"...how many historians hold Ferdinand largely, if not solely, responsible for deepening the Hungarian Crisis from the death of his uncle onwards, in large part taking the semi-consensus view that it was on his shoulders alone to deescalate tensions and find a compromise. This ignores that Ferdinand's advice from his Prague Circle was very poor (even if they often told him what he wanted to hear), that Germany and to a lesser extent Italy were beginning to outwardly and openly meddle in Hungarian affairs throughout the spring and summer of 1918, and that he also did not have many partners to compromise with in Hungary. It also must be noted that one of the most severe provocations between the dissolution of the Diet and the murder of Prince Franz lays at the feet of Karolyi.
The December Crisis which led to the Diet's dissolution was perhaps an inevitability of the various machinations of the prior year, but were inherently a political dispute in which both sides drew hard red lines that they became increasingly unable to walk away from. Andrassy hoped that, with the Compromise extend temporarily until 1920 and the legislature suspended, he could begin a grand negotiation with Karolyi to lower temperatures and come to some kind of agreement as to what would come next, and overtures throughout the spring of 1918 through intermediaries in Milan led to no tangible outcome but persuaded Andrassy, who was no naive babe in the woods, that no more surprises loomed and that with more nudging Karolyi and Jaszi could see reason and embark on a "yearslong odyssey" to find a "constitutional solution" to the crisis enveloping the Dual Monarchy, with himself in the role of the great compromiser, Ferenc Deak.
Such ideas were put to rest quickly and ruthlessly, as Karolyi took an action from which there was no turning back. One of the great disputes that had poisoned the atmosphere of late 1917 was Ferdinand's coronation in Vienna and his tentative plans for a coronation in Bohemia sometime the following year; that the first had occurred without a subsequent ceremony in Budapest was not surprising, but the idea that Bohemia would get a coronation before Hungary was a grievous insult, and one that Greens suspected was deliberate. The Prague coronation was, it turned out, just rumor - one perhaps spread by Magyar nationalists - but it scratched the right itches for Ferdinand's enemies, who already saw him as a Magyarphobe and Slavophile and were willing to believe just about anything about him. Ferdinand made things noticeably worse on May 26, 1918, when he acknowledged the fact that he had not traveled to Budapest to wear the Crown of Saint Stephen - one of Europe's holiest relics and the very symbol of Hungary herself - and thereafter recite the coronation oath. He expressed mild regret, before pivoting to blame "the politics of the hour" and obliquely suggested that he did not want to "provoke the sentiments of the hot-blooded" by going through with the coronation until "the current disputes are resolved, or moving towards doing so."
Could Ferdinand have deescalated by being coronated in Budapest? Maybe. It was not a small gesture to the Hungarian street, and it was one that irritated even Romanians and Slovaks who took pride in the pageantry and sacred symbolism of the Crown of Saint Stephen. While Ferdinand had been on the throne just over a year, he was nonetheless the first Habsburg monarch to not have been crowned King of Hungary since Joseph II in the late 18th century and that he seemed in no hurry to secure that key piece of legitimacy told many Hungarians everything they needed to know - that Ferdinand II was not their Ferdinand IV in anything other than name, and that he was their imperial overlord, not sovereign king. Were Hungarians the co-equals of the Dual Monarchy, or a conquered people? Did Ferdinand spit on the Compromise he was so attached to?
Ironically, at the exact time that Ferdinand sowed doubt with the Austrian newspapers that he would travel to Budapest - security concerns were part of the factor, too, as the Emperor had never forgotten his Magyarphile cousin's spectacular assassination thirty years earlier - he was in fact making plans to invite Karolyi to return from Milan and begin working towards a solution, and the coronation was something that Ferdinand considered a carrot to dangle for the Greens. If that was his plan, he miscalculated how willing Karolyi was to indulge, but even in such a miscalculation Karolyi's denunciation of him on May 31 for "refusing to take his solemn crown and abrogating his duty to Hungary." On June 2, a curious document began circulating Magyar exile circles in Milan, titled Kervenyt a Koronaert - the "Petition for the Crown," one of the most inflammatory and impactful writings in European history since the 99 Theses nailed to the church doors by Martin Luther:
"In the event that an heir refuses to coronate himself before his people, can it be said that he has refused the Crown? And if he refuses the Crown and the holy oaths that tie him to it and the throne it represents, can it be said that he has left the throne empty? These are the questions which the House of Habsburg must answer - and the questions the Magyar people must begin to ask." This opening stanza to a three-paragraph missive was designed to be hypothetical and rhetorical, but its meaning was plain as day - it was an open argument that Ferdinand was effectively renouncing the throne of Hungary and, by extension, that of Croatia-Slavonia, and implied that Hungary sought a new King. A less aggressive version of the Kervenyt appeared in Budapest which simply asked why Ferdinand had not accepted a coronation and demanded he do so, but the Milanese draft was the one published - with Karolyi's signature listed first and largest, as a Magyar John Hancock - across Europe.
No royal house in Europe was willing to entertain the idea that the Hungarian crown was indeed open - even Heinrich of Germany, a firm Magyarphile, rejected the Kervenyt outright and dismissed it as a "crude insult to Europe's oldest and noblest dynasty." But it was a remarkable escalation, one from which there was no return, in that Karolyi was seen in Vienna and elsewhere as now essentially advocating for the abdication of Ferdinand at least in Hungary, and rejecting him as an illegitimate ruler if he did not bend. The renewal of the Compromise now seemed to be the least of the Dual Monarchy's concerns.
The Kervenyt proved to be the last straw for Victor Emanuel, who upon reading it and realizing its plain implications convened an emergency Cabinet meeting, wherein Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando argued, over objections from the more militant foreign minister Sidney Sonnino, that the clear course of action was to immediately expel Karolyi out of fear of a genuine geopolitical crisis. The King agreed, and on June 10, the Carabineri arrived at the house where Karolyi was staying, asked him to pack his suitcases, and board the next train to Switzerland; over the next week, every other Milan Magyar that had put their signature to the Kervenyt were asked to do likewise, and with that the Milan Magyars became the Zurich Magyars. In many ways, Switzerland was a more ideal exile anyways - it had long been a repository for European problems after Belgium ceased serving that function decades earlier - and Karolyi took to enjoying long ways along the shore of the lake. It was on one of those such walks, without warning in the late afternoon of June 28 - thirty years to the day of Crown Prince Rudolf's assassination in Budapest - that he was approached by a man he had sworn he had seen at the market the day before, and he recoiled as the stranger brandished a pistol and opened fire. One bullet grazed Karolyi's shoulder, the other lodged in his left rib; it was only by a miracle that the next two shots missed, and that a nearby banker out for a stroll attacked the assassin with his cane and bludgeoned him into submission until the police could arrive.
Karolyi's doctors elected to stitch up his shoulder wound and were able to remove the bullet from his broken rib safely; though he lost a fair deal of blood, he would survive, albeit weakened for weeks. The assassin spoke German fluently and insisted to the police on his Swiss citizenship, giving the name Lukas Friedenberg, claiming to hail from a village near Lake Konstanz; that aroused Karolyi's suspicions even further upon hearing this and that the man could give no evidence he was in fact Swiss, deducing that his would-be killer was an Austrian agent hired to come into Switzerland and shoot him dead now that he was not under Italian semi-protection, and that was the conclusion most Greens both inside and outside of Hungary arrived at, too..."
- Ferdinand: The Last Emperor