": "Fővárosunk. Irta Táncsics Mihály. Hasonmás kiadás - Budapest Főváros Levéltára forráskiadványai 8. (Budapest, 1976)

On „Our Capital" by Mihály Táncsics

On „Our Capital" by Mihály Táncsics The City Archives of Budapest is publishing with this volume a book written more than hundred years ago, a book by Mihály Táncsics, a descendant of serfs, a revolutionary and the first theoretician of Sicialism in Hungary under the title „Our Capital". The date of its publishing is 1867, the year of the Compromise. Kept in prison for writing and distributing leaflets calling to arms, to revolt against Habsburg absolutism, he wrote and later dictated it half-blind showing new aspects of his creative mind and well deserving the name given him by the contemporaries: „the Hungarian Rousseau". The author, fighting with word and writing for the freedom of the press, the abolition of feudal conditions and for national independence, writes here of his plans for the development of the Hungarian capital. His choice of subject was naturally determined in part by the tight control in prison, which meant an obstacle to dealing with social problems par excellence. But, on the other hand, the problem was really up-to-date, as he was informed by the members of his family visiting him daily with special permit and reading him aloud the papers. Capitalist development, more and mire marked in spite of the barriers, after the failure of the 1848—49 revolution, made the transformation of the three towns on the Danube — Pest, Buda and Old Buda — into an active centre of the country urgent both de iure and de facto. Pest-Buda gained an ever growing significance as an economic centre and also as the centre of the national and cultural life. The needs of the rapidly growing population and the new functions of the city in the economic life of the country from the sixties made the creation of a modern metropolis necessary both technically and from the point of view of the townscape. In the early 1860's there had been lots of plans and programmes for the replanning, technical development and embellishment of the city. The elaboration and realization of these plans could, however, follow only after the Compromise or Ausgleich of 1867, when the Habsburg-