Francois Fejtõ
A Great 19th-Century Social-Liberal Thinker
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Of all the 19th-century Hungarian liberal thinkers Baron József Eötvös, novel- ist, essayist and statesman, was the most interesting and original, and the deepest. His work also best illustrates the importance of French culture as the dominant influence in Hungarian politics and intellectual life between 1830 and 1867. In 1838, at the age of 27, Eötvös spent a year in France. In his youth, even before that date, he had been enthusiastic about the romanticism of Victor Hugo, devoting two of his early essays (1835 and 1837) to the author of Hernani and La Légende des Siécles; he had been passionate about the ideas of Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, the followers of Saint-Simon and the utopian socialists but in his maturity it was Guizot and later, and primarily, Tocqueville who stimulated his thinking.
Eötvös had been one of the leaders of the moderate reformers amongst the aristocrats, a moving spirit in the great fight for reform in the eighteen forties; in September 1848, however, when the peaceful reform he had hoped for changed into a clash between the dynasty and the Hungarian nation, and also a civil war, Eötvös retired from politics and took refuge in Munich. After 1859, in exile in Germany, he wrote his major work, The Influence of the Dominant Ideas of the 19th Century on the Evolution of Societies and States, which appeared in German before it was published in Hungary. Although this work already bears the mark of Tocqueville's ideas, whose books Eötvös had carefully studied, and of Montalembert, whom he was to meet in 1853, in his reflections on democracy Eötvös went further than the author of L'Ancient régime et la Révolution. Eötvös thought of étatisme, of the bureaucratization of society, as an even greater danger to a liberal society than egalitarianism as such. It required considerable clairvoyance to predict in 1854 - when his monumental work in two volumes appeared - that, if the Western countries did not change course, the road to levelling by the will of the state would confront them with the pathetic alternative of authoritarian regimes charged with assuring the safeguarding of private property and a communism which, through its radicalizing the democratic spirit, would lead to the total bureaucratization of society.
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[...] Eötvös asked why revolutions inspired by the glorious ideas of the century of the Enlightenment had to go bankrupt. Why did 1789 lead on to the Jacobins and Bonaparte? According to him, this was not due to errors inherent in the ideas themselves but to their mistaken application. He identified two factors as the source of this failure. First of all the replacement by the Jacobins and their successors of the ideology of liberty by the "false and dangerous" notion of the sovereignty of the people which implied the absolutization and deification of the inarticulate placed above that supreme value which is the liberty of the individual. This substitution of the people for individual liberty inevitably ended up, according to Eötvös, in the progressive strengthening of an étatisme which the revolution had inherited from the monarchy, an étatisme at the opposite pole to that desire for freedom which had imbued the best spirits of 1789. The English model was much more reasonable. That was concerned primarily with preventing absolute power on the part of the state, taking the precaution of limiting it and of creating countervailing powers.
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[...] Eötvös participated in the 1848 events without, however, wishing to take Hungary out of the Habsburg Empire. He opposed the national principle since the latter, according to him, could not be truly asserted except by destroying historic rights and the framework of established states. In his view, the unification of Germany could well imply aggression threatening the frontiers of Denmark, Austria, France, and even Russia. In the name of the self-determination of nations the French could claim Belgium, and Spain could claim part of French territory. Switzerland would be partitioned. "To speak of the equal rights of nations," Eötvös wrote, "was as absurd as taking the egalitarianism of individuals to excess."
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[...] He also understood that the national principle applied where nations were inextricably intermingled could only lead to regression in Europe, to "trouble, terror, the greed of conquest, and megalomania," as he was to write à propos the Balkanization of Central and Eastern Europe as the inevitable consequence of the destruction of the last multinational empires.
Eötvös's critique of nationalist ideologies has lost none of its validity; the tragedy of former Yugoslavia offers striking confirmation. But history has denied his conviction that the Austro-Hungarian Empire could be reformed. Federalization alone could have prevented a falling apart. If it is true that all nationalism contains, at least in the bud, an unacknowledged imperialism and a tendency towards homogenization, it is equally true that this can only be transcended - in the absence of an authoritarian force of integration - by the satisfaction of a legitimate desire for autonomy on the part of the peoples who live in the Central European area. Integration and the transcendence of nationalism will not be possible - as has become more obvious since 1989 - except after a period of the effective acquisition of national autonomies and the democratic regulation of the problem of national minorities.
Baron Eötvös was born in Buda in 1813, the scion of an ancient aristocratic family loyal to the House of Habsburg, and completed his education in Pest and Vienna with the customary Grand Tour. Becoming involved in the patriotic movement of the thirties and forties, he took the side of those who prescribed an Anglo-French rather than a Prussian course for the future development of Hungary. His early novels, The Carthusian (1839), The Village Notary (1845), and Hungary 1514 (1848) were protests against the exploitation of the serfs and the abuses of feudalism. In 1867 he was appointed Minister of Education in the first representative government elected after the Compromise with Austria of which he, Deák, and Andrássy had been the architects. He piloted legislation on the emancipation of the Jews and an extremely liberal National Minorities Act, which his successors did not implement. Eötvös died in 1871.
Francois Fejtõ
is a noted French journalist and historian of Hungarian birth, a specialist in East-West relations and one-time editor of Preuves. His works include Histoire des democraties populaires (Seuil). The above was a contribution to a Round Table arranged by the Hungarian Cultural Institute in Paris, first published in French in France-Forum.
