Hungarian Conservative

16 November marks the day when Rear Admiral, and later Regent, Miklós Horthy marched into Budapest in 1919, symbolically ending the Hungarian Soviet Republic. This remains a controversial event to this very day: while on the one hand, it ended a period of chaos and dictatorship, on the other hand, it bolstered the so-called White Terror.

The history of the palace in Dég, Hungary is not only intertwined with that of the Festetics family, but also with Freemasonry in Hungary, as the palace’s builder, Antal Festetics, was the right-hand man of the movement’s Master Chief in the country. Magyar Krónika paid a visit to the newly renovated Festetics Palace in Dég.

‘The kuruc were never mindless rabble-rousers, just like the labanc were never simply unpatriotic traitors. While the merits and good practices of kuruc and 49ist politicians have been been amply publicised and celebrated, the labanc side was often sidelined, and as a result, their perspectives and values are still missing from contemporary politics. It would be worth devoting more attention to the ideas of the Young Conservatives from the Era of Reform. They understood that while our interests must be unwaveringly represented and fought for, Hungary cannot stand alone in turbulent times.’

Losing the World War and the experience of the Treaty of Trianon triggered a discourse in Hungarian public life that was not without precedent, but had never been so vehement before. Perhaps the opinion of many was reflected by the renowned writer Ferenc Herczeg, who declared that ‘Europe, free press, liberalism—all these are slogans that have deceived us.’

Paradoxically, Communist Béla Kun and the contemporary nationalist racists had more in common in terms of their views than the Communist leader had with the social-democratic and the left-leaning bourgeois émigrés.

Aversion to work was not unique to the leaders of the emigration. After a while, Mihály Révész, a social-democratic journalist in exile, had enough of living abroad and tried to get a job in Budapest. But when his left-wing friends found him a job as a manual worker, he turned it down, indignantly declaring ‘I won’t be a street sweeper’.

Although the official Hungarian propaganda constantly portrayed the ‘dark figures’ of the leftist emigration as plotting from abroad against Hungary, the surviving primary sources show a picture of ineffectual losers fighting among themselves.

In the last days of World War I, dissatisfied soldiers in Budapest revolted against the establishment, demanding Hungary’s independence and democratisation. Their uprising, the Aster Revolution is known to be the only successful Hungarian revolution.

The story of Zadravecz’s controversial years well illustrates the fascinating internal debates and lively public life of the early Horthy period, as well as the divisions between Christian churches in a period which desperately called for Christian unity. 

Just as some Christians had trouble accounting for their role in the 1918 Aster Revolution and the 1919 Communist coup d’état, some Jews also had difficulty facing their former position in terms of these events.

The translation of the Book of Books into Hungarian not only contributed to the establishment of the Reformation in Hungary, but also had a fundamentally important effect on the social and cultural development of the country.

The guiding thread of Hungarian conservative thinking has always been to represent the Hungarian national interest, and thus the preservation of the country’s sovereignty and freedom—this is understood to supersede any theoretical concepts.