The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918)

by C A Macartney

  The danger-year had passed over equally quietly in Prague, except for some sentimental outbreaks of sympathy for the Poles. Neither did the following years see any political developments worth recording in these Lands. In the Lands of the Hungarian Crown, on the other hand, 1830 ushered in a really eventful lustrum.

  In the summer Francis re-convoked the Hungarian Diet, partly to crown Ferdinand and partly to receive the Crown’s demands for the recruits and money which Metternich wanted for his actions against European revolution, and already this Diet was only half complaisant. It crowned Ferdinand, on 28 September, although not without some grumblings, and the magnates, who were as anxious as Metternich himself that revolution should not spread to the Monarchy, were prepared to grant the Crown’s full demand for recruits, viz., 30,000 immediately, to bring the Hungarian regiments in the standing army up to strength, and 20,000 more if the defence of the State required them before the next Diet opened. But the Lower Table haggled. They ended by voting the immediate requirements, but only 28,000 (to show their independence), and made the supply of the other 20,000 dependent on various conditions (which Francis did not, indeed, accept), including that they should not be used for intervention abroad ‘against popular liberties’. As the price for this they extracted, at last, one really substantial linguistic concession. No person not conversant with the Magyar language was in future to be admitted to the public services in Inner Hungary, and after four years, the same condition was to apply for admission to the Bar. The Chancellery and the Curia were to be bound to answer in Magyar communications addressed to them in that language by the Counties, and Magyar might also be used in the Courts.27

  They had a great number of other requests as well, and when Francis, employing his customary device, sent them home as soon as he had gained his own points, they received the intimation with strong protests of their ‘consternation’.

  Up to a point, this Diet should still be regarded as the successor of that of 1825, rather than the inaugurator of the very different series which followed. Almost all its demands were directed towards maintaining Hungary’s constitutional independence vis-à-vis Vienna; even the caveat regarding popular liberties abroad was made because speakers thought that the existence of other constitutional regimes would make it easier for Hungary to defend her own. But two years passed before the next Diet met, which was longer than it should have been; for on closing the Diet of 1830, Francis had promised faithfully to convoke its successor the following year, and give a proper hearing to the nation’s wishes. But in 1831 a devastating outbreak of cholera, spreading from Russia via Galicia, ravaged Hungary with such dreadful effect that in the single year 536,517 persons sickened of it, 237,641 of the cases – one in twenty-five of the entire population – proving fatal.28 Francis made the outbreak a pretext for leaving the Diet unconvoked, although it was freely said that his real reason had been fear of indiscreet demonstrations of sympathy for the Poles, if not something worse (reports had been reaching the secret police of Polish emissaries spreading revolution, and of Hungarian conventicles plotting it)29 and when it did assemble, on 16 December 1832, its mood was not only more combative still than that of its predecessor, but different in kind. The change was due (apart from the general spirit of the age) to two influences.

  One was the effect of the epidemic itself, and its concomitants. The authorities had sent round commissioners to pour chlorine into the wells, and had also made issues of bismuth. By ill-fortune, some persons using the disinfected wells, and some taking bismuth, had died, while others who had taken no medicaments had survived. The epidemic had been worst in the northern Counties, where the peasantry was most backward, and also most oppressed. A belief had spread that the authorities, the landlords and the Jews were in conspiracy to reduce the population by poisoning it off. Many landlords’ houses were sacked and burnt, and a number of nobles and their bailiffs, priests and Jews were murdered, some of them in indescribably brutal fashion.

  These dreadful excesses shattered the complacent belief of the Hungarian landowners that the peasant situation could be left to look after itself. A wave of near-panic swept over them. One party, indeed, called for severe repressive measures (such as were in fact applied in the affected areas), but another, not inconsiderable, group felt that the remedy should lie in reforming the peasants’ conditions. Whichever the standpoint, the peasant question appeared to call for urgent action.

  The second factor to alter the mood of the Diet was the personal influence of a single man, Count István Széchenyi, the man who had intervened so sensationally in the linguistic debates of 1825.

