Baar Monika. Historians and Nationalism: East-Central Europe in the Nineteenth Century

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38 Five Biographical Proﬁles

After the suppression of the revolution, under adventurous circum-

stances, Horv

ath succeeded in narrowly escaping from an impending

death penalty, crossing the border disguised as the butler of a Hungarian

noblewoman. Subsequently, in his absence, his name was nailed onto

the gallows. He initially settled in Paris and earned his living by tutoring

the children of the widow of Louis Batthy

any, the unlawfully executed

Prime Minister of the ﬁrst revolutionary government. The year 1856

saw his move to Brussels and regular visits to the municipal archive

borefruitinacollectionofHungarica (sources relating to Hungar-

ian history). These were published in Hungary under the pseudonym

of Mih

aly Hatvani as Magyar t¨ort´enelmi okm

anyt

ar a br¨usseli orsz

agos

lev´elt

arb´ol ´es a burgundi lev´elt

arb´ol (Hungarian Historical Documents

from the Archives of Brussels and Burgundy, 1857–9). The special

signiﬁcance of this four-volume collection was that it inaugurated the

Monumenta Hungariae Historica series, the foremost Hungarian his-

torical source collection. Upon the invitation of another Hungarian

aristocrat’s widow to tutor her daughter, Horv

ath left Brussels for

Genoa in 1859. It seems likely that he encountered Louis Kossuth

during his three-year sojourn in Italy, although by this time Horv

ath’s

support for him had begun to wane, as he believed Kossuth’s dream

of a Danubian federation to be unfeasible. Between 1862 and 1866

Horv

ath again lived in Geneva, and during this time, the improved,

six-volume version of his Magyarorsz

ag t¨ort´enelme (History of Hungary,

1860–3) was published in Hungary, causing a political sensation. The

cover of the book suggested that this was a re-edition of his former

four-volume work, but in reality it disguised a new and substantially

amended text.

Horv

ath’s original intention was to conclude his narrative with the

year 1812 or 1815, in line with his belief that everything which happened

after that time was not history but part of an ‘unﬁnished revolution’,

still unfolding during the 1860s. Nevertheless, a friend (the eminent

literary scholar Ferenc Toldy) convinced him to carry on until January

1848 (the outbreak of the revolution in Paris), because ‘it would render

more useful service to the nation than Kossuth’s stirring speeches at

meetings in America’. The result was a seminal and monumental study

of the era between 1823 and 1848, Huszon¨ot ´ev Magyarorsz

ag t¨ort´enet´eb˝ol

(Twenty-ﬁve Years in the History of Hungary, 1864). The two-volume

book, which was published in Geneva and then smuggled into the

country, assessed developments in the Reform Era through the prism of

liberalism. Despite the unavailability of primary sources, he succeeded

Five Biographical Proﬁles 39

in producing a book which has remained a deﬁnitive account until the

present day.

In 1865 a further major book followed, Magyarorsz

ag f¨uggetlens´egi

harc

anak t¨ort´enete 1848 ´es 1849-ben (History of the 1848–9 War of In-

dependence, published in Geneva), in which he recounted the principal

episodes in the War of Independence and analysed its failure, distancing

himself further from Kossuth’s ideal of full independence in favour of

the political forces which subsequently brought the Compromise with

the Habsburgs in 1867. Initially the government banned the book, but

it soon became a favourite of Empress Elisabeth, Francis Joseph’s wife,

who shortly before her coronation (as Queen of Hungary) invited the

historian to her residence in order to discuss the book with him.

Horv

ath abandoned his clerical vocation during his period in em-

igration, and therefore saw no impediment to marrying his Genevan

housekeeper. The marriage produced ﬁve children, two of whom sur-

vived into adulthood. Homesickness made Horv

ath yearn to return to

Hungary. After an unsuccessful clemency plea in 1857, he was ﬁnally

granted amnesty in 1866, after the defeat of K

oniggr

atz, which consid-

erably weakened the position of the Habsburg dynasty. Upon his return

he received a warm welcome from Hungarian scholars and the learned

public alike. The Catholic Church refused to acknowledge his civil

marriage and granted him an honorary bishopric together with an an-

nual living allowance. During these years Horv

ath’s research somewhat

declined in signiﬁcance; nevertheless he lent invaluable support to the

institutionalization of the historical discipline. In 1867 he was elected as

the vice-president of the newly founded Hungarian Historical Society

and later became its president. The published version of his inaugura-

tion lecture launched the journal of the Society, Sz

azadok (Centuries)

