Introduction: What is ‘liberal democracy’?

In his influential book, Keywords, first published in 1976 and reissued in 1988, Raymond Williams gives clear definitions of both the adjective ‘liberal’ and the noun ‘democracy’ in this much-used phrase. Leaving aside the medieval uses of the word ‘liberal’, which came into English via Latin and had a purely academic meaning,…

… the affirmation of ‘liberal’ came mainly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century from the strong sense of ‘Liberty’ from the mid-seventeenth century. It was used in the sense of ‘open-minded’, and thence of ‘unorthodox’ from the late eighteenth century: ‘liberal opinions’ (Gibbon, 1781).

The adjective is very clear in a modern political sense in an example Williams gives from 1801, concerning the extinction of every vestige of freedom, and of every liberal idea with which they are associated. This led to the formation of the noun as a political term, proudly and even defiantly announced in the title of an 1822 periodical, The Liberal. It was then that the term acquired it more negative connotation (for some) as referring to an unorthodox political opinion of ‘foreign’ origin. There was talk of the ‘Ultras’ and ‘Liberals’ of Paris in 1820, and some early usages were in a foreign form in English, e.g. Liberales (Southey, 1816); Libereux (Scott, 1826). The term was applied as a nickname to advanced Whigs and Radicals by their opponents; it was then consciously adopted and within a generation, it had become both powerful and orthodox. Liberality, which since the fourteenth century had carried the sense of ‘generosity’, and later of open-mindedness, was joined by political Liberalism from the early nineteenth century. Libertarian in the eighteenth century indicated a believer in free will as against determinism, but from the nineteenth century, it acquired social and political senses. By the mid-twentieth century, the term libertarian socialism was coined, which was not seen as a form of ‘liberalism’, but rather a form of ‘socialism’ opposed to centralised and bureaucratic controls. Libertarians on the ‘Right’ also share this antipathy to state control, as well as wishing to uphold individual liberties above the requirements of the central state.

In the established party-political sense, the term ‘Liberal’ is clear enough. But ‘liberal’ as a term of political discourse remains complex. It has been under regular and heavy attack from conservative positions, where the senses of a lack of restraint and lack of discipline have been brought to bear, and also the sense of a weak and sentimental generosity as being endemic to liberal views and values. The sense of a lack of intellectual rigour among ‘liberals’ has also been drawn on in academic disputations. Against this kind of attack, ‘liberal’ has often been a group term for ‘progressive’ or ‘radical’ opinions, and is still clearly used in this sense, especially in the USA. But ‘liberal’ as a pejorative term has also been widely used by ‘authoritarian’ socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of a lack of rigour and of shallow and over-generous beliefs and attitudes.

To this accusation, ‘liberals’ reply that they are concerned with individual liberties, and socialists are not. But socialists have countered with the rejoinder, which is supported by the burden of historical evidence, that ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine based on ‘individualist’ theories of the relationship between man and society and therefore in conflict not only with ‘socialist’ theories of that relationship but also with social democratic ones. However, as Williams points out, if ‘liberalism’ is the highest form of thought developed within ‘bourgeois’ or ‘capitalist’ society, then ‘liberal’ can be taken to refer the mixture of liberating and limiting ideas, rather than being loosely used as a ‘swear-word’. In this sense, ‘liberalism’ is a doctrine guaranteeing certain necessary kinds of freedom, but also, and essentially, a doctrine of ‘possessive individualism’. C. B. Macpherson has used this concept to describe the way in which ‘Society’ becomes a dynamic entity of free and equal individuals relating to each other as proprietors of their own capacities and of what they have acquired by their exercise. Society, therefore, consists of an exchange between proprietors.

‘Democracy’ is, of course, an ancient Greek word, Demokratia, a compound noun based on the root words demos, translated as ‘people’, and Kratos, meaning ‘rule’. It came into English in the sixteenth century, from its French form démocratie and the middle Latin word, democratia. It was defined by Elyot, with specific reference to the Greek instance, in 1531:

… another publique weal was among the people … This manner of governaunce was called in greke ‘Democratia’, in latine, ‘Popularis potentia’, in englisshe the rule of the commonaltie. 

Nevertheless, its meanings have always been complex, and everything depends on the senses which are given to ‘people’ and ‘rule’. Herodotus defined a democracy as an administration in which power was in the hands, not of the few, but of the many, and all that is opposed to despotic power has the name of democracy. Aristotle  wrote:

… a democracy is a state where the freemen and the poor, being in the majority, are invested with the power of the state.

Yet much depends here on what is meant by ‘invested with power’: whether it is ultimate sovereignty or, at the other extreme, practical and unshared rule. Plato made Socrates say that …

… democracy comes into being after the poor have conquered their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing some, while to the remainder they give an equal share of freedom and power.

This particular use, indicating a form of popular class rule, is – of course – some distance from any orthodox modern ‘Western’ definition of democracy. But it does illustrate how the range of uses, near the roots of the term, makes any simple derivation impossible. ‘Democracy’ is now often traced back to medieval precedents and a given a Greek authority. But the fact is that, with only occasional exceptions, until the late nineteenth century, the term was a strongly negative term. It is only since then that a majority of political parties and groups have united in declaring their belief in it. In 1777, the American revolutionary Hamilton observed that representative democracy was not a perfect principle but a practical process …

… when the deliberative or judicial powers are vested wholly or partly in the collective body of the people, you must expect error, confusion and instability. But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated (is one in which) … the exercise of the legislative executive is vested in select persons … etc.

It is from this altered American use that a dominant modern sense developed. Jeremy Bentham formulated a general sense of democracy as rule by the majority of the people and then distinguished between ‘direct democracy’ and ‘representative democracy’, recommending the latter because it provided continuity and could be extended to large societies. In the mid-twentieth century, therefore, an assertion of direct democracy could be described as ‘anti-democratic’, since the first principle of ‘democracy’ is that of rule by elected representatives. Thus, the contemporary understanding of democracy involves the right to vote for representatives rather than the older, normal sense of popular power. ‘Democracy’ was still a radical or even revolutionary term in the mid-nineteenth century, and the specialised development of ‘representative democracy’ was at least in part a reaction to this.

It is from this point that the two modern meanings of ‘democracy’ can be seen to diverge. In the socialist tradition, it continued to mean ‘popular power’: a state in which the interests of the majority of the people were paramount and in which these interests were practically exercised and controlled by the majority. In the ‘liberal tradition’, democracy meant the open election of representatives and certain conditions of ‘democratic rights’ such as free speech, which guaranteed the openness of elections and political argument, discussion and debate. These two conceptions, in their extreme forms, are diametrically opposed to each other. If the predominant criterion is popular power in the popular interest, other criteria are often taken as secondary, as in the ‘People’s Democracies’, and their influence is often characterised as ‘bourgeois democracy’. But if the predominant criteria are elections and free speech, other criteria are rejected, e.g. an attempt to exercise popular power through a General Strike is viewed as being anti-democratic since democracy has already been achieved by other means. To claim ‘economic equality’ as the essence of democracy is seen as leading to ‘chaos’ or to totalitarian rule or government by trade unions.

In one characteristic use of ‘democratic’ as referring to open argument, freedom of speech and assembly are seen as ‘democratic rights’, sufficient in themselves, without reference to the institution or character of political power. This is a limiting sense derived from the ‘liberal tradition’, which in its full form has to include election and popular sovereignty, though not popular rule. To the positive opposed senses of the socialist and liberal traditions we have to add, from the late twentieth century onwards, various populist distortions of democracy, reducing the concepts of election, representation and mandate to deliberate formalities or merely manipulated forms; reducing the concept of popular power, or government in the popular interest, to nominal slogans covering the rule of a bureaucracy or oligarchy. These manipulated forms are not real democracy, Williams suggests, but they have added to the confused contemporary nature of the concept.

Putting the two words together, therefore, it would seem that a ‘liberal democracy’ as a term in modern use can be taken to refer to a nation-state which guarantees its individual citizens equal access to an open and pluralistic political discourse. To understand how this applies to Hungary today, we need first to understand how the concept has developed in the context of the modern history of Hungary.

