American Journal of Humanities and Social Science (AJHSS) Volume 6, 2020 From Confession to Constitution. The Hungarian MPs’ Motivation in the mid-18th Century*1 István M. Szijártó Eötvös University, Hungary The Norwegian anthropologist, Fredrik Barth insists that we build ‟generative models‟ that do not describe forms but identify processes. „They are designed so that they, by specified operations can generate such regularities and forms.‟ It is to be discovered, which „particular constellation of the variables in the model‟ generates the forms corresponding to the „empirical forms of social systems.‟1 That is, the generative model is built well if we switch it on and, then, it produces exactly those phenomena that we can actually observe in reality. The Italian microhistorian Maurizio Gribaudi has given an example how to build a „generative model‟ in social history. Writing about a workers‟ quarter in Turin between the two world wars, he has found that identical socio-economic backgrounds may result in different mobilities – that is, usual macro-explanations do not work, they should be replaced by stressing individual agency.2 In what follows, I try to build a generative model for mid-18th century Hungarian parliamentary politics by identifying the set of factors which, when combined, produce the MPs‟ actual political acts that we can observe in our parliamentary sources. We build our generative model for the explanation of political positions taken because politics is an aggregative sphere of human social and cultural existence, summing up various motives, different endeavours. As the Italian Renaissance historian and political thinker, Francesco Guicciardini put it: “politics is life itself.”3 When Fernand Braudel tried to write the total history of France at the end of his life, his The identity of France was comprised of geographical, demographic and economic analyses,4 but not much later, the big collective venture coordinated by Pierre Nora, Realms of memory found that French identity is linked first of all to politics.5 The period between 1728 and 1765 is selected, since earlier work on the institutional history of the Hungarian diet suggested that it was in the mid-18th century that parliamentary politics underwent a major transformation: the political power of the lower house, and especially that of the county deputies, increased at the expense of that of the upper house, and particularly at that of the aristocracy.6 In this period four diets were held (1728-9, 1741, 1751, and 1764-5) as well as four little diets, called concursus in the late 1730s that had the voting for an extra war tax (contribution) as their single task.7 Of these, the one held in 1736 is included into this investigation. Of all 18th-century diets, it is the one held in 1728-9 that had the most occasions of personal voting. This is due to a growing insecurity as for which part of the MPs represented that pars sanior et potior, more eminent and wiser part, the opinion of which settled the * The article is written with financial support of the joint project of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research and the Foundation for Support of the Russian Language and Culture (Hungary) "The Habsburg Monarchy: new trends in research of economic, sociopolitical and national development of the Central-European composite state", No 19-59-23005. I would like to thank Wim Blockmans and László Kontler for their comments on an earlier version of this text. 1 American Journal of Humanities and Social Science (AJHSS) Volume 6, 2020 matter: it was not any longer evident that the lords represented these, and it was not yet an established fact that county deputies did so. Among these circumstances, the personalis, speaker of the lower house, not rarely called on the members to give their personal votes – something that was more or less exceptional in the 18th-century history of Hungarian parliamentarism.8 At the end of this selected period, in 1764-5, pamphlets appeared in a large number due to the heated political debates. These are our two main sources when trying to reconstruct a certain MP‟s political stance taken at the diet: voting and pasquils. Following into Barth‟s footsteps, I shall try to find explanatory factors for the motivation behind political positions taken at the diet9– mostly based on sources that simplify these to a binary antithesis between opposition and pro-government views. Votes and pasquils allow us to identify 411 political positions from the period 1728 to 1765, and there were 60 MPs whose political positions can be identified in at least two instances.10 We shall concentrate our investigation to these. Looking at their careers we try to uncover combinations of background factors that explain their political attitudes: geographical origin11, denomination, previous royal favour and office-holding. It can soon be found out that holding of royal office was a cross-section of all kinds of royal favour12 in