Körmöczi Katalin szerk.: Historical Exhibition of the Hungarian National Museum 3 - From the End of the Turkish Wars to the Millennium - The history of Hungary in the 18th and 19th centuries (Budapest, 2001)
ROOM 15. Education, Science and Culture at the End of the 19th Century (Katalin Körmöczi - Eszter Aczél - Annamária T. Németh - Edit Haider)
63. Ferenc Pulszky (1814-1897), Painting by Mór Than 2nd half of the 19 th century odicals, and material published in the mother-tongues of the nationalities during the second half of the century. THE FREEMASONRY MOVEMENT AT THE END OF THE 19TH CENTURY In the wake of the social and economic changes around the time of the Compromise and during the decades which followed it, different kinds of social organization were formed. Bourgeois associations, clubs and societies were organized; of these, masonic lodges, secret societies of freemasons, played a special role. Hungary's freemasonry movement, which had been broken and banned in 1795, revived in the 1860s, faithfully adhering to its ideology, which had developed during the 18th century. Its first members were recruited from Hungarian emigres active earlier in foreign - Italian and Swiss lodges. Visitors can easily follow the growth of the movement and the various stages of its development on the basis of the insignia of different lodges and various freemasonry documents - certificates of mastership, letters of foundation and passes. The majority of members came from the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intelligentsia. Hungarian freemasonry acquired the leading role in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, maintaining this right up until 1918, since in the Austrian half of the empire Francis Joseph I refused to permit the movement to organize. Numerous social organizations owed their establishment and continuation to their freemason founders and supporters. Until they were banned in 1920, freemasons carried on their activity in some 126 lodges, which between them had nearly 13,000 members. LITERATURE, MUSIC, THEATRE The unity of literature and politics, public life and the arts is nostalgically recalled by Kálmán Mikszáth 's lines about the 1870s: "Statesmen and eminent figures in public life came together to get literary works published; ... politics and literature were baked in the same oven, by the same fire so to speak. In the afternoons, Ferenc Deák smoked his cigars in an armchair in Mór Ráth's bookshop, on the lookout for new books that had been published." Jókai and Kálmán Tisza played taroc at the same table, and the bank official László Arany, in his Hero of the Fata Morgana, gave expression to the disillusionment of his generation:
