Fernand Vix

Fernand Vix was a career officer of the French colonial troops who earned his place in history through a single document. As a lieutenant colonel and head of the Inter-Allied Military Mission in Budapest, on 20 March 1919 he handed the Hungarian president, Mihály Károlyi, a note in which the Powers demanded a further withdrawal of Hungarian troops to the west. The government rejected it and resigned, and the next day the Social Democrats and Communists proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. For Hungarians the “Vix Note” became a symbol of the victors’ injustice, and for decades the man who delivered it was regarded as a heartless executor of French policy. More recent research portrays him rather as an officer who tried to enforce the armistice agreements in a situation over which he had no control, and who himself warned Paris against making excessive demands of Hungary. Apart from this episode, his life was spent far from high politics, in colonial garrisons and on staffs.

An officer of the colonial troops

He was born on 26 October 1876 in Alsace, according to most sources in the village of Sand in Lower Alsace (some sources give Strasbourg). Alsace had by then belonged to the German Empire for five years. Even so, Vix became an officer in the French army. In 1898 he graduated from the Saint-Cyr military academy and joined the marine infantry, from which the French colonial troops developed. He served in various colonial units and made a name for himself as a staff officer specialising in operations outside Europe. His pre-war career was in no way remarkable, and the sources say little about it.

For his service in the First World War he received the Croix de Guerre. On 6 July 1917 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel. In 1918 he was chief of staff of the 17th Colonial Infantry Division, part of the Allied Army of the Orient, which fought on the Macedonian front. In the autumn of 1918 the armies of General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey routed the Bulgarians, liberated Serbia and reached the Danube. Vix joined the staff of the French forces in the East in Belgrade.

The mission in Budapest

On 13 November 1918 in Belgrade, representatives of Károlyi’s government signed a military convention with the Allied command that laid down a demarcation line. To supervise its implementation the Allies sent a military mission to Budapest. The commander of the French Army of the Orient, General Paul Prosper Henrys, put Vix in charge of it. The lieutenant colonel arrived in Budapest on 26 November 1918. His task was to supervise the implementation of the Armistice of Villa Giusti and the Belgrade convention, prepare for a possible entry of French troops, gather intelligence and keep watch on foreigners. The mission was mostly French, but it also included Serbian, British, Italian and American officers. It was guarded by about a hundred French soldiers.

In practice Vix became the intermediary through whom the victors passed one demand after another to the Hungarians. The lines drawn in Belgrade quickly ceased to apply, as Hungary’s neighbours, recognised by Paris as allies, occupied more and more territory. On 3 December 1918 Vix conveyed to the Hungarian government the demand that it evacuate Slovakia, which Czechoslovakia was claiming, and on 23 December a note laying down a line behind which Hungarian troops were to withdraw, close to the later border. In Budapest each such note was a blow to Károlyi’s government, which had promised Hungarians that a democratic state would be treated leniently by the Entente.

Vix’s reports to his superiors, meanwhile, were far more favourable to Hungary than the Hungarians supposed. The lieutenant colonel advised that France should swiftly occupy the country with its own troops and support Károlyi against the increasingly powerful Communists. He also protested against Czechoslovak and Romanian troops advancing beyond the lines fixed in Belgrade, which exposed him to the charge of serving the enemy’s interests. The French generals in the Balkans were, besides, quarrelling among themselves over their respective powers, and in any case everything was decided by the peace conference in Paris.

The note of 20 March 1919

On 26 February 1919 the peace conference decided to separate the Hungarian and Romanian forces with a neutral zone. The Romanians were to advance to the Satu Mare – Oradea – Arad railway line, and the Hungarians to fall back to a line running west of Debrecen, roughly from Vásárosnamény to the area of Szeged. The zone in between was to be occupied by Allied troops. The decision, approved in mid-March, was sent to Budapest by the commander of the Allied forces in Hungary, the French general Paul de Lobit.

On the morning of 20 March 1919 Vix, accompanied by officers of the Allied Powers, handed the note to Károlyi. The withdrawal was to begin on 23 March and be completed within ten days. A reply was demanded by six o’clock in the evening of 21 March. Károlyi received the note with anger. He regarded it as a breach of the Belgrade convention and a portent of the loss of lands inhabited by Hungarians. The government of Dénes Berinkey decided that it could not accept it and resigned. On 21 March, a few minutes before the deadline, Vix received a refusal, and that evening the dictatorship of the proletariat was proclaimed in Budapest. The real leader of the new regime was the Communist Béla Kun.

In the days that followed the Allied mission found itself in a difficult position. Red Guards took its cars and weapons, its communications were cut and its offices were ransacked. On the evening of 26 March Vix and all the Allied representatives left Budapest by train for Szeged, in the zone held by French troops. That was the end of his Hungarian episode.

Later service

After his return Vix continued to serve in the colonial troops. In 1920 he became an officer of the Legion of Honour; on 23 September 1921 he was promoted to colonel; in 1926–1927 he commanded colonial regiments; and on 28 February 1928 he became a brigadier general and took command of one of the military subdivisions in the Rouen region. In 1929–1932 he held various posts in the Levant, France’s mandated territories in Syria and Lebanon. In 1932 he was made a commander of the Legion of Honour, and on 20 March 1933 he was promoted to major general of the colonial troops. In 1934–1935 he commanded the 2nd Senegalese Colonial Division, made up of soldiers from West Africa, and in 1935 he retired.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, the 62-year-old general was recalled to service. From 2 September to 24 November 1939 he commanded the 54th Infantry Division, a reserve formation mobilised in the Oise valley. On health grounds he was then retired again. He therefore did not witness the defeat of France in May and June 1940 as a commander. He died on 21 March 1941 in Neuilly-sur-Seine near Paris, in a country occupied by Germany. A street in his native Sand bears his name.

Significance

Vix was the messenger, not the author, of the decision that brought down Hungarian democracy. The neutral zone was drawn by the Powers in Paris, who wanted to separate the Hungarian and Romanian armies and, according to some historians, also to wall off Central Europe from Bolshevik Russia. For Hungarians, however, it was his name that became the symbol of a whole series of humiliations, from the Belgrade convention to the Treaty of Trianon. The Hungarian émigrés and the propaganda of Miklós Horthy’s regime portrayed him as a heartless tyrant, and communist historiography as a tool of imperialism that had pushed Hungary towards revolution. Only research in the French archives, carried out by Hungarian historians among others, showed that Vix had repeatedly warned his superiors that excessive demands on Hungary would drive the country into the arms of the Bolsheviks. The events of March 1919 bore out those fears.

The note he delivered had consequences that reached as far as the Second World War. It led to the creation of the Soviet Republic, and that in turn to the war with Romania, the occupation of Budapest and Horthy’s rule. The sense that the victors had imposed borders on Hungary without regard for its case became the foundation of Hungarian revisionism between the wars. That revisionism drew Hungary first towards Italy and then towards Adolf Hitler’s Germany, which in 1938–1940 returned to Hungary part of the lands lost at Trianon and in exchange drew it into its war.