The Hungarian Liberal Inheritance, 1828-1848:

Recently, in Hungarian political discourse, the adjective ‘Liberális’ has been used to describe ideas which are considered to be of alien, ‘Western’ origin, and therefore found objectionable by the ruling ‘Fidesz’/ Civic Alliance Party. Yet the Hungarian word for ‘liberty’ or ‘freedom’ is ‘szabadság’, which is also taken to mean ‘independence’, and the adjectival form is ‘szabadelvű’, which is used as a synonym for ‘liberális’. In the noun form it is used to describe the purpose of the Revolution which took place in 1848, which is commemorated by a National Holiday on 15 March. As István Bart (1999) has pointed out in his ‘Dictionary’ of ‘Keywords’ relating to Hungary and the Hungarians, this forradalom (revolution)…

… is such an unequivocally uplifting and ceremonious occasion in the history of Hungary, that every government, regardles of persuasion, has tried to turn it to its advantage by interpreting it to meet its own ends.  

The current government is certainly no exception to this rule, interpreting it as a popular nationalist uprising against the ‘slavery’ imposed on Hungary by the foreign Austrian empire. Hungarian historians like László Kontler have seen it as the fruition of a half-century in which the radical and liberal ideas of the French Revolution penetrated into Central European political thinking. He has  used the word ‘liberal’ to reference the swelling liberal sentiments in  early nineteenth century Hungary, commenting that:

The experience of the three decades between the Jacobin trials and the beginning of a new contest between progressive and retrograde opinion in Hungary developed what remained of it, in terms of culture and attitudes, into a vigorous national romanticism, and in terms of sociopolitical ideas, into a programme of improvement imbued by the principles of liberalism.

The execution of Ignác Martinovics and his comrades, a water-colour by an unknown artist. On 20 May 1785, five members of the Hungarian ‘Jacobin’ movement were beheaded on the Vérmező (Bloody Meadow) in Buda. Martinovics was a Franciscan monk and philosopher. The bodies of the chief defendants in the Jacobin trial were finally uncovered in 1914, with their heads placed at their feet.

Hungarian governments began to challenge the power of the feudal nobility, and though it was a formidable task to persuade the masses of petty nobility that they would in fact gain from losing the only thing that distinguished them from the peasantry: their privileges. Although their situation exposed them to the machinations of the government, it was at least possible to win part of them over to the rest of the ‘liberal programme’; equality before the law, civil liberties, representative and responsible government. Kontler goes on to argue that the new corporate constitution and the reform projects of the 1790s at the committee sessions of 1828-1830 created a space in which the ‘liberal nobility of the Age of Reform attempted a peaceful transition to modernity’.

Count István Széchenyi was the first of the dominant personalities of that ‘age’ to appear on the ‘stage’. He was an extensive reader of the modern classics of social and political thought from Rousseau through Adam Smith to Jeremy Bentham and travels in Western Europe, Italy and the Balkans awoke him to the backwardness of his own country. Like his father, he was particularly impressed by the laws, institutions, manners and social system of England. Already by the 1820s, Széchenyi frustration with feudal Hungary had led him to become one of the founders of the Liberal Magnates Club at the Diet and a well-informed and disdainful critic of the policies of the Holy Alliance against the liberal movements and freedom fighters in Spain, Italy and Greece. He also abhorred violence and revolution, but his attempt to mediate between the court and the nation in the transition from absolute to representative government was rejected by Chancellor Metternich, who was still determined, in 1825, to work with the old reactionaries rather than the ‘new’ reformers.

A lithograph by V. Katzler, 1860. His chief project is omitted from the circle of pictures, the one to which he sacrificed most of his wealth – the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which stands on the Pest side of the Chain Bridge, close to the Parliament House.

Within liberalism, political concepts started to diverge, which led to a gradual separation between Széchenyi and his close friend and political associate, his companion on his travels in the 1820s, the Transylvanian Baron Miklós Wesselényi. Unlike Széchenyi, Wesselényi found not only that the redemption of the serfs’ feudal obligations should take place under state supervision, but also that social change ought to be accompanied by the dismantling of absolutism – on which he laid the blame for backwardness – and the creation of a monarchy with civil liberties. In 1839, the increasingly influential opposition, now led by Ferenc Deák, insisted on putting and keeping on the Diet’s agenda the issue of freedom of expression. Deák, with the assistance of a group of liberal magnates led by in the Upper House, including, besides Széchenyi, Count Lajos Batthány, Baron József Eötvös and others, managed to secure the refusal of the Diet to discuss taxation and recruitment before the issue of freedom of expression was settled. In addition, a half-century-long process towards the emancipation of the Jews started by permitting them the (almost) free choice of their residence, trade or profession and the ownership of real estate. Laws relating to commerce, industry and banking passed in 1840 created a legal framework which stimulated the development of Hungarian capitalism for several decades.

Ferenc Deák (1803-1876), in a painting by Bertalan Székely, 1869

In the 1840s, associations for charitable purposes, social service, self-help economic or cultural improvement proliferated and contributed to the disintegration of the barriers between the estates. The combined membership of the approximately six hundred associations in Hungary and Transylvania might have reached a hundred thousand by 1848. Some of the over two hundred ‘casinos’ and reading societies, with tens of thousands of members, became thoroughly politicised and were hotbeds of the political parties that arose in 1846 and 1847. An enthusiastic supporter of Wesselenyi, Lajos Kossúth, a young jurist and scion from a landless noble family been arrested in 1837 and spent his three years in prison reading classics of politics and economics and learning English. He emerged from captivity with strengthened determination and great charisma, launching a new liberal newspaper, Pesti Hírlap (Pest News) in January 1841. The government hoped that Kossúth’s radical enthusiasm would split the ‘liberal movement’ and that, through censorship, he could be kept under control. However, these traditional methods were fully unequipped to cope with the difficulties posed by Kossúth’s entirely new type of political journalism.

The experimental railroad at Köbánya: 1829 engraving. The first ‘real’ railroad track between Pest and Vác was completed in 1846. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Hungary was trying to catch up with other European countries intellectually and technologically. But by the end of the century, it had carved out for itself a leading in its machine industry which also served its rapidly developing electrification. The First World War brought these developments to an abrupt end.

During the first few months of the existence of Pesti Hírlap, the editorials exposed the most soaring cases of social injustice, such as the backward and humiliating practice of flogging peasants at the behest of overbearing landlords. Kossúth’s antidote was a true ‘union of interest’ through social and political emancipation, a more equitable distribution of burdens and economic modernisation, and cited examples from the experience of capitalism and political liberalism in Western Europe and America. Instead of the aristocracy, he considered the ‘nobility of middling rank’ as the vehicle of the reform process, which he found, or rather hoped, to be sufficiently imbued with an enlightened and ‘liberal spirit’ to push through his programme. Kossúth’s propaganda also resulted in the rise of local Buy Hungarian! movements and he was elected director of the National Protectionist Association established by distinguished liberal aristocrats in 1844. All this contributed to nationalist and separatist sentiments, and Pesti Hírlap encouraged the process of Magyarisation, although Kossúth also warned against the violent propagation of the Hungarian language.

The aristocratic new conservatives (or ‘cautious progressives’ as they dubbed themselves) urged a united front of the propertied classes against the propertiless, led by Kossúth, whom they saw as intoxicated by ‘poorly digested liberal and radical maxims’, and hoped to drive a wedge between him and figures like Széchenyi (pictured right), Batthány and Deák. Széchenyi, in particular, did not need stimuli to turn against Kossúth, whom he attacked in a lengthy pamphlet, The People of the Orient, as early as 1841. The conflict between the two dominant personalities of Hungary’s transition to modernity is one of the factors which raises the process to a dramatic pitch, and naturally one of the most fruitful and often exploited topics of Hungarian historical discourse. Among other criticisms, Széchenyi berated Kossúth for what he saw as the latter’s excessive nationalism, adding that the nationalisms of the ethnic minorities were merely self-defence mechanisms in the face of Magyar dominance. These were opinions which could hardly have endeared Széchenyi to the bulk of contemporary liberals, whom he tried to win over to a ‘moderate liberal centre’, but in vain.

