Capitulation of Hungarian Army at Világos 1849
While the Hungarians were still retreating in the autumn of
1848, Engels wanted to mobilize the public in his newspaper in order to protect
“the greatest man of the year 1848”. In April 1849 he already praised the
Magyars’ “well organized and superbly led army”, calling Generals Görgey and
Bem “the most gifted commanders of our time”. At the same time Engels (as well
as Marx) expressed his contempt for the Czechs and above all the South
Slavs—the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, who were “nations lacking history”. The
Austrian South Slavs were nothing more than the “ethnic rubbish” of a
complicated “thousand-year evolution”. Since the eleventh century they had lost
“any semblance” of national independence, and were “torn tatters” dragged along
by the Germans and Magyars.
During that spring, despite the splendid victories achieved
by the Hungarian troops led by Görgey, Bem, Klapka and other talented officers,
and the liberation of all of Transylvania and most of Hungary, the inevitable
catastrophe—the intervention of Russia—was fast approaching. By March that
intervention had already been agreed upon as the Austrian government proved
unable to master the situation on its own. This was the natural consequence of
the cooperation between the Habsburgs and the Romanovs, which had become even
closer since the defeat of the Polish Revolution of 1830–1. It was thus not
Kossuth’s Declaration of Independence that had prompted the invasion.
After repeated calls for help Emperor Franz Joseph was
finally obliged to appeal to Tsar Nicholas I in an official letter—printed in
the Wiener Zeitung on 1 May 1849—for armed assistance in “the sacred struggle
against anarchy”. The Tsar replied by return, advising that he had ordered the
Viceroy of Poland, Field-Marshal Prince Ivan Paskevich, to hasten to the aid of
their Austrian comrades-in-arms. Austrian humiliation culminated in Franz
Joseph’s arrival in Warsaw, where on 21 May 1849, with a genuflection, he
kissed the hand of the Ruler of all the Russias. The young Emperor enthusiastically
reported the event to his mother:
He received me exceptionally graciously and cordially, and
at 4 o’clock I dined with him tête-à-tête. We travelled very fast, and the
Russian railways are especially outstanding for their good organization and
smooth ride. Altogether everything is so pleasantly orderly and calm here.
Hungarian and foreign historians, and in particular
contemporaries have long debated whether Russia’s intervention, so detrimental
to Austria’s prestige, was really necessary for the defeat of the Revolution.
In a report on the campaign Captain Ramming von Riedkirchen, chief of staff to
the Austrian commander, Haynau, appointed at the end of May, stated:
The question is often raised whether the Austrian state in
that situation, without Russian aid, would have been able to defeat the
Hungarian uprising, which, after its unexpected successes in the spring of
1849, grew so rapidly and became so immense. […] In order to attain a decisive
military superiority, which was also assured in all aspects of foreign
relations, the Russian armed intervention was indispensable in Hungary and
Transylvania. The mighty and imposing aid of a Russian army would inevitably
lead to success, and result in the establishment of peace in Austria and the
whole of Europe, even if Austria’s performance were less energetic and
successful.
The Austrian historian Zöllner is also of the opinion that
“the victory of the monarchical conservative forces would not have been possible
without foreign help.” Deák, on the other hand, believes that the Austrians
could have achieved victory by themselves, even though it might have taken them
longer. A breakdown of war casualties cited by him, appears to confirm his
thesis:
The Austrians kept inadequate records, the Hungarians kept
almost none. It seems that about 50,000 Hungarians died and about the same
number of Austrians. The Russian expeditionary forces lost only 543 killed in
battle and 1,670 wounded. On the other hand. Paskevichs army buried 11,028
cholera victims.
In the event Russia’s intervention sealed the fate of
Hungary. Against 194,000 Russians and 176,000 Austrians with a total of 1,200
artillery pieces, the 152,000 honvéds (according to some estimates 170,000)
with 450 field-guns did not stand a chance. Yet the fighting lasted until
August.
