Faith, Scripture, and Reason: The Debate between Transylvanian Sabbatarians and Christian Francken

Réka Újlaki-Nagy
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 4  (2021):653-674 DOI 10.38145/2021.4.653

In this study, I present two Sabbatarian texts which were written in response to texts by Christian Francken. Based on the argumentation in the Sabbatarian texts, I try to clarify which writings by the German philosopher they were responding to. I offer an explanation of the ferocity of the Sabbatarian response, and I clarify the reasons why the Sabbatarians found it so important to respond to Francken’s ideas. My analysis of the Sabbatarian texts shows persuasively that Francken’s attacks were related to the basic and specific teachings of the Sabbatarians. The challenge presented by fashionable philosophical trends at the time compelled the Sabbatarians to face not only the benefits but also the dangers of following the ratio in the interpretation of Scripture. Sabbatarian texts arrived at a solution (by drawing a distinction between the concepts of ratio and philosophy) which, although formulated earlier in the established churches, was still undeveloped in the Transylvanian Antitrinitarian movement out of which Sabbatarianism grew.

Keywords: Sabbatarianism, philosophical skepticism, early modern atheism, ratio

One of the most infamous apostates of the late sixteenth century, the German free thinker Christian Francken, visited Transylvania twice, in the middle and late 1580s, and taught at the Unitarian College in Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Romania).1 He noted several times in his writings that he had intentionally chosen this part of Europe instead of taking one of the other posts which he had been offered with better salaries because in Transylvania he hopes to “find people that Diogenes was looking for with a torch in broad daylight.” Had his goal had been to make money, he writes, he would have chosen another region.2 This self-confident claim must be treated with reservations, as there was practically no other place in Europe where he would have been able to move freely to propagate his teachings, and he would not have found such openness for his bold ideas elsewhere in Europe. Francken tried to spread his criticism of Christian churches among the deniers of the Trinity in the guise of Aristotelianism. This philosophical trend seemed familiar to the Transylvanian Antitrinitarian elite, most of whom had been educated in Padua.3 However, this social stratum was open to a wide variety of new ideas, not just those coming from philosophical skepticism. Fashionable trends competed with one another, and the circle of potentially interested parties overlapped. Since the spiritual elite consisted primarily of aristocrats, who were also supporters and patrons with political power and influence, winning them was a serious challenge. Antal Pirnát considered the Sabbatarian debate with Francken a struggle for support and positions.4 Although with his presence and work in Transylvania Francken not only aroused interest but also provoked hostility in many,5 only Sabbatarians reflected on this in voluminous written texts. These texts try to reach and convince the abovementioned target audience. One of them indicates in its title the reason why it was written: some “great and noble” people had begun to follow a kind of human, Aristotelian reasoning which questioned the authority of Moses and other holy people of ancient times. The main disseminator of these dangerous misconceptions “gives great courage to many great and noble men to their peril.”6 Sabbatarian texts argue with Francken (though without referring to him by name) and not with the aristocrats, whom they address indirectly, presumably in an effort to avoid provoking resentment among them. Thus, it is repeatedly emphasized that the addressees are the deceived people and their “master,” “with the exception of those pious, God-fearing gentlemen and noblemen who do not believe in such lies and seek” to live gracefully.7

Sabbatarianism in the 1580s and early 1590s was still a relatively recent, evolving initiative which looked back on a history of only a few years. Theological debate formulated in polemical-apological writings was seen as a means of perhaps averting the threat to the very existence of Sabbatarianism.

I work in my inquiry here from the hypothesis that Francken attacked the area of the religion that was most sensitive to the Sabbatarian faith. Francken’s attack was not deliberately directed against the Sabbatarians. His works written in Transylvania imply a much broader target audience, and their intellectual horizon included new ideas in terms of philosophy, nonadorantism, and politics. Although Francken could not have regarded the Sabbatarians as remarkable opponents, the anger which one discerns in the Sabbatarian texts and also the length of these texts can be interpreted as indications that the Sabbatarians felt threatened by his ideas. The purpose of the analysis I offer here, therefore, is to identify the areas in which Sabbatarians found Francken’s attacks the most troubling and how they defended themselves against his ideas. I do this by placing reading the Sabbatarian apologies as polemical texts in debate with Francken’s writings. Although Bálint Keserű, Antal Pirnát, and Györgyi Máté have shown that the Sabbatarian texts are reactions to Francken’s provocative writings, they do not offer any in-depth analysis of the disputed issues or their theological background. Though one cannot speak of a nuanced exchange of ideas among the disagreeing parties, since we have only the responses of the Sabbatarians to Francken’s writings but no response from Francken to their polemics, the Sabbatarian texts nonetheless offer a clear indication of the impact of Francken’s ideas.

I begin with a discussion of Francken’s writings, or more narrowly, the texts which seem, on the basis of the Sabbatarian texts, to have been met with such alarm among the Sabbatarians. I then consider the ways in which the ideas found in his writings were recast and rephrased in the Sabbatarian texts, and I consider the Sabbatarian arguments against his tenets.

Francken’s Most Debated Texts

The most important among the text by Francken to which the Sabbatarian polemical writings respond are the Argumenta XXII in Sacram Mosis Historiam and the Disputatio inter Theologum et Philosophum de incertitudine religionis Christianae. In addition, the Sabbatarian texts also seem to have responded to some of the ideas from his Praecipuarum enumeratio8 and Spectrum diurnum Genii Christiani.9

The theses of the Argumenta10 have survived along with their refutation by Franciscus Junius, a French professor from Heidelberg. According to Antal Pirnát, the original document was written before 1587, and it was probably taken by Transylvanian students on their study trip to Heidelberg.11 The 22 theses published in the appendix to Junius’ writing attack the authenticity of the story of creation and the authority of Moses, setting Aristotelian physics as the only reasonable worldview. The original document was written presumably as a reaction to the so-called judaizer practices that Francken encountered in the court of János Gerendi.12 Gerendi was the leader of the abovementioned group formed from the aristocratic elite. He was in contact with the most prominent promulgators of Antitrinitarianism, and he supported them financially and also with his political influence. At the time Francken visited him, he was celebrating Sabbath and also observing certain dietary restrictions, presumably for reasons other than the reasons which guided dietary restrictions among the so-called Sabbatarians.13 Based on the experiences gained during the visit, Francken promised in a letter to him that he would deal in more detail with the beliefs concerning the writings of Moses.14

The other important work by Francken on the subject is the Disputatio, written during his second stay in Kolozsvár around 1590.15 This is perhaps the work in which Francken went the furthest in questioning the foundations of Christianity and belief in God. He himself later declared it a dangerous, atheistic, blasphemous text.16 It was written in the form of a dialogue between a Philosopher and a Theologian. Lech Szczucki aptly called it a “deaf-mute dialogue,”17 as it is only the philosopher who responds to the theologian’s arguments. The theologian does not even seem to understand his opponent’s objection, who does not accept the Holy Scripture as the authoritative basis for the debate, and he (the theologian) founds his arguments over and over again on the infallibility of Scripture. Consequently, the Philosopher begins most of his replies by pronouncing the theologian’s arguments logically defective. The philosopher’s answers in the Disputatio (presumably Francken’s own voice)18 blame his opponent for ignoring rationality and disregarding the rules of logic and argumentation. According to the philosopher, theologians do not derive the less known from the known, but infer it from an uncertain premise and thus commit the classical fallacy of petitio principii. Divine revelation can only be proved from the words of the Scripture, which are precisely what the philosopher requires proof for. Thus, an argument based on divine revelation is only an argument for those who want to believe it.19 This oft repeated accusation is so irritating that it demands the reader’s attention and reflection. This may have been the case for the Sabbatarians as well.

Sabbatarian Texts Written against Francken and the Issues Debated

On the divine wisdom of the prophet Moses

Two polemical texts are included in the Sabbatarian codices that were written against Christian Francken and his followers. One is the On the divine wisdom of the prophet Moses and the worldly wisdom of Aristotle and the various reasonings of men that were now brought forth by the noble orders and presented as true knowledge against the prophet Moses and against the knowledge and understanding of many old saints, presumably written by András Eőssi and surviving in two early Sabbatarian manuscript collections.20 The first part of the text is for the most part a reply to Francken’s criticism of the biblical history of creation, while the second chapter targeted the three other main camps (secta) of those who were seen by the Sabbatarians as having erred: adherents of popery, the followers of Luther, and above all, the Adorantists (Antitrinitarians who accepted the adoration of Christ), called demetriades. The name of the latter group derives from the Unitarian bishop Demeter Hunyadi, who forcibly compelled his followers to accept the worship of Jesus. The literature dates this Sabbatarian text between May 31 and July 8, 1592 and treats it as a reply to Francken’s Argumenta.21

The text mentions two critiques by Francken and offers polemical refutations of them.

The first critique by Francken discussed in this Sabbatarian text concerns the person and credibility of Moses, who according to Francken (as paraphrased in the Sabbatarian text) “talks a lot but proves little.”22 This is not a specific contention found in one of Francken’s works. Rather, it can be seen as a summary of the Argumenta, as this work is in general a questioning of the credibility of Moses and the first chapters of the Bible. One finds a similar line of reasoning in the Disputatio, in which Francken repeatedly states that only those believe the absurd stories of Moses who want to believe them.23

Francken’s criticism of Moses and his laws constituted an attack on the greatest authority for the Sabbatarians. The Sabbatarian apology is trivial. It consists mostly of arguments based on the authority of the Bible: Moses was recognized as a divine messenger by the people living after him, by prophets, saints, apostles, and Christ himself. They referred to him as a supreme authority and did not correct his writings. The same is not true of Aristotle, who never enjoyed such acceptance and authority. Moses’ divine mission was demonstrated by the miracles which had taken place before the eyes and ears of an entire people on Mount Sinai and throughout the wanderings in the wilderness. In contrast, Aristotle authority was not proven by any divine miracle or extraordinary phenomenon. The divine origin of the prophecies of Moses are also confirmed by their fulfilment. Everything that Moses said came true, and this could be continuously verified.24

The second problem discussed by the Sabbatarian author in detail is the question of who Cain feared after he killed Abel, as he was the only living son of the first human couple according to the Bible.25 The answer, according to the author, lies in the characteristics of biblical genealogical tables. The author of Genesis mentioned only the genealogy of the godly, the “holy branch,” i.e. of those who were the ancestors of the Messiah, because he knew that God took no delight in murderers. This way of thinking can be observed in the way in which the text mentions that Cain took a wife but does not specify who his wife was. As a consequence, we do not know of any brothers or sons who were evil, nor do we know of any women. The first God-fearing son of Adam was Seth, who is part of the genealogical table. According to the author, another answer may have been Cain’s state of mind following the murder. God gave him “a terrified heart” because of his deed, and ever since, one who spills innocent blood “dreads even the rustling leaf of the tree,” like Lamech who committed a murder similar to the one committed by Cain.26

The author addresses Aristotle: “This does not mean that man existed on other lands in this earth.” And he continues: “God did not have another creation beyond from Adam, despite what you say, Aristotle.”27 These quotations suggest the existence of a theory of creation assuming parallel creations on different continents with different “Adams.” The “critique of Aristotel” formulated here is thus ambiguous. The surviving documents do not contain any reflection by Francken on the story of Cain, however, such an idea wouldn’t be surprising from him, given his critical attitude to the Mosaic narrative.

It seems, however, that the Sabbatarian author struggles against an allegorical theory of creation very similar to the concepts of Jacobus Palaeologus. Palaeologus, who was born in Chios and completed his literary work in Transylvania, propagated co-Adamism or multiple Adamism, a theory that presumed parallel creations (in opposition to the literal understanding of the story of creation) in his treatise entitled An omnes ab uno Adamo descenderint (1573).28 Nevertheless, he did not go so far to question the veracity of the creation story, nor did he mention this view in his later works.29

The Sabbatarian text calls the opponent Aristotle, which, according to the secondary literature, is a reference to Francken.30 It is also conceivable, however, that the author is confronted with a mixture of fashionable ideas in which, although Francken’s influence is obviously felt, Palaeologus is also implicitly present (despite their otherwise appreciative attitude towards the Greek scholar). If the promotion of this theory of creation was nevertheless connected to Francken, it could only be true in the 1580s, since in Disputatio, which was written later, Francken denied the necessity of divine creation. According to the philosopher of the Disputatio, the creation and functioning of the world can be explained on the basis of the immanent reasons operating it, without the acceptance of a concept of God, a primary reason, or the creatio ex nihilo.31

Towards the end of On the prophet Moses, the author informs us that the disseminator of these false theses denied the existence of God and the Devil, as well as resurrection.32 The latter accusation is also present in the next Sabbatarian text, and it is an unambiguous allusion to Francken. The Devil is not discussed explicitly in the abovementioned works by Francken, but he partially explains his view on resurrection and the afterworld in a short work addressed to Gerendi.33 He claims in this work that literary immortality “is the eternal life all of us must wish for our true friends… We all love the other eternal life [the one in the afterworld] but a secret natural instinct makes us suspect that it is rather uncertain and we would not readily trade one for the other, even if it were possible.”34

The Sabbatarian position follows a traditional Christian argumentation, according to which human nature (conscience and the fear of death) suggests and proves the existence of an afterworld. Francken reverses this line of reasoning, arguing that it is precisely human nature that bears witness to the immortality of the soul and the afterlife. The desire for happiness and immortality can only be a result of the imperfection of nature.35

Francken’s most provocative charge, which the Sabbatarian author does not explicitly mention though he defends his faith against it, concerned the ratio. The philosopher of the Disputatio disputed the actual use of ratio by theologians. This charge obviously disturbed the Sabbatarians, as they were the successors of an Antitrinitarian tradition in which the ratio became increasingly important and the effort to follow it became more and more pronounced. Correspondence with ratio in their view was a condition of true faith.

The Sabbatarian text responds to the charge of neglecting reason with a kind of differentiation in the concept of the ratio. This distinction between divine and human ratio appears in the title and runs throughout the text. Understanding Scripture depends on approaching it with human or divine wisdom. This is, in fact, a rejection of Francken’s claim, which is only willing to accept rational and natural philosophical arguments as the basis of the debate on religion and theology. Thus, the Sabbatarian author does not directly refer to Scripture as the absolute authority, but rather claims that the mere notion of following reason does not mean the same thing to him as it does to his opponent. Decisive authority for him is divine wisdom, which obviously includes the perceptive capacity of the mind, but also conceals the written and oral revelation that does not contradict it. Thus, contrary to Francken’s method inclining to rationality, the Sabbatarian author when dealing with religious issues may allow himself, under the pretext of divine wisdom, to use other (even scriptural) arguments that fit into his concept of divine wisdom.

As can be seen from the responses in the Sabbatarian text, the polemic treatise On the prophet Moses… is not a direct reply to Francken’s Argumenta. This finding is confirmed not only by the mention in the Sabbatarian text of ideas that are not found in the Argumenta (e. g. Cain’s fear), but also by the fact that there are no issues in it that are not present in Francken’s other works.

The Complaint of the Holy Scripture

The second, undated Sabbatarian apology against Francken is entitled Complaint of the Holy Scripture against those who started to hate it out of obstinacy, the love of the world or other reasons due to human wickedness (hereinafter Complaint).36 The first 18 arguments (out of 37 arguments for the existence of God) of the theologian of Disputatio are thematized and cited in this text. However, like the other Sabbatarian polemic writing mentioned above, this text cannot be considered merely an answer to the Disputatio, since the Sabbatarian author also fights against thoughts of unspecified origin and ideas known from Francken’s other works. The author does not even refer to a particular work, but his most commonly used formula of address is the plural “your Sophists also say,” which may also apply to ideas spread orally.

It could be claimed that the preface of the Complaint is a response to the preface of the Disputatio, but one should be careful with this claim, since Francken’s main argument against Christian theologians discussed here (that religion cannot be supported by an absolutely certain and doubtless argument) can be found also in his Spectrum.37 He asserts that the arguments supporting religion are only of a probable nature, and since probable arguments can be refuted and human cognitive abilities vary, this explains the existence of the many religions.38 He sees the reason for the existence of religion itself in fear of punishment, which suppresses the mind and allows it to be dominated by distorted beliefs.39 Although he is highly critical of religions, he does not reject them completely. In his view, religions are useful tools for society, as they hold people in check and make them easy to control.40

The Sabbatarian author formulates this utilitarian thought of Francken, according to which religion is merely a tool, with these words: “religion was only invented for the foolish people.”41 According to him, bad interpretations lead to the creation of errant religions, but this does not change the substance of God’s word. A true fact may be interpreted in many ways, depending on influencing factors and interests. He takes an example from Transylvanian social practice: if a case is taken to the Diet, Saxons and Hungarians interpret it in different ways according to various factors. However, the truth of the case is independent of the Hungarian and Saxon interpretation, as the truth stands in and of itself. One must make efforts to find the truth, the true religion, and one must look for it at the right place (that is, in Judaism).42

As a counterattack, the Sabbatarian author accuses Francken of covert atheism. He attributes to him a reduced image of God that could not have originated from the Disputatio, which rejects even the idea of a God based on the smallest dogmatic minimum, but which must have been closer to the concept of God of the Spectrum and was probably spread orally by Francken’s followers. The Spectrum still keeps a reduced, so-called Anselmian concept of God (“quo nihil sit melius aut maius” – “argumentum Anselmianum” of Anselm of Canterbury) and protests against the charge of atheism.43

The Sabbatarian charge is as follows: “You say that the kind of God you promote with your disciples and Sophists, just to refute the accusation that you are a denier of God, does not feel anything, does not talk to those on Earth, does not take care of or hurt anyone, just sits calmly and is not angry with anyone.”44 Although the Sabbatarian author sensed the difference between atheism and Francken’s concept of God, he thought that Francken’s defense against atheism was artificial, apparent objection. According to him, the existence of a God that Francken’s worldview allows cannot be demonstrated with any argument.45 The author does not tolerate any other image of God or concept of revelation than the one announced in the Old Testament. This means that, as opposed to the theologian of the Disputatio, among others, the Sabbatarian author is against the natural religion. He believes that without oral revelation, nothing is sufficient to prove the existence of a true God.46

The criticism in Francken’s works that seems to have irritated the Sabbatarian author the most was probably the one concerning Moses and the revelation of the law. It is no coincidence that both Sabbatarian texts deal with this issue at the greatest length. The first text indicates this in its title, and although the title of the second one suggests that its author defends all of Scripture, he also reduces his defense to the person and writings of Moses. The previously mentioned Argumenta is entirely a questioning of the history of creation written by Moses and of his intentions and capacities. Francken formulated his arguments in a very provocative way, presenting Moses as someone who “can hardly avoid the stamp of ignorance,”47 who “does not understand what he is saying,”48 who “demonstrates his total lack of astronomical knowledge” or “any kind of meteorological knowledge,” and who “presents God as an ignorant God who does not foresee anything,” “either because he did not know that there is also air in nature or because he did not want his Jews to know this, and he claims—not only falsely but entirely improbably—that birds were created from water”49 and “man is similar to God in body, so Moses believes that God is also a body.”50 These statements constituted an attack on the books of the Scripture that were considered most authentic and important by the Sabbatarians and even went so far as to mock the greatest biblical authority, Moses, and present him as ignorant and of dubious intentions.

