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

The Intellectual Horizons of Liberal Nationalism in Hungaryings of some political journalists of the age. Among these, he hadaccess only to published works.The most amazing feature of Horváth’s work is that it retained thosesets of ideas up to the 1860s that were characteristic of the Reform Era.He examined the age with the eyes of a devoted liberal. He described thespread of liberalism as something inevitable, as it belonged to the Zeitgeist:[The Catholic clergy] did not want to realize that democratic freedom hadbecome the guiding principle of the age, and not only those who wereenthusiastic about this idea were progressing on that track but also thosewho defined themselves as the enemies of it. They were taken … in spiteof their wish. Members of the clergy were incapable of realizing that theywere also just blind tools in the hands of divine providence, and that theidea of equality and freedom was so general and lasting that it was overcomingthe limits of human will, thus it must have been the will of divineprovidence itself. 16Horváth often supported his arguments by referring to the positive exampleof foreign countries: “the emancipation of Irish Catholics in GreatBritain was greeted by every enlightened person and this gave the opportunityto some countries to urge their representatives to draft a proposalfor extending the religious freedom of Protestants.”Horváth showed how the most important liberal demands weregradually disseminated in the country. He mostly concentrated on theissues of imposition of taxes on the nobility, extension of civil rights to thecommon people, and reformation of the criminal law. As far as religion isconcerned, Horváth advocated religious freedom. It was self-evident forhim that Protestants should be given equal rights, the change of religionsshould not be hindered, in the case of mixed marriages children shouldnot inevitably become Catholic, etc. Since the institution of civil marriagehad not existed in Hungary in those days, some of these issues were evenmore pressing. His attitude towards the clergy was severely critical but nothostile. The way he praised Bishop József Lonovics is especially meaningful:“ultramontanist ideas were never uttered by him.” 17This statement, especially Horváth’s criticism of ultramontanism,makes him a late representative of Josephinism: this tolerant attitude toother denominations recalls the spirit of the Edict of Toleration of 1781.He believed in the regulation of the relations between the church and thestate and, in this spirit, he even wrote a short biographical sketch of RogerWilliams, the “creator and representative of the principle of free Churchin a free State”; which he drew on J. F. Astie’s Histoire de la République desÉtats-Unis. Following Williams, he argued that the aims and resources of35