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 detailed analysis of the debate on taxation made it possible to significantly widen the scope of speakers and also those who voiced their opinion outside the debate (amounting to more than third but less than half of the county deputies). Also it was possible to determine specific stages and turning points within the lengthy daily sessions, which signal the slow disintegration of the opposition. Focussing on the debate on taxation, we can gain insight into the political strategy of the government. It meant that the court managed to have its way with increasing the taxes in several stages, partly by pressurising the members of the Upper House, partly by coaxing them into compromises at various private gatherings (held at aristocratic households), partly by dividing the opposition along the lines of their smaller-scale grievances. While the bargaining positions of the estates were a lot worse than at previous diets, the significant tax increase of 1751 saw to it that paradoxically Hungary’s share within the total military expenditure of the Habsburg Monarchy also significantly increased. This also signals the increased economic and political significance of the Kingdom of Hungary within the ‘composite monarchy’ of the Habsburgs.

I have also studied the key concepts and arguments used in the taxation discourse, and found that appealing to the common good or the needs of the empress was more and more the rhetoric tool of the politicians aligned with the government, while the members of the opposition kept to the traditional vocabulary of republicanism, sprinkled with the odd invocation of grievances.

The perception of politics and society by the estates in 1751 was pastoriented in the Koselleckian sense - they considered all innovation harmful, but under the pretext of redressing their old grievances they would raise numerous reform-ready questions (e.g. the regulation of urbárium, river regulations and canal constructions, trade and customs regulations, the expansion of the educational institution system).

The enactment of the free royal borough status of Győr, Komárom, Újvidék and Zombor was carried out amid the protests of the bishop and chapter of Győr as well as the county and town nobility, who saw it as a potential danger to their feudal interests. It created a precedent and had countrywide importance also because this time the grievances involving the taxation of the town-dwelling nobility (especially in the case of Győr and Komárom) created waves on a national level, which again made the cracks on the principle of ne onus fundo inhaerat, the tax exemption of the nobility ever more visible. As for the debate concerning the practice and procedure of indigenisation, it showcases the double-natured approach of the estates to this question. On the one hand, they saw the ‘foreign aristocrats’ (and their deputies sent to the House in their absence) as the Trojan