In his first eight arguments of the Argumenta, Francken sets out in his objections to the history of creation with references to details of astronomy, which the Sabbatarian author formulates in the following words: “As the son cannot be born before the father, the day cannot exist before the Sun. But the Sun was created on the fourth day, so it cannot have existed on the previous three days, because the Sun and the Moon make and divide the day and the night.”51 The Argumenta states that the cause of the days is the sun, and light is the quality and attribute of the sun, not a substance but an accident. However, the effect cannot precede the cause, just as the son cannot precede his father, and the accident cannot exist without the subject to which it belongs.52 Darkness does not precede but simply follows the existence of light.53 He repeatedly refers to the relationship of the part to the whole and claims that the whole cannot be created without its parts.54

The Sabbatarian reply to this is not particularly detailed. It is limited to the distinction between “dies” and “Sol.” According to the Sabbatarian author, at the beginning of creation, on the first day, the duration of a day was determined. The day had some light, but not as strong as later from the sun. Thus, on the first three days, day was separated from night in a way that a furrow separates two pieces of land: it is not as evident as if a great stone had been put between the two to signal the demarcation.55

Not only the Argumenta, but also the first point of the Disputatio discusses the revelation, claiming that there is no evidence for it. Accordingly, the Sabbatarian response is also detailed. The Sabbatarian author seeks to list a number of arguments in defense of divine revelation, the most significant of which he considers to be human remembrance. The existence of generations and empires is built on collective memory, preserved through letters, oral testimonies, and historical chronicles. Nor can the existence of Aristotle be proven in any other way unless we give credit to the writings that perpetuate his memory.56 In addition to written memory, however, there is also an oral memory, survived purely only among Jews. The yearly festivals and rites with historical narratives served as aids to keep memories alive and pure.57 In order to prove the authenticity of the revelation and the writings of Moses, the author also tries to use psychological arguments. Contrary to the “sophist” charge, according to which Moses wrote and acted arbitrarily, he tries to prove that, like the other prophets, Moses did nothing to seek his own glory. According to the Sabbatarian author, it would be understandable if Moses had attributed the law to himself, issued in his own name to seek his own glory, but he never did.58 If the law had been merely a fiction of Moses, it would not have been able to persuade an entire people to follow it. After his death, there would have been little compulsion or reason to obey such a law,59 just as it would have been pointless to suffer in the desert for 40 years without any result if Moses had been the originator of all this. It is a well-known argument that it would have been foolish for the prophets to endure persecution and torture for something they themselves knew was not true.60 Scripture cannot belong solely to Moses, because the covenant had begun with Abraham. Moses only continued an existing tradition. If the writings of Moses had been created arbitrarily, the prophets of later ages would have pointed out the unauthentic parts.61 The author defends only the prophecies of Moses against the accusation by Francken that they were not fulfilled. According to the philosopher of the Disputatio, if the facts prove that the prophets were not mistaken, it is due to chance or the existence of magical powers.62 The Sabbatarian author, on the other hand, believes that the prophecies had been fulfilled “point by point,” and this can be verified empirically. The miserable fate of the Jews, foretold by Moses as a consequence of their disobedience, is still clearly perceptible.63

The essence of the revelation for the Sabbatarian author is the law, so it is particularly offensive to him that Francken considers biblical law and other religious laws equal.64 The philosopher of the Disputatio claims that the laws of different nations are equally useful tools of social order, of controlling people.65 Although they are not of divine origin, they teach us honesty when interpreted properly.66 Francken finds a parallel between Moses and other lawmakers who lied and claimed that they had received their laws from gods, e. g. Zoroaster from the Good Spirit, Lycurgus from Apollo, Mohammed from Gabriel, etc.67

In contrast, the Sabbatarian author believes that although divine laws (such as the laws of Adam and Noah) existed outside the mosaic law, they survived only among the Jews and the Caldeans.68 Every other law is just human fabrication. He proves this with yet another psychological argument: the omission of human writings does not have an effect on the human soul, as opposed to Scripture, which influences our soul. If you keep its teachings, you will feel good. If not, you will be filled with fear:69 “It is not possible that the dead Moses does this in the human heart, that he creates a movement and sensitivity… He bears his blessed and damned effects in his conscience, whether he wants to or not… he cannot remove it.”70 The hour of death or dying is a great sign of this functioning, as even the “atheist” feels “the sting of eternal death” and is horrified.71

The Sabbatarian text mentions several so called “sophist” criticisms related to the authenticity of the Holy Scripture which are not found in Francken’s writings. One of these criticisms was that believers in Scripture cannot even say when these books were given the names Scripture and Bible.72 The Sabbatarian author tries to give a historical answer, but he is a bit misinformed (according to him, the texts were given these names when the Septuagint translation was completed), and he concludes his line of reasoning with a logical argument: the late appearance of a name is not an argument against the authenticity of the object of the name, just as the New World discovered by the Spanish had existed for a long time, regardless of the fact that it only received its name recently. However, the answer points out that the author considers the Hebrew Scripture to be the Bible and not the Christian one.73

Similarly, the origin of the “sophist” argument that the historical events portrayed in the Bible are not mentioned by other nations is unknown. According to the Sabbatarian author, it is only natural that the revelation was given to only one nation, the nation that was willing to pass it on. Each nation tried to record and pass on the glory of its own nation and not that of others, if it knew writing at all (except the Chaldeans).74 Nevertheless, the lack of such texts in other nations does not demonstrate the inauthenticity of Scripture. Just because Mohammed does not write about Attila’s acts and Vlach (Romanian) chronicles do not mention King Matthias, these people and their deeds existed.75

Another criticism by Francken which constituted a keen attack on essential aspects of the faith for the Sabbatarians concerns the Jewish people as the chosen one (Disputatio, arguments 3–5). The philosopher argues “on the basis of rationality” that God cannot be closer to one people than to another. If he created all people, he nurtures them all. Everyone is his property, and he takes care of everyone. He must teach everyone if he wants everyone to convert. It is also clear that every nation refers to its own divine miracles and exceptional treatment, and every nation considers itself God’s people and its law divine law.76

The Sabbatarian text clearly and firmly defends the Jews as the chosen people. It mentions the usual Sabbatarian argument according to which the revelation and its interpretation were given to the Jews and it asserts the Jews the guides of the blind in this matter, but it also describes the Jews with stereotypical characteristics as an exceptional, blessed nation. They handle work and money wisely and have learned longsuffering and patience at the cost of much misery.77

To reinforce his proofs, Francken ends his Disputatio with a catalogue enumerating ten theses from ancient atheist philosophers. The Sabbatarian author saw in this catalogue the machination of contrasting philosophy and religious faith.78 He rejects this attempt by stating that philosophy is not necessarily blasphemous. Because of the oblivion of true memory among their fathers, the philosophers in question could no longer learn of God. The Sabbatarian author also devaluates his opponent’s skills and character with pejorative words, contrasting him with the ancient “sophists,” who pursued philosophical reasoning on a higher level:

But wise men with a true mind could differentiate between the grunt of a drove of pigs and the song of the nightingale. Read the writings of Coriphees attacking atheists: the philosophy of Lactantius, Philippus Morneus, Joannes Bodinus, Philo. See what Josephus answers to Appion the Grammaticus when Appion had the same opinion of Moses as you do. Read old histories that I cannot even enumerate. Were all philosophers atheists? Plato, Socrates and the others.79

Although Sabbatarian texts do not have a positive view of philosophy in general, it cannot be stated that they were expressly anti-philosophical. Towards the end of the apology under discussion, the following statement can be found: “Philosophy is thus double: true and false. One is for my followers, one is for yours.”80 The abovementioned “grunt of a drove of pigs” and the “song of the nightingale” thus signify the two kinds of philosophy or wisdom, true and false.

One long Sabbatarian treatise begins with the theoretical distinction between human and divine wisdom and brings philosophy into the discourse:

[Those erring] do not make a difference between the two kinds of wisdom, as the wisdom of this world is worldly, the wisdom of the spiritual person is heavenly… That is what Lactantius thinks when he writes: The sages of the world are rightly called philosophers, as they seek wisdom throughout their lives, but they never find it, because they do not search it where it can be found, for out of the nations under the sun God had given it unto one nation.81

This latter text gives us the Sabbatarian key to true philosophy and wisdom: the Jewish oral tradition, or in other words, the Jewish interpretation of Scripture.

Conclusion

Christian Francken’s works written in Transylvania are of historical and philosophical significance on the European level, especially his Disputatio inter Theologum et Philosophum de incertitudine religionis Christianae, the first theoretical atheist work in the history of European philosophy.82 The most significant reflection on the works of the German philosopher, at least from the perspective of the length of the texts, came from the Transylvanian Sabbatarians. Therefore, it would be reasonable for the secondary literature to place more emphasis on these polemic texts. Although the impact of the texts discussed above remained local due to their inaccessibility in terms of language and the fact that they remained in handwritten manuscripts, the ideas in these texts were nonetheless significant for the formation of a religious community balancing between Christianity and Judaism.

As is clear from the discussion above, the ideas in Francken’s writings which were made the object of criticism by the Sabbatarian author(s) concerned four main theological topics: the existence of God, the authenticity of Scripture and the law, the authority of Moses, and the privileges of the chosen people. Most of these issues, especially the last three, are particularly emphatic teachings for the Sabbatarians. In the defense of these teachings, they could not have relied on other denominations. These were theological issues which for the Sabbatarians were the foundations of true religion and faith on which they built their entire system of teachings. It is thus understandable that they came to the defense of these ideas.

In addition to opposing certain attacks on Scripture and the belief in God, the most important part of the Sabbatarian defense was that the provocative ideas claiming to follow the ratio were considered human reasonings by them. Although they may have experienced the presence of the philosophy of Francken as a serious threat and may have detected its influence, this threat did not entail a devaluation of rationality or a total rejection of philosophy by them. In the search for effective answers, they had to make their own way without the help of their spiritual predecessors. They did not choose a solution that subordinated ratio entirely to the text of Scripture, but avoided the accusation of anti-rationality by drawing a distinction between philosophy and the concept of ratio.

The interaction and influence between the Sabbatarians and Francken could not have been deep or long-term. It was reciprocal in the sense that it stimulated discussion and debate on both sides. Thanks to the law-oriented spiritual trends of the time in Transylvania, Francken was thoroughly immersed in dissecting the authenticity of the Holy Scripture, especially the books of Moses and the law. The result, in turn, forced Sabbatarians of the 1590s into a defensive stance and prompted them to face the challenges of following the ratio.

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The Making of a Catholic Parish in Eighteenth-Century Hungary: Competing Interests, Integration, and Interference

A Small Town’s Quest for Modernity in the Shadow of the Big City: The Case of Senj and Fiume

Veronika Eszik
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 4  (2021):706-736 DOI 10.38145/2021.4.706

Most of the theories concerning modernization and a number of trends in the historiography treat the big city as the most important arena of modernization, an arena which, thanks to our grasp of an array of social and economic transformations, can be made the ideal subject of studies on the processes and consequences of modernization. From this perspective, the small town becomes a kind of abstraction for backwardness, failed attempts to catch up, or a community that simply has remained unaffected by modernization. Thus, the study of the dynamics of modernization in smaller urban settlements from a new perspective which attributes genuine agency to them may well offer new findings and insights. In the historiography concerning the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the recent imperial turn has shown a perfectly natural interest in the peripheries of the empire, as it has striven to untangle the intertwining strands of local, regional, national, and imperial loyalties found there. The research on which this article is based, which focuses on Senj (Zengg), a small seaside Croatian city, is shaped by this dual interest. Senj’s resistance and adaptation to top-down initiatives of modernization can be captured through its conflict with the city of Fiume (today Rijeka, Croatia), which is not far from Senj and which before World War I belonged to Hungary. In this story, Fiume represents the “mainstream” manner of big-city modernization: it became the tenth most active port city in Europe over the course of a few decades. The area surrounding the city, however, was not able to keep up with this rapid pace of development. In this article, I present the distinctive program for modernization adopted by the elites of Senj, as well as their critique of modernization. Furthermore, the history of the city towards the end of the nineteenth century sheds light on the interdependencies among the cities of Austria–Hungary, interdependencies which were independent of legal or administrative borders. By analyzing relations between Senj and Fiume, I seek to offer a nuanced interpretation of the conflict between the two cities, which tends to be portrayed simply as a consequence of national antagonisms.

Keywords: anti-modernism, scaling urban modernity, urban history, Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Fiume, Senj

For both contemporaries and historians, the explosion of urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century seemed a fundamental process the study of which, it was hoped, would yield insights into the essence of the great transformation called modernization. The industrializing metropolis, which was expanding at an unprecedented rate, was seen by scholars (sociologists, social psychologists, historians, urbanists) as a kind of laboratory. With regards to the writing of history, this understanding of the big city has survived to the present day in an array of trends in the historiography.1

Regardless of their actual size, small towns figured in this modernization-discourse only as the counterexample of or counterpoint to the metropolis: as an ideal type, they represented everything against which urban modernity could be defined. In the eyes of critics of the big city, they offered a cohesive community instead of an atomized society, a space of serenity instead of overstimulation, breathing room instead of congestion, a human scale instead of exaggeration, a stable value system instead of a crisis of values, or in other words, a space which was thriving from the perspectives of health care, intellectual and moral prosperity. In contrast, in the eyes of admirers of urban modernity, the small town was defined by its shortcomings. As a space that had been left out of the process of modernization, it was seen as stagnant or in decline. These two visions2 thus idealized or, by simply applying the label “backward,” ignored the specific trajectories of small-town development. Apart from the top predators in the urban networks (i.e. the most rapidly developing), other cities seemed motionless, doomed to stagnation, or frozen in the pose of preservation of values, and historical scholarship rarely sought to uncover the distinctive dynamics of their processes of modernization.

In 2008, the Journal of Urban History devoted a thematic issue entitled Decentering Urban History to the problem of small towns. In the introductory study to the issue, James J. Connolly criticized the secondary literature on urban history for focusing predominantly on metropolises and for having “failed to distinguish between the metropolis and the smaller, more peripheral cities in meaningful ways.”3 In other words, according to Connolly, while there is no shortage of case studies on cities that occupy a secondary place in the urban hierarchy, many of these studies either describe these cities as counterexamples to the big city or simply insist on difference in size. And yet it was precisely the process of urbanization in the second half of the nineteenth century that made it essential to draw a conceptual distinction between “small” and “big.” In theoretical works on modern urban life, this separation of settlements into big city or small city appears at the same time as the process itself, i.e. towards the end of the nineteenth century. The long-standing topos of the opposition between nature and city (a topos often attributed to Rousseau) was enriched with a new shade of meaning when the modern metropolis began to become such a striking phenomenon in the European urban network. It was no longer simply a matter of the ways in which, in contrast with the rural lifestyle, the huge crowds thronging into the cities allegedly exerted a corrupting influence and city life in general was physically unhealthy. Now, the industrializing city was seen as a threat to urban values themselves.4 It thus became necessary to consider what made a city good and how the modern city could be good to live in. The arguments used in the discourses against city life shifted away from praise of rural communities and towards a positive reassessment of the small town, and the array of theoretical works on urbanization began to raise questions concerning the ways in which the city could be improved or perfected.5

This theoretical body of work, however, in no way compensates for the dearth of historical research which describes the settlements which fell on the lower levels of the urban hierarchy as communities which were capable of taking action. Small towns reacted to change in a variety of ways: their strategies depended on their experiences, resources, and demographics, as well as on the trades and professions in which their populations specialized. These towns offered an array of different economic imaginaries,6 mindsets that were highly dependent on the settlements’ intellectual capital. The town under investigation in this paper showed willingness to take initiative. Senj’s (Zengg by its Hungarian name)7 reaction to radical transformation was twofold: on the one hand, the town’s intellectuals turned to an idealized past to find support for their community and reinforce their identity in times of transition. This anti-modern gesture was complemented, however, by their plans for the future, an alternative vision of urban modernity which included a critical perception of the dominant model: Fiume’s (today Rijeka, Croatia) way of development. When facing change, Senj showed both resistance and adaptation, and its strategies drew on both traditionalism and innovation. The aim of this article is to examine these complex techniques, which made the town resilient to the potentially destructive forces of modernization.

Over the course of the past two decades, researchers focusing on the history of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy have realized that very little attention has been paid to distinctive patterns and strategies of small-town modernization, and they have also realized the potential insights the study of these patterns and strategies might yield. Naturally, representatives of the so-called imperial turn8 in the historiography have looked with interest at the peripheries of the empire, as they have striven to untangle the intertwining strands of local, regional, national, and imperial loyalties found in these regions. Research which has adopted this perspective as its point of departure found less that was of interest in the development of the large imperial or national capitals than it did in the histories of the diverse regional centers on different levels of the urban hierarchy. Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Zagreb came to be seen as “cosmopolitan cities with a small range of influence,”9 and they gradually acquired the accoutrements of major international cities. At the same time, smaller urban centers which did not follow the patterns of globalizing urbanism had the potential to reveal more about the functioning of the multiethnic empire.10 From the perspectives of ethnic, denominational, and occupational makeup or culture and urban planning, they may have been more colorful in the Central European context in which one of the defining elements was heterogeneity, a heterogeneity of which the homogenizing centers offered the least evidence.

My research, which focuses on Senj, a small seaside Croatian city, is shaped by this dual interest: I investigate the town’s resilience and its role in a multilayered urban network. The town’s resilience reminds us that there was life outside of the metropolises, and the role it played in the urban network sheds light on the ways in which local experiences of urban modernity and modernity as otherness can modify macro-level political indicators such as election results. There is ample evidence in the secondary literature showing that nationalist mobilization is more successful when social and ethnic cleavages overlap, but a reverse logic is also of interest. When access to modernization is uneven among different national communities, it soon becomes apparent that modernization is a power tool, and this realization can influence political loyalties as much as national feelings of belonging can.

Senj, a settlement of roughly 3,000 people, is not far from the city of Fiume, which, over the course of only a few decades, became the tenth most active port city in Europe.11 Not surprisingly, the area surrounding the city, the Croatian Adriatic littoral, was not able to keep up with this rapid pace of development. However, Senj’s response, a program of conservation and modernization, went well beyond simple efforts to catch up. Representatives of the community developed a vision which was based on a kind of middle road between the extremes of growth into a bustling metropolis and stagnation. They thus sought to transform the position of the town, which was increasingly excluded from large industry and global trade, into an advantage. This vision had elements of nostalgia and anti-modernism, but it also offered an alternative vision of the future.12 The city also used the most modern tools to propagate this vision, from the budding regional and national press to the cultivation of a thriving array of associations.

The history of Senj at the end of the nineteenth century also sheds light on the close connections among and interdependence of the cities of the Habsburg lands, regardless of legal boundaries. Although Senj was separated from Fiume by an administrative border, as Senj belonged legally to Croatia while Fiume belonged to Hungary within the dual state, its opportunities for growth and development were determined far more by the port city than by Zagreb, which was gradually becoming the Croatian national capital. Vienna and Budapest also had an increasing influence on Senj’s fate, as the two capital cities played a fundamental role in the multilevel decision-making structure of the empire. The tension between Fiume and Senj has usually been characterized in the secondary literature as a consequence of national antagonisms, but it is quite clear that everyday life in cities along the (Hungarian-)Croatian coast was shaped as much or more by their different opportunities and their varying access to the infrastructure than it was by the national question. Thus, the focus of this essay is not on the discourses of nation-building which were prominent at the time, but rather on local discourses and strategies related to modernization.

As the only seaport in Hungary, Fiume played a major role in the national economy, and the Hungarian state made significant investments to improve its infrastructure and industry and make the city competitive with similar port cities across Europe as quickly as possible.13 The rapid growth to which the city bore witness is perhaps most clearly illustrated by the fact that, between 1867 (the year of the Austro-Hungarian Settlement) and 1891, the population of this “merchant, sailor, and fisherman town” tripled, and from the perspective of the population of the city that was engaged in industry and traffic, it was the second most industrialized city in Hungary after Banská Štiavnica (Selmecbánya).14

The secondary literature has attempted to place the city, which was linked to the Hungarian crown as a corpus separatum, in the Hungarian urban hierarchy, although it is difficult to find a single category in the various classifications which adequately describes its role and functioning:

The situation and urban roles of Fiume […] were special in the Dualist era; legally it was an exclave of Hungary and the authority of its administrative institutions did not reach beyond the boundaries of the town. Being the only seaport of Hungary, it enjoyed substantial support from the Hungarian state. […]. As regards the volume of its urban functions, it is at the top of the order of the county centres […] its hinterland was nevertheless not in the neighbouring areas—from which it was separated by administrative borders, orographic obstacles and the lack of transport infrastructure, and even by language differences—but in its far-away motherland.15

This characterization of the city as isolated begs for nuance. The position of Fiume can hardly be assessed simply on the basis of its place in the Hungarian urban hierarchy. After Zagreb, it was the second most industrialized city in Croatia as well.16 More importantly, its modernization had a massive regional influence also. The investigation of the latter makes perceptible the effects of industrialization on the transformation of the urban network across the state-legal frameworks. True, Fiume belonged to the Hungarian crown, but it still played a vibrant role in the network of Croatian cities, and it exerted a strong influence on the seaside settlements in its vicinity.

This influence was mostly a consequence of the fact that all of the infrastructure investments flowed into Fiume. Through its railway connections and the development of its harbor, the city had an unsurmountable advantage over the neighboring port cities, which earlier had been in roughly the same position. Senj was the biggest loser in the concentration of resources. Prior to the construction of the railway that connected Fiume with Zagreb and Budapest (1873), the city had been a major commercial center thanks to the Josephina,17 a historic road which connected Senj with the city of Karlovac (Károlyváros). Senj resold the goods arriving on this route through its flourishing harbor. However, with the spread of the use of steamships, both the commercial and the main industrial profiles of the town were pushed into the background, and the urban elite, which relied largely on shipbuilding, lost its source of income and thus its status. In this difficult situation, the patrician layer in Senj redefined its role and developed various strategies to address the crisis. In the first part of this essay, I focus briefly on the narratives concerning this shift, including specific visions of the path to urban change for Fiume and Senj, and in the second and third sections, I focus on the solutions that were suggested.

As I shall show, the elites of Senj adopted strategies that raised the struggle of the town to national significance in at least two respects. First, Senj and the surrounding Lika-Krbava County became the core area of the Croatian Party of Rights, the main opposition force in the Croatian parliament (the Sabor)18 until the 1880s. The Party of Rights and its leader, Ante Starčević (often called “The Father of the Nation”), advocated for the integrity of Croatian lands and more political and economic independence for the country. The national movement thus found its most loyal voters and adherents in the area under investigation. Second, the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which was in almost continuous contact with decision-making circles in Vienna, Budapest and Zagreb, resolved to advance the cause of small-scale industry. The rescue of the handicraft industry seemed a prudent self-defense strategy for the industrial association of the city, which had been left out of the capitalist manufacturing industry and indeed had even had to deal with issues which had arisen because of abuses and mismanagement in this sector. This strategy was consistently represented at the national level with the mediation of the Zagreb Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

I have drawn primarily on articles from the local press, though I also examine the oeuvre of Vjenceslav Novak, perhaps the most significant writer of the region and age, as well as the documents of the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Due to the town’s extremely limited opportunities to assert political interests, the chamber came to play a remarkably important political role too. Though no archives of the chamber survived, thanks to its active maintenance of ties and contacts with various decision-making bodies (the Royal Hungarian Maritime Authority, various ministries, the local government, the Zagreb Chamber of Commerce and Industry, etc.), we have an array of admittedly scattered resources on the basis of which we can arrive at a relatively clear understanding of the work of the institution as an instrument for lobbying, to use a word from today’s political parlance.

Perceptions of Senj’s Loss of Position

Though at one point a flourishing hub for commerce and sailing ship-building and also an episcopal and a military center, Senj was plunged into crisis by shifts in trade routes and the increasing use of the steamboat, which slowly came to replace the sailing ship. Traffic on the aforementioned Josephina had begun to decline with the construction of the Trieste railway line, but it dropped dramatically with the completion in 1873 of the railway line between Karlovac and Fiume. As the table below shows, Senj had not recovered from the consequences of this diversion of traffic even several decades later. The city started to see some transitional improvements in 1905, due primarily to the strengthening of a single company, Hrvatsko parobrodarsko društvo, which was founded in 1902. Although the economic crisis of the 1870s and then the agricultural crisis contributed to the sustained decline in traffic, the major factor was quite simply the fact that Senj had lost much of its hinterland: areas that traditionally had transported their goods to the port city were able to reach Fiume more quickly and at less expense.

Table 1. Traffic in the Senj harbor, 1859–1910, tons/year19

* Concerning the interpretation of the peak value of 1905, a comparison with Fiume is useful: according to the calculations of Márton Pelles, the total traffic in the Hungarian port in 1905 was 1,500,000 tons. Pelles, “Üzleti és nemzeti érdekek,” 158.

