National Romanticism: The Formation of National Movements

István Széchenyi: Hunnia

ISTVÁN SZÉCHENYI: HUNNIA Title: Hunnia Originally published: Originally written in 1835, first published by János Török and printed in Pest by Gusztáv Heckenast in 1858 Language: Hungarian The excerpts used are from the reprint: István Széchenyi, Hunnia (Budapest: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1985), pp. 5–11. About the author István Széchenyi [1791, Vienna – 1860, Döbling (Austria)]: politician and political writer. He was the scion of one of the most prestigious Catholic aristocratic families of the country. His father, Ferenc Széchényi, was famous for his cultural interests and founded the national library. As a young soldier István Széchenyi fought against Napoleon and led a bohemian life in the high society of Vienna. Later, he underwent a profound spiritual transformation and, influenced by his travels to England, he started to champion the modernization of the economy, society, and intellectual life of Hungary, initiating the foundation of the Academy of Sciences and the National Casino, proposing the regulation of rivers, building stone bridges, and introducing horse races. His political and economic essays stimulated the development of liberal political thinking in Hungary. In the 1840s he assumed a more conciliatory position towards Vienna, concentrating on socio-economic gains rather than on symbolic and constitutional issues. He also opposed Kossuth’s assimilatory nationalism and became increasingly critical of the opposition movement, which was mostly based on the political culture of the country gentry. He accepted the Ministry of Transportation in the revolutionary government of Hungary (1848), but he resigned when the break with Austria seemed inevitable. Széchenyi suffered a mental breakdown in 1848 and spent the subsequent years in a sanatorium. In the 1850s he started to publish again, and grew increasingly critical of the Austrian ‘neo-absolutist’ regime. He committed suicide after a clash with the authorities following the publication of one of his pamphlets . Subsequently, he became ‘canonized’ as the ‘Greatest Hungarian’—the symbol of Hungarian national awakening. Main works: Hitel [Credit] (1830); Világ [Light] (1831); Stádium [Stadium] (1833); Kelet népe [People of the East] (1841); Politikai programtöredékek [Fragments of a political program] (1847); Blick auf den anonymen Rückblick [A look at an anonymous backward look] (1859). ISTVÁN SZÉCHENYI: HUNNIA 225 Context Széchenyi’s political philosophy is based on the notion of the accumulative progress of civility characteristic of the British (and preeminently the Scottish) Enlightenment. He sees the road to national recovery as a process of ‘polishing’ the manners of the community. Civilization “conquers in due time even the most tyrannical power”; therefore, the task should be to create a specifically Hungarian form of civilization, otherwise social progress might affect “a deadly blow on our originality and peculiarity.” In the 1830s and 1840s he formulated a program of enhancing communication through means both formal (such as credit institutions, and the development of infrastructure ) and informal (casinos, horse races). Apart from the transformations in the socio-economic sphere, however, the notion of enhancing civility by the intensification of communication had another crucial aspect that represented a serious theoretical and also practical problem for the emerging liberal reformists . Obviously, this was the issue of the multi-ethnic composition of the territories of ‘historical Hungary,’ with over fifty percent of its inhabitants having a mother tongue other than Hungarian. While his early writings (for example, ‘Credit’) dealt mainly with socioeconomic issues, in Hunnia Széchenyi turned to the problem of nationbuilding , the national language, and the overall question of the nationalities. While the text was published only later and thus did not have an immediate impact, it is arguably Széchenyi’s most compact argument concerning these issues. In this text he sought to make his audience conscious of the ‘national aspect’ of the country’s backwardness. He asserted that the most immediate danger is the “fatal division” of the national community. But, according to him, the root of this division was not so much ethnic but rather sociocultural , with the cosmopolitan aristocracy set against the uncultivated masses (characteristically, Széchenyi included the country-gentry in the second category). Hungarian public culture thus contained inorganic fragments of Western European culture removed from their context and mixed up with the self-complacent backwardness of the local tradition. In his understanding, the closing of this gap and the development of a unified Hungarian national public is conditioned by the success of modernization . At the same time, the continuity of...