Happy birthday to Lajos Kossuth. Kossuth followed the ideas of the French nation state ideology, which was a ruling liberal idea of his era. Accordingly he considered and regarded everybody as Hungarian -regardless of their mother tongue and ethnic ancestry - who lived in the territory of Hungary. He even quoted King Stephen I of Hungarys admonition: A nation of one language and the same customs is weak and fragile Kossuths ideas stand on the enlightened Western European type liberal nationalism (based on the jus soli principle) (which is the complete opposition of the ethnic nationalism, which based on jus sanguinis, archaically: race-based principle.) (Nonetheless, Kossuth pleaded in the newspaper Pesti Hírlap for rapid Magyarization: Let us hurry, let us hurry to Magyarize the Croats, the Romanians, and the Saxons, for otherwise we shall perish. In 1842 he argued that Hungarian had to be the exclusive language in public life. He also stated that in one country it is impossible to speak in a hundred different languages. There must be one language and in Hungary this must by Hungarian.) When Kossuth entered the Hungarian Diet, his political rivals felt that his personal ambition and egoism led him to assume the chief place, and to use his parliamentary position to establish himself as leader of the nation; but before his eloquence and energy all apprehensions were useless. His eloquence was of that nature, in its impassioned appeals to the strongest emotions, that it required for its full effect the highest themes and the most dramatic situations. In a time of rest, though he could never have been obscure, he would never have attained the highest power. It was therefore a necessity of his nature, perhaps unconsciously, always to drive things to a crisis. He simarlarly aggrandized attention and power during the Revolution of 48. After the Franzjosephine Terror began, in April 1849, when the Hungarians had won many successes, and after sounding the army, he issued the celebrated Hungarian Declaration of Independence, in which he declared that the house of Habsburg-Lorraine, perjured in the sight of God and man, had forfeited the Hungarian throne. It was a step characteristic of his love for extreme and dramatic action, but it added to the dissensions between him and those who wished only for autonomy under the old dynasty, and his enemies did not scruple to accuse him of aiming for Kingship. The dethronement also made any compromise with the Habsburgs practically impossible. For the time the future form of government was left undecided, and Kossuth was appointed regent-president (to satisfy both royalists and republicans) Later, as has been truly said, the revolutionary power he had seized could only be held by revolutionary means; but he was by nature soft-hearted and always merciful; though often audacious, he lacked decision in dealing with men. It has been said that he showed a want of personal courage; this is not improbable, the excess of feeling which made him so great an orator could hardly be combined with the coolness in danger required of a soldier; but no one was able, as he was, to infuse courage into others. In power, despite having appealed exclusively to the Hungarian nobility in his speeches, and in spite of his advocacy of Magyarization, Kossuth played an important part in the shaping of the law of minority rights in 1849. It was the first law which recognized minority rights in Europe. It gave minorities the freedom to use their mothertongue at local administration, at tribunals, in schools, in community life and even within the national guard of non-Magyar councils. However he did not support any kind of regional administration within Hungary based on the nationality principle. Kossuth accepted some national demands of the Romanians and the Croats, but he showed no understanding for the requests of the Slovaks. The outcome of the war was determined by the Russians, who so angered Kussoth that his speeches in Britain are credited with contributing to the Crimean War and subsequentRussophobia, and he even tried to form a Magyar Legion to support Britain and France in the Crimean War Had the Russians not lived up to the pledge of the Holy Alliance, but instead, supported an indepentent Hungary (under King Maximilian, with Kossuth as regent, therefore butterflies with Napoleon, and stability for Mexico and Bonnie III declares for the CSA). I do not see the Austrian Empire surviving long, except as the United Kingdom of Austria and Bohemia, and even then it would have lost Italy, while neither Austria or Hungary could have been as proactive in the Balkans, giving the Tsars a playing field, until a Tsarvitch was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosniak Muslim. To return to the real world, this is a good note to end on. In 1890, a delegation of Hungarian pilgrims in Turin recorded a short patriotic speech delivered by the elderly Lajos Kossuth. The original recording on two wax cylinders for the Edison phonograph survives to this day, although barely audible due to excess playback and unsuccessful early restoration attempts. Recording Kossuths voice was one of the earliest applications of phonograph, and his few sentences are the earliest known recorded Hungarian speech. youtube/watch?v=LYi8DsiKgOE
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 22:16:44 +0000
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