Albert Apponyi


Albert György Gyula Mária Apponyi, Count of Nagyappony was a Hungarian aristocrat and politician. He was a board member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Chairman of from 1921 to 1933, and a knight of the Austrian Golden Fleece from 1921. He was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize five times.

Early life

Albert Apponyi was born on 29 May 1846, in Vienna, where his father, Count György Apponyi, was the resident Hungarian Chancellor at the time. He belonged to an ancient noble family dating back to the 13th century. His mother, Countess Júliane Sztáray de Nagymihály et Sztára was also member of an equally old Hungarian nobility.
While other Hungarian aristocrats like István Széchenyi or Lajos Batthyány had to learn Hungarian separately in the aristocratic world of the time, Albert Apponyi grew up in a conservative Apponyi family with Hungarian as his mother tongue, but he mastered several Western European languages from an early age.
He was educated at the Jesuit institute in Calxburg until 1863, after which he studied law in Pest and Vienna. After completing his studies, he spent a long period abroad, as was customary at the time, mainly in Germany, England and France, where he was introduced to the royalist aristocracy. Among the French aristocrats he was particularly influenced by Count Charles de Montalembert. It was at his house that he met Pierre Guillaume Frédéric Le Play, the famous conservative sociologist whose work was to have a major influence on his intellectual development. Despite owning a villa in London, he mostly spent time with the British royal family in the Buckingham Palace due to his close friendship to Queen Victoria and Edward VII.
Beyond his talent as an orator and fluency in six languages, Albert Apponyi had wide-ranging interests outside politics, encompassing philosophy, literature, and especially music and religion, namely Roman Catholicism. He visited the United States three times, first in 1904 and last in 1924, where he engaged in lecture tours and befriended leading public figures, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft. He also visited Egypt twice, including in 1869 when he was invited to the inauguration of the Suez Canal.
He owned the family castle in Éberhard,, where he entertained guests including Theodore Roosevelt during his tour of Europe in 1910. Roosevelt described Apponyi as "an advanced Liberal in matters political but also in matters ecclesiastical" and "like an American Liberal of the best type."
He considered his first political activity to be the role he once played alongside Ferenc Deák as a university student, when he was present as an Italian interpreter at a meeting with a delegation from Dalmatia.

Marriage and family

Count Albert Apponyi married to the women's rights activist Countess Clotilde von Mensdorff-Pouilly in Vienna on 1 March 1897.
Their children:
  • Count György II Alexander Apponyi, politician, member of the Parliament, journalist.
  • Mária Alexandrina ; marriage: Budapest, 29 June 1933 to Prince Karl de Rohan
  • Julianna ; 1st husband: Count Ferenc Pálffy ; 2nd husband: Elemér Klobusiczky

    Political career

Count Albert Apponyi became a member of the Hungarian Parliament in 1872 and remained a member almost uninterrupted until his death.
Returning home from his travels abroad, he soon found himself in the thick of the political life of the time. In 1872, he was elected as a member of the Hungarian Parliament for the first time, and after that he was a member of the Hungarian legislature until his death, practically without interruption. He won his first mandate in the district of Szentendre as a member of the platform of Ferenc Deák. "Everyone greeted me with a certain curiosity", he writes in his memoirs of his first appearance in the House of Representatives, "but few with sympathy. The left considered me the offspring of the conservatives, the liberal Deák supporters saw me as the representative of an ultramontane action'. Curiosity was soon replaced by warm interest, however, because his oratory skills were a sensation from the very first time he spoke.
In the general elections of 1875 – the terms of the Parliament were then still three years – he lost the elections in three places: in Kőszeg, in a district of Bačka and in an Oláh district of Transylvania, as you write: he failed in the elections, if not from the Carpathians to the Adriatic, but from the Vág to the Olt, from the Danube to the Tisza. Only in 1877 was he elected – but this time unanimously – in the now vacant Bobró district in the county of Árva county, on the platform of the conservative Sennyey party. Until then, he represented that party's position in the upper House of the parliament.
After the retirement of Baron Pál Sennyey, when his conservative party, Dezső Szilágyi's extraordinary party group and the Independent Libertarian Party merged to form the united opposition, he joined it, and his abilities made him a leader in this party after Dezső Szilágyi's departure. His party took the name of the National Party in October 1892, and remained under that name until February 1900, when it merged with the Libertarian Party. In 1889, he led all opposition parties in the debate on the development of the memorable army, demanding the assertion of the national rights guaranteed by the Compromise. This struggle broke the fifteen-year reign of Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza, and his fall soon followed.
Tisza's successor, Prime Minister Gyula Szapáry, was initially supported by Apponyi, but he turned against him when, instead of the original bill on administrative reform, he would have settled for a law stating that public administration was a state function. He then went into permanent opposition when Szapáry asked for and received a provisoire in October 1891 to dissolve parliament. The dissolution was carried out, but the opposition, and with it the National Party, emerged stronger from the electoral struggle, which in 1892 was conducted in an exile situation. Szapáry was defeated in the same year, and Apponyi played no small part in his downfall.

Advisor to Franz Joseph

A serious and long crisis ensued, during which Franz Joseph sought Apponyi's opinion, and which ended with the appointment of Baron Dezső Bánffy, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, as Prime Minister on 17 January 1895. Bánffy invited Apponyi to formal merger talks, but these ended inconclusively, as Bánffy made the merger conditional on the renunciation of national military requirements.
It was in this year that Count Albert Apponyi first appeared in the Inter-Parliamentary Union. The conference was held in Brussels, and Bánffy initiated the strong participation of the Hungarian parliament, because in connection with the upcoming millenary celebrations of the Hungarian state, he wanted to invite the conference to be held the following year to Budapest, and a great battle was expected to develop around this invitation. The Hungarian delegation succeeded brilliantly: Budapest was accepted as the venue for the next conference by a majority of votes, with only five votes against.
Towards the end of the year the opposition, led by Apponyi, was again at war with the government. Apponyi was so taken by the idea of the upcoming millenary celebrations that on Christmas Day he proclaimed a "treuga Dei" in his party's organ, the National Newspaper. However, 1896 had not yet ended when Apponyi's fight against Bánffy began again, as the government resorted to all means of violence and corruption in the general elections of that year. Apponyi was merciless in his scourging of abuses and public corruption in the newspapers, and then turned against him over the so-called 'Ischl clause'. However, he still did not participate in the resulting parliamentary filibuster, because he considered it "medicina pejor morbo". The fight ultimately led to Bánffy's downfall.
The government of Kálmán Széll followed. Apponyi came to an agreement with Széll and joined the Libertarian Party with his party. Shortly afterwards, the 1901 Diet elected him president, and in the same year he became a de facto internal privy councillor to the king. Before the 1903 recruitment bill was discussed, he presented his military programme, calling for the implementation of the so-called national concessions, but he agreed to postpone the issue until the new law on defence was implemented. For this reason, he did not approve of the Independence Party's obstruction of the recruitment bill, but as president he conducted the House's often stormy negotiations objectively and urged the delegations that came to see him to maintain their confidence in Parliament. After Széll's resignation on 1 July 1903, in order to stop the obstruction, he resigned his presidency and made a speech in favour of parliamentary peace, but the obstruction continued until Khuen-Héderváry's second resignation, and when the Libertarian Party had to take a stand on military issues, Apponyi became a member of the Committee of Nine sent to draw up the party's new military programme.
Apponyi was inclined towards the opposition: although he did not succeed in asserting his position, he remained in the Libertarian Party until it became clear that he could not realise his military demands in that party. His intention to leave was matured by the parallel meetings decided by the majority, which were aimed at violently breaking down the obstruction. On 26 November, he therefore left the party, having already resigned the presidency on 3 November. He was followed by members of the former National Party, with whom he has now re-formed the National Party. This party was sixty-seven strong, but it was particularly close to the Independence Party on the military question and agreed with the Independence Party on the question of the house rule revision planned by István Tisza, which brought the house rule revision into line with a substantial extension of the right to vote.