„Királyi demokrácia” (Szabadságjogok a magyar liberálisok reform-terveiben 1867 után)
“Royal Democracy”. Civil Liberties in the Reform Plans of the Hun-garian Liberals after 1867

Summary/Abstract: The paper makes an attempt to give a survey of the how the cause of the codification of civil liberties appeared in the reform plans of the Hungarian liberal elite, which rose to power after the Austrian-Hungarian Compromise of 1867. First, it gives an overview of how the state of civil liberties improved as a result of the 1848 Revolution then tries to answer why, despite these antecedents and the promises pol-iticians made in 1867, civil liberties were codified belatedly and in a rather limited form. First and foremost, the author collected archival documents about the penal code, the abolition of corporal punishment, the laws governing the police as well as the rights of as-sociation and assembly, and tried to reconstruct how the government had planned to se-cure civil liberties and what the proposed legal solutions had been. The paper claims that the process of building a constitutional state decelerated due to the following reasons. (1) The legitimacy of the new political system was uncertain: the an-ti-Compromise radical opposition organized social protests, while the unpopularity of the new elite manifested itself in the peasant movements demanding land reform and ethnic protests etc. (2) The inner problems of government: the inefficient operation of the new administration as well as the fact the the governing party was divided on important reform issues. (3) Finally, the transformation of Hungarian liberal thinking, a long process with many phases, is discussed. The doctrinaire liberalism of the past was gradually revised and reinterpreted. The liberalism of Jñzsef Eötvös and Ferenc Deák was pushed into the back-ground and was replaced by a more pragmatic state-centered concept. However, this elitist (“aristocratic”) model of state led to the conservation, occasionally even widening, of class differences rather than to the reduction of them. The author believes that, as a result of their fears, the liberals in power saw their oppor-tunities for carrying out a constitutional reform much more limited than they actually were.

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