In the meantime, the steamship had completely transformed the world of maritime trade. The fleet of steamships was not only more reliable, faster, and able to carry far heavier loads, it was also very capital intensive.20 It was precisely for this reason that the only shipping companies that were able to remain in business in the empire were the ones which enjoyed some form of state support. The Hungarian state decided to devote most of its support to two large companies based in Fiume: the “Adria” Royal Hungarian Sea Navigation Company, which was engaged in long-distance trade, and the Hungarian-Croatian Steamship Company (commonly known as Ungaro-Croata), which handled coastal shipping.21 The shipping companies which were entirely reliant on private capital in general, including the various consortia of Senj traders, were not able to compete with them. Steamships, moreover, could only be built in shipyards with adequate mechanical and financial resources, and the traditional shipyards, most of which were family businesses, went out of business one by one, not only in Senj but also in Fiume.22

The transformation of traffic patterns and industry also brought about changes in the hierarchy of cities in Croatia. Most of the 17 settlements which were recognized as cities showed only modest growth in the Dualist Era according to all indicators of urbanization. In contrast, Karlovac, Sisak (Sziszek), Senj, and Bakar (Buccari) did not even enjoy modest growth. Karlovac and Sisak were adversely affected by railway policy, while Senj and Buccari by both the advent of the railway and transformations in the maritime sector.23 In the case of Senj, demographic indicators offer clear evidence of this process, and not only in moments of stagnation, but rather as a trend in population decline which lasted until 1890 (see Table 2). Migration to the New World, a common concern for nationalists across the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia, was proverbially the most striking phenomenon precisely in Lika-Krbava County.

Table 2. Population shifts in Fiume and Senj, 1869–191024

Several of the documents of the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which was searching desperately for solutions to slow the population decline, offered diagnoses of varying lengths of the problems that the city faced. An 1885 letter to Ban Károly (Dragutin) Khuen-Héderváry25 offered a dramatic picture of the situation of the city:

The city of Senj, which was known for its famous and very busy market on the Croatian coast not so many years ago, is facing a rapid decline in trade today and, and deprived of its greatest strength […], the city fears that it will have an even darker future if some change does not save it from the fate of the other seaside harbors which were once engaged in trade but today are dead.26

The contrast with the praise which was showered on Fiume in the Hungarian press, Hungarian literature, and Hungarian scholarship is striking.27 Given their very different fates, the two Adriatic cities offered perfect examples of the bustling modern big city on the one hand and the traditional small town which was unable to keep up with its rival on the other. Of course, both smallness and bigness are relational and subjective. We use these categories as they appear in local narratives about the two settlements’ fates, narratives which repeat the abovementioned clichés about modern urban living while also offering local modifications of these general visions.

One of the most elaborate among these narratives can be captured in the literary works of a Senj-based circle,28 mainly in the writings of the most outstanding writer of realist novels in Croatian literature, Vjenceslav Novak, who was born in Senj. His 1899 novel Posljednji Štipančići [The last of the Štipančić line], for instance, offers the story of the decline of a Senj patrician family. Juraj Štipančić, the last son of this family, leaves the family house, and in Zagreb, he cannot “resist” changing his name to the conspicuously Hungarian name György Istvánffy. In several of his works, Novak deals with the problems of his “homeland,” narrowly understood, or in other words, Senj and the Croatian coast.

Particularly interesting from the perspective of this discussion, however, is the mental map that emerges from his works, a map on which the Velebit mountain range, which surrounds Senj, is essentially a line which separates two worlds. The mountains hold Senj, a town which is stuck in its traditions, in their embrace, isolating it not only from the rest of Croatia, but also from the rest of Europe and, indeed, the world. In Novak’s works, Vienna, Bratislava (Pozsony), Prague, and London stand in sharp contrast to the seaside county, the marginality of which is eloquently captured in a Croatian word borrowed from Hungarian, the adjective “varmeđinski,” an adjective which means something like “of the shire” and which comes etymologically from the Hungarian word “vármegyei,” which could be translated as county but which has feudal and provincial overtones.29

What a difference there is between a poor life by the sea and the swirling whirlpool of other human lives! […] Here, man and nature are got to know from the songs and stories born by meager hearths, while there, the human soul besieges the peaks of wealth, the sciences, the arts, and cultivation […]!30

The spaces which acquired symbolic meaning as the embodiments or symptoms of backwardness and the absence of modernity were the closed interiors and ruins of houses that had either been abandoned or were being demolished, spaces from which the realms of fantasy were the only refuge (music, the sciences, or more precisely, the study of Darwinism).31 The Senj of the last son of the Štipančić line emerges as a town from which there is no escape, an insular city (surrounded by a literal wall) with only a narrow grasp of the word outside, a place of passivity and suspicious resentment of anything new. By using this small-town topos, Novak places the city of his birth alongside the small towns of Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, or even Chekhov. Thus, nostalgia and the critique of modernization are articulated with the help of modern expressive tools which fit well into the most recent literary trends of the time.

The novel about the small town also offers a portrayal of the slowness of life in the city. The sense of time standing still is again in sharp contrast with the world of the modern industrial city, in which the sense of the fast pace of life is one of the most salient elements, or the sense of rush and hurry,32 which is even more subjective. In the city of Senj as depicted in Novak’s novel, in contrast, the bora (a strong north to northeastern wind) forces the denizens of the harbor town to take shelter in their homes, and it mercilessly tears the sails of the ships, much as it has for centuries. But this century is different from the previous ones, for this century is moving at a breathtaking pace. Senj’s exclusion from all this, of course, is a loss only from a certain perspective. In the depictions of cities in the Senj literature and in some of the local press, traditionalism is an ambivalent concept which includes not simply elements of backwardness but also the preservation of values. In Posljednji Štipančići, the lost golden age has an appealing allure, although the attempts to recapture this allure is sometimes caricature-like. The image of the city as a stronghold with a heroic military past which put up brave resistance to the Ottoman Turks and then flourished as a prosperous commercial center is clearly a lofty vision somewhat distant from the realities of everyday life. According to Valpurga, the mother in the ancient patrician family, the men of Senj were once a good head taller than the men of the city today, and the women took silver buckets with them when they went to the well for water.33 Putting the caricature aside, Senj was home to the established patrician families which had founded, in 1835, the oldest reading circle and printing-house of South Slavic countries, and the other cultural institutions in the town or the active associational life suggest that, as a community, the city did indeed try to preserve genuine values.34 Under the difficult economic circumstances that the city came to face, it fell on the cultural institutions of Senj (or to use the term which has become part of our parlance today, the civil sphere) to safeguard something of the city’s positive self- image, and naturally this local patriot effort to maintain the town’s identity turned to the more beautiful moments of the settlement’s past for affirmation.

Radiša (Brave Worker), a Senj newspaper which was launched in 1875 (but which had gone out of print within a year), published a three-part series of articles entitled “What was the City of Senj Like Then and What is it Like Today?” by theologian, philologist, and grammar school instructor Ivan Radetić. The text strikes a nostalgic tone while also rebuking the denizens of the city who were incapable of moving and who even hampered the growth of the town, “moving in crab-like steps.” Radetić writes with praise of the alleged virtues of the city in the past, including its cohesive power and the tendency to put the individual pursuit of happiness to the side in favor of the common good, a tendency which, Radetić claims, stands in contrast with the individualism of his era. In his assessment of the situation at the time, however, he does not blame the difficulties that the city faces entirely on external factors:

Because of Senj’s position, it is destined to bring commerce to the sea. The sea has raised many cities, but Senj must always have been among the first. But today, trade in the city not only will not grow, it will decline. What is the reason for this? Perhaps the railroads that were built in the area. […] The other cause of the crab-like steps which hinder the development of Senj is the population of the city itself. The old people of Senj were united in everything, they were brave, ready to work, and they lived together like a single big family […]. But now! nothing but dissension, envy, hatred, and conflict.35

In Radetić’s narrative, selfishness and the rejection of anything new appear as habitudes the origins of which are essentially the same, habitudes which are caused by a narrow horizon and a lack of culture and cultivation:

With the exception of the few officials and the priest […] the majority does not concern itself with the common industrial worker and merchant class. […] People who have never explored the big world and have never striven to see it through different eyes cannot know anything of the development which is underway in the rest of the world. They sincerely believe that if their selfish and personal aims are achieved, everything is just fine.36

Such people, Radetić seems to suggest, are easy to deceive, because they have no knowledge of the processes going on around them, and they see anyone who wants to bring about change as an enemy. Thus, the more cautious no longer dare mention “development,” as they fear that if they do, whatever initiatives they may seek to take will be severed at the roots. The newspaper saw it as the mission of the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry to foster a sense of cooperation and to bring about unified, rapid action.

The image one gets of Senj on the basis of the various sources can be described, a bit summarily, as a traditionalist cityscape, with consideration, of course, of all the contradictions in this compound word. The symbolic counterpoint to the city of Senj was Fiume, the glittery, bustling harbor city, which was seen and depicted as such in the spheres of public life in Hungary, in which it was celebrated as the triumphant result of modernization. However, if one considers sources on Fiume that are from the area around the busy harbor town, one stumbles across a very different perception of the city. In these texts, Fiume, which, in contrast with Senj, was enjoying dynamic growth and had been rapidly transformed, with significant state assistance, into a node in the capitalist economy, is not portrayed in unambiguously positive terms. In a memorandum that was composed in May 1886 and was sent by the Senj chamber to the Zagreb government and the Hungarian Royal Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, the development which Fiume was undergoing is characterized as an exaggerated, unnatural, even harmful process. The memorandum called attention to the recurring problems caused by congestion because of the limits of the railway junction, which led to stockpiles of good that did not make it to their destinations, and it drew the following conclusion: “While Rijeka is, to put it in vulgar terms, drowning in its own fat, the harbors in Bakar and Kraljevica are declining dramatically because of lack of use.”37

One finds similar perceptions of Fiume in sources from the city itself. In the periodical La Difesa, which was the first organ of the press published by the Italian Autonomous Party of Fiume (it was launched in 1898), one regularly found articles advocating the interests of local artisans and calling attention to the shift in the mindset of the city:

[…] When commerce with the sailing ship was flourishing, the people of Fiume were frugal, hardworking, and dignified. […] The change in their mentality was attributed to the decline in the use of the sailing ship, and it was believed that they became vulnerable and easy to manipulate as a result of the tensions arising from the precariousness of their incomes and the unfavorable political events. This was the beginning, it was said, of the era of grand inaugural ceremonies, banquets, and political promises, which has lasted now for 30 (!) years. Those who call for autonomy complain that the benefits of the improvements

have been skimmed not by them, but by government confidants: small retailers and artisans are out of work and are compelled, in their penury, to rely on charity, and those who own ships are more likely to register their vessels in Trieste.38

Distasteful luxury investments, signs of excess, and the unhealthy inundation of consumer goods are recurring elements of the negative image of Fiume as the city increasingly came to dominate economic life on the Croatian coast. This narrative differs from the usual criticisms of industrial centers, which tend to focus on neighborhoods allegedly thronging with impoverished, penurious crowds and characterized by unsustainable hygiene and moral depravity. The classic formulation of the latter perception of the urban world is coupled in Lewis Mumford’s work with a critique of the vision of industrialization as an indisputably salubrious development.39

Because of the distinctive features of the local context, a narrative emerged concerning Fiume which differed from this classic understanding of the city. Due to the scarcity of space, the city never really had neighborhoods which were home exclusively to the working class.40 Rather, for the most part, the industrial workforce commuted to the city to work in the factories. As new urban spaces could only be created by transforming parts of the sea into land, the square meters of space that were won through this process served functions both in the local industries and as symbols of the city’s rapid development. The natural surroundings of the city prevented haphazard growth, as there were essentially literal barriers to expansion in every direction. Precisely for this reason, an interesting local variation emerged of the critical perception of the industrial city, which did not simply borrow or recycle the tropes of the anticapitalistic phobia of urbanization which, by then, were well worn and intermixed with several general commonplaces.41

This local variation complained more about the industrial port than about industrial neighborhoods. The widespread use of the steamship instead of the sailing ship was unquestionably a change which was met with a nostalgic-romantic sense of loss and an attachment to the old way of life over the new, even if the new was more efficient and more profitable. A Hungarian doctor on one of the frigates captured these sentiments in his description of the changes that had taken place (he also notes straightforwardly that steamships are simply ugly, as they ruin the cityscape with their chimneys):

As the navy slowly crossed the sailing ships off the “list” of vessels in its fleet, the age of chivalry faded and vanished just as quickly from the sea. […] The mission of the armored ships is also beautiful and glorious […]; but it does not attain the heights of the life of the now bygone era of the sailing ship, which was full of struggle, danger, sacrifice, and hardship, but which was, above all, wondrously beautiful.42

In summary, in the first decades after the Croatian-Hungarian Settlement, the hierarchy of cities in the coastal region was completely rearranged, and this rearrangement led to new readings of Fiume, the city which emerged as the victor of this process, and Senj, which was one of the biggest losers. Both cities bore witness to dramatic changes, and these changes were met with sensitive reactions. Distinctive local versions of the capitalist critique of industrial cities were formed, as was a narrative of the “backward city,” which both bewailed the lack of modernization while at the same time placing emphasis on the alleged importance of preserving values from the past.

“Nest of Grocers, Tailors, and Cobblers” from a Sense of Inferiority to the Strategic Representation of the Craft Industry

The reference to professions in the title above is from Novak’s novel the Posljednji Štipančići. It comes from the mouth of the father figure in the book, and it has a decidedly derisive tone. It is meant as a characterization of the inferiority of Senj, a city in which one could hardly find any truly sophisticated representatives of the new urban class alongside the artisans whose professions are mentioned so dismissively. However, if one ignores the derisive overtones, the characterization is in fact a relatively accurate description of the social composition of the city. According to the 1900 census, the proportion of people who were involved in artisanal trades and commerce in Senj was very high (43.55 percent).43 Since there was only one manufacturing institution—a tobacco factory44 founded in 1894—in the city at the time (and initially it was merely a subsidiary of a parent company in Fiume), handcrafts and artisanal trades really did dominate the city’s economy. If one examines the situation in Lika-Krbava County as a whole, the picture is even clearer. Under the new county law passed in 1886,45 counties were required to submit a comprehensive annual report to the government with the most important statistics affecting the area. In the annual reports of Lika-Krbava County, under the heading “Industry,” most of the time, one finds simply the comment that, “in the absence of a railway junction, there is no industry in the county,” and the permits which were issued are listed, for the most part permits for small-scale industries (such as brewing).

Under the circumstances, the advocacy work of the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry focused primarily on two areas. First, the Chamber tirelessly composed innumerable submissions and requests for the construction of a railway junction and the modernization of the port, though to no avail.46 Over time, it took on another role, mainly through the work of its most dedicated secretary, Sebald Cihlar. It undertook to protect small-scale, traditional handicrafts from the rise of manufacturing industry. The Chamber also sought to accomplish this mission at the national level. In 1884, for example, when the new law concerning industry was being negotiated by the chambers of commerce and industry, it was the Senj Chamber that pushed for the convocation of another national assembly to be held as soon as possible, where the only topic would be the protection of small industry. The assembly was indeed held, and several issues concerning industry were regulated. The Senj Chamber was given the task of developing regulations for certain professions (for instance chimney sweeping and tavern keeping). Obrtnik (Craftsman), the chambers’ central Zagreb newspaper, regularly reported on the initiatives of the Senj Chamber.47

A law on chambers of commerce and industry was passed in 1868 which applied to Croatia-Slavonia, and a similar law was passed applying to the Military Frontier a year later.48 However, the Senj Chamber did not begin operations until 1876, making it the youngest of this type of advocacy body in the country. One of the reasons for the delay is found in the difficulties surrounding the demilitarization of the Frontier.49 Senj sought to carry out the advocacy work to serve its own interests as a free royal city and as a harbor town, and it was less eager to accept responsibility for the economic problems faced by the communities in the border region. It was thus slow to establish a chamber. The second reason lies in the fact that the city of Bakar was also a possible candidate as the seat for the chamber, so the Senj patricians in the Sabor had to fight to protect their hometown’s status. The issue of the location of the seat of the chamber was important in part because half of the members of the chamber were elected from among the denizens of the city which was chosen to function as the seat. Thus, these representatives would be able to keep local questions on the agenda, and they would be able to form a unified interest group within the chamber.50

As an institution, the chamber “functioned as a link between the state administration and the practical world of everyday life, and the chambers served as legal representative bodies of the interests entrusted to them in opposition to the bodies of state administration.”51 In the sub-dualist system, Croatia had limited autonomy in its handling of its financial affairs. With the approval of the bans, lord lieutenants were put at the head of the counties, as a result they could not really put up much opposition. Given the lack of income, the city leadership hardly had any room for maneuver, so the various forms in which the chambers were able to represent the interests of the trades and the cities constituted the legal channels through which local interests could be communicated to the various organs which actually made decisions. The given organs had to respond to them, in contrast with the problems raised in the local organs of the opposition press.

In 1888, at the request of the Lord Lieutenant of Lika-Krbava County, Chamber Secretary Sebald Cihlar drew up a proposal to deal with the crisis in Senj which was also something of a summary of his ten years of work as a member of the chamber. Though he had previously been involved in the struggle for the modernization of the city’s infrastructure,52 Cihlar clearly considered, according to this proposal, the preservation of the town’s handcrafts and the improvement of the quality of small-scale production a priority, and he did not even mention the situation of railways and ports. He presented his position as a stance in favor of the presentation of values, which he characterized as necessary due to the aggressive expansion of large-scale industry. The crisis in the craft industry was a complex social problem, in his view, because a great wealth of knowledge and expertise would be lost, as would the dignity stemming from mastery of these crafts, a dignity (or to use his word, pride) which earlier had been characteristic of the denizens of Senj and which indeed had helped sustain them (he claimed) in the face of adversity.53

After giving his diagnosis, Cihlar made four suggestions to improve the situation. First, he proposed providing a subsidy or loan of 15,000–20,000 Hungarian forint as a form of emergency aid which could be used by the “local industrial class” for the purchase and storage of raw materials. He also pushed to have the army become a permanent customer of the Senj craft industry, as “army orders would provide permanent business for artisans […]. In addition, it would encourage [them] to unite, and together, they would be better able to compete with big industry.”54 Cihlar also suggested that only artisans with a formal license should be allowed to work, as this would offer some assurance of quality control. Finally, he proposed the establishment of a vocational school, and he offered praise for the development of vocational education in Zagreb, which had been launched at the initiative of Minister of Culture Izidor Kršnjavi. Given the traditions in Senj and the potentials of the city, Cihlar recommended setting up a vocational school for the wood industry.

Calls for the protection of small industry in the face of cheap industrial mass production and its allegedly soullessly uniform production methods are hardly an unfamiliar phenomenon in the history of industry and urbanization. Camillo Sitte based his theoretical ideas concerning modern urban planning on this very notion of preservation of values, and these ideas, originally formulated in 1889, were made well-known by Carl. E. Schorske’s dramatically influential essay concerning urban architecture in Vienna at the turn of the century. Sitte argued against the rationalized space of the big city and in favor of the city community created by the handcraft and artisanal industries (and therefore necessarily less monumental in scale). One of the very clear social implications of this urban development project was the potential safeguards it would provide for the layer of people engaged in small industry, whose source of income was threatened by industrialization. Sitte’s ideas were a source of inspiration for others too. Numerous antimodernist narratives which were critical of the big city drew heavily on his arguments.55

What is most important from the perspective of the discussion here, however, is not the relevance of these considerations in the larger history of ideas so much as the simple fact that both the community of a small city and the administrative body which served as a representative of its interests came to very similar conclusions on the basis of lived experiences. They formulated a distinct vision of urban modernization which took local considerations into account, and they arrived at decisions concerning local interests independently. This bears an interesting affinity with the thoroughly-researched German context, where there was a clear parallel between the decline of the prominence and influence of small, independent artisans and the increasing emergence of a particular ideological-political posture of popular anti-modernism.56

This autonomy suggests that what we refer to as urban modernization is not actually a single, uniform process, but rather a combination of processes which are at times different both in their emphasis and their pace. In the case of Senj, for instance, the town had far more intellectual capital than it did real capital (put simply, money). While the intellectual capital of the city paid close attention to the dynamics of modernization and even worked out alternative paths, attempts to bring real capital to Senj remained largely unsuccessful throughout the period under discussion. If there was a single characteristic of Senj which would throw into question the topos of the small town as a space of stagnation, it was its intellectual and cultural potential. The episcopal seat is a case in point. The four bishops who served between 1868 and 1914 were highly educated, broad-minded intellectuals who represented the grandiose heritage of the episcopate, which had been founded in the fifth century and had functioned continuously ever since. Juraj Posilović, one of the bishops, rose to the position of the archbishop of Zagreb. Another, Antun Maurović, had been the rector of Zagreb University before his appointment to Senj. The fathers of the other two (Vjenceslav Soić and Roko Vučić) were sea captains from the region.57 Two future bishops grew up experiencing the decline of their fathers’ social standing as well as the florescence of the intellectual climate offered by Senj’s schools and churches. These figures show how a town of 3,000 dwellers can be a place of national influence and authenticity at the same time.

The grammar school (which stood out as excellent even on the national level), the very active work of the associations, as well as the literary life and organs of the press all show very clearly that the denizens of the town had access to an array of impulses that formed their economic and political imaginaries. In discussions of the complexity of modernization with regards to other settlements, it may be prudent to devote some study to the disharmonic movement between material and intellectual capital. An imbalance between the potentials of a given community and the actual opportunities it has may be a common feature of urban settlements which find themselves in the second row.

In the texts discussed in this essay, emphasis on the benefits of the handcraft industry is mixed with antimodernist views, or in other words, the advocacy activity of the chambers harmonizes with the critique of large-scale industry and capitalism in the readings of the city presented in the previous section. The case of Senj is hardly without precedent, but it has one distinctive and important feature. The main railway line, which bypassed Senj, was officially built by a “foreign” government, and Senj was separated from its rival (Fiume) by an administrative border. In the final section of the essay, I address the political implications of these factors.

