Austrian cavalry charge on Hungarian border outpost.
The army of Nicholas I, was large in size and formidable in appearance—just as it was meant to be. One other feature of Nicholas’s military policy deserves attention: its parsimony. Nicholas was interested in maintaining the largest army possible at the lowest possible cost. Of course, soldiers’ pay in Russia remained both sporadic and negligible. But when multiplied by the hundreds of thousands of men in the ranks, the total military wage bill amounted to a formidable sum. Much more expensive was the cost of equipping the troops—supplying them with uniforms, firearms, and munitions. And the most costly item in the debit column of the military ledger was foodstuffs and forage. In the effort to establish control over those costs, Nicholas had a preexisting instrument ready to hand: the notorious system of military colonies.
The Vienna October Revolution was a turning-point in
Austrian history, with far-reaching consequences for Hungary’s future as well.
The rising of workers and students broke out on 6 October. The spark that
ignited the tinderbox of accumulated discontent was the mutiny of a Grenadier
battalion of the Viennese garrison, which the Minister of War, Latour, wanted
to send to the aid of Jelačić in Hungary. Latour himself was attacked and
lynched in the Ministry building and his mangled corpse was strung up on a
lamppost. The Emperor, the Court and the highest officials fled to Olmütz in
Moravia.
The appeal by the revolutionary German poet Ferdinand
Freiligrath in his poem “Wien” (Vienna) to the Germans to rise up was just as
futile as the hope that the Hungarian revolutionary troops would succeed in
relieving Vienna from the besieging Imperial troops. The Austrian-Croatian Imperial
Army defeated the somewhat reluctantly advancing small Hungarian force at
Schwechat. On 31 October Field-Marshal Windisch-Graetz marched into Vienna,
drowned the uprising in a bloodbath, and set up a military dictatorship which
lasted till 1853. The Polish revolutionary General Józef Bem managed to flee,
but First Lieutenant Messenhauser who had refused to turn his guns against the
people, was executed together with a number of radicals, among them Robert
Blum, a deputy of the Frankfurt Assembly.
Both sides now armed for war. Austria had gained a new prime
minister in the person of the diplomat and general Prince Felix Schwarzenberg,
incidentally brother-in-law of the ambitious Windisch-Graetz: he was, in Robert
A. Kann’s assessment, “an adventurer and political gambler”. Radetzky
controlled Northern Italy and Windisch-Graetz became commander-in-chief of the
impending campaign against the Hungarian rebels.
Schwarzenberg, together with Archduchess Sophie, succeeded
in persuading Emperor Ferdinand to abdicate in favour of Archduke Franz, his
eighteen-year-old nephew and the Archduchess’s son. The change of rulers took
place on 2 December 1848. The arrogant and imperialistic Schwarzenberg
(Széchenyi called him a “cold-blooded vampire”) was determined once and for all
to downgrade Hungary to the level of a province. The new Emperor, who added to
his name that of Joseph to signify his recognition of enlightened
“Josephinismus”, relied on Schwarzenberg as he did on none of his subsequent
advisers. The consequences of this reliance were more than questionable: thus,
for example, the forcible dissolution of the Austrian Reichstag at Kremsier and
the arrest of several deputies in March 1849.
Meanwhile the Magyars refused in mid-December to recognize
the new Emperor as their king, because he had not been crowned with the Crown
of St Stephen and did not feel bound by the royal oath of his predecessors.
Kossuth had not intended this conclusive break, but probably welcomed it.
In December Austrian troops attacked Hungary from all sides.
A peace mission to Vienna of moderate Hungarian politicians, among them the
former Prime Minister Batthyány and the Minister of Justice Deák, failed;
Windisch-Graetz refused even to receive them. The Hungarians were fenced in
from all sides. Parts of the Austrian army under General Schlick attacked from
Galicia in the north, and in the south-west the Romanians and Saxons joined the
offensive. The Serbs advanced from the south, the Croats approached across the
Dráva and the Danube, and Windisch-Graetz struck from the west. They occupied
Buda-Pest in January 1849, and Kossuth fled with the deputies and
officials—altogether about 2,000—to Debrecen, 220 km. to the east. The
provisional capital was no more than a giant village, with only a single doctor
in private practice, but as a centre of Calvinism it counted not only as the
most distant town from the attacking Austrian army, but also as a symbol of
resistance to the Catholic Habsburgs.