Széchenyi was the first to call attention to the problem of the multiple nationalisms in the Carpathian Basin, which ultimately proved to be the insoluble dilemma of Hungarian liberalism. It was a liberalism based on the concept of the extension of noble rights to non-nobles which would result in the replacement of the corporate natio Hungarica with a modern Hungarian state of emancipated citizens. Language and ethnicity were not enough, in the view of the Hungarian liberals, to constitute a nation without a historic past and a historical state. Except for the Croats, they refused to acknowledge the claim of the ethnic minorities to nationhood. Kontler has written that…

… the organising principle behind the concept of the ‘unitary Hungarian political nation’ of Hungarian liberals was that the extension of individual rights would render collective rights superfluous even in the eyes of the ethnic minorities who … would voluntarily assimilate into the Hungarian nation.

In the mid-nineteenth-century Hungarian mind, therefore, ‘liberalism’ and ‘nationalism’ went hand in glove. They were not seen as separate ideologies. The Hungarian national movement proved highly successful, especially in urban contexts, not only among the Jewish intellectuals and German burghers of Budapest but also among many Slovaks, Serbs, Greeks, Armenians and others. From the earliest times that charges of forced Magyarisation were levelled against the Hungarian political élite, there were also plenty of examples of voluntary integration as well. But as far as the views of the leading members of the movements for ‘national awakening’ among the ethnic minorities were concerned, the concept of a ‘unitary political nation’ was anathema. They stressed the role of language and ethnicity in nationhood. Hungary’s population in 1842 was nearly thirteen million, of whom under five million, less than forty per cent were ethnic Magyar. Romanians numbered 2.2 million (17%), Slovaks 1.7 million (13%), Germans 1.3 million (10%), Serbs 1.2 million (9%) , Croats 900,000 (7%), Ruthenes 450,000 (3.5%) and Jews 250,000 (2%). Only a part of each of these nationalities lived in contiguous regions or areas, the rest being inseparably intertwined with others in patchwork-like patterns, making ‘national territory’ impossible to demarcate with any precision. Against this complex background, the statement made by the Romanian historian Kogalniceanu in newly independent Moldavia in 1843 might look somewhat ominous:

I regard as my fatherland all that territory where Romanian is spoken.

The obsession with the Pan-Slav threat made the Hungarian liberals somewhat negligent of Romanian national aspirations, even though the cultivation and modernisation of the mother tongue continued under strong French and Italian influence into the second half of the nineteenth century. By the mid-1840s, the Hungarian liberal national movement seems to have emerged in full force, to some extent in competition with others in the historic Kingdom of Hungary. Opposition liberals were returned in large numbers to the Diet of 1843-1844.

However, Metternich was able to take advantage of the differences within the liberal opposition. Frustrated with the meagre results of the diet, which however included the passing of the official status of the Hungarian language, at the end of 1843 József Eötvös offered his support for the government in return for its commitment to reform. Eötvös was probably the most politically erudite and intellectually sophisticated of the Hungarian reformers of the nineteenth century. From an aristocratic family, he had travelled widely in the West in his youth and having been bankrupted in 1840, he became a professional politician and a freelance writer, and the leader of the ‘centralist’ group of liberal reformers. With the historian László Szalay and others, he idolised English Whiggery and Alexis de Tocqueville, and advocated ‘constitutional centralisation’. In addition to these ‘defections’, a national Conservative Party was founded in November 1846 which appropriated a number of the reform proposals from the liberals.

At first, therefore, it seemed as if the Habsburg court would be able to defy the ‘liberal challenge’. The rise of parties was a prelude to elections into what turned out to be the last feudal diet in Hungary opened in Pozsony (Bratislava, pictured above in a contemporary painting) in November 1847. By February 1848, a stalemate had developed at the Diet, which was only resolved under the impact of the wave of European revolutions. The revolutions of 1848 were the outcome of a combination of factors, from the general tensions arising from the conservative international system created in 1815 at the Congress of Vienna (pictured below), through the economic and financial crisis prior to 1848, to the encouragement they mutually drew from each other in a chain-reaction of upheavals across the continent.

At the same time, these mutual effects were largely superficial and symbolic, and despite the roughly common ideology the outbreak, the goals, events and the outcome of the revolutions reflected local circumstances. Nevertheless, the Hungarian revolution fitted smoothly into the chain-reaction, preceded as it was by those in Palermo, Paris, central Italy, Piedmont and Vienna, and followed by those in Berlin, Merlin, Venice, Prague and Bucharest. The real catalyst was the events of 22-25 February in Paris and the news of the overthrow of the rule of the ‘bourgeois king’ Louis-Philippe by a combination of nouveaux riches who wanted political influence, radicals who wanted to extend suffrage, and socialists who wanted social equality. These goals were clearly at variance with those of contemporary Central European liberals, but the news of the revolution which reached Pozsony on 1 March caused great excitement.

The Liberal Revolution & War of Independence, 1848-49:

 Revolutionary leaders of the ‘Ides of March’, including Sándor Petöfi & Kossúth (front)

It is not my intention here to provide a detailed narrative of the events of the ‘Ides of March’ and the 1848 Revolution here, but my purpose is rather to highlight the role of the liberal movements in it. The Battyány government which moved to Pest on 14 April, was a coalition. The ‘court’ minister was Prince Pál Eszterházy, an experienced conservative diplomat. Lázár Mészáros, a hussar general appointed as minister for war, was politically unaffiliated, as was Széchenyi, who overcame his scepticism about Kossúth and his radical faction to become Minister of Communication and Public Works. The moderate liberals were represented by Deák, Minister of Justice, and Gábor Klauzál (Agriculture and Industry), the radicals by Kossúth (Finance) and Bertalan Szemere (Interior). The ‘centralist’ Liberals were represented by Eötvös (Education & Ecclesiastical Affairs). This was a government ‘of all the talents’ in William Pitt’s famous phrase, and one which remained in office longer than any other of the revolutionary administrations created in Europe in 1848. It was Hungary’s first modern government.

However, the Hungarian liberal constitution was silent on the subject of the collective rights of national minorities and established Magyar as the only language of legislation and administration in the country, thus denying any corporate rights, which were considered to be vestiges of the feudal past. Following the June elections, the Hungarian Parliament convened on 5 July. Nearly a quarter of its members had been deputies in the previous diet, and the electors seemed to acknowledge the political expertise and former services of the ‘liberal nobility’. Besides a handful of conservatives and about forty of the radicals, the overwhelming majority supported the government.

The execution of Lajos Batthány: a lithograph by Louis Noeli. Batthány, the ‘president’ of the Hungarian republican government was a great but enlightened landowner who supported measured opposition and progress through compromise. His execution was a juridical absurdity, the product of intimidation and vengeance.

The revolution was followed by a ‘War of Liberation’ or ‘War of Independence’ against the Austrian emperor in a year-long struggle which ended in October 1849 when the Hungarian Army was finally defeated by the Imperial Army, bolstered by Russian troops. Hungary’s fight for independence won the goodwill of the world, including the United States President. Hungarian emigrants and refugees were received with open arms by the Western liberal democracies, many of whom were themselves involved in a broad struggle with autocracy in the revolutions which swept across Europe in 1848.

The ‘bourgeois’ Revolutionary leader Lajos Kossúth was welcomed in New York, Washington and in Britain. The contemporary English poet, Matthew Arnold, penned his praises to the ‘liberal’ Hungarian leaders of 1848-49:

Hungarians! Save the World!

Renew the stories

Of men who against hope repelled the chain

And make the world’s dead spirit leap again! 

Even twenty-five years after the defeat of the Revolution, the English poet Charles Swinburne described Kossúth as the Star of the unsetting sunset, though some contemporary conservative Hungarian politicians saw him as an irresponsible radical, particularly when he opposed their Compromise with the Habsburg autocracy as “treason” in 1867. He and his fellow radicals may not always have described themselves as ‘liberals’, but this is certainly what they were in the context of European history and historiography of the period.

The Kossúth Memorial Statue in New York (1928). In the USA, the aura Kossúth obtained through his personal tour following defeat in the War of Independence was revived through the emigration that carried waves of human beings to the New World by the turn of the century. Though this emigration was chiefly rooted in economic factors, it was invigorated by patriotic nostalgia, the “1848 state of mind” and the Kossúth ‘cult’.

Neo-Absolutism & The Compromise, 1849-1869:

Political opinion in Hungary during the years of neo-absolutism which followed the War of Independence was highly stratified, with a number of competing visions about the future of the country. There was certainly a minority willing to co-operate in the creation and operation of the institutions of the new régime. The ‘old conservative’ aristocrats, the dominant figures in the government in the mid-1840s certainly did not sympathise with the vision of the new imperial leaders in Vienna, while the ‘centralist’ Liberals, while deeply pessimistic about the fight for the full liberal programme of the Age of Reform, were also abhorred by the Habsburg repression. Whereas Kemény, in his pamphlet After the Revolution (1850) and as editor of the still influential political weekly Pesti Hírlap, urged Hungarians to return to the programme of Széchenyi, Eötvös made efforts to point out to Vienna that the ‘European necessity’ of a large state in the middle of the continent could only be fulfilled by the Habsburg monarchy if the existing historic rights were adjusted to the unity of the monarchy (through federation), and other ethnic and linguistic rights were also satisfied within that framework through the granting of autonomies.

As an archetypal ‘Central European liberal’, Eötvös used his experience of competing nationalisms to enrich the views of contemporary Western liberals like Lord Acton on the inevitable tension between the ideals of liberty and equality. The ‘dominant ideas’ of the nineteenth century, Eötvös suggested, caused so much suffering because they were misinterpretations of the true notions of liberty, equality and nationality. They were all mistaken for the idea of sovereignty, which bred conflict, whereas rightly conceived they were merely devices to protect the integrity and ensure the self-fulfilment of the individual. Instead of popular sovereignty, based on the wrong ‘dominant ideas’, it was civil liberties, primarily the right of association, that would effectively safeguard the individual and the group (including ethnic groups) against the modern nation-state.

The Hungarian delegation that negotiated the Compromise with the Austrian Emperor in January and February 1867 was headed by Count Gyula Andrássy, who enjoyed the full confidence of Ferenc Deák and Hungarian liberals as well as the royal couple, even though his name was on the list of émigrés hanged in effigy in the aftermath of 1849. Having returned to Hungary in 1857, he was an experienced politician, with an instinctive skill for brilliant improvision. Andrássy was appointed Prime Minister in February 1867. Liberal commoners, as well as aristocratic magnates, were represented in his ministry, Hungary’s third. Contemporaneously, the Austrian Emperor and court well understood that the Compromise was arguably the only way to preserve its great power status. In Hungary too, it was seen by many as the only way to secure the country’s survival. After all, three out of every ten of the imperial democratic corps and four out of ten of the Dual Monarchy’s foreign ministers were subjects of the Hungarian crown. It is therefore not surprising that Hungarian nationalists were dazzled by the prospect of governing the half of the empire whose economic and demographic dynamism might soon shift the balance of power in their favour and might even compel the Habsburg dynasty to remove its main residence and seat of power from Vienna to Budapest.

The Rise of Hungarian Liberalism, 1870-1890:

The historical tarot card game: a painting by Arthur Ferraris. Under the portrait of Ferenc Deák are Kálmán Tisza (1830-1902) and the players participating in the ‘general’s’ game, including Károly Eötvös (1842-1916), the lawyer and author who successfully defended the Jews of Tiszaeszlár who were charged with the “ritual murder of children”, Mór Jókai  (1825-1904), the well-known author of prose fiction and MP. Kálmán Tisza was prime minister from 1875 to 1890, an unprecedented period in office. During this period, major political issues were settled not in parliament but at casino tables, and the political and intellectual élites were not yet separate entities.

An element of Hungary’s past cherished among liberals was the supposed parallel between the constitutional development of Hungary and that of Britain. These parallels go back at least to the time of Magna Carta, which preceded the Golden Bull of Andrew II by a mere seven years. I have written more about these links and parallels in an earlier series of articles on this site. They were popularised from the end of the eighteenth century in Hungary. At the level of domestic policy, one convincing argument in favour of the Compromise was that for the two leading nations of the Habsburg Monarchy it did represent a shift from absolutist government to liberal representative democracy, albeit with all its flaws, and for the bulk of Hungarian liberals some of these shortcomings made it more attractive than potential alternatives. Some of these limitations derived from the nature and basis of liberalism in Hungary. At its inception, it had been a ‘liberalism of noblemen’, largely directed to offset or moderate the effects of capitalist development in a predominantly rural society, priorities reflected in the way in which the dismantling of feudalism had taken place during and after the Age of Reform and the Revolution of 1848. Relations of dependence and hierarchy and traditional respect for authority were preserved in social attitudes. As Kontler has pointed out:

Liberal equality remained a fiction even within the political élite. The Compromise, which was, after all, a conservative step, checked whatever emancipationist momentum Hungarian liberalism still had. It became increasingly confined to the espousal of free enterprise, the introduction of modern infrastructure and, with considerable delay, to the secularisation of the public sphere and the regulation of state-church relations. Political power remained in the hands of the traditional élite, with which newcomers were assimilated, with roughly eighty per cent of MPs permanently drawn from the landowning classes. 

The franchise only extended to about six per cent of the population throughout the period, was acceptable at the beginning but anachronistic by 1884, the year by which Britain had achieved Universal Manhood Suffrage. Most districts remained under the patrimony of local potentates and political groups, elections were rigged and there was large-scale patronage at all levels of administration. Kontler’s view is that, if Hungary’s constitutional liberty resembled that of Britain during the time of Kalmán Tisza’s premiership from 1875 to 1890, it mainly represented the Britain of Robert Walpole’s ‘whig oligarchy’ of a century and a half earlier. Yet since the Hungarian Parliament was a largely independent institution under the crown, Hungary’s constitution was freer than that of any state east of the Rhine. In addition, there was a conspicuous case of the amalgam of liberal and conservative principles and motives was the regulation of county and municipal self-government (1870). The county and municipal assemblies were acknowledged as the legitimate bodies of political discussion outside the parliament. They were entitled to address national political issues at their sessions, to make their resolutions on these issues public, to petition the government on these issues or to remonstrate against measures they deemed illegal or unsatisfactory.

The Royal Family at Gödöllö – a lithograph, 1871. Queen Elizabeth was glad to stay in Buda after the Compromise and coronation of in 1867, and especially at Gödöllö, rebuilt as a royal summer residence.

The most unequivocally liberal in spirit and letter was the 1868 law on elementary schooling, worked out by Eötvös. The appalling literacy statistics (in 1869, 59 per cent of the male and 79 per cent of the female population over the age of six were illiterate) made new legislation urgent. Elementary education for children between the ages of six and twelve was made compulsory and was to be obtained in the mother tongue. Schools were established in every locality with over thirty school-age children and there was also provision for ‘higher elementary’ education, until the age of fifteen. Over the following two decades, more than three thousand new schools were added to the nearly fourteen thousand already existing. The proportion of school attendance increased from 50% to 81%, and illiteracy dropped to 34% among men and 53% among women.

The Tisza era saw significant ‘anti-liberal’ trends emerge in parliament, though they didn’t constitute a menace to either the Tisza government or the ascendancy of the Liberal Party. One of these was political anti-Semitism, which emerged as a nascent political party which had the potential to overtake the Independence Party by targeting its voters, those who had lost out in capitalist development, a process which seemed to benefit the Jewish middle classes. Largely through immigration from Galicia and Moravia, from a modest 83,000, or one per cent of the population at the beginning of the century, the Jewish population of Hungary rose to five million or five per cent by the eve of the First World War. Immigrant Jews established family wealth by trading in corn, wood and wool. ; their sons turned it to interest in credit institutions or industrial assets, and the grandsons of the most successful bought into the titular aristocracy. They were a tiny minority among a mass of small businessmen and professionals, and they represented no competition to the livelihood of the genteel classes, which considered the civil service as the only respectable form of employment. Nevertheless, the foreignness and capitalist success of the Jews made them viable scapegoats in the eyes of an ailing gentry, in spite of the fact that they assimilated and supported the idea of the Hungarian nation-state with great enthusiasm.

“PANEMI!”  (BREAD!) – a painting by Imre Révész (1859-1945), 1899. Following the liberation of the serfs in 1848, agrarian society in Hungary became profoundly segmented, and the land was very disproportionately distributed. Hundreds of thousands of village people emigrated, and agrarian-socialist movements were established. Despite technological innovation in agriculture elsewhere, in Hungary harvesting by hand remained the sole method until the mid-twentieth century.