The Success of the Party of Rights in Senj

It is gratifying that the Fiume periodical Bilancia has provided a prominent space for the publication […] of last year’s report of the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Bilancia has thus made clear that it is of the following view: economic expansion in Fiume has not played even the slightest role in the economic conditions in the territories represented by the Senj Chamber […], and on the basis of the report, it was not capable of drawing any other conclusion than that the circumstances in the area under the jurisdiction of the Chamber are “regrettable and embittering” because the crop was bad.58

The sense of indignation in the passage cited above was the dominant tone of Novi List, the periodical published by the oppositional Party of Rights in Sušak (Szusák, direct neighboring city of Fiume, and today part of it, at the time beyond the Hungarian border and thus belonging to Croatia)59. The article captures the frustration with the failure to recognize the process which I have described in this essay: the concentration of capital in Fiume was one of the most important factors in the economic life of the whole region.

It was easy and, to some extent, justified to blame not only capitalism in general but also the economic policy of the Hungarian government for the lag in modernization. The struggle which Senj had waged for decades for a railway connection60 and the similarly fruitless efforts to develop the harbor appeared as problems with nationalistic overtones. According to this narrative, the Hungarian government was discriminating against the settlements on the Croatian coast and had essentially usurped Fiume and made the city a tool in the service of Hungarian nation building. A discourse emerged under sub-dualism which strongly resembled the discourse which was often used by the Hungarian pro-independence opposition in the Austro-Hungarian context: among the peoples of the empire, the ruling nations were at an advantage in an unfair competition in which they controlled the imperial economy to promote their own interests, and in doing so, they prevented the other nations of the empire from developing and flourishing. The implication was obvious: the city could only hope to find solutions to the difficulties it faced if there were some change in the power relations among the major players in the larger political arena. The fact that the town of Senj and the surroundings remained an “oppositional nest” for the entire half-century of the Dualist Era is due in no small part to this insight, which also explains the fact that, by the 1880s, the area had become the most important base of support for the Party of Rights.61

The rhetoric of the Party of Rights never failed to include allusions to Senj’s bygone golden era, and thanks to the efforts of the politicians from the seaside who managed to gain some influence in the larger political framework, a circle emerged in Zagreb which represented the problems faced by the region. At the beginning of 1879, Andrija Valušnik, a representative of the Party of Rights, spoke up in support of providing the resources necessary for the proper maintenance of the seaside roads, and he noted the essential interests of the merchants for whom the railway was both distant and expensive and therefore also practically inaccessible. This issue made the disadvantages of the system created by the Compromise clear quite early on, disadvantages which included a cumbersome bureaucracy and the continuous transfer of responsibility to other administrative organs, as the Hungarian and the Croatian governments debated the issue of who was responsible for the maintenance of the roads in question for years.62

In the 1880s, three elections were held in Croatia-Slavonia. In all three (they were held in 1883, 1884, and 1887), the city of Senj sent a representative of the Party of Rights to the Sabor. In 1884, the Party of Rights won in four of the nine electoral districts in the county. In the elections held in 1887, which were infamous because of the influence of Khuen-Héderváry (who used forceful tools to ensure that the ruling party would prevail), the victory of the Party of Rights constituted a particularly remarkable feat. After the electoral reforms in 1888, the party was unable to repeat this triumph,63 but the seaside was still home to the aforementioned periodical Novi List, which was unquestionably one of the major organs of the oppositional press.

It is perhaps emblematic, from the perspective of this essay, that Josip Gržanić, who is infamous for having physically attacked the Ban in the Croatian parliament in 1885, was the representative of the Party of Rights from Senj. He is remembered today primarily for this dramatic episode, but perhaps more important from our point of view is the fact that he was socialized in the intellectual milieu (the grammar school in Senj) out which several individuals who were later prominent as Party of Rights activists also came, including for instance Fran Folnegović, who earlier had also represented Senj in the Sabor.64 Before he became active in national politics, Gržanić was the city notary, and as such, he did a great deal to further the foundation of the Senj Savings Bank. The creation of this financial institution was a fundamental precondition for the development of a capitalist economy in the region, which was difficult in part simply because the area was lacking in capital.65

Josip Gržanić was the leader of the Party of Rights in Senj in 1883, when, in the course of anti-Hungarian and anti-modernization disturbances a protest broke out.66 The demonstrators painted over the bilingual Hungarian and Croatian coats of arms on the local customs office and then tore them down and threw them in the sea, cheering both Croatia and the Party of Rights all the while. The people who were identified, in the investigation which was launched in the wake of the protest, as the “principal culprits” and instigators were all familiar names, including Gržanić and Vjenceslav Novak, but also Ladislav Krajacz, who was perhaps the most esteemed wholesale dealer in Senj and also one of the founders of Ungaro-Croata and who served, between 1886 and 1893, as the major of the city.67

The whole coastal region around Senj became one of the core areas of the wave of protests which were growing increasingly strident at the time and spreading to the villages, while the other major area where there were similar shows of discontent was the surroundings of Zagreb. This would suggest that the two large, modernized cities played roles in fomenting tensions and kindling sentiments of exasperation. In the case of the coastal region, the feelings of discontent could perhaps be explained the presence of nearby Fiume, which was seen as a display of Hungarian dominance. However, this would hardly explain the signs of frustration in the area around Zagreb. Thus, if perhaps cautiously, one could hazard the conjecture that, alongside the efforts that were being made to whip up feelings of national pride, the difficulties faced by these areas because of the transition to capitalism had a similarly decisive impact on the popularity and successes of the political opposition. This explanation seems all the more plausible if one simply takes into consideration the processes in question and the circumstances that shaped the fate of Fiume. It seems perfectly likely that Fiume would have come to play a dominant role in the region even if, in the course of the negotiations concerning the Compromise, the proposal made by the Hungarian side, according to which the city would have fallen under shared administration, had been accepted. Indeed, it probably would have risen to a position of prominence and influence in the region even if it had been put under exclusive Croatian control. Economic logic dictated that Fiume would develop very rapidly, regardless of the political constellation. The emergence of a capital intense structure (i.e. the development of factory industry and global commercial ties) radically transformed the network and hierarchy of the cities, raising some central places to new positions of dominance, while other cities, which earlier may also have flourished, would, according to all the indicators of urbanization, lag far behind.

Thus, the antagonisms which found expression in the discourses of nationalism were in fact fueled in no small part by the tensions created by modernization. There is, of course, an explanation for the conflicts which emerged which identifies ethnic attachments and passions as the primary factor, and this explanation was meaningful to the actors at the time as well. And yet both cooperation and conflict among the various (national) communities within the empire were also shaped to no small extent by the degree and pace of the processes of modernization which affected them.

This insight also furthers an understanding of the popularity of the Party of Rights among the denizens of Senj. It explains why the earlier-cited report issued after the events of 1883 identified Josip Gržanić as a figure with socialist sympathies.68 In other words, the successes of the opposition should not be attributed entirely to the appeal of anti-Hungarian political agitation. Rather, it was also a sign of the discontent of a community which was not satisfied with the central government and which felt itself both excluded from the benefits of modernization and directly exposed to its many disadvantages.

Conclusion

My primary goal in this essay was to consider the regional reactions to the growth and development of the city of Fiume, which have only rarely been made the subject of scholarly inquiry or have been presented in the secondary literature as expressions of national antagonisms. The struggle of the city of Senj was significant in the local context, but it also offers an example of how a small city formed its own distinctive vision of modernization. It thus adds a layer of nuance to the image of a peripheral city which was seen, overly simplistically, as doomed to decline. After showing how industrialization and infrastructural development in Fiume shaped the fate of its Adriatic neighbor, I examined three phenomena that can be interpreted as responses to this transformation. First, two new understandings of the city emerged which drew on the experiences of the industrial city: one can be interpreted as a critique of the modern city, while the other was the image of the traditional city which suffered from a lag in modernization or which sought to shield itself from the drawbacks of modernization. The second phenomenon I analyzed, which was tied in part to these identity-forming narratives, was the decision by the community of the city to embrace and support traditional artisanal crafts, a decision which led to concrete lobbying efforts. This task was undertaken by the Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Finally, I offered a brief discussion of the political consequences of the situation that emerged. Support for the political opposition in the region was fueled not only by the national issue but also by the socio-economic transformation. All three phenomena suggest that the social changes ushered in by industrialization and, within this, the emergence of industrial capitalism (which meant a more intense concentration of resources in a smaller number of communities) were for the people at the time part of a clear process against which, in various areas and at various levels, communities fought. Neither were the towns in the region around Fiume isolated from the changes which were taking place in the growing port city, nor were they merely passive victims of the transformations which were taking place in the emerging new world. Rather, these towns developed their own paths towards modernization.

Archival Sources

Hrvatski Državni Arhiv [State Archive of Croatia] (HDA)

Izvještaji upravnog odbora županije ličko-krbavske, 1894–1918.

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archives] (MNL OL)

K 228 Kereskedelemügyi minisztérium; Tengerészeti, hajózási és vízépítési szakosztály iratai, 1889–1911.

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Kolar, Mira. “Senjska trgovačko-obrtnička komora 1875. – 1924. I. dio (1875–1890)” [The Senj Chamber of Commerce and Industry 1875. – 1924. I. part (1875–1890)]. Senjski zbornik 28, no. 1 (2001): 153–82.

Ljubović, Enver. “Senjska luka i Jozefinska cesta, arterija tranzitne trgovine” [The port of Senj and the Josephina road, artery of the transit trade]. Modruški zbornik 6, no. 1 (2012): 101–15.

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Pavličević, Dragutin. Narodni pokret 1883. u Hrvatskoj [The national movement of 1883 in Croatia]. Zagreb: Sveučilišna naklada Liber, 1980.

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Pelles, Márton. “Üzleti és nemzeti érdekek harca a dualizmus idején: Az Osztrák Lloyd Társaság tengeri kereskedelme Fiuméban (1871–1913)” [The struggle of business and national interests in the Dualist era: The maritime trade of the Austrian Lloyd’s Society in Fiume (1871–1913)]. Köztes-Európa Társadalomtudományi Folyóirat 3, no. 1–2 (2016): 153–63.

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Soldiers in the Revolution: Violence and Consolidation in 1918 in the Territory of the Disintegrating Kingdom of Hungary

Tamás Révész
Research Centre for the Humanities
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 4  (2021):737-767 DOI 10.38145/2021.4.737

In November 1918, as in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, a large wave of violence swept across the territory of the crumbling Kingdom of Hungary. Soldiers returning from the fronts played a key role in the acts of looting that were committed everywhere. At the same time, many of the soldiers joined the various paramilitary policing units that were being formed. In the traditional historiography, one finds essentially two attempts to explain the behavior of these soldiers. Left-leaning interpretations have tended to characterize the events as precursors to an early agrarian socialist revolution, while more nationalistic interpretations have seen them as the first steps in a national revolution. Drawing on archival sources which until now have remained unused, this essay discusses the background and motivations of the soldiers involved in the looting. It then analyses the circumstances surrounding the formation of law enforcement guard forces and the motivations of those who joined these forces.

Keywords: WWI veterans, green cadres, paramilitarism, brutalization, peasant violence, revolution

On November 3, 1918, the denizens of a small village called Adony, situated 50 km south of Budapest, held a popular assembly. The crowd wanted to raise flour rations, bring prices down to peacetime levels, and abolish the food rationing system. Last and in all likelihood not least, they wanted to open the taverns and put an end to the alcohol ban that had been in place. According to the official reports, the core of the rioters consisted of Austro-Hungarian veterans who had fought in World War I. The frightened notary, together with the merchants and landowners, appeared willing to meet their demands. Nevertheless, the crowd broke into the shops during the night and either stole or destroyed everything they found. The looters only plundered the stores owned by Jews, saying that they would break into the stores owned by Christians the next day. They never got the chance, however. A police force arrived from the barracks in the nearby city of Székesfehérvár and put an end to the upheaval. Two people were executed, and with the help of the local aldermen, a national guard was organized in the village consisting of men who had served as soldiers.1

This episode offers a clear illustration of two patterns of behavior that were typical of soldiers of Austria-Hungary returning from the fronts in early November 1918. As was the case in other successor states of the disintegrating empire, the members of the once proud Habsburg armed forces played a key role in the large-scale disturbances of the peace that were breaking out. At the same time, many of them were joining the various leftwing, rightwing, nationalist, or completely apolitical paramilitary formations which were springing up all over the country like mushrooms.

In the traditional historiography of the post-Habsburg states, one finds essentially two explanations for the behavior of these soldiers. According to the socialist revolutionary narrative, the events of 1918 were antecedents to a genuine Bolshevik revolution. The people at the heart of the disturbances were allegedly (according to this explanation) seeking to create a just communist society, but they were unable to do so in the absence of a political party to lead them.2 This leftwing narrative appeared in this blunt, extreme form almost exclusively in Hungary in the successor states, it was often intertwined with a nationalist interpretation, and the two appeared together.3

According to this latter interpretation, the soldiers who were returning from the front rejected the rule of the “oppressive” empires and strove resolutely to create nation-states. For instance, in his narrative concerning the transformation of the region in 1918, Marián Hronský contends that, following the collapse of the old system, the Slovak peasantry, filled with an elusive sense of freedom, attacked their former oppressors. The fact that members of the Slovak intelligentsia were able to quell the riots offers, according to Hronský, a clear indication of the fundamentally nationalistic nature of the uprising. He argued that the people responsible for the disturbances recognized these elites as their legitimate leaders.4 One finds similar interpretations in the traditional Romanian historiography as well. Gheorghe Iancu, for instance, argues that a “genuine Romanian national revolution took place” in November 1918, which finally brought Transylvania under the control of the Romanian-speaking majority.5

In recent decades, modern historiography has tried to provide more nuanced analyses of the interwar transformation of the region. The current literature tends to emphasize the importance of continuity, especially on the local level, and it presents the transformation from empire to nation-state as a slow and gradual process.6 This trend coincides with the emergence of new innovative studies discussing the role of war veterans in the interwar period. Most of these inquiries have dealt primarily with far-right groups which formed in the ruins of the disintegrating empires. They argue that the experiences of the returning veterans during the violent months of late 1918 an early 1919 led to their quick radicalization. These ex-servicemen continued to fight against the “internal enemies” of the nation, and their actions greatly contributed to the violent political culture of the region. In the case of Hungary, Béla Bodó published pioneering studies on Horthy’s radical rightwing paramilitaries. He argues that their actions cannot be interpreted as a mere reaction to the Hungarian Soviet Republic. He claims that the atrocities they committed were patterned acts perpetrated in a time of perceived social crisis.7

The recent scholarship also highlights the important pre-1914 roots of the violence which broke out in the region. They argue that the social crisis caused by the war (especially in its latter years) catalyzed existing conflicts.8 In the case of the former Hungarian Kingdom for example Miloslav Szabó points out the continuity of anti-Semitic political rhetoric in the territory of today’s Slovakia and its influence from the late nineteenth century to the interwar period.9

Veterans returning from the war who were apolitical or significantly less radical, however, have never really been given comparable attention in the secondary literature. Jakub Benes’s 2017 groundbreaking article on the green cadres took a new approach to the study of the armed groups, active in the hinterland of the Habsburg Empire. According to Benes, “the Green Cadres represented a major rural insurgency, […] which bore the hallmarks of peasant revolts of previous centuries but was also a bid to influence, and participate in, post-imperial national politics.”10 Benes’s study focuses primarily on Moravia, Galicia, and Slavonia and offers only a partial analysis of the events which took place in Hungary. His work has had an inspiring effect on Hungarian historians. New studies by Balázs Ablonczy, Pál Hatos, and Tamás Csiki have been published on the “forgotten revolution” in the Hungarian countryside. They persuasively point out the importance of these (neither red, nor white) peasant movements in the dissolution of the state administration on the local level.11 This essay seeks to contribute to this new trend in the literature. While it challenges the dual explanation of the traditional national historiographies, it aims to provide a better understanding of the acts committed by veterans during the last months of 1918. The first section deals with soldiers who caused upheavals and disorder. It identifies the regions and places in the Hungarian Kingdom where the violence was the most intense and sheds light on the social backgrounds of the perpetrators. The second part investigates the nature of the violence. It aims to go beyond the traditional Bolshevik and national narratives and provide a more nuanced explanation of the motivations of the rioters. The third section strives to add nuance to the picture of a “revolutionary” soldier and examine the role of veterans in the consolidation of the countryside. It focuses on the social backgrounds of the men who joined the different paramilitary formations and considers their possible motivations for doing so.

The Peasant Revolution of November 1918: A Topography of Violence

Beginning in 1917, more and more violent acts were being committed in the hinterland of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Armed groups of deserters were able to bring whole regions under their control, for the most part in Slavonia. This was less true in the territories of the Kingdom of Hungary than it was in Cisleithania, but there were several groups of deserters who were active in the valley of the Vág River and the mountainous western regions of Transylvania. In some cases, rebel soldiers were able to take control of entire city districts. On May 20, 1918, for instance, soldiers who were protesting against orders to go to the front seized and, for a short time, held the train station in the city of Pécs, a regional center in southern Hungary.12

The situation in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary became critical after the victory of the Aster Revolution on October 31, 1918. Although the regime change led by Count Mihály Károlyi, took place relatively bloodlessly in Budapest, at the news of the collapse of the monarchy, a wave of violence swept through rural areas of the country. Although the violence caused by the returning soldiers and the peasantry was typical of the entire territory of the collapsing Hungarian Kingdom, the situation was the most serious in the northern and eastern parts of the country, which were mainly inhabited by members of the national minorities.13 The upheavals lasted for about two weeks, and by mid-November, consolidation had begun in the central lowlands and larger cities of the country. However, in some areas, the Budapest government failed to hold its grip on power.14 In Transylvania, the Hungarian administrative bodies in the Metaliferi Mountains had lost almost all influence over events, and Árva County (today Orava County, Slovakia) in the north was almost completely lost to the Károlyi government. In these places, especially in Transylvania but also in the northern part of present-day Slovakia and in the eastern part of Transcarpathia, the newly formed national councils took over.15 In many places, the Hungarian administration essentially abandoned the countryside and withdrew to the larger cities, where they tried to unite the remaining law enforcement units and solidify their positions. In Hunyad County (mostly congruent with Hunedoara County today, in Romania), for example, at the beginning of December 1918, all gendarmerie units were summoned Déva (today Deva, Romania), the county seat.16 In Máramaros County (today Maramureş County, Romania), on November 10, all “at-risk” gendarmes were already stationed in Máramarossziget (today Sighetu Marmaşiei, Romania). Similar measures were introduced in the northern part of Upper Hungary. The gendarmes who had been withdrawn from Liptó County (today Liptov County, Slovakia) and Árva County were all sent to Kassa (today, Košice Slovakia), and the soldiers of Trencsén County (today Trenčín County, Slovakia) and Zsolnai County (today Žilina, Slovakia) retreated to the town of Žilina.17 The topography of violence can be observed on a micro level as well. Certain sites in the rural parts of the country were especially dangerous in the first days of November 1918.

These zones of violence can be divided into two groups. The rebels attacked buildings in which there were items valuable enough to merit looting, for the most part food, tobacco, and even money. In November 1918, the railway stations were, from this perspective, the most critical sites. The riots usually started at the train stations and then spread to the rest of the settlements. The railways were prominent sites for the disturbances for two reasons. First, most of the soldiers travelled by train, so suddenly, several hundred or even thousands of hungry, cold, and often armed soldiers would show up at the stations on the major railway lines. Second, there were usually plenty of military buildings near the train stations in which large quantities of munitions were stored.18

In the city of Kolozsvár (today Cluj, Romania), soldiers returning from the front pillaged the warehouses and train cars in the station on November 1, 1918 in search of food, clothing, and alcohol.19 In some cases (especially when the soldiers drastically outnumbered the local authorities), they took the entire station under their complete control. In Tövis (today Teiuş, Romania), a city not far from Kolozsvár, the soldiers simply disarmed the railway personnel and the small number of armed guards at the station and then looted the ammunition and tobacco depots.20

Prisoner-of-war camps which had either been abandoned or which were in the process of being dismantled were also frequent targets of the people responsible for the uprisings and upheaval. Winter was approaching, so what little food remained in these camps was valuable, as was the wood that had been used to build the barracks. In the cities in which there were, for all practical purposes, no armed forces of any consequence, the soldiers even attacked the army barracks. On November 4, for instance, the soldiers in the city of Nagyszeben (today Sibiu, Romania) looted the army barracks, together with many locals. The mob stole not only the stocks in the food depots but also the cash and the government bonds in the regiment coffers.21

In most settlements, the soldiers’ most common targets were the local stores and businesses. For example, on December 11 and 12, 1918, roughly 500 armed soldiers swarmed the streets of the city of Kaposvár (the seat of Somogy County in southern Transdanubia), where they broke into, pillaged, and set fire to many shops. Between 10 and 12 people were killed in the course of the looting.22 In many cases, the looters shouted anti-Semitic slurs. On November 1, at the news of the revolution which had taken place in Budapest, in the small settlement of Tótkomlós in Békés County rioters looted shops owned by Jews and either beat or drove off the merchants they found there. They set many of the houses owned by Jews in the town on fire, and they murdered the Jewish cantor. As it was a market day, the soldiers were joined by peasants from the area, who later chanted the following anti-Semitic taunt in front of the building of the local savings bank: “Down with the Jews, down with the rich!” “Long live the republic!”23 There were similar cases of looting and violence in northern and eastern Hungary as well, for instance in Bars Country (the territory of which today is in Slovakia) and Szilágy County (the territory of which today is in northwestern Romania), and also in Máramaros.24 Although the sources clearly indicate the places where the acts of violence were committed, they are vague with respect to the perpetrators of the these acts. It is not easy to determine the social backgrounds of the rioting soldiers because most of the available sources were written by the representatives of the state authorities. They usually described the rioters as “scum,” “shirkers,” or a mob. Some sources, however, tried to draw distinctions among the particular groups and determine who could be blamed for the violence. They mostly reported that “poor peasants,” “women,” and “soldiers” were the most sizeable groups in the rioting crowds. The inclusion of the first two groups alongside the soldiers was based on earlier perceptions about the allegedly “unreliable,” “irresponsible,” and “hysterical” elements of society. The frequent appearance of soldiers as a distinct group could be explained by two factors. First, due to the lack of civil clothing at the demobilization stations in November 1918, many veterans were still wearing their uniforms even long after they had been demobilized and had returned to their home communities. These people could appear in the eyes of the state authorities as “soldiers,” an easily identifiable group in the crowd. However, in all likelihood, the veterans did not have any separate or special agenda that differed from the goals of the “civilian” peasants of their own local communities.

