LA JOS KOSSUTH SENT WORD... Papers delivered on the occasion of the bicentenary of Kossuth’s birth Edited by Laszlo Peter, Martyn Rady, Peter Sherwood Hungarian Cultural Centre London School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London LAJOS KOSSUTH SENT WORD ... Papers delivered on the occasion of the bicentenary of Kossuth’s birth LAJOS KOSSUTH SENT WORD ... Papers delivered on the occasion of the bicentenary of Kossuth’s birth Edited by lASZLO PETER, MARTYN RADY, PETER SHERWOOD Hungarian Cultural Centre, London School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London LA JOS KOSSUTH SENT WORD ... Papers delivered on the occasion of the bicentenary of Kossuth’s birth EDITED BY LASZLO PETER, MARTYN RADY, PETER SHERWOOD © School of Slavonic and East European Studies 2003 SSEES Occasional Papers No. 56 ISBN: 0-903425-67-X All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any other form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. Copies of this publication and others in the School’s refereed series of Occasional Papers can be obtained from the Director’s Office, SSEES-UCL, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU Front Cover: Lajos Kossuth, with a deputation of the Hungarian diet, enters Vienna on 15th March 1848. Contemporary lithograph from the National Museum, Budapest Typeset and printed in Great Britain by Q3 Digital/Litho Queens Road, Loughborough, Leics. LEI 1 1HH Preface The Hungarian Cultural Centre in London and the Centre for the Study of Central Europe, School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London organized a conference ‘Lajos Kossuth Sent Word to commemorate the bicentenary of his birth in March 2002 with both Hungarian and British participants. Academician Domokos Kosary gave his support to the conference from the start; he was sched¬ uled to deliver the keynote speech but on medical advice could not travel from the heart of Europe to its edge. Thanks to the generous financial support of the Hungarian Cultural Centre and its Director-General, Mrs Katalin Bogyay, and the encouragement of Professor George Kolankie- wicz, Director of SSEES, the papers read at the conference and two contributions commissioned after the conference can be published here. The volume brings together the results of recent research on Kossuth’s politics in the setting of the Habsburg Monarchy’s great nineteenth century revolutions. The contributions, by many of the leading scholars on the subject, offer a variety of (and in some respects even contradictory) perspectives and assessments of such complex subjects as the 1848 revo¬ lutions. Our aim is to take the subject further by looking at it from new perspectives that may offer fresh insights into the political personality of a remarkable politician, rather than to try to achieve some common outlook either on Kossuth or on the revolutions themselves. This accounts for the catholicity of the volume. The Editors. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES) https://archive.org/details/SSEES0026 Contents Preface v Introduction 1 Laszlo Peter Lajos Kossuth in the Batthyany Cabinet 15 Aladar Urban Kossuth, Parliamentary Dictator 41 Robert Hermann Kossuth and the Emancipation of the Serfs 71 Gabor Pajkossy Lajos Kossuth and the Conversion of the Constitution 81 Laszlo Peter Kossuth’s Nationality Policy, 1847-1853 95 Andras Gergely Lajos Kossuth, Domokos Kosary and Hungarian Foreign Policy, 1848—49 105 Martyn Rady Kossuth and Stun Two National Heroes 119 Robert Evans Mirror Images: Kossuth and Jelacic in 1848-49 135 Alan Sked Kossuth’s Pie in the Sky: Serbia and the Great Danubian Confederation Scam 183 Ian D. Armour A Comment on Dr. Armour’s Paper, ‘Kossuth’s Pie in the Sky: Serbia and the Great Danubian Confederation Scam’ 205 Robin Okey Vll viii Contents Kossuth in Exile and Marx 211 Klara Kingston-Tiszai Kossuth in Exile 219 George Gomori Marketing Hungary: Kossuth and the Politics of Propaganda 221 Tibor Frank Comments on Tibor Frank’s Paper ‘Marketing Hungary’ 251 Daniel Abondolo Contributors 255 Select Index 257 Introduction Lajos Kossuth sent word... Laszlo Peter The 1848 Revolutions in Europe were predictable and were indeed predicted. When, however, in November 1847 Archduke Istvan, palatine and locumtenens, opened the Hungarian diet in Pressburg nobody thought that it was going to be for the last time. Yet the Hungarian revolution turned out to be a good fit in the chain reaction of popular upheavals that shook the continent in the spring of 1848. Indeed the Hungarian revolution lasted longer than any of the others; it required the armies of two great powers to suppress it and 1848 brought lasting changes to the country. It removed much that was obsolete in order to create a Hungarian ‘civil society’ (polgari tarsadalom) out of legally and culturally diverse social groups, that is, a society based on laws applied to everybody equally in place of a society based on a hierarchy of privileges. The Hungarian revo¬ lution became a focus for national aspirations to attain independence and it made endemic the conflicts within the kingdom between the Hungarian and their rival Slav and Romanian movements. It is no exaggeration to say that 1848 was the year, more than any other, in which the Hungarians made history. 