the mid-18th century, just as everyone given land or a baronial or comital title by the rulers, or made a valiant knight with golden spurs at their coronation, also filled a post at some central administrative body (Hungarian Chamber, Council of Lieutenancy, Chancellery) or court (a district court, the Royal Court of Justice, or the court of appeals). It is, therefore, enough for us to focus on royal appointments.13 Alongside power (which goes with high office-holding), payment was a highly important source of motivation. In Hungary, the paid royal offices those were few in number and operated purely as a central body, except for those within the apparatus of the Hungarian Chamber. They may have had even more appeal for Hungarians in the 18th century than for the nobility in Western Europe or in Prussia.14 So here, in this investigation, motivation does not signify intention or purpose as in an interpretative approach, rather those identifiable factors are understood by it which inspired our politicians in the form of reasons fuelling them and goals that they intended to achieve. Writing of mid-18th century England, Lewis Namier outlined a political system driven by individual interests and based on personal connections, a world of patronage and corruption.15 Jeremy Black claims that Namier was, actually, examining an exceptional period in English history, one that followed the stormy beginning and preceded a similarly tense end of the 18th century, periods of sharp conflict, when questions of principle took over and politicians were not motivated by self-interest.16 The era under scrutiny here, 1728-65, was, however, similarly a political lull in the history of Hungary compared not just to the period 1703-11, but even to the 1790s, and so Namier‟s attitude towards politics might be adequate here, too. We shall, therefore, measure how many MPs were appointed to royal office after a diet. Motivation Of the 60 politicians active at the diet in the mid-18th century and under investigation here, 12 were appointed to office, and 39 were not; while 9 MPs already were office-holders at the beginning of the diet. These aside, the success rate is close to one fourth. If we do not consider individual MPs, but think of the fact that they could take part in more than one diet, and regard these political appearances at individual diets or concursus separately, and also consider the promotions of several of those who arrived at the diet as existing bearers of office, we can say that out of the 76 cases 20 appearances at the diet can be seen to be 2 American Journal of Humanities and Social Science (AJHSS) Volume 6, 2020 successful, that is, the rate of success was even higher than 25%. Understanding success in an even broader sense and considering the appointments of our MPs‟ sons, as in their promotion their fathers‟ political services were often of determining importance, the „rate of success‟ is rising to well above one third. The great majority, 36 out of 53 „unsuccessful‟ appearances at the diet, ones that did not bring appointment, are associated with county deputies (half of them) and the deputies of nine absentees.17 Of the 53 „unsuccessful‟ diet appearances, 29 are from the Cisdanubian district, 13 from the Transdanubian one, and only 10 from the two Tibiscan districts.18 26 are associated with Protestants and only 24 with Catholics.19 The 76 political profiles of the 60 participants at the diet (separately for the period of each diet) produce a total of 126 political positions taken at the diet, considering taxation and other issues separately. With respect to positions taken on taxation, the Protestants supported and opposed the government in roughly equal numbers (13:11), while the Catholics were rather more oppositional (18:22). On other subjects, the Protestants seem clearly pro- government (13:6), something that is, importantly, not only the consequence of the confessional debate of 1729, mentioned above, but rather a much more general tendency. Meanwhile, the oppositionality of the Catholics (10:17) is even more striking in this mixed field of political issues. Regarding all the issues together, we see the Protestants as mostly pro-government (26:17), and the Catholics as distinctly oppositional (28:39).20 It was among the Protestants coming from the Cisdanubian district that support for the ruler was the strongest, while positions pro and contra the government were about equal among Transdanubian Catholics; in the Tibiscan districts, meanwhile, members of both confessions were outdone in oppositionality only by the Catholics from Cisdanubia, among whom we see that more than two-thirds of political positions were taken against the régime. This examination into the confessional affiliation and geographical origins of politicians from the lesser nobility at the mid-century diets produces results that rewrite the image suggested by other sources, and the conclusions drawn elsewhere in the specialist literature.