1848 (56 page)

The year 1849 dawned bleakly for Hungary. The Austrians were in control of Budapest. The National Assembly had gathered in remote Debrecen, where only 145 deputies out of 415 turned up to its first reconvening on 9 January. Eventually, that number would rise to three hundred, but for now the small rump was dominated by those who wanted to negotiate with the Austrians. Yet liberal Hungary clung on. It was able to do so because of the vigorous efforts of the government to mobilise national resources and to encourage a counter-attack. Resolution and determination became the qualities that decided promotion for junior officers and, while most of them were still of noble background, non-nobles were raised from the ranks. The army that would determinedly drive out the Austrians in the spring of 1849 was for the large part the citizens' force of Honvéd battalions. Their number had expanded dramatically from 16 in September 1848 to 140 by June 1849; in the same period, including regulars, the army had expanded from 100,000 to 170,000. Much of this was thanks to the introduction of conscription, which had been brought in at the outbreak of the war, so while a tenth of the ranks were filled with students, intellectuals and landowners, most of the recruits (about two-thirds) were drawn from the poorer peasantry. A fifth comprised artisans and journeymen. These figures probably reflect the fact that those who drew a short straw in the conscription ballot and who were sufficiently wealthy could pay someone else (usually poorer) to take their place. Yet none of this absolutely precludes patriotic fervour as a motivation among the rank and file - for instance, the 9th Battalion, the ‘red caps', became famous for its commitment and determination. And the hard patriotic core in the ranks was strengthened by the quality of the leadership. Officers from the old imperial army who joined the Honvéd battalions were almost automatically given a higher rank in the new units, while non-commissioned officers were made officers. These experienced soldiers and the educated rank-and-file volunteers who were made NCOs formed a solid group of instructors who could train the rest. Efforts to recruit from among the rebellious Romanian and southern Slav populations were virtually futile, so the brunt of the enlistment was borne by the Magyars, although among the officers there were plenty of Poles and Germans. The latter made up some 15 per cent of the officer corps at the start of 1849, so Leiningen was by no means unique.
⁴⁸

The National Defence Committee, led by Kossuth, purchased - and smuggled - arms from abroad, paying with Hungary's gold reserves. Meanwhile, Hungarian workshops hammered out close to five hundred muskets a day. Others had already been purchased from abroad, particularly Belgium, by the Batthyány government in the summer of 1848. Equipping the army, however, proved to be a greater challenge than recruiting it. By the time the war had broken out, many of the volunteers were still without cloaks, just as the cold weather was closing in, and boots were not being cobbled together with sufficient speed. To try to ease the crisis, the government sent raw materials into the provinces, placing orders with local craft workers, allowing the battalions raised locally to be directly supplied.
⁴⁹
The committee offered large loans to manufacturers to switch to wartime production; it weeded out skilled workers from the Honvéd battalions, sending them into the workshops; it bought up grain surpluses for the military; and it created a military academy and new field hospitals. The printing presses for Hungarian banknotes had been hauled from Budapest to Debrecen. Some eighty government commissioners, with wide-ranging and in some cases absolute powers, were sent across the country to mobilise the population and its resources for the war effort, to supervise the military and to report back to the committee. They were sorely needed as a counterweight against the local county officials, who were showing an alarming tendency to turn with the political tide - which in the New Year was flowing Austria's way.

Unfortunately, the Hungarian counter-attack was not achieved without internal bloodshed. The crisis gave renewed vigour to the radicals, who at Debrecen pressed for universal male suffrage, the proclamation of a republic, the abolition of the nobility and a law that defined as treason the demands of the national minorities. Parliament responded by establishing revolutionary tribunals to try traitors. Radicals and moderates alike were angry at the rebelliousness of the ethnic minorities and, in the end, these tribunals handed down 122 death sentences - mostly against non-Magyars.
⁵⁰

