Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

MÓNIKA BAÁRThe Catholic Church did not acknowledge his civil marriage, thus he continuedto be considered a cleric and received an honorary bishopric togetherwith a yearly living allowance. In 1868, he became a member of Parliamenton behalf of Ferenc Deák’s Liberal Party. He died in 1878.Horváth’s original intention was to finish his History of Hungary withthe year 1812 or 1815, claiming that everything which happened after thattime was not history, but a part of an unfinished revolution which still continuedin the 1860s. It was his friend, Ferenc Toldy, who convinced him tocarry on with his history of constitutional Hungary until January 1848,because “it will be more useful for the nation than all the shining speechesof Lajos Kossuth at the meetings in America.” In fact, the book wasa political statement as well as an academic history.Horváth’s aims were twofold. First, to present a narrative fromwhich the younger generation could understand what the main concernsof the period were and how the reforms evolved. Second, he wantedto inform the ignorant foreign public, who “understands the cries ofIreland, the complaints of Venice, and appreciates the heroic fightsof the Poles, but is not sympathetic to the desires of our nation becauseit does not know its history in the past decades.” 15 Lacking many of thesources he needed, Horváth’s aim could not have been to offer a historythat embraced every single issue in the period under discussion.“Incomplete, surely, but perhaps better than nothing” was his modestremark on the book. Since he also presented the pre-1825 internal conditionsof the country in a way that explicitly criticized the Habsburgs,he could not expect that the book would pass censorship in Hungary.It was finally published in Geneva.The Twenty-five years is not a “history of the people” as envisagedby Horváth in his early years. Horváth’s intention in this case was towrite a moral history, but again, “moral” here meant something similarto Heeren’s ideas: “a history, which is to include all social, intellectualand material movements..., aiming at a political reform.” Themain corpus of the book is organized around the diets, and, generallyspeaking, political problems take priority over other issues. Horváth’sfocused on the discussions of political parties, the government, andespecially the relation of the two. In addition, Horváth shortly presentedthe most important figures of Hungarian intellectual, cultural andliterary history. In order to support his argument, he made extensiveuse of parliamentary speeches, literary pieces, memoirs, etc., and successfullyintegrated them into the main body of the text. In the “Preface”of the book, Horváth complained that only the minutes of thediet had become available to the public, whereas the richest sourceswere hidden in the county archives, government offices and in the writ-34