Körmöczi Katalin szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum 3 - From the End of the Turkish Wars to the Millennium - The history of Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries (Budapest, 2001)

ROOM 11. Reform in Hungary in the First Half of the 19th Century "We Must Extricate Ourselves from the Morass of Decaying Feudalism" (István Széchenyi) (Katalin Körmöczi)

ROOM 11 Reform in Hungary in the First Half of the 19th Century "We Must Extricate Ourselves from the Morass of Decaying Feudalism" (István Széchenyi) After the upheavals caused by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Europe was reorganized by a congress of European states meeting in Vienna. The division of Poland was decreed, and an Austrian-led German Confederation created out of the German states. With Francis Fs taking, in 1804, of the title of hereditary emperor of Austria, and his renunciation in 1806 of the long-empty title of Holy Roman emperor, the Holy Roman Empire had formally ceased to exist. This, and the post-Waterloo status quo in Europe, received sanction from the conservative "HolyAlliance", signed in Paris in 1815 by Emperor Francis I of Austria, Tsar Alexander I of Russia and King Frederick William III of Prussia. Having created unity, the Holy Alliance now moved against all revolutionary and all liberal views. The Christian orientation of the Holy Alliance meant that the Turkish empire was excluded, while Great Britain and the United States of America were deemed unsuited for admission on account of their constitutionalism. As a result of all this, a country's inclusion in, or exclusion from, the Holy Alliance almost depended on its level of social and economic modernity, and its location among the various developmental zones of Europe - with the exception of the restored Kingdom of France. In Britain, in the most westerly part of Europe, change was occurring in a civil society under constitutional monarchy, and a rational, practical outlook and way of life had replaced the feudal BaroqueRococo mentality. In the Western states of the continent, hostile forces contended with each other in a trail of strength last seen during the French Revolution, while the middle part - Hungary included - had progressed beyond the first recognitions and the first failures. At the eastern extremities of the continent, on the other hand, inertia and petrification were in their last phase. The Hungarian reformer Count István Széchenyi (179 l-l 860) had an up-to-date view of the Europe of his time (Fig. 26). Wishing to make changes in the picture that was taking shape, he set a course, marking out not only his own tasks personally, but also Hungary's place on the map of a Europe undergoing bourgeois transformation. The aristocrat Széchenyi wanted modernization and a European identity. The transformation was carried through by his circle; that of Count Lajos Batthyány (1807-^49), a fellow aristocrat; the liberal lesser nobility; and every section of 19th-century Hungarian society with political influence. This followed from the fact that as one proceeded across Europe from west to east, one encountered an increasing populous and distinct nobility, an increasingly dependent serf population, and an increasingly small and ethnically diverse middle class. A characteristic East-Central European phenomenon was the large percentage of lesser nobles in the population as a whole, and their decisive role in political life. A significant part of the Hungarian lesser nobility proved to be rational, capable of useful work and enterprising - and together with the aristocracy, representative of European culture in Hungary - when, as the social base for the Reform Age, it assumed the role of "Third Estate" in the 1830s. Striving for economic and social modernization and for national independence within the empire, it represented a new kind of opponent to the Habsburg Monarchy's feudal-type absolutism as represented by Chancellor Metternich. As