There are men of whom it must be said that their lives are of interest primarily because they illuminate the inner history of an epoch. In the course of a long life, Béla Menczer built no more than a modest reputation as an international journalist, popular historian, and would-be adventurer, but his evolution from a revolutionary socialist to a counterrevolutionary conservative sheds considerable light on the spiritual crisis of the century now coming to a close—one that has witnessed war, revolution, and mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Moreover, that evolution reflects Menczer’s unusual ability to discern what he believed to be the supramundane significance of worldly events.

Born in Budapest during the twilight years of the Habsburg Monarchy, Menczer was too young to serve in the Great War, but old enough to respond to the initial promptings of his rebellious nature. During the time that the Monarchy was fighting for its life, he began to attend meetings of the Galileo Circle, a gathering of radical left-wing university students and intellectuals, and when, after the war and the quick collapse of a democratic and a Soviet Republic, the government of Admiral Miklós Horthy failed to curb a White Terror that targeted leftists and Jews, he proclaimed his conversion to "revolutionary socialism".¹

Menczer’s hatred of the Horthy counterrevolution was all the more intense because, although born to a prosperous Calvinist family, his father was at least partially of Jewish origin. The senior Béla Menczer was in fact first cousin to the mother of Oszkár Jászi; the famous editor of Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), an assimilated Jew, visited the Menczer home often and exerted a lasting, though not a decisive, influence on Menczer’s intellectual evolution. We know, for example, that the younger man admired the first book Jászi wrote in Vienna after leaving Hungary in 1919: a memoir/history of the Hungarian postwar that included a bitter de-nunciation of the Horthy regime and all its works.² Itching to do something subversive, Menczer and three friends arranged a series of lectures for fellow law students on incendiary topics such as the democratic/socialist evolution of modern Europe.³

At the time, Hungarian law required that those who organized any meeting at which more than five people were to be present obtain prior permission from the police. When, early in 1922, the headstrong Menczer refused to comply with the law, the police took him into custody. A court quickly sentenced him to prison for 18 months, ten of which he served before being released with the proviso that he report regularly to the authorities. Soon tiring of such a restricted life, he obtained a forged passport and made his way to Vienna, then the centre of the Hungarian emigration. Finding work in the once proud imperial capital proved to be difficult, however, and in 1924 he moved on to Paris, a natural choice for someone so in love with all things French.

For the next five years, Menczer eked out a living in Paris by commenting on Central European affairs for Léon Blum’s Le Populaire and such other publications as Le Soir and Le Quotidien.⁴ He obtained those impressive journalistic assignments as a result of his association with József Diner-Dénes, a Blum confidant and leader of the Paris Világosság (Light) group of Hungarian socialists. Menczer admired Diner-Dénes as a "curious sort of Socialist —too fond of humanistic culture to be a revolutionary and at heart… even a ‘great-Austrian’."5 The older man possessed a religious and prophetic understanding of socialism that fascinated Menczer, who had always been attracted by the prophetic genius of the Jews.⁶ From the mid-1920s on, certainly, he began to focus his attention on those prophets of the past who seemed to have been the most clairvoyant.

When he was not writing for French journals, Menczer spent most of his time in the cosmopolitan circle that had gathered around Mihály Károlyi, the aristocrat-turned-democrat who led the short-lived Hungarian Democratic Republic of 1918–19. It was largely as a result of that connection that he came into contact with other exile circles—Russian, Bulgarian, Italian, and Spanish. Having met members of the latter group, including the writer and philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, he formed the opinion that Spaniards and Hungarians shared much in common.⁷ But he did not, then, give the matter further thought, for he was too busy helping Károlyi and Diner-Dénes do everything possible to discredit the Horthy government.

In that effort Menczer worked closely with Gyula Illyés, a former Budapest comrade and fellow exile. In fact, he shared a room with Illyés, later to become one of twentieth-century Hungary’s finest poets and men of letters, on the Ile St Louis in 1925–26. In the latter year the two young "Huns"⁸ even convinced themselves that they could be instrumental in bringing the counterrevolutionary regime down, in the aftermath of a bizarre attempt on the part of Hungarian civilian and military leaders to disrupt the French economy by circulating 1.⁵ billion forged francs.

In the event, nothing much came of the affair, in part it seems because the French did not wish to take any action that might dampen the spirit of Locarno. Disappointed, Menczer stayed on in Paris until 1929, when the police, increasingly worried about a possible communist threat, expelled him for "subversive activity". Knowing German almost as well as he did French, he moved to Berlin, "which was becoming increasingly important and about which [he] wanted to have some experience."⁹ There, in the city of Isherwood’s famous stories, Menczer earned his keep as a correspondent for a Vienna press agency, a lecturer (chiefly on Proudhon and Georges Sorel) at the Volkshochschule and Hochschule für Politik, and a specialist on Central European affairs for Die Welt am Montag and Die Weltbühne, the principal organ of the linke Intellektuelle.

It did not take Menczer long to discover that Germany would never replace France in his affections. In fact, he despised the country, as anyone who read his inexpert Weltbühne ruminations on Hegel could plainly see. It was from Hegel’s philosophy, he insisted, that Prussian-German imperialism drew its inspiration. Worse, "Hegelianism did not stop at the German linguistic frontier;" it was the source of communism and fascism as well. "All three asserted their claim to power in the name of ‘objective necessity’."¹⁰ Such historical fatalism, he surmised, was deeply rooted in Protestant notions of predestination.

It must have come as a relief when, shortly after Hitler’s accession to power, Menczer retreated to Paris. Much had changed since the 1920s, however, and, always eager for new experiences, he pushed on to London in the summer of 1934—fully intending to return to the French capital. He took lodgings in Bloomsbury and remained there for the next six years. Thanks to his Hungarian contacts, the internationally-known Károlyi above all, he managed to wangle an invitation to the Saturday gatherings at Lansdowne House presided over by Henry Wickham Steed, former foreign editor of The Times and notorious enemy of the Habsburg Monarchy. No doubt he hoped to ingratiate himself with Steed and other members of the salon by publishing in The Contemporary Review an article opposing a Habsburg restoration.¹¹

Not that Menczer wrote solely as an opportunist. He still considered himself to be a socialist, albeit of a fiercely independent sort. Thus he fell in with the Labour Party, working as an advisor and translator for its International Department. From 1936 to 1938 he also lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association.¹² Some of the material for his lectures he drew from the research that he had begun for a book on the London exile of Kossuth, Mazzini, and Ledru-Rollin. Menczer never wrote the book because his studies disillusioned him with the 1848–49 revolutions, and hence with Kossuth and Hungarian nationalism. "Had Kossuth’s party prevailed," he observed in later years, "the dissolution of Austria might have led to the same results in the 1850s which we saw almost a century later: the clash between Pan-German and Pan-Slav ambitions."¹³

As his enthusiasm for Kossuth’s left liberalism waned, Menczer developed a new interest in the right liberalism of József Eötvös. Unlike Kossuth, who came from an impoverished and Lutheran noble family, Eötvös was a Baron and a Catholic. Thus, although he loved liberty every bit as much, if not more, than Kossuth did, he did not share the latter’s nationalism and hostility to the Habsburgs. He served as Minister of Education, Arts and Public Worship in the short-lived 1848 government of Lajos Batthyány, but left Hungary for Munich when war erupted with Austria. It was in the Bavarian capital that he wrote The Ruling Ideas of the Nineteenth Century and Their Influence on the State.

Having re-read Eötvös’s masterly study of liberty, equality, and nationality with fresh eyes, Menczer was pleased to note that the Baron’s terminology was "definitely un-Hegelian". Just as definitely, it was not borrowed from the French Revolution but from English constitutional history. To Eötvös, "English Liberty means mainly personal freedom; the accent lies on the word ‘person’—the Christian medieval notion of the human person."¹⁴ Like Tocqueville, whom he much admired, Eötvös recognized that equality conflicted with liberty; ultimately, he believed, egalitarian demands would lead to a strong and coercive central power and to the extinguishing of liberty.

In time, Eötvös reasoned, the central power would turn to nationalism as a legitimizing idea, for nationalism was the mightiest of the three ruling ideas of the nineteenth century. Writing about Eötvös in 1939, Menczer was struck by the accuracy of his subject’s prophecies, by the uses communists made of egalitarianism and Nazis of nationalism. Just as important, he was taken with Eötvös’s proposed remedy, namely a reaffirmation of the ideas of liberty and human oneness as they were embodied in Christian civilization. "The creative policy of the future," Menczer wrote, "should aim at the protection of personality against the arbitrary interference of national and equalitarian collectivisms. Such a policy must necessarily be Christian."¹⁵ Menczer did not mean by that that a theocracy should be established, for he recognized the irreversibility of secularization. But precisely because the state had become secularized, he believed that human personality and individual conscience depended upon a Christian society; both were Christianity in its secular—moral and political—aspect. "It is characteristic of the Christian and Western medium," he wrote in the 1930s, "that men, in their reasoning and moral feeling, should behave as members of universal mankind rather than as subjects of a particular king or particles of a special community."¹⁶

That, certainly, was the way that Menczer, as a cultural Christian of partially Jewish origin, wished to behave. And with good reason. "When Israel was dispersed," he wrote in the 1950s, "mankind itself became a spiritual Israel."¹⁷ Of course the idea of Judeo-Christian universality ran counter to the Protestantism into which he had been born; increasingly drawn to the faith of Eötvös, he was not able to take Catholic instruction before Hitler unleashed war on Poland—and on his beloved France.

Badly shaken, Menczer could scarcely speak of the fall of Paris. "As to the events," he wrote to Oszkár Jászi in a long and anguished letter of August 10, 1940,

"I do not know how I did to survive to them [sic]. On the 17th of June I had really no wish and no desire to do so. I thought the fall of Paris and of France was definitely more than I could bear and still to-day, I beg you to forgive me, if I do not attempt to give my version and my ‘explanation’ of the French tragedy." He had, indeed, discovered an explanation in the writings of the nineteenth-century Spanish conservative Juan Donoso Cortés. "Europe fell exactly as the strange genius of Donoso Cortés has foretold that it will: sophistry was followed by demagogy, demagogy by despotism, despotism by barbaric invasion in a moment when all better spiritual and moral energies were paralysed by fear…"¹⁸

In his late 30s, Menczer could not endure the thought of remaining on the sidelines while the war against barbarism was being waged.

I am in close touch with the French organization of General de Gaulle [he confided to Jászi]. I hope to be of some use to them, last not least on account of my knowledge of some Arabic. The Free French Forces are already in action as you have probably read it in the British communiqués. Some of the General’s collaborators were known to me already in France. As to the General himself, he is a most brilliant intelligence with a very considerable knowledge not only of military matters, but also of history, politics and of all things in Europe and the Middle-East, where he served throughout the greater part of his career… De Gaulle is to-day the man who after Joan of Arc and Henry IV may become the third liberator of France from dissolution and disaster.

Just as presciently, and revealingly, he shared with Jászi his hopes and fears with respect to the future.

I look with confidence at the military side of the picture. Germany has achieved victories by 10,000 tanks and 10,000 aircraft. She will be defeated by 20,000 tanks and 20,000 aircraft. This is rather simple and only a question of time. Much less simple is the deeply rooted spiritual, social and moral evil of Europe and of the century of which Hitlerism is but a passing and superficial expression and symptom. Nazism will come to an end, the "age of the masses", of brute instincts, of pseudo-religions and pseudo-sciences will, or at least may, last. All what we, men with an intellectual, moral and religious conscience, can do is very little. We can fight the battle up to the bitter end (the end will be "bitter" even in case of victory) and we can save our souls.¹⁹

Before the end of August, Menczer had obtained permission to join the Free French Forces and soon found himself with 2000 other men, including de Gaulle himself, en route to French West Africa. On arrival, he participated in the abortive Free French-British attempt to secure Dakar, as part of de Gaulle’s plan to establish a foothold in France’s colonial empire. For almost three years subsequent to that he served as an infantry NCO in French Equatorial Africa, accompanying patrols on the road from Chad to Libya and trying to ward off repeated attacks of malaria. In April of 1941, while convalescing after one such attack and reflecting on his experience of war, he made the spiritual decision toward which he had been leaning for years—he requested and received baptism as a Catholic.²⁰ Finally, in 1943, he was declared unfit for further service and sent back to England, where, for the next three years, he manned the German and East European press desk for General de Gaulle.

That work came to an end in May 1946 and Menczer returned to civilian life, where he made his way as a free-lance writer and a correspondent for French newspapers before landing an editorial job with the BBC. Only then did he decide to make England his permanent home, and that despite the fact that he was in the midst of a personal crisis. His Catholic faith had led to growing tension in his relationship with his companion and sometime lover Ruth von Schulze-Gaevernitz, a highly intelligent woman whom he had met in Berlin in 1930. Seeing no hope of overcoming their ever deepening alienation, the two decided to go their separate ways, and in July 1947 Menczer married Marjorie Ries, a secondary school teacher of French nine years his junior. A Catholic who shared his deep commitment to the Church, Ries had served during the war in General de Gaulle’s Red Cross.

Not long after Menczer’s marriage, Jászi, who was on his way to or from a last visit to Hungary, stopped off in London. According to Menczer, they attended Mass together and discussed Catholicism at length. Although his old friend and relative had no intention of converting, Menczer concluded that Jászi had Catholic inclinations and conservative sympathies.²¹ This came as no surprise, for already, in an address given at a London gathering in 1945, Menczer had linked Jászi’s name to that of Eötvös.²² Like the Catholic Baron, Jászi recognized the danger of nationalism and championed a more universal community of persons. He saw too the need for a religious, or at least a natural law, foundation for ethics.

And yet, despite his genuine admiration for Jászi, Menczer had already begun to move beyond a vaguely Catholic right liberalism to an assertively Catholic reform conservatism. In large part that was because the war and Nazi atrocities—especially the mass murder of the Jews—had brought home to him as never before the reality of evil. Anyone like him, he considered, who continued to believe in the necessity and importance of reform had to make certain that he never lost sight of that reality. The nineteenth century, Menczer now concluded, had prepared the way for the catastrophic twentieth by its optimism and its belief in the curative effects of revolution. Only a few prophets had correctly diagnosed the times and foreseen the disasters that the spirit of revolution would produce.

Chief among those prophets was Donoso Cortés, whom Menczer had begun to read before the war, perhaps when preparing his Berlin lectures on Proudhon, the Spaniard’s bęte noire.²³ Unlike the intellectuals who welcomed the European Revolution of 1848–49, Donoso viewed it as an effort to uproot Christian civilization and to plant a new order inspired by the secular religions of nationalism and socialism. The result would be nothing short of calamitous. "You," Donoso told members of the Spanish Cortes in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil, "believe that civilization and the world are advancing, when civilization and the world are regressing. The world is taking great strides towards the constitution of the most gigantic and destructive despotism which men have ever known."²⁴

Shortly after delivering that speech, Donoso assumed his responsibilities as Minister Plenipotentiary to Prussia. But like Menczer after him, he found the political and intellectual atmosphere in Berlin to be stifling; in particular, "the ‘nebulous rationalism’ of Hegelian philosophy filled him with horror."²⁵ Gazing into the future, he foresaw the rise of a nationalistic, and despotic, Prussia. More importantly and more strikingly, he revised his once favourable opinion of Russia. No longer did he view the eastern colossus as the bulwark of European conservatism, but as a future and terrifying enemy of Christian civilization. Having witnessed the chaos caused by the revolutions of 1848–49, he foresaw a time when an even greater European anarchy would open the continent to invasion from the East, to a Russian autocracy wedded to revolutionary socialism.²⁶ Such a prophecy could not but impress Menczer, whose native land had fallen victim to Russian communist occupation as a result of the Second World War.

It was that same prophecy that had once caught the attention of Metternich, the political leader for whom Menczer had gained a new appreciation. Metternich "was fully aware of the dangerous tendencies existing in Russia," the Hungarian observed, "and attributed them, again not so wrongly, to circles which propagated innovations from the West."²⁷ Just as important, Metternich understood that nineteenth-century liberals, even those on the political right, like Eötvös, had erred in their excessive optimism regarding human nature and in their identification of the guiding principle of politics and social life.

For Metternich and all genuine conservatives, that guiding principle was not Liberty, but Order. In French, the language he preferred to use, the Austrian leader once wrote that "the word ‘liberty’ has no value for me as a point of departure, but as a point of real arrival. It is the word ‘order’ that designates the point of departure. The idea of liberty can only be based upon the idea of order."²⁸ Menczer therefore concluded that Metternich was not opposed to true—disciplined rather than anarchic—liberty, and within the context of a stable order he wished to extend its frontiers. That was particularly true in Hungary, which he viewed as crucial to the preservation of Austria’s status as a great power.

Naturally Metternich had little use for Kossuth’s brand of liberal nationalism, and though he—the Austrian—admired the more conservative István Széchenyi, he thought him too much the Romantic.²⁹ He did, however, recognize men of like mind among the few conservative members of the Reform Generation (1825–48), chief among whom was Count József Dessewffy, a Catholic loyal to the Habsburg dynasty. Dessewffy passed the torch of reform conservatism on to his sons, especially the gifted Aurél, but they were not able to wrest the reform movement from Kossuth and the radical nationalists. That was a great misfortune, Menczer maintained, because it meant that Hungary conspired in its own undoing. "It adopted a revolutionary nationalism as its ideology… and deserted the spirit of conservative reform which could only reside in a strong Monarchy."³⁰

Menczer had clearly changed his tune since 1934, when, as we have seen, he still leaned to the left and opposed a Habsburg restoration. "Landscapes change," he wrote in the early 1950s, "with every move of the sun and with every step the spectator takes, and the history of an era provides just such a landscape. The light changes with the passing of time."³¹ In the changed light of the post-war era he had come to believe that the Austrian Royal House had presided over a Christian Monarchy of Order and Liberty. In its opposition to Revolutionary France it had therefore fought a religious even more than a secular war, for as Donoso had pointed out, modern political struggles were properly understood as the continuations of theological controversies by other means. Thus he had identified monarchy with Catholicism, liberalism with Deism, democracy with Pantheism, and socialism with open rebellion against God.³²

This secularization of theology meant that the battle for the soul of Western Civilization—more properly, Western Christendom—would be won or lost in the arena of secular history and political thought. Donoso recognized that and he therefore took his rightful place alongside Joseph de Maistre and the Vicomte de Bonald among "the lay Fathers of the Church", a dignity bestowed upon them by a Menczer favourite, the novelist, dandy, and sometime ultra-Catholic Jules Amadée Barbey d’Aurevilly.

Although he never quite made an explicit claim, Menczer saw himself, if not as a lay Father of the Church, at least as a minor actor in the historical drama of "secular spirituality", a crusader engaged in a life or death struggle against the Enemy who in his primal rebellion against God had inspired the human rebellion against God’s Order, the progressive stages of which were the French Revolution of 1789, the European Revolution of 1848–49, and the World Revolution of 1914–18 and beyond. Its aim, he believed, was not liberty and reform, but tyranny and the deification of Man. True rebellion was in his view always on the side of authority.

I will never believe the world perfect enough [he wrote towards the end of his life] to be able to live without revolutionaries, and only a solid conservative order can produce true, genuine revolutionaries. When the Pope and the Emperor divided power over Europe between them, there was room for St Francis of Assisi. When the Church was safe, when Empires and dynasties were solidly established, there were statesmen, sometimes Bishops and sometimes rulers, who could dare to make radical reform and audacious innovations, which had a chance of success because the authority which introduced them was unchallenged and universally recognized. A weak and tottering government never dares to do anything, and if the Monarch and the Church in modern times were reactionary, it was because the progressive Radicals, so-called free-thinkers and agnostics made them weak and tottering, because this was their aim, rather than to make social improvements and genuine reforms prevail.³³

To be sure, the restoration of Christian and monarchical authority was not a likelihood in the second half of the twentieth century, and Menczer knew it. There was, however, one country in which he could witness a successful holding action, a last stand of Christian civilization. "For a generation," he told Jászi in 1948, "only Spain, among all of Europe’s nations, has displayed real intellectual and cultural life in the midst of the decadence, the dissolution, or, in the best case, the stagnation in the rest of Europe."³⁴

In the postwar years, Menczer improved his Spanish, travelled in Spain, and lectured at El Ateneo, the free university of Madrid where the young Donoso Cortés had once professed Constitutional Political Law. It was, of course, Donoso who had first inspired in Menczer a love of Spanish culture, but as he began to acquaint himself with other Spanish thinkers, men such as Pastor Díaz, Menéndez y Pelayo, Ortega y Gasset, and Unamuno, he noticed that they were all unconventional, unorthodox, difficult to categorize intellectually—rather as he imagined himself to be. Almost all, too, were reformers and defenders of freedom, but champions of order; men who eschewed pagan (stoic) resignation while at the same time possessing a tragic sense of life.³⁵

Nor were these apparent contradictions an accident, but the direct result of modern Spanish history. Once closely tied to France, Spaniards had taken up arms against Napoleon and the French Revolution in 1808. France’s "revolution of the rights of Man," Menczer argued, "evoked a revolution of historical rights, a ‘conservative revolution’ as Ernst Jünger and others said later, a renewal with the goal of preservation."³⁶ That was the key to understanding the Spanish mind, a mind that Menczer found more congenial than any he had previously known.

Menczer recorded these reflections on Spain in the early 1970s, at a time when an aging General Franco was still at the Spanish helm. He was, however, unperturbed, for he recognized that at the time Franco had taken up arms against the republican government, Spain had been divided into two irreconcilable camps, the one revolutionary and anti-Christian, the other counterrevolutionary and Christian. One side or the other was going to prevail and Menczer was "totally convinced that Franco [by his victory] rendered service to the whole of Europe and Europe was most ungrateful to Spain and to him."³⁷ He recalled what Donoso had said in the famous speech on dictatorship he delivered before the Spanish Cortes on January 4, 1849, namely that as men’s internal (religious) control weakens, liberty invites tyranny, and so external (political) control must be established.

Thus, as I have said, Gentlemen, the choice does not lie between liberty and dictatorship; if that were so, I would vote for liberty, just as all of us here would do. The problem, and my conclusion, are as follows: we have to choose between the dictatorship of insurrection and the dictatorship of government; of these two alternatives I choose dictatorship on the part of the government, as being less onerous and less shameful.³⁸

Menczer agreed. Early in 1950 he wrote to tell Jászi about a rewarding four-week trip he had recently made to Franco’s Spain. "The Spanish atmosphere," he reported, "is alive and exciting, full of far-reaching visions, ideas, and plans." The Franco government, he conceded, was a military—and, he might have added, a Donosian—dictatorship, but it was far removed from either Fascism or Nazism. There was in Spain no extolling of instinct, no cult of physical strength, and no mass movement ideology. "The key to Italian Fascism," he rightly observed, "was Mussolini’s former Marxism… Franco was never a Marxist." Nor was the Generalissimo a tyrant or a demagogue. Conversations in public places, even among critics of the regime, were frank and unguarded, and though there were limits to criticism, they were notably broad.³⁹

Menczer was greatly pleased, but not surprised when, during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Franco spoke publicly of the duty that Christian nations had to stand by the rebels.⁴⁰ For like the Spanish in 1808—and in 1936—Hungarians had confronted a revolutionary and imperialist power with "a conservative revolution", "a revolution of historical rights."

Spain represented for Menczer a last flicker of hope for Catholic monarchy, a last reminder that order and liberty could be brought into proper balance. The latter goal requires emphasis, for what Carl Schmitt once wrote of Donoso Cortés could also be said of Menczer: "In his personal being [he] was liberal in the best sense of the word, even more essentially liberal than his humanist and moralizing enemies, for the true home of all liberal qualities is, after all, in the sphere of the individual and the personal, not in that of government and politics."⁴¹

And yet, as a Christian, Menczer did not feel obliged to place all of his hope in earthly events; indeed, he believed it necessary to live without "practical remedies", with the hope of final salvation alone. That salvation and final justice had not yet arrived; "the dead," he wrote on the eve of the Hungarian Revolution, "are not yet resurrected and they do not yet walk. But there is no doubt that they will." A prophetic utterance, that. But even if he were to die before that day arrived, it would matter little, for he had come to believe that true life began only when earthly existence ended.⁴²

Notes