Gróf Batthyány Lajos emlékezete
Remembering Count Lajos Batthyány

Summary/Abstract: Those who fell victim of the revenge of the Austrian government and the circles at court after the revolution and war of independence of 1848-49 included, besides the generals executed at Arad, Prime Minister Count Lajos Batthyány as well. The Count was an adherent of constitutional monarchy, never wanted separation from Austria, and was not even in Debrecen when the House of Hapsburg was dethroned in that town in April, 1849. He had been arrested earlier, in January 1849, when returning to the capital from a peace mission as a member of a delegation to the Austrian Commander-in- Chief Windisch-Grätz. Court martial proceedings were immediately initiated against Batthyány, but it was through great difficulties, with false witnesses and through an arbitrary interpretation of his conduct that the charge of high treason could be construed that led to his excution on October 6, 1849. The unprecedented judicial murder caused great outrage in Western Europe, and the pressure of public opinion was so powerful in England that the Austrian government was compelled to send an extraordinary commissioner to explain what had happened. While the press abroad published freely on the activities, the trial, and the death of Count Batthyány, in his own country it was forbidden to commemorate him. The first reliable monument to the first constitutional Prime Minister of Hungary was raised by historian Mihály Horváth (Minister of Education in the 1849 government) in his great work published in Hungarian in Geneva in 1865. Batthyány was publicly and solemnly commemorated in Hungary in the summer of 1870, when the capital and the family, with a hundred thousand people attending, reburied his remains so far hidden in the crypt of the Franciscans’ church in Pest. At the end of the century, when the Neugebaude, the notorious military building, in which Batthyány had been imprisoned and under whose walls he had been executed by a firing squad, was demolished, the capital wanted to erect a monument at the site of the execution. The onument was finally built in 1926, and stands there to this day in the form of an ornate lamp containing an eternal flame. However, the Premier of the first responsible government of Hungary has no statue in the capital. Of his contemporaries, Count István Szécheny’s cult was built up between the two world wars, Lajos Kossuth’s after 1945, the latter projecting back the personal cult of the one-party system upon the head of state of Hungary in 1849. It is only in the last few decades that a realistic historical assessment of Batthyány has been possible, and researches have shown that the Count was not an opportunist, or a collaborator of Vienna, but the initiator of the Hungarian army organized from the militia and volunteers. The units of this army would then serve as models for creating the national mass army of the war of independence. The essay concludes with a survey of the latest results of this latter approach.

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