Revolutions - 7.22- The April Laws

Episode Date: January 14, 2018

In April 1848, the Hungarians won the right to national self-government. But what about the other nations of the Kingdom of Hungary?

and welcome to revolutions. Episode 7.22, the April laws. Last time, we caught up with Vienna and traced events in the imperial capital during the spring of 1848 as the new quote-unquote liberal ministry consistently failed to maintain control of events. We also talked about rising Czech nationalism in Bohemia and its effect on the larger question of both German unification and the future of Austria's multi-ethnic empire. Well, this week, we will spend that same spring of 1848 in Hungary, as they expand and consolidate the concessions that they had secured from the emperor

in the wake of the March Revolution. Concessions secured in part to avoid alienating the Hungarians just as a potential war of independence is breaking out in Italy. The empire was going to need Hungarian soldiers to keep control of Italy, a consideration that will greatly affect the course of events in Hungary. Now, I hadn't really thought about it until I was putting together this week's episode, but if there's any place that might be considered the center of the revolutions of 1848, it would have to be the imperial capital of Vienna. No other city dealt so consistently with every question at stake in 1848. The implications of nationalism, German unification, Italian resurgimento, liberal reforms, radical demands, barricades out in the streets, armies in the field, all of it ultimately ran through Vienna.

So Vienna, capital of Austria, capital of the revolutions of 1848. Today, though, we are going to move back to the great question of Hungary. Now, when we left the Hungarians back in episode 7.15, slaves no more, we ended with the double climax on March the 15th and March the 16th. In Budapest, radical agitators led by that poet revolutionary Shandor Potofi, printed the 12 demands, sang the national song, and then paraded around the city forcing both the municipal and imperial officials to bend to their will. Meanwhile, up in Vienna, the delegation representing the Hungarian diet extracted promises

from the emperor that they would be allowed to establish their own ministry, on the way to de facto autonomy within the Austrian Empire. Today we will address the fallout of those victories, as tensions emerged between conservatives and liberals and radicals, now that Hungary had been given more or less carte blanche to establish their own independent constitution. But even more important than that would be the tension that emerged between the ethnic Majyars, and I will start saying Majjar instead of Magyar, and the minority nationalities inside the crown of Hungary once that constitution was settled.

Because what many in the Hungarian diet believed, Lyoskosh Koshute, chief among them, was that the settling of the Constitution was the end of the revolution, when in fact it was only just the beginning of a much larger struggle. A struggle that would ultimately doom the liberal constitution drafted in the spring of 1848, and doomed, for that matter, the Hungarian Revolution. As soon as they had permission to form their own ministry, the delegation from the Hungarian diet left Vienna as fast as they could before more reactionary advisors could convince the emperor to counterman that declaration that he had signed

on March the 16th. The liberal reformers in the diet were now the dominant faction, and they were energetically led by Lyosheuat, who was, in every way, the man of the hour. But he himself was too polarizing a figure to be appointed Hungary's first prime minister, as even Koschut himself recognized. And so that job had fallen to Lyoshe Batanyi.

Batanyi, you remember, was a super-rich liberal noble, who had helped fund Koschut's journalism career, and then backed his candidacy for the diet. So where Koshute had led the liberal opposition in the lower house of the diet, Batanii was its principal spokesman in the upper house. He was thus an ally and a patron of Koshute, and the two mostly saw eye to eye. Though Batani was no mere frontman for Koshut.

He tended to be a bit more conservative, and was now one of the few politicians capable of maintaining independence from the polarizing atmosphere that surrounded Koschut. More and more, it seemed like you were either a supporter of Koshut, and you recognized him as your leader, or you opposed him as your enemy as the devil. But Batani was neither Koshute's disciple nor his enemy. And together, they would now take the lead as the liberal opposition

became the liberal majority, and they prepared a huge list of reforms that would transform Hungary into a modern nation. While the liberals took the ball and ran with it, they were protected by Archduke Stephen, the Palatine of Hungary, who I very briefly introduced at the end of episode 7.15 without much further explanation. It was Archduke Stephen who went behind everybody's back on the morning of March the 16th and convinced the emperor to sign off on the Hungarian list of demands. But he's an important figure in all this, so we do need to flesh him out a little bit more. So the Palatine of Hungary was the most senior state officer in the Kingdom of Hungary.