Second, in many cases, former soldiers were the most radical and seemingly most dangerous perpetrators. Often, their arrival home provoked violent uprisings.25 The chief judge of Zenta (today Senta, Serbia), for example, reported that, until November 2, 1918, in many settlements in Bács-Bodrog County (today’s northern Serbia and southern Hungary), “there was nothing to complain about from the perspective of public order and safety.” When the soldiers arrived the next day, however, they were joined by shirkers, and together, they “rioted with unbridled destructiveness, set fires, looted, and stole.”26 In other settlements, returning soldiers were catalysts for disorder. In Versec (today Vršac, Serbia), for example, after the military train arrived in the station, the people returning from the front immediately began to riot. Once the news spread, they were joined almost immediately by the reservists stationed in the city, as well as the civilian population.27 Unfortunately, we know relatively little about the ethnic backgrounds of the rioting soldiers. From what sources we do have, it seems that members of all the ethnic groups living in the Kingdom of Hungary took part in the instances of upheaval and insurrection. Among the soldiers who looted warehouses and train stations, one finds young men of Hungarian, Romanian, and various Slavic nationalities.28

Fortunately, the sources contain more information about the social backgrounds of the veterans. As in the case of the 1918 German revolution, most of the participating soldiers were older reservists who had spent the second part of the war in the hinterland. We can be more or less sure about this, because at the time of the uprising, the actual frontline soldiers had not yet returned home. These veterans arrived in Hungary only in the middle of November, when the largest wave of violence had subsided.29 One finds further support for this conclusion in the fact that the crisis hotspots did not break out in the western part of the country, where most of the units returning from the front arrived, but rather in the peripheral territories of the country, which even during the pre-war period had been under a less effective state control. The relative proximity of the soldiers to their homes would explain why they were able to take the side of the rebellious peasantry almost immediately and why they apparently identified with the grievances of the people living in the rural communities around them. Soldiers stationed in the hinterland knew firsthand the hardships faced by the civilian population, as they were able to keep in touch with friends and family members much more easily than the soldiers who were stationed on the Italian or the Balkan fronts, whose correspondence was subject to the censors.30

The Nature of the Violence

It is hard to determine the motivations of the thousands of people who participated in the massive uprisings in the autumn of 1918. There are, however, some distinguishable patterns of violence. Sometimes, the people involved in the riots were not motivated simply by the desire to loot or steal. In many cases, they attacked institutions or individuals who, in their eyes, represented the authority of the old state. Some of the violence that accompanied the riots remained symbolic. Portraits of the king, for instance, were destroyed and the officers’ insignias were torn off.31 In the majority of cases, however, they did not content themselves with these kinds of symbolic shows of discontent. Rather, they beat and, in many cases, killed local representatives of the government, including clerks, mayors, and officials.32 According to some estimates, at least one third of the government clerks in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary were driven from their settlements. This was particularly common in but not restricted to the areas in which the local majority population did not regard itself as Hungarian. According to the reports, in the whole county of Maros-Torda (today Mureş-Torda, Romania), for example, all of the aldermen in the towns and villages were driven from their posts. In the area around the city of Óbecse (today Bečej, Serbia) in the south, all the clerks fled. According to the deputy lieutenants in Gömör and Kishont County (the territory of which lies for the most part in Slovakia today,) in the north, in the early days of November, district clerks, chief magistrates, and in many places even forestry officials had to flee their homes.33

The uprisings among soldiers in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary followed the choreography of a premodern peasant uprising. The acts committed by the people responsible for the upheaval can thus basically be interpreted as a kind of reactive violence.34 Like the riots carried out in other areas of the collapsing Habsburg Empire, the rebellions were not intended to usher in a new system or lay the foundations for a new world, at least initially, but rather to restore a preexisting moral order, or at least a moral order that was seen in population imagination as having existed.35 According to the peasant population and the soldiers, the local representatives of the state administration had expected them to make unjust and disproportionate sacrifices during the war.

In a November 8 report, the notary of the small town of Újléta in the Great Plain described the vulnerable position of the representatives of the state administration as follows:

When the clerks were implementing the decrees issued by the state, they roused the anger of the people. They did not give wartime aid to anyone whose livelihood was secure because the government had instructed them not to. They could not exempt any individual soldier because they had not been empowered to do so. They could not give clothing to those who were cold or bread to those who were going hungry, because, in some cases, they themselves had none to give, and if they did, they didn’t have much. First, they took the fathers for service, then the sons, and they withdrew military aid from the families of those who had fallen in battle because the state had instructed them to do so.36

In November 1918, news of the revolution in Budapest and the collapse of the monarchy essentially created a chance for the soldiers to settle accounts and seek some form of compensation for the injustices they felt, rightly or wrongly, that they had suffered. In the eyes of the peasantry (and this interpretation is arguably a motif in the traditional narrative crafted by the peasantry concerning oppressors), merchants and others in the world of commerce had also profited unfairly while, in the meantime, the majority had enjoyed none of the benefits of the war and, indeed, had fallen into poverty. In their understandings of the shifting circumstances, in general, the returning soldiers saw much beyond the borders of their own villages or the areas surrounding the towns they called home. Their visions of a just world would have been difficult to incorporate into a political party platform. The courthouses which were tied to the new liberal Budapest government fell prey to looters much as the manors and castles of the representatives of the old order did.37 This sense of justice based on the local assertion of authority also explains why certain institutions and individuals were spared. In the aforementioned settlement of Tótkomlós, for example, all the shops were looted, but the building of the bank where the farmers kept their money went undamaged.38

Many of these attacks were fueled by strong antisemitism. As was true in the case of the pogroms that were committed in the city of Lemberg (today Lviv, Ukraine), there were essentially two motivations behind these atrocities.39 Clearly, some of the attacks were fueled by envy and the desire to steal. In many parts of the country and especially in the smaller settlements, a significant proportion of the people involved in commerce were Jewish. Their shops were simply the most obvious and, often, simply the only target for the looters.40

The ideological antisemitism had deeper roots in the Hungarian countryside, however, especially in the northeastern parts of the country, where most of the atrocities took place. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the new agrarian political parties, which were very popular among the region’s Greek Catholic elite, connected the economic development of the region with Anti-Semitic ideas. They promoted selective anti-Semitism against the “foreign” eastern Jews, who were allegedly “exploiting” the local peasantry and hampering its social, economic, and cultural development. The propagated aim of this Christian agrarian movement was to achieve social justice through the quick and radical redistribution of wealth, which would be taken from the “foreigners” and given to the local peasantry. This idea was often supported by the liberal Hungarian state administration as well.41 These ideas became more and more popular during World War I. The need for “social justice” became particularly acute due to the massive economic hardships experienced by many peasants during the latter years of the war. Thus, it is no surprise that the tensions that were kindled as a consequence of the practice of scapegoating the local Jewish communities for (perceived or real) social injustices became one of the main motivations for the anti-Semitic attacks in November 1918.

In many cases, the peasantry saw the atrocities as acts of just punishment committed against the Jews for their alleged sins and wrongdoings. According to the peasantry, with its conduct both during and after the war, the Jewry of Hungary had broken an unwritten social contract which specified its place in the social hierarchy. For instance, in the case of anti-Semitic atrocities committed by Ruthenian-speaking communities, in many places, news of the alleged arming of the Jewish population was cited as an explanation (or pretext) for the acts of violence (as was true in places in Galicia).

In many settlements, the word “Jew” was understood as a synonym for “rich” or for “war-profiteer,” so the acts of violence committed against Jews were motivated both by “ideological” anti-Semitism (i.e. the identification of Jews as belonging to a different religious community) and by the perception of their economic status. Though admittedly the relationships between these perceptions are often blurred. Seemingly the latter (i.e. the perception of economic difference) was in some cases more important than the former. For instance, in Tótkomlós, all the shops owned by Jewish inhabitants of the town were looted with the exception of one, the Vogel bakery, because it was the place where “bread for the poor man was baked.” The fact that the head of the family was serving on the front at the time (and thus was doing his “fair” share) may also have played a role in the decision of the locals to spare his store.42 In other areas and especially in northeastern Hungary, where many of the local leaders in the public administration were Jewish, many of the members of the Slovak-speaking or Ruthenian-speaking population saw them as representatives of the Hungarian state. In Alsóvis (today Viştea de Jos, Romania), for example, the clerk was made the target of the anti-Semitic attacks, and he was forced by the mob to resign.43 In these areas, anti-Semitism and anti-Magyar sentiment often meant the same thing, as the majority of the Magyar-speaking elite were Jewish.44 In the spring of 1919, the invading Czech legionaries adopted essentially the same logic when they attacked the Jewish citizens of the towns in what had been Upper Hungary.45

In several places, uprisings did indeed break out as national conflicts, and the change of rule was interpreted in this context. In the areas in which the majority population was Hungarian-speaking, this often meant a revival of the anti-Habsburg traditions of 1848. For example, on October 31, 1918, in the city of Várpalota, a detachment assigned to the railway station tore off the insignia on the soldiers’ caps that were signs of the Habsburg House and demanded that the soldiers wear the cockade that was used as the symbol of the Hungarian National Council as a sign of the country’s newly won independence.46 The uprisings took on national connotations primarily in settlements in which the efforts to cultivate a sense of Romanian, Slovak, Serb, or Ruthenian national identity had met with success towards the end of the nineteenth century. In many of these communities, the local national elites were at the forefront of the groups leading the uprisings. They felt that the time had come to seize power from the Hungarian majority.

In Tornova (today Târnova, Romania), near Arad, for example, in early November, two lieutenants of Romanian nationality had the local population swear allegiance to the Romanian National Council in the church. The crowd then allegedly set fire to all the houses in the town which were home to Hungarian speakers and chose individuals from among themselves to form the new prefecture.47 At the town hall of Apahida (today in Romania) near Kolozsvár, a newly arrived Romanian lieutenant proclaimed that “power is in the hands of the Romanians,” and that from that moment on, “Romanian laws apply.” In the second week of November, the Romanian national councils around Balázsfalva (today Blaj, Romania) resolved to replace the “foreign” gendarmerie (which in many places consisted largely of Romanians) with Romanian national guards.48 In Szancsal (today Sâncel, Romania), a lieutenant in the Romanian National Guard took control of the gendarmerie barracks and proclaimed that he does not want to see any gendarmes anymore.”49 The conflicts were especially violent in regions in which the Romanian-Hungarian atrocities dated back to the mid-nineteenth century. For example, in Fehér County the Hungarian elite was in constant fear of an ethnic conflict similar to what had happened in 1848–1849. These interethnic tensions were particularly acute after the unsuccessful Romanian military campaign in the region in 1916.50 The situation was not the same in all regions of Transylvania, however. In many places, for a long time, there were clear signs of cooperation rather than conflict. In many of the settlements in the eastern part of the Hungarian Great Plain which had a Romanian-speaking majority, the atrocities committed by the soldiers did not seem to be motivated by any kind of attachment to national identity.51 In Máramaros, the Romanian-speaking population remained basically peaceful, in contrast with the pro-secession Ruthenian groups. According to one report, “the Ruthenians are already openly saying that they want to belong to Ukraine, and they are calling on Ukrainian troops for help, and then they will finish with the Hungarian population here.”52 However, the situation in the Ruthenian-speaking communities in Transcarpathia was also not uniform. Here too, Ukrainian nationalist ideas were stronger among the elites, especially in the more isolated region around the town of Kőrősmező (today Yasinia, Ukraine).

In the southern parts of Hungary, the riots and upheaval were mainly caused by soldiers from the rapidly disintegrating Balkan army, which was stationed nearby. Here too, the crisis was dire, as succinctly put in a telephone report received by the Ministry of Defense from Nagybecskerek (today Zrenjanin, Serbia): “The situation is as bad as it could be.”53 There were relatively few reports of nationalistic uprisings in the southern region, though reports of these kinds of disturbances became more frequent with the arrival of the Serb military forces. In Szabadka (today Subotica, Serbia), for example, the day before these forces arrived in the city, members of the local Slavic communities in the area stormed the army barracks.54

Serious atrocities took place almost everywhere in Upper Hungary, though there was some variation from county to county and settlement to settlement. The city of Rózsahegy (today Ružomberok, Slovakia), for instance, which according to the reports was the centre of the Slovak national movement, was in a state of complete disarray (at least according to the reports). In Alsókubin (today Dolný Kubín, Slovakia), the soldiers forced the local authorities to fly the Slovak national flag on the town hall, and in Bártfa (today Bardejov, Slovakia), the returning soldiers marched down the main street shouting, “Long live freedom! Long live Slovakia!” In contrast, according to the reports from Liptószentmiklós (today Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia), the town was calm, though it was also home to a large Slovak-speaking majority.55

In the case of Upper Hungary, however, it seems clear that in most places, the arrival of units from the surrounding countries gave new impetus to the various national movements, and the Hungarian administration only vanished completely after the occupying troops had arrived in the towns and cities. In the case of the aforementioned Árva County, it was the arrival of Polish units that strengthened the local nationalist efforts, while in the northwestern region, it was the Czech units slowly coming across the border from Moravia who gave further momentum to the Slovak nationalist cause. In both cases, these units were essentially what remained of the earlier Habsburg reserve formations, which hardly constituted a significant military force, but these units often enjoyed the support of and were joined by members the national guard forces, who for the most part were Slovak. This took place, for instance, on November 10 in Nagybiccse (today Bytča, Slovakia) in Trencsén County.56 The people who led the attacks in Upper Hungary usually targeted clerks and Hungarian civil servants. 52 clerks fled Pozsony County, the territory around Bratislava alone.57

Consolidation and Mobilization: The Creation of the Paramilitary Units

Soldiers were not only the vanguard of the uprising but also contributed to the quick consolidation of power in the countryside. These Austro-Hungarian veterans constituted the bulk of the countless new paramilitary groups formed in the region in the autumn of 1918. However, these were not always radical rightwing paramilitary groups.58 Law enforcement agencies, labor unions, landowners, and even the leaders of large factories tried to hire as many people as possible to protect themselves from the people causing the upheavals. These spontaneously formed units often clashed with one another and committed bloody atrocities. In Jósikafalva (today Beliş, Romania), not far from Kolozsvár, for example, a paramilitary squad that protected the manor house of local landowner János Urmánczy from looting staged a serious massacre and slaughtered Romanian peasants. A paramilitary group recruited by Urmánczy’s brother killed at least 20 to 30 people, but probably as many as 90. All this put the Károlyi government, which was negotiating with the Romanian delegates at the time, in a very difficult situation.59

The Budapest government quickly sensed that these groups were threatening its authority in the collapsing country, and it therefore tried to regulate the spontaneously formed paramilitary units as quickly as possible and restore its own monopoly on the use of force. On November 12, 1918, the so-called National Guard was established, under the umbrella of which most of the internal security policing units were to fall.60 The organization of national guard units proved surprisingly successful. At the beginning of December, a total of 100,000 people served in some such paramilitary unit in the Kingdom of Hungary.61 One has a sense of the importance of this force if one compares this number with the number of soldiers who were serving in the regular Hungarian army at the time, which was barely 37,000. Even the National Army under Miklós Horthy, who would soon assume control of Hungary, had less than 100,000 soldiers in its ranks. Indeed, only the Red Army organized by the short-lived Soviet Republic under Béla Kun was able to mobilize more soldiers (between 120,000 and 200,000).62

There were significant regional differences, however, within the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary. As a proportion of the local population, most national guard units were formed in the Great Plain and the central part of the country. These were usually counties which had Hungarian majorities and which were relatively close to the capital. Separate Romanian, Saxon, and Hungarian national guard forces were established in Transylvania. According to reports, at the end of November, 6,616 Hungarian national guards were stationed in the region, along with roughly the same number of Saxons and about 3,700 Romanian national guards. The number of the latter may have been higher, but in all likelihood some of the Romanian commanders no longer bothered to report these soldiers to the Hungarian authorities. Most of the Hungarian and Saxon national guards served in the larger cities, while the Romanian units tended to hold the rural areas under their control.63

For the most part, mobilization was carried out not by the official state bodies but by the municipalities, in cooperation with the officers of the remaining local military formations. In early November 1918, several calls were issued to the local press. The population was called on to defend “law and order.” An article in Dunántúl (Transdanubia), a journal published out of Pécs, informed its readership that, in order to ensure internal order and peace, the establishment of a civil guard and a national guard had been ordered in all villages, because the region was endangered by “neighbouring Slavonian-Croatian gangs of rioters.”64 These kinds of claims were not new. Before 1914, the middle class had offered similar explanations for the establishment of its shooting associations, which were allegedly founded in order to protect “law and order.”65 In 1918, law enforcement guards were usually recruited in public buildings, mostly the town hall but also in the police and gendarmerie barracks. In some places, enthusiastic military officers went out into the streets and tried to gather people. In Arad (today in Romania), people were recruited by officers in cars in front of the city cafés, where the officers present held patriotic speeches.66

Rural National Guard units were usually led by reserve military officers or career soldiers who had already served somewhere in the hinterland by the autumn of 1918. Unfortunately, we have very little information concerning the individuals who joined the National Guard. Based on the few surviving sources, most of the members seem to have had similar social backgrounds to the rioters. They were older servicemen, who had served in reserve formations at the end of World War I. Many of them were already in the hinterland in the early days of November 1918.67

The mobilization of the formations established in early November 1918 followed two patterns. Most of the paramilitary units were essentially mobilized by the old elite in an attempt to consolidate their positions.68 In the more prominent cities, they were created by renaming the replacement formations (Ersatzbattalion) of the old regiments. In Nyitra (today Nitra, Slovakia), for example, the National Guard detachments were formed out of what remained of the 13th and 62nd infantry regiments. In many cases, the national guard units in smaller settlements were established by renaming some kind of gendarmerie or police formation or even a volunteer fire brigade.69 These units used the existing gendarmerie and police infrastructure. In larger settlements, national guards were usually given lodgings in empty military barracks, while in smaller settlements, they were housed in public schools or other buildings previously used for military purposes. They then set out from these locations to patrol the area. Police and gendarmerie headquarters were also responsible for providing them with food and equipment. At the head of the emerging national guard units, one usually found professional soldiers or, in many cases, reserve officers (or in the case of villages, non-commissioned officers).70

In larger settlements, the bulk of the national guard forces consisted of university and high school students. In Kolozsvár, a volunteer corps of university students was formed in the military barracks under the leadership of former Habsburg and Hungarian officers living in the city.71 In other settlements, many of the people who served in the national guard units were students in local high schools. In Nagyvárad (today Oradea, Romania), for example, the oldest grades of the local military school disarmed soldiers arriving at the train station in the city.72 The mobilization of students followed patterns which had existed already at the outbreak of World War I. As had happened in 1914, the students, under the guidance of their teachers, marched into the nearby barracks and began to perform auxiliary services.73 It is thus hardly surprising that, in November 1918, when a crisis began to break out in the hinterland because of the soldiers returning from the front, the mobilization of students was a matter of course for both schools and the civilian authorities.

However, in November 1918, some of the paramilitary units that were formed were not created under the control of the elite from the Dualist Era. In many places in the areas with Hungarian-speaking majorities, returning soldiers replaced the local gendarmerie and created new law enforcement formations. In the village of Guta (today Kolárovo, Slovakia), for example, the returning soldiers completely took over the civilian administration, and they also selected the leaders of the National Council from among themselves.74

The role of soldiers in the change of elites was most spectacular in the peripheral areas of the country. New Romanian national guards were formed in certain areas of Transylvania, mainly in the areas with Romanian-speaking majorities. The sources suggest that most of these units were made up of returning veterans, and the equipment and clothing they used had been taken from the military warehouses they had seized.75 Romanian national guard units were usually led by members of the local Romanian elite, former Austro-Hungarian officers of Romanian nationality. In Szászváros (today Orăştie, Romania), for example, under the command of a lieutenant colonel of Romanian nationality, the members of the national guard took supplies from the barracks of the former 82nd Infantry Regiment and then set out and tried to disarm the Hungarian gendarmes. Initially, the Károlyi government supported and oversaw the establishment of the Romanian National Guard. After a while, however, most of these units only took instructions from the Romanian National Council. However, this did not mean that each national guard followed exclusively and consistently the instructions of its own political leadership.76 On November 21, 1918, in Dés (today Dej, Romania), in the central part of Transylvania, for example, a mixed Romanian-Hungarian detachment disarmed soldiers who were outraged because of their pay.77 In larger cities such as Nagyszeben, a Romanian national guard numbering 1,000 men, a Saxon national guard of 700 men, and a Hungarian national guard of 120 men were present at the same time.78

On November 16, 1918, the Hungarian government tried to reach an agreement with the Slovak National Council to maintain order. The Slovak national guard forces would have had authority over the northernmost counties, while the Hungarian national guards would have been responsible for what today is southern Slovakia. It was also agreed that Hungarian-speaking officers would serve in the Slovak national guard forces and Slovak-speaking officers would serve in the Hungarian national guard forces in order to ensure that they would be able to quell conflicts that might arise in linguistically mixed areas.79

In Transcarpathia, the region which at the time was in northeastern Hungary, the Ruthenian elite was divided. In the area around the city of Ungvár (today Uzhhorod, Ukraine), the majority accepted the plans sent from Budapest concerning the creation of an autonomous region, while a smaller group supported accession to Czechoslovakia. However, in the areas furthest from Budapest, around Máramaros, the returning soldiers, like some of their Ukrainian comrades in Galicia, established a short-lived independent state.80 At the beginning of January 1919, under the leadership of Stepan Klochurak, a 23-year-old former ensign, the independent Hucul Republic was proclaimed in Kőrősmező. Ukrainian veterans formed their own guard forces, which drove off the Hungarian national guard forces in the region. Klochurak’s ultimate goal was to join Ukraine, but the state was destroyed by invading Romanian troops in the summer of 1919.81

Perhaps the most unusual self-defence force that was created in the Kingdom of Hungary in the turmoil which came in the wake of the war was the so-called Jewish Volunteer Squadron. The squadron was founded by Adolf Strausz, who learned about the anti-Semitic atrocities which were being committed against Jews in rural parts of the country in early November. Strausz was a leading figure in the Hungarian Zionist movement, and he used his contacts to recruit reserve officers and students from the Maccabean associations to the corps. The unit, later renamed the Volunteer Police Squadron, was stationed in Budapest under the command of a Zionist engineer and captain in reserve Ármin Beregi.82 According to estimates which seem inflated, by the time it was dissolved in February 1919, it numbered roughly 2,000 soldiers, including many Christians.83

The different ethnic elites were not the only groups to establish new law enforcement formations. Representatives of the Social Democratic Party, which was gathering strength, also did. After the victory of the Aster Revolution, in the cities, the Social Democratic Party created the largest law enforcement units. In many settlements, union members formed their own self-defence units under the leadership of local heads of the Social Democratic Party. In certain working districts of Budapest and in the industrial zones of Kispest and Újpest, these units were essentially the only forces engaged in and responsible for law enforcement. Here, local union leaders simply dismantled the factory guard forces, which consisted for the most part of older soldiers who served in the reserve battalions, took their weapons, and used them to arm their own men. Thus, it is not surprising that in many places the internal hierarchy of the new workers’ guard forces was almost identical to that of the unions in the factories.84 Because they could use the existing organizational structure which had been put in place to enable workers to represent their interests, these units of workers were able to mobilize much more rapidly and efficiently than other “normal” national guard forces.

