Kossuth, az ördög
Kossuth, the Devil

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines how the leaders of the imperial and royal army saw Kossuth during the months of the Revolution of 1848. The first chapter describes the picture of Kossuth as drawn and implied in imperial as well as imperial and royal proclamations and announce-ments. The paper claims that, paradoxically, these documents actively contributed to the emergence of Kossuth‟s cult because, by overemphasizing his role, they substantiated the public image about his importance. In the second chapter, the operations of the Hungarian and Austrian intelligence in 1848 and 1849 are discussed. It is claimed that the intelligence services had notable failures on both sides, while successes were rare as agents could usually only follow the events rather than forecast them. This is interesting especially be-cause the imperial and royal army as well the imperial government had already had an ex-tensive network of intelligence before 1848 but this collapsed after the revolution. The Hungarian side had to build an intelligence service from scratch, and in this respect it only had the advantage of playing on the home filed. Using documents related to the military campaigns of 1848-1849 held in the Old Field Documents collection (Alte Feldakten) of the Austrian Military Archives (Kriegsarchiv), the third chapter analyzes how the imperial and royal army leaders saw Kossuth. In the vast collection of documents Kossuth is mentioned rather often, but the imperial and royal mili-tary were more interested in his field visits than in his political activity. It was so because they believed that if Kossuth was with the army the Hungarian troops would launch an at-tack at the given battlefield. The imperial and royal intelligence had relatively accurate data on Kossuth‟s sojourns near the Leitha and in Pozsony in October-November 1848, his ac-tivity in Debrecen in January 1849, as well as his visits to the field in March and April. It noteworthy that it was such an intelligence report that recorded Kossuth‟s speech at Eger on March 30, 1849. During the spring of 1849, however, the imperial and royal military were given more misinformation, for example, about Kossuth‟s visit at Pancsova or about his appearance at Komárom in August 1849. This flow of false reports ended only when the news of Kossuth‟s leaving the country at Orsova began to spread.

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