It was a post that had existed going back to the 11th century and functioned as something like the head of a Supreme Court of Justice. But the Palatine also exercised general political authority on behalf of the king if the monarch was absent or indisposed. When the Hampstburgs took over Hungary, they obviously got a hold of the Palatinate too, and it became one of the various high offices they would dole out to members. of the Habsburg expended family. Our man, Archduke Stephen, became Palatine of Hungary in January 1847 upon the death of his father. But he was not just some Viennese transplant. His father had been the Palatine of Hungary, and Stephen had been born and raised in Budapest. And given his education and upbringing, he was always eager to lend a sympathetic ear to Hungarian complaints. So when the revolutions of 1848 hit, he was the foremost voice,

inside the imperial court arguing that making concessions and working with the Hungarians was the only way to avoid losing them completely. Now, Stephen's motives and all this were suspected by both sides. Many Hungarians accepted his help, but were suspicious he was engineering temporary concessions, and then when things died down, to go recommend reneging on everything. Meanwhile, his more conservative relatives were absolutely convinced that his ultimate intention was to ingratiate himself so much with the Hungarians that they would make him king when they inevitably declared independence. Now, I don't know enough about Stephen's inner life

to say one way or the other, but it does not seem like he was trying to make himself a king. I think he really believed that working with the Hungarian liberals was simply the least bad option. He did not want the Hungarians driven to independence, nor did he want more radical elements in Budapest to seize the reigns of power. And at that moment, those more radical elements were actually on their way. A delegation representing the radicals who had just staged all the momentous demonstrations in Budapest, arrived in Presbyrne on March the 19th. They demanded that the diet immediately ratify the 12 demands and then leave Presbyrug and reconvene the national diet in Budapest.

To this request, Koschut took the lead and engaged in some pretty skillful political dancing. Budapest would be the capital of the new government. Everyone agreed on that. But Koshut wanted to make sure that the groundwork was laid well outside the intimidating radical mobs that had just been storming around the capital. Remember, Koshute has a half-finished history of the French Revolution somewhere in his papers, and he knew the role of the Paris mobs. Frankly, he did not want Budapest to become a Hungarian Paris. So he delivered a response to the radicals on behalf of the diet. He said, We will not leave Presberg until our work here is done. But don't worry about the 12 demands. All those points will be folded into the new constitution. But though he is now kind of blowing the radicals off, Koschut did not tell these agitators that they should stand down or denounce them for going off the rails. Koschut wanted the threat of further radical insurrection in Budapest to keep a guy like Archduke Stephen,

reminding the emperor that the liberals in Pressburg were a much better option than the radicals in Budapest. But Koshute also wanted to position himself as the man who could balance the scales. To conservatives, he was the man who would be able to keep the radical mobs in line, and to the radicals, he was the man who would not let the conservatives backslide. He relished his role as the man of the hour, and he made the most of it. The radicals thus blown off and sent back to Budapest, the liberals in the diet dove headlong into work, trying to get as much done as possible before anyone else got in their way. The next two weeks saw a flurry of activity.

Laws drafted and debated and passed one after another, though not without frequent clashes, because what they were doing through all of these individual laws was rewrite the whole constitution of Hungary. Now, I'm not going to run through the whole enumerated gamut of laws, but one of the biggest deals was the tax exemption of the nobles. That was now kaput. Taxes would be levied generally and proportionally. Also abolished was serfdom, and any lingering vestiges of serfdom, including all feudal dues owed to their lords. The clergy were also induced to voluntarily renounce their tithes. Basically, the diet was systematically dismantling piece by piece the old feudal order. But that said, all the delegates at the diet were nobles and many of them landowners,

