The Aster Revolution

On the evening of 28 October 1918 a crowd of several thousand that had gathered in the centre of Pest set off towards the Chain Bridge. The demonstrators wanted to cross to the other bank of the Danube, to the castle in Buda, and demand that the King’s plenipotentiary, Archduke Joseph August, appoint the leader of the opposition, Count Mihály Károlyi, as Prime Minister of Hungary. At the entrance to the bridge their way was barred by cordons of police, gendarmes and soldiers. Mounted police rode into the crowd with drawn sabres and the gendarmes opened fire. Three people were killed – four, according to some accounts – and more than fifty were wounded. Hungarians called the clash the “Battle of the Chain Bridge”. It is regarded as the start of a revolution that within three days, almost without bloodshed, took power in Hungary out of the hands of the men of the old monarchy. During the night of 30–31 October mutinous soldiers and workers seized control of Budapest, and on the morning of 31 October Károlyi became Prime Minister. The events of those days were named the Aster Revolution after the flowers that soldiers pinned to their caps in place of the imperial and royal cockades.

A state that was losing the war

Since 1867 the Kingdom of Hungary had been an equal half of the Habsburg monarchy. It had its own parliament, government and administration, and was bound to Austria by the person of the monarch, who wore the crown in Budapest as King of Hungary, and by a common army, foreign policy and war finances. It was ruled by a narrow class of landed gentry and aristocrats. Fewer than ten per cent of the inhabitants had the vote, and Hungarians made up only about half of the population of a state that was also home to Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs, Croats, Germans and Ruthenians. The strongest man in this system was Count István Tisza, Prime Minister from 1913 to 1917 and afterwards, though out of office, leader of the parliamentary majority.

Four years of war had exhausted the country. There was a shortage of bread, coal and clothing, prices rose month after month, and news came back from the front of hundreds of thousands killed, wounded and taken prisoner. In January and June 1918 great strikes swept through Budapest. More and more soldiers deserted or failed to return from leave. The example of the revolution in Russia, from where hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war from the monarchy had been returning since the spring of 1918, fired the imagination of workers and soldiers. Károlyi’s popularity was growing too. This aristocrat, one of the richest men in the country, had since 1916 led his own party, which demanded a peace without annexations, a break with the German alliance, universal suffrage and land reform. To the right he was little short of a traitor; to people weary of the war he was a source of hope.

In the autumn of 1918 the monarchy began to crumble. Bulgaria, its ally in the Balkans, capitulated, and Entente troops advanced north from Salonika towards Hungary’s southern border. On 16 October Emperor and King Charles I issued a manifesto announcing the transformation of the Austrian half of the state into a federation of nations. The manifesto did not cover Hungary, because the Hungarian government would hear of no change to the borders of the Lands of the Crown of St Stephen. The nations of the monarchy nevertheless read it as permission to go their separate ways. Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Romanians and South Slavs formed national councils and proclaimed states of their own. On 17 October Tisza admitted in parliament: “We have lost this war.” In those same days the Prime Minister, Sándor Wekerle, announced in parliament that from now on Hungary would be linked to Austria only by the person of a common monarch. On 23 October Wekerle’s government resigned. The next day the Italians and their allies launched an offensive on the Piave that within ten days shattered the Austro-Hungarian army in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto. The first Hungarian regiments refused to fight and demanded to be sent home to a country which, they had heard, was threatened from the south.

The National Council

During the night of 24–25 October, in the Károlyi palace in Budapest, representatives of three opposition parties formed the Hungarian National Council. It brought together Károlyi’s followers, the bourgeois radicals of the sociologist Oszkár Jászi, and the Social Democrats, whose leaders included Ernő Garami and Zsigmond Kunfi. Károlyi became its chairman. Sources and studies give the date of the Council’s founding as anything from 23 to 25 October, because the talks lasted several days and the Council was constituted at night. Its headquarters was the Hotel Astoria, on the corner of two of Pest’s great avenues, and it was there that delegations, petitions and news from the city arrived over the following week.

On 26 October the Council issued a proclamation setting out twelve demands. It called for an immediate end to the war and a separate peace, a break with the German alliance, full independence for Hungary, the dissolution of the parliament elected under the old franchise and new elections by universal secret ballot, including women, land reform, civil liberties and an agreement with the national minorities. Hungary was to keep its territorial integrity while its peoples were to be given the right to self-determination – two aims that in practice were hard to reconcile. The proclamation did not yet mention a republic. The Council declared itself a kind of opposition government and demanded that the King entrust power to Károlyi. At the same time a group of young officers led by an air force lieutenant, Imre Csernyák, set up a Soldiers’ Council, which began recruiting supporters in the Budapest barracks.