At the height of the anti-Semitic agitation, in 1883, an Anti-Semitic Party was established, the stake being nothing less than bringing down Tisza, who was motivated by his liberal convictions and ties with the Jewish community to take a firm stand against the movement and the new party. The Independence Party resisted the temptation to join forces with the anti-Semites, who figured badly in the 1884 elections, and having been discredited by the outcome of a blood libel case, disappeared from the political scene by the end of the decade. The fall of Tisza was finally precipitated by his inability to work out a compromise on the reform of the defence forces. He had held the office of PM for fifteen years; in the following fifteen years, Hungary had seven PMs, struggling ever more helplessly to cope with the same problems. Even after his fall, Tisza remained as a dominant figure in the Liberal Party, convinced that the maintenance of ‘dualism’ was the only chance for the survival of historic Hungary with its many national and ethnic minorities. Regarded as stubborn, Tisza was a politician of stature and integrity unknown in Hungary since the eras of reform and revolution. Among the traditional élite, he might have been alone in recognising the full relevance of industrialisation and capitalism. His traditionalism, the paternalistic and aristocratic brand of liberalism he inherited from his father led him to turn to ‘disciplining’ the Hungarian people and awakening them to an awareness of where their true interests lay, in the consolidation of dualism.

The Decline & Death of Liberal Hungary, 1890-1914:

The limited liberal thrust of Tisza’s policies continued in the 1890s under the administrations of his former associates, Gyula Szapáry and Sándor Wekerle.

It was under the Wekerle and Szapáry governments that the reform of church-state relations was carried out. In Hungary, only a minority of the Catholic clergy was imbued with the spirit of the Christian Socialist movement associated with Pope Leo XIII. However, even the reformist Pope opposed the contemplated separation of Church and state in an encyclical specifically devoted to Hungary. The Church was also backed by a profoundly religious ruler in Franz Josef (seen at prayer on the right), who considered the Church one of the strongest pillars of the monarchy. It successfully resisted innovations that had been introduced in most of the western European countries a few decades earlier: civil marriages, state registrations of births and deaths, freedom of conscience and affiliation and the acceptance of Judaism as a ‘received’ faith.  Against a background of intensive public interest and heated debates in parliament, these reforms were finally introduced in 1894 and 1895 and became outstanding pieces of liberal legislation in Hungary. Following this high-water mark, however, when in 1903, the Habsburg ruler turned to István Tisza to secure the continuation of the dualist system, a faction of the Liberal Party led by Andrássy the younger left the government party and joined forces with the coalition of the parliamentary opposition determined to ‘improve’ that system. The ensuing violence in parliament led to its dissolution and in the January 1905 election, the coalition headed by Ferenc Kossúth, son of Lajos and leader of the Independence Party, gained a substantial majority.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Social Democratic Party also gained in influence, thanks to the talented orator Dezső Bokányi and intellectuals like Ervin Szabó, an original Marxist theorist of international stature. The latter kept close links with the most articulate of all those challenging the régime including the radical democrats, who ‘raised their standard’ in the social science journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century), launched in 1900, and in the Society for Social Science, founded in the following year. The group, whose ranks included a number of young assimilated Jews, argued on the basis of social Darwinism and Marxist sociology in favour of universal suffrage, the elimination of ‘feudal’ remnants and the promotion of the co-operative movement among the peasantry, democratic local self-government, the extension of the nationalities law, educational reform and improved insurance schemes. They had a broad network of sympathisers from dissident Independentists through to the Galilei Circle of university students and Freemasons to respected literary figures like the prophetic poet Endre Ady. They did not emerge as a distinct political party until 1914, but their programme had already been conceived by 1907 and published by their leader Oszkár Jászi in his article Towards a New Hungary, foreshadowing the ideas in his scholarly thesis of 1912 on the nationality question: that there was a way to reconcile national independence and democratic progress, ‘the Hungarian idea and free thinking’, in the historic state transformed through reform into a ‘brotherhood of nations’.

However, the dated and old-fashioned liberalism of the previous generations defied the democratic challenge, and the progressive coalition collapsed. Some of the leaders and most of the supporters of the Independence Party, frustrated by the failure of the government to achieve the ‘national goals’, had already been alienated by 1909. The party split under the leadership of Ferenc Kossúth. In January 1910, Wekerle was forced to step down, to be replaced by the old Liberal Khuen-Héderváry. István Tisza re-emerged on the political scene at the head of a party consisting mainly of haute bourgeois and land-owning supporters of the former Liberal Party. His new National Party of Work won a convincing victory in what turned out to be the last elections in the Hungary of the dualist period in June 1910. Obstruction in parliament began again, and Tisza concluded that the strengthening of dualism and of historic Hungary as he envisaged it was no longer compatible with observing the ‘niceties of parliamentarism’.

The Parliament House, on the Danube bank on the Pest side of the river, built between 1885 and 1904

His view prevailed in the party of one-time Liberals in the spring of 1912 when Kluen-Héderváry was replaced by László Lukács as PM and Tisza had himself been elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. A mass demonstration in the capital against his hardly concealed plans degenerated into street fighting and police and protesters in which six people were wounded on ‘Bloody Thursday’, 23 May.  On 4 June, the new Speaker refused to let the opposition speak, and had its protesting members removed by the police. Similar methods were used in the debate on the rather lightweight electoral reform bill, voted through in April 1913. Tisza had no doubt that there would be a major war between the Habsburg monarchy and its adversaries in the region, and laws were passed which curtailed the freedom of association, assembly and the press, prohibited republican propaganda and made it possible for the government to wield emergency powers. There were few in Hungary who recognised the dilemmas, the traps the country faced on the eve of the First World War in all their depth. As Kontler has written:

On one side of the ideological divide, Endre Ady was the greatest of them all, as he singled out with characteristic acuteness his counterpart on the other: István Tisza. In the troublesome summer of 1914, the ‘deranged man of Geszi’, as Ady called the Prime Minister after the seat of the Tisza estate, hesitated for two weeks, but in the end he gave his sanction to decisions that made inevitable the war which ultimately demolished historic Hungary in a way unwanted by any of its Hungarian critics.  

By the outbreak of the war, Tisza had effectively halted the forward march of Liberal democracy in Hungary. It didn’t resume on a continuous basis until the last decade of the twentieth century.

Sources (in addition to those fully referenced in the text):

László Kontler (2009), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing House.

Below: Conflict in the sixteenth century, a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer

Part Two – Martin Luther, Humanism and Nationalism:

The late fifteenth century saw a consolidation of many European states and a coalescence of Europe into the political contours which were to shape it for almost four hundred years, until the crisis of nationalism in the nineteenth century. In the southwest, the Spanish state emerged with the final conquest of Granada from the Muslim Moors in 1492 and the Union of the crowns of Aragon and Castille. The French kings continued the process of expanding the royal domain, until by 1483 only the Duchy of Brittany remained more or less independent, and even this was absorbed in the early sixteenth century. England had lost all its lands in France, except for Calais, and was racked by a bitter civil war from 1453 to 1487, from which it began to emerge under the Welsh Tudor dynasty from 1485 onwards as a maritime power, whose interests in terms of territorial expansion lay outside Europe.

Above: King Matthias Hunting at Vajdahunyád. This most impressive Transylvanian castle was the residence of the Hunyádi dynasty and seat of their immense estates.

In the East, Hungary’s power and influence grew in the reign of Matthias Corvinus from 1458 until 1490. Corvinus was a renaissance ruler who promoted learning, but he also had to resist the Turkish advance. He maintained a largely defensive attitude, seeking to preserve his kingdom without trying to push back the Ottomans to any great extent. His main attention was directed westwards. With the standing army he had developed, he hoped to become the crown of Bohemia and become Holy Roman Emperor. Bohemia remained divided as a result of the Hussite Wars and in 1468 Corvinus obtained Papal support to conduct a crusade against its Hussite ruler, George Podebrady. This led to the partition of the Bohemian kingdom. Corvinus gained Moravia, Silesia and Lusatia as well as the title ‘King of Bohemia’, though not Bohemia itself. Corvinus was opposed by the Emperor Frederick III (1440-93) who had been elected ruler of Hungary in 1439 by a group of nobles. Nevertheless, Corvinus was successful, in gaining Lower Austria and Styria from Austria, and transferring his capital to Vienna. The Hungarian state developed considerably under Matthias Corvinus, although he continued to face opposition from nobles concerned about their privileges.

