Hőnich – Nagy: Társadalomszemlélet és politika a napóleoni háborúk magyarországi katolikus zászlószentelő prédikációiban

Perceptions of Society and Politics in Catholic Flag Consecration Sermons in Hungary during the Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

The study examines the role of printed sermons of Catholic flag consecration ceremonies in wartime mobilization and propaganda during the Napoleonic Wars. The research corpus consists of ten texts in German and Hungarian by various authors, delivered and published between 1806 and 1814. Most of them were addressed to the civil guard, and some were sermons delivered for the feudal militia raised by the nobility (insurrectio) and voluntary recruits joining the regular Hungarian regiments. 

The study first presents the sociohistorical and communicative context of flag consecration sermons, their place in the segmented propaganda of the Estates system in wartime Hungary, and the related ceremonial military rites. This is followed by reconstructing the ideas that emerged in the political discourse regarding the role of the church in war, with particular emphasis on the importance of the pulpit and sermons. Subsequently, the corpus is thoroughly explored to reconstruct the normative societal and political framework of the time, especially the mutual relationship between privileges and military duty as outlined in the texts targeting regular and irregular armed forces, and the respective Estates that raised them.

Finally, the authors present the patterns of “patriotic-warrior masculinity” in the sermons, depicting the “noble insurgent,” “Hungarian warrior,” and “armed citizen” as competing models, segmented by Estate affiliation. The first two operate with and extend the dominance of a catalog of noble virtues and the concept of shared national origin. In comparison, the latter is more particular, displaying a form of local patriotism shaped by both contemporary natural law discourse and the Estates concept, strongly associated with traditional Christianity and free royal towns. The conclusion suggests that this period played a crucial role in the long-term process which, through the interaction and partial synthesis of traditional and new elements, led to the emergence of the language of modern Hungarian nationalism in the mid-nineteenth century.