In those days King Charles was staying at the palace of Gödöllő outside Budapest; he later returned to Vienna. He talked with Károlyi and, according to some accounts, was inclined to give him the government, but his advisers talked him out of it, among them the new Foreign Minister, Count Gyula Andrássy. On 26 October – a day later, according to some sources – Charles appointed Archduke Joseph August as his plenipotentiary in Hungary, the “homo regius”. The most Hungarian of the Habsburgs, grandson of a former Palatine and a popular commander on the Italian front, he was supposed to calm both the Hungarian politicians and the street. That same day Charles informed Emperor Wilhelm II that the monarchy would ask for a separate peace. The note to that effect, signed by Andrássy, was sent to President Woodrow Wilson on 27 October.

The Chain Bridge

On 27 October demonstrations in support of the National Council marched through the streets of Budapest. On the evening of 28 October a crowd that Hungarian studies put at about ten thousand gathered in Gizella Square (today Vörösmarty Square) and set off for the Danube. It meant to cross the Chain Bridge to Buda, to the castle where the Archduke was in residence, and present him with the Council’s demands. Cordons were waiting at the Pest end of the bridge. When the crowd tried to break through, mounted police charged with sabres and the gendarmes fired a volley. Three workers were killed and more than fifty people wounded. According to some accounts there were four dead.

The shots on the bridge had the opposite effect to the one intended by those who had ordered them. Outrage gripped the whole city. On 29 October crowds took to the streets again, but this time the army stayed out of it, and the Budapest police announced that they recognised the authority of the National Council. The Archduke, meanwhile, contrary to what the street expected, gave the task of forming a government not to Károlyi but to a conservative, Count János Hadik. Hadik was sworn in on the morning of 30 October and began assembling a cabinet. The answer was strikes in the factories and more marches to the Hotel Astoria.

The night of 30–31 October

On 30 October soldiers gathered in Gizella Square swore allegiance to the National Council. They tore the cockades bearing the imperial and royal monogram from their field caps and pinned asters in their place, autumn flowers that could be bought on every street corner in those days. Civilians wore asters too. They became the emblem of the revolution and gave it its name: Hungarians call it the “őszirózsás forradalom”, the Aster Revolution – literally, the revolution of the “autumn roses”.

That evening the Soldiers’ Council, under Csernyák’s direction, went into action. During the night detachments of mutinous soldiers, backed by armed workers, occupied the railway stations, the telephone exchange, the post office, barracks and arms depots. The prison on Conti Street was opened and the political prisoners released. The military commandant of Budapest, General Géza Lukachich, hated for his harshness towards deserters, was placed under the National Council’s guard, which, according to Hungarian studies, saved him from being lynched. The members of the Council spent the night at the Hotel Astoria. Many of them feared until the very end that in the morning troops loyal to the King would enter the city and that it would all end in bloodshed.

Nothing of the kind happened. The garrison no longer wanted to defend the old order, and the command had no troops to hand on which it could rely. At around three o’clock on the morning of 31 October Hadik resigned. He had been Prime Minister for about seventeen hours, the shortest tenure in Hungarian history, and had not even had time to announce the members of his government.

31 October: the Károlyi government and the death of Tisza

In the morning Archduke Joseph August received Károlyi and appointed him Prime Minister. King Charles confirmed the appointment by telephone from Vienna. The government was formed by the three parties of the National Council. Jászi became Minister for Nationalities, Garami Minister of Commerce, Kunfi Minister of Welfare and Colonel Béla Linder Minister of War. In the afternoon the ministers took their oath before the Archduke, still in the King’s name. This angered the supporters of a republic, who were rapidly gaining the upper hand on the street and within the Council itself. On 1 November the government asked to be released from its oath and, once released, swore a new one, this time before the National Council. According to Hungarian sources, the Archduke himself also declared his allegiance to the Council.

The revolution was not, however, entirely bloodless. Towards evening on 31 October – at around 5.45 p.m., according to most accounts – a group of armed soldiers forced their way through the garden into the villa on Hermina Road in Budapest where Tisza lived. The intruders disarmed the gendarmes guarding him and demanded that he answer for the war. Tisza came out to face them, revolver in hand, accompanied by his wife and a relative, Countess Denise Almásy. When he put down the weapon, shots were fired. Tisza was killed on the spot, and a bullet struck Countess Almásy in the face. According to press reports his last words were: “It is over for me. It had to be so.” By an irony of fate, he was the man who in July 1914 had been the only one of the monarchy’s leaders to oppose war with Serbia for any length of time. The public knew nothing of this and saw him as the symbol of the war. The investigation stalled. Only in 1921, in a completely different political climate, did a court convict several soldiers and left-wing activists from the National Council’s circle, most of them in absentia. Who was behind the killing has never been fully established. Károlyi condemned it and sent a wreath for the coffin, but for years the right accused him of sharing responsibility, although neither the court nor historians have found any evidence of it.

