From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 191-194:
By the day of the coronation only the most dissenting voices in the court were complaining about the Compromise. Most had come round to accepting it as a consummate act of outstanding diplomacy by the emperor. In Hungary Andrássy and Deák were declared the presiding political geniuses and it was generally agreed that the Hungarians had received from the arrangement more than they had thought possible a few years earlier. ‘Hungary won victory from defeat,’ as Jókai once said. He meant it with a degree of irony, but the phrase has stuck and entire histories of Hungary have been written with the famous phrase as their titles.
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The old Hungarian constitution was re-established, giving the Hungarian nobles essentially the same rights they had before 1848, though technically serfdom was abolished. The Empire of Austria became the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary with two capitals, two parliaments (both with limited powers) and two Cabinets. Only the Foreign Minister, the War Minister and the Finance Minister acted for both (and even then only for financial issues that affected the Empire as a whole). It was a highly complex structure that gave the Hungarians far more power as a proportion of their population. But Austria was far richer and paid 70 per cent of Imperial costs.
The system worked, for the moment, by balancing and safeguarding the Magyars’ sense of identity and the dynastic sovereignty of the Habsburgs. It was an intricate and fragile system, which worked for a limited period and gave rise, in Hungary at least, to an extraordinary spurt of prosperity and creativity. Essentially, modern Budapest is the product of the Dual Monarchy – and despite sporadic hostile reactions in Hungary, people were more satisfied with it than frustrated. It had plenty of absurdities: Hungary was under the king-emperor’s rule but was not subject to the Austrian Imperial government, a fact that wasn’t even mentioned in the Compromise Laws that brought the new empire into being and would cause severe problems later.
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The nomenclature of ‘dualism’ had to be navigated with extreme tact for there were endless snares and traps. The joint institutions were called ‘Imperial and royal’ (kaiserlich und königlich), or k.u.k. The Hungarians had insisted on ‘and’ to signify that they were equal. The purely Austrian offices were called Imperial-royal k.u.k., but the purely Hungarian ones just royal (königlich, or simply k). But in Budapest the term magyar királyi (Hungarian royal) was in general use, abbreviated as often as not on official signs in Budapest as magy.k.
Hungary was even more caste-conscious and hierarchical than Austria. Titles were important and there were highly complex rules about how to address different grades in the civil service. The first two grades were addressed as Gracious Sir (kegyelmes), grades three to five as Dignified Sir (méltóságos), grades six to nine as Great Sir (nagyságos) and grades ten and eleven as Respectable Sir (tekintetes or cimzetes). This was followed in various ways in a whole range of other managerial jobs and professions, and navigating proper usage was a minefield until after the Second World War.
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