This essay, as a peculiar continuation to Vera Bácskai’s article, examines the legal aspect of a family confl ict, which took place in both parts of the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy in the latter third of the nineteenth century. Th e story itself is that of the disintegration of the family of the Saxon-Hungarian soldierbaron who had seduced and married the daughter of a Viennese Greek merchant. It reports the eff orts of the husband and his wife, disowned by her father, to secure her inheritance, and later on, the ruin of their marriage and the subsequent criminal case of adultery starting in Görz (Gorizia, Austria), continuing in Budapest, and culminating in a scandalous divorce case in Cluj. (Kolozsvár, Hungary) Th e essay, however, focuses less on the actual story, and more on the relationships between diff erent legal procedures, the choice of legal strategies and tactics of the family members, the underlying motivations, and the consequences of their decisions. Th e justifi cation of this choice, which is also one of the most important conclusions of this essay, is that the source expected to help us reconstruct the confl ict, the narratives of the participants and their witnesses presented in courts of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy conform these aforementioned strategies entirely. According to the author, a case of pathological legal practice, in some respects, sheds more light on the operation of the contemporary legal system than ’normal’ legal cases. In this case, family members consciously (ab)use the confl icting Austro-Hungarian (as well as Hungarian vs Transylvanian) laws and fully exploit the possibilities that these confl icts opened up for them in order to achieve their goals. Th is manoeuvring in the given legal context increase the importance of questions of adjective law, arising from the status of the subjects (citizenship/national status, place of residency, religion). At the same time it ’unpersonalised’ the legal confl ict for the participants, in that determining the tactics were entirely taken over by professional representatives and lawyers instead of the parties involved. Analysis in this particular case stresses the intimate relationship between lawsuits and administrative procedures. Th e modality of the criminal lawsuit of adultery and the divorce case (examined in greater depth due to the nature of source material available) is fundamentally determined by the struggle for the inheritance. Ultimately, especially following the estrangement of the couple, the legal confl ict lost its ’rational’ characteristics, ruined the social prestige of the families involved, and irreversibly destroyed all human bonds between the members of the family. Th us, no matter how resourceful individual legal practices were in this case, beyond a certain point (and one that is hard to defi ne) the institutionalised administration of justice made the irreconcilable parties pay a high price. Th e author also draws attention to a possible, and in this particular case seemingly relevant, explanation of pathological legal practice. A couple of decades earlier, a similarly intensive litigation took place for the inheritance in the family of our unscrupulously litigating baron’s mother. Th is fact, corroborated by a contemporary comment, justifi es the conclusion that the mother’s decisions, which had eventually led to the strengthening of the family’s status, may have provided her son with a pattern as to how to resolve his own confl icts by legal means.

Nincs absztrakt.

Historians studying divorce generally suggest that the nineteenth century was the age of secularisation and describe a trend – the onset of the present-day growth path of divorces –, which seems to prefi gure the future (our present) undisputedly. Thus, whereas studies of earlier periods usually assume a culturalanthropological approach, examining their subject from an appropriate distance and focusing on the meaning of individual decisions, divorce in the second half of the nineteenth century is often painted as familiar, mensurable, and comparable to our day and age. As opposed to this, present study approach the constructs of the legal institution (divorce) and marital status (divorced) critically through the peculiar development of marriage law in the Hungarian capital and in general. An inconsistency is revealed about the surveys of Hungarian censuses concerning the divorced population (which, at the time, included informally divorced Catholic couples too): the census data repeatedly indicate more divorced women than men, even though in the case of Budapest, where the same phenomenon is found, the ratio of remarrying men and women is only 10:9. As the most likely explanation for this, the paper suggests a ‘tendency to hide’ among the divorced population, and especially among men. Two particular case studies are given as examples for the falsification of real marital status by divorced women in the capital, and at the same time, the author stresses the possibility of societal control with regard to the name of married women. The hypothesis is that it was easier for divorced men to be overlooked in administration, such as in censuses. Furthermore, the author refines the hypothesis of ‘witholding information’, and draws attention to the uncertainties about the contemporary meaning of the term ‘divorced’, and its use in everyday life. Using dictionaries, census instructions, and marriage certifi cates from Budapest, Nagy addresses the possibility of blurring the diff erence between estranged spouses and offi cially divorced couples, as well as the various alternative terms used to signify the marital status of offi cially divorced persons (e.g. widow(er), ‘szabados’, ‘ledig und frei’). Finally, specifi cally Hungarian anomalies of the legal institution itself, that is, the termination of marriages, are discussed. On one hand, the termination of Catholic marriages became possible after 1868, however, if either of the spouses remained in the Catholic faith, the marriage remained binding for him/her. On the other hand, the parallel and often overlapping secular-ritual practices of terminating Jewish marriages resulted in similar uncertainties. In both cases the same question may arise: who was considered ‘divorced’ after all?

Nincs absztrakt.

Nincs absztrakt.