Lajos Kossuth

Lajos Kossuth was the leading figure of the Hungarian revolution of 1848 and the war of independence that followed. A lawyer and journalist from the minor nobility, he became Hungary's finance minister in the first responsible government of 1848, then head of its national defence and, in 1849, governor-president of an independent Hungary. After the revolution was crushed by Austrian and Russian armies he spent the remaining forty-five years of his life in exile, celebrated in Britain and the United States as a hero of European liberty, and he remains the most honoured national figure of modern Hungary.

Kossuth was born on 19 September 1802 in Monok, in Zemplén county in north-eastern Hungary, the eldest child of a Lutheran family of the untitled lesser nobility with roots in what is now Slovakia. He studied at the University of Pest and practised law in his home county from the 1820s.

Hungary was then a kingdom within the Habsburg Monarchy, governed under its own constitution but ruled from Vienna, with a diet dominated by the nobility, who paid no taxes, and a peasantry still bound by feudal dues. In the 1820s and 1830s a reform movement led by Count István Széchenyi called for economic modernisation and the use of Hungarian in public life. In 1832 Kossuth went to the diet at Pressburg, today Bratislava, as proxy for an absent magnate, and began writing reports of its debates which, because the press was censored, circulated in handwritten copies. When the diet closed in 1836 he continued with reports from the county assemblies. In 1837 he was arrested, and in 1839 he was sentenced to four years in prison for sedition. He was released under an amnesty in 1840 and married Terézia Meszlényi.

From 1841 Kossuth edited the Pest newspaper Pesti Hírlap, which under him became the most influential paper in Hungary. His editorials called for the abolition of serfdom with compensation for landlords, taxation of the nobility, equality before the law and protective tariffs for Hungarian industry. Széchenyi warned that his methods would drive the nation to revolution, and the two became rivals. Kossuth's liberalism was joined to a demanding nationalism: he pressed for Hungarian to be the sole language of public life and urged the assimilation of the kingdom's Croats, Romanians, Slovaks, Serbs and Germans, who together made up about half its population. That stance helped turn many of them against the Hungarian cause in 1848.

Dismissed from the paper in 1844, Kossuth refused an offer of government employment conveyed by Chancellor Klemens von Metternich. In 1847 he was elected to the diet for Pest county and became the leader of the opposition.

News of the February revolution in Paris reached Pressburg in early March 1848. On 3 March Kossuth gave a speech demanding a responsible government for Hungary and constitutional rule for the rest of the empire; read aloud in Vienna, it helped spark the rising that forced Metternich to flee. Within weeks the court accepted the April Laws, which created a Hungarian ministry responsible to an elected parliament, abolished serfdom and noble tax exemption, and ended censorship. Kossuth became minister of finance in Count Lajos Batthyány's government and soon issued Hungarian banknotes.

The settlement did not hold. The Croatian ban Josip Jelačić, backed by the court and by Croat and Serb opposition to Hungarian rule, invaded in September. Batthyány resigned, and Kossuth became president of the National Defence Committee, in effect the head of government. He toured the Great Plain raising volunteers for a new army, the Honvéd. When Emperor Ferdinand abdicated in December in favour of his nephew Franz Joseph I, the Hungarian parliament refused to recognise a king who had not been crowned with the Holy Crown of Saint Stephen. As the Austrian army under Windisch-Grätz advanced, the government withdrew to Debrecen, taking the crown with it.

In the spring of 1849 Hungarian armies under Artúr Görgei won a series of victories and drove the Austrians out of most of the country. On 14 April, in Debrecen, the parliament adopted a Declaration of Independence drafted under Kossuth's influence, deposing the Habsburg dynasty, and elected him governor-president. The step was controversial among his own generals, and it gave Franz Joseph his reason to ask for help from Tsar Nicholas I. In June some 200,000 troops of the Russian Empire invaded alongside a reinforced Austrian army. Kossuth, who had no military training, quarrelled with Görgei over strategy, and in July the government fled again as the armies closed in. Kossuth passed his powers to Görgei on 11 August, and two days later Görgei surrendered to the Russians at Világos. The Austrian reprisals that followed included the execution of Batthyány and of thirteen Hungarian generals at Arad on 6 October 1849.

In 1849 the parliament had also passed a law on nationalities that granted the use of minority languages in local administration, schools and courts, an early law of its kind in Europe, but it came too late to change the course of the war.

Kossuth escaped into the Ottoman Empire, which refused Austrian and Russian demands for his surrender and interned him, latterly at Kütahya in Anatolia. Released in 1851, he sailed on an American warship and landed at Southampton in October. In London and the industrial cities of England huge crowds turned out to hear him speak in a vivid, old-fashioned English. In December 1851 he arrived in New York as a guest of the nation, was received by President Millard Fillmore and addressed a joint meeting of Congress, the second foreigner after Lafayette to do so. "Kossuth mania" swept the country, and in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln helped organise a meeting in his support. Yet he obtained no government help for Hungary, and abolitionists criticised his refusal to speak about American slavery.

He lived in London through the 1850s, working with exiles such as Giuseppe Mazzini. In 1859 he moved to Italy, where he negotiated with Napoleon III and hoped that the wars of Italian unification and the campaigns of Giuseppe Garibaldi would open a new front against Austria; each time the great powers made peace without Hungary.

In 1867 Ferenc Deák and the moderate Hungarian leaders reached the Compromise with Franz Joseph that created Austria-Hungary, with Hungary self-governing in internal affairs under the Habsburg crown. Kossuth denounced it in an open letter as the death of the nation and refused the amnesty, which he would have had to accept on terms of loyalty to the king. He settled near Turin, writing his memoirs, studying botany and receiving Hungarian visitors. The Independence Party, which demanded a fully separate Hungary, regarded him as its spiritual leader.

Kossuth died in Turin on 20 March 1894, aged 91. His body was brought to Budapest, where a vast crowd attended his funeral, and he was buried in the Kerepesi Cemetery.

In Hungary, Kossuth became the symbol of national independence; the square in front of the Parliament bears his name, and almost every town has a Kossuth street. Historians weigh this reputation against his record: his oratory and energy made the defence of 1848 possible, but his hostility to the claims of the non-Hungarian nationalities and his readiness to break with the dynasty also contributed to the revolution's isolation and defeat. His liberal and anti-Habsburg ideal shaped the opposition politics of the dual monarchy and the later national memory of Hungary. His admirers abroad included Scots building the National Wallace Monument, who received a letter of support from him; it is now displayed at the monument to William Wallace near Stirling.