  Széchenyi is one of the most important figures in the modern history of the Monarchy, one of the most admirable and of the most tragic, because the waters which he released, out of the deepest conviction and with the purest intention, turned within a very few years into a raging torrent which menaced the very foundations of what he still held to be essential to their useful operation.

  István Széchenyi was a member of one of Hungary’s greatest families, one which had, indeed, a tradition of national service: his father, Count Ferencz Széchenyi, was the founder of the great national library which still bears his name. But the family, whose estates lay hard on the Austrian frontier, was also one of those whose loyalty to the dynasty had always been total. Széchenyi himself had begun his career by serving his Monarch, with some distinction, as an officer of hussars, and even the tongue in which he thought and expressed himself most freely was German.

  Loyalty to the dynasty was always axiomatic to him, and he never even saw Hungary except in terms of the Gesammtmonarchie.30 He also had a realistic appreciation of Hungary’s weaknesses, political, national and financial, and was convinced that the help, protection and financial resources of Vienna were essential to her. But his was a brooding and mystical spirit, which became possessed by a passion in which devotion to God was so mingled with an intense and compassionate love of Hungary and of the Magyar people that the elements defy separation. When peace came he had sent in his papers and thereafter travelled widely in Western Europe, especially England. He was shocked by the contrast between the progress, wealth and civic liberty which he found there and the backwardness, poverty and degradation of the ‘great fallow-land’, as he termed his own country, and had immediately set himself to diagnosing the ills which he found there, and to seeking remedy for them.

  It is a curious feature of Széchenyi’s activity that while his whole inspiration was essentially moral, even religious, his approach to problems and his arguments were always severely practical.31 His first enterprises (apart from the offer to finance the Academy) sounded almost trivial: the foundation of an aristocrats’ club, the introduction of horse-racing. But they had a practical purpose: the club was to enable its members to read Western literature and to exchange ideas, the races, to improve the breed of Hungarian horses.

  After another visit to England he became interested in the navigation of the Danube, took shares in the recently-established Donaudampschiffgesellschaft, which had begun plying between Vienna and Pest in 1830, and launched a plan for an independent Hungarian company, which was also to work the lower stretches of the river. At the same time, Széchenyi was launching propaganda for the most famous of all the children of his brain, the construction of a suspension bridge between Buda and Pest. Revolutionary in its grandeur, this project contained a proposal which was more revolutionary still, for Széchenyi proposed to exact a toll from all users of the bridge, noble or non-noble; if accepted, this would have constituted the first breach in the nobles’ cherished exemption from taxation.

  By this time all Hungary was humming with the activities of ‘the Count’. Some laughed at him, others admired him, but he was the talk of the country. Then, in 1830, came his first full-scale book, Hitel (Credit).

  Hitel is an astonishing book. The inspiration of it, apparent in every line, is a pure and intense love and pity for his country and its people, deserving, he thinks, of so
much and capable of achieving it, but now in possession of so little. Yet he barely invokes the moral considerations which move him so deeply; his references to the incompatibility of Hungary’s social system, above all, the unfree condition of the peasants, with the claims of human dignity are almost parenthetical. If he seeks souls, he does so through an appeal to pockets, by arguing that the Hungarian Constitution is materially disadvantageous to its supposed beneficiaries, the nobles, themselves. The inalienability of their estates imposed by the aviticitas makes it impossible for them to give them as security for the loans without which they cannot carry through essential improvements. Their exemption from taxation prevents the accumulation of funds to construct the communications without which their produce remains unsaleable. The landlord-peasant nexus and the robot system are unprofitable to the landlords themselves, because, as he calculates, a day’s robot is only one-third as productive as the hired labour of a freeman.

  Széchenyi suggested no far-reaching political remedies; certainly nothing like the introduction of Western democracy, which to the end of his days he thought dangerous for Hungary; his programme was always a paternal one, of reform from above. And yet his theses, severely practical as they were, were revolutionary in the fullest sense of the term. The proposition that the sacrosanct Hungarian Constitution was no fortress of liberty, but a prison, stood all Hungarian political thought on its head. Moreover, Széchenyi argued his case with a brutal frankness which did not spare his readers. He told his fellow-nobles, with great candour, that the ultimate cause of their country’s backwardness lay, not in foreign oppression, but in their own sloth, selfishness and complacency, and that the remedy lay in their own hands.

