The Treaty of Trianon
The Hungarian Peace Treaty was the penultimate piece of the Paris Peace Conference ending the First World War that was signed 100 years ago at Great Trianon Palace in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles on June 4, 1920. The series of events that led to the partition of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the result of strategic considerations by the great powers, the secessionist aspirations of the minorities of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire and the territorial claims of neighboring states.
On November 3, 1918, the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s plenipotentiaries signed an armistice at Villa Giusti near Padua: the last common act of the Empire. National Councils had already been formed throughout the Monarchy and the individual constituent states declared their secession in Prague, Krakow or Zagreb. In Budapest, Count Mihály Károlyi proclaimed the short-lived People’s Republic on November 16, 1918 and became its first President. His government was progressively shifting leftward, followed by a communist takeover on March 21, 1919, was the first of its kind in Central Europe. After a few months of transition following the fall of the communists in August 1919 and the entry of the Romanian army into Budapest, the election of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the last naval commander of the Monarchy, as governor (Regent), established the political system that characterized Hungary until 1944.
The armies of the successor states (Serbian, Czechoslovak, Romanian) already began to attack the periphery of the country at the end of 1918, and by January 1919, the date of the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, Czechoslovak and Serbian troops had occupied the territory they wanted to gain for their country from the Kingdom of Hungary, and Romanian troops were not far behind. The borders of Hungary were decided by the Peace Conference’s expert committees in mid-March 1919, and were finalized at the political level and communicated to the Hungarian party in June 1919. After that, only minor changes were made to the draft, the most significant of which was the annexation of Western Hungary in favor of Austria.
The Hungarian peace delegation did not arrive in Paris until January 1920, and although it tried to make certain changes to the text, mainly territorial ones, it was unsuccessful. Under the terms of the peace, only 93,075 of the 282,000 square kilometers of the Kingdom of Hungary remained under Hungarian rule, and the country’s former population of 18.2 million had been reduced to 7.9 million. According to the 1910 census, the treaty made 3.3 million of the almost exactly 10 million inhabitants who claimed to be Hungarian native speakers citizens of a foreign state. Hungary had to disarm its army and was obliged to pay war reparations. In addition to the loss of raw material resources, railways and mines, the country faced economic collapse and a mass influx of refugees: between 1918 and 1924, 400-500,000 refugees arrived in what remained of Hungary.