for a far broader stratum than any time before. (Thus, for example, it was when Hungary constructed its particularly dense railway network on a European scale.)¹⁴

If the collapse at the end of the era is connected with the Compromise, it would be one-sided to state that the Compromise of 1867 had nothing to do with these positive accomplishments. The less so would it be fair, since a large number of Hungarian politicians involved in the Compromise referred to the fact that the political and constitutional deed was needed for continuing Hungary’s national development, which had started in the Reform Age. According to József Eötvös: “With the Compromise Hungary gains influence over precisely the most important branches of its state life, which she has never had before. It ensures her material well-being and the possibility of her intellectual development to such a degree which she was not able to do before.” With the settlement of the constitutional question at last “the time has come for us to provide for realizing the other aims of the 1848 legislation. [...] Who does not feel or see the need for progress and reform in every field?”¹⁵ A government party lecturer of the Kecskemét Law School argued similarly during the first elections after the Compromise:

1848 [...] only began the restoration of our homeland’s independence, [...] by proclaiming the liberation of land and civil equality before the law. Yet, it left their execution for later.’67 did not give up any of that, moreover, it multiplied them [...] by making nearly half a million Jews citizens and Hungarian patriots,¹⁶ by introducing a more expedient civil procedure,¹⁷ not to mention those of lesser importance.¹⁸

Menyhért Lónyay, the Finance Minister of the Hungarian government formed in 1867, summarized the significance of the Compromise a couple of years later in the following: “1867 opened for us the era of creation and action,” the opportunity for “intellectual development and material prosperity.”¹⁹

So the leading liberal politicians involved in the Compromise were convinced that they were able to continue the work of modernizing the country, which had been interrupted in 1848. Even among the moderate opposition the atmosphere was not necessarily one of rejection. Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky recorded in his diary on 20 June 1867:

However we perceive the work of the Compromise, which is attacked by many and condemned by others, we shall still be compelled to admit that, if we utilize the advantages provided for us cleverly and calmly, and cast an unbiased glance back at our homeland’s history of past centuries, we will be able to pursue the matters of our country such that at last our nation will hardly be able to pen in the book of her destiny a happier and more fortunate period than the present one since the Mohács Disaster.

When the diary was published 20 years later, the by then government-party baron commented on the hopeful tone with the following words: “Who would dare deny that the sentence included here word by word has been accomplished?”²⁰

Of course, the followers of the Compromise thought later on, too, that a correct decision was made in 1867 and the actions of that period were confirmed by the time having passed since then. The Roman Catholic chaplain of Erzsébetváros (today Dumbrăveni), Lajos Cenner, addressing the issue of “is the history of the latest 25 years satisfactory,” asserted that, after all, “Hungary, that is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is a great power among the other countries of Europe, which has [...] great prestige. And our country is free and independent. And the Hungarian national spirit has returned to us in the last 25 years.”²¹ Prime Minister, Count István Tisza addressed the issue in one of his speeches delivered during the 1905 elections: “What did those great patriots who created the Compromise in 1867 want? They wanted a compromise and peace. Peace that guarantees the fundamental rights for the nation and on this basis creates the atmosphere and the political conditions in which the Hungarian nation can successfully turn all its strength to the great tasks of positive work.”²² Tisza continued with the idea in another of his speeches in 1905: “Whoever looks upon the history of the last quarter of a century with only a little unbias, whatever they declare, will admit that world history has provided only a few examples of a nation demonstrating as much progress in every field in 30 years as the Hungarian nation has demonstrated.”²³

But was there indeed a connection between the country’s economic and cultural development and the Compromise, and if there was, what was it? It is worth noting that it was far more the antecedents of previous centuries, the position taken within the European and world economy and Hungary’s social and economic endowments formed as a result of longer processes that had an impact on Hungary’s modern economic development. At the same time, important decisions such as the Compromise, which determined the life of millions in Central Europe and affected the long-term future, naturally have an economic impact, even if a large part of the economic-political decisions made after the Compromise of 1867 represented the continuation of former relations: with the stipulation that Hungary had the right to change them within a defined framework. The common customs area was maintained and consequently when concluding agreements on foreign trade the approval of both countries was required; the common central bank remained, although it was transformed later, and the common currency was also kept, etc.²⁴ Of course, decisions were needed for not introducing changes; thus the impact of the economic-political parts of the 1867 settlement and its evaluation also belong to the history of the Compromise.

The Compromise had its direct economic-financial effect – first of all the constitutional settlement at last created stability and reliable relations. With the cessation of earlier uncertainty due to the unsettled...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Hungary’s Contribution to the Creation of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy
• Part I: Experience, Memory and Historiography
• Part II: Ideas and Institutions
• Part III: Emancipation and Identity
• Part IV: Economic Consequences
• Index