The Staatskonferenz, in which Metternich now seems to have taken charge of Hungarian affairs,80 had come prepared to pay a price for its requirements. Pálffy was dismissed – only, it is true, in favour of the only slightly less unpopular Antal Majláth, and similar changes made in the other top offices. During the Diet itself, the Government yielded considerable ground in several minor fields,81 and retreated a long step on the linguistic question. Magyar now became obligatory for communications from the Consilium and Camera to Hungarian authorities in Inner Hungary, and for the internal service in the country, and a knowledge of Magyar was required of all parish priests, of whatever confession. Finally, at the end of the Diet, Wesselényi (who meanwhile had lost his sight) and Kossuth were amnestied.
For their part the reformers in the Lower House, among whom Deák had by general consent taken the lead, were anxious to avoid a clash, and the Diet, its conditions having been met, duly voted the 30,000 recruits asked of it, also consenting that they should be enlisted by the Austrian method of conscription through the drawing of lots.
So the results of the Diet could thus be called another victory for the policy of grudging concession; but one that was unlikely to prove permanent. The reformers were far from satisfied, particularly since they had made no progress over several questions on which they felt deeply, including the position of the Protestant Churches. Thus the closing of the Diet was not even followed by the breathing-space usual in more tranquil times, when the legislators had been accustomed to return home to see what their wives and their bailiffs had been doing in their absence. The Counties remained in permanent session, and declaring, with some truth, that it was impossible to get legislation through the Diet, proceeded to pass enactments, often very radical, of national scope,82 but with local application. The Crown regularly annulled these, but could not check the rising temper of public opinion, which its own best intentions promoted. Metternich had decided that the national passion for freedom of expression was something to which it would be wise to make concessions.83 Papers and periodicals were now appearing in some numbers, and when Kossuth came out of prison in 1841, he was, under circumstances which are still obscure, allowed to become editor of one of them, the Pesti Hirlap, with a practically free hand, subject only to his undertaking not to attack the dynasty, or to write on conditions in Germany. Kossuth used his opportunity to extraordinary effect. The aura of martyrdom with which his imprisonment had invested him lent his words an almost oracular authority. They were read throughout the country – before long the circulation of the Pesti Hirlap had reached the figure, prodigious for the day, of 10,000 – and his readers became his converts. There was hardly any aspect of Hungarian affairs on which he did not comment, and always with the implicit assumption that true reform was impossible without political liberty. The three years of his editorship may be said to have established definitively in the Magyar popular mind the identification of reform with opposition to Vienna, and thus the priority of the political struggle.
He was, however, far from being the unquestioned leader of the Hungarian opposition.84 Széchenyi, perhaps, could hardly be counted as any longer belonging to the opposition at all, for on the central political question he was nearer the party of ‘considered reform’. He and Kossuth attacked each other in barbed pamphlets which did little to enhance the reputation of either man. But Deák distrusted Kossuth’s wisdom and disliked his provocative tone, and another group – small but important – was emerging which also differed from him. This was a handful of men, the best known of whom today is Baron József Eötvös, known in derision as the ‘Centralists’ or ‘Doctrinaires’. Without sharing Kossuth’s nebulous allergy to all things Austrian, and genuinely concerned to preserve the integrity of the Monarchy, they went as far as he on the central political issue, in demanding a Government responsible to the electorate; and in another respect, further. While Kossuth regarded the Hungarian Counties with mystical devotion and still saw them as bulwarks against Viennese oppression, the Centralists held them to be strongholds of reaction and obscurantism, and argued for a strong central Hungarian Government, administering the country with modern efficiency, and equally efficient local government. On social issues they were more radical than Széchenyi and more logical than Kossuth. They were heavily outshadowed at the time by the more popular and spectacular Kossuth, but played a large part in the inner councils of the reformers, especially after 1844, when Kossuth quarrelled with the proprietor of the Pesti Hirlap and left the paper, which the Centralists then took over as their organ.
