1848 (47 page)

On 15 September, when Jelačić was a hair-raising forty miles from Budapest, and people were digging entrenchments outside the city, Kossuth rose to the challenge, proposing that a parliamentary committee be established to deal with confidential military affairs, since the responsibility was too much for Batthyány, who still had no cabinet. Parliament agreed over the prime minister's protests, and Kossuth joined with the radicals in taking control of this new ‘Committee of National Defence': since no one knew how the crisis would turn, the initiative fell to those who were willing to risk bold measures. Meanwhile, Palatine Stephen resigned and left for Vienna on 23 September. In fact, if not in law, Hungary was at this moment a fully independent country. Shortly afterwards, Kossuth toured the central Hungarian plains, drumming up recruits, like ‘a giant spirit who works the people up from their deathly dream', as an awe-inspired radical wrote. When he returned to Budapest, he claimed that some twelve thousand volunteers were now on their way to join the Hungarian colours.
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At this point the Austrian government made what was meant to be a conciliatory gesture, by appointing Count Ferenc Lamberg as royal commissioner and commander of all forces in Hungary on 25 September. Lamberg was a conservative, but he was no outright reactionary: a Hungarian who had earned Batthyány's respect, he had participated in the Magyar reform diet of 1847-8. As a soldier, the doves in the Austrian government hoped that Lamberg would be able to exert some authority on both the Croatian and the Magyar forces and broker an armistice. It seems odd that the imperial ministry should have sought a suspension of hostilities just as it looked like Jelačić was going to take Budapest. It may have been because the more moderate ministers, like Wessenberg, feared that an outright victory for Jelačić would either provoke further radical upheavals in the Austrian capital or strengthen the hands of reactionaries like Latour - or probably both. Wessenberg may not have liked the Viennese radicals, but, as a constitutional minister, he wanted to see at least some of the political gains of 1848 survive. On 21 September, he fretted to Ferdinand that a triumph for Jelačić ‘would be likely to do away with the constitutional liberties'.
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Unfortunately, the Hungarians did not see Lamberg's appointment as an olive branch, not least because the Austrian government also named the conservative reformist Baron Miklós Vay as prime minister. In accordance with the April Laws, these appointments were both illegal, because they had not been approved by the Hungarian government in Budapest. On 27 September, the Hungarian parliament hit back with a resolution declaring its determination to uphold the constitution. When Lamberg arrived in Budapest the following day, his carriage was spotted crossing the pontoon bridge by a crowd of artisans, students and soldiers, who dragged him out and then bludgeoned and stabbed him to death. Only the late arrival of the National Guard prevented the mob from stringing up his torn, lifeless body.
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The news of this horrific murder discredited moderate Austrian attempts at conciliation and played straight into the hands of the reactionaries in the government, which was now determined to join Jelačić in crushing the Hungarian revolution by force. War was duly declared on Hungary on 3 October.

Even now, Batthyány did not give up in his efforts for peace. Returning from a visit to the army facing the Croats, he sped to Vienna to plead one more time for reconciliation, but he was coolly received. In the absence of a proper government the Hungarian parliament took over. All too aware of the consequences of Lamberg's brutal death, it agreed to Kossuth's suggestion of condemning the deed and resolving to bring those responsible to justice. Then it converted the Committee of National Defence into an emergency executive government, with Kossuth as its president. Yet, at the very moment when the radicals gained power, they consciously shared it with the moderates. The committee's membership was expanded from six to twelve, with all the new members being drawn from the upper house of parliament and from among Batthyány's former cabinet. That the Hungarian radicals - unlike many of their hot-headed European counterparts - were so compliant (although during the September crisis an article in
March Fifteenth
did call for a gallows and a guillotine to be used on ‘traitors') can be explained in at least four ways. First, they sought to show that the extraordinary government was not just working in the interests of a radical minority, but was genuinely a national executive. Second, it was in the radicals' own interests to join with the moderates in defending the constitution: their vision of a democratic Hungary could scarcely have survived if it were destroyed.
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Third, the Society of Equality had only a thousand members nationwide and the elections that summer had shown that they did not enjoy mass support. If they were to govern alone in Budapest, then they would have to force their will on the rest of the country, igniting civil war at precisely the moment when Hungary faced invasion. Fourth, when the radicals surrendered their predominant political position, the military situation had just taken a turn for the better, since Hungarian forces had finally made a stand at the village of Pákozd, where they had defeated Jelačić.

The radicals had no desire to break apart the national unity that had now been forged. They were absorbed with the task of defending Hungary against foreign invasion: most of the radical leadership, including Petőfi and Vasvári, went off to join the Honvéd units - both would meet their deaths, killed in action, in 1849 - while those in parliament supported the war effort in a variety of ways. Hungary's September crisis therefore did not provoke a radical revolution. An emergency government which included radicals had been established by parliamentary vote. For this reason, Istvan Deak describes the events of 1848-9 in Hungary as a ‘lawful revolution'.
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Nor did the crisis provoke a scurrying of the moderates away from the political centre and towards the reactionaries, as occurred elsewhere. One of the explanations for this was social: while the landed elites in most other European countries were generally conservative or moderate, the Hungarian liberals and radicals alike were magnates and landed gentry. For them, the national cause coincided with entrenching and strengthening their political influence. This meant that even relatively conservative reformers like Széchenyi were sucked into the revolutionary storm. Moreover, since the main threat of insurrection against property came not from radical artisans or workers but from the peasantry, which was usually loyal to the Emperor, the Magyar nobles had much to fear from a counter-revolution. So it was that Count Karl Leiningen-Westerburg, a moderately liberal German magnate with large estates in Voivodina and the Banat, had no difficulty in offering his sword to the Hungarian revolution, since the Serbian insurgents had overrun his land and burned his fields.
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He was driven by an urgent desire to see order restored to his province. He was also, as a German born and bred, increasingly hostile to the Habsburgs, whom he was coming to regard as a perfidious obstacle to the emergence of a federal German state. Moreover, it should be said, he had a genuine love for his adopted country (and his wife, Lizzie, was Magyar):

