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Hungary's War of Independence was the bloodiest conflict of a European revolutionary era. It excited nationalist passions that have not yet been stilled. The principal actor of the drama was the nobleman, Louis Kossuth. The story of the revolution of 1848, Hungary's most important historic event, is told here in terms of the towering personality of Louis Kossuth. In the spring of that year, Kossuth and his fellow noblemen seized the opportunity presented by the European revolutions to legally restore the sovereignty of the country under the Habsburg Crown. They also introduced many administrative, social and economic reforms. The goals of the reformers however ran into the opposition of the Habsburg Court, the new liberal Austrian government and the non-Magyar peoples of Hungary who feared Hungarian nationalism. In the ensuing war the country was led by Kossuth. The Hungarians lost the war and, in August 1849, Kossuth fled, never to return to his homeland. Louis Kossuth was a forceful, powerful governor-president of Hungary, the people's spokesman and hero but also the symbol of much that they considered calamitous in the national character. At once dynamic and forceful, but also hesitant and weak - he made great provisions for the wounded, veterans, women and orphans but also squandered the lives of his soldiers unnecessarily. He emancipated the peasants and the Jews and, though he died an impoverished exile, he remained a popular idol in Hungary, his name a symbol of the aspiration for independence. His legend grew with the years and was further cultivated after 1945, when Hungary had lost much of the independence for which Kossuth struggled.
67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.
"Audiences at theaters, fairs, statue raisings, and commemorations of national figures; political rallies; ethnic mobs; May Day celebrations; monarchical festivities; and finally war rallies all take up places in this history. Not only insurgent crowds, but festive ones as well have political and material goals, Freifeld finds. And hope for liberal nationalism, which Hungarian crowds carried from their experience of 1848, thus continued to confront the monarchy, its bureaucracy, and the gentry.
Why did Hungary, a country that shared much of the religious and institutional heritage of western Europe, fail to replicate the social and political experiences of the latter in the nineteenth and early twenties centuries? The answer, the author argues, lies not with cultural idiosyncracies or historical accident, but with the internal dynamics of the modern world system that stimulated aspirations not easily realizable within the confines of backward economics in peripheral national states. The author develops his theme by examining a century of Hungarian economic, social, and political history. During the period under consideration, the country witnessed attempts to transplant liberal institutions from the West, the corruption of these institutions into a "neo-corporatist" bureaucratic state, and finally, the rise of diverse Left and Right radical movements as much in protest against this institutional corruption as against the prevailing global division of labor and economic inequality. Pointing to significant analogies between the Hungarian past and the plight of the countries of the Third World today, this work should be of interest not only to the specialist on East European politics, but also to students of development, dependency, and center-periphery relations in the contemporary world.
A student textbook designed to introduce, in an accessible manner, all the principal themes and problems of this period in European history.
The events of 1989/90 in Europe demonstrated the renewed relevance of the mid-nineteenth century uprisings: both by showing, once again, how a revolutionary initiative could quickly spread through different European countries, but also by calling into question the nature of revolution and the criteria for a revolution's success and failure. To commemorate the 1848 revolution in a spirit of renewed critical inquiry, an international team of prominent historians have come together to produce what must be the most comprehensive work on this topic to date and to offer a synthesis that sums up the current state of scholarly research, emphasizing the many new interpretations that have developed over several decades.
On István Széchenyi.