Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [175]
The Hungarians received a cold but correct welcome from the French and were taken off to the Château de Madrid, a resort hotel in the Bois de Boulogne. They were treated better than the Germans had been; they could wander through the Bois, even go to local restaurants. They received their peace terms in a brief ceremony at the Quai d’Orsay. Clemenceau curtly informed Apponyi that he could make a statement the following day but there would be no verbal negotiations, only written ones. On leaving the room, the French prime minister gave a loud contemptuous laugh.37
Apponyi’s statement was, in Lloyd George’s opinion, a tour de force. He spoke in fluent French, then switched to equally impeccable English and concluded with flawless Italian. He pointed out that Hungary was being punished more severely than any other of the defeated nations. It was losing two thirds of its territory and its population, it was being cut off from its markets and its sources of raw materials, and it was expected to pay heavy reparations. Three and a half million Hungarians were going to end up outside Hungary. If the principle of self-determination was a fair one, and he thought it was, then surely it should apply to the Hungarians. At the very least, there should be plebiscites held in the territories being taken from Hungary. (Unwisely, the count weakened his case by complaining that Hungarians were being condemned to live under the rule of inferior civilizations.38)
In reply to a question from Lloyd George, Apponyi unfurled a large ethnographic map that he had brought with him, and the peacemakers gathered around. Lloyd George whispered to Apponyi, “You were very eloquent.” Even Clemenceau was polite. As the Hungarians went back to their hotel to prepare their written commentary, there was some feeling of hope. In Britain, critical questions were being asked in Parliament about the Hungarian terms. Several important French businessmen were interested in reopening economic relations between France and Hungary and informal talks had already started. The Italian government, under a new prime minister, swung around from its previous hostility and urged its allies to take Hungarian protests into account. It was not enough. In the end, the British and the French were not prepared to redo the treaties; the Italians were not willing to force the issue. The peacemakers may have been influenced, too, by a memorandum from Rumania, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia which argued that any attempt to redraw the borders would be a betrayal. What ultimately weighed against Hungary was sheer inertia. As a young English observer told Károlyi in 1919, “The Entente governments had many more important things to worry about than the fate of ten million people in Hungary.”39
Hungary won only a few minor concessions: more patrol boats on the Danube, for example. On June 4, 1920, in a brief ceremony at the Trianon Palace, its representatives signed the treaty. In Hungary, the flags on public buildings flew at half-mast. “Trianon” became shorthand for Allied cruelty and its memory fueled an almost universal desire among Hungarians to undo its provisions. The leading political figure in the interwar years was Horthy, now designated regent on the grounds that Hungary was still a monarchy. (It never managed to find a king again, which suited both the British and Horthy himself.) Horthy and his supporters toyed with improbable plans to restore Hungary to its prewar boundaries, for example by gassing Czech soldiers in their barracks in Slovakia and rushing in with Hungarian troops. Moderates would have settled for Transylvania.40
In the 1930s, Hungary cautiously drew closer to the other revisionist powers, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. After the Munich settlement of 1938 left Czechoslovakia alone and exposed to Hitler, Hungary successfully demanded a slice of Slovakia and the whole of Ruthenia. In 1940 it was Rumania’s turn,