  Not unnaturally, Hitel met with a mixed reception. The rich magnates, on whom the weight of noble taxation would fall, regarded his proposals as simply highway robbery; the backwoods squires could not believe that any better existence than theirs was led by any class on earth; and for proof that they owed their blessings to their Constitution, pointed to the repeated complaints by Vienna precisely against that Constitution. Széchenyi was denounced as an unpractical dilettante, a bird fouling his own nest, a red revolutionary, a traitor.

  But Széchenyi stood his ground. In 1831 he answered his critics and developed his arguments, especially his case for social and political reform, in the still more impressive Világ (Light).32 And the very storm which his books aroused helped to increase their effect. The questions which they raised became the subject of hot controversy. The virtues and blessings of the Constitution were no longer assumed as automatic. They were still most generally maintained, but not a few people were found to agree on the weakness of the spots on which Széchenyi had put his finger. When the 1832 Diet met, Széchenyi had still very few supporters among the magnates, but the Lower House contained a considerable group of ‘Liberal’ advocates of at least some of his ideas. Among these, Ferencz Kölcsey was the man whose ideas were the most closely akin to Széchenyi’s own, but the man destined to appear as the most important of all was Ferencz Deák, a sober, high-principled and respected medium landowner from Zala, who, quietly turning things over in his own mind, had come to the conclusion that far-reaching reforms, including the complete emancipation of the peasants and the extension of taxation to the nobles, were necessary on moral, political and economic grounds.

  So battle was joined between the conservatives and the reformers, and if the latter were few, they were vocal, and since the Diet was now technically submitting to the Crown the revised reports of the Committees originally set up in 1791, they had a chance to talk on almost any subject they fancied. Progressives from all over the country had taken the opportunity to get their ideas into the reports, which accordingly contained a long series of proposals, some of them genuinely radical for that day: for far-reaching improvements in the condition of the peasants, for the removal of unequal restrictions on Protestants, for reform of the tariff system (to consider which it was suggested that discussions might be held between representatives of the Hungarian and Austrian Estates), for the abolition of the aviticitas, and a host more; besides such purely national demands as the re-integration of the Partium and more facilities still for the use of Magyar in public life; and to sweeten the mixture, a motion of sympathy for the Polish nation.

  Against most of these proposals, the Hungarian magnates put up a stubborn resistance, and they were nearly always backed by the Crown, partly out of its innate conservatism, partly on the a priori reasoning that anything which Hungarians wanted must be undesirable. Heavy personal responsibility rests here on Metternich, who had snubbed Széchenyi in 1825, when the young Count had pleaded with him for reform from above, in collaboration with Vienna. ‘No, no!’ the old wise-acre had replied: ‘Take one stone out of the vaulting and the whole thing collapses’ – thus really damning in advance all Széchenyi’s hopes. The result was that by the end of 1835, when the ‘Long Diet’, as it was baptized, had sat for three full years, it had very small results to show for so much talking. Perhaps the most conspicuous of them was that it had accepted, after bitter opposition from the die-hards (one of whom shed tears over the deflowering of the nobles’ fiscal virginity), Széchenyi’s toll-bridge. Besides this, the Magyar text of laws was to be the authentic one, lawsuits could be conducted in Magyar, registers were to be kept in Magyar in parishes in which the sermon was preached in that language. The peasants received a few concessions which brought their legal position up to that of their opposite numbers in the West: they were entitled to commute their dues and services for a money rent (although not to buy their holdings) and the competence of the Patrimonial Courts was somewhat restricted. The reintegration of the Partium was accepted on paper. But the Crown had made no concession at all on the tariff question, flatly rejecting the suggestion of Austro-Hungarian discussions, on the ground that the determination of tariffs was a prerogative of the Crown, in which the Estates had no voice, and practically none in the religious.

