Ságvári Ágnes (szerk.): Budapest. The History of a Capital (Budapest, 1975)
Pest-Buda from 1686 to 1849
of the censorship—the twelve points and the National Song of Petőfi which has since become world-famous. Tens of thousands had already gathered for the public meeting called for the afternoon before the National Museum. They included the countryfolk up for the Joseph Day Fair: peasants, farm stewards and country tradesmen, and even nobles. Returning home a few days later they were to spread the news of the Pest revolution all over the country. From the Museum the crowd streamed to the Pest Town Hall; its delegates inarched into the Council Hall, and the Council of Pest, under the pressure of the crowd, declared their agreement with the twelve points. Those present formed a Committee of Public Order—including Sándor Petőfi and the Deputy Mayor of Pest, Lipót Rottenbiller—and thus the leading body of the Pest revolution came into being. The crowd which in the meanwhile had grown to something like twenty thousand, then marched to Buda, and there forced the Council of the Governor-General to accept the twelve points, abolish the censorship and release Mihály Táncsics, who had been imprisoned there for an offence against the press regulations. The 15th of March 1848 owed its overwhelming strength to the great crowd of Pest citizens joining the young intellectuals and students who had initiated the demonstration. In the first months of the revolution, mass movements in Pest greatly contributed to the successes achieved against the reactionary forces of the Viennese Court, and in the Diet, which finally abolished feudal privileges and conditions. And when in the fateful days of the autumn of 1848, at the lowest ebb of the European revolutionary wave, the Viennese Court considered the time ripe for the military suppression of the Hungarian revolution, it was again the people in the streets of Pest who urged to organize a revolutionary army in self-defence. Nor must the assistance which the capital furnished in the War of Independence by raising troops and the providing arms, uniforms and equipment, be underrated. Until the Government moved to Debrecen, Pest was the capital of the national struggle, and for this reason it had to suffer the full force of revenge on the part of the Imperial forces when they entered the city in January 1849, and later, after the Hungarians had retaken the city, the brutal bombardment of the Austrian General Hentzi in the spring of 1849 defending Buda against the reconquering Hungarian forces. In this bombardment the most beautiful part of Pest, the row of fine mansions and palaces of the nobility along the Danube, and numerous old buildings in the Inner City, the Lipótváros and Terézváros, were destroyed. In April 1848 Pest became the seat of the first Independent Hungarian Government, which came into existence as a result of the revolution. It was here that in the summer of 1848 the first popularly elected National Assembly met, and with this event Pest and Buda became once more in every respect the true capital of Hungary. From the end of the egihteenth century, although Buda was officially recognized as the capital of Hungary, the lead was in fact taken by the rapidly developing business and economic centre of the country, the city of Pest, and one is justified in declaring that the two cities, still separate, jointly exercised the function of a capital. It was not by chance that from the beginning of the nineteenth century contemporaries referred to the two cities with increasing frequency as Pest-Buda or Budapest, and the demand for their unification as a united capital was heard with increasing frequency. The organic unity of the two cities was primarily impeded by a single geographic factor: the Danube. Until 1849, the connection between the two cities—and to a large extent the two parts of the country—depended 36
