THE BUDAPEST HABSBURG CORONATION OF 1916

Abstract

INWHAT CAN BE SAID TO BE ITS FINAL FORM the Habsburg empire took the shape of what was known as the Dual Monarchy. After the Ausgleich the compromise adjustment of 1867 the empire was divided between the ruling class of Hungary and the Vienna administration. This was symbolised by a change in the style and title now employed: Imperial and Royal, 'k und k', kaiserlich und koniglich. ('Kakania' as Robert Musil had it.) An insignificant river, the Leithia, marked the boundary between the Empire of Austria, 'Cisleithia', and the kingdom of Hungary, 'Transleithia'. We cannot be too much concerned here with what led to this division of the government of the Habsburg lands. Division it was: from now on, there were two governments and parliaments, one in Vienna, one in Budapest. Only for finance, war and the foreign service were there joint ministries. Neither of these governments ruled over an homogeneous people. In the Vienna Imperial parliament when it sat Czechs and Poles were prominent, alongside German-speaking Austrians and numerous smaller national group and language groupings. In 1867, the deal struck was that Hungary would revert to what was put forward as ancient constitutional forms. Some of the 1848 revolutionary Kossuth constitution was also in the package. The Hungarian negotiators were the Magyar upper· classes, the Magnates. Their economic base sat not only on the Magyar peasantry, but on great estates stretching far beyond the Magyar-speaking heartland, to where the population was all too often mostly Slav or Rumanian; in Croatia, bordering on Serbia, or in Transylvania. The newly politically empowered Hungarian social elite now could bolster their hegenomy by royal ceremony Franz Josef, who had hitherto refused to be crowned from his coming to the throne in 1848 as the oath which accompanied the ceremony he considered too binding on his authority, came to Budapest for his coronation as king in 1867, immediately symbolising the new relationship. In the long history of the Hungarian monarchy from St Stephen, crowned on the cusp of the years 1000 1001 at Esztergom coronations were not necessarily, indeed for periods not, or rarely, at Buda, the royal city today twinned with Pest. They were often at Pozsony, today's Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. It was there that Franz Josef's predecessor, the Emperor Ferdinand was crowned in 1835 as Ferdinand V of Hungary. But after 1867, the Hungarian ruling class, now sure of an established modus vivendi with Vienna, consolidated itself in power by devices familiar in other parts of Europe: an emphasis on historic legitimacy and some accommodation with the bourgeosie. It presented itself too as legitimised by its insistance on constitutional forms. On examination, however, even by 1916 the distribution of the seats in the Gothicrevival Puginesque Parliament on the Pest side of the Danube they had had built, with its echoes of the Palace of Westminster, lacked true representational