The sense of national community in the 18th-century Kingdom of Hungary was determined by several notions that predated modern nationhood. The hungarus identity, based on geography, included everyone living in the Regnum Hungariae regardless of ethnicity or language; the class-based concept of natio Hungarica was perceived as consisting only of the nati, the “natives” of the houses with a pedigree, that is, the members of the nobility. A membership in the natio Hungarica provided economic privileges (exemption from taxation) and political rights (representation at the Diet, i.e. the feudal parliament). This form of nationhood was deemed to apply to the ethnic Magyar nobility by right of conquest: the claim that their ancestors “spilled their blood” in seizing the country during the 9th-century Conquest. (The peasantry was seen as the descendants of the subjected non-Magyar inhabitants.) Despite this argument of genealogical continuity, the natio Hungarica was open to non-Magyar or new nobility. The linguistic constituent of this type of nationhood was Latin rather than Magyar, but its main characterological component was the ethnotype traditionally ascribed to Hungarians, valour. Thus, even with the rising cult of the vernacular by the late 18th century, language was perceived as an incidental cultural feature that merely supplemented aristocratic/heroic virtues. The ancestral myth reinforcing prowess as a characteristic ethnotype (accompanied by Roman republican virtues of self-sacrifice and freedom) was Scythianism (akin to Polish Sarmatism), which, in its heyday during the 1790s, reinforced the political community of the nobility by linking it to the mythical warrior folk of the Scythians. The last two great emanations of this pre-nationalist patriotism came in April 1790 when the Holy Crown was delivered to Buda and with the insurrection of the gentry against Napoleon’s invading army in 1808.
After 1800, ideologies of common origin or commonly shared political privileges and military duties were increasingly supplanted by the notion of a collectivity based on language and culture. Nonetheless, the notion of a common origin and realm continued to exert its influence, resulting in the simultaneous presence of three major types of nationalism (culture, descent, state) with alternating dominance.
The attempts to integrate the vernacular into the feudal notion of common origin only caused contradiction: Kazinczy envisaged a refined Magyar-language culture elevating the nation itself, but, in 1790, he also voiced concerns that the criterion of language would raise a divide between the country’s Magyars and non-Magyars. It was only by the 1820s that the natio Hungarica tradition retrenched into an ethnolinguistic definition, witness Izidor Guzmics’s A nyelvnek hármas befolyása (“The triple influence of language on man”).
A new sense of state-based community within the Habsburg Empire was proposed by Joseph von Hormayr and his circle gather around the Viennese periodical Archiv für Geographie, Historie, Staats- und Kriegskunst. Viennese periodicals had already provided publishing space for the linguistic, historical, and literary endeavours of the various nationalities within the Empire, from the Hungarian Kazinczy to the Slovenian Jernej Kopitar; the Archiv in particular wanted to popularize certain themes and literary forms (historical drama, historical ballads and legends) through which these nationalities could recognize and express the interconnectedness of their histories within the Empire (along with positive Austro-German cultural and political influences). The figures from Hungarian history who seemed adaptable to the hero-worship of imperial patriotism included St Stephen (on whom August Kotzebue wrote a drama and to whom Beethoven dedicated an unfinished opera), Miklós Zrínyi, a 16th-century Croatian-Hungarian warlord (on whom Theodor Körner wrote a drama), and János Hunyadi, the 15th-century governor of Hungary (on whom Sándor Kisfaludy wrote a drama). On the negative side, the Habsburg frame for a common historical consciousness omitted the 1703-11 Rákóczi uprising and the history of an independent Transylvania as an Ottoman client state. The most significant Hungarian contributors to the Archiv included the historians János Majláth, the editor of Magyarische Sagen und Märchen (1825), Alajos Mednyánszky, the editor of Erzählungen, Sagen und Legenden aus Ungarns Vorzeit (1829/1832), and the economist Gergely Berzeviczy, who in his 1817 Etwas über Nationen und Sprachen proposed to maintain Latin as the “constitutional language” of the multilingual and multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary.
