Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [168]
The young Károlyi reacted by throwing himself madly into various pursuits. He forced himself to become an orator and took up politics. He gambled, he drank, he drove fast cars very badly. He became the foremost dandy in Budapest, then the wildest man-about-town. He played polo recklessly, he fenced compulsively, he took one of the first flights over the city. He raised eyebrows by finding shooting parties boring, and doubts about his manhood when he refused the young peasant girl in his bed (supplied by custom to all male guests along with the game). His ideas, at least by the standards of his world, were radical. Before the war he was seen with strange people: socialists, middle-class politicians, intellectuals.5
When the war started, Károlyi joined up. (His regiment was held back from active service until his wife gave birth to their first child.) By 1918, he was demanding a separate peace with the Allies and, finally, the end of the union with Austria. On October 31 Károlyi became Hungary’s prime minister; two weeks later, he proclaimed a republic. “He seems a very good fellow,” reported an American, “but nervous and permanently worried, which is perhaps not surprising.”6 The army no longer obeyed orders, the civil administration had broken down, the transport system had collapsed and money was rapidly losing its value.
The Hungarians, with their territory melting away, cast about for protection. A cousin of the emperor, now calling himself Joe Habsburg, wrote to George V in London suggesting that Hungary become part of the British empire. Perhaps, Hungarians hoped, they could borrow an English prince. Like the Germans and the Austrians, they also hoped that their republican revolution would soften the Allies. The Hungarian Academy appealed to distinguished Allied scholars not to let Hungary be dismembered. Károlyi dispatched a prominent feminist as his representative to contact the Allies in neutral Switzerland, calculating, wrongly as it turned out, that this would demonstrate the new, liberal face of Hungary. (She shocked the conservative Swiss and spent most of her time quarreling with her own staff.) A leading Budapest restaurant named a dish in honor of Marshal Foch. (Unfortunately, in Hungarian it came out as “diarrhea soup.”)7
Like everyone else, the Hungarians looked to the Americans. His peace platform, Károlyi assured American representatives in Budapest, was “Wilson, Wilson, Wilson.” The city was festooned with Wilson’s photograph and the slogan “A Wilson Peace Is the Only Peace for Hungary.” What that meant, at least to Hungarians, was not self-determination for the minorities within Hungary but that their country should keep its historic boundaries. There was much talk of Switzerland, a favorite analogy in Central Europe, of regional autonomy, and of language and other rights. The Károlyi government set about passing laws to this effect.8
The Hungarian appeals were futile. The Allies remained suspicious of Hungary. Was Károlyi really as liberal as he claimed? He was, after all, an aristocrat, related to the men who had led Hungary into the war. If the British and the Americans were cool, the French were actively hostile. Only the Italians were sympathetic, simply because they hoped to use Hungary against Yugoslavia. That both Czechoslovakia and Rumania were able to present their demands as Allies did not help Hungary. Nor did the fact that Hungary’s borders were drawn piecemeal, in the Czechoslovak commission and the one on Rumania and Yugoslavia. As Nicolson, who represented Britain on both, admitted, “it was only too late that it was realised that these two separate Committees had between them imposed upon Hungary