The end of the Hungarian People's Republic

On 8 August 1919 the official gazette, Budapesti Közlöny, published the first decree of Hungary’s new Prime Minister, István Friedrich. Citing the shortage of paper, it banned the publication of all newspapers and periodicals apart from the official gazette. More important than its content was the signature. In it Friedrich styled himself “Prime Minister of the Hungarian Republic” (Magyar Köztársaság). As recently as 2 August the government of the Social Democrat Gyula Peidl had solemnly restored to the state the name “Hungarian People’s Republic” (Magyar Népköztársaság), which it had been given in November 1918. Now the word “People’s” had disappeared. That is why this day is usually given as the end of the Hungarian People’s Republic, the first republic in Hungary’s history. In reality there was no single act that dissolved it. The People’s Republic was brought to an end by the coup of 6 August and the assumption of power by Archduke Joseph August on 7 August; 8 August is above all the date of the first document in which the new regime called the state by a different name.

What the sources say

The date of 8 August is given by some sources, which cite the minutes of that day’s meeting of the council of ministers and Friedrich’s press decree. The texts of the decrees of August 1919 show, however, that the new government did not consistently keep to any one name. A decree of 9 August banning the export of works of art was issued by “the government of the Hungarian People’s Republic”, although it was already signed by Friedrich. In most of its acts his cabinet avoided naming the form of the state altogether and wrote simply of “the Hungarian government”. Only the decree of 19 August on the provisional regulation of the judiciary instructed the courts to give judgment “in the name of the Hungarian Republic” until “the full restoration of constitutionality”. Some accounts, and a number of Hungarian historians, point out that there is no evidence of a formal change of the state’s name, and that both names appeared in documents until 1920. What is certain, however, is that the people who had created the People’s Republic were removed from power, and that the new rulers made no secret of wanting a return to the order that had existed before the revolution of 1918.

The People’s Republic

The Hungarian People’s Republic had been proclaimed on 16 November 1918 in front of the Parliament building in Budapest, two weeks after the Aster Revolution. The “People’s Resolution” announced that day declared Hungary an independent people’s republic, with power exercised until elections by the government of Count Mihály Károlyi. In January 1919 Károlyi became provisional president. The republic introduced universal suffrage, including votes for women, and passed a land reform, but it did not manage to hold elections. On 21 March 1919 it was replaced by Béla Kun’s Hungarian Soviet Republic.

When the soviet government resigned on 1 August and Kun fled to Austria, the moderate Social Democrats took power. Their first decree, signed by Peidl on 2 August, declared that the form of the Hungarian state was a people’s republic, and that its official name was accordingly “the Hungarian People’s Republic” and that of its government “the Government of the Hungarian People’s Republic”. The trade union government repealed the Communists’ decrees, but it had neither an army nor Allied recognition. On 3 and 4 August the Romanians entered Budapest, bringing the Hungarian–Romanian War to an end.

The coup of 6 August

The coup was prepared by the right-wing White House Comradely Association (Fehérház Bajtársi Egyesület). Its members were officials, professors, officers and professional men, many of them on the far right and antisemitic. They met at the home of the dentist András Csilléry. Friedrich, an engineer and the owner of a machine factory, one of Károlyi’s men in 1918 and later his opponent, joined them at the last moment. According to the American historian Eva S. Balogh, author of the most important study of the coup, he did so in order to gain control over a conspiracy in which he had little faith. The conspirators decided to act quickly, before the Allies could come to terms with Peidl. On 4 August a delegation headed by Friedrich persuaded Archduke Joseph August, a wartime commander popular in Hungary, to come to Budapest from his estate at Alcsút that very night. On 5 August a telephone call was intercepted from Vilmos Böhm, the Hungarian envoy in Vienna, who reported to the government that the Entente’s representatives would accept Peidl’s government if it were only slightly reshuffled. That settled the timing.