in 1868. In the same year he became a representative in the parliament

as a member of Ferenc De

ak’s party (De

ak played an instrumental role

in negotiating the Compromise). In 1848 Horv

ath urged the represen-

tatives to initiate the foundation of the National Archives. His most

comprehensive, eight-volume Magyarorsz

ag t¨ort´enelme was published

in 1871–3, representing a landmark achievement: for the ﬁrst time,

the Hungarian public was provided with a substantial national history

ranging from the ancient era until contemporary times. Horv

ath was

also encouraged to collect and publish his earlier minor writings, an

idea which did not entirely please him initially, as he believed some

of his writings had become outdated. Finally, he accepted the offer,

and the four-volume Horv

ath Mih

aly kisebb t¨ort´enelmi munk

ai (Mih

aly

40 Five Biographical Proﬁles

Horv

ath’s Minor Historical Works) appeared in 1868. Horv

ath died in

1878, during a convalescent sojourn in Karlsbad.

Although Horv

ath’s immediate successors greatly appreciated his

legacy, in the twentieth century he received far less attention than my

other protagonists in their respective countries. Somewhat surprisingly,

not even his remarkable Huszon¨ot ´ev Magyarorsz

ag t¨ort´enet´eb˝ol (Twenty-

ﬁve Years in the History of Hungary, 1864) merited a reprint, and

only a limited range of his writings is available today. Among these

is an anthology, Polg

arosod

as, liberalizmus, f¨uggetlens´egi harc: v

alogatott

ír

asok (Budapest, 1986) and a critical edition of his essay on the peasant

uprising of 1514.

KOG

ALNICEANU

The Romanian scholar was born into an aristocratic family in 1817 in

Ias¸i, the capital of Moldavia, and he was related by family and political

ties to the upper nobility; his father was a close collaborator of the

post-1834 ruler of Moldavia, Prince Mihail Sturdza. Kog

alniceanu was

fortunate to be educated in a ‘noble way’.¹⁸ He ﬁrst received private

education locally and then, when the Prince’s two sons commenced

their studies in France in 1834, he was invited to accompany them. At

ﬁrst they stayed in Lun

eville, a town in the vicinity of Nancy. They were

intentionally kept away from Paris in order to prevent revolutionary

ideas from inﬁltrating their minds and, for the same reason, their

teachers were monarchist and conservative priests. Kog

alniceanu learnt

French, Latin, Greek, German and some of the humanities subjects;

however, contrary to his teachers’ intentions, he could not be kept

insulated from the currents of the age and developed a fascination with

the social philosophy of the Encyclopaedists. The sojourn abroad also

provided him with a contrast to the conditions in his homeland, for

example, regarding the freedom of the press. At his father’s request, he

also kept abreast of technological developments, such as silk-production

and sheep-farming, although he was aware that these could not be

implemented in Moldavia on the basis of mere observation.

Towards the end of 1835 the Romanian students were suddenly

ordered to leave France. As Kog

alniceanu recalled several decades later:

¹⁸ The deﬁnitive account on Kog

alniceanu is Alexandru Zub’s Kog

alniceanu, istoric (Ias¸i,

1974).

Five Biographical Proﬁles 41

‘French education seemed too revolutionary to our great protector, Tsar

Nicholas I, therefore we were redirected from Lun

eville to Berlin.’¹⁹

He then enrolled at the University of Berlin and took courses in

natural law, Roman law and history; whereas Greek, Latin, philosophy

and mathematics were taught by a private tutor. In contrast to his

previous isolation, my protagonist suddenly found himself in a thriving

university, boasting some of the most eminent professors of the age,

including Leopold von Ranke, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, Wilhelm

von Humboldt and Eduard Gans, a professor of Prussian civil and

criminal law. Kog

alniceanu lodged with a Lutheran pastor, whose

apartment served as a focal point for attempts to create a uniﬁed

Germany. He followed the course of German uniﬁcation with his own

desire for the unity of the Romanian principalities uppermost in his

mind and also realized that, in order to counter-balance Turkish and

Russian ambitions of power politics, it was essential to win over the

support of the progressive European public for the Romanian cause. This

determination led him to the study of history: he comprehended that the

precondition for achieving this objective was to raise public awareness

of the very existence and the history of the Romanian principalities.

