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 14. Endurance, Compromise and Economic Boom "The Repudiation of That Which is Illegal is No Mere Option, But Rather an Obligation" (Ferenc Deák) (Katalin Körmöczi - Edit Haider)
49. Silver inkwell of Count Béla Keglevich, recording secretary to the Lower House of the 1861 Parliament, 1861 the form of a petition - the traditional form of contact between the Diet and the monarch. At the point when these principles were crystallizing, news arrived of the ending of the Italian attack. Nevertheless, László Teleki worked out a radical programme which was unacceptable to the Court. Left without support, he committed suicide. The first petition proposal, built on the framework of the Pragmatica Sanctio (1723) and the 1848 laws, was deemed treasonable by Francis Joseph, who refused to accept it. At the same time as the Hungarian Parliament was sitting, the Serbian Congress set in Karlóca (Sremski Karlovci), the Romanian Congress met at Balázsfalva (Blaj) and the Slovak Congress at Túrócszentmárton (Martin). The Hungarian Parliament appointed a special committee to deal with the nationalities issue, and the programme it worked out proclaimed the principle of the equality of nationalities. Ferenc Deák's second petition proposal was conveyed to Vienna by unanimous decision of the House of Deputies. Parliament was now dissolved by military command (Fig. 49). It left behind a stronglyworded petition from the Deák party, and a new radical grouping organized from members of the motion party. As in the period of passive resistance, so at the time of the Interlude, the programme was given in the words of Ferenc Deák: "If needs be, the nation will endure, so that it can save for posterity the constitutional liberty it has inherited from our forebears..." Increasingly, Ferenc Deák acquired the role of leader and of "Wise Man of Hungary", or "Father of Hungary". In the 1860s his room in the Queen of England Hotel became a political centre. Visitors can see a detail of an interior consisting of Ferenc Deák's furniture, fittings and objects for personal use taken from his room in the hotel. These are the items among which Deák and his supporters brooded over Hungary's fate, and where, together with Antal Csengery, Boldizsár Horvát, József Eötvös and others, he worded the petition proposals and later the Compromise laws. His desk is opposite that of Kossuth; on it are documents containing his ideas on the Compromise. In the mid-1860s, the slogan "The nation will wait and endure with dignity", which announced the programme in the second petition of 1861, was less and less effective. The House of Habsburg pursued the illusion of a Greater Germany, and German unity, under Austrian leadership in opposition to Prussia, but with less and less chance of success. On April 16,1865, Deák s "Easter Article" appeared anonymously in the Pest Diary proposing a compromise. It stated: "We