and these reforms were not carried without a lot of friction. So they also debated how best to compensate the nobles for their lost dues and increased taxes, a combination which left many of them staring down the barrel of financial ruin. At one point the debate got so heated that a guy said to Patani, if you pass these laws without guaranteeing me compensation, I'll go get a gun and shoot you dead. And Batany, himself a major landowner, said, no need, if all this passes without compensation, I'll do it myself. The compensation bill passed, though where the money would come from, nobody quite knew. This flurry of legislation also brought forth the elements that are

virtually synonymous with the revolutions of 1848, increased liberal civil rights, and the creation of a National Guard. But though things were about to get a lot more liberal and hungry, that did not mean they were going to go the way of like France. The press bill, for example, ended censorship, but included a whole number of stipulations, restrictions, fines, bonds, and rules about the limits of what could be said in the press without punishment. And it was on points like this, that Archduke Stephen felt vindicated in recommending that the emperor work with the guys in Pressburg rather than against them. The radicals in Budapesthapest, wanted a totally free and unrestricted press, and when they read a copy of the new press law, they burned it in protest,

and the last thing the empire needed was guys like that getting into power. The Hungarians would also not be taking the great leap into the democratic abyss. They planned on taking the momentous step of abandoning the thousand-year-old national diet and convening instead a new national parliament. But while the new parliament would have no basis in the old feudal estates, it would not be founded on anything close to universal manhood suffrage. Voting rights would come with a number of residency and wealth and employment requirements. Anyone who was not of independent means, which included those working for wages, mind you,

would not have the vote. They also included a rule about how you had to profess to one of the recognized established religions, a requirement that ruled out anyone who's Jewish, because their religion was not amongst those recognized and established. But if you owned enough property or happened to be a member of one of the approved, educated professions, like a doctor, a lawyer, or a professor, you could vote, whether or not you could have ever voted before. Koschut and his allies had a very specific new political society they were aiming at, one rooted in the prosperous and educated middle classes.

But recognizing political reality, they controversially maintained one holdover from the feudal era that they were dismantling. Every noble who had previously held the right to vote, no matter his current education or economic status, would still have the right to vote. So in the end, suffrage expanded, but less so than in other places we've seen so far in the podcast. Best guess is about 25% of adult men would be eligible to vote for the first national parliament, which would convene in Budapest in July. While the diet was working out all the deep, of the Constitution, they also proposed and approved a new ministry, the first independent Hungarian ministry in the history of the empire. Now, as I said, Koschut himself was far too

polarizing to be prime minister, and so he was ready to settle for minister of the interior. But though enormously popular, Koschut was not all-powerful, and many in the diet feared that he was on his way to becoming a dictator. So they successfully maneuvered him into the ministry of finance. Granted, being in charge of the money has the potential to be a powerful position, but at that moment, the job was going to be pretty thankless. Trying to collect taxes from nobles who had never paid taxes, trying to fulfill promises that there was yet no money for. It wasn't going to be fun. But Koshute took the job, and never would let it interrupt his very public role as the most dominant personality of the Hungarian Revolution. I won't bore you with any

of the other guys in the ministry, except to mention that the great reformer Ishtvon Seyny was given the post Minister of Public Works, which was a job that was right up his alley. But I also need to say that Sechani was increasingly exhausted and stressed by the rapid course of events, and his mental health was deteriorating. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the great Hungarian reformer was just a few months away from a nervous breakdown and a permanent retirement from politics. And if you Google him, you'll see that it does not end well, Force Cheney. With all of this shaping up by the end of March, Archduke Stephen went back to the court and said,