But if the Hungarian opposition was thus growing with headlong rapidity, so was the opposition to the opposition. In Croatia the movement had failed to follow the line which Gaj had marked out for it. He himself had begun by preaching pure ‘Illyrianism’; he had initiated the ‘Croat News’ with an appeal to ‘the famed Slav people in the Southern Regions, such as Croats, Slovenians, Dalmatians, Ragusans, Serbs, Carniolans, Styrians, Istrians and Bosnyaks’, and the Danica had depicted the triangle between Scutari, Varna and Villach as ‘the Illyrian lyre’, the harmonizing of whose now discordant strings, Carinthia, Gorizia, Istria, Carniola, Styria, Croatia, Slavonia, Dalmatia, Ragusa, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia, Bulgaria and Lower Hungary, was the task of the future. In 1836 he changed his paper’s name to Illirske Narodne Novine (Illyrian national news).
For a time Vienna continued to load him with favours; in 1839 Kolowrat got Ferdinand to present him with a gold ring for his ‘services to literature’, on the grounds that ‘in view of the way in which the Magyars treat the Slavs living in their country, the latter need protection’, adding, in words which show how little new there was in the ideas with which Francis Ferdinand was toying eighty years later, that ‘a closer connection between the 3,000,000 (Southern) Slavs living in the German and Hungarian Lands could only be of advantage, especially in regard to Hungary’.
But in 1840, when the Eastern crisis grew acute, the Pasha of Bosnia complained that Gaj was fomenting agitation among the Slavs in his province, and this was embarrassing to Metternich, who was working to strengthen the Sultan’s authority. Moreover, the other prospect held out by Gaj, that he would influence in Austria’s favour the Slav peoples ‘chained to Russia’, did not materialize. The Serbs rejected ‘Illyrianism’, with its Western connotations, almost unanimously; as they grew more nationally conscious, they became, not more Austrophile, but more Russophile. Gaj himself visited Russia and took money from Russian agents. The pull appeared to be in the wrong direction. In 1842 Metternich complained to the Czar, who repudiated responsibility, sincerely enough – he was antagonistic towards all popular movements. But the fact remained that Illyrianism had become an international embarrassment, and was not helping Austria; that the Hungarian authorities were flooding Vienna with complaints needs no mention. So the word ‘Illyrian’ was forbidden, and Gaj had to change the name of his paper back to ‘Croat’.
But the rescript communicating the prohibition contained the assurance that ‘His Majesty wishes no obstacles to be placed in the way of the cultivation of the national language, and will most graciously defend the public rights of Croatia and its nationality, as built up under the shield of those rights, against any attack’. This was perfectly agreeable to nine out of ten Croat nationalists, on whom ‘Illyrianism’ had made as little impact as it had on the Serbs (or, be it remarked here, the Slovenes). It was not an ‘Illyria’ that they wanted, but a Great Croatia, to include at least the Slavonian Counties, Fiume and Dalmatia, and ultimately, Bosnia. It was to continue to be a part of the Habsburg Monarchy; but the really important postulate (which emerged, indeed, only gradually, for up to 1848 there was no fixed programme) was that it was not to be mediatized through Budapest, but to stand directly under Vienna.
These aspirations were now entertained by the majority of the politically active classes of Croatia; although still not by all. A second party, known, through a corruption of the word ‘Magyaromane’, as the ‘Magyarones’ – an u
nfair description, for they were not real Magyaromanes, but nor were the extreme nationalists ‘Illyrians’, as the Hungarians called them – preferred the traditional connection with Hungary. The Magyarones were strongest among the half-Magyar magnates, but included also the Croat sandalled nobles, and especially those of Turopolje, who, as we have said elsewhere,85 had their own representative in the Diet at Pozsony. This was paradoxical, for in Inner Hungary, as we saw, the corresponding class had been enlisted on its side by Vienna in 1819;86 but the Croat nobles of the Illyrian party chose to regard the extension of the decree to that effect to Croatia as another infringement of Croatia’s historic rights; whereupon the Magyarones gratefully added the Turopolyans to their own voting strength.
