of 1847,”33 an overview of the political and social movements that were pushing Europe toward revolution, Hungary is mentioned in a passage summarizing the revolutionary effects of bourgeoisification in previously backward areas:
Even in quite barbarous lands the bourgeoisie is advancing. . . . In Hungary, the feudal magnates are more and more changing into wholesale corn and wool merchants and cattle dealers, and consequently now appear in the Diet as bourgeois.
In a second article in the same paper, “The Beginning of the End in Austria,”34 Engels describes the Habsburg Empire as a patchwork of “A dozen nations whose customs, character, and institutions were flagrantly opposed to one another.” They have clung together “on the strength of their common dislike of civilization.” The geographical position of these “patriarchal” peoples in the middle of Europe, isolated from one another and from the more civilised peoples to the north and south by impassable mountains and lack of accesses to the sea or great rivers, made possible the rule of the House of Austria, “the representative of barbarism, of reactionary stability in Europe.” Engels concludes:
Hence the House of Austria was invincible as long as the barbarous character of its subjects remained untouched. Hence it was threatened by only one danger—the penetration of bourgeois civilization.
Engels then lists the disruptive effects of this inevitable penetration. His sole mention of Hungary is to the Diet which “is preparing revolutionary proposals and is sure of a majority for them.” What these “revolutionary proposals” are is not made explicit but the rest of the article would indicate that Engels is referring to proposals to eliminate the remaining feudal obligations, in particular corvée labor. The Hungarian landowners-turned-bourgeoisie who, according to Engels’ earlier article, dominated the Diet were presumably the driving force behind these “revolutionary proposals.” However, when Engels uses the word “revolutionary” in this article he is referring to the objective consequences of these measures and not a conscious or organized subversive political movement. In the next sentence he states that “Austria, which needs Hungarian Hussars in Milan, Moderna and Parma, Austria itself puts forward revolutionary proposals to the Diet although it knows very well that these are its own death warrant.” The Hungarian landlords in this article are a revolutionary force willy-nilly, like the Hapsburg monarchy itself.
The next mention of Hungary by either Marx or Engels is in January of 1849. This is a major analytical article in which Engels announces that the Hungarian revolution is as important for 1849 as the Paris revolt was for 1848.
For the first time in the revolutionary movements of 1848, for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior counterrevolutionary forces dares to counter the cowardly counterrevolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge. For the first time after a long period we meet with a truly revolutionary figure, a man who in the name of his people dares to accept the challenge of a desperate struggle, who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person—Lajos Kossuth.35
Did the feudal magnates turned bourgeois corn dealers and wool merchants suddenly become Jacobins? Engels did not think so. There was no doubt that the Hungarian rebellion began as a defense of the traditional rights of the Magyar* nobility against the centralizing tendency of the Hapsburgs. Like Poland, Hungary had been for centuries a kind of feudal democracy. The king was elected and responsible to a Diet of the Magyar nobility. But “nobility” in Hungary as in Poland was a relative term. Engels undoubtedly went too far in describing “the greater part of the Hungarian nobility” as “mere proletarians [sic] whose aristocratic privileges are confined to the fact that they cannot be subjected to corporal punishment.”36 Nevertheless, both contemporary and modern observers have also emphasized that “noble” status in Hungary as in Poland was enjoyed by a large percentage of the rural population many of whom would look to us, as they did to their contemporaries, very much like free-holding peasants, and not always very well off peasants at that. There was an egalitarian, “democratic” feel about this constitutional set up which appeared quite modern although it was in reality based on a feudal social form that predated the modernizing absolute monarchy of the Hapsburgs.
The Hapsburgs became Kings of Hungary not by conquest or marriage but by election. The Diet, for diplomatic reasons, offered the crown to the Hapsburgs in the 17th century and with one exception, the “enlightened” Joseph II, Hapsburg emperors went through the motions of accepting the crown of St. Stephen after election by the Diet. For the Hapsburgs this was a legal fiction. The Hungarians looked at it differently.
To complicate matters, there was a large Slavic peasant population and a significant German and German-Jewish bourgeoisie in Hungary. There were also German and Wallachian (modern Roumanian) peasants. To these large minorities the traditional “liberties” of the ethnic Hungarians were a source of resentment and envy. For a modern observer it is hard to overlook the resemblance of the Hungarian “nation” to a semi-independent military caste like the Cossacks in the Russian Empire. The latter also enjoyed certain “liberties,” that is to say privileges, vis-à-vis the absolute monarchy. The social structure of the Cossack “nation” was also relatively egalitarian compared to the Empire as a whole. In the Hapsburg Empire similar privileges were also enjoyed by the Croats who were to become the most bitter opponents of Hungarian independence.
All this broke down in 1848. The conflict between the centralizing tendencies of the Hapsburg monarchy and the claims of the Hungarian Diet, especially over the always awkward question of taxation, had long been a source of tension even in peaceful times. With demands for constitutional liberties and representative government—even for democracy!—threatening the existence of the Hapsburg monarchy and the old regime throughout Europe, the “liberties” of the Hungarians were a dangerous example despite their originally feudal content. As in France in 1789-91, the liberal-minded, “improving,” nobility—the noble corn dealers Engels had referred to earlier—were forced to take extreme measures to defend their traditional privileges. In Hungary in 1848 they also had to defend their national independence. As in France in 1789, the resistance to the absolute monarchy initiated from above in response to a crisis provoked a revolution from below.
Democratic opinion in Germany was overwhelmingly in support of the Hungarian rising. Even the Frankfurt Assembly, which had hesitated when it came to opposing Prussian occupation of Poland, supported the Hungarians against Austria. There were, of course, those who feared the defeat of the Austrians by a popular uprising. One of the journalistic adherents of this point of view was the main rival of the NRZ, the Kölnische Zeitung. At the height of the rebellion the paper ridiculed the democratic supporters of Hungarian independence
The so-called democratic press in Germany has sided with the Magyars in the Austro-Hungarian conflict. . . . Certainly strange enough! The German democrats siding with that aristocratic caste, for which, in spite of the nineteenth century, its own nation has never ceased to be misera contribuens plebs [a pitiful tax-burdened plebian mass]; the German democrats siding with the most arrogant oppressors of the people!37
Engels polemic against this editorial, “The Kölnische Zeitung on the Magyar Struggle,” begins by arguing that even if the Kölnische Zeitung were right, even if this were an uprising of an “aristocratic caste,” the fact would be irrelevant. The Austrian troops and their Croatian allies were not fighting for an end to feudalism. They were not aiming at the suppression of the “aristocratic caste.” Engels then compares the Hungarian revolt to the 1830 uprising in Poland, an uprising whose defeat Engels himself had argued little more than a year before was a direct result of the domination of that revolt by an “aristocratic caste.”
In 1830, when the Poles rose against Russia, was it then a question whether merely an “aristocratic caste” was at their head? At that time it was in the first place
