Fraternity-Testvériség, 1949 (27. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1949-02-01 / 2. szám

TESTVÉRISÉG

months. The old division between conservative and liberal reformers still obtained: the Széchenyi faction was pushing the cause of economic reform in the guise of a grandiose nationwide transportation network; the Kossuth party was demanding redress for the Government’s violation of administrative autonomy. There was little doubt that some reforms of a moderate nature would be enacted, especially after Kossuth came to an agreement with the conservatives that the opposition, instead of the immediate introduction of parliamentary constitutionalism, would be content with transforming the sections of the absolutistic Government Council (with the exception of financial, military, and foreign affairs) into executive agencies responsible to the Diet. The cause of social reform was also making headway: activity (the inalienability of hereditary noble land) as well as feudal obligations had been abolished (although the latter only in principle), partly because of rural unrest caused by the poor crops of 1846 and 1847. In the city of Pest — at that time still a municipality separate from its twin town of Buda — there were queues waiting for the distribution of free bread.

In the middle of the nineteenth century Budapest, with a combined population in excess of 100,000, was the only Hungarian urban district worthy to be called a city. Industrialization was just beginning; on the eve of the revolution the Pest side of the city had 40 industrial plants employing 753 workers. The citizenry was still predominantly German-speaking (Pozsony, the legislative capital of Hungary, was compactly German), but the Pest population included an extremely nationalistic and liberal body of university students and other intellectuals who had been receiving their mental alimentation from Paris and the West for approximately two decades. Outstanding among these young men—loosely designated the “Young Hungary” movement—was the 25 year old poet Sándor Petőfi, in whom the great romantic tradition of the West had been fused with the radical, populist nationalism of a nonindustrial eastern country.

The news of Louis Philippe’s fall in Paris on February 22-24, 1848, caused scarcely a ripple among the German burghers of Pozsony; in the Diet, however, Kossuth correctly appraised its significance and accordingly, on March 3, increased his demands to include constitutional government not only for Hungary but also for all the Hapsburg lands. On March 13 the revolutionary chain reaction reached Vienna and destroyed at a blow the repressive Metternich system. On the following day Kossuth again widened his demands to include freedom of the press, trial by jury, popular representation, and union of Hungary with the detached principality of Transylvania.

This was the natural reaction of the parliamentary leader to the sudden change in the European political atmosphere; in Pest, in “Young Hungary” circles, the fall of Metternich had quite a different result. The news reached the Café Pilvax, the headquarters of the movement, at about 10 o’clock in the evening of March 14 and burst among the young men already mesmerized by the bombshells of which the city was to have its full quota before long. The night was spent in feverish preparations. Early in the morning the students marched on the leading Pest printing plant, seized a press “in the name of the people”, and ran off Pető- fi’s inflammatory “National Song” without benefit of the censor. They also printed their political objectives in 12 points, listed under the title, “What the Hungarian Nation Demands”, which corresponded in substance with Kossuth’s program. In the afternoon a mass meeting before the National Museum heard Petőfi declaim his rousing new poem. Then a swollen multitude marched on the City Hall in Pest and invaded the chambers of the Government Council in Buda. The terrified councilors accepted the “twelve points”, demobilized the militia, which stood idly by while the crowd, perhaps in unconscious imitation of the great tableau of the Bastille, liberated the socialist revolutionary Mihály Táncsics from prison. The ides of March had come in Budapest, but no blood flowed. It was a true “glorious revolution”, effective and irresiistible and so completely successful that factional historians are still debating whether it was the work of the buorgeoisie, the peasantry, or the proletariat.

The events in Vienna had frightened into submission the camarilla which was ruling in the name of the imbecile Emperor Ferdinand; the uprising in Pest struck a chill in the hearts of Kossuth’s conservative opponents. Both had to yield. On March 17 the first responsible Hungarian Cabinet was appointed under the premiership of Count Lajos Batthyány, with Kossuth as his Minister of Finance, Széchenyi as Minister of Transportation, and Ferenc Deák (whose greatest political achievement, the Constitutional Compromise, was to be accomplished in 1867) as Minister of Justice. On April 11, Ferdinand, in his capacity as King of Hungary, affixed his signature to the so-called March Laws, transforming Hungary into a modern parliamentary nation-state, governed by an annual parliament elected on the basis of a wide popular franchise. In the social sphere, too, far-reaching reforms were enacted. The nobility lost its tax-exempt status; the Church, its tithes; feudal obligations, atavicity, and baronial jurisdiction were abolished, but the landowners were to be compensated by the Government. Serfdom thus disappeared, at least as far as feudal tenants were concerned; as for the con