By the age of twenty Kog

alniceanu grew increasingly conscious of his

future aims: to create a uniﬁed Romanian state and to implement

political and social reforms whereby feudalism would be abolished and

his country transformed into a modern society. He considered Count

Hardenberg’s programme of enlightened reform, informed by the ideal

of (a) ‘monarchy based on democratic institutions’, to be exemplary for

a future political arrangement of his homeland.²⁰

Like my other historians, Kog

alniceanu commenced his scholarly

activities at an early age. Hoping to ﬁll a lacuna in the knowledge

of the foreign educated public and allegedly inspired by Wilhelm von

Humboldt, he wrote a pioneering study of the Gypsies, Esquisse sur

l’histoire, les moeurs et la langue des Cigains, which appeared in 1837 in

Leipzig. In the same year his single-volume national history, similarly

aimed at the foreign learned public, was published in Berlin, entitled

Histoire de la Valachie, de la Moldavie et des Valaques transdanubiens.

Focusing primarily on the history of Wallachia up until 1792, it was

originally intended to form the ﬁrst volume of a two-part work, but

his subsequent immersion in politics, lack of adequate sources, and

the ruler Prince Sturdza’s unwillingness to approve a work which

¹⁹ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, Vol. I (Bucharest, 1974), 605. ²⁰ Ibid., I. 609.

42 Five Biographical Proﬁles

might have offended Russian interests, prevented Kog

alniceanu from

producing the envisioned sequel. Of the 500 printed copies, eighty

reached the principalities, but initially, they proved unpopular and two

translations of the manuscript also remained unpublished. In the longer

term, however, the innovative potential of this synthesis, in particular

the use of historical arguments to reinforce unity, came to be fully

appreciated. The year 1837 saw another publication by my historian:

a brief overview of Romanian cultural developments, ‘Rom

anische

oder Wallachische Sprache und Literatur’ in Lehrmann’s Magazin f¨ur

die Literatur des Auslandes, which appeared two years later in French

translation.

In 1838 Kog

alniceanu was ordered to return home by Prince Stur-

dza, who was alarmed by the young man’s sympathetic attitude to the

reformist, or even radical, intellectuals of the age. As well as working

for the Prince as his private secretary, in the following decades he

became involved in the promotion of Romanian culture in numerous

ways. One of these was through journals, and, although his initiatives

were invariably short-lived, their signiﬁcance extended far beyond their

print-run. The most ambitious enterprise was Dacia Literar

a.Founded

in 1840, it represented an innovative attempt to foster national unity

through the medium of literature. Other titles included Prop

as¸irea

(Progress, 1843) and Calendar pentru Poporul Rom

anesc (Almanac for

the Romanian People, 1842). Kog

alniceanu published several of his

own articles in these journals, as well as translations of varying lengths,

including the short essays Despre Civilisat¸ie (On Civilization) and De-

spre Pauperism (On Pauperism). Similarly to my other protagonists,

Kog

alniceanu strove to publish primary sources pertinent to Romanian

history. This entailed another short-lived journal specializing in histor-

ical sources, Archiva Rom

aneasc

a (Romanian Archive, 1840), and the

inception of Scriptores Rerum Romaniarum in 1845. The publication

of the chronicles of humanist historians in two editions, Letopiset¸ele

Moldaviei (s¸i Valahiei) (Annals of Moldavia and Wallachia, 1860) and

Chronicele Rom

aniei (the Chronicles of Romania, 1872), represented

a watershed in the history of source publications; some of these had

appeared earlier in French, as Fragments tir´es des chroniques Moldaves et

Valaques (Ias¸i, 1845). My historian also had a keen interest in theatre:

in 1840 he became co-director of the National Theatre in Ias¸i and

worked as a theatre critic. Besides, two comedies and an unﬁnished

autobiographical novel, Tainele inimei (Mysteries of the Heart), testify

to his literary pursuits.

Five Biographical Proﬁles 43

In 1843 Kog

alniceanu launched a course on national history at the

Academia Mih

ailean

a (Mihailean Academy) in Ias¸i. His inaugural lec-

ture, Cuv

ant pentru deschiderea cursului de istorie nat¸ional

aînAcademia

Mih

ailean

a (Speech for the Opening of the Course on National History)

contemplated the meaning and purpose of history. In the absence of

a more comprehensive narrative, this essay provides the most concise

account of Kog

alniceanu’s interpretation of Romanian history. In ad-

dition to the inaugural lecture’s signiﬁcance as an embodiment of my

historian’s views, its message was also highly politicized; in that context,

its emphasis on the inevitability of uniﬁcation found a strong resonance

not just domestically, but also among Romanian students residing in

Paris. Nevertheless, challenging the status quo upset Prince Sturdza;

consequently, in 1844 the course was abruptly cancelled and later that

year Kog

alniceanu was brieﬂy imprisoned for his part in plotting to

overthrow the Prince. Between 1845 and 1847 Kog

alniceanu travelled

around Europe, spending extended periods in Paris and Spain, the latter

of which inspired his travel observations, Notes sur l’Espagne.