 

Yet the variety of circumstances, the complexity of motives and the conflicting loyalties, particularly among aristocratic army officers who had taken an oath of loyalty to the Habsburg crown, meant that not all nobles rallied to the revolution. The war tore apart elite families. Leiningen's cousin, Christian, commanded a battalion at the fortress of Temesvár (or Timisoara in Romanian) and joined his fellow officers in declaring for the Habsburgs against the revolution and stirring up the Serb and Romanian peasants against the Magyars in the region. The radical Count László Teleki was brother to Ádám Teleki, the conservative general who resigned his commission rather than fight Jelačić

It was the day after Latour's murder that the Hungarians, under General János Móga, at last engaged with the Croats in battle. The strength of Jelačić's forces had been sapped because their looting - and perhaps some of the patriotic propaganda emanating from the Magyar revolutionaries - had incited the peasantry against them. Small skirmishes erupted, particularly in the rear of the Croatian army, but its numbers were still far greater than those mustered by the Hungarians, who on 29 September defeated them at Pákozd, only thirty miles from Budapest. Further east, a famished and bedraggled second Croatian army that had also been advancing on Budapest surrendered to the Hungarians at Ozora on 7 October. Immediately after Pákozd, Jelačić had asked for a three-day truce, which he used to withdraw his tired troops towards Vienna to support, he claimed, the Habsburg court. On 8 October, as he advanced on that city, he received the news of the radical uprising, which justified his decision retrospectively. Two days later, he was at the gates of Vienna, where he awaited the arrival of Windischgrätz's forces on the march from Prague. The Hungarian pursuit culminated in their force's defeat at Schwechat twenty days later.

With this new crisis, the National Defence Committee donned the full panoply of its new powers to mobilise the resources of the country so that Hungary was (just) able to survive the crushing Austrian counter-attack. This had started not from Austria itself but in Transylvania. There, General Anton von Puchner, the commander of imperial forces in the province, gave the wink to the Romanian nationalists and - while carefully avoiding any hint that he supported Romanian independence - allowed them to hold a second great congress at Blaj at the end of September. When he received word of the Austrian declaration of war a few days later, he sensed that the time had come for a coup against the Magyar authorities in Transylvania and to assume executive powers in the name of the Emperor. Declaring the committee in Budapest illegal, he called on all loyal Transylvanians to ‘rise to the last man, one for all and all for one'. When he made this declaration on 18 October, the Magyar Székely minority defiantly declared its loyalty to Hungary, and some thirty thousand of them, including the border regiments, took up arms. Puchner's appeals found an enthusiastic response among the Romanian peasants, who had been alarmed and enraged by the attempts of Hungarian officials to enrol them into the Honvéd battalions. (By contrast, Puchner endeared himself to the peasants by ordering an end to such recruitment.) The Romanian revolutionaries also backed Puchner: irked by Magyar nationalism, they now saw in Austrian help their best hope of securing at least some recognition of their Romanian aspirations. The peasant insurrection swamped Transylvania. Groups of villagers tracked down and slaughtered Magyar and German landlords and government officials. In retaliation the Székelys and Honvéd units chased after the peasants, mowing them down in mass executions. Hundreds of villages were razed to the ground.
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This brutal conflict would prove to be one of the longest and bloodiest of all the ethnic struggles of 1848-9, with some 40,000 people killed and 230 villages set aflame.
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Leiningen was with a Hungarian unit that was advancing on Temesvár after dispersing a band of armed peasants who had skirmished with the Magyars. His testimony mixed a sense of revulsion for the atrocities with the ethnic hatred that drove both sides:

 

Meanwhile, Puchner's imperial troops and Romanian volunteers had swept across most of Transylvania by the end of November, with only a few pockets of stubborn Magyar resistance holding out. When they invaded Hungary proper, however, Puchner ran into a hastily assembled Hungarian army under the Polish exile General Józef Bem, who had fought in Vienna in October and fled when Windischgrätz took the city. Bem managed to drive out the Austro-Romanian forces and had reconquered most of Transylvania by the end of January. Imperial forces clung on in Sibiu and Braşov, but Bem's victory secured Hungary's eastern front as the main Austrian onslaught started in the west. As for the Romanians, they were now left weighing the pros and cons of securing Russian help. At Puchner's urging, the Romanian National Committee sent Bishop Andreiu Şaguna to Bucharest, where he met the commander of the Russian army occupying Wallachia. The general refused to offer Russian aid without the Tsar's approval, so the cleric then tried a new tack, travelling to meet the Emperor, whose court was still taking refuge at Olmütz. There, Şaguna presented the now modest Romanian national programme - in effect, it called for an autonomous Transylvanian duchy within the Habsburg Empire - but even that fell on unsympathetic ears in a court now in the grip of a counter-revolutionary fever.
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