Despite their different approaches and emphases, the Hungarian contributions to the Archiv boosted a new, Romantic Hungarian nationalism and an intense historicism in Magyar-language literature.
From the 1820s ethnocultural nationalism gained momentum, especially in the writings of Ferenc Kölcsey. In his essays Nemzeti hagyományok (“National traditions”, 1826) and Mohács (1832-34?), Kölcsey stressed the importance of common historical remembrance and literary heritage in what he saw as a rapidly cosmopolitanizing world. Proposing a community of cultural tradition regardless of class, Kölcsey positioned a repository of genuine Hungarian heritage in folk poetry (“peasant songs”) against an alien European high culture that had been adopted by the Hungarian nobility along with Christianity. Kölcsey also admitted that these authentic national traditions were at best rudimentary, very difficult to recover, and as alien to contemporary observers as Mexican ruins. Kölcsey’s reservations as to the accessibility of an original national culture dwindled amongst his followers.
Despite a short-lived current of liberal cosmopolitanism in the late 1830s (which relied on Tocqueville’s notion of patriotism as a matter of rational self-interest), it was Kölcsey’s views which eventually became dominant. Herder’s influence was noticeable, not only in Kölcsey’s writings, but also in those of János Erdélyi, who in the 1840s became the main collector, publisher, and theoretician of Hungarian folk poetry, and who saw language as the main differentiation agent between those nations, each of which offered its own contribution to the divinely-ordained palette of humanity. This Herderian influence is noteworthy because of his prognosis, in the 1784-91 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit, that the Magyars would disappear in the encircling sea of Slavs and Germans. The fear of cultural extinction was not new; but the horror of “Herder’s prophecy” developed into an active irritant in Hungarian Romantic Nationalism.
This compounded the trauma of the failed 1848-49 revolution, which reflected a generally shared desire to emancipate a Hungarian nation from under Habsburg monarchical suzerainty, but also strong intra-national divisions between aristocrats like István Széchenyi and liberal reformers from the lower gentry like Kossuth and Deák. The liberal ideal of a modern political nation (a civic society as opposed to the feudal assemblage of differently-privileged classes) implied that, if each individual citizen should enjoy the same civil liberties (or if, as envisaged in István Széchenyi’s 1830 Hitel, “Credit”, programme, economic modernization would bring about a community of shared interests and mutual trust), then claims to subsidiary ethnic autonomy were unnecessary. Even if in a speech given at the Hungarian Academy in 1842, Széchenyi warned against language oppression and reminded that fast Magyarization would provoke hostility among Serbs and Slovaks, in his 1841 Kelet Népe he also insisted that non-Magyars should confine the use of their mother tongue to the private sphere. While Hungarian liberals hoped that once given individual rights, the “ethnic minorities”, just like the peasants, would quickly assimilate into the modern Hungarian nation, in 1848 it became clear that this was not the case. In fact, nationalities had already been explicitly unhappy with this prior to the revolution. In his Über die Magyariesierung der Slawen in Ungarn (1821), Ján Kollár based his idea of nationhood on language. Kollár’s Hungarian opponents during the ensuing controversy call into doubt whether Slovaks were a nation precisely on the grounds that they failed to have their own state.
Street manifestations, proclamations of reformist agendas and of national poems, characterized the early stages of the 1848 Revolution, which rode the tide of the general European fervour of that year. By mid-1848, a separate Hungarian government had been set up; by the autumn, a secessionist government under Kossuth was engaged in armed hostilities with the Habsburg forces under the leadership of the Croatian ban (viceroy) Josip Jelačić. After initial military successes, Kossuth declared the Habsburg dynasty dethroned in 1849. Eventually, amidst confused battles and counter-insurgencies by the non-Magyar ethnicities of the Hungarian Kingdom, the revolution was broken, mainly as a result of Russian armed intervention in aid of the Habsburgs. A harsh anti-revolutionary and anti-democratic backlash ensued, which was not relaxed until the Ausgleich (“Compromise”) of 1867.
