Baják László Ihász István: The Hungarian National Museum History Exhibition Guide 4 - The short century of survival (1900-1990) (Budapest, 2008)

Room 17. The Hungary of Trianon from the Election of the Regent to the Last Year of Peace (1920-1938). László Baják

Hungary may have been invited to the Paris Peace Conference, but for the most part this was a mere formality. As a result of past obligations and short-term political interests, the Allies decided in favour of the carving up of Hungary. In Paris, neither the eloquence of Count Albert Apponyi, the leader of the Hungarian peace delegation, nor the precise, graphic maps of the geographer Count Pál Teleki were deigned to be taken into consideration. The victors rejected every Hungarian argument, and on June 4, 1920, in the Ernő Jeges: "No, no, never!" (poster, 1918) Versailles building known as the "Grand Trianon Palace", the country was forced to sign an unprecedentedly harsh dictate. 36% of Hungary's population and 67% of its territory was annexed to Romania and the newly created Czechoslovakian and Serb-Croat-Slovene states. 3,227,000 people whose mothertongue was Hungarian found themselves living in a foreign country. The contract obliterated borders that had remained unchanged for more than one thousand years, the coherent geographical unity of the Carpathian Basin was cut up and strongly interdependent economic territories were separated. Hungary lost towns, roads, railways and sources of energy and raw materials of key importance, in addition to which the country was placed under Allied military supervision, compelled to make redresses, and its army significantly reduced in numbers as well as in the degree to which it was equipped. It was the French Marshall Foch who with surprising foresight characterised the contract the most inventively when he announced, "This is no peace treaty, it is a 20-year ceasefire." For Hungary, "Trianon" meant an indigestible trauma. There was not a social group, not a political force that could resign itself to the situation. The feeling was perfectly expressed in the poster with the simple caption "Nem nem soha!" ("No, no, never!") which won first prize in the League for the Protection of Territories competition at the end of 1918, but which later regularly appeared at anti-Trianon rallies and on propaganda materials. During the entire period, sometimes under the surface, sometimes openly, the priority of Hungarian politics was a revision of territorial interests.