Report of the Meeting “Rapaci allo sbaraglio. The Habsburg Empire from a Hungarian Perspective”
On Tuesday 18 November, at the headquarters of the "Manlio Cecovini Study Society", the conference “Rapaci allo sbaraglio. The Habsburg Empire from a Hungarian Perspective” was held, with Juhasz Balazs, lecturer in contemporary history at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, as speaker.
Introduced by Luca Manenti, who noted that the Hungarian point of view often remains marginal in the imagination of the people of Trieste, Balazs invited the audience to reflect on how complex it is to use modern categories – such as “Austria”, “Hungary” or “nation” – to describe a political world utterly different from today’s: one shaped by a feudal organisation, by strong territorial autonomies, and by an ethnic plurality that does not correspond to nineteenth-century national visions. Hungary, he explained, regarded itself as a “part apart” within the Habsburg universe, linked to the emperor solely through the person of the sovereign, while the Viennese court tended to view those territories as a component to be integrated and controlled.
The long relationship between Hungary and the Habsburgs was marked by an unstable balance of necessity and resistance. On the one hand, military and economic support from Vienna often represented the only effective defence against Ottoman expansion; on the other, the Magyar nobility tenaciously defended a system of laws that even contemplated the right to rebellion should the sovereign fail to respect the kingdom’s liberties. From this interplay emerged two political categories still present in Hungarian discourse today: the “Labanc”, favourable to cooperation with the empire, and the “Kuruc”, advocates of independence – symbols of an age-old dialectic between openness to the West and the rigorous defence of national autonomy.
The modernising attempts of Maria Theresa and Joseph II were long interpreted by Hungarian tradition as centralising impositions. In reality, Balazs stressed, their actions formed part of a broader project of rationalising the state. Magyar collective memory continued to preserve an ambivalent image of the Habsburgs, often simplified or distorted, especially during the socialist twentieth century, when the official narrative reduced them to symbols of imperialist oppression. In the same period, the spread of national ideas profoundly reshaped the identity of the Kingdom of Hungary, transforming a historically multi-ethnic reality into a community increasingly inclined to define itself in homogeneous linguistic and cultural terms, with complex consequences for relations with other peoples of the empire.
The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established dualism and formally placed Hungary on an equal footing with Austria. Although that moment is remembered as a period of great economic and cultural development – Budapest’s monuments still bear clear witness to it – it was not without criticism and opposition, such as that of Lajos Kossuth, who, from his exile in Turin, judged the agreement a fatal mistake. Internal tensions within the empire continued up to the First World War, when the differing visions of the two halves of the monarchy made even the management of supplies difficult, revealing how fragile the idea of a single imperial community actually was.
In the concluding debate, the audience asked numerous questions: from the perception of Sisi as “queen of the Hungarians” to the cultural network that, in the early twentieth century, linked Budapest, Trieste and Florence; from the role of the Croats in the nineteenth-century political system to the internal dynamics of the army during the Great War. Balazs’s answers provided a rich and multifaceted picture, in which the Habsburg Empire appears as a mosaic of cultures, identities and memories that continue to question and divide even today. The conference thus proved to be a valuable opportunity to view a shared history – often recounted from only one of its many perspectives – with fresh eyes.
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Introduced by Luca Manenti, who noted that the Hungarian point of view often remains marginal in the imagination of the people of Trieste, Balazs invited the audience to reflect on how complex it is to use modern categories – such as “Austria”, “Hungary” or “nation” – to describe a political world utterly different from today’s: one shaped by a feudal organisation, by strong territorial autonomies, and by an ethnic plurality that does not correspond to nineteenth-century national visions. Hungary, he explained, regarded itself as a “part apart” within the Habsburg universe, linked to the emperor solely through the person of the sovereign, while the Viennese court tended to view those territories as a component to be integrated and controlled.
The long relationship between Hungary and the Habsburgs was marked by an unstable balance of necessity and resistance. On the one hand, military and economic support from Vienna often represented the only effective defence against Ottoman expansion; on the other, the Magyar nobility tenaciously defended a system of laws that even contemplated the right to rebellion should the sovereign fail to respect the kingdom’s liberties. From this interplay emerged two political categories still present in Hungarian discourse today: the “Labanc”, favourable to cooperation with the empire, and the “Kuruc”, advocates of independence – symbols of an age-old dialectic between openness to the West and the rigorous defence of national autonomy.
The modernising attempts of Maria Theresa and Joseph II were long interpreted by Hungarian tradition as centralising impositions. In reality, Balazs stressed, their actions formed part of a broader project of rationalising the state. Magyar collective memory continued to preserve an ambivalent image of the Habsburgs, often simplified or distorted, especially during the socialist twentieth century, when the official narrative reduced them to symbols of imperialist oppression. In the same period, the spread of national ideas profoundly reshaped the identity of the Kingdom of Hungary, transforming a historically multi-ethnic reality into a community increasingly inclined to define itself in homogeneous linguistic and cultural terms, with complex consequences for relations with other peoples of the empire.
The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 established dualism and formally placed Hungary on an equal footing with Austria. Although that moment is remembered as a period of great economic and cultural development – Budapest’s monuments still bear clear witness to it – it was not without criticism and opposition, such as that of Lajos Kossuth, who, from his exile in Turin, judged the agreement a fatal mistake. Internal tensions within the empire continued up to the First World War, when the differing visions of the two halves of the monarchy made even the management of supplies difficult, revealing how fragile the idea of a single imperial community actually was.
In the concluding debate, the audience asked numerous questions: from the perception of Sisi as “queen of the Hungarians” to the cultural network that, in the early twentieth century, linked Budapest, Trieste and Florence; from the role of the Croats in the nineteenth-century political system to the internal dynamics of the army during the Great War. Balazs’s answers provided a rich and multifaceted picture, in which the Habsburg Empire appears as a mosaic of cultures, identities and memories that continue to question and divide even today. The conference thus proved to be a valuable opportunity to view a shared history – often recounted from only one of its many perspectives – with fresh eyes.
WATCH THE GALLERY
