The Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence

The Metternich system and Hungary's Reform Era

The European order after the Congress of Vienna of 1815 was inseparable from the name of Klemens von Metternich, Austrian foreign minister from 1809 and state chancellor from 1821 to 1848. For three decades he stood at the centre of the balance of power known as the Concert of Europe, and through the "Metternich system" of international congresses he aligned Austria with Russia and, to a lesser extent, Prussia against revolution and nationalism. The Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 policed the universities and press of the German Confederation, and at home he used censorship and a wide-ranging spy network to suppress unrest. Pre-March Austria restricted freedom of the press, limited university activities and banned student fraternities. Nineteenth-century critics held that he had prevented Austria and central Europe from "developing along normal liberal and constitutional lines". 1 2 3

Within the Habsburg monarchy the Kingdom of Hungary held a position of its own. An old historic constitution, going back to the Golden Bull of 1222, limited the power of the crown; the king had to swear at his coronation to uphold it, and the highly autonomous county assemblies possessed a recognised right to refuse "unconstitutional" royal orders. From 1526 to 1851 Hungary even kept its own customs border. Yet the nobility paid no taxes, and the peasants lived in feudal subjection, owing labour services and dues to their lords. The reconvening of the Diet in 1825 opened the "Reform Era". Count István Széchenyi preached modernisation on the British model, and from the mid-1830s the journalist Lajos Kossuth won a name with his reports of the Diet's debates. Arrested for high treason in May 1837, Kossuth was imprisoned, and was released in 1840 after the Diet refused to pass government measures until the political prisoners were freed. 4 5

From 1841 Kossuth edited the Pesti Hírlap, Hungary's first political newspaper, which called for broader parliamentary democracy, rapid industrialisation, general taxation and the abolition of serfdom and aristocratic privilege. At the same time he wrote, "Let us hurry, let us hurry to Magyarize the Croats, the Romanians, and the Saxons", and argued that Hungarian must be the exclusive language of public life, a stance that later came back as conflict with the non-Hungarian nationalities. In 1844 the Diet made Hungarian the official language of administration, legislation and schooling in place of Latin. On 15 March 1847 the Opposition Party (Ellenzéki Párt), uniting the various currents of the reform opposition, was founded in Pest, with Count Lajos Batthyány as its president and Kossuth as the author of its programme. The Opposition Declaration, given its final form by Ferenc Deák, was adopted that June, and the "Twelve Points" that grew out of it became the guiding principles of the April Laws. In the autumn of 1847, with Batthyány's backing, Kossuth entered the Diet as deputy for Pest County. 5 4 6 7

March 1848: the rising in Vienna and the bloodless revolution in Pest

The potato blight that swept Europe from 1845 and the economic crisis of 1845–1847 drove up food prices, and in 1846 in Austrian Galicia peasants rose against a Polish noble insurrection and slaughtered the nobles. The news that Louis Philippe had abdicated in Paris at the end of February 1848 reached Pozsony (today Bratislava), where the Hungarian Diet was sitting, on 1 March. On 3 March Kossuth demanded in the Lower House a responsible ministry for Hungary and constitutional government for the rest of Austria, and his speech was read aloud to the crowds in the streets of Vienna. 3 4 5

In Vienna on 13 March students and citizens gathered at the Lower Austrian Diet demanded Metternich's resignation. Troops were sent into the streets, and when the crowd turned hostile in the afternoon a division opened fire, killing five; the liberals were now joined by the city's poor and the situation got out of hand. The students offered to form a pro-government Academic Legion if their demands were met, and Archduke Ludwig told Metternich he must resign. Metternich resigned that night, left Vienna and went into exile in London, and the Viennese cheered his fall. Ferdinand I appointed nominally liberal ministers, and by November five minister-presidents had come and gone. 1 3 8