By the end of 1848 all appeared lost for the Magyars; the
Austrians believed they had throttled the Hungarian Revolution “as in the coils
of a boa-constrictor”, as Friedrich Engels wrote in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung. Yet the Hungarians fought on with ever-increasing ferocity, though
with varying success. Windisch-Graetz proved a rather ineffective commander,
and fell victim to his own vanity as well as to the tactical superiority of the
Hungarian revolutionary generals. After a strategically unimportant victory at
Kápolna, to the east of Buda-Pest, over troops led by the Polish General Henryk
Dembinski, Windisch-Graetz believed that the Hungarians had been finally
beaten, and in a report to the Court, which was still at Olmütz, announced his
imminent entry into Debrecen. This ill-considered move led to the
abovementioned imposed constitution of 4 March, which gave the resisting
Hungarians an enormous psychological boost to their by now victorious military
campaign against Austria.
On 14 April 1849 the Hungarians replied to the proclamation
of the octroied (granted) constitution, which eliminated Hungary’s ancient
rights and denied it Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia and Transylvania, with a
psychologically understandable but politically unwise “Declaration of
Independence”. In it the parliament in the great Calvinist church at Debrecen
proclaimed the dethronement of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, Kossuth was
unanimously elected provisional Head of State with the title of
“Governor-President” and Bertalan Szemere Minister of the Interior.
Hungary was isolated, yet its army fought on with such
success that many people spoke of a “springtime miracle”. One of the
revolutionaries’ principal demands was the creation of a national army with
Hungarian as the language of command. Commands, however, still had to be drafted
and conveyed in German, because many of the key officers did not understand a
word of Hungarian. One of Kossuth’s most devoted associates was the Englishman
General Richard Guyon, who had been a first lieutenant in a Hungarian hussar
regiment before the Revolution and who, having a Hungarian wife, had become an
ardent Magyar patriot. Another of the numerous foreign professional officers
was General Count Karl Leiningen-Westerburg, a member of the Hessian ruling
house and related to the Coburgs and hence the English royal house; through
marriage and predilection he also became Hungarian.
In the autumn of 1849 close on 50,000 members of the
Imperial-Royal army were fighting on the Hungarian side, including about 1,500
professional officers. These regular units were not integrated into the new
honvéd army; the soldiers kept their uniforms, leading to tragicomic
misunderstandings, since it was often impossible to differentiate between
friend and foe. The bugle and drum signals, the drill and, as already mentioned,
the language of command remained the same. At least 1,000 officers or
approximately 10 per cent of the Habsburg officer corps decided in favour of
the Hungarian cause. The military historian Gábor Bona estimates that of the
honvéd army’s 830 generals and staff officers 15.5 per cent were Germans, 4.2
per cent Poles and 3.6 per cent Serbs and Croats. The cosmopolitan character of
the revolutionary force was maintained from the hopeful beginning to the bitter
end of the War of Independence. Hungarians of German origin (excluding the
Transylvanian Saxons) generally stood by the Magyars, as did many Slovaks and,
without exception, the Jews who hoped for emancipation. About 3,000 Poles, many
of them officers, fought for the Magyars.
But it was first and foremost Kossuth who, with his dynamism
and incorrigible optimism, supplied the motley army with tens of thousands of
recruits, with arms and munitions from abroad, and eventually created a war
industry out of nothing. By June 1849 Kossuth succeeded in mustering a honvéd
army of 170,000.
At a time when the tide of revolution was receding and
reaction was being consolidated, the Hungarians’ dazzling victories in the
spring of 1849, culminating in May in the reconquest of the capital, moved all
of Europe. In Germany Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Heinrich Heine and Ferdinand
Freiligrath, among many others, took a deep interest. The first edition of the
Neue Rheinische Zeitung for the year opened with Freiligrath’s poem “Ungarn”,
extolling the Hungarians’ fighting spirit. The unconditional support of Marx
and Engels for the Magyars was connected with their admiration for the last
active revolutionary movement. Engels wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung:
“For the first time in a very long time there is a truly revolutionary
personality, a man, who dares to take up the gauntlet of the desperate fight
for his people, who is a Danton and a Carnot combined for his nation—Lajos
Kossuth.”
