The Treaty of Trianon

On the afternoon of 4 June 1920 – at 4.32 p.m., according to Hungarian and German accounts – two little-known officials put their signatures, in the long gallery of the Grand Trianon palace in the park at Versailles, to the peace treaty between Hungary and the Allied and Associated Powers. They were Ágost Benárd, Minister of Welfare and Labour, and Alfréd Drasche-Lázár, envoy extraordinary. No well-known Hungarian politician wanted his name attached to a document that took two thirds of its territory from the Kingdom of St Stephen and left more than three million Hungarians inside the borders of neighbouring states. The head of the delegation, Count Albert Apponyi, had already resigned from that post. The Treaty of Trianon was the fourth of the five peace treaties prepared by the Paris Peace Conference, and the one that a defeated country accepted in the deepest despair. In Budapest that day, according to press reports, the shops closed, flags were lowered to half-mast and church bells tolled. For the next twenty years revision of the treaty was Hungary’s overriding aim – and only those who wanted to overturn the entire Versailles order could fulfil it.

A country defeated twice

The Kingdom of Hungary emerged from the First World War as part of a defeated monarchy, but it reached Paris only after a year and a half that was itself a string of disasters. After the Aster Revolution at the end of October 1918, the government of Mihály Károlyi broke the union with Austria and demobilised the army, hoping that a democratic Hungary would be treated more leniently than the monarchy. The military convention signed in Belgrade on 13 November drew demarcation lines, which Serbian, Romanian and Czechoslovak troops soon crossed. By the spring of 1919 most of the former kingdom’s lands were under foreign control. When in March 1919 the French Lieutenant Colonel Fernand Vix delivered a demand for a further withdrawal of troops, Károlyi stepped down and power passed to the Communists of Béla Kun, who proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic. Their Red Army briefly recaptured part of Slovakia but lost the war with Romania, and on 3 and 4 August 1919 the Romanians entered Budapest.

The peace conference could not negotiate with a government it did not recognise. Its territorial commissions had drawn Hungary’s borders as early as the spring of 1919, largely on the basis of the demands of Czechoslovakia, Romania and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. American experts, and later the Italians, sometimes proposed lines closer to the ethnic boundaries, but their voice rarely prevailed. Only after Admiral Miklós Horthy’s National Army had entered the capital in November 1919, and a coalition government under Károly Huszár, recognised by the Allies, had been formed on 24 November, did the Supreme Council invite the Hungarians to Paris on 1 December.

Apponyi before the Supreme Council

The government placed at the head of the delegation the seventy-three-year-old Count Apponyi, Hungary’s most celebrated orator, well known in London and the United States, but also a former Minister of Education whose school laws of 1907 were seen in Prague and Bucharest as the very symbol of Magyarisation. The delegation’s members included, among others, the future prime ministers Pál Teleki and István Bethlen. Teleki, a geographer, prepared the famous ethnic map on which the areas inhabited by Hungarians were marked in red. The delegation brought with it hundreds of notes and memoranda and thousands of pages of statistics and maps.

The Hungarians were lodged outside Paris, in effect in isolation, as the Germans had been at Versailles and the Austrians at Saint-Germain before them. On 15 January 1920 they were handed the peace terms. The next day, 16 January, Apponyi addressed the Supreme Council at the French Foreign Ministry on the Quai d’Orsay; its members included Georges Clemenceau, David Lloyd George and Francesco Saverio Nitti. He spoke in French, then summarised the speech himself in English, and finished in Italian. He argued that Hungary did not bear the main responsibility for the war, that the historic kingdom was a geographical and economic whole, and that a truncated country would be unable to survive. His strongest argument was the demand that the fate of the disputed lands be settled by plebiscites: in the name of the principle proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson – that no population may be handed from state to state like a herd of cattle – Hungary was ready to abide by the result of the vote, whatever it might be. And if it had to choose between accepting and rejecting such a peace, its choice would come down to whether to commit suicide in order to avoid a natural death.