The news from Vienna reached Pest on 14 March. The "Youths of March" who met at the Pilvax coffee house brought forward their planned rally from the 19th to the 15th. On the morning of 15 March Sándor Petőfi, with Mór Jókai, Pál Vasvári and others, went from faculty to faculty reciting the National Song he had written the night before, while Jókai read the Twelve Points, beginning "What the Hungarian nation wants": freedom of the press, an independent responsible government in Buda-Pest, an annual parliament, civil and religious equality before the law, a national army, equal taxation, the abolition of socage, juries, a national bank, an army oath to the constitution and the withdrawal of foreign troops, the release of political prisoners, and union with Transylvania. At the Landerer press the crowd printed both texts without censorship; after a mass meeting before the National Museum at three in the afternoon it crossed to Buda, made the Governor-General's council sign the Twelve Points and freed the political prisoner Mihály Táncsics. This bloodless 15 March is today one of Hungary's three national holidays. 4 9 10 11

The April Laws, the Batthyány government and the end of serfdom

On 17 March Emperor Ferdinand (as king of Hungary, Ferdinand V) assented to Hungary's first responsible ministry. Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány presented his cabinet to the Diet on 23 March; Kossuth became minister of finance, and Széchenyi and Deák also took portfolios. With the exception of Kossuth, all were close to Széchenyi's moderate line. The reform bills passed by the Diet at Pozsony in March received royal assent at the Primate's Palace on 11 April (10 April in another source) and became the April Laws. They erased all the privileges of the Hungarian nobility and established a government responsible to parliament, a national guard, Hungarian control of the budget and of foreign policy, and the end of serfdom. To all intents and purposes Hungary had become an independent state bound to Austria only through the Palatine. 4 12 7

The new suffrage law (Act V of 1848) turned the old Estates parliament into a representative assembly. Hungary became, after France (1791) and Belgium (1831), the third country of continental Europe to enact democratic parliamentary elections, and the English Wikipedia describes its franchise as the widest in Europe at the time. The reformers won the first general election in June. One of the Diet's first acts was the abolition of serfdom, announced on 18 March. Yet the reform remained the work of the nobility. When the fervour of Pest cooled and the revolution passed into the hands of noble politicians, Petőfi criticised the Diet's goals and methods and stood unsuccessfully for parliament in his native district; his comrade Táncsics was imprisoned again by the new government. 7 3 4 10

On the Austrian side too the feudal order in the countryside collapsed. Serfdom was abolished in Galicia on 17 April 1848 and in Bukovina on 1 July. In the Reichstag, 383 deputies from the Austrian lands without Hungary, which first met on 22 July, Hans Kudlich, the not yet 25-year-old son of peasants from Austrian Silesia, moved on 26 July that "from now on the relationship of subjection, with all its rights and obligations, is abolished". An imperial patent of 7 September announced the decision, but in exchange for their freedom the peasants had to take on redemption payments (Grundentlastung). The Reichstag, with this as its most important achievement, moved to Kremsier (Kroměříž) in October and was dissolved by force on 7 March 1849. 3 13 14 15

The Prague Slavic Congress and the non-Hungarian nationalities

The Austrian Empire was home to Germans, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Ruthenians, Slovenes, Slovaks, Romanians, Croats, Italians and Serbs, all of whom sought autonomy, independence or hegemony over other nationalities in the course of the revolution. In Bohemia German nationalists wanted to take part in the elections to the Frankfurt National Assembly, but the historian František Palacký, in his "Letter to Frankfurt" of April, refused to attend the Pre-Parliament on the grounds that as a Czech he had no interest in German affairs. He wanted a strong Austria built as a federation of the southern German and Slavonic states, a programme known as Austroslavism. 3 16 17

The Slavic Congress that opened in Prague on 2 June was the first occasion on which representatives of nearly all the Slav peoples met in one place. Palacký presided; the congress met in three sections, Poles and Ruthenians, South Slavs, and Czechs and Slovaks, and Bakunin attended as a delegate. Its Manifesto to the Nations of Europe, pronounced around 10 June, demanded an end to the oppression of the Slavs and the full equality of all nations whatever their size or power. On 12 June, however, troops stopped a procession leaving a Whitsun mass in Celetná Street, and a rising of students and radical democrats began. On the first day General Windischgrätz's wife was killed by a stray bullet at her window; on the night of 14–15 June Windischgrätz withdrew his troops to the left bank of the Vltava and shelled the Old Town. By the time the insurgents capitulated on the 17th, 43 of them had been killed and 63 wounded, against 14 dead and 71 wounded in the army. Martial law was declared, the National Committee dissolved and the Congress delegates sent home. Prague was the first victory of the counter-revolution in the Austrian Empire. 18 17 19 3

