A TRANSYLVANIAN INTERLUDE on 11 June 1848 Dumitru Brătianu Had

A TRANSYLVANIAN INTERLUDE On 11 June 1848 Dumitru Brătianu had received his accreditation as diplomatic agent in troubled Austria-Hungary, as the first diplomatic representative of modern Romania.221 Until then, Romanian interests abroad had been represented by officials of the Ottoman suzerain power. He travelled via Vienna, where the situation was confused after the collapse of the interim government led by Karl Ludwig von Fic- quelmont, and reached Pest in late June. Since March, under popular pressure, the Habsburg monarchy appeared to have imploded. Vienna as the official centre of power in the Empire was now challenged by Central European “staging-points in the multilateral contestation” during the events of 1848–49:222 Milan, Buda-Pest,223 Prague, Lemberg, Cracow, Timişoara, Braşov, Blaj and Cluj – to mention just a few of the cities engulfed by the protests – were all bursting with revolu- tionary ferment, political and territorial demands and potential multi- ethnic strife. Only one element in the confusing political landscape of 1848–49 remained stable: the now beleaguered Habsburg dynasty and the principle of dynastic loyalty as the pivotal centre of an otherwise explosive multi-national conundrum. After March and especially after the enactment of the April Laws by the Hungarian Diet, the new Hungarian regime had been operat- ing on the basis of a virtual, if brittle, parliamentary sovereignty and autonomy from Austria. A reformist Hungarian government led by Lajos Batthyány comprised the liberal István Széchenyi, the ‘roman- tic hero’ Lajos Kossuth and the ‘man of the future’, Ferenc Deák.224 Embedded within, and extending beyond, the complex network of constitutional, political, economic and military difficulties facing the empire was the thorny nationalities question. The ethnic dilemmas of the multi-national Austrian state would prove an obstacle to dialogue and a main cause of the defeat of the revolutions in Austria, Hun- gary, Transylvania and the Romanian Principalities. To summarise a 221 Anul 1848, 1: 515. Cf. also Iordache, Dumitru Brătianu, 90. 222 The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 183. 223 Buda and Pest were still two separate, though contiguous, cities. They finally united in 1873 to form the present-day Hungarian capital, Budapest. 224 The Revolutions, ed. Evans and von Strandmann, 187. a transylvanian interlude 91 convoluted situation in simple terms, Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Ruthenes and Romanians turned against a would-be centralist, unified Hun- garian state and “against a government which they perceived to be Magyar- and noble-dominated, its political benefits outweighed by a cultural-linguistic agenda of ‘Magyarization’ [. .].”225 On the occasion of a first in a series of national meetings in the Transylvanian town Blaj, on April 30, five to six thousand Romanian peasants urged by some of their intellectual leaders, initially declared themselves ready to fight for their rights by constitutional, non-violent means.226 At the time, the union of Transylvania to Hungary, ultimately sought by the Hungarians, was still considered of minor importance, as the Roma- nians were trying primarily to obtain their recognition as a ‘nation’ within the Austrian Empire and the civil and political rights such a recognition would have entailed. However, as Hungarian pressures for Transylvania’s merger with Hungary mounted, at their national con- gress at Blaj on May 15–17, thirty thousand Romanians “proclaimed the independence of the Romanian nation and its full equality with the other nations of Transylvania and declared their intention of maintaining its rights by creating a new political system based upon liberal principles.”227 Both conservatives and liberals in the Magyar- dominated Transylvanian government united and persisted in their refusal to recognize the Romanians as a separate nation, and perceived the links between the Transylvanian and Wallachian intellectuals as an encouragement to separatism and to a ‘Greater Romania project’. Consequently the Transylvanian Diet, in which the Romanians were not represented, pronounced the union of Transylvania to Hungary on 30 May and Emperor Ferdinand, in refuge in Innsbruck, recognised the union on June 10. It was against the backdrop of a solid Austrian- Hungarian front on the issue of the Transylvanian Romanians that Dumitru Brătianu arrived in Pest to negotiate with the Hungarian leaders. His suggestions for a Romanian-Magyar defensive alliance against the Austrians and the Russians – who were then poised for military intervention against the insurrection – were initially waived aside by Lajos Batthyány, the leader of the separatist Hungarian government. A compromise subsequently proposed by the Hungarian side would 225 Idem, 192. 226 Keith Hitchins, A Nation Discovered: Romanian intellectuals in Transylvania and the idea of nation, 1700–1848 (Bucharest, 1999), 184 sqq. 227 Ibid., 192..

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