István Tisza

Count István Tisza was the strongest politician in the Hungarian half of the Habsburg monarchy and the only one of its leaders who in July 1914 opposed war with Serbia for almost two weeks. Once he gave way, however, he waged it with iron consistency as Prime Minister of Hungary until 1917, and then, out of office, as leader of the majority in the Budapest parliament. He defended dualism, that is, Hungary’s equal standing with Austria, the rule of the Hungarian nobility over the Kingdom’s nationalities and a narrow franchise, and so for the Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and the Hungarian left he became a symbol of the old order and of the war. He was killed by soldiers on the first day of the Hungarian revolution, 31 October 1918.

Before the war

He was born on 22 April 1861 in Pest, the son of Kálmán Tisza, who was Prime Minister of Hungary from 1875 to 1890. Some Polish studies give his birthplace as the family estate at Geszt, where he spent his childhood. The family came from the Calvinist lesser nobility, and the title of count was granted to his uncle in 1883. The young Tisza studied law and political science in Budapest, Berlin and Heidelberg, and from 1886 sat in parliament for his father’s Liberals. An economist by training, he admired English parliamentarism and Bismarck, and was a stern, stubborn Calvinist and a keen fencer who did not shy away from duels.

He was first prime minister in 1903–1905. He then tried to break by force the obstruction of the opposition, which demanded among other things Hungarian as the language of command in the army, and lost the election. A few years later he returned with the new National Party of Work, which won an absolute majority in 1910. In 1912, as Speaker of the House of Representatives, he forced through the army bills, having protesting deputies removed by the police. One of them fired at him in the chamber. On 10 June 1913 he again became head of the government.

He believed that Hungary could survive only as an equal partner in a strong great power on the Danube, and at the same time as a state governed by Magyars, even though they made up only about half of the Kingdom’s inhabitants. Fewer than 10 per cent of the population could vote. The heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, saw him as the main enemy of his plans to restructure the monarchy and called him the dictator of Hungary who wanted to dictate in Vienna as well.

July 1914

After the assassination in Sarajevo Tisza was the only one of the monarchy’s leading politicians who did not want immediate war. As early as 1 July he warned Emperor Franz Joseph that an attack on Serbia would be a “fatal mistake”. At the joint Council of Ministers on 7 July, when the other participants came out for war, he argued that a blow against Serbia would draw Russia in and lead to a world war, and that Romania, instead of helping, might attack Transylvania. He demanded that Serbia first be presented with harsh but acceptable conditions. He also feared that a victorious war would bring the annexation of Serbia, and that new Slav subjects would undermine the Hungarian position in the monarchy.

The Foreign Minister, Leopold Berchtold, and the Chief of the General Staff, Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf, worked on him for a week. What tipped the balance were the German assurances that Berlin would back the monarchy and hold Romania in check, and the argument that delay would undermine the ally’s confidence. On 14 July Tisza gave way, and on 19 July the Council of Ministers, at his demand, undertook not to annex any sizeable Serbian territory. Once the decision was taken, however, he defended it without hesitation. He wrote that it had been hard for him to come out for war, but that he was now convinced of its necessity. The public did not know of his earlier opposition, which later sealed his fate.

War premier

In the first years of the war Tisza had an influence in the monarchy that no Hungarian politician before him had had. When in the autumn of 1914 the Russians entered Hungary, he intervened with the military in defence of the population, while pressing for the enemy to be driven out of the Kingdom at any cost. In January 1915 he brought about the replacement of Berchtold by his confidant István Burián. Together they rejected territorial concessions to Italy, because they regarded them as a precedent that Romania would invoke over Transylvania. Tisza also refused any concessions to Bucharest. He opposed Conrad’s plans to incorporate the whole of Serbia and Montenegro into the monarchy, but in the event of Congress Poland being joined to Austria he demanded compensation for Hungary in the form of Bosnia and Dalmatia. He refused to place Croatia under military rule, and when the Transylvanian Romanian politician Iuliu Maniu, later Prime Minister of Romania, was preparing a programme of his compatriots’ demands, Tisza had him drafted into the army.

His position was shaken in August 1916, when Romania entered the war and invaded Transylvania, which only German troops managed to defend. With the death of Franz Joseph in November of that year Tisza lost his most important protector. He still managed to persuade the new ruler, Charles I, to a swift coronation in Budapest. On 30 December 1916, standing in for the vacant office of palatine, it was he, according to accounts of the ceremony, who together with the Primate of Hungary placed the Holy Crown of St Stephen on his head. The coronation oath bound Charles to the Hungarian constitution and to the integrity of the lands of the crown, which closed the way to a restructuring of the monarchy involving the Slavs of its Hungarian part. In January 1917 Tisza replied in parliament to President Wilson that it was the Entente’s conditions, amounting to the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, that stood in the way of peace.

Charles, however, wanted reforms, and after the February Revolution in Russia the question of widening the franchise became urgent. Tisza would agree at most to minor changes, and in particular would not give the vote to all front-line soldiers. On 23 May 1917, at the king’s demand, he resigned, although his government remained in office until 15 June.

At the front and in parliament

His resignation did not take away his power. The National Party of Work had a majority in parliament, and Tisza easily blocked the electoral reform of the government of Móric Esterházy, which fell after two months, and then of Sándor Wekerle. He himself did something unusual: the 56-year-old former prime minister went to the Italian front as a colonel and commanded the 2nd Honvéd Hussar Regiment of Debrecen. According to accounts he was tough with his superiors and caring towards his men, giving them his tobacco ration and paying towards their food. He wrote that only in the trenches had he really got to know the simple Hungarian peasant.

In 1918 he returned to Budapest and was again calling the tune in parliament. In April his party refused to support a compromise on the franchise, and Burián’s return to the foreign ministry was read as a strengthening of the Tisza camp. In September 1918 the king sent him to Bosnia and Croatia to gauge the mood of the Yugoslavs. In Sarajevo, on 20 and 21 September, he received delegations of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs who demanded union with the South Slavs, and dismissed them curtly, rejecting the very right of nations to self-determination.

A few weeks later reality caught up with him too. On 16 October the monarch issued a manifesto on the transformation of Austria into a federal state, and the next day Tisza admitted in parliament: “We have lost this war.” The day before, outside the parliament building, a member of an anti-war youth group had tried to shoot him, but the revolver failed. On 31 October, the day the Aster Revolution broke out, when Mihály Károlyi took power in Budapest, towards evening a group of armed soldiers burst into his villa in Hermina Street. According to accounts they shouted that it was because of him that the war had gone on for years. Tisza put down the revolver he was holding, and shots were fired. His relative, Countess Denise Almásy, was also wounded. His last words, as attributed to him, were: “It had to be so.”

After his death

The investigation into the murder stalled under Károlyi’s government and the Hungarian Soviet Republic. After the fall of the communists the trial lasted two years, and in October 1921 the court found guilty several soldiers and left-wing politicians, including Pál Kéri and József Pogány, who were already abroad. Historians still disagree about who was really behind the assassination and how far the verdict was political. In the interwar period, under Miklós Horthy, Tisza became a hero of the Hungarian right, a martyr of the “revolution” that was blamed for the dismemberment of the country in the Treaty of Trianon. In communist times he was presented in the opposite light, as a reactionary and warmonger.

Assessment

Tisza remains a contested figure, in Hungary as well. His defenders, among them the American biographer Gabor Vermes, stress that he was the only leader of the monarchy who in July 1914 clearly foresaw that a war with Serbia would turn into a world war, and that during the war he opposed annexations and military rule. They also recall his personal courage, honesty and loyalty to the monarch, which not even his dismissal changed.

Critics point out that his opposition in July 1914 stemmed above all from concern for the position of the Magyars in the dual monarchy, not from pacifism, and that he gave way after a few days. Austrian and German historians accuse him of blocking, by his stubborn defence of Magyar supremacy over the nationalities, of the narrow franchise and of the integrity of the lands of the crown, any reforms that might have given the monarchy a chance of survival. The Hungarian politician Dezső Bánffy is said to have called him as early as 1909 a man “as dangerous as an open razor”, and the German ambassador in Vienna, Heinrich von Tschirschky, wrote in 1916 that Tisza’s government was pursuing a narrow Magyar policy with no understanding for the common cause of the whole state. Most historians see him as a tragic figure: a politician who soberly assessed the dangers but was incapable of the change that might have averted them.