The government also faced a challenge from one of its own commanders - Görgey. The general's political convictions rested on the defence of the April Laws, and now he was worried that Hungary was being steered towards a republic. His army was riven with discontented officers who believed that they would have legality on their side for as long as they were fighting for the constitution, but nothing more radical than that. The officer corps of whole units were deserting to the imperial forces. With his army looking likely to disintegrate before his eyes, Görgey made a resounding proclamation on 5 January at Vác, where his Corps of the Upper Danube was defending the approaches to Budapest: this army ‘faithful to its oath for the maintenance of the Constitution of Hungary . . . intends to defend that Constitution against all foreign enemies'. It would obey the legitimate minister of war - in other words, the one approved by the King and responsible to the Hungarian parliament - but not the committee. This was a rejection of the radical liberalism - and the suspected republicanism - of the political leadership of the Hungarian revolution.
⁵¹
The bold proclamation stemmed the flow of desertions - at last, declared Charles Leiningen, he had met a leader who was a determined enemy of the ‘republican party' and who wanted ‘nothing more than the constitution of 1848'.
⁵²
Kossuth, faced with this mutiny against the committee, privately accused Görgey of being a traitor. The general was no turncoat, however: when Windischgrätz called on him to surrender and to bring his entire army with him, Görgey simply demanded negotiations with the Austrians on the basis of the April Laws. In any case he had little political backing: the moderate ‘peace party' at Debrecen ought to have seen him as an ally, but they feared that he aspired to military dictatorship. The soldier heartily reciprocated their distrust, feeling that all politicians were shady characters. Yet he soon proved to be the temporary saviour of the liberal regime. After the Austrians took Budapest, he kept his army intact by withdrawing into the Slovakian hills. Forging on through bitter winter weather and over mountainous terrain, his troops fell on the Austrian units that were feeling their way towards Debrecen, forcing them to retreat and seek the safety of Windischgrätz's main army in the west. Görgey then marched southwards towards the River Tisza, where the main body of Hungarian forces held the line against the Austrians.

Owing to Görgey's obvious capabilities, Kossuth was eventually left with little choice but to appoint him to lead the counter-offensive in the spring, though he refused to make him commander-in-chief. In early April the Hungarians fought a series of bloody battles and pressed forward towards Budapest. Görgey tried to persuade Kossuth that the bulk of his forces should avoid getting bogged down in recapturing the capital, but rather should circumvent it and relieve the fortress of Komárom, which was of greater strategic importance. It was as the Hungarians were driving the Austrians before them that a momentous event occurred: on 14 April Kossuth proclaimed Hungarian independence before the excited parliament and a packed crowd of spectators: ‘an act of the last necessity', the opening paragraph protested, ‘adopted to preserve from utter destruction a nation persecuted to the limits of the most enduring patience'.
⁵³
The declaration was formally published five days later.

The catalyst had been the new imperial constitution imposed by the Emperor on 5 March. It stripped Hungary of its April constitution and reduced its territory and status within the monarchy. There could, in other words, be no compromise between the liberal regime in Hungary and the monarchy in Vienna. Moreover, besides discrediting the Hungarian peace party and making war and independence the only option for the Magyar liberals, the imperial constitution sent out a very dispiriting message to the other nationalities of the kingdom. The Voivodina Serbs, who had been sustaining the full horrors of ethnic conflict in southern Hungary since the summer of 1848, were put on notice that, contrary to their hopes and expectations, the Emperor would not reward their loyalty by recognising their national aspirations. Weary of the brutalities of the conflict, Serb resistance to the Hungarians now began to disintegrate. In Transylvania General Bem had used a combination of force and diplomacy to subdue resistance. He had provoked Kossuth's anger by offering an amnesty to all Romanian fighters who surrendered their arms. He had tried to pacify the population by offering them some degree of self-government and the local use of their language. For Kossuth - as for other Hungarian nationalists - Transylvania was an integral part of the lands of Saint Stephen and should have been incorporated without such concessions. Now, though, with the declaration of independence, Kossuth at last reached out to the Romanians, sending a Romanian member of parliament into the Transylvanian mountains to meet with the remaining guerrilla fighters, who gave their unambiguous answer by killing him.
⁵⁴

Kossuth left the precise form of the new Hungary - whether it would be a republic or a monarchy - to a constituent assembly to be elected after the war. On 23 April the Austrians in Budapest, aware of Görgey's advance on Komárom (which fell shortly afterwards), abandoned the city to avoid being encircled. They did, though, leave a garrison in Buda Castle. Hungarian troops marched into the city hours later to an ecstatic welcome. Görgey, who had now been made minister of war by Kossuth, believed that the army needed a rest - and he knew that many of his officers would have been shaken by the implications of the declaration of independence. Kossuth, however, believed that the complete liberation of Budapest would bring international diplomatic recognition for independent Hungary. Time was pressing, for the Austrians would soon be reinforced by troops redeployed from Italy after Novara. Görgey bowed to the political pressure and transferred the bulk of his Honvéd forces from Komárom to the siege of Buda Castle.
⁵⁵
It was a fatal mistake: had the Hungarians pressed on towards Vienna, they might at least have secured a negotiated peace.