In 1848, like Palack

y and Horv

ath in their home countries, Kog

al-

niceanu became involved in the short-lived revolution in Moldova, again

incurring the Prince’s wrath. He escaped to Bukovina (an Austrian

territory) and became a chief ideologist of the Moldavian Central

Revolutionary Committee in exile, and his manifesto, Dorint¸ele partidei

nationale din Moldova (The Wishes of the National Party in Moldavia,

August 1848), set out a constitutional programme, reiterating the call

for the union of the two principalities, as well as for civic and political

liberties. In April 1849 the Ottoman and Russian powers appointed

a new Prince, Grigore Ghica, who was receptive to the liberal and

unionist factions. Kog

alniceanu returned from exile and accepted high-

level administrative posts. He promoted the idea of uniﬁcation through

the magazine Steaua Dun

arii (The Star of the Danube), also published

in Brussels as L’

Etoile du Danube. Another mission was to eradicate

feudalism and, more speciﬁcally, its particularly inhumane practice,

serfdom. To that end, Kog

alniceanu’s study Scl

avie, vecin

atate s¸i boieresc

(Slavery, Serfdom and Statute Labour, 1853), published in its original

version as a foreword to the translation of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s Uncle

Tom’s Cabin, and two years later in the Dacia Literar

a, assessed the

types of serfdom in European history and presented a strong case for its

abolition in all forms.²¹

²¹ Ibid., I. 592–602.

44 Five Biographical Proﬁles

The outcome of the Crimean War in 1858 facilitated the uniﬁ-

cation of the principalities under Alexandru Ioan Cuza. As a close

associate of the new Prince, Kog

alniceanu was responsible for some

major reforms put forward in the fourteen points of his Profesie di

credint¸

a (Political Credo, 1860). Among these featured the seculariza-

tion of the vast areas owned by the Orthodox clergy, electoral reform,

the reorganization of the internal administrative and legal systems,

creating equality before the law by abolishing boyar ranks and privi-

leges, and the introduction of the Napoleonic code. My historian also

played an instrumental role in the foundation of the University of

Ias¸i (1860) and University of Bucharest (1864). In 1862 Kog

alniceanu

delivered a speech in Parliament on the improvement of the condi-

tions of the peasantry,

Imbun

at¸irea soartei t¸

aranilor (The Relief of

the Burdens of the Peasantry, 1862). His argument was reinforced

by frequent references to historical precedent: on the one hand he

emphasized that the abolition of feudal remnants was an indispens-

able humanitarian, as well as pragmatic, requirement of the age; on

the other, he declared that a future resolution must take into account

the historical speciﬁcs of Romanian society. Serving as Prime Min-

ister as well as Minister of the Interior between October 1863 and

January 1865, Kog

alniceanu initiated the agrarian reform of 1864,

which sought, albeit with limited success, to address peasant land

ownership. After Cuza’s fall and the accession of Prince Charles I of

Hohenzollern in 1866, Kog

alniceanu continued his active participation

in politics, serving as Minister of the Interior on three further occa-

sions between 1868 and 1880. As Foreign Minister he also played a

salient role in securing Romania’s independence from Ottoman rule

in 1878.

In the 1880s Kog

alniceanu withdrew from political life and focused

his energies on academic commitments. He was elected to the Romanian

Academy in 1868 and served as its president between 1887 and

1889. He spent time collecting historical documents and promoting

archaeological excavations. His last signiﬁcant public appearance in

1891 was a speech commemorating the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of the

Romanian Academy: Dezrobirea t¸iganilor, s¸tergerea privilegiilor boieres¸ti,

emanciparea t¸

aranilor (The Liberation of the Gypsies, the Abolition of

Boyar Privileges and the Emancipation of the Peasantry) called attention

to the unresolved issues of land ownership and especially the lowly status

of the Gypsy population; it also contained personal recollections of the

scholar’s life. Kog

alniceanu had suffered from ill-health since 1886 and

Five Biographical Proﬁles 45

died in 1891 in Paris, where he was undergoing an operation. He was

buried in Ias¸i.