The workers played a key role in maintaining order not only in Budapest, but also in many other, smaller cities which had major industrial parks. In Debrecen, for example, the largest and most reliable law enforcement force consisted of employees who worked for the national railway.85 In some large industrial centers, workers almost completely took power from the municipalities. Their best-known organization was the Zsilvölgy National Council in Transylvania, in the mining area around the city of Petrozsény (today Petroşani, Romania). In early November 1918, this body quickly put power into the hands of the local Social Democratic Party.86 According to their report, they almost immediately dismissed the military units supervising the mines, but the council of local workers and the civilian authorities were able to maintain order.

However, the important role of trade unions in setting up law enforcement units was only rarely an attempt at some kind of revolutionary takeover. In most place, the workers’ units were able to work relatively well with local law enforcement. The government leaders had few reliable soldiers on whom they could depend in the hinterland, so they often gladly entrusted the Social Democrats with the task of securing the industrial parks. In Kolozs County (today Cluj County, Romania), the military headquarters directly called on the “socialist workers” to form their own guard units and protect their factories from the looting crowd.87 Even in the aforementioned city of Petrozsény, which was the settlement which was most at the tipping point of revolution, the three-person law enforcement patrols were assembled to include one member of the old gendarmerie, one “civilian” national guardsman, and one trade union worker.88

One might well ask why the campaigns to mobilize soldiers were so successful, to which one obvious reply would be that the establishment of self-defence units was a natural and foreseeable reaction to the waves of violence. However, the situation was more complex than this answer might suggest. No clear link can be established between the extent of the violence and the effectiveness of mobilization. The largest number of paramilitary formations were not necessarily formed in the places the riots were most destructive. As Mark Jones has already shown based on the example of Germany, violent acts in given settlements are not a precondition for intensive mobilization by public authorities. If senior officials perceive themselves or their communities as facing potential threats (a perception which is usually created by rumors circulating in the press), this perception itself is more than enough to prompt mobilization campaigns.89 There was no shortage of these kinds of rumors in the press in Hungary in November 1918. On the contrary, the newspapers contained innumerable reports of murders and robberies, not to mention claims concerning prisoners of war who were allegedly eager to take revenge.90

Alongside the fear of looters, very material considerations may also have played a significant role in the successful mobilization. In early November, the government and several municipalities offered people who were willing to serve high daily wages, which must have been particularly appealing, given the widespread postwar unemployment. It is thus hardly surprising that, when there were pay-cuts, the Ministry of Defence received numerous reports concerning frustrated guardsmen who wanted to leave the force.91

The opportunity to join the National Guard may also have been appealing simply because most of the soldiers found themselves in an unusual, precarious, and transitional situation at the end of the war. They had been decommissioned, and the process of integrating these young men back into traditional (mostly peasant) society after a period during which they had been severed from their roots for several years did not seem simple. As Tamás Csíki has suggested, the returning soldiers found themselves in a liminal position for a long time.92 In some ways, the national guard forces offered an institutional framework for this transitional situation. The young men who served in the guard forces were able to preserve their military identities and function as important members of the community again.

There may have been one other important factor behind the successful mobilization of war veterans in these paramilitary formations. As the monarchy was disintegrating, local authorities were able to reach out to civilian institutions in the hinterland, such as schools and trade unions, which had a significant number of members suitable for military service. At a moment at which the state was essentially collapsing, these institutions played a major role in shaping the daily lives of ordinary people. In the big cities, this phenomenon was most visible in the case of the Social Democratic unions. In the second half of the war, with the formation of the so-called Beschwerdekomissions, the unions began to exert a decisive influence in employment services, and they often had the final say in who would remain on the frontlines and who would be able to return home. Not surprisingly, they generally showed a bias, in their decisions, for the interests of active union members. Thus, there was rapid growth in the number of organizations which represented different interest groups, and quite understandably, the people who were exempted from service were even more closely linked to their own leaders, as they had been “saved” from service on the frontlines. The leaders of the labor unions, furthermore, had already gained considerable practical knowledge, in the course of the organization of protests before the war, of how to mobilize the members of the unions.93

In rural areas, teachers and landlords usually played the leading roles in the organization of law enforcement units. They were individuals who already had prominent roles in their communities, so it was almost taken for granted that they would be entrusted with the task of leading the various self-defence forces. Furthermore, by organizing the law-enforcement units, they were able to strengthen their positions within their communities, which was particularly important at a moment which was bearing witness to the collapse of the state. This is essentially what took place in the multinational areas as well. The local (and this was true mostly in the case of Transylvania) Romanian elite may have been motivated by a desire to create some form of armed forces as quickly as possible to serve in the place of the Hungarian gendarmes, who had been driven off. This desire to create a new armed force in some cases overrode national or ethnic considerations, as even in several settlements in which gendarmes themselves were Romanians, the gendarmerie was still expelled.94

Conclusion: Soldiers in the Revolution: Uprising and Consolidation

The massive unrest in Hungary caused largely by the returning war veterans in November 1918 fits well into the general trends of the region history in the wake of the war. Like the population of the former Habsburg and Romanov Empires, people living in the territory of the collapsing Hungarian Kingdom experienced a massive wave of violence. As was the case in Slavonia or Moravia, the riots were particularly violent in the rural, distant, mountainous regions. Here, the power of the state had often been very weak before 1914, and the local administration was further weakened in the last years of the war. The social backgrounds of the perpetrators and the victims of the violence also fit well into the general trends of the region. The riots were mostly led by Austro-Hungarian veterans who, upon having returned to their home communities, became the vanguards of the local peasant movements. Unlike the Green Cadre in Slavonia and Moravia, however, these people were not deserters. They were mostly stationed in the reserve units in the hinterland and only rioted after news arrived of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian state.

The nature of the violence in Hungary is also comparable to the acts of violence in other areas of the region. The peasant-soldiers attacked the representatives of the state and the members of the local economic and political elite. In the countryside, these attacks were mostly the results of entangled sociocultural and ethnic tensions. It would be misleading, however, simply to characterize the series of uprisings that broke out in Hungary in November 1918 as stages in either a socialist or a national revolution. For the most part, the instances of violence seem to share affinities with premodern peasant uprisings. The soldiers and peasants who committed the acts of violence were not bound by any shared ideology, nor did they have leaders who they all accepted. Essentially, the acts were motivated by the desire to address social injustices, perceived and real, that had developed during World War I. The goals of those who took part in the uprisings generally concerning local issues and grievances, and the participants did not really articulate national political demands. In this respect, there were no major differences between the areas inhabited by Hungarian speakers on the one hand and members of the national minorities on the other. In some regions, however, the national and social dividing lines coincided, and here, insurgents often expressed their demands using the linguistic toolchest of nationalism or even anti-Semitism. The events which took place in Hungary did not differ significantly from the events which were unfolding in other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The acts committed by the green cadres in Galicia, Slavonia, and Moravia were similarly motivated by a desire to exact (perceived) justice on the local level. The anti-Semitic nature of the attacks was not unique either, and similar events took place in Galicia in a much bloodier form.95

The intensity of the violence depend often but not exclusively on the pre-war political developments. As has been pointed out in the recent literature concerning other cases of the region, there had long been tensions, and the hardships of war aggravated these tensions. This was most clear in the case of Transylvania, where ethnic conflicts dated back to 1848–1849 and had been reinforced by the Romanian campaign of 1916. In northern Hungary, anti-Semitic attitudes and practices had long been part of the culture of the local elites, as had the idea of taking the allegedly undeserved wealth of the Jews and redistributing it among the peasants.

Despite the many similarities, the Hungarian case has some unique characteristics. In comparison with the acts committed by the Green Cadres, the riots in Hungary in November 1918 had a much smaller impact on the country’s interwar politics. In Slavonia, some of the leaders later became legendary figures of the local folklore, and they were never really integrated into the political platforms of the newly emerging nation-states.96 In contrast, the uprising which took place in Hungary in November 1918 was more or less forgotten. There are two main reasons for this. First, while the Green Cadres ruled for months or years, in Hungary, the interim “stateless” period lasted only a few weeks. In the central regions of the Carpathian basin, the Hungarian state was able to restore its rule very soon, while in the peripheral areas, the advancing Romanian, Serb, and Czechoslovak armies had taken control by the end of 1918 at the latest. These new nation-states began to organize their public administration and suppressed any kind of uprising. Second, in Hungary, a powerful “culture of defeat” developed immediately after the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920. The story of a spontaneous uprising led by the “‘glorious” soldiers did not harmonize well with the stab-in-the-back narrative propagated by the interwar Hungarian regime.

The Hungarian case also demonstrated clearly that the return of millions of war veterans could contribute, admittedly, to the destruction of state power, but could also further the consolidation of state power. The local elite almost immediately perceived the situation as a deep social crisis, and it began to organize self-defense forces consisting of local soldiers. The general fear of a Bolshevik-type revolution and the collapse of the social order became a powerful mobilization tool in the hands of institutions, municipalities, and trade unions. They were able to recruit large numbers of law enforcement units in response to the wave of violence. The mobilization campaigns were so successful that there were far more people serving in the national guard forces that had been created all over Hungary by November 1918 than later served in either the so-called white or red guards put together. And the local elites had done little more, in order to assemble these forces, than use the same tools that they had used in order to mobilize the civilian population in 1914. This was all part of a larger European trend. In other parts and provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, large numbers of similar law enforcement units were created, building in many cases on the existing Bürgercorps.97 In the spring of 1919, there were roughly one million people serving in the so-called Einwohnerwehren, which were locally organized self-defence militias in Germany—far more than in the far-right Freikorps.98 In the territory of the disintegrating Kingdom of Hungary, non-Hungarian elites also sought to establish paramilitary units. These formations were also usually built on the former k. u. k. military units and the memberships of nationalist associations. The involvement of high school, university and college students was not unique at all. The Polish volunteer army recruited many young boys who were college and university students. The Burschenschaft students also participated in the Kärtner Abwehrkampf in massive numbers. They also followed the patterns of mobilization established during the first years of the war. Surprisingly, the social-democratic paramilitaries also consisted of members of existing communities, mostly the local trade union cells. Similar developments can be observed in the Ruhr region as well.99

In Hungary, however, many of these local elites belonged to the non-Magyar ethnic groups. They began to form new local guards which represented new national ideas and visions of the future. These were mostly established in the regions in which the local Slavic and Romanian nation-building efforts were powerful enough to gain traction and the Hungarian state administration was weak.

Due to the heterogeneous nature of these units and the rather conservative approach of their mobilization, the general fear of revolution does not necessarily seem to have led to the establishment of radical paramilitary groups. The violent ultra-masculine communities described by Béla Bodo fit into this trend, but they constituted a minority of the many paramilitary groups and formations established in this period. In many cases, these forces were led by moderate political forces and became tools for political consolidation.

In this sense, the acts committed by war veterans in the last months of 1918 contributed to the further collapse of the state but at the same time also reinforced some of its structures. These acts, including both violence and the quick mobilization was largely influenced by the ideological, economic, and social circumstances which had prevailed before the war. They not only mark the end of an era but also showed remarkable continuity on an institutional and personal level, especially in the more rural regions of the country.

Archival Sources

Hadtörténelmi Levéltár, Budapest [Military History Archives] (HL)

Polgári demokratikus forradalom katonai iratanyaga [Military papers of the Democratic Revolution] (HL P. d. f.)

Magyarországi Tanácsköztársaság katonai iratai [Military papers of the Hungarian Council’s Republic] (HL MTK)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára [Hungarian National Archive, State Archive] (MNL OL) 

K 803. 1918–1919. évi kormányhatóságok táviratgyűjteménye (1918–1919) [Telegramm collection of the state administiration 1918–1919]

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Veszprém Megyei Levéltára [Hungarian National Archive, Veszprém County Archive] (MNL VeML)

XIV. Kratochwill Károly hadosztályparancsnok iratai [Papers of Károly Kratochwill]

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Kéziratgyűjtemény [National Széchényi Library, Manuscript Collection] (OSZKK)

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Political Readings of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in Portugal

José Miguel Sardica
Catholic University of Portugal
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 4  (2021):768-799 DOI 10.38145/2021.4.768

The 1956 Hungarian revolution had a resonant echo in Western Europe, gaining large attention and media coverage. This article explores how the small, peripheral Atlantic country of Portugal, on the other side of the European continent (Lisbon lies more than 3,000 kilometers from Budapest), which was under the rightwing conservative dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar’s New State at the time, became interested in the Hungarian events, allowing them to be written about in the most influential newspapers. The article begins with a discussion of the basic context of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and of the Portuguese political context in the mid-1950s (the Salazarist regime and the bulk of the oppositional forces) and then offers an analysis of articles found in seven important Portuguese newspapers. Essentially, it presents a survey of the coverage of the Hungarian Revolution in the Portuguese press and explores how those events were interpreted and how they had an impact on the ideological readings and positions of the government, the moderate opposition, and the radical opposition of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP).
The 1956 revolution merited extensive coverage in the Portuguese papers, with titles, pictures, and news boxes on the front pages sometimes continuing into the next pages of a given paper or on the last page. The stories were narrated, for most part, in a lively, fluid, sentimental, and apologetic language. The New State in particular, but also moderate publications which were oppositional to Salazar, endorsed the Budapest revolutionaries and criticized and denounced orthodox communism in the form of Soviet repression, either in the name of Christendom, national independence, and the Western European safeguard against communism (in the case of Salazarism), or in the name (and hope) of a democratic surge, which would usher in strident calls for civil liberties (in the case of oppositional voices). With the exception of the press organ which voiced the official position of the Portuguese Communist Party, supporting the Soviet response against the Hungarian insurgents (and thus was in sharp contrast with the larger share of public opinion), there was a rare convergence, despite nuances in the language, in the images, narratives, messages, and general tone of the articles in the various organs of the Portuguese press, which tended to show compassion and support for the insurgents in Budapest because their actions targeted communism and tended to decry the final bloody repression, which exposed the Soviet Union as a murderous regime.

Keywords: Portugal, New State, Salazar, Hungary, newspapers, public opinion, anti-communism, opposition, Portuguese Communist Party, Cold War, 1956

Introduction

During the Cold War, few major events in Eastern Europe made headline news in the West. Among the events that caught the attention of people in the West were occasions in which a “distant” and “forgotten” country in the East, behind the Iron Curtain, rose to the fore and dared challenge Soviet domination. To some extent, these occasions, which included national uprisings and anti-Soviet rebellions, were a political tool with which the West could denounce the Kremlin’s international rule. These cases included, first and foremost, the revolt in East Germany in 1953, the 1956 revolution in Hungary, and the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia in 1968.

The events in Hungary in the autumn of 1956 had a resonant echo in Western Europe, grabbing considerable attention and media coverage. In a seminal essay authored in the aftermath of the revolution, world-renowned political scientist Hannah Arendt would make the following remarks concerning the uprising:

This was a true event whose stature will not depend upon victory or defeat; its greatness is secure in the tragedy it enacted [...] What happened in Hungary happened nowhere else, and the twelve days of the revolution contained more history than the twelve years since the Red Army had ‘liberated’ the country from Nazi domination.1

The fact that Hungary caught the attention of the media and the political world in West Germany (where Hannah Arendt lived by then), France, Italy, or the UK (i.e., the major continental powers and the closest US ally) does not come as a surprise. In this article, I deal with a case which, by comparison, is a bit eccentric. I consider how Portugal, a small, peripheral Atlantic country on the other side of the European continent (Lisbon is more than 3,000 kilometers from Budapest) and under the rightwing conservative dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar’s New State, became interested in the events in Hungary, allowing them various spreads on the most influential newspapers. Recalling the basic coordinates of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and of the Portuguese political context in the mid-1950s (the Salazarist regime and the bulk of the oppositional forces) and offering an analysis of writings from seven important Portuguese newspapers, I present a survey of the Portuguese press and its coverage of the Hungarian revolution, to explore how those events were commented and impacted on the ideological readings and positions of the government, its moderate opposition and the radical opposition of the PCP, the acronym for the Portuguese Communist Party.

Salazar’s New State exerted censorship over every form of media, though at times its visible activity could be reduced, because the intensity of the repression varied according to the nature of the national or international themes. All materials were read by the censors, who would cut the forbidden parts and force newsrooms to alter contents, with no blank spaces being allowed in printed papers. From 1936 onwards, because of Spanish republican propaganda pouring into Portugal to encourage anti-Salazarist opposition, all foreign publications and news had to be authorized before being allowed into circulation. Radio was also strictly censored, and only “friendly” broadcasters were tolerated, such as the state-owned national radio company and the Catholic broadcaster. When regular television started in Portugal in 1957, there was only a single channel, and it was state-owned and thus easily controlled by the political power.2

Despite this apparatus, in late October and early November 1956, “the Portuguese press became, overnight, a very free source of knowledge on the Eastern world, about which almost everything could be said or thought.”3 The anti-communist revolution in Hungary was seen as meriting broad coverage in the Portuguese papers, with titles, pictures, and news boxes on the front pages, sometimes spreading into the interior or even the last pages, featuring, in most cases, a lively, fluid, sentimental, and apologetic language. Due to the political orientation of Salazarism, which sought to isolate the country from any undesired foreign influence, the Portuguese press had few correspondents working directly from abroad and none placed in the capital cities of Eastern countries. For international themes, newsrooms relied on dispatches from international correspondents, transmitted through news agencies, above all France Press and Reuters. In the particular case of Catholic newspapers and public opinion, close international ties were held with the Vatican State, and Pope Pius XII’s diplomatic appeals concerning the fate of the Hungarian Catholics were the prime source for the faithful Portuguese. In 1956, information from Budapest reached Portugal via Paris, Rome (the Holy See), London, and Vienna, and the mere fact that papers could publish articles about what was unfolding in Hungary, quoting the political proclamations in Budapest and the insurrectionists’ radio broadcasts and reproducing photographs, shows that censorship allowed newsrooms to do this, since all foreign material had to be preauthorized before any public release. As for the clandestine Portuguese Communist Party, its sources varied, but there were underground ties with Spanish and French communist forces, chiefly with the Parisian newspaper L’Humanité (the official organ of the French Communist Party), which had its own correspondent reporting from Budapest.

Through most newspapers, during the days of the Hungarian revolution, Portuguese readers were provided with realistic journalism which used words such as “independence,” “nationalism,” “liberty,” “democracy,” “socialism,” “revolution,” “insurrection,” “hope,” “longing,” “fight,” “combat,” “repression,” “brutality,” “massacre,” and “death.” This vocabulary, usually absent from the Portuguese media in the Salazarist conservative, sanitized state, was displayed by Salazarist papers and also by titles where moderate oppositional voices were able to state their views. The vivacity, energy, and empathy of the language conveyed how something important was taking place far from Lisbon, on the other “enemy” side of Europe, worth following and commenting on. Not surprisingly, the New State expressed its support for the Budapest revolutionaries, but so did moderate oppositional sectors to Salazar. Both criticized and denounced orthodox communism in the form of Soviet repression, either in the name of Christendom, national independence, and the protection of Western European anti-communism (in the case of Salazarism) or in the name of (and hope for) a democratic surge, which it was hoped would be accompanied by recognition of civil liberties (in the case of oppositional voices). Apart from the official position of the Portuguese Communist Party, which supported the Soviet attitude response to the Hungarian insurgents and was in sharp contrast with the larger share of public opinion, there was a rare convergence, despite the language nuances, in the images, narratives, messages, and general tone of the articles in the Portuguese press and in the support for the insurgents in Budapest, because their actions targeted communism and the final bloody repression exposed the Soviet Union as a murderous regime.

