Nagy János: Rendi ellenzék és kormánypárt az 1751. évi országgyűlésen - Disszertációk Budapest Főváros Levéltárából 7. (Budapest, 2020)
The opposition of the estates and the loyalists at the Diet of 1750 (summary)
The opposition of the estates and the loyalists at the Diet of 1751 Until very recently, the academic discourse concerning the Hungarian diets of the 18th century mainly restrained itself to the chronology of events defining the relationship between the estates of the realm and the monarch. The recent years, however, have seen a renewed interest in the social and cultural history of politics, which has brought about changes in the research of Hungarian diets as well. There have been new findings following the prosopographic analysis of certain groups of deputies or the study of some political discourses used at the diets. This book focuses on the group that played the most active role at the diet of 1751, the county deputies. My assumption is that by the mid-18th century the county deputies, who were usually members of the politically active group of the affluent well-to-do gentry (bene possessionati) had gradually taken over the lead within diet politics. Their appearance in the arena increased the conflict potential of the diets: their representatives in 1751 reacted much more sensitively to the taxation and other financial measures (that can be termed constitutional) of the government and their supporters at the diet than their counterparts at earlier diets had done. In the first section of the book I will apply the traditional political and chronological historic approach to analyse specific debates at the diet, with great emphasis on identifying and exploring the potential real or alleged individual and group interests to be pursued during the conflicts that emerged between certain groups of the opposition and the loyalists. This analysis is complemented by the conceptual and discursive historic study of the practical ‘language of politics’, based mainly on diaries, pasquilles and the texts of the pleas of the estates (humillima repraesentatio) to the monarch and the monarch’s resolutions (benigna resolutio). On the second level of the work the social history of diet politics is in the foreground. Using the outcomes of debates analysed earlier as a starting point, I attempt to outline a ‘political map’ of the counties of Hungary at the time. The prosopographic analysis of the groups of county deputies reveals the major faultlines within this social stratum and the individual career building strategies tend to appear. The picture thus outlined gets further details added by the case studies of individual counties and diet participants. These not only allow us to see the long-term continuity within the party affiliations of specific counties or regions, but also certain regularities concerning the patterns of actions of specific families or individuals. 551