The Hungarians were totally isolated. Kossuth and his Prime
Minister Szemere addressed a desperate appeal to the peoples of Europe:
“Europe’s freedom will be decided on Hungarian soil. With it world freedom
loses a great country, with this nation a loyal hero.” Even Kossuth’s
emissaries in London and Paris, Count László Teleki and Ferenc Pulszky, both
with excellent social connections, could achieve nothing. As so often before
and after in Hungarian history (from 1241 to 1956), no European power lifted a
finger in the interests of the Magyars. Lord Palmerston, for example, never
wavered from his belief in the necessity of preserving the Monarchy’s
integrity. Even though in Parliament he publicly declared himself disturbed by
the Russian intervention, in a personal conversation with the Russian
ambassador in London he expressed the hope that the Tsar’s army would act
swiftly.
Paskevich, Haynau and Jelačić attacked the Hungarian units
from all sides, forcing them back into the far south-eastern corner of the
country. Until that time the deputies still held their meetings in the National
Assembly in the southern city of Szeged, and on 28 July they crowned their work
with two significant and symbolic enactments on the equality of nationalities
and the emancipation of the Jews.
The Nationalities Law was passed after
Kossuth had negotiated in July with the Romanian liberal intellectual Nicolae
Balcescu, and Serbian representatives over the possibility of reconciliation
and co-operation. Although Law VIII of 1849 reinforced Hungarian as the
official language, it also envisaged the free development of all ethnic groups:
every citizen had the right to use his own language in his dealings with the
authorities; the majority would determine the language to be used in local
administration; and primary schools would use the local language.
The bill for the emancipation of the Jews provoked no
debate. The government and deputies recognized the community as equal; it had
stood by the nation with 10,000–20,000 volunteers and numerous officers in the
honvéd army and made donations for weapons as loyally as the Christian
Hungarians. After the war the Jews paid a high price for the public avowal of
their Hungarianness; some of their leaders were arrested, and some communities
had to pay colossal fines.
In retrospect the optimism at Szeged is incomprehensible.
The government was in flight; many of the weary and depleted units were
surrounded, and some were actually in retreat. Hundreds of deputies had already
left; mighty armies were inexorably moving across the country—and yet hope
still persisted in this second temporary capital. The Prime Minister, Szemere,
spoke optimistically of the British and French governments’ “awakening”.
Kossuth declared to the assembled peasants: “The freedom of Europe will radiate
out from this city.”
Barely a fortnight later the dream was over. After defeats
at Szeged and Temesvár Kossuth abdicated and fled, disguised as the butler of a
Polish nobleman. He shaved off his distinguishing beard, changed his hairstyle
and, armed with two passports, one in the name of a Hungarian (“Tamás Udvardi”)
and an English one in the name of “James Bloomfield”, took off for Turkey. On
August 11 he had already transfered full military and civilian authority to
Görgey, the Minister of War, who—as Head of State for a day—surrendered to the
Russians at Világos near Arad with his shrunken army of eleven generals, 1,426
officers and 32,569 other ranks, with 144 field-guns and sixty battle flags.
Whether Görgey’s preference for laying down his arms before the Russians and
not the Austrians goaded the Austrians to even more appalling retribution
against the revolutionaries is a moot question. The surrender at Világos marked
the end of revolution in the Habsburg empire, which had run its course several
weeks earlier when the last German republicans capitulated to Prussia. Heinrich
Heine in Paris saw the collapse of Hungary as the final act in the drama of the
Europe-wide Revolution: “Thus fell the last bastion of freedom….” Prince
Paskevich reported to the Tsar: “Hungary lies at the feet of Your Majesty.” The
Tsar exhorted the Austrians to show clemency to the defeated rebels.
The young Emperor celebrated his nineteenth birthday at Bad
Ischl. His mother, as always, had arranged everything beautifully: there was a
large birthday cake with nineteen candles, a Tyrolean choir sang the Austrian
national anthem, and the happy young man bagged six chamois bucks. Afterwards,
however, Franz Joseph committed a grave error: as always, he needed the advice
of his implacable Prime Minister Schwarzenberg, and on 20 August the Council of
Ministers, presided over by the Emperor, determined that all the Hungarian
ringleaders, from staff officers upwards, should be court-martialled.