Portrait of Matthias Corvinus from the Philostratus Codex, c. 1487-1490

The beginnings of the primacy of the nation-state are conventionally traced to the early sixteenth century. A new type of king arose across, like Matthias Corvinus, called the Renaissance Prince. These monarchs attacked the powers of the nobles and tried to unite their countries. In England, this process was accelerated by the eventual victory of the Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses, but on the continent, it was much slower. The mercantile classes were generally hostile to the warlike feudal nobles, who interfered with and interrupted their trade, so they tended to support the king against the nobles. A new sense of unity arose, where local languages and dialects merged into national languages and, through the advent of the printing press, national literatures developed.

For a while, however, the most successful states appeared to be multi-national ones, such as the Ottoman Empire in the east, or the universal monarchy built up by Charles V, encompassing Spain, the Netherlands and the Austrian dominions of the Habsburgs. The small states of the Holy Roman Empire, the patchwork of cities and territories, also contained some of the most affluent parts of Europe. Charles of Habsburg inherited, by quirks of marriage and early deaths, the Burgundian Netherlands (1506), the united Spanish crowns (1516), and the lands of his grandfather Maximilian of Austria (1519), after which he succeeded him as Holy Roman Emperor. The Imperial title, the secular equivalent of the Papacy, still carried immense prestige, giving its holder pre-eminence over lesser monarchs.

The Empire was a waning but still imposing legacy of the Middle Ages. Since the office of emperor was elective, any European prince was eligible, but the electors were predominantly German and therefore preferred a German. Yet they were realistic enough to recognise that no German had sufficient strength in his own right to sustain the office. They were, therefore, ready to accept the head of one of the great powers, and the choice lay between Francis of France and Charles of Spain. Francis I tried in vain to secure election, seeing the danger of his country being encircled by a ring of hostile territories. The Pope objected to either, however, because an accretion of power on one side or the other would destroy that balance of power on which papal security depended. When the Germans despaired of a German, the pope threw his support to Frederick the Wise, but Frederick himself, sensible of his inadequacies, defeated himself by voting for the Habsburg.

For centuries the seven Electors had chosen the Habsburg heir, but previously he had been German, or at least German-speaking; At the age of just twenty, Charles I of Spain became Emperor Charles V on 28 June 1519. Francis pursued his legacy of French claims to Milan and Naples, and sought to extend his eastern frontier towards the Rhine. He was an ambitious man, but also frivolous, whereas Charles was regarded as harder-working. The rivalry between the two men was to dominate European politics from 1519 to 1547. While Charles emerged as the more powerful of the two, he had many more problems to distract him. Winning the election was only the beginning of his trials, as Charles now faced an immense task of keeping his domains united.  The main source of his power and wealth continued to lie in the Netherlands, in the seventeen separate provinces that he had inherited from his father, Philip the Handsome, in 1506. The great commercial wealth of these provinces made their taxes particularly valuable, even if their independent-mindedness meant that Charles had to treat them with extreme caution. Besides the territories he had inherited, Charles added several more Dutch provinces, Milan, Mexico and Peru to his empire at home and overseas.

Europe in the time of Henry VIII, Charles I of Spain and Francis I of France

The Map above shows the extent of Charles’ scattered empire; it included many peoples, each proud of their own traditions, language, and separate government. Even in Spain, only the royal will bound together Castile with Granada and Aragon, which, in turn, was made up of the four distinct states of Aragon, Valencia, Catalonia and Navarre. There was a serious revolt in Aragon itself in 1520. Besides Spain, he had to assert his nominal authority over the independent princes, bishops, knights and city-states that formed the Holy Roman Empire.  If all this wasn’t enough to contend with, he was opposed by successive popes, who resented his power in Italy despite his championship of the Roman Church. Within the Church, from 1517, reformers like Martin Luther had begun to challenge the authority of both the ecclesiastical and secular leaders of the Empire, leading to further disunity both within and between the German states.

Above: The Central European Habsburg Empire of Charles V

The rise of Protestantism in Germany in the first half of the sixteenth century placed an additional strain on his European empire. Charles failed to suppress it by force, but held firm to Catholicism even though, in Germany at least, it might have been politically expedient to convert to Lutheranism. In 1517-19, Martin Luther had challenged the authority of the Pope in tolerating the abuses of the Church, and a considerable movement for reform had grown around his protest at Wittenberg. His work and that of subsequent reformers was greatly stimulated by the translation of the Bible into ‘high’ German, which Luther himself completed in 1534, and by its printing and widespread publication. This religious movement coincided with the rise of national feeling. Renaissance princes, eager to gain complete domination over their territories, were supported in a breach with the Pope by their subjects, who regarded Papal authority as foreign interference. The wealth and lands of the Church, combined by the heavy exactions it made on its adherents, had provoked great dissatisfaction among princes, merchants and peasants.

In 1517, the impulsive and headstrong Augustinian friar and Professor of Theology at Wittenberg had denounced the sale of indulgences by unprincipled agents of the Papal envoy, Tetzel, and had won enthusiastic support. The Pope sent Cardinal Cajetan to interview Luther at Augsburg (I have written about these early disputations over indulgences in more detail elsewhere on this site). When he got word that Cajetan had been empowered by the Pope to arrest him, Luther escaped the city gates by night, fleeing in such haste that he had to ride to Nürnberg in his cowl, without breeches, spurs, stirrups or a sword. He arrived back in Wittenberg on 30 October, exactly a year after he had first posted his 95 Theses to the Castle church door. Cajetan then demanded that Frederick the Wise should either send  Luther bound to Rome or else banish him from his territories. Luther made matters even more difficult for his prince by publishing his own version of his interview with the Cardinal. There was no longer any attempt to explain the papal decree against him in any favourable sense. Instead, he declared that it was emphatically false, and contrasted the ambiguous decretal of a mortal pope with the clear testimonies of Holy Scripture:

The Apostolic Legate opposed me with the thunder of his majesty and told me to recant. I told him the pope abused Scripture. I will honour the sanctity of the pope, but I will adore the sanctity of Christ and the truth. I do not deny this new monarchy of the Roman Church which has arisen in our generation, but I deny that you cannot be a Christian without being subject to the decrees of the Roman pontiff… I resist those who in the name of the Roman Church wish to institute Babylon.

His accusation that the Roman pontiff and curia were instituting Babylon introduced an apocalyptic tone into the dispute. On 28 November, Luther lodged with a notary an appeal to the pope for a general council, declaring that such a council, legitimately called in the Holy Spirit, could better represent the Catholic Church than the pope, who, being a man, was able to err, sin and lie. Not even St Peter, he pointed out, was above this infirmity.  Luther had the appeal printed, requesting that all the copies should be withheld from publication unless and until he was actually banned. The printer, however, disregarded the embargo and gave them out immediately to the public. Pope Julius II had ruled that a direct appeal to a council, without papal consent, constituted in itself an act of heresy. Luther had placed himself in an exposed situation and had also embarrassed his prince. Frederick the Wise considered himself to be a most Catholic prince. He was addicted to the cult of relics, devoted to indulgences and quite sincere in his claim that he was not in a position to judge Luther’s teaching. That was why he had founded the University of Wittenberg and why he so often turned to it for advice on matters juristic and theological. Luther was one of the doctors of that university, commissioned to instruct his prince in matters of faith.

As far as Frederick was concerned, if the pope declared Luther a heretic, that would settle the matter, but the pontiff had not yet pontificated. Neither had the theological faculty at Wittenberg repudiated their colleague. Many scholars throughout Germany believed Luther to be right. Frederick differed from many other princes in that he never asked how to extend his territories nor even how to preserve his dignities. His only question was, what is my duty as a Christian prince? He wrote to the Emperor beseeching him either to drop the case or to grant a hearing before unimpeachable judges in Germany. He also sent to Cajetan the only document ever sent to the Roman curia on Luther’s behalf:

We are sure that you acted paternally towards Luther, but we understand that he was not shown sufficient cause to revoke. There are learned men in the universities who hold that his teaching has not been shown to be unjust, unchristian, or heretical. The few who think so are jealous of his attainments. If we understand his doctrine to be impious or untenable, we would not defend it. Our whole purpose is to fulfill the office of a Christian prince. Therefore we hope that Rome will pronounce on the question. As for sending him to Rome or banishing him, that we will do only after he has been convicted of heresy. … He should be shown in what respect he is a heretic and not condemned in advance. We will not lightly allow ourselves to be drawn into error nor to be made disobedient to the Holy See. 