I recommend you sign all of these laws that they've drafted, because you only have three options on the table. Either you can order the withdrawal of the army from Hungary and let the peasant vent a thousand years of wrath on the Hungarian nobility, but that seems pretty immoral, or we could go the other way and mass an army and in invade and conquer Hungary, which seems pretty infeasible at the moment, or we can work with them for now, and if you don't like some particular bit, we can renegotiate it later. Besides, we all have much larger concerns. Italy is going into revolt, and Hungarian money, and more importantly, Hungarian soldiers, are going to be absolutely necessary to winning that war. And then, I mean, God forbid the Italian provinces do break away, the Kingdom of Lombardy, Venetia,

represents one-third of all imperial revenue. If we lose that and the Hungarians, the empire is finished. So please don't drive them to a war of independence of their own. In response to these recommendations, the new quote-unquote liberal ministry, now serving under Minister Kolarot, decided to go in for their signature brand of cracking down and backing down. On March the 29th, they issued a declaration to the Hungarian diet that was meant to dictate the terms of their new relationship with Hungary. There were five points to it. First, the court will maintain its Hungarian chancellery, and it will have supervisory powers over the Hungarian ministry. Second, the Palatine will continue to live in Hungary, act for the king, and be physically sacrosanct.

Third, Hungarian taxes owed to the king will be paid into the central imperial treasury, and then be reimbursed back to Hungary after our expenses are deducted. Fourth, the king will monopolize the appointment of all military officers. And finally, the Hungarians will help to pay the imperial debt at an amount to be determined by the imperial finance ministry. When these demands landed in the Hungarian diet, there was an uproar, and Koschut made the most of it, barking indignant about who did they think they were, who were they to deprive us of our essential freedom and autonomy? We simply won't have it. Now, luckily, for Koschut and his friends in Pressburg, Back down in Budapest, the radicals were getting antsy.

Many of them, including Shandor Potofi, had been unsatisfied with their previous interaction with the diet. And on March the 27th, they held a mass meeting demanding the removal of the Patani Ministry. They demanded a new National Assembly. And then most radically of all, the Declaration of a Republic. Then two days later, a large demonstration paraded down to the City Hall, and while this was going on, barricades started going up across the city. though no one could say who they were going up against. The imperial officials were keeping the army in the barracks and showed no signs of moving.

Then the next day, 20,000 gathered in front of the National Museum where Potofi gave a stirring speech that this was a revolution we're having here. We are in fact participating in a world revolution. The upshot of all this, though, was not to make Hungary a republic or drive the revolution in a more radical direction, but instead to further the strength in the hands of the liberals in Pressburg. They reported all of this back to the court and say, look, you guys shouldn't be messing around with us. If you want to maintain any semblance of control, you will drop your demands and let us do things our way.

So what comes after the crackdown? That's right, the backdown. The ministry sent a new declaration stipulating that the Palatine would be sacrosanct and that the emperor would still control all army commissions. But the real guts of it, The chancellery oversight, the financial controls, it was all dropped. It amounted to a total triumph for Koshute and the gang.

On April the 11th, 1848, the King of Hungary, aka the Emperor of Austria, still steering clear of Vienna, arrived in Pressburg to affix his signature to 31 laws that had been drafted over the past few weeks. These laws are now known to history as the April laws. As soon as they were signed, the Hungarians packed up and went home, almost to a man believing that the revolution was now over. Everything that the liberal reformers had sought to achieve over the last 25 years had been achieved. They now had parliamentary government with a ministry answerable to that parliament. Equality before the law, general taxation, the abolition of serfdom and feudal dues, religious liberty, the right to assembly, freedom of the press, or it is, at least the abolition of censorship. All of this was fantastic. All of this was everything that they

had wanted. They were thrilled, and even St. Cheney admitted that the dynamic aggression of Koschut had accomplished far more than he had thought possible. Writing to a friend, he admitted, my policy was certain but slow. Koschut staked everything on one card and has already won as much for the nation as my policy could have produced over perhaps 20 years. So with all that had now been one for the nation in hand, it was time to pivot to how all of this was going to be received in Hungary. Because one question that didn't really come up too much in the debates in the diet was now going to be of paramount importance. How are the ethnic minorities of the Kingdom of Hungary going to respond? Because in the Hungarian

crown lands, the ethnic Majjar only made up like 40% of the population. The rest were Romanian, Slovak, German, Croat, Serb, Ruthene, and Jewish. The question of the minority nationalities had been at the heart of the long-running debate between Cachini and Couchute during the 1830s and 1840s. Remember, Cicheney was sensitive to the dignity and identities of the minority nationalities, while Couchute was a proponent of majorization. Now, that did not mean only Majors would be allowed in Hungary, and everyone with the wrong blood would need to be exterminated,

