Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Pest-Buda from 1686 to 1849
feudal traditions prevented the development of a bourgeoisie with any substantial economic and political strength. In the economy of the country the nobility with their vast farming and grain-producing estates took first place and due to their class outlook, ignored one of the main factors impeding progress, that is, the continuance of the obsolete feudal tradition and its effects. Their politics focussed instead on the other impediment, the economic policy of Austria, with its deleterious effects on Hungarian trade. Considering Austria the main obstacle to progress, they concentrated primarily on the achievement of Hungarian independence. Within the context of social change, even the narrow section accepting the ideas of the Enlightenment—with a few outstanding exceptions—confined their desires to the introduction of only moderate reforms. At first, it was the civil servants, mostly of noble origin, employed in government departments in the capital, together with professors of the university, the intellectuals who played an outstanding part in stimulating the development of an active intellectual political life in Pest. These men transmitted to a wider public the ideas of the French Enlightenment; many of them were members of the liberal-oriented Freemason Lodges proliferating at the end of the eighteenth century and supporters of the Republican (Jacobin) Movement designed to promote the transition to a bourgeois society. This movement was drowned in blood with the execution of the leading Jacobins in 1795, and all progressive ideas and movements for the transformation of society were suppressed and silenced for several decades. Around 1800, the movement for the development of the Hungarian language and Hungarian culture, an indispensable tool for the development of national consciousness and national progress, began to dominate political and cultural life. The transfer of the university to Pest led to a rapid increase in the number of printing houses and bookshops. In the first twenty or thirty years of the nineteenth century Pest had become the book centre of Hungary. Men of letters and scholars, who had been dispersed over the country to that time, settled in the capital in increasing numbers: there were already more than 150 of them in Pest between the years 1820 and 1830, and something more than fifty painters, sculptors and artists. The National Museum and the Academy of Sciences were founded and set up in Pest, and it was here that the first permanent Hungarian theatre, the National Theatre, which exercised so great influence in the popularization of cultivated Hungarian language, was established. Between 1830 and 1850 literary and scientific societies proliferated, following one another in swift succession; it was in Pest that the growing number of periodicals and newspapers in the Hungarian language were published, and were distributed throughout the country, increasingly catering for the requirements and taste of the bourgeoisie. As a result of these activities, and not least the introduction of education in Hungarian in the schools, the use of the Hungarian language and “Hungarianism” as opposed to the German influence from Austria again gained ground in the capital. The expansion of opportunities for the publication of books, the growth of a new reading public as bourgeois ways of life penetrated the population, enabled the new generation of writers to congregate in the capital from 1820 onwards, since for them literature had now become a vocation guaranteeing a livelihood, as opposed to their situation some twenty years earlier when the livelihood of men of letters dispersed throughout the country had been dependent either on the revenue of their own private estates or on assistance from their patrons. 33