Prince Frederick also appended a copy of a letter from the University of Wittenberg in Luther’s defence. Luther himself wrote to his mentor and confidant, George Spalatin, to express his joy at reading the prince’s letter to the Papal Legate. Cajetan knew that, although Luther was a vexation, he was not yet a heretic, since heresy involved a rejection of the established dogma of the Church, and the doctrine of indulgences had not yet received an official papal definition. On 9 November 1518, the bull Cum Postquam definitely clarified many of the disputed points. Indulgences were declared only to apply to penalty and not to guilt, which must first have been remitted through the sacrament of penance. In the case of the penalties of purgatory, the pope could do no more than present to God the treasury of the superfluous merits of Christ and the saints by way of petition. This decretal terminated some of the worst abuses Luther had complained about in his Ninety-Five Theses.

Had it appeared earlier, the controversy might conceivably have been terminated, but in the interim Luther had attacked not only papal power but also the infallibility of the Pope. He had also questioned the biblical basis for the sacrament of penance and had rejected part of canon law as being inconsistent with Scripture. For his part, the Pope had called him ‘a son of iniquity’ and the loyal Dominicans had already declared him to be ‘a notorious heretic’. The conciliatory policy commenced in December 1518 was prompted by political considerations which now became more marked due to the death of Emperor Maximilian and the need to elect a successor as Holy Roman Emperor. The election of Charles V at the end of June 1519 made no great difference to the situation with Luther, because for over a year Charles was too occupied in Spain to concern himself with Germany, where Frederick remained the pivotal figure. The pope still could not afford to alienate him unduly over Luther and so his conciliatory policy continued.

Tetzel was made the scapegoat for the controversy over indulgences. Cajetan’s new German assistant, Milititz summoned him to a hearing and charged that he was extravagant in travelling with two horses and a carriage, and that he had two illegitimate children. Tetzel retired to a convent where he died of chagrin. Luther wrote sympathetically to him; you didn’t start this racket: The child had another father. 

Meanwhile, the University of Wittenberg was becoming known as a Lutheran institution. Prominent among the faculty were Carlstadt and Melanchthon. Carlstadt, a senior colleague to Luther, was erudite but sometimes recklessly outspoken and more radical. Melanchthon was gentler, younger (at twenty-one) a prodigy of learning, already enjoying a pan-European reputation. These two reformers ‘in their own right’ soon became the leaders of the Reformation in Wittenberg. Against them, the papacy found a worthy academic in John Eck, a professor from the University of Ingolstadt, who had already published a refutation of Luther’s theses. He had been Luther’s friend, a humanist and a German. Eck also succeeded in persuading the University of Leipzig to sponsor him against Wittenberg, which added the internal political rivalry of ducal and electoral Saxony to the mix. Duke George, the patron of Leipzig, agreed that Eck should debate with Carlstadt at Leipzig. Carlstadt had already launched a determined defence of Luther and a virulent attack on Eck, but the latter was in no mood to accept ‘second best’. He openly baited Luther by challenging his assertions that the Roman Church in the days of Constantine had not been seen as superior to the other churches and that the popes had not always been seen as in apostolic succession to Peter, and that therefore the papacy was a relatively recent human institution, not a divine one.

Above: Philip Melanchthon’s study in his home in Wittenberg

Clearly, this debate was between Eck and Luther, but the bishop of the diocese interposed a prohibition. Duke George said that all he wanted to know was whether as soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs. He reminded the bishop that…

Disputations have been allowed from ancient times, even concerning the Holy Trinity. What good is a soldier if he is not allowed to fight, a sheep dog if he may not bark, and a theologian if he may not debate? Better spend money to support old women who can knit than theologians who cannot discuss.

Luther set himself to prepare for the debate. Since he had asserted that only in the decretals of the previous four hundred years could the claims of papal primacy be established, he must devote himself to a study of the decretals. As he worked, his conclusions grew even more radical. He wrote to a friend in January that…

Eck is fomenting new wars against me. He may yet drive me to a serious attack upon the Romanists. So far I have been merely trifling.

In March, Luther confided to Spalatin:

I am studying the papal decretals for my debate. I whisper this in your ear, “I do not know whether the pope is Antichrist or his apostle, so does he in his decretals corrupt and crucify Christ, that is, the truth.”

The reference to Antichrist was ominous. Luther was to find it easier to convince people that the pope was Antichrist than that ‘the just shall live by faith’. The suspicion which Luther did not yet dare to breathe in the open linked him with the medieval millenarian sectaries who had revived and transformed the theme of Antichrist, the figure invented by the Jews and developed in early Christian eschatology in times of captivity and persecution to derive comfort from their calamities on the grounds that the Advent or Second Coming of the Messiah would be retarded by the machinations of an Anti-Messiah, whose predominant evil would reach a peak before the Saviour would come. The gloomiest picture of the present thus became the most encouraging vision for the future. The Book of Revelation had added the details that before ‘the End of Time’ two witnesses would testify and suffer martyrdom. Then the Archangel Michael would appear, together with a figure with flaming eyes upon a white horse, to cast the beast into the abyss. How the theme was dealt with in Luther’s day is graphically illustrated in a woodcut from the Nürnberg Chronicle (below):

In previous posts on this site, I have examined how the theme became very popular in the late Middle Ages among Flagellants, Wyclifites and Hussites, especially the more radical Táborites in Bohemia, who increasingly identified the popes with the Antichrist soon to be overthrown.  Luther was, therefore, aligning himself with these sectaries, with one significant difference. Whereas they had identified particular popes with Antichrist, due to their apparently evil lives as well as other contemporary events, Luther held that every pope was Antichrist even if personally exemplary in their conduct, because Antichrist was for him a collective symbol of penultimate evil, the institution of the papacy and the Roman curia, a system which corrupts the the truth of Christ and the true Church. This explains how Luther could repeatedly address Leo X in terms of personal respect only a few days after blasting him as Antichrist. Nevertheless, to one who had been, and remained, so devoted to the Holy Father as the chief vicar of Christ, the thought that he, in person, might be Christ’s great opponent was difficult to reconcile. At the same time, it was also a comforting thought, for the doom of Antichrist was ensured by Scripture. If Luther should be martyred like the two witnesses, his executioner would soon be demolished by the hand of God. It was no longer merely a fight between men, but against the principalities and powers and the ruler over this darkness on earth.

Meanwhile, between 4-14 July Luther engaged in the Leipzig debate with Eck. The Wittenbergers arrived a few days after Eck; Luther, Carlstadt and Melanchthon with other doctors and two hundred students armed with battle-axes. Eck was provided with a bodyguard of seventy-six men by the town council, to protect him from the Wittenbergers and the Bohemians who were believed to be amongst them. The concourse was so great that Duke George placed the auditorium of the Castle at their disposal. After a week of theological debate between Eck and Carlstadt, Luther answered a rhetorical question from Duke George; what does it all matter whether the pope is by divine right or by human right? He remains the pope just the same. Luther used the intervention to insist that by denying the divine origin of the papacy he was not counselling a withdrawal of obedience from the Pontiff. For Eck, however, the claim of the Pope to unquestioning obedience rested on the belief that his office was divinely instituted. Eck then attacked Luther’s teaching in its similarities with that of Wyclif and Hus, both of whom had been condemned as heretics in the early fifteenth century:

“I see” said Eck “that you are following the damned and pestiferous errors of John Wyclif, who said ‘It is not necessary for salvation to believe that the Roman Church is above all others.’ And you are espousing the pestilent errors of John Hus, who claimed that Peter neither was nor is the head of the Holy Catholic Church.”

“I repulse the charge of Bohemianism,” roared Luther. “I have never approved of their schism. Even though they had divine right on their side, they ought not to have withdrawn from the Church, because the highest divine right is unity and charity.”

Eck was driving Luther onto dangerous territory, especially at Leipzig, because Bohemia was close by and, within living memory, the Hussites had invaded and ravaged the Saxon lands thereabouts. Luther used an interlude in proceedings to go to the university library and read the acts of the Council of Constance, at which Hus had been condemned to be burnt. To his amazement, he found among the reproved articles the following statements of Hus:

The one holy universal Church is the company of the predestined… The universal Holy Church is one, as the number of the elect is one. 