From revolution to republic

The new government broke with the old order at once. It declared the union with Austria at an end and called on Hungarian soldiers to come home from the fronts. On 2 November the War Minister, Linder, declared that he “no longer wanted to see soldiers” and ordered them to lay down their arms. This hastened the final disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian army in Italy, but it left Hungary almost without an army at a moment when Entente troops were advancing from the south and Czechoslovak and Romanian forces were moving into the Kingdom’s territory. The Károlyi government refused to accept that it was bound by the Armistice of Villa Giusti, signed on 3 November in the name of the Emperor and King. Károlyi therefore went to Belgrade to see the commander of the Allied armies in the Balkans, General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey, hoping that his anti-war record would earn the new Hungary gentler treatment. The Frenchman treated his delegation as representatives of a defeated state, and the military convention signed in Belgrade on 13 November drew a demarcation line that placed a large part of the south and east of the country under Allied control.

On that same 13 November, at the castle of Eckartsau near Vienna, Charles signed a declaration in which he renounced any part in the affairs of the Hungarian state and accepted in advance the nation’s decision on its form of government. He carefully avoided the word “abdication”. On 16 November 1918 both houses of parliament dissolved themselves, and in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, before a huge crowd, the Hungarian People’s Republic was proclaimed. This is the “First Hungarian Republic” of the historical literature. Károlyi became Prime Minister and provisional head of state, and in January 1919 the National Council elected him President. Legislative power passed to an enlarged National Council. And so, within three weeks – from the shots on the bridge to the proclamation of the republic – nearly four hundred years of Habsburg rule in Hungary came to an end.

The long shadow of the Aster Revolution

Károlyi’s democratic republic lasted less than five months. It introduced universal suffrage, including for women, freedom of the press and of assembly, and a land reform law, and in February 1919 Károlyi himself began distributing land from his own estates to the peasants. But it could neither hold the country’s borders nor win the trust of the victors. The Slovaks, Romanians and Serbs no longer wished to live in any Hungarian state, and the armies of the neighbouring countries, backed by France, occupied more and more territory. On 20 March 1919 the Entente’s representative in Budapest delivered a demand for a further withdrawal of Hungarian troops into the interior. The government resigned, and the next day power was taken by the Social Democrats and Communists, who proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Its leader was Béla Kun, a former prisoner of war in Russia and a disciple of Vladimir Lenin. The Soviet Republic fought wars with Czechoslovakia and Romania, and its Red Terror cost several hundred lives. It fell after 133 days, at the beginning of August 1919, as the Romanian army closed in on Budapest, which it occupied a few days later.

From the ruins of both republics rose the regime that would rule Hungary until 1944. In November 1919 Admiral Miklós Horthy rode into Budapest at the head of the National Army, and in March 1920 parliament elected him Regent of the Kingdom of Hungary – a kingdom without a king. The right-wing detachments that followed him murdered many people in the White Terror, above all Communists, socialists and Jews. To the new regime the Aster Revolution was a “betrayal” that had disarmed the country and opened the way to the Communists. Károlyi was convicted of high treason in absentia and his property confiscated, while the murdered Tisza became a martyr of the right.

On 4 June 1920 Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon. It lost about two-thirds of its former territory and more than half its population, and some 3.3 million Hungarians found themselves outside the country’s borders, in Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The army was limited to 35,000 men. The slogan “No, no, never!” and the drive to revise the borders became the foundation of Hungarian foreign policy between the wars. They drew Budapest first towards Italy and then, after Hitler came to power, ever closer to Germany, the only great power that was able and willing to overturn the order established in 1919 and 1920. Revision came only through the dictates of Berlin and Rome: the First Vienna Award of November 1938 gave Hungary southern Slovakia, in March 1939 it occupied Carpathian Ruthenia, and the Second Vienna Award of August 1940 handed it northern Transylvania. Hungary paid for these gains by joining the Tripartite Pact in November 1940 and by fighting on Germany’s side, first against Yugoslavia and, from June 1941, against the Soviet Union. The road from the Chain Bridge to the front on the Don was neither straight nor inevitable, but it began in those three October days in which the old Kingdom of Hungary fell apart.