Meanwhile, nationhood (seen as shared commitment to Magyar language and culture) had become an operative concept in assimilation policies, although non-Magyars too stressed their individuality and their separate cultural roots. A case in point is Ferenc Toldy (1805–1875), born as Franz Schedel, the founder of the discipline of modern literary history in Hungarian scholarship; his working method faced a profound contradiction: in his literary histories of the 1850-60s, Toldy/Schedel used the first person plural (“we”) when referring to Magyar-born persons. This rhetorical manoeuvre can be seen both as a deliberate suppression of his own non-Magyar background in the light of a new ethnolinguistic sense of nationality and as an invocation of the tradition of symbolic integration into the natio Hungarica. Ethnolinguistic nationalism was fed by the remembrance of pre-modern types of nationhood: myths of ethnic origin suffuse Vörösmarty’s epic; even the democratism of Petőfi (who like Toldy was of non-Magyar background and self-assimilated) used a received historicist frame with the class relations inverted: for him, the peasants were the true descendants of the conquerors and it was the nobility that was of foreign origin.
By strengthening the bond between language and nationhood in a multilingual country, Romantic Nationalism simultaneously stretched the boundaries of nation beyond the confines of feudalism and defined it more narrowly, transforming an ethnically pluralistic patriotism into competing forms of exclusive nationalism. These forms co-existed both in confrontational and symbiotic relations: the linguistic, philological, or folkloristic efforts of the various national movements (Hungarian, Slovak, Serbian, etc.) unfolded in shared cultural spaces, such as Pest and Buda. In the face of their concurrent nation-building efforts, they attempted to appropriate as much as possible from their common pre-national cultural heritage. While authors previously had published in several languages according to genre or occasion, from the 1830s polyglottism in the world of letters increasingly came to be treated as a betrayal of nationality.
The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 left the Austrian Empire defeated, bereft of most of its Italian possessions, impoverished, and badly weakened. In order to marshal its resources and to rally its non-German dominions, especially Hungary, a conciliation effort was worked out: the Ausgleich or Compromise of 1867, which turned the Austrian Empire into a dual Austrian/Hungarian, imperial/royal monarchy with substantial autonomous powers ceded to its subsidiary Hungarian Kingdom. Following the 1867 Compromise, Hungarian liberal nationalism gained state legitimation and political power to carry out its goals of unification. The ethnic decree of 1868 declared that the citizens of Hungary constitute a single, politically undividable nation, regardless of ethnicity. As Kálmán Tisza, the liberal prime minister, insisted in 1875: “There can be only one viable nation within the frontiers of Hungary: that political nation is the Hungarian one. Hungary cannot become an Eastern Switzerland because then it would cease to exist”. Nonetheless, even in the era of full-fledged political nationalism, imperial patriotism retained some of its appeal along with an interest in local identities. The 1886-91 venture generally known as the Kronprinzenwerk – Az Osztrák-Magyar Monarchia Írásban és Képben/Die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild – attempted to represent a unity of Habsburg loyalism and the various nationalisms in the Empire, promoting a dual devotion to Crown and homeland.
Based on the belief in the assimilative power of the Hungarian language, the political efforts toward cultural assimilation to the now-ruling Magyar element included attempts to reduce the number of non-Magyar schools and to encourage name Magyarization. In the 1880s a Central Name-Magyarization Society was established, which encouraged people to undergo “national baptism”. Its driving ideology maintained that non-Magyar peoples within the Kingdom of Hungary were incapable of independent advancement and required Magyarization for their future development. In the event, assimilation proved to be successful precisely among the German and Jewish middle classes, especially in Budapest, where, contrary to Prague, the large German-speaking population became considerably Magyarized by 1900, although the city remained mainly bilingual.
Around 1900, the word “chauvinism” had a positive meaning in the Hungarian political vocabulary. The influential journalist Jenő Rákosi, his German descent notwithstanding, called for “a total Hungarianness” with every man a Magyar chauvinist in a country of “thirty million Magyars”.