The speech made an impression but changed nothing. Some of its arguments even rebounded on the speaker. Apponyi spoke of hegemony being handed to peoples “standing at a lower level of culture”, which to Czech, Slovak, Romanian and Serbian ears sounded like confirmation of their charges. The delegates of the neighbouring states had to hand examples of restrictions on minority schooling from the time when Apponyi himself had been minister. According to Hungarian accounts, Lloyd George then asked about the Hungarian communities just beyond the proposed border and for a moment bent over Teleki’s map with the others, but that was the only crack in a decision already taken. The Council refused to hold plebiscites.

Over the following months the Hungarians sent note after note, counted on disagreements among the Allies and on Italian support, and in London some members of parliament spoke up in their defence. Meanwhile, at home, on 1 March 1920 parliament elected Horthy as regent, and in mid-March Sándor Simonyi-Semadam became head of government. On 6 May the Hungarians were handed the final text together with a covering letter from the president of the conference, the French prime minister Alexandre Millerand. The letter rejected the Hungarian objections and stated that overturning a thousand-year-old state of affairs was no injustice if that state of affairs had itself been unjust, but it allowed that the commissions demarcating the border on the ground might propose corrections and that the Council of the League of Nations might mediate in their adoption. In Budapest this was read as a promise of future revision. The hope proved illusory: the corrections were limited to individual villages. Apponyi, unwilling to sign a document he had been unable to change, gave up the leadership of the delegation. The government had no choice. Rejecting the treaty would have meant continued occupation, blockade and a lack of coal, which the country could not import without its neighbours’ consent.

What the treaty decided

The treaty had 364 articles in fourteen parts and was modelled on those of Versailles and Saint-Germain. It opened with the Covenant of the League of Nations. The territorial provisions mattered most. The Kingdom of Hungary without autonomous Croatia-Slavonia had covered some 283,000 square kilometres before the war and, according to the 1910 census, had 18.3 million inhabitants. The new Hungary had some 93,000 square kilometres and 7.6 million inhabitants. The country thus lost 67 per cent of its territory – over 70 per cent counting Croatia – and nearly 60 per cent of its population.

Romania received the most, over 100,000 square kilometres: Transylvania, the eastern part of the Banat, Crișana and Maramureș, with towns such as Kolozsvár – Cluj – and Nagyvárad – Oradea. Czechoslovakia obtained Slovakia, with its border on the Danube, including Pozsony – Bratislava – Komárno and Košice, as well as Subcarpathian Ruthenia. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes kept Croatia-Slavonia and also received the Bačka, the western Banat, part of Baranya, Međimurje and Prekmurje. Austria was awarded the mainly German-inhabited strip of western Hungary, the Burgenland. Hungary renounced its rights to Rijeka (Fiume), its only port. Small fragments of Spiš and Orava, formerly Hungarian counties, went to Poland under a decision of the Allied Conference of Ambassadors of July 1920.

The borders were not arbitrary. In the transferred lands taken as a whole the non-Hungarian population predominated, and the Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Croats received what they had been fighting for over generations. Where the ethnic principle clashed with the strategic or economic interests of the victors, however, the latter prevailed. In the east the line was drawn so that the railway linking Satu Mare, Oradea and Arad fell to Romania; in the north so that Czechoslovakia had the Danube and the railway across southern Slovakia. As a result, in a wide belt along the new borders, and in the compact Székely community deep inside Transylvania, some 3.2–3.3 million people who had given Hungarian as their mother tongue in the 1910 census – roughly a third of all Hungarians – were left abroad: about 1.6 million in Romania, over a million in Czechoslovakia and about half a million in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. That census is disputed because it overstated the number of Hungarians, but the scale of the phenomenon is beyond question.