The retribution was entrusted to the infamous German General
Baron Ludwig von Haynau, illegitimate son of the Elector Wilhelm I of
Hesse-Kassel. He had earned himself the sobriquet “the hyena of Brescia” for
his gory deeds in Italy where, after occupying the Lombard city, he ordered the
public flogging of local insurgents, among them women, and the arrest and
execution of a priest who was dragged from the altar. In the words of the old
Field-Marshal Radetzky, “He is my best general, but he is like a razor that
should be put back into its case after use.” Feldzeugmeister Haynau worked
fast, without mercy and delighting in his assignment. “I am the man who will
restore order, I shall have hundreds shot with a clear conscience,” he wrote to
Radetzky. Originally no death penalty was to be carried out without approval
from Vienna, but the Emperor and the government finally gave in to Haynau’s
urging; it would suffice to announce the executions retrospectively.
On 6 October 1849, the anniversary of Minister of War Latour’s
murder, thirteen generals of the Hungarian revolutionary army were executed in
the fortress of Arad. A fourteenth former officer of the Imperial army was also
condemned to death as a Hungarian general, but at the last moment his sentence
was commuted to life imprisonment. The thirteen heroes of the Revolution, whose
anniversary is annually commemorated in Hungary, included a German of Austrian
origin, a German-Austrian, two Hungarian-Germans, a Croat, a Serb from the
Bánát and two Hungarians of Armenian origin. Not all the five “pure” Hungarians
were familiar with the Hungarian language. Six civilians were executed in Pest,
among them the moderate former Prime Minister of Hungary, Count Lajos
Batthyány. He had stabbed himself in the neck with a dagger smuggled into the
military prison by his sister-in-law and, although army doctors saved his life,
it was impossible to hang him and he had to be shot despite the terms of the
original sentence.
On Haynau’s orders 2,000 officers and civilian patriots were
imprisoned, and 500 former Habsburg officers, including 24 Imperial-Royal
generals, were court-martialled, and about forty officers (though no more
generals) were executed, while most of the others were condemned to years of
imprisonment in chains. The total number of executions has been estimated at
120.
In his History of the Habsburg Empire, 1526–1918 the
American historian of Austrian origin, Robert A. Kann, assessed the reprisals
thus:
To the enduring shame of the Schwarzenberg government even
the intervention of the czar for the brave Hungarian commanders was rejected…
The action of the Schwarzenberg government and its henchmen stands in contrast
to Grant’s generous attitude toward the officers of the South after the
surrender at Appomattox in the American Civil War. Schwarzenberg managed to
unite English, French, German, and even Russian feelings in common revulsion
against him and Haynau, who was publicly insulted during his subsequent
“goodwill” visits to Brussels and London.
Haynau soon became intolerable to the Court as well, and was
pensioned off in 1850. Strangely he bought an estate in Hungary and was even
outraged that the “New Landowner” (as he was caricatured in one of Jókai’s
novels) was shunned by the other landowners. He died, supposedly insane, in
1853.
The other principal character on the Imperial side, Ban
Jelačić, lived on for a few more years, but also mentally deranged. As a
disappointed Croat patriot he had given up on his cause; the Austrian
government kept only very few of the promises made to the Croats. Each
historical turning-point influenced the Jelačić myth. Thus in 1866, before the
settlement between Hungary and Croatia, an equestrian statue was erected to him
in the main square of Zagreb, pointing his index finger towards the north in
the direction of Hungary. Eighty years later, in 1947, the statue was
dismantled and the place renamed “Square of the Republic”. After the rebirth of
Croatia in 1990, the government restored the statue, this time with the index
finger pointing south, i.e. towards neither the long-forgotten Hungarian enemy
nor the new arch-enemy Serbia. The place is once again called “Ban Josipa
Jelačić square”.
0 comments:
Post a Comment