By 1843 things were working up to a crisis. The Hungarians, while not admitting the Croat nationalists’ thesis on the relationship between the two countries, had yet been trying to avoid a clash, and the language laws of both 1836 and 1840 had been made applicable only intra limites regni, i.e., not to Croatia. But the Croats’ claim that they were entitled to leave the body corporate of the Hungarian Crown altogether, taking with them the Slavonian Counties and Fiume, was too much even for the Hungarian moderates. Deák himself rejected it flatly.
*
In the 1840s a new and unhappy chapter had also opened in the relations between the Magyars and the non-Magyar ‘nationalities’ of Inner Hungary.87 This does not, of course, mean that a relationship which had previously been universally untroubled now became universally bad, for as we have seen, the Serbs of the South had since their arrival in Hungary been fundamentally hostile to the Hungarian State, while conversely, when the new phase opened, most of the Germans of Inner Hungary, many of the Slovaks and practically all the educated Ruthenes found no objection to it. Yet a new and disturbing element had entered into the general relationship between Magyars and non-Magyars, the unhappy but inevitable result precisely of the spread among both parties of modern, and to some extent, democratic, ideas. Before these entered the picture, the Hungarian political ‘nation’ had been, by definition, exclusively its ‘noble’ class, and it was a fact that, except for the denationalized magnates at the top, the overwhelming majority of its effective members,88 who alone composed the Diet and the Congregationes and staffed the public services, whatever their ancestry, spoke Magyar and felt themselves Magyars. Up to the 1830s, the Hungarian nobles, in their demand for a wider use of their language, had had their eyes fixed almost exclusively on Vienna, and the point as they saw it had been the reasonable one that it was absurd and unnatural to forbid them to conduct their own affairs in their own language, for the convenience of a regime which in any case they regarded as a trespasser in most of the fields occupied by it. The fact that more than half the non-nobles of Hungary were non-Magyars was simply irrelevant, since they were not concerned with public life; and it was also a fact that up to that date the vast majority of the non-nobles whose mother-tongue was not Magyar, still accepted this point of view, and cheerfully learned Magyar as the price of advancement.
The new element came in, tragically, when Hungarian political thought became broader and more democratic in the sense that it came to take other classes besides the nobility into consideration. The Magyar-feeling nobles simply assumed that the new, broader State would have the same character as the old, narrower one, and the demand for more schooling in Magyar for non-Magyars (which in practice applied only to secondary and higher education)89 was made, at first, in the honest faith that it was conferring a benefit on non-Magyars to enable them to acquire the necessary linguistic equipment for taking their place in the national political community. Many majorities in history have, of course, adopted this attitude, and many minorities have welcomed it, as, even now, did many non-Magyars in Hungary.
But national feeling was awakening also among the non-Magyars, and the men touched by it felt that they had the same natural right as the Magyars themselves to use their own languages, cultivate their own national attributes, take pride in their own national pasts. And if the idea of inter-national equality was pushed to its logical conclusion, this would mean that Hungary must cease to be a Magyar State, and become a multi-national one. If few of them went so far as this in the Vormärz, more and more were beginning to want political institutions of their own on a lower level, with the appropriate languages of administration and education. It was a conflict of principle which in practice was made acute by the conviction of the Magyars that their State could not continue to exist at all, except on its old basis. For this they undoubtedly had reason. There was the irredentism being preached from Serbia and Roumania; the Pan-Slav effusions of certain Slovaks, which enormously affected Hungarian public opinion (if the dangers from this quarter were not so great as the Hungarians believed, this was not the fault of Kollar or Stratimirovics). Above all, there was Vienna, with its age-long hostility to Hungarian nationalism, and its traditional policy of allying itself with the non-Magyars. Many Hungarians felt that the only real safety for their country would have lain in turning the entire Magyar population – or at least, its whole educated class – into Magyars, an operation which, the ardent spirits added, would have strengthened the army of those championing and enjoying the blessings of freedom and progress which they proposed to bestow on Hungary, against Viennese (and Czarist) reaction and obscurantism.
So a dismal vicious circle took shape. The Magyar chauvinists, with some genuine cause for alarm, pressed their remedy to ridiculous excess, and began to see treachery in the mildest assertion of nationality by a non-Magyar; thereby in fact turning against Hungary many who would have been perfectly happy to admit even its traditional Magyar character, had this been combined with respect for the national susceptibilities of its non-Magyar citizens.
In this field also Magyar chauvinism reached a new high level in the excited years 1840–3. In this respect, too, Kossuth led the extremists, while Széchenyi sacrificed the last remnants of his popularity by publicly condemning the Magyarization campaign as both un-Christian and ineffectual.90
With all these passions in the air, Hungary in 1843 was like Aeolus’s cave, and the elections to the Diet were turbulent to a degree. The Opposition, however, made an error in tactics: it announced that noble taxation was the key to all reform, and while not yet daring to attack the contributio, proposed that the cassa domestica should be extended to all noble land; conversely, those not paying it should be excluded from representation. Either change would have inflicted a crippling blow on the sandalled nobles, whom the Government, in reply, mobilized as its allies. Thanks to their vehement interventions, many Counties returned Conservatives, and the Opposition increased its representation only slightly, while losing also much of its coherence and moral strength through the absence of Deák.91
The scales being thus fairly evenly balanced, the Opposition made only small advances in most fields. The Protestants got a concession over the long-debated question of mixed marriages, which could now be celebrated by a minister of either confession, while male issue followed the religion of the father, and female, that of the mother. Non-nobles received the right to hold public office and to buy noble land, and their obligations in respect of public works were limited. But a new codification of the criminal law which would have abolished the competence in it of the Patrimonial Courts and introduced universal equality before the law was rejected, as were a motion to introduce trial by jury, another to reform the statutes of the Royal Free Boroughs, and a third calling for the unification of Transylvania with Hungary.
The Opposition did, however, force through two important decisions. Shortly before it met, the Staatskonferenz had taken the decision mentioned above92 against Austria’s joining the Zollverein or a rival South German grouping. But soon after, Kübeck and Pillersdorf had reached the conclusion that Austrian production could stand up to Hungarian competition, and that if the Monarchy was to stand apart from Germany economically, it must form itself into an economic unit. This would have meant abolis
hing the internal tariff against which Hungarian Diets had protested so often; it would, indeed, obviously have necessitated also the abolition of the Hungarian nobles’ exemption from taxation and the introduction into Hungary of the Austrian indirect taxation, including the excise on tobacco, the cultivation and consumption of which had hitherto been completely unrestricted there.
The big Hungarian agrarians thought that the advantages which would accrue to their exports would outweigh the new burdens; it is from this time on that they accepted the idea of noble taxation. But the economic unification would clearly also have strengthened the political unity of the Monarchy; also, as things stood, of the German element in Hungary itself, which then constituted Hungary’s chief trading and industrial classes. Kossuth, moreover, had been reading List’s Nationales System der Politischen Oekonomie and had been fired with the ideal of economic autarky, or at least of so much industrialization as would diminish the then excessive span of the ‘agrarian scissors’. Inspired by him, the Diet demanded that the Crown recognize Hungary’s right to decide her own tariffs. When the Crown returned an evasive answer, a group of reformers, again inspired by Kossuth, set up a ‘National Association for the protection of Industry’,93 announcing that ‘if it proved impossible to set up a protective tariff on the national frontiers, it was possible, and necessary, to set one up on the threshold of every citizen’s home’.
The Habsburg Empire (1790-1918) Page 45