The press survey below draws on seven Portuguese titles running at the time of the Hungarian revolution: Diário de Notícias (the best-seller generalist newspaper, broadly identified with the ideological stance of the New State), O Século (a generalist, more popular newspaper, also identified with the regime), Diário da Manhã (the official newspaper for Salazarism), Novidades (the official newspaper for the Catholic church), República and Diário de Lisboa (the two main newspapers voicing moderate liberal oppositional opinions), and, lastly, differing from all these, Avante!, the monthly clandestine title which was the official organ of the Portuguese Communist Party. The survey will focus mainly on sample readings from two moments in the unfolding of the Hungarian revolution: the initial hopes in the late October days which seemed to bear witness to the triumph of the insurrection, and the disillusionment and criticism sparked by the final defeat of the revolutionary forces in the early days of November. Additionally, attention will be paid to the laudatory publicity given to many Portuguese civic pro-Hungarian demonstrations and campaigns or acts of solidarity mounted by the national authorities and the national Catholic church.4

The Events in Hungary in 1956 and the Portuguese Context: The Salazarist Regime and the Oppositional Forces

In February 1956, the denunciation of Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress encouraged dissidents within Eastern Europe communist parties. In Hungary, the winds of de-Stalinization ignited old national patriotic feelings and a deep anti-Soviet resentment, and various groups of intellectuals, students, and workers started crying out for freedom and a better standard of living. Khrushchev tried to tone down the Hungarian protests by encouraging the local Stalinist party leader Mátyás Rákosi to resign. Rákosi was replaced, in July 1956, by another hard-liner, Ernő Gerő, but this only intensified audible demands for change and democratization.5

On October 23, 1956, a massive popular demonstration broke out in the streets of Budapest as protesters demanded the end of the communist rule, the withdrawal of Soviet troops, a set of reforms, free elections, and the symbolic release of Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty, the Hungarian Primate, who had been imprisoned since 1949.6 Recognizing that the appointment of Gerő had been but a mistake, the Soviet authorities allowed for a restructuring of the local government. Imre Nagy (who had previously led Hungary in 1953–55) became Prime-Minister and János Kádár became the First Secretary of the Communist Party. In the following days, from October 24 to 28, revolution seemed to have triumphed, even amidst acts of repression. Nagy called on reformists (social democrats), accepted multi-partisanship, released Mindszenty and roughly 5,000 other political prisoners, and started defending a “free, democratic, and independent” Hungary, promising to abolish the secret police and secure the departure of Soviet troops from Budapest.7

On October 29, the Soviet troops stationed in Hungary withdrew. Two days later, Prime Minister Imre Nagy went one step further, and indeed in doing so took a step too far for the Kremlin, by announcing that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. Determined to crush the Hungarian “counterrevolution,” the Kremlin decided to act decisively. On November 1, 75,000 soldiers and 2,500 tanks crossed the border into Hungary heading for Budapest.8 At dawn of November 4, they reached the capital and violently repressed all demonstrators. The Soviet invasion of Budapest lasted 48 hours, with tragic numbers. An estimated 22,000 Hungarians and 2,300 Soviet soldiers were killed or wounded. In the aftermath of the repression, 100,000 citizens were imprisoned, 35,000 were put on trial, and 26,000 were found guilty and sentenced. In the following weeks, 13,000 Hungarians were dismissed from their offices or sent to Soviet camps, and some 200,000 people (two percent of the population) fled the country.9 On November 7, János Kádár was entrusted with the Hungarian government and given the task of saving the “Popular Republic” from any “fascist counterrevolutionaries.”10 Democracy in Hungary would have to wait until the revolutions of 1989–90, more than one generation later.

The Western reaction to the Hungarian uprising was primarily determined by the ruling Cold War status quo. Notwithstanding the détente that followed Stalin’s death (in 1953), the division of Europe was “a de facto state of affairs not to be challenged through military means,” and in that division, Hungary fell behind the Iron Curtain and was deeply embedded in the geographical area dominated by Soviet rule. Thus, as historians have noted, for the West, “the costs of any direct intervention within the Soviet sphere were simply too high.”11 Even if the events which had taken place in Hungary had stirred an awakening in Western European public opinion, shattering some hopes and illusions about the Soviet model of socialism and exposing it as a form of totalitarian imperialism (to the dismay of many socialist and even communist voices), all the West was willing to do was to offer criticism of the Soviet atrocities which had been committed and make pledges that the UN would support verbal condemnations of or sanctions against Moscow.12

This was also, as will be shown, the overall tone of media reactions in Portugal, where a rightwing, ultra-nationalistic, authoritarian, conservative, and Catholic-rooted dictatorship called the “Estado Novo” (New State) had been in place since the early 1930s. Led by António de Oliveira Salazar, an elitist catholic finance professor from the University of Coimbra, the New State had survived the Nazi-fascist defeat in World War II, entering a second period of its history, from 1945 until the end of the 1950s, of internal consolidation and external acceptance.13 A staunch anti-communist, Salazar always defined the ideology spreading from the Soviet Union as “the greatest heresy of our age.”14 Thus, he was able to enter the Cold War era as a tacit member and ally of the crusade against Soviet communism, or in other words as “an anticommunist bulwark of Western civilisation,”15 allowing Portugal to become a founding member of NATO in April 1949, to enter the United Nations in December 1955, and to be a founding member of EFTA (the European Free Trade Association, a rival of the continental EEC) in January 1960, all international ties which “lessened the relative isolation of Salazar’s authoritarian regime.”16 With the consolidation of the Cold War international scenario, the 1950s were the easiest and quietest years of Salazarist rule. The regime projected an image of “benign authoritarianism.”17 The Marshall Plan financial aid fostered economic development and helped calm social unrest, and the regime managed to secure more foreign endorsements of its hold on power.18 Salazar never lost sight, however, of the necessity of intensifying ideological indoctrination and taming potential problems caused by oppositional forces.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, the various oppositional factions (including the Communist Party) had coalesced against Salazarism, trying to take advantage of the pro-democratic wave of 1945. The MUD, the Portuguese acronym for the Democratic Unity Movement, was created and briefly tolerated by the regime, and the upsurge of anti-Salazarism lasted until 1949, when the opposition rallied around the presidential candidacy of General Norton de Matos. But after those initial collaborative strategies, the various sectors of the opposition seemed divided, withdrawn, and demobilized, and they had a diminished capacity to intervene.19 The consolidation of the Cold War, which split Europe and the World in half and sparked new conflicts (like the Korean War of 1950–53), led to the growing distancing between Portuguese communists and all the other oppositional forces.

The Portuguese oppositional field was indeed plural rather than singular, with dividing lines whose rigidity or fluidity varied over the course of the decade.20 Two major factions can be identified: the broad spectrum of the moderate, non-communist opposition and the clandestine opposition of the Portuguese Communist Party. Tolerated by Salazar as a sort of a “semi-legal and controlled political competition,”21 the moderate opposition was a set of liberal and old republican voices mixed with younger socialist voices, the former rallying around the so-called DDS (the Portuguese acronym for Social-Democrat Directory), led by prestigious figures such as António Sérgio, Mário de Azevedo Gomes, Jaime Cortesão, and Francisco Cunha Leal, the latter consisting of the so-called RRS (the Portuguese acronym for Socialist-Republican Resistance), led by emerging figures such as Piteira Santos and Mário Soares.22 They all voiced support for Western-type democracies, and they repudiated totalitarian communism and tried to foster a peaceful (electoral) evolution for a post-Salazarist path.23 Among their ranks, a lively debate went on concerning whether or not to seek or accept communist cooperation, since doing so would render them less tolerable in the eyes of the regime and thus make it more difficult for them to attract Salazarist dissidents.24

Persecuted as an “illegal, clandestine, and radical”25 opposition, the PCP had been created in March 1921, and it was later one of the forces fighting against Salazar’s ascent to power. Deemed an “atheist,” “revolutionary,” and “foreign” negative influence by the New State, the PCP was able to survive underground, with secret passwords and informants, a ciphered language, and some discreet typographies, and the party was able to keep a monthly newspaper entitled Avante! in circulation.26 The communist opposition went through two different periods in the 1950s. In the first half of the decade, following the capture and arrest of Álvaro Cunhal, PCP’s key figure, by the political police (in 1949), communists were dominated by internal sectarianism, ideological dogma, persecution, and purges, and the party became increasing isolated from and closed off to other oppositional factions as it clung to its revolutionary plans to overthrow Salazarism without first forging any “anti-fascist” unity.27 But in the aftermath of Stalin’s death, the international détente, and its tone of peaceful cohabitation between the two blocs, the PCP adopted a new strategy that would dominate the second half of the decade, seeking to overcome sectarianism and opening collaborative platforms with all oppositional forces in search of what was termed a “peaceful solution to the Portuguese problem.”28 This internal détente, this “transitional policy,” this openness, which was later characterized as a “rightist deviation,” was a reaction against the isolation and weakness felt inside the party and was also significantly influenced by a parallel path followed by the Spanish Communist Party.29

Such an ideological shift was introduced during the PCP’s Central Committee meeting of August 1955, where it was advocated by Júlio de Melo Fogaça, who essentially had replaced Cunhal as the leading name in the Party.30 This is why some historians contend that the PCP anticipated some of the main conclusions of the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress of February 1956, i.e., de-Stalinization, peaceful coexistence, parliamentary transition towards socialism, and collaborative platforms among communists, social-democrats, and liberals.31 In April 1956, the Portuguese and Spanish communists issued a joint note defending “peaceful,” “democratic solutions” for their countries through the rallying of the “broadest social and political forces” that opposed both Salazar and Franco.32 In October of that year, perhaps coinciding with the Hungarian uprising, the Portuguese communist Central Committee issued a document conveying the new acting line of a “vast anti-Salazarist electoral front,” which could even extend to Catholics and dissidents from fascism, and expressing criticism of past sectarian positions.33 The party’s official program in the PCP’s V (clandestine) Congress, which was held in September 1957, confirmed this line.34 Less than a year later, in June 1958, this oppositional catch-all platform would coalesce behind General Humberto Delgado and his daring campaign in the presidential elections, won, through electoral fraud, by the regime’s candidate, Admiral Américo Tomás.35 Had the Portuguese Communist Party maintained such a reformist and collaborative approach, it could have been converted into what would later be labelled a “euro-communist” party, like many similar parties in Europe, escaping the tight orthodox grip of Moscow’s tutelage.36 But in the early 1960s, Álvaro Cunhal, having escaped from prison, where he had been a critic of Fogaça’s “rightist deviation,” reentered the communist leadership and cut short that evolving path, reinstating the isolationist strategy of an armed revolution against the ageing Salazarist regime.37

Other shades or factions of opposition were also surfacing in the late 1950s. A diffuse student protest movement emerged in universities and high schools, rising to the fore and gaining the attention of the public news outlets in December 1956, when a large part of the Portuguese youth opposed a decree that threatened the autonomy of academic associations. Protesting against this was a mixture of non-partisan students, alongside others who were militants of the RRS, the PCP, and even Catholic Universitarian Youths.38 Students and Catholics would also react to the 1956 Hungarian events and show their support for the revolutionaries (as I will discuss), but their strength as an oppositional force (the latter under the label of “Progressive Catholics”) would be much more recognizable as a phenomenon in the 1960s.39

A solid postwar and internationally recognized dictatorial regime facing a feeble opposition comprised of different actors who were divided between a collaborative anti-Salazarist strategy and separate legal or revolutionary options—this was the overall portrait of the Portuguese political scenario in the 1950s. How strong was Salazar’s position, both in the international arena and within the national context? How determined and effective could the tolerated moderate opposition be? To what extent would the communist party actually be open to other elements of the anti-Salazarist front? These issues and others influenced how the Hungarian events were received, interpreted, and instrumentalized in Portugal in 1956 by the various commentators.

The Salazarist and Catholic Press Coverage of the Events in Hungary

In late October and early November 1956, three international themes made the headlines in the majority of the Portuguese press: the Suez crisis, which brought Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism in Egypt into direct confrontation with Israel, the UK, and France; Eisenhower’s reelection campaign in the United States; and the Hungarian revolution. In particular in the tense days when Budapest was the stage of confrontations between pro-democrats and Soviet forces, the Hungarian events were the domineering theme, overshadowing the other two international issues, especially within the pro-Salazarist and traditionally Catholic press, for which, clearly, Hungarian events offered an important “propagandistic breath” for a renewed “anti-communist campaign.”40

The Hungarian events were first reported on in the pro-regime newspapers in an ideological editorial published on October 23 in Diário de Notícias. The editorial, which bore the literary title “Something new on the Eastern front,” offered an analysis of the eroding dynamics of communism:

There is an evident crisis in Russia. The gigantism of the Stalinist massive construction is under severe threat […] Stalin was a bloody tsar, no doubt. But his tyranny represented unity. A harsh unity through asphyxia, but unity nevertheless [...] It would be absurd not to consider, within Western defense policy, this transformative tendency, not for premature celebrations, but for the consolidation of Western solidarity.41

Two days later, an article entitled “Budapest in Flames” (which included two photos of Rákóczi Avenue in Budapest), offered a narrative of the fighting in various areas of the city, with explicit mention of the hundreds of dead and wounded. Considerable attention was given to the symbolic act of the destruction of Stalin’s statue and to the use of unmarked Hungarian military uniforms and flags.42 Imre Nagy, the newly appointed Prime Minister, defined as “a liberal communist,” was quoted as saying that he would be enforcing “a program for the liberalization of Hungarian communism.”43 In O Século, the tone was the same, though the approach was more sensationalistic, with a large picture of Budapest’s parliament square under the “horrors” (“10,000 victims”) committed by “the Red Army.” News from Moscow made references to pressure on Khrushchev, since the Hungarian uprisings were allegedly “direct consequences of the liberalizing policies of de-Stalinization.” It thus seemed that the “democratization of Hungarian public life” was underway, especially because of the announced withdrawal of Soviet forces and the “end of repression and the political police.”44 On October 29, after the initial confrontations between revolutionaries and state authorities in Hungary, considerable space was given to international reactions to what apparently had been a victory for the insurgents. According to Nagy, events in Hungary should be understood as “a democratic movement to guarantee our independence, which is the only basis of a true socialist democracy.”45

Diário da Manhã and Novidades, the official newspapers of the regime and the Catholic Church in Portugal, adopted more conservative approaches to their reporting on the Hungarian revolution, but they were unambiguously supportive of the revolutionary forces. In an editorial by Jacques Ploncard d’Assac (a French far-right activist and counsellor to Salazar) entitled “the Red Danube,” the Portuguese readership was informed of how

[t]he Budapest leaders were surprised and surpassed by the violence of a truly nationalistic uprising. The Communist party soon understood that if such a rebellion was not immediately crushed in blood, the Hungarian communist regime would suffer the same fate experienced, 37 years ago, by Béla Kun’s first Hungarian Soviet republic.46

Instead of praising Nagy, whose “democracy” and “reformed socialism” were too radical for Salazar, publicity was given rather to both the “valiant people” of Hungary, the figure of Cardinal Mindszenty, and to Mindszenty’s radio appeals to the UN and Western powers for support. In accordance, the Portuguese Catholic Church publicly called for a mass to be celebrated in Lisbon for “the sufferings of the Hungarian heroes killed in the largest tragedy in our recent times” and for “the liberation of all the peoples enslaved by Moscow’s tyranny.”47

The counterattack launched by the Soviet forces, which invaded Hungary and smothered the nationalistic uprising, was given even greater attention by the Portuguese newspapers. Diário de Notícias informed its readers that “Hungary is totally occupied by the Soviet army, which yesterday at dawn invaded the country with massive forces,” and it offered dramatic claims concerning the pleas made by the victims: “We will be massacred”; “God save our souls.” Such “unmatched ferocity” deserved harsh international criticism, and the article quoted Adenauer’s plea for the Hungarians and Eisenhower’s urgent message to Nikolai Bulganin, the Premier of Soviet Union under Khrushchev.48 According to O Século, “Western public opinion” was unanimous in its “indignation,” condemning “in unprecedented terms the brutality and cynicism of the Soviet Union,” because the “Hungarians fought with astonishing energy [and were] willing to resist until death.”49 Large titles filled the Novidades: “Budapest is a huge brazier after massive Soviet attack.” The Vatican Radio was quoted as having said that “violence is the true spirit of communism.” And in its reporting on Cardinal Mindszenty’s decision to take refuge in the American Legation and how the Portuguese episcopate was calling for a day’s prayer for the Hungarians, the paper explained that the “humane” intentions of the Nagy government had been overthrown by a “killing machine” totally alien to any concern for “human dignity” or “respect for the will of the people.”50 Diário da Manhã offered doctrinal considerations concerning each nation’s due legitimacy in fulfilling its political self-determination:

At this moment in Hungary, one of the greatest acts of violence recorded in the saddest pages of modern history was committed, violence exercised in the name of an ideology which, even bringing with it a disgusting flow of atrocities, overcomes itself by refusing to accept that a people, entitled to its destiny, can repudiate it and expel it.51

The extinguishing of the “Nagy hope” was attentively and empathically followed not only by political and Catholic circles in Portugal but also by the broader readership of the organs of the press. On November 6, a spontaneous crowd of some 20,000 to 30,000 people filled Rossio Square in downtown Lisbon and marched up to the Portuguese parliament holding Hungarian flags, “singing in tears,” and “voicing loudly” their disgust and their solidarity with the massacred people of Hungary, with banners reading “Hungary wants freedom,” “Down with the Soviet aggression,” “Tanks cannot withstand a people’s soul,” and “Hungarian colleagues are martyrs.”52 A picture of Rossio and another of the Portuguese parliament square showed “a sea of people tarnished by indignation and demanding freedom for Hungary.”53 Portuguese Cáritas, a Catholic relief organization, had already received money (400,000 escudos), food, and clothing to send to the Hungarians by air using transportation granted by Swissair and also some 1,900 letters from all corners of Portugal praising the Hungarian cause.54 Appeals were made everywhere for the Salazarist government officially to condemn “in strong terms every cruel act committed by the invading army against the courageous people of Hungary.”55

The Portuguese government reacted by having the secretary of the Premiership issue a press declaration and also by making a formal declaration of the Council of Ministers. In the first, entitled “Portugal will be present wherever help can be given to oppressed Hungary,” the popular demonstrations in the country were greeted and very critical terms were used against Moscow:

The perfidious and sinister intervention of the Soviet Union in Hungary provoked the greatest revulsion and emotion in all the countries of the civilized world [...] The Lusitanian soul could not contain itself without letting out its cry of revolt against the infamous affront launched by the savage Russians, whose ultimate goal is to establish world domination.56

The next day, Salazar and his entire government were cited as having made a “condemnation of the Soviet aggression against Hungary” and a public offer of “every possible form of support by the Portuguese nation for the victims of Russian repression.”57 The Ministry of Defense allowed an arms parade in the Military College, with the flags of Portugal and Hungary side by side, and the Portuguese Legion (the paramilitary organization created to protect the country against the Spanish “red threat” of 1936) was instructed to collaborate with the Portuguese Red Cross in the collection of donations destined for the Hungarian people.58

The Hungarian events were carefully used by the Portuguese ruling power to issue political messages to the public and even to perform a planned indoctrination of the crowds supportive of the Salazarist regime. Addressing the pro-Hungarian demonstrators in Lisbon, Marcelo Caetano, who held the unofficial post of vice-Prime-Minister and would later succeed Salazar (in 1968), was clear about these intentions:

We are an old nation, deeply rooted in the sacred ideals of God, Homeland, and Family, ideals for which the Hungarian people has fought with valorous despair. Like Hungary, we hate any foreign dominance and any system destructive of human personality. We have witnessed with hope and anguish the Hungarian drama—which resembles the dramas of so many other countries submitted through violence to communist tyranny. One should learn the lesson that matters: to stand for the nation’s liberty, defending the civilization that we hold dear and opposing the propagation of ideologies which offend this [civilization] and the spread of imperialisms threatening our world.59

The Portuguese Catholic church was proactive in the aftermath of the Hungarian bloodshed, in no small part because of its solidarity with Mindszenty. Catholic scouts rallied parishes in Lisbon, Oporto, and elsewhere to pray for a people (the Hungarians) defined as “martyrs of faith and of human liberty.”60 At the highest level, and in accordance with the universal pledge issued by Pope Pius XII,61 the Cardinal Patriarch, Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, called for an appeal for solidarity to be made in every mass and for a “crusade of prayer” to be held in the Marian sanctuary of Fátima on November 18, solemnly to invoke “the protection of Holy Mary” for European peace and for the “sacrificed nation of Hungary.”62

The official resolution of the Portuguese cabinet to condemn the invasion of Hungary and the solace of faith offered by the episcope and a myriad of acts by the Catholic Church in Portugal show how the country adopted a clear stance in defense of the righteousness of the Hungarian rising. The charitable donations collected by many were sent to Budapest via Switzerland or Austria, and the public authorities announced that Portugal could willingly accept and shelter 5,000 young children from Hungary.63

Despite the seriousness and drama of the events in Hungary, as shown above in the content of the news articles and in the anguished titles with which they began, there was space, at moments, for more or less satirical cartoons, a type of visual language which Salazarism did not approve of. Fig. 1 shows one example which was published in Novidades. A large intimidating bear (the Soviet Union) looks down on two smaller bears who represent two defiant “satellites” of the Soviet sphere, Nagy’s Hungary and Gomulka’s Poland. One of the little bears is holding a bottle of “De-Stalinization Vodka.” Above the drawing a caption reads “Awfully strong alcohol.”

Figure 1. Novidades, October 31, 1956, 1

Fig. 2 is also a cartoon, though a much less humorous one, published in Diário da Manhã. Russian Secretary Khrushchev and Premier Bulganin are standing on top of a Red Army Soviet tank which is crushing a delicate feminine figure representing Hungary. To the right of the image, the title reads “Red Peace!”

The four newspapers analyzed above were unanimous in their praise for the Budapest insurgents and their condemnations of the bloody Soviet counterattack. From the perspective of the international arena, both the newspapers that were more in tune with the regime (Diário da Manhã, Diário de Notícias and O Século) and those that voiced the views of the Catholic Church (Novidades) contended that the final outcome of the Hungarian national uprising clearly showed the violent proselytizing energy of Soviet communism, its “solar vocation” (a metaphor meaning that communism sought to spread its “radiating” influence) to secure the political homogenization of the “popular democracies” of Eastern Europe.64 1956 was thus proof of the dangers of communist totalitarianism, something that Salazar had always hated and warned against. For the Portuguese leader and his press spokespersons, the events in Hungary were a useful took with which to fuel the “black legend” of communism and reinforce the idea of the need for a Western Euro-American stance against it, a stance to which the New State had been a loyal and daring bulwark ever since its creation.