On the afternoon of 6 August the men of the White House, who already had the police and some of the units in the capital on their side, arrested the Minister of the Interior, Károly Peyer, while General Ferenc Schnetzer occupied the Ministry of Defence without resistance. They then surrounded the Sándor Palace, where the government was in session, and demanded its resignation. A Romanian detachment stationed nearby did not intervene. The Romanian command knew of the conspirators’ plans and did not stand in their way, and the head of the Italian mission in Budapest, Lieutenant Colonel Guido Romanelli, also knew of the preparations; according to some studies he advised the conspirators against the coup. Peidl protested, but in return for a promise of safety and the formation of a coalition government the ministers resigned. Not a single shot was fired.

The regent and the new government

On 7 August Archduke Joseph August proclaimed himself regent (kormányzó) of Hungary and appointed Friedrich prime minister. A Habsburg at the head of a state that was still formally a republic was the clearest sign of the direction in which the country was heading. For the first week most ministries were run by civil servants, and Friedrich formed a cabinet that included politicians only on 15 August. The new regime swiftly abolished whatever Peidl had not had time to abolish. It restored private ownership in industry, trade and agriculture, rebuilt the gendarmerie and arrested the people of the soviet republic. Attacks on Jews, blamed for communism, began as early as August. According to Balogh, Friedrich tried to curb the lynchings, but without much success. Beyond the reach of the Romanian occupation, around Lake Balaton, the officer detachments of Miklós Horthy’s National Army began the White Terror, which by 1921 had cost the lives of between about a thousand and several thousand people.

The Romanians treated the new regime coolly. On 11 August they presented the regent with an ultimatum of economic demands, while their army carried weapons, railway rolling stock, machinery and grain out of the country. Hungary had a government that nobody recognised and was largely under occupation.

A Habsburg is unacceptable

The fate of the regency was decided by the powers. Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and Romania regarded a Habsburg restoration as a mortal threat. The Social Democratic leader Ernő Garami lobbied the Allied representatives in Vienna for the Archduke’s removal. In Paris the most vehement opposition came from the Americans of Herbert Hoover’s Relief Administration. On 21 and 22 August the Supreme Council of the peace conference made it plain that it would not recognise any government headed by a member of the House of Habsburg. On 23 August Joseph August stepped down. Before leaving he confirmed Horthy as commander-in-chief of the National Army. Friedrich became prime minister of a country without a head of state. Until November he reshuffled his government several times, first trying to draw in the Social Democrats and liberals, then relying more and more on the right. The Allies still did not recognise him.

The breakthrough came with the mission of the British diplomat George Clerk, sent by the peace conference in October. Under his pressure the parties and Horthy’s command agreed to form a coalition government and to hold elections. On 14 November the Romanians left Budapest, and on 16 November Horthy rode into the city on a white horse, calling the capital a “sinful city”. On 24 November Friedrich was replaced by Károly Huszár, whose government the Allies recognised. In January 1920 Hungary elected a parliament by secret ballot for the first time.

A kingdom without a king

The republic, with or without the word “People’s” in its name, did not survive this change. At the turn of February and March 1920 the new National Assembly passed a law restoring the constitutional institutions that had existed before the revolution and recognising Hungary as a monarchy, and on 1 March 1920, in a building ringed by soldiers of the National Army, it elected Horthy regent. Hungary became a kingdom without a king, ruled by an admiral in a landlocked state. When in 1921 the last monarch, Charles I, twice tried to regain the throne, Horthy barred his way, and parliament, under pressure from the powers, stripped the Habsburgs of their rights to the crown. On 4 June 1920 Hungary signed the Treaty of Trianon, which took about two-thirds of its territory.

For the regime born in August 1919, both republics of 1918–1919 – Károlyi’s democratic one and Kun’s communist one – were a single catastrophe: the first had disarmed the country and handed it over to its enemies, the second had brought terror. For a quarter of a century this verdict justified iron-fisted rule, a restricted franchise, hostility to the left, and antisemitism. The slogan of revising the Trianon frontiers drew Hungary towards Italy and then towards Adolf Hitler’s Germany, to which the country owed its territorial gains of 1938–1941 and, later, its part in the war against the Soviet Union. The republic was restored in Hungary only on 1 February 1946, by which time the country was already under the control of the Red Army.