Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Pest-Buda from 1686 to 1849
Ali these events and this ferment in the city could not but affect the ordinary citizens as well. The capitalist entrepreneurs came out unequivocally in support of the demands for reform, put forward by the more progressive nobles. They often marched with their business interests, particularly as many of their enterprises were founded in co-partnership with members of the nobility. Although the petty-bourgeois class, made up of the guild craftsmen and of shopkeepers, also suffered considerably from the competition of Austrian industry and commerce, and was therefore receptive to the ideas of national independence, they did not welcome the demands of the reformists for the freedom of industry and commerce, the abolition of the guilds, and the democratization of the municipal administration. Up to then the political interests of this class of petty-bourgeois had not extended beyond the horizons of municipal life. Their main desire continued to be the maintenance of municipal and guild privileges. But they were increasingly forced to realize that the maintenance of their authority and power no longer depended on the continuation of the rule of the Council and its narrow composition—it was in any case forced to make concessions to the demands of the age—but was also subject to trends in national politics. Those more politically schooled and with more progressive views among the city oligarchy tended to move with the times, and in many questions became cautious and often inconsistent supporters of the liberal nobility. But the great mass of petty-bourgeois society were easily influenced and convinced first by one political party, then by another, and the conservatives more than once succeeded in gaining their support. And finally, the poorest inhabitants of the city: the artisans, the journeymen, the workers, the masses streaming into the city to escape the famine consequent on the bad harvests of the 1840s, had no clearly defined political views; poor, disenfranchised, they were ripe to support the young intellectuals campaigning for a more radical and thoroughgoing bourgeois transformation of society. The city population, therefore, with the exception of a narrow stratum, possessed no single set of clear and well-defined political objectives and demands, and were consequently an easy prey for various political movements. But it is nevertheless undoubtedly true that in the 1840s they became politically more active, whether in this direction or in that, which in its turn played its part in the development of Pest and Buda as the starting point and wellspring of the 1848 bourgeois revolution, and later the capital of the revolutionary movement and independent Hungary. Capital of the Revolution In the early morning of 15th of March 1848, on receipt of the news of the revolution in Vienna, Sándor Petőfi and a few other leaders of Young Hungary decided to organize a large-scale mass demonstration the same day, and to achieve the fulfilment of their demands for a radical programme for transformation to a bourgeois society by revolutionary means, with the support of the people, contained in the twelve points they had drawn up a few days before. A small group of young people, numbering some sixty or seventy, set out from the Pilvax Café in the Inner City to mobilize, in the first place, all the university students. On the way they were joined by increasing numbers of the city inhabitants: burghers, tradesmen, journeymen, workers. When they reached the Länderer Printing House, the crowd, already some two thousand strong, insisted that the firm immediately print—without permission 35