For die-heart Salazarists and also for the Portuguese Catholic Church, the Hungarian insurgents where above all “nationalists” and “Catholics” who had fought for the freedom of their nation against external interference and had upheld Christian faith against the atheism of the hammer-and-sickle ideology. 1956 should then be understood as a confrontation between Hungarian Catholic nationalists and international communism. The Portuguese regime wanted the Hungarian nationalists to win not only over pure communists, but also over Nagy’s reformers, whose “social democracy” or “democratic socialism” were perhaps too menacing for the ruling authoritarianism.65 It was known that Hungarian rightwing nationalist sectors had ties with Miklós Horthy, the former leader of Hungary’s nationalistic regime, who had been in power between 1920 and 1944. After his fall from power, Horthy had briefly lived in Germany before settling in Portugal in 1950. It is true that the press survey reveals no sign of Horthy’s words or noticeable attitudes in Portugal during the 1956 Hungarian crisis. But among members of the inner circle of Salazarism, he may have symbolically influenced the pro-nationalistic and pro-Catholic stance publicly adopted by the Portuguese regime.66

In Salazarist voices, the struggle for a Christian and independent nation was combined with another theme which remained implicit but nonetheless clearly present in the articles published in the press: the condemnation of the Portuguese Communist Party. The press was not allowed to make any references of any kind to that clandestine organization, but the Hungarian events were used to convey to domestic public opinion how those who followed the communist ideology were accomplices of those who had committed the bloody acts of violence in Hungary. The more the Portuguese communists could be denounced and perceived by others as mere “Moscow servants,”67 the more the clandestine PCP could be isolated in the domestic political arena, hampering any planned or possible collaboration (feared by Salazar) with other (democratic) oppositional forces, which as noted above was precisely the new strategy that PCP was trying to adopt in 1956. The violence of the Soviet Red Army response to the Hungarian revolution was seen as showing the outrages which would be committed under communism were it one day to prevail in Portugal, and the resistance by the insurgents against orthodox communism was seen as a justifiable means of saving the Hungarian nation from what, in the end, came to be its defeat at the hands of Moscow.

The Portuguese Democratic Opposition Press Coverage of the Events in Hungary

The plural, moderate, democratic Portuguese oppositional front was also captivated and troubled by the unravelling of the Hungarian drama, and it devoted considerable attention to it in its newspapers República and Diário de Lisboa. Both were old liberal titles, the former dating back to the early days of the first republic, in 1911, and the latter from 1921. Since they worked as exhaust valves and expression channels for the acceptable opposition, the authorities allowed them to run rather freely, despite the censorship screening that filtered everything that was written in the Portuguese press. At a glance, the overall editorial tone of their reports on Hungary did not differ radically from what one finds in the regime’s newspapers. Nevertheless, a more in-depth content analysis reveals two important general features. The first is that both República and Diário de Lisboa were more descriptive, objective, shrewd, and restrained in their language, and their articles offered less comment and more citations from local and international sources, thus avoiding the hyperbolic, dramatic tone of Salazarist and Catholic newspapers. The second feature is that, while praising and supporting the heroism of the Hungarian popular uprising and Imre Nagy’s attempted reforms, the articles contained a far less vehement attack on the communist ideology than the attacks found in the pro-regime press. Moderate conservative oppositional forces clearly knew what was at stake, what sharply divided Hungarian reformism and Moscow’s hard-line; those who wrote for and read República and Diário de Lisboa were sometimes republicans, socialists, and others who hesitated in openly condemning the whole of communism, because the collaboration of the Portuguese Communist Party was seen as potentially useful for internal anti-Salazarist purposes. In the end, these organs of the press still made general criticisms of the Soviet response to the Hungarian revolution, but the Salazarist and Catholic newspapers were much blunter and more categorical with their attacks on orthodox communism. As the socialist Mário Soares would claim, expressing what many other non-communist opponents to Salazar thought, “when the revelation of the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress and the events of Hungary came, the communist language and methods left me rather indifferent.”68

República’s coverage of the events of late October 1956 in Budapest was mainly drawn from dispatches coming from Vienna, Paris, or some British papers, such as Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph. On October 24, after the front page title “The problems of communism: is Khrushchev preparing the Soviet Union’s democratization?,” attention was paid to Nagy’s statement concerning the “possibility of Hungary establishing democracy in all parts of the country.”69 Over the course of the next few days, the Portuguese paper continued to provide coverage of the crude facts of the Hungarian political process, referring to the many deaths that bloodied local streets, but above all how the “nationalistic” and “pro-independent” rebellion was apparently led by “various forces with diverse and contradictory ideas and goals.”70 Until October 31, República hesitated to give a specific label to the insurgents: they were referred as “rebels,” “revolutionaries,” “youths,” “democrats,” and “reformists,” and the very relationship between the new Prime Minister Imre Nagy and those forces remained uncertain. On October 31, the paper mourned the human losses of the week that had passed, underlined the political significance of Cardinal Mindszenty’s release, and praised Nagy’s solemn promises to hold “free elections” for a “new government.”71

In the early days of November, República echoed the growing feelings of expectation, anxiety, and fear kindle by the thought of an increasingly probable Soviet repressive intervention in Budapest, seemingly to crush the “patriot work” already developed by the “enthusiastic Hungarian nation,” all because the Russians were anticipating that “within a couple of months, there would be no more than a handful of communists and Hungary would eventually lean towards the West.”72 The “Hungarian drama” of Budapest’s recapture by the Red Army was reported through the sequenced reproduction of foreign dispatches issued from Hungary via Vienna and Paris or the protests in the United Nations, with strikingly less detail or drama than found in the Salazarist newspapers quoted above. The conclusion was a rather detached one: “liberals, socialists, and Titoists lost, and with them, an entire people was humiliated and disappointed,” while the Soviet Union had gained “a victory whose fruits will perhaps be poisonous in the future.”73 On the aftermath of the suppression of the Hungarian revolution, República continued to use titles suggesting that in the streets of Budapest the mood was one of “hunger, terror, and looting” and containing references to the “winter cold” and “epidemic threats,” while some final “struggles and summary executions” were still unravelling.74

While siding with the position of the Hungarian insurgents, as the liberal republican Portuguese opposition did, República was the only Portuguese newspaper surveyed (aside from the communist Avante!) in which not a single photograph of Budapest’s attempted revolution was published. And it was also the only one in which the parallel pro-Hungarian stance of the Salazarist regime was totally ignored, even to the point of making no mention whatsoever of the popular, anonymous, student, and Catholic demonstrations and charitable actions that the regime’s press was so eager to report on and praise.75 A moderate oppositional paper, República was unwilling to support the instrumentalization of the events by Salazar and his spokespersons and journalists. Therefore, the political readings were more restrained. One could refer, for instance, to a rare editorial entitled “Oppression,” which was published on November 8, in which República refers to the events in Hungary, Poland, and even Egypt to underline how the whole world seemed to be going through “a violent convulsion,” as “public opinion” everywhere indicated that people wanted to become “their own masters,” free from “the hardships of dictatorial rule.”76 In other words, the editorial referred not simply to the struggle of the Hungarians against the communists, but also, implicitly, to the struggle of the Portuguese against Salazar.

Because of this, the events in Hungary actually served as a pretext for a verbal confrontation between the regime and the moderate opposition of República, through a controversy involving the vice-Prime-Minister Marcelo Caetano and Francisco Cunha Leal, one of the leading names of the DDS, the Social-Democrat Directory. Caetano had criticized the “men in the opposition” for their “silence,” or at least lack of energy, when confronted with the “martyrdom of the noble Hungarian nation.” In an open letter published in the paper (and then printed in a small booklet), Cunha Leal replied that “no one but us, true democrats, feel in the flesh and in the soul the pain of a sacrificed people.” But because the opposition in Portugal was denied freedom of opinion and action, “we find it worthier to shut up and just pray to God, in the silence of our souls and consciences, that He may save poor Hungary.”77 Leal added that the aspirations of the Portuguese liberal opposition were very close to those of Nagy’s supporters, namely free elections, the legalization of political parties, the freedom of the trade unions, and political pluralism.78

Diário de Lisboa (the other important and tolerated oppositional paper) also started reporting on the situation in Hungary on October 24, 1956 through Austrian dispatches concerning the possibility of Imre Nagy reassuming power in Budapest.79 The following day, Yugoslav sources were quoted which suggested that the Hungarian events might lead Moscow to adopt a hard-line policy against other Eastern countries, while Nagy was labelled as the “Hungarian Gomulka” and Kádar as a “Titoist.”80 An interpretation of what was happening in Budapest followed: the “confusing situation in Hungary” was due both to the “irresponsible and criminal activity” of its past leaders and to the “misery” of Hungarian society and the “bankrupt” Hungarian economy.81 The martyrdom of the Budapest population in the Parliament Square triggered the first critical news about the Soviet responses: “men, women, and children could not do anything but await their death” as “anti-communist Hungarians who had fought to express their hate for the regime and its protectors.”82 The first photograph in Diário de Lisboa of the events in Hungary, which shows a group of demonstrators singing the French Marseillaise anthem, appeared on the front page of the October 29, issue, next to the title, “Budapest has returned to its normal life.”

After a couple of days of silence, on November 4, the theme was again raised in the oppositional newspaper with reports relying on the telegraph according to which the Hungarian capital was under siege by “Russian troops” who had “imprisoned Imre Nagy’s government.”83 In the editions of November 5 and 6, the violent counterattack and occupation of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army were reported on and characterized as “a tragedy,” “the crushing of Magyar patriotism,” preventing the “defenseless” and “brutalized” Hungarian nation from “freely securing its destiny,” away from a “set of political institutions against which it rose up in arms.”84 Particular attention was also given to the United Nations maneuvers to condemn the actions of the Soviet Union and to the humanitarian drama of the refugees fleeing Hungary towards Austria. On November 6, siding with the bulk of the Salazarist papers, Diário de Lisboa quite extensively reported on the massive pro-Hungarian rally that marched from Rossio square, in Lisbon, to the Portuguese parliament, quoting the interventions of students who cheered the crowd with the slogans “Liberty to Hungary” and “Down with Russian colonialism.” A conclusive sentence served as a moto for the newspaper coverage: “The Budapest events cannot cease to alarm all free men (if they still exist, on this ill-fated planet where we live).”85

Even with sometimes different editorial options, in the moderate oppositional newspapers’ coverage, the nationalistic cum-Catholic tone that dominated Salazarist press was secondary, and the praise was focused on some of policies and aims suggested by Imre Nagy, including free elections, a general amnesty, free trade unionism, perhaps even worker’s participation in factories and corporate management, a free press, and civil liberties. República and Diário de Lisboa did not dare to depart openly from what Nagy was promising to Hungarians and write instead on what the Portuguese should be granted, but their analysis of the 1956 drama served to remind domestic readers that Salazarism was also a repressive regime. Unlike the communists, the moderate opposition did not label the insurgents “counterrevolutionaries” or “fascists”; but unlike the Salazarists, they did not harbor any sympathies for all-out rightwing Hungarian nationalists.86 Theirs was a hope, or a longing, that somehow the Hungarian cries of freedom would inspire Portuguese cries of freedom, not against a radical leftwing dictatorship, but against rightwing authoritarian rule. And this is also the reason why Salazarism, as was shown, was so eager and keen to cast the 1956 Hungarian uprising as a patriotic recovery of national independence, rooted in Christian traditions, and not merely as an attempted social-democratic revolution.

A Dissonant Voice: the Portuguese Communist Press Coverage of the Events in Hungary

Within the Portuguese communist realm, where Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization thesis had reinforced a collaborative strategy with other oppositional forces in the mid-1950s, the Hungarian events created a paradox of surprise, shock, and unease among many, though in the end these sentiments remained hidden and stifled by the official position of obedience to Moscow’s guidelines.87 In 1956, the PCP wanted to collaborate with moderate anti-Salazarists, but the manner in which the Kremlin’s hardliners ferociously crushed reformists in Budapest compromised and darkened the very image that communists had been working to build up in Portuguese public opinion. Many anonymous militants, actually, resented the Soviet violence against Hungary and recognized the contradictions therein: how could the PCP attack Anglo-French intervention in the Suez crisis while at the same time accepting and even praising the Soviet Union’s intervention in Budapest? And could the PCP collaborate with other oppositional forces that were now closer to the Salazarist regime in their condemnations of the outcome of the Hungarian crisis? In the Portuguese context, “the PCP seemed cornered again, and the meager gains made with the non-communist opposition forces were endangered.”88

As challenging as the dilemma may have been, domestic needs or aspirations could not go against the structural loyalty or dependency that the PCP always showed towards whomever ruled the Kremlin and whatever those powers dictated.89 Thus, internal critics, disoriented or even disgusted, were silenced to avoid any possible “alignment” with the Salazarist anti-Soviet propaganda, and they were indoctrinated with the thesis that the Soviet intervention had been called upon by Hungarian communists to prevent the “fascist imperialist military offensive” from gaining momentum in Budapest behind Imre Nagy.90 Some of the internal critics may have become party dissidents who refused this official narrative, but all in all, it seems that the PCP’s Hungarian debate was insufficient to “fundamentally question the communist identity” of the party and its “close dependency on the Soviet Union.”91 Therefore, while the Portuguese organs of the press mentioned above displayed a more or less emotional solidarity with the fallen Hungarians who had supported Nagy and Mindszenty, the Portuguese Communist Party’s newspaper Avante! stood as a clearly dissonant voice, attacking the reformist intentions and defending Moscow’s intervention and its hard-line communist stance.

On the front page of Avante!’s November 1956 edition, an editorial entitled “The Egyptian aggression and the fascist coup in Hungary threaten peace” revealed the Portuguese communist interpretation of the two leading (and interrelated) international events of those days:

There is a joint plan, drawn by international reaction, captained by the leading power, the United States. The intent of these imperialists is evident: to undermine the forces of the Socialist world and to hide from general public opinion blunt acts of piracy. The fascist coup in Budapest aimed to topple the Socialist regime to give power to a fascist and capitalist government [...] The darkest forces of international reaction helped prepare this fascist coup, among them the government of Salazar, who turned our country into a saddlebag of conspirators supported by funds of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.92

Accordingly, Imre Nagy was characterized as a mere puppet of “counterrevolutionaries,” or in other words rightwing nationalists, perhaps in conspiracy with the remnants of the deposed Horthy regime, certainly backed by the United States to throw the whole Soviet sphere into turmoil and create a “fascist” and “capitalist” (the two words were presented as synonyms in the Portuguese communist propaganda) government in the heart of Eastern Europe, much as the United Kingdom and France were allegedly trying to do in Egypt, fighting alongside Israel against Nasser’s government. There followed a clear accusation against Salazarism, who had allowed the country to help the rebels in Hungary and had even mobilized forces to do so, thus siding with all the “international reactionary forces.” Unlike the moderate opposition gathered around República and Diário de Lisboa, the PCP openly contested Salazar’s right to support the alleged Hungarian freedom quest, inasmuch as the Portuguese people had been totally deprived of basic liberties and of any social or economic wellbeing93. In order to counter and diminish the governmental, Church, and popular initiatives of solidarity with the Hungarians, communists even printed a boycott poster that red: “Christmas 1956. While the workmen’s sons have a hungry Christmas, Cáritas sends tons of food to Hungary. Protest!”94

In December, the PCP celebrated the “failure of the national and international reactionary plans against the liberty and independence of the people” and the “victory of the forces of peace” in Hungary. The Soviet Union was praised as “a paladin of world peace,” which its enemies had tried to sabotage by interfering in Hungary and enraging “the Cold War climate,” putting an end to “the peaceful coexistence of states with different political and social regimes.”95 The events in Hungary thus had heroes and villains, victims and executioners. But the communist narrative in Lisbon reproduced Moscow’s interpretation, according to which the villains, the provocative agents, had been the people of Hungary and the despised Nagy, who had forced the Soviets to defend themselves and rightfully to cut short an illegitimate, foreign imperialist interference in the Russian pax.

In the early days of January 1957, Avante! published an entire supplement with the full interview given by János Kádár, the new figurehead entrusted by the Soviets to serve as the leader of the Hungarian communist party, to the French correspondent of L’Humanité in Budapest. According to the editorial introducing the interview, his words should be considered “the ultimate and pure version” of what had happened in those October and November days, echoing the theory of the “fascist” and “imperialist” conspiracy against peaceful communist rule in Hungary since 1949. Imre Nagy and Cardinal Jószef Mindszenty were characterized as “a hidden right-winger” and “the face of the reaction,” and public praise was given to the Soviet Union for having dealt appropriately with the “white terror,” which had threatened to compromise “the security of the whole socialist sphere” and separate the Hungarian people from its well-deserved “socialist regime.”96

Despite some possible internal divisions or dissent within the party, the interview published in Avante! indicates unambiguous support for the Soviet Union’s response to the Hungarian rising, even if the bloody intervention by the Red Army in Budapest had hurt international reputation of the communist forces, thus isolating the PCP within the Portuguese anti-Salazarist opposition. By praising Khrushchev’s final decision to crush the insurgency and, indeed, by denigrating the insurgency, the PCP, some of its militants feared, was isolating itself even more in Portuguese political life.97 These views, however, did not represent the official position of the party, which was totally loyal to Moscow.

Conclusion

The 1956 Hungarian revolution challenged the European status quo and awoke the hope in the West that a piece of the Soviet domino could eventually lessen its dependency on Moscow or even liberate itself from the Soviet grip. This was followed by shock, despair, and lamentation when Kremlin hardliners made it clear to the world that even in the era of de-Stalinization, Hungarian independence and democratic socialism were threats that would be crushed, as indeed they were in a blatantly repressive manner.

Despite the ruling censorship and a cautious prudence with regards to any foreign matter (in a traditionalist inward-looking country), the Portuguese press and Portuguese public opinion followed the events in Hungary with keen interest. Indoctrination against the “heresy” of communism had gained ground in nationalistic circles, and for the Salazarist regime, the most logical response was to expose the brutality of the Soviet reaction to an attempt by a comparatively defenseless nation (and also a Christian one) to assert its independence. The demonstrations and acts of solidarity came from many in the literate Portuguese middle class that consumed newspapers, including young students, members of university communities, public servants, the middle ranks of the army, Catholic organizations, and the episcopate.

Censorship was certainly eased to allow news, titles, images, and even cartoons about the Hungarian revolution to appear more easily on the pages of the newspapers. Salazar and the government wanted to let the facts and the reactions of the international community suffice as a condemnation of communism and to use the martyrdom of Hungary to show how Portugal’s nationalistic stance should be pursued in a world which lay in the shadow of proselytizing Soviet expansionism. In addition to this international reading of the events in Hungary, the regime also fashioned a domestic one to strengthen its internal solidity. It sought to profit off the splintering of the opposition as a consequence of the Hungarian crisis, with democrats criticizing (alongside Salazar) the violent Soviet response to the uprising, while the vast majority of communists felt that the Soviet response had been appropriate and the outcome of the events had been justified. An otherwise immobile regime thus went “revolutionary,” praising the movement and novelty represented by the nationalists, the Catholics, and the “democratic” insurgents surrounding Imre Nagy and siding with or finding themselves side by side with moderate oppositional voices who also stood by the Hungarian cause in order to denounce all repressive regimes, i.e., not only the orthodox communist ones, but also, indirectly, the New State dictatorship. Salazar was not unaware of this. And through the Catholic approach and carefully chosen official declarations saluting the country’s pro-Hungarian demonstrations, he instrumentalized the demonstrations, highlighting how the national newspapers were acknowledging, if not cheering for, the righteous stance of the regime in the face of the Hungarian tragedy. As one Portuguese historian writes,

Someone who travels today through the Portuguese press to examine the coverage given to the 1956 “Hungarian Spring” will be impressed by the quantity and quality of the information published in a country used to censorship [...] However, this strange freedom is only incomprehensible if we fail to grasp the political and ideological usefulness of the “exemplary” Hungarian case for Portuguese nationalists: it showed the failure of the Soviet model and, above all, alerted the country to the danger of new political alliances—namely the possibility of reifying the unitary opposition movements that had preoccupied the regime in the years after World War II.98

One must not forget that in the mid-1950s, the New State was strong enough to allow newspapers and people to use strong words like “revolution,” “independence,” “reform,” “freedom,” and “democracy.” In comparison, the openness to and tolerance or even support for the expression of these kinds of attitudes would disappear when Portugal (and Europe) was faced with another Eastern anti-Soviet rising: the “Prague Spring” in August 1968. By that time, the regime had become weaker (the colonial wars waged by Portugal in Africa started in 1961), the demands for domestic democratization by the Portuguese public were much stronger, and the “Prague Spring” sympathizers were too enraged, too influenced by the May 1968 Parisian slogans for Salazar to ride the wave or accept that the major organs of the press could or should do it.

Although critical of the ruling Salazarist status quo, the plural field of liberal, republican, and moderate socialist opposition forces did side with the regime in its responses to the news coverage of the Hungarian crisis and in its criticism of the final outcome of this crisis, even if its tone was not so openly outraged or openly anti-communist. But while in other European countries 1956 created a severe split between orthodox communists and other leftist factions, in Portugal, the events in Hungary had comparatively “little impact”99 on their mutual relationship:

The [Portuguese Communist] Party dissidents, as well as non-communist sectors of the opposition may have seen in the Soviet intervention the confirmation of their opinions or an added argument for political and ideological divergences; still, their [the Portuguese Communist Party dissidents’] public interventions were timid and fleeting.100

The pro-Salazarist press was not timid in its staunch attack on Soviet communism. The discourse in Avante!, however, which was supportive of the Soviet response and which fell on the opposite side of the Portuguese political scenario, also was not timid. Silencing internal critics, the otherwise clandestine revolutionary communists expressed a very situationist, conservative, and immobile stance towards the 1956 Hungarian uprising, criticizing all hopes and schemes for change and praising the reassertion of Moscow’s control over the Eastern country. The same thing would happen in 1968 in response to the frustrated pro-democratic attempts of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia. In other words, while keeping its essential anti-communist stance, the New State changed its ideological attitude from 1956 to 1968 when considering the protesters. In contrast, the Portuguese Communist Party did not, condemning Dubcek in the late 1960s as it had condemned Nagy and praising Brezhnev as it had praised Khrushchev.

In conclusion, most of the Portuguese newspapers surveyed from the perspective of their coverage of the 1956 Hungarian revolution (Avante! was the clear exception) and the overall political and collective mood present a sort of a paradox or perhaps an unintended irony: that of a profoundly anti-revolutionary and anti-liberal regime—the Salazarist New State—praising and endorsing, hand in hand with the larger part of domestic public opinion (even anti-Salazarist public opinion), a foreign revolution in which the insurgents tenaciously, if unsuccessfully, fought (and died) in the hopes of winning independence.

Bibliography

Newspapers

Avante!

Diário da Manhã

Diário de Lisboa

Diário de Notícias

Novidades

O Século

República

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Patriotism, Nation, and Masculinity in the Official Propaganda of the Hungarian Insurrectio during the War of the Fifth Coalition (1809)

Ágoston Nagy
University of Public Service, Budapest
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 11 Issue 1  (2022):3-43 DOI 10.38145/2022.1.3