But it did mean that Koschut expected that everyone else would assume the Majjar language and culture, and that they would all be equal citizens together, whatever their ethnic ancestry. Koschut would remain tone-deaf to the outcry that went up when he started publishing policies that required Majar to be the official and only language of Hungary. It would be one of his blind spots through the entire Hungarian revolution. So the response was not overwhelmingly positive. For the moment, I'm going to pass over the aspirations of the Slovak's and the insane intricacies of what's going to go on with the Romanians, and instead focus on the conflict that will be central to the rest of the Hungarian revolution. The conflict between Hungary and Croatia.

So if you remember back, when we ran through the history of Hungary, and I'm sure you do, the kingdom of Croatia had been incorporated into the so-called crown of St. Stephen, that is the Hungarian crown. around about 700 years earlier. In theory, for all of this time, it had been an equal member of the crown, but in reality, with a population just over 10% that of Hungary, it was always a junior and subservient partner. But the Kingdom of Croatia was unique in that their incorporation into Hungary had brought with it many ancient rights and privileges that could not just be cast aside by the Hungarian diet. For example, they have their own diet, and they have their own diet, did not plan on giving it up. They had also long maintained their own laws and administration, and were not at all happy with the universal leveling and centralization being pushed by the

Majjar reformers in Budapest. Now, until recently, the Croatians and Hungarians had mostly been on the same side against the overarching tyranny of the Habsburgs. The Croatians had never been happy that a good chunk of their territory had been peeled off and turned into the military border, a border that was governed by martial law and by the Austrian military. And no less than the Hungarians, the Croatians wanted more autonomy and recognition for their national language and culture and religions. In fact, no less than the Hungarians, Croatian nationalists themselves wanted independence from Habsburg rule. But with the rush of events in March of 1848, everything was now thrown into a big jumble. By April of 1848, at least from the

Croatian point of view, it was Budapest that loomed as the fearful source of future tyranny rather than Vienna. Vienna, in fact, might act as their protectors and benefactors. And with Croatian soldiers, making up such a critical part of the imperial army, they did have some leverage to wield. Italy isn't going to reconquer itself. It's going to need Croatians as much as it needs Hungarians. So the man who would stand at the center of this brewing three-way conflict between Austria, Hungary, and Croatia, was the great Croatian national hero, Yossop Yelichich. In March of 1848, Yelichich was a colonel in the imperial army. The son of a general, he was raised in that army, and was considered a loyal and faithful subject

of the empire, which he mostly was, mostly, because Yelachij was also a romantic Croatian nationalist, who promoted Croatian culture and himself dabbled in patriotic poetry. Yelichichich may have dreamed of Croatia regaining its ancient dignity and throwing off the chains of both Vienna and Budapest, but there was never any practical way to achieve that goal. But then along comes the revolutions of 1848, and suddenly there's a path. It was a dangerous path, and one that would require clever politicking and the odd double-cross, but there was a path. So Yelichich found himself perfectly positioned in the spring of 1840,

to become the leader of his people. As the Imperial Court was reckoning with the fallout of the March Revolution, they appointed Yelichich BAN of Croatia, the Ban, being the local head of government. He was given this appointment for three reasons. First, he was considered trustworthy by the Imperial Court, both thanks to his lifetime of service in the Army, but also because he was an outright conservative, not some liberal reformer.