While the Hungarians were still retreating in the autumn of
1848, Engels wanted to mobilize the public in his newspaper in order to protect
“the greatest man of the year 1848”. In April 1849 he already praised the
Magyars’ “well organized and superbly led army”, calling Generals Görgey and
Bem “the most gifted commanders of our time”. At the same time Engels (as well
as Marx) expressed his contempt for the Czechs and above all the South
Slavs—the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who were “nations lacking history”. The
Austrian South Slavs were nothing more than the “ethnic rubbish” of a complicated
“thousand-year evolution”. Since the eleventh century they had lost “any
semblance” of national independence, and were “torn tatters” dragged along by
the Germans and Magyars.
During that spring, despite the splendid victories achieved
by the Hungarian troops led by Görgey, Bem, Klapka and other talented officers,
and the liberation of all of Transylvania and most of Hungary, the inevitable
catastrophe—the intervention of Russia—was fast approaching. By March that
intervention had already been agreed upon as the Austrian government proved
unable to master the situation on its own. This was the natural consequence of
the cooperation between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, which had become even
closer since the defeat of the Polish Revolution of 1830–1. It was thus not
Kossuth’s Declaration of Independence that had prompted the invasion.
After repeated calls for help Emperor Franz Joseph was
finally obliged to appeal to Tsar Nicholas I in an official letter—printed in
the Wiener Zeitung on 1 May 1849—for armed assistance in “the sacred struggle
against anarchy”. The Tsar replied by return, advising that he had ordered the
Viceroy of Poland, Field-Marshal Prince Ivan Paskevich, to hasten to the aid of
their Austrian comrades-in-arms. Austrian humiliation culminated in Franz
Joseph’s arrival in Warsaw, where on 21 May 1849, with a genuflection, he
kissed the hand of the Ruler of all the Russias. The young Emperor
enthusiastically reported the event to his mother:
He received me exceptionally graciously and cordially,
and at 4 o’clock I dined with him tête-à-tête. We travelled very fast, and the
Russian railways are especially outstanding for their good organization and
smooth ride. Altogether everything is so pleasantly orderly and calm here.
Hungarian and foreign historians, and in particular
contemporaries have long debated whether Russia’s intervention, so detrimental
to Austria’s prestige, was really necessary for the defeat of the Revolution.
In a report on the campaign Captain Ramming von Riedkirchen, chief of staff to
the Austrian commander, Haynau, appointed at the end of May, stated:
The question is often raised whether the Austrian state
in that situation, without Russian aid, would have been able to defeat the
Hungarian uprising, which, after its unexpected successes in the spring of
1849, grew so rapidly and became so immense. […] In order to attain a decisive
military superiority, which was also assured in all aspects of foreign
relations, the Russian armed intervention was indispensable in Hungary and
Transylvania. The mighty and imposing aid of a Russian army would inevitably
lead to success, and result in the establishment of peace in Austria and the
whole of Europe, even if Austria’s performance were less energetic and
successful.
The Austrian historian Zöllner is also of the opinion that
“the victory of the monarchical conservative forces would not have been
possible without foreign help.” Deák, on the other hand, believes that the
Austrians could have achieved victory by themselves, even though it might have
taken them longer. A breakdown of war casualties cited by him, appears to
confirm his thesis:
The Austrians kept inadequate records, the Hungarians kept
almost none. It seems that about 50,000 Hungarians died and about the same
number of Austrians. The Russian expeditionary forces lost only 543 killed in
battle and 1,670 wounded. The Austrians kept inadequate records, the Hungarians
kept almost none. It seems that about 50,000 Hungarians died and about the same
number of Austrians. The Russian expeditionary forces lost only 543 killed in
battle and 1,670 wounded. On the other hand. Paskevichs army buried 11,028
cholera victims.