He recognised the theology of these statements as deriving directly from St Augustine. When the assembly reconvened, Luther declared:

 Among the articles of John Hus, I find many which are plainly Christian and evangelical, which the universal church cannot condemn… As for the article of Hus that ‘it is not necessary for salvation to believe the Roman Church is superior to all others’, I do not care whether this comes from Wyclif or Hus. I know that innumerable Greeks have been saved though they never heard this article. It is not in the power of the Roman pontiff or of the Inquisition to construct new articles of faith. No believing Christian can be coerced beyond holy writ. By divine law we are forbidden to believe anything which is not established by divine Scripture or manifest revelation. One of the canon lawyers has said that the opinion of a single private man has more weight than that of a Roman pontiff or an ecclesiastical council if grounded on a better authority or reason. I cannot believe that the Council of Constance would condemn these propositions of Hus… The Council did not say that all the articles of Hus were heretical. It said that ‘some were heretical, some erroneous, some blasphemous, some presumptuous, some sedtious and some offensive to pious respectively… 

Luther went on, now in German, to reiterate that a council cannot make divine right out of that which by nature is not divine right and make new articles of faith, and that a simple layman armed with Scripture is… above a pope or a council without it. Articles of faith must come from Scripture, for the sake of which we should reject pope and councils. Eck retorted, in a manner which conjured up memories of the Hussite hordes ravaging Saxon lands, that this is the Bohemian virus, in that the Reverend Father, against the holy Council of the Constance and the consensus of all Christians does not fear to call certain articles of Wyclif and Hus most Christian and evangelical. 

After the Leipzig debate, Eck came upon a new fagot for Luther’s pyre. “At any rate,” he crowed, “no one is hailing me as the Saxon Hus.” Two letters to Luther had been intercepted, from Hussites of Prague, in which they said, “What Hus was once in Bohemia you, Martin, are in Saxony. Stand firm.” When they did eventually reach Luther, they were accompanied by a copy of Hus’s work On the Church. “I agree now with more articles of Hus than I did at Leipzig,” Luther commented. In February of the following year, he had come to the conclusion that “we are all Hussites without knowing it.” For Eck and the Roman Pontiff and curia, however, ‘Hussite’ remained a byword for ‘heretic’, and Luther was indeed known amongst them as ‘the Saxon Hus’. Luther was still in mortal danger, and no doubt remembered how his predecessor had been given an imperial pass to Constance and never returned.

By February 1520, Luther had also become a national figure in Germany, as a result of the Leipzig debate. His endorsement of Hus was not likely to have brought him acclaim among Germans more widely, except that it cast him in the role of an insurgent heretic who had held his argument against one of the most renowned theologians of his time. But it may well have been the dissemination of his writings which proved more influential in making him not only a national but also an international figure. In addition to reaching Spain and England, the Swiss reformer Zwingli had also been distributing his printed sermons around Zurich and the Swiss cantons. Such acclaim rapidly made Luther the head of a movement which has come to be known as the Reformation. As it took on shape, it was bound to come into contact with those two great philosophical movements of his day, the Renaissance and nationalism.

The Renaissance was a many-sided phenomenon in which a central place was occupied by the ideal commonly labelled ‘Humanism’. Although a synthesis between the classical and the Christian had already been achieved by St Augustine, a menace to Christianity was still implicit in the movement because it was centred on mankind, because the search for truth in any quarter might lead to ‘relativism’ and because the philosophies of antiquity had no place for the distinctive tenets of Christianity: the Incarnation and the Cross. Yet, at several points, Humanism and the Reformation could form an alliance. Both demanded the right of free investigation. The Humanists included the Bible and the biblical languages in the curriculum of reviving antiquity, and Luther’s battle for the right understanding of Paul’s teaching on the Hebrews appeared to them, as to Luther himself, as a continuation of the campaign of the great German Hebraist, Reuchlin, over the freedom of scholarship (see the cartoon below).

The deepest affinity appeared at that point where the Renaissance man was not so sure of himself, when he began to wonder whether his valour might not be thwarted by the goddess Fortuna or whether his destiny had not already been determined by the stars. Here was Luther’s problem of God the capricious and God the adverse. Renaissance man, confronted by this enigma and having no deep religion of his own, was commonly disposed to find solace less in Luther’s stupefying irrationalities than in the venerable authority of the Church. Erasmus was closer to Luther than any other figure of the Renaissance because he was so Christian. His ideal, like that of Luther, was to revive the Christian consciousness of Europe through the dissemination of the sacred writings, and to that end, it was Erasmus who first made available the New Testament in its Greek original. The volume reached Wittenberg just as Luther was working on the ninth chapter of Romans, and thereafter it became his working tool. It was from this tool that he learned of the inaccuracy of the Vulgate rendering of ‘do penance’ rather than ‘be penitent’. Luther and Erasmus had much in common. Both insisted that the Church of their day had relapsed into the Judaistic legalism castigated by St Paul. Christianity, said Erasmus, has been made to consist not in loving one’s neighbour, but in abstaining from butter and cheese during Lent.

 

Nevertheless, Erasmus was wary of giving his unreserved support to Luther. He was nostalgic for the old unities of Europe, the multi-cultural states and empires. His dream was that Christian Humanism might serve as a check upon the growth of nationalism. The threat of war and division implicit in the Reformation frightened him, and he had good cause for this, as German nationalism was the second great movement to attach itself to the Reformation, just as Bohemian nationalism had previously attached itself to the cause of the Hussites. Germany was retarded in the process of national unification as compared with Spain, France, England and even Bohemia. Germany had no centralised government and no obvious capital city. The Holy Roman Empire no more than approximated a German national state because it was at once too large, since any European prince was eligible for the highest office, and too small, because of the dominance of the Habsburg dynasty and, by 1519, their huge European and overseas empire.

Germany was segmented into small and overlapping jurisdictions of princes and bishops. The free cities became entangled in shifting alliances with the territories as well as, for trading purposes, with the Hanseatic League. The knights were a restive class seeking to arrest the waning of their power, and the peasants were likewise restive because they wanted to have a political role commensurate with their economic importance. No government and no class was able to weld Germany into one. Dismembered and retarded, she was derided by the Italians and treated by the papacy as a private cow. Resentment against Rome was more intense than in countries where national governments curbed papal exploitation. The representatives of German nationalism who for several years in some measure affected Luther’s career were Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen. Hutten was himself both a knight and a Humanist. He illustrates the diversity of Humanism, which could at once be internationalist in Erasmus, and nationalist in him.

Hutten did much to create the concept of German nationalism and to construct the picture of the ideal German, who should repel the enemies of the fatherland and erect a culture able to vie with the Italian culture. In the opening stages of Luther’s skirmishes with Eck at Leipzig, Hutten looked on the controversy as a squabble between monks, but he soon realised that Luther’s words had a ring of his own about them. Luther, too, resented the fleecing of Germany, Italian chicanery and duplicity. Luther wished that St Peter’s might lie in ashes rather than that Germany should be despoiled. Hutten’s picture of the Romantic German could be enriched by Luther’s concept of a mystical depth in the German soul exceeding that of other peoples.

In August 1520 Luther intimated that, due to the promises of support he had received from Hutten and Sickingen, including an offer to ride to his aid with a hundred knights, he would attack the papacy as Antichrist. He also wanted the curia to know that, if by their fulminations he was exiled from Saxony, he would not go to Bohemia, but would find asylum in Germany itself, where he might be more obnoxious than he would be under the surveillance of the prince and fully occupied with his teaching duties. While the assurance of protection from the German knights undoubtedly emboldened him, the source of his courage was not to be found in a sense of immunity. As Roland Bainton has pointed out, the most intrepid revolutionary is the one who has a fear greater than anything his opponents can inflict upon him. Luther, who had trembled before the face of God, had no fear before the face of man. It was at this point, in August 1520, that Luther penned his tract, The Address to the German Nobility, one of several that he wrote during the summer months of that year.

Franz von Sickengen’s castle, where Hutten also established himself during

the ‘warless winter’ of 1519-20.

The poet laureate read to the illiterate knights from Luther’s German works.

(to be continued…)