The substitution of Magyar for Latin and German raised a new and painful issue. The population of Hungary, even excluding Croatia, had never been purely Magyar, but the pre-Magyar inhabitants of the plains and the newcomers to them (outside the towns) had quickly become Magyarized; and, while this was not true of the peripheral areas, their populations were relatively sparse. By the end of the 15th century, the Slovaks and Ruthenes of the north, the Germans of the free boroughs, Szepes (Zips), and Transylvania, and the Vlachs, or Romanians, of the country’s eastern region numbered hardly more than 20 to 25 percent of the total. The Magyar majority included almost the entire politically active noble class, the non-Magyar recruits to which assimilated most readily. The surviving non-Magyar peasants had neither the wish nor the ability to question the Magyar character of the state, which for its part was uninterested in what languages were spoken by the politically disregarded, unfree populace.

Between 1500 and 1800, however, the ethnic composition of the country changed. The most purely Magyar areas were heavily depopulated during the Turkish wars. These losses were accompanied by mass immigrations of Serbs, Croats, and Romanians from the Balkans and later by the introduction by the Austrian government of large numbers of German and other Western colonists. By 1720 the Magyars numbered only some 35 percent of the total population. By 1780 the figure had risen to nearly 40 percent, but the periphery, although it contained islands of Magyar population, was still largely non-Magyar. Moreover, as a result of this ethnic colonization, the population of Hungary grew to nearly 10 million by the end of the 18th century, almost trebling the country’s population of some 3.5 million in 1720.

In this environment the ideas of the French Revolution and of nationalism, one of its major consequences, took hold. Hungarians and most of the other ethnic groups discovered their own national identities. From the late 18th century, poetry, drama, fiction, and literary criticism combined to elevate the Hungarian vernacular to the standard of a literary language, partly in response to the forced Germanization by the Habsburgs but even more as part of an international trend that was particularly strong in central Europe. Institutions such as the National Library, the National Theatre, and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—all organized during this period—were also part of the linguistic-cultural movement that soon took the form of self-conscious chauvinism and then became an organized political movement.

Revolution, reaction, and “compromise”

The Hungarian reformers’ opportunity came in the spring of 1848. Inspired by the Revolution of 1848 in Paris, a popular upheaval caused the breakdown of central authority in Vienna. On March 15—a date celebrated in Hungary ever since—a bloodless revolution led by young intellectuals, including the poet Sándor Petőfi, abolished censorship in Pest (later part of Budapest) and formulated a series of demands. Seizing the moment, Kossuth prodded the Diet to rush through a body of laws. The March Laws (also known as the April Laws) enacted important internal reforms, such as the generalizing of taxes, the abolition of villein status and the transfer of villein holdings to their cultivators, and the reorganization of the lower table of Parliament on a representative basis. They also provided for the restoration of the territorial integrity of the lands of the Hungarian crown (subject, in the case of Transylvania, to the agreement of its Diet) and the appointment of a “responsible independent Hungarian Ministry,” which was headed by a progressive magnate, Lajos, Count Batthyány, and included Kossuth, Széchenyi, Deák, and Eötvös. But the new government had enemies: the conservatives resented the land reform, and the centralists (i.e., those who advocated a Vienna-dominated empire) regarded the independent ministry as dangerous to the integrity of the monarchy. They found allies among the disaffected nationalities, notably the Serbs and Romanians, and in the Croats, whose ban, Josip Jelačić, refused to recognize the authority of Buda and Pest.

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Tension between Vienna and Buda-Pest mounted steadily, and in September, when the rest of the monarchy had been reduced, Jelačić, on Vienna’s orders, invaded Hungary. Batthyány and other ministers resigned, leaving Kossuth in charge. An improvised national army drove Jelačić out of the country, but in December Ferdinand (whose coronation oath bound him to observe the March Laws) was made to abdicate in favour of his young nephew, Franz Joseph. The invasion was now renewed. A panmonarchic constitution abolished the March Laws, in reply to which a rump Diet, inspired by Kossuth, proclaimed the full independence of Hungary and the deposition of the Habsburg dynasty (April 14, 1849). The Hungarian forces, led by a young soldier of genius, Artúr Görgey, held their own until the Austrian court appealed for help to the Russian tsar, who sent an army across the Carpathians. Bitter fighting went on for some weeks more, led by György Klapka and other generals, but the odds were too heavy. On August 12, Kossuth fled the country, transferring his authority to Görgey, who the next day surrendered at Világos to the Russian commander.

Savage reprisals followed, and the country was again subjected to an absolutist and extortionate rule exercised from Vienna through a foreign bureaucracy. This “Bach regime” (named for Alexander Bach, Austrian minister of the interior) was maintained, unrelaxed in principle although with some alterations in practice, until Austria’s defeat in Italy in 1859 forced Franz Joseph to begin his retreat from absolutism. The followers of the exiled Kossuth were irreconcilable, but many inside Hungary rallied behind Deák. He held that the March Laws were legally valid and that Hungary’s right to complete internal independence was inalienable but that under the Pragmatic Sanction, which he accepted, foreign affairs and defense were subjects common to the two halves of the monarchy and that a mechanism could be devised for handling these affairs constitutionally. A Diet convoked in 1861 was dissolved after a few weeks because the gap between the Hungarians’ views and those of Franz Joseph and his centralist ministry in Vienna was still too wide to be bridged. Absolutism was reimposed, but the pressure of international and internal economic difficulties gradually drove Franz Joseph to further concessions. In July 1865 he dismissed his centralist ministry; in December a new Diet was convoked and the negotiations reopened. Interrupted by the outbreak of the Seven Weeks’ War, they were resumed after Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866 had further convinced both parties of the necessity of agreement.