In the event Russia’s intervention sealed the fate of
Hungary. Against 194,000 Russians and 176,000 Austrians with a total of 1,200
artillery pieces, the 152,000 honvéds (according to some estimates 170,000)
with 450 field-guns did not stand a chance. Yet the fighting lasted until
August.
The Hungarians were totally isolated. Kossuth and his Prime
Minister Szemere addressed a desperate appeal to the peoples of Europe:
“Europe’s freedom will be decided on Hungarian soil. With it world freedom
loses a great country, with this nation a loyal hero.” Even Kossuth’s
emissaries in London and Paris, Count László Teleki and Ferenc Pulszky, both
with excellent social connections, could achieve nothing. As so often before
and after in Hungarian history (from 1241 to 1956), no European power lifted a finger
in the interests of the Magyars. Lord Palmerston, for example, never wavered
from his belief in the necessity of preserving the Monarchy’s integrity. Even
though in Parliament he publicly declared himself disturbed by the Russian
intervention, in a personal conversation with the Russian ambassador in London
he expressed the hope that the Tsar’s army would act swiftly.
Paskevich, Haynau and Jelačić attacked the Hungarian units
from all sides, forcing them back into the far south-eastern corner of the
country. Until that time the deputies still held their meetings in the National
Assembly in the southern city of Szeged, and on 28 July they crowned their work
with two significant and symbolic enactments on the equality of nationalities
and the emancipation of the Jews. The Nationalities Law was passed after
Kossuth had negotiated in July with the Romanian liberal intellectual Nicolae
Balcescu, and Serbian representatives over the possibility of reconciliation
and co-operation. Although Law VIII of 1849 reinforced Hungarian as the
official language, it also envisaged the free development of all ethnic groups:
every citizen had the right to use his own language in his dealings with the
authorities; the majority would determine the language to be used in local
administration; and primary schools would use the local language.
The bill for the emancipation of the Jews provoked no
debate. The government and deputies recognized the community as equal; it had
stood by the nation with 10,000–20,000 volunteers and numerous officers in the
honvéd army and made donations for weapons as loyally as the Christian
Hungarians. After the war the Jews paid a high price for the public avowal of
their Hungarianness; some of their leaders were arrested, and some communities
had to pay colossal fines.
In retrospect the optimism at Szeged is incomprehensible.
The government was in flight; many of the weary and depleted units were
surrounded, and some were actually in retreat. Hundreds of deputies had already
left; mighty armies were inexorably moving across the country—and yet hope
still persisted in this second temporary capital. The Prime Minister, Szemere,
spoke optimistically of the British and French governments’ “awakening”.
Kossuth declared to the assembled peasants: “The freedom of Europe will radiate
out from this city.”
Barely a fortnight later the dream was over. After defeats
at Szeged and Temesvár Kossuth abdicated and fled, disguised as the butler of a
Polish nobleman. He shaved off his distinguishing beard, changed his hairstyle
and, armed with two passports, one in the name of a Hungarian (“Tamás Udvardi”)
and an English one in the name of “James Bloomfield”, took off for Turkey. On
August 11 he had already transfered full military and civilian authority to
Görgey, the Minister of War, who—as Head of State for a day—surrendered to the
Russians at Világos near Arad with his shrunken army of eleven generals, 1,426
officers and 32,569 other ranks, with 144 field-guns and sixty battle flags.
Whether Görgey’s preference for laying down his arms before the Russians and
not the Austrians goaded the Austrians to even more appalling retribution
against the revolutionaries is a moot question. The surrender at Világos marked
the end of revolution in the Habsburg empire, which had run its course several
weeks earlier when the last German republicans capitulated to Prussia. Heinrich
Heine in Paris saw the collapse of Hungary as the final act in the drama of the
Europe-wide Revolution: “Thus fell the last bastion of freedom….” Prince
Paskevich reported to the Tsar: “Hungary lies at the feet of Your Majesty.” The
Tsar exhorted the Austrians to show clemency to the defeated rebels.