Kog

alniceanu is primarily remembered and celebrated as a politician,

the main architect of Romanian uniﬁcation. His historical output, at

least in the narrow sense of the word, was not as illustrious as that of my

other historians, even though, as we have seen, some of his numerous and

weighty parliamentary orations could also be deﬁned as historical studies.

Some cornerstones of his understanding of the national past, such as

the postulation of Roman origins, were embedded in earlier traditions,

whilst the rendering of national unity as a leitmotif represented a novel

element. In addition to reshaping the Romanian political landscape,

my protagonist exerted signiﬁcant inﬂuence on the vistas of national

life in his role as a publicist, theatre critic, editor and an outstanding

organizer of cultural life. Kog

alniceanu’s historical and belletristic work,

together with his numerous parliamentary discourses, were published in

Opere (Works, in ﬁve parts from 1974), and a comprehensive annotated

bibliography of his oeuvre, Mihail Kog

alniceanu 1817–91 Biobibliograﬁe

(Bucharest, 1971) was produced by Alexandru Zub.

Romantic Historiography in the Service

of Nation-Building

THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF HISTORICAL

WRITING

‘If the study of history has ever been essential, then it must have become

soinourpresentage,inthetimeofdisturbances...analtaronwhich

we can rely . . . a prophecy which foreshadows the future.’¹ The words

of Mihail Kog

alniceanu, echoed by many of his contemporaries, testify

to the widely accepted assumption that nineteenth-century scholars

attributed an exceptional role to the study of history. By extension,

those who undertook that study enjoyed considerable prestige. The

nineteenth century was without doubt the great era of the ‘backward-

looking prophets’.² Historical research in the Romantic epoch extended

to a variety of genres and subjects, but a great number of historians

showed afﬁnity ﬁrst and foremost with the history of their own nation.

Deﬁning their intentions in stark contrast to the achievements of

earlier generations, their stated goal was to renew historiography. The

eminent French historian Augustin Thierry captured the mood of

general dissatisfaction when he demanded that historians must no

longer repeat the old stories under a new guise. He asserted that previous

histories of France could not claim to be accurate representations because

they revolved around a number of princely families. This idea resounded

in his complaint: ‘Accustomed from childhood to this historical pattern,

we not only are not shocked by it, we do not even imagine that another

could be devised . . . But a true history of France should relate the

¹ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, Vol. II (Bucharest, 1976), 448. The statement was inspired by

Augustin Thierry.

² These were Friedrich Schlegel’s famous words.

Romantic Historiography and Nation-Building 47

destinies of the entire French nation: its hero would be the whole

nation.’³

My protagonists elucidated their expectations of historical writing

within this framework: they did not intend to follow in the footsteps of

their predecessors because they believed that those accounts were insuf-

ﬁcient. The eschewal of the historical writing of preceding generations,

whether erudite humanists or scholars of the Enlightenment, became

their vantage point from which they expounded their desiderata. Their

ambition resided in writing a complete history of their own nation

from its origins until recent times from a new perspective, one which

encompassed the ‘democratization’ of every aspect of historiography:

its subject, stage, medium and audience. Just as Thierry pointed to the

deﬁcient nature of earlier histories of France, Kog

alniceanu regretted:

‘Perhaps it is unique in the case of the history of the Moldavian and

Wallachian people that all the chronicles of this country, all the memoirs

of by-gone times, describe the life of princes, nobles and the clergy.

Nowhere do the people appear, yet the prince is everywhere, although

it should be the other way around.’⁴

In keeping with this criticism, scholars aimed to extend the scope of

their writing, so that it would encompass the history of the entire nation.

In particular, they proposed to incorporate the life of the unprivileged

common people into their study, in other words, they sought to

democratize their subject. This intention was academic in form, but

political in content. The concept of nationhood in early modern Europe

was associated less with common ethnic bonds than with certain feudal

privileges, which only a small segment of the population, usually the

nobility and clergy, enjoyed. Liberal historians redeﬁned the privileges

of political representation and property ownership as rights that should

be bestowed upon a much wider sphere of the population. This attitude

emanated from their conviction that, within society, a balance must

be achieved between rights and obligations. Accordingly, the ordinary

people, who had to share in the burdens, were to be entitled to the

enjoyment of rights and membership of the nation. As a consequence,

the terms ‘nation’ and ‘people’ no longer denoted different social strata,

butbecameconterminous.ItwasinthisspiritthattheforemostWhig

³ Augustin Thierry, Dix ans d’ ´etudes historiques (Paris, 1834), 307–8, quoted in Gossman,

Between History and Literature, 93.

⁴ Kog

alniceanu, Opere, II. 186.