The Aristocracy, the Gentry and Their Parliamentary Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

CHAPTER NINE THE ARISTOCRACY, THE GENTRY AND THEIR PARLIAMENTARY TRADITION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARY Introduction From the Middle Ages until recently the aristocracy and the gentry landowners preserved their ascendancy in Hungarian society. These two groups, the Catholic and Habsburgtreu titled aristocracy, and the partly Protestant well-to-do provincial gentry, the ‘backbone of the nation’, formed the landowning élite. Each group possessed independent social power while, arguably, no other social group did so enduringly on a wide scale. The élite’s power was rooted in the noble ownership of land, based on royal donation, in exemptions, immunities and other privileges; in the maintenance of serfdom, that enabled the élite to be masters over the bulk of the population as a workforce; and in the political institutions at their disposal: the county and the diet. Other élites, vested in privileged districts, like the Saxons and the Szekels in Transylvania, the Jász-Kun Districts in the Plain, and the Serbian community in the south, wielded local power only. For centuries, the Roman Catholic Church was an independent force which exercised influence in the whole Kingdom. But the Church lost its independent political position after 1780.1 The vigorous use of the monarch’s ius patronatus in making church appointments, and particularly the Erastian policies pur- sued by the government under Joseph II and his successors, made the Church dependent on the crown. Nor could the towns match the power of the landowning noble élite. Urban society was not strong enough to challenge the paramount influence and political domination of landowners. Towns in Hungary appeared late; they were few and small, eco- nomically weak and, since they were led by German burghers, socially isolated. Politically they depended on the crown and wielded little influence in the diet. Most were also set apart by their Lutheran confession. 1 The Churches, nevertheless, retained influence in public life. Signifĳicantly, the political élite was educated in Roman Catholic and Protestant grammar schools—a subject which has not been looked at by historians. 306 CHAPTER NINE Modern Budapest, the country’s capital, essentially the outgrowth of the nineteenth-century empire of Austria-Hungary, was an exception. Its ‘American type’ of rapid growth and splendid dynamism created independent middle classes2 which, after the turn of the century, at least in culture, challenged the dominance of the landowning élite. The business classes, the overwhelming majority being assimilant Germans and Jews, remained, however, even in the twentieth century politically aimless, and possessed an outsider mentality.3 On the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in 1918 Hungary’s landowning élite lost its position. This turned out to be temporary: the earlier social balance, largely restored in 1920, survived until the end of the Second World War.4 In contrast with all the other social groups in Hungary, the aristocracy and the landed gentry, the upper crust of the nobility, possessed institu- tional influence strong enough to bargain with the monarch. They were 2 ‘At times people spoke of the “American” Budapest’, writes John Lukacs about the building boom of the capital (John Lukacs, Budapest 1900, London, 1988, p. 53); on the conflict between the gentry and the largely Jewish upper class of Budapest, see pp. 194 fff. 3 Károly Vörös has carried out basic research into Budapest’s virilists, the 1200 highest taxpayers from whom half of the 400-city assembly was elected (Section 26, Law XXXVI of 1872 on the government of the united capital), Budapest legnagyobb adófĳizetői 1873–1917, Budapest, 1979. Dr Vörös’s study demonstrates, among many other points, that by the end of the century a new wealthy bourgeoisie supplanted the old city patricians and the aristocracy in the leadership of the capital, pp. 165–66. But the landed aristocracy and gentry kept away from the largely Jewish new wealth (id., Budapest története, IV, Budapest, 1978, pp. 426–27). Gabor Vermes describes the business classes in the early twentieth century as a ‘fragmented bourgeoisie’. ‘Their recent gain in self-esteem and material comfort kept them pliable and simultaneously immune to any independent political action’; their atti- tudes ‘precluded the emergence of a strong, independent bourgeois political force’ (Gabor Vermes, István Tisza, New York, 1985, pp. 46 and 154). That the prominence of the new urban upper classes did not undermine the political leadership of the landowning élite is demonstrated by George Deák’s recent study on the role of the National Association of Hungarian Industrialists, The Economy and Polity in Early Twentieth Century Hungary, New York, 1990: the bourgeoisie flourished ‘under the benevolent rule’ of the Liberals; ‘the new wealth and political power were largely distinct’ but they co-operated; the bankers secured foreign loans for state projects and fĳinanced electoral campaigns. ‘In exchange, the bourgeoisie enjoyed the patronage of the government’ (pp. 108–09), but it did not pro- duce a political movement, nor was it accepted by the nobility (pp. 123–24). The Association was at times an efffective pressure group with regard to the government (see especially pp. 84, 97, 103 and 121), but, signifĳicantly, it failed to secure a proper franchise reform or, indeed, to change the political system (pp. 156–62). 4 In the inter-war years offfĳice and parliament were once more dominated by the ‘his- toric classes’ rather than by the urban interests. C. A. Macartney found the position of the gentry ‘impregnable’, although it was now a gentry bureaucracy rather than a class of independent landowners (C. A. Macartney, Hungary, London, 1934, pp. 196–98). The politician Imre Kovács recalled that in January 1945 a peasant had taken the news about the forma- tion of a provisional government seriously only on hearing that there was a ‘Count’ (Géza Teleki) among the ministers..

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