Surrender at Világos, 1849
The young Emperor celebrated his nineteenth birthday at Bad
Ischl. His mother, as always, had arranged everything beautifully: there was a
large birthday cake with nineteen candles, a Tyrolean choir sang the Austrian
national anthem, and the happy young man bagged six chamois bucks. Afterwards,
however, Franz Joseph committed a grave error: as always, he needed the advice
of his implacable Prime Minister Schwarzenberg, and on 20 August the Council of
Ministers, presided over by the Emperor, determined that all the Hungarian
ringleaders, from staff officers upwards, should be court-martialled.
The retribution was entrusted to the infamous German General
Baron Ludwig von Haynau, illegitimate son of the Elector Wilhelm I of
Hesse-Kassel. He had earned himself the sobriquet “the hyena of Brescia” for
his gory deeds in Italy where, after occupying the Lombard city, he ordered the
public flogging of local insurgents, among them women, and the arrest and
execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar. In the words of the old
Field-Marshal Radetzky, “He is my best general, but he is like a razor that
should be put back into its case after use.” Feldzeugmeister Haynau worked
fast, without mercy and delighting in his assignment. “I am the man who will
restore order, I shall have hundreds shot with a clear conscience,” he wrote to
Radetzky. Originally no death penalty was to be carried out without approval
from Vienna, but the Emperor and the government finally gave in to Haynau’s
urging; it would suffice to announce the executions retrospectively.
On 6 October 1849, the anniversary of Minister of War
Latour’s murder, thirteen generals of the Hungarian revolutionary army were
executed in the fortress of Arad. A fourteenth former officer of the Imperial
army was also condemned to death as a Hungarian general, but at the last moment
his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The thirteen heroes of the
Revolution, whose anniversary is annually commemorated in Hungary, included a
German of Austrian origin, a German-Austrian, two Hungarian-Germans, a Croat, a
Serb from the Bánát and two Hungarians of Armenian origin. Not all the five
“pure” Hungarians were familiar with the Hungarian language. Six civilians were
executed in Pest, among them the moderate former Prime Minister of Hungary,
Count Lajos Batthyány. He had stabbed himself in the neck with a dagger
smuggled into the military prison by his sister-in-law and, although army
doctors saved his life, it was impossible to hang him and he had to be shot
despite the terms of the original sentence.
On Haynau’s orders 2,000 officers and civilian patriots were
imprisoned, and 500 former Habsburg officers, including 24 Imperial-Royal
generals, were court-martialled, and about forty officers (though no more
generals) were executed, while most of the others were condemned to years of
imprisonment in chains. The total number of executions has been estimated at
120.
In his History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 the
American historian of Austrian origin, Robert A. Kann, assessed the reprisals
thus:
To the enduring shame of the Schwarzenberg government
even the intervention of the czar for the brave Hungarian commanders was
rejected… The action of the Schwarzenberg government and its henchmen stands in
contrast to Grant’s generous attitude toward the officers of the South after
the surrender at Appomatox in the American Civil War. Schwarzenberg managed to
unite English, French, German, and even Russian feelings in common revulsion
against him and Haynau, who was publicly insulted during his subsequent
“goodwill” visits to Brussels and London.
Haynau soon became intolerable to the Court as well, and was
pensioned off in 1850. Strangely he bought an estate in Hungary and was even
outraged that the “New Landowner” (as he was caricatured in one of Jókai’s
novels) was shunned by the other landowners. He died, supposedly insane, in 1853.
The other principal character on the Imperial side, Ban Jelačić, lived on for a few more years, but also mentally deranged. As a disappointed Croat patriot he had given up on his cause; the Austrian government kept only very few of the promises made to the Croats. Each historical turning-point influenced the Jelačić myth. Thus in 1866, before the settlement between Hungary and Croatia, an equestrian statue was erected to him in the main square of Zagreb, pointing his index finger towards the north in the direction of Hungary. Eighty years later, in 1947, the statue was dismantled and the place renamed “Square of the Republic”. After the rebirth of Croatia in 1990, the government restored the statue, this time with the index finger pointing south, i.e. towards neither the long-forgotten Hungarian enemy nor the new arch-enemy Serbia. The place is once again called “Ban Josipa Jelačić square”.