The military clauses limited the army to 35,000 volunteers, with no conscription, air force, tanks or heavy artillery, under the supervision of an Inter-Allied Military Control Commission. Article 161, the counterpart of the famous Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, made Hungary and its allies responsible for the victors’ losses, with the amount of reparations to be fixed by the Reparation Commission. The successor states took over part of the former kingdom’s debts. Hungary undertook to protect the rights of its minorities, and its neighbours made similar commitments in separate minority treaties. The treaty also restored trade and required coal deliveries, which for the ruined country was a matter of life and death.

Ratification and the first years

The new government of Count Pál Teleki submitted the treaty to parliament, which approved it in mid-November 1920. The act incorporating it into Hungarian law invoked the position of duress in which the unhappy outcome of the war had placed Hungary. The treaty came into force on 26 July 1921, after ratification by the Powers. The United States, whose Senate had already rejected the Treaty of Versailles and the League Covenant, did not ratify this treaty either, although its representative had signed it, and later concluded a separate peace with Hungary.

The only place where the Trianon border gave way to Hungary was Sopron. In the autumn of 1921, when Austria was due to take over the Burgenland, Hungarian volunteers fought the Austrian gendarmerie for several weeks. A compromise negotiated through Italian mediation provided for a vote in the town itself and eight surrounding villages, and the Sopron plebiscite of December 1921 brought victory for Hungary. Otherwise little changed; a few villages were moved to one side of the border or the other. Hungary’s neighbours, convinced that Budapest would never accept the new order, concluded a series of bilateral alliances in 1920–1921, out of which grew the Little Entente of Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia, backed by France.

No, no, never

In Hungary no treaty of the era caused comparable trauma. The word “Trianon” became a byword for national catastrophe, and the slogans “Nem, nem, soha!” (“No, no, never!”) and “Mindent vissza!” (“Give everything back!”) accompanied the entire interwar period. Schoolchildren recited the “Hungarian Credo”, a prayer that ended with words of faith in Hungary’s resurrection. Revisionism united all political camps, from the legitimists to the government, which differed only in the extent of their demands and their methods. Prime Minister Bethlen, who governed from 1921 to 1931, pursued a cautious policy, but as early as 1927 he concluded a treaty of friendship with Benito Mussolini’s Italy, the first great power willing to support Hungarian claims. In the same year the British press magnate Lord Rothermere published a much-discussed article in the Daily Mail on “Hungary’s place in the sun”, calling for the borders to be changed.

Hungarian revisionism was not fascism, but it led towards the fascist powers, because only they wanted to tear down the order that had taken Hungary’s land. In 1933 Prime Minister Gyula Gömbös became the first foreign head of government to visit Adolf Hitler. The Trianon borders began to crumble in 1938. In the First Vienna Award of 2 November 1938 Germany and Italy granted Hungary southern Slovakia, with Košice and Komárno. In March 1939, as Hitler was dismembering Czechoslovakia, Hungarian troops occupied Subcarpathian Ruthenia, which was welcomed in Poland because it gave the two countries a common border. Six months later, in September 1939, Hungary refused German troops passage through its territory and took in tens of thousands of Polish refugees. On 30 August 1940, in the Second Vienna Award, Hungary received northern Transylvania. It paid for these gains by joining the Tripartite Pact in November 1940; by taking part in the attack on Yugoslavia in April 1941, before which Prime Minister Teleki – the same man who in 1920 had drawn the red map for Apponyi – took his own life; and finally by going to war against the Soviet Union from June 1941.

The reckoning proved tragic. Hungary lost its entire Second Army on the Don, was occupied by Germany in 1944, and hundreds of thousands of Jews were deported from its lands to their deaths. All the gains of 1938–1941 were lost. The Paris Peace Treaty of 10 February 1947 restored the Trianon borders and in addition took three villages near Bratislava from Hungary. The treaty of 4 June 1920 shows a mechanism repeated throughout Central Europe: a peace that freed some nations left another with a sense of injustice so deep that its state followed anyone who promised to put that injustice right – all the way into Hitler’s war.