  Yet it was only in appearance that the victory lay with the Crown and its allies. Széchenyi’s criticisms of the Constitution had by now found very widespread agreement; and Széchenyi himself was already becoming a back number. If the reformers were still too advanced for most regular members of the Diet, they had become too slow-minded for the gallery. It was the custom of each Deputy to bring with him one or more juratus, or recent graduate in law, to act as his secretary or simply to gain experience by listening to the debates, and at the Long Diet no less than fifteen hundred of these youths had appeared, including many of the figures to become prominent in 1848.33 Technically nobles, many of them were from landless families, or else younger sons for whom the paternal acres provided no fortune, so that they had no vested interest in the status quo, and they belonged, of course, to a younger age-group than the Deputies and were open to more modern ideas. Most of them were under the influence of the French Liberals of the day, Thiers, Lammenais, Victor Hugo, etc., whose writings easily slipped into Hungary past the slip-shod censorship of the day. A programme drawn up by a group of them in 1835 included, besides Széchenyi’s demands, popular representation, Ministerial responsibility and Parliamentary control over the Budget.

  The jurati could not, of course, intervene officially in the debates of the Diet, but tradition and the national character permitted them to accompany its proceedings with applause, catcalls and interruptions, so that the Diet (and the Crown) were soon aware on which side the sympathies of Hungary’s angry young men lay. And before the Diet had risen, the young radicals had found a leader, and still more, a mouthpiece, in the person of the man who was soon to drive Széchenyi out of the field, Lajos Kossuth.

  Kossuth was a somewhat older man than the jurati, having been born in 1802. He came from the mixed Magyar-Slovak district of North-Eastern Hungary, and his family (which was Lutheran) was of originally Slovak stock on the paternal side,34 although those who call him ‘a renegade Slovak’, ‘a Slovak trying to be a Magyar’, etc. only show that they do
not understand the atmosphere of the place and time. His family had been Hungarian nobles for centuries, and for as long, spiritually Hungarians; if some of them still spoke Slovak, as well as Magyar, this was common in mixed districts up to at least 1918. But although noble, the Kossuths were also impoverished, and after various adventures (including an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a post in the Consilium), Lajos had found employment as estate agent to a rich widowed Countess in his native County. She fell in love with him and he spent seven years in her company, taking only a small part in local affairs. In 1832 they parted, but still, it appears, feeling affection for him, she found him a mandate to represent a distant relative of hers in the Diet, a post which, under the peculiar procedure of that body, allowed him to sit, not among the magnates but with the lesser men, but not to speak. Here, for the first time, he was drawn into national politics.

  Although Kossuth soon had more political followers than any other man in Hungary, it is easier to draw out Leviathan with a hook than to reduce his political philosophy to a system; so much do his utterances abound in digressions and irrelevances, even in flat mutual contradictions. Their coherence is emotional, for all of them are instinct with a burning love of his country and his fellow-countrymen and a passionate wish to see them in enjoyment of every blessing which thought had anywhere devised for any people. In this he did not differ from Széchenyi, nor greatly in his view of Hungary’s condition; but his remedy was very different. A true child of his age, Kossuth accepted its almost automatic identification of the good with liberty; on which ground alone, he wanted to see every Hungarian enjoying personal liberty (including equality before the law), liberty of religion, of thought, speech and the written word, and the rest. But again like most Central European reformers of his day, he put national liberty highest of all, not merely as the summum bonum to which all else would have to be sacrificed if necessary, but as the true pre-condition for any real social, economic or cultural advance. Blind, owing to his narrower horizon, to the material advantages which Széchenyi saw in the connection with ‘Vienna’, he saw the source of everything that was wrong in Hungary in the illegitimate35 domination exercised over her by ‘Vienna’ and its servants. The first step must be to get rid of that domination; the political battle came first. He saw, and presented, every question in that light, thus repudiating (and quickly defeating, in the popular mind) Széchenyi’s programme of reform through collaboration with ‘Vienna’.