Lajos Kossuth: Hungarian republican nationalist
Kossuth was a deputy in the Hungarian diet (Parliament), and a journalist who was imprisoned for criticising the Austro-Hungarian government. In 1847, he wrote the programme for the Hungarian opposition party and was elected to the new diet representing Pest (now part of Budapest). In March 1848, with the establishment of the first semi-autonomous Hungarian government, Kossuth, as one of the opposition’s leaders, became Minister of Finance. Lajos Batthyany was the prime minister, the government being accountable to the diet, rather than to the King Emperor Ferdinand. In December 1848, the diet decided to no longer recognise the King Emperor and Kossuth in effect became regent-president of an autonomous Hungary. In April 1849, Kossuth issued a declaration of Hungarian independence. After a series of battles between the Hungarian army and the Austrian army, the Russian emperor Tsar Nicholas intervened in favour of the Habsburgs and Kossuth’s appeal for British and French intervention was rejected by both Lord Palmerston and Louis Napoleon. Kossuth was forced to abdicate, and his successor, the army general Gorgey, surrendered to the Russians.
Kossuth escaped to the Ottoman Empire and then took a boat to Marseille in an attempt to reach England, where he hoped to get asylum. Louis Napoleon refused him transit through France. Kossuth travelled into exile in the United States, but en route, he spent three weeks in England, where he was feted by English radicals and Liberal intellectuals. However, in the United States, he had disputes with some of the leading Liberals when he refused to endorse the anti-slavery campaign, and travelled back to Europe, arriving back in England in July 1852, staying in the country for eight years.
Kossuth became active in the circle of nationalist republican exiles, collaborating with the other “great men of exile”, Giuseppe Mazzini, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and the exiled Pole Vladislav Worcell. He joined the Central Revolutionary Committee and was a signatory to the Republican Manifesto of 1855. He tried to organise a Hungarian legion to fight in the Crimean War, but in 1859 organised a legion of exiles in Italy, but this failed to invade Dalmatia as planned, with some joining Garibaldi instead. Kossuth, however, while remaining in exile, was seen as the spiritual leader of the opposition party in Hungary, which had a significant role in Hungarian politics after the elections of 1869, in which Kossuth had been elected to the diet, though he failed to return to Hungary to take his seat. His persistence in using the title of “Regent”, however, led to other Hungarian exiles such as Batthyany attacking him for his arrogance. He died in Turin in 1894. In 1880, his memoirs were published in English in London.Kossuth was never a socialist. He denied being a “red Republican”, and he tended to identify mostly with middle-class reformers. Of noble birth, he was primarily a Hungarian nationalist. His appeal to English radicals was based on his opposition to both the Austro-Hungarian and the Russian empires, which was also welcomed by Marx, another exile in London, who was well known as a Russophobe. His memoir presents extensive speeches given in England, though none of them touches in any detail on what could be called social or socialist issues – they were all focused on his being a leader of an oppressed nationality and appealing for support. In 1856, in Edinburgh, he made a rather general appeal for “further political recognition of the democratic element and those measures required for the social amelioration.” There was a strong international solidarity tradition within the late Chartist groupings led by Gerald Massey, Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney, and trade unionists joined in massive demonstrations welcoming Kossuth in cities such as London, Birmingham and Bradford in 1851. The fact that not only was Kossuth a noble, but that in his brief rule in Hungary, he was more of an autocrat rather than a democrat, was somehow discounted. As commented in Toth’s recent study of Hungarian and German exiles, he was a key figure in the Transatlantic lecture circuit of professional revolutionaries who had become professional emigres.
The following is an extract from the Central Republican Manifesto of 1855:
“It belongs not to a few individuals, nor even to the entire acting party, to decide on the practical measures by which the revolution shall remedy the evils under which the masses are suffering, the striking inequalities of the actual social system, that will be the work of the revolution itself, of which we can only be the initiators…. For life engenders life; liberty begets intelligence, and to the man who clasps the hands of his brethren in a burst of devotion, enthusiasm and triumphant love, is given a revelation of truth denied to the isolated slave who dares not break his chain.”
Further Reading
Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre; Kossuth, Lajos and Mazzini, Giuseppe Manifesto of the Republican Party (London 1855 )
Kossuth, Louis Memoirs of Exile (London: Cassell 1880)
Kossuth and the Hungarian War (New Haven, H Mansfield 1852)
Headley, F C Life of Louis Kossuth (Auburn, Texas: Derby and Miller 1852)
Deak, Istvan The Lawful Revolution: Louis Kossuth and the Hungarians 1848-9 (New York: Columbia University Press 1979)
Finn, Margot After Chartism : Class and Nation in English Radical Politics 1848-1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004)
Toth, Helena An Exiled Generation: German and Hungarian Refugees of Revolution 1848-1871 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014)
Claeys, Greg Mazzini, Kossuth and British Radicalism 1848-54 in Journal of British Studies July 1989.