Second, he was a popular figure back home, Croatia, and his appointment would be welcomed by the people. And then third, the court wanted to get the appointment in before the Hungarians tried to lay claim to it. Now, the Hungarians were indeed very angry when they got the news, as they believed that the appointment was their prerogative, and they did not like the further news that the Imperial Court had gone and done something unprecedented. They appointed Yelichich to command the military border. Those two posts, one civil, the other military, had always gone to separate men. United in Yelichich's hands, the suspicion in Budapest was that the court was planting a staging point

for the reconquest of Hungary should it ever come to that. But whether the ministry was thinking that far ahead is pretty doubtful. Their immediate concern, as we will see next week, was the war in Italy. That war required the absolute loyalty of the Croatian soldiers, and it was with this in mind as much as Hungary, that the court placed so much authority in Yelichich's hands. And right away, he embraced his role as the Empire's faithful servant. Though his end goal was probably an independent Croatia, he believed that the best play right now was to tightly align himself with Austria against Hungary, and then once he had popped the Kingdom of Croatia out from under the crown of St. Stephen,

he could turn around and pivot to Croatian national autonomy. But though he planned to be a loyal subject of the empire. Yelachit planned to be a flagrantly disloyal subject of Budapest. He took up his post as ban of Croatia just before the new Hungarian ministry returned to the capital. But when they came back

and started making appointments of this or that guy to go to Croatia and start implementing their various laws, Yelichich told his subordinates to ignore those officials. Then when the ministry sent letters ordering him to do this or that, he returned those letters

unopened. Flummoxed, the Hungarian ministry went through cycles of conciliation and retaliation. They said that they recognized the ancient legal rights of the Kingdom of Croatia. But at the same time, Koshute and the other proponents of liberal reform and majorization simply could not wrap their heads around what the problem was. They were all a part of Hungary. They were all now equal before the law. They all held equal rights. They shared equally in taxation and benefits. I mean, what was the problem? This increasingly intolerable state of affairs continued all through April and May, and came to an immediate head when the Croatians made it clear that they were going to convene a meeting of their own national diet,

without asking for, nor, frankly caring about, permission from Budapest. Unable to control Yelichich, Prime Minister Batanyi decided it was time to appeal to a higher authority and get the emperor to put a stop to all this. He wanted the emperor to declare that the kingdom of Croatia was in union, with Hungary and needed to take its orders from Budapest. So now caught between the need to placate the Hungarians and the need to placate the Croatians, men in Archduke Stephen's Circle got the upper hand, and they convinced the Emperor to draft a proclamation forbidding the Croatian diet from meeting, and then also acknowledging

Hungary's right to appoint the ban of Croatia. Successfully convincing the Emperor that Yelichich had gone rogue and needed to be removed, the Emperor removed him. ban of Croatia in early June. But pointedly, the emperor did not remove Yelichich from command of the military border, which meant that his authority in Croatia was more or less unchanged, even with the loss of his civil title. And though he was now out of favor, Yelichich had his own supporters at court who were happy to take up his cause. And their case was that in an effort to weaken Croatia, the Hungarians had been withholding necessary money and supplies from the imperial army in the military border. In their attempt to run roughshod over the ancient rights of

Croatia, these Hungarian revolutionaries had been putting the defense of the empire at risk. So as the first national parliament in the history of Hungary prepared to convene at the beginning of July 1848, it was looking like the only way Hungary was ever going to be able to fully assert its authority over Croatia was war. And that is where we will leave Hungary. Hungary, on the brink of war. Now, a complete national transformation was underway in the Kingdom of Hungary, but they never successfully addressed what to do about the minority nationalities, and their inability to successfully deal with that question would ultimately ruin them, because that war that is about to get going with Croatia will lead to the collapse of the Hungarian

revolution. But that war could not be won by the Croatians and the other minority nationalities until the Austrians were able to give them their full support, which they could not do with the moment, because at that moment, the Austrians were mired in the First War of Italian Independence. Now, they did not know that it was the First War of Italian Independence. All they knew was that everything had broken down in the Kingdom of Lombardy, Venetia. Milan and Venice had driven out their imperial overlords,

and King Charles Albert of Piedmont Sardinia had decided that the time had come to make his play, for immortality.