So it was that, on 4 May, the castle hill was encircled by forty thousand Hungarian troops. The brutal fighting lasted two and a half weeks. In these critical days the Austrian guns shelled the city from the castle and even tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to zero in on Széchenyi's chain bridge. Finally, the Hungarian siege guns that had been hauled down from Komárom blasted a breach in the citadel's walls and, in a night assault on 20-1 May, the Honvéd forces surged up the slope and through the gap under murderous Austrian fire. Görgey had ordered that no quarter be given, while the Austrians had pledged to fight to the very end, so the combat at close quarters, in a darkness lit by the bursting of shells and the flashes of musketry, was desperate, brutal and bloody: in this one night, one thousand Austrians lost their lives.
⁵⁶
Though an important symbolic victory, the Hungarian forces had lost precious weeks that could have been used in pushing the Austrians further west. As Görgey had feared, his men were now too exhausted to press on into Austria, and the imperial forces remained camped on the western fringes of the country. Moreover, with victory and independence apparently in sight, the Hungarian revolutionaries now manoeuvred for domestic political advantage.

The National Assembly had elected Kossuth governor-president of Hungary, but he was no dictator, since on 2 May he had appointed a cabinet led by his close colleague Bertalan Szemere, with Görgey as minister of war. Parliament still sat and the government commanded the support of the majority. While Kossuth accepted the right to determine the general direction of policy, he willingly agreed that the ministers had to countersign his decrees and that he was bound to obey the laws passed by the National Assembly - and so ran the oath of office which he took on 14 May.
⁵⁷
Thus Kossuth's presidential powers and the legislative authority of parliament sat together awkwardly. At the end of May, Szemere asked the Assembly to dissolve itself and to reconvene in Budapest on 2 July.

By that point, a great noose was being prepared for liberal Hungary. Tsar Nicholas I had agreed to the Emperor Franz Joseph's plea for Russian military intervention in the name of ‘the holy struggle against anarchy'.
⁵⁸
Görgey, who as minister of war now had overall supervision of all the Hungarian army corps, was among the first to read the writing on the wall. Never happy with the idea of resistance to the bitter end, he and many of his officers wanted to negotiate rather than see Hungary put to the sword. Their desire for a rapid, negotiated peace was no doubt sharpened when two Hungarian officers were captured by the Austrians, summarily tried as rebels and shot on 5 June under the orders of the new Austrian commander, the infamously ruthless General Ludwig Haynau (who had been transferred from Italy, where he had brutally suppressed an insurrection at Brescia, which had finished with the flogging of civilians, including women). Such a negotiated peace was impossible for as long as Kossuth was in charge. Görgey considered the possibility of a military coup, but he failed to secure any support from the civilian politicians. He angrily returned to the army.

On hearing the first news of the Emperor's appeal to the Tsar, Kossuth called on the Hungarian people to rise up against the Russian hordes. The government also made vain efforts to obtain international support for Hungarian independence, pointing out the dangers of a surge of Russian military might into Central Europe. Unfortunately, though, Prussia was downright hostile to Hungary: the conservative government certainly feared the consequences of Russian military intervention, but rather than help the Magyars, it offered to send its own troops to take part in the invasion, so that Prussia would have some control over the situation. The Western powers were less overtly hostile, but still offered no help. Louis-Napoleon's France was in no mood to challenge the Russians and was in any case on the cusp of crushing the Roman republic. The Hungarians found sympathy primarily on the French radical left, but it could do little more than make the right noises through its newspapers. The Paris government itself received Hungarian pleas with stony silence. Meanwhile, the British insisted that, legally, Hungary was still part of the Austrian Empire. Hungary's only ally was therefore Manin's Venetian republic. The United States was sympathetic but offered only diplomatic recognition - and the distances to be covered by the Hungarian envoys meant that by the time they arrived in Washington the revolution at home had already been extinguished.
⁵⁹