Within Hungary, too, the Magyars were a majority only in the central regions. On 22 March the Croatian Sabor elected Josip Jelačić as Ban, and on 19 April Jelačić proclaimed the union of the Croatian lands and their separation from the Kingdom of Hungary. The Serbs proclaimed Serbian Vojvodina at the May Assembly in Sremski Karlovci on 13–15 May; when Kossuth refused to recognise them as a nation, remarking that only a people with its own government and state could become a nation, armed clashes followed from June. In Transylvania more than 40,000 Romanians gathered at the Blaj (Balázsfalva) assemblies in April and May to oppose union with Hungary, but on 29 May (30 May in another source) the Transylvanian Diet at Kolozsvár ratified it. In Upper Hungary the "Demands of the Slovak Nation" appeared in April, and from September the Slovak Volunteers led by Ľudovít Štúr and others fought the Hungarian government, though they raised only about 2,000 men while many more Slovaks served in the Honvéd. The court in Vienna set these national movements against the Hungarian government with conflicting promises. 4 20 21 22 3

Jelačić's invasion, Pákozd and the Vienna October Uprising

Through the summer the Hungarian government tried to win the court's support against Jelačić, even offering troops for northern Italy, but at the end of August the imperial government in Vienna ordered it to stop forming a Hungarian army. On 29 August Batthyány and Deák went to Vienna to ask that Jelačić be halted, but on 11 September Jelačić crossed the Drava and invaded Hungary, with 50,000 men according to the English Wikipedia and 35,000 according to the Hungarian. Batthyány's cabinet resigned, except for Kossuth, Szemere and Mészáros, and was then re-formed, while the Palatine, Archduke Stephen, left Hungary on the emperor's orders. Kossuth went from town to town recruiting volunteers, and the Honvéd was his creation. On 28 September Count Lamberg, who had been given command of all the armies in Hungary, was murdered by a crowd in Pest (27 September in another source). 12 4 23 22

On 29 September the Hungarian army under General János Móga stopped Jelačić at Pákozd, near Székesfehérvár. Jelačić asked for a three-day truce and withdrew towards the Austrian border, and on 7 October troops led by Colonels Artúr Görgei and Mór Perczel forced a Croatian corps of 9,000 to surrender at Ozora. Pákozd became an icon of the Hungarian army. In these weeks the Diet set up the National Defence Committee (OHB), and Kossuth as its president led what was in effect the government from the end of September. On 2 October Batthyány, realising that a peaceful compromise with the dynasty was impossible, resigned both the premiership and his seat in parliament. After the emperor's manifesto of 3 October the fortresses of Transylvania and the Banat, including Arad and Temesvár, went over to the imperial side. 4 20 24 12

On 6 October in Vienna, workers, students and mutinous soldiers tried to stop troops leaving to suppress the Hungarian revolution, and street fighting broke out. Blood was spilt in St Stephen's Cathedral, the minister of war, Count Latour, was lynched by the crowd, and the next day the emperor and the court fled to Olmütz (Olomouc). On 26 October Austrian and Croatian forces of about 75,000 under Windischgrätz and Jelačić began bombarding the city. The Hungarian commanders hesitated to cross the border and advanced only under pressure from Kossuth, to be defeated at Schwechat on 30 October. The next day imperial forces stormed the city centre. The Polish general Józef Bem, who led the defence, escaped to Hungary, but Messenhauser, the journalists Becher and Jellinek and Robert Blum, the radical deputy of the Frankfurt National Assembly who invoked his parliamentary immunity, were executed. The two sides together lost about 2,000 men. Engels blamed the defeat on the counter-revolutionary support of the "nonhistoric" Slav peoples, and his articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung took that as their starting point. 8 4 25 26 27

The accession of Franz Joseph and the Winter Campaign

After the recapture of Vienna Ferdinand I made Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg head of government, and Schwarzenberg persuaded the feeble-minded Ferdinand to abdicate. On 2 December 1848, at Olmütz, his eighteen-year-old nephew Franz Joseph ascended the throne. Hungarian accounts state the purpose of the change plainly: Ferdinand, having signed the April Laws, could not order an attack on Hungary, while Franz Joseph, who had not signed them, could. The new emperor revoked all the concessions of March and outlawed Kossuth and the Hungarian government. On 7 December the Hungarian Diet refused to recognise him as king, "as without the knowledge and consent of the diet no one could sit on the Hungarian throne"; constitutionally, Ferdinand remained the lawful king. Franz Joseph was not crowned king of Hungary until 1867. 3 28 29 5 4

On 14 December the main army under Windischgrätz crossed the Hungarian border. With Serbian, Transylvanian and Croatian troops the imperial side numbered nearly 150,000, the Hungarians around 100,000. The imperial army took Pozsony and Győr with little resistance and defeated Perczel at Mór on 30 December. Kossuth asked the American envoy Stiles to mediate, but Windischgrätz refused all terms. The government and the Diet moved to Debrecen, using the new Pest–Szolnok railway, and Kossuth took the Crown of St Stephen with him. Imperial troops entered Pest on 5 January 1849 (another source dates its surrender without a fight to 4 January). Batthyány, who had opposed the move to Debrecen and joined the delegation to Windischgrätz, was arrested in Pest on 8 January. Görgei withdrew into the northern mountains, drawing the main imperial forces after him, and broke through the Branyiszkó pass on 5 February. 4 29 19 12

In Transylvania General Puchner openly turned against the Hungarian government on 18 October and, together with Romanian insurgents, overwhelmed the Hungarian militias. The civil war there was savage for civilians on both sides. The Hungarian historian Ákos Egyed estimates that 14,000 to 15,000 people were massacred in Transylvania in 1848–1849: 7,500–8,500 Hungarians, 4,400–6,000 Romanians and about 500 Saxons, Armenians, Jews and others. The official lists published in the Wiener Zeitung give 4,834 people killed without trial by Hungarian military tribunals, 4,425 of them Romanians. Bem, who took command in December, recovered the north with 12,500 men. At the end of January 1849 7,000 Russian troops arrived and were stationed at Brassó and Nagyszeben; Bem suffered a heavy defeat at Vízakna on 4 February but won at the bridge of Piski on 9 February, and on 11 March took Nagyszeben and drove the Austrian and Russian troops out of Transylvania. 4 30 25 31

Henryk Dembiński, the Polish general whom Kossuth appointed commander-in-chief on 29 January, was defeated at Kápolna on 26–27 February. Windischgrätz exaggerated the victory and reported to the emperor that the uprising had been crushed, and the Schwarzenberg government imposed on 4 March 1849 the March (Olmütz) Constitution, which incorporated Hungary into the centralised empire. Three days later the Kremsier Reichstag was dissolved by force, and Hungary was to be carved into five military districts. To the Hungarian side this was an attempt by imperial bodies in which Hungary had never been represented to abolish a constitution centuries old. 29 4 32 13

The Spring Campaign and the Debrecen Declaration of Independence

When Görgei became temporary commander-in-chief at the end of March the Honvéd went over to the offensive. Already 100,000–110,000 strong by mid-December 1848, the revolutionary army drew about 40 percent of its private soldiers from the country's ethnic minorities, and around half its officers and generals were of foreign origin. Görgei won at Hatvan on 2 April, at Tápióbicske on the 4th and at Isaszeg on the 6th, where he defeated Windischgrätz himself, then at Vác on the 10th and Nagysalló on the 19th, and relieved the siege of Komárom on the 26th. After this series of defeats Windischgrätz was replaced, and Welden ordered the evacuation of the capital. By 14 June, when the Spring Campaign was over, the territory under the Hungarian government had grown from 95,000 to 250,000 square kilometres; only Croatia, Syrmia, the central Transylvanian mountains and a few fortresses remained outside it. 4 33 19

In the atmosphere of victory Kossuth presented a declaration of independence to a closed session of the Assembly on 13 April and to an open session the next day, and proclaimed it from the Reformed Great Church of Debrecen. It proclaimed that "the House of Habsburg-Lorraine is unexampled in the compass of its perjuries" and that "the house of Habsburg has forfeited the throne". The future form of government was left open and Kossuth became regent-president (governor), a compromise meant to satisfy both royalists and republicans. The declaration passed unanimously, but it provoked opposition from the Peace Party, which wanted only autonomy under the dynasty, and from the generals, and Görgei later blamed it for bringing in the Russians. The article on the Martyrs of Arad dates the declaration to 19 April, at odds with the other sources. A new cabinet under Bertalan Szemere was formed on 2 May, and Görgei became minister of war on 7 May. 34 5 4 35 36

Instead of pursuing the retreating Austrians, the main Honvéd army was tied down for weeks besieging Buda Castle, in which the English Wikipedia gives Kossuth a key role. The siege, begun on 4 May, dragged on against strong defences and with inadequate artillery, and the final assault of 21 May returned the capital to Hungarian control. On the same day Franz Joseph agreed with Nicholas I in Warsaw on the dispatch of a Russian army. Independent Hungary also attempted, belatedly, a reconciliation with the non-Hungarian nationalities. In May 1849 Kossuth met the Wallachian revolutionary Nicolae Bălcescu in Debrecen, and on 28 July the revolutionary parliament enacted what is counted as the first law on minority rights in Europe, recognising the use of the mother tongue in local administration and in schools. But it came after the Russians had arrived, and it was overturned when the revolution was crushed. 4 5 23 22

The Russian intervention and the surrender at Világos

By the spring of 1849 the Austrian Empire was close to collapse. On 1 May Franz Joseph asked Nicholas I for military aid by formal letter, and on 21 May in Warsaw, in the name of the Holy Alliance, he kissed the hand of the Russian tsar. Nicholas, called the "gendarme of Europe", stood at the forefront of reaction in 1848. Figures for the Russian force differ. The English Wikipedia article on the revolution gives 200,000 men with 80,000 auxiliaries; its article on the Summer Campaign gives nearly 193,000 men and 584 guns, with 60,000 more on standby in Galicia and 15,000 in Wallachia; the Hungarian Wikipedia says "nearly 200,000". The commander was Ivan Paskevich, who had taken Warsaw in 1831. The Austrian army under Julius Jacob von Haynau numbered 180,000 men with 605 guns, aided by 70,000 Romanian militiamen. The allies together had 380,000 men against 160,000 Hungarians. 4 29 23 37 38

In mid-June the Russians crossed the frontier in several columns. In the west Haynau defeated Poeltenberg at Győr on 28 June; Görgei halted him at Komárom on 2 July but was wounded and missed the battle of 11 July. The conflict between Kossuth and Görgei over the declaration of independence and the direction of operations flared again, and the government ordered a concentration at Szeged without telling him. Görgei turned east, clashed with Paskevich at Vác on 15–17 July, slipped behind the Russian lines and reached Arad on 9 August. In Transylvania Bem's army was annihilated by Lüders's Russians at Segesvár on 31 July. Petőfi was last seen alive in this battle and his body was never found; in the late 1980s records that some 1,800 prisoners were marched to Siberia gave rise to a theory that he died in Barguzin. 4 29 10 25

On 5 August Haynau crossed the Tisza and defeated Dembiński at Szőreg, and on 9 August the Hungarian southern army under Bem collapsed at Temesvár. On 11 August Kossuth resigned and handed full power to Görgei, on the ground that the general alone could save the nation. With fewer than 30,000 men, Görgei, after a council of war, surrendered to the Russian general Rüdiger at Világos (today Șiria in Romania) on 13 August. He tried to show that Hungary had been defeated by Russia and not by Austria, but the Russians handed the prisoners over to the Austrians. Kossuth crossed into the Ottoman Empire on 17 August. The remaining troops and fortresses surrendered one after another; Komárom, held by György Klapka, did not capitulate until 2 October. 4 39 5 23

Haynau's reprisals and the thirteen martyrs of Arad

After the surrender Haynau took charge of Hungary as plenipotentiary. Despite the Russian emperor's pleas for clemency, the Austrians sentenced hundreds of soldiers and civilians to death, imprisoned many more and conscripted prisoners into the Austrian army. On 6 October 1849 twelve Hungarian generals and one colonel were executed at Arad. Most of the "thirteen martyrs of Arad" were not of ethnic Hungarian origin: János Damjanich was of Serb descent, and Baron Hruby, also executed at Arