In 1826, fires raged across Transdanubia, including Zala County. Both the population and the authorities believed that some of these cases involved arson. In August, after a fire had broken out in Füred, the enraged mob beat and murdered a Jewish arrendator from Nagyvázsony, who was passing through there. The rioting crowd also beat up a vice judlium (deputy county magistrate), a Reformed pastor from Somogy, and a soldier. A popular writer of his time and judge at the Zala County court of appeals, Sándor Kisfaludy, wrote a long letter describing the “vandal murder” of Füred to the count palatine, relayed through his brother, who served as Archduke Joseph’s aide-de-camp. In this document – essentially a memorandum – Kisfaludy lays out a diagnosis of the broader crisis of the late estates system, and identifies the political, social, and economic problems involved. He also proposes a detailed plan of action, which relied on the palatine’s authority. Analysing Kisfaludy’s letter, the study explores the county-level securitization process of fires and arson, a discourse whereby political actors identify a threat, seeking the consent of a given target audience to legitimize extraordinary measures.

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.

A significant portion of Hungarian nobility held aristocratic credentials but was forced to reside in urbarial plots in return for urbarial contract and services, such as socage, tithe, ninth, and so on. Based on the local usus of taxation, in some counties they also had to pay the military tax for the state (contributio). At the same time, their status was not politicized on a national level for a long time. The king’s resolution in the Diet of 1825–27 proposed conducting a census to assess the taxpaying entities of the country, in order to proportionally redraw the existing tax distribution per county. The proposal also included compiling a list of nobles who used urbarial plots (based on the status of their land) with the aim of keeping them as taxpayers. The latter led to heated debates. Some argued against the census and taxing these nobles by appealing to the (fictitious) principle of ‘one and the same liberty’ and demanded the abolition of taxation of all noblemen. Others wanted to tax them, emphasizing that tax immunity applied to the ‘noble person’, not the ‘peasant plot’. The prolonged debate was fought mainly by means of the political language of the ‘ancient constitution’ and delved into the domain of ‘old laws’. Raising fundamental questions concerning the rights and duties of the nobility, as well as the idea of their (legal) unity—as of the self-professed political community or ‘nation’—this discourse transcended itself. The present study, primarily based on original records of the Diet, traces the formation of the image of this inferior ‘class’ of nobility, and uses it to reconstruct the well-to-do county delegates’ perceptions of the Estates society in general.

In 1824, two brothers, Heinrich and Bernhard Lackenbacher, received from King Francis I Hungarian nobility and land donation, as well as the prædicatum (usu- ally the place name of landed property donated by a monarch) “of Solomon”. The brothers, who continued their father’s business, were grain wholesalers of Jewish origin, who had converted to Catholicism some years before their ennoblement. The present study examines two problems concerning their ennoblement. First, it examines in detail how they earned their title and land in order to assess both the bureaucratic process and expense of ennoblement and its value for the brothers in the “society of the Estates system”. Doing this, the paper also explores the mean- ings of the prædicatum and the coat of arms, as both apparently represented the personal taste and aspirations of the brothers. Second, the study analyzes contem- porary attitudes towards the new ennoblements and land donations at the time. These were articulated by two members of the wealthy landowning nobility, Sán- dor Kisfaludy (1772–1844), a popular writer and poet from Zala County, and István Borsiczky (1783–1850), the representative of Trencsén County at the Diet of 1832–36. They both perceived and presented the Lackenbachers as members of a wider social group, seen as “other” or “alien” within the Hungarian nobility despite their title and land, and discussed this new type of ennoblement as a ten- dency. The statistical analysis of ennoblements in this era, however, does not verify these perceptions. Constructing an image of otherness within the nobility calls the attention to the discrepancies between legal status and social prestige in the society of the late Estates system in Hungary and exposes the possibilities and limits of crossing the boundaries between the estates.

In addition to the common soldiers conscripted or recruited from the peasantry, as well as the NCOs and officers of the regular army, the four noble levies (generalis exercitus) during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars engaged a large number of the nobility, i.e. the members of the Hungarian political nation, in military service. The noble levy of 1809 was unusual because the 1808 law mandated the personal involvement of the nobility, which substantiated the estate system and, within that, the national character of the institution of the levy. The actual deployment of the troops mobilised in this way, however, took place for the first and the last time in the fifth coalition war in 1809. Revisiting Zoltán Tóth’s concept of estate norms, the present study uses the example of Veszprém County to demonstrate how personal participation in armed service and subsequent military merits during a noble levy could become the means of social mobility for both the nobility and those below the estate line. The examination of the election of the officers in Veszprém County is followed by that of various forms of rewards after the war, including the renewal of officers in 1810. The sources reveal that after the war both the lord lieutenant of the county and the wider public strove to reward servicemen for their personal military service on a sliding scale based on their position in the estate system and their local prestige.

The cholera pandemic reached Hungary in 1831 from Galicia, and it required the authorities to take immediate preventive measures. The Council of Lieutenancy in Buda was the central factor of disease control, but its orders had to be implemented by the Hungarian counties. The counties, which held significant autonomy regarding enforcement, had to establish sanitary permanent deputations, appoint commissioners, and employ guards to control its borders. This situation frequently caused conflicts of competence between the government and middle level authorities, as well as among the counties themselves. Zala county, in southwestern Hungary also established four sub-deputations, among one of which was presided over by the writer Sándor Kisfaludy, an esteemed member of the local wealthy nobility. The present contribution, based on county archival sources, demonstrates how Kisfaludy tried to cope with his tasks on the western border of Zala. The analysis concentrates on Kisfaludy’s attempts to manage acute crisis situations and his perception of problems between lower-level and mid-level county authorities and the central government. It also considers how Kisfaludy became aware of and reflected on more profound structural sociopolitical tensions, which he experienced through his official praxis.

The topoi of Hungarian national dress emerged in literature to counter Emperor Josef II’s Germanisation efforts in the 1790s. Several authors, previously emphasizing the importance of commerce and improving looks in general, turned their attention towards the preservation of national characteristics around this time. Attitudes towards national dress have gained a political edge as part of the Hungarian nobility’s resistance movement. The transfer of the national crown to Buda, the death of Emperor Josef II, and the National Assembly of 1790–91 filled the country with jubilant sentiments. Political pamphlets increasingly focused on issues such as the constitution, language, religious tolerance and, first and foremost, national dress. The symbolic significance of national dress and the Hungarian crown is well illustrated by the significance attached to the uniform of the crown guards. The ideas about national dress, which became widely accepted and internalised by the resistance of the nobility in the 1790s, were originally formulated ten years earlier in the 1780s. These ideas fundamentally operated within the framework of the Republican political language, which emphasised masculinity, valour and simplicity in the discourse on national dress. In pamphlets expounding the importance of national dress the republicanism of Hungarian nobility three distinct aspects or argumentative techniques emerged, emphasising the nobility and simplicity of the forebears of Hungarian people: ‘Spartan Plutarchy’, patriotism for the ‘ancient constitution’, and the medieval idea of the Scythian heritage of the Hungarians. Republicanism among the Hungarian nobility associated foreign (mostly German) style with softness and visions of degeneration. This study interprets the political discourse about national dress and the crown guards’ uniform through the language of Republicanism and the agenda of “improving looks”. The study suggests that while in questions of the Hungarian national dress republican interpretations prevailed, the critique of the crown guards’ uniform was still fundamentally republican, but with elements like the agenda of ‘improving looks’ and economic rationale, which eschewed classical military values and found different criteria for the integration into political communities.