1848 became the emblem of national identity. Lajos Kossuth was the protagonist of the revolution, the driving force behind events in Hungary between June 1846 and August 1849. This was recognized by contemporaries as well as by posterity both in Hungary and abroad. No other man had a more profound influence on Hungarian national mentalite and no other Hungarian has become even remotely as well known abroad as Kossuth. ‘Not less than one hundred and ten books have appeared in the English language, of which Kossuth is the subject; several thousand English articles were written about him and one hundred and fifty three English poems addressed to him’, wrote Istvan Gal over half a century ago.1 In Hungary literature on 1848 and Kossuth could fill a 1 Stephen Gal, Hungary and the Anglo-Saxon World, Budapest, 1944, p. 17. 1 2 Introduction large library. In a single year, on the 150th anniversary of the revolution, in 1998, over 250 publications appeared2 and in the course of 2002, the bicentenary of Kossuth’s birth was celebrated by commemorative retro¬ spection at numerous conferences and by a spate of new publications. Public interest does not, of course, necessarily either help under¬ standing or offer insight into a subject; indeed it invariably constrains the historians’ outlook. Nevertheless, today we know so much more about the Hungarian revolution than historians did before 1945 because in the inter¬ vening years research has benefited from the strong public interest in the subject. Much has been uncovered by the publication of important primary sources and monographs based on rigorous scholarship. Yet notwithstanding the knowledge gathered on 1848 and indeed the wealth of available primary sources, including the surviving papers of Kossuth himself — a graphomane — several questions about the revolution and the War of Independence remain unanswered. As for Kossuth’s political personality, if he is no longer quite an enigma, there are aspects of his career that remain relatively obscure. The charismatic Hungarian leader, still remembered in folksongs as the country’s liberator, has inspired many scholars to write hagiographies about him and others to denounce him as a dangerous demagogue and rabid nationalist. This introduction will briefly outline Kossuth’s long and eventful life and explore the question of how a landless noble living in relative poverty was able to rise with such spectacular speed to the heights of political leadership in a society as strictly hierarchical as Hungary was before 1848.3 Lajos Kossuth was bom in Monok, Hungary, on 19 September 1802 and died in Turin, Italy, on 20 March 1894. His life virtually encom¬ passed the whole nineteenth century. Belonging to an old but impover¬ ished noble family, as C.A. Macartney observed, he was ‘a member of that dangerous class which possesses birth and brains but no means’.4 His 2 According to Robert Hermann in BUKSZ, Budapest, 3, 2000, p. 264. 3 Most historians take for granted Kossuth’s dominant role in Hungarian nineteenth century politics. They do not ask the question that the Szekel primor Janos Palffy, an adherent and later opponent of Kossuth, asked: how a ‘poor noble could, on his own, stir up such a magnificent and truly national revolution in this aristocratic- monarchic nation’, Janos Palffy, Magyarorszagi es erdelyi urak, ed., Attila T. Szabo, 2 vols, Kolozsvar, 1939 (hereafter Magyarorszagi) p. 81, quoted by Akos Egyed, ‘Kossuth es a szekelyek 1848-ban Szazadok, 128, 1994, p. 835. 4 C. A. Macartney, Hungary, A Short History, Edinburgh, 1962, p. 138. The summing up may reveal as much about Macartney’s attitudes as about the character of Kossuth. Laszlo Peter 3 family came originally from Kossuthfalva in County Turoc (now part of Martin, Slovak Republic). They probably had a Slavonic background and were ennobled in 1263. The claim that the Kossuths were Slovaks is a misconception, apparently ineradicable from books in English.5 They were Hungarian nobles, living in multilingual upper Hungary, filling minor county offices. Some members of the large family became Slovak when Slovak nationality was formed in the nineteenth century. Kossuth’s father had actually moved down from Turoc to Zemplen in the 1780s to fill a county post as a solicitor. Kossuth’s mother was half-German. Her only son, Lajos (later followed by four sisters, all bom in the Hungarian village of Monok) was given a good education.