Revista Analele Banatului S.N. Arheologie-Istorie

Marcell Tóth

Lajos Varjassy: from secretary of the Arad Chamber of Commerce to minister of Hungarian counter-revolutionary governments

1 Ianuarie 2022

Abstract

Lajos Varjassy Jr. (1879-1935), a Hungarian politician, is often confused with his identically named father, who was the mayor of Arad during the city's heyday, even by historians specializing in that era. If the Austro-Hungarian Empire and historical Hungary had not collapsed in the autumn of 1918, he might have remained a second-rate figure even at the local level, someone we would only read about in the footnotes of local history works. At barely 39 years old, he suddenly rose from being a simple provincial chamber of commerce secretary to the governor-prefect of the city and County of Arad, because he had the trust of both the new Hungarian political system and the Romanian leaders of his homeland, as he had already shown friendship towards the Romanian minority before 1918. As a cosmopolitan and francophone, he easily communicated not only with the local Romanians but also with the soon-to-arrive French occupiers. In the following months, he had a dizzying career; first, it was rumored that he would become a minister, and then he actually held these high positions in the counter-revolutionary governments of Arad and Szeged. In fact, he was the only minister who could be a member of all the cabinets. This lightning career lasted just over a year: in its final act, he barely managed to save his own life from the military officers with whom he had worked not long before to overthrow the communist regime. He spent the last decade and a half of his life in Romania. He was inexorably drifting down the slope of his life, his influential Romanian allies turned away from him, and the Hungarian politicians in Romania and Hungary considered him a traitor. This latter accusation was even reinforced by his death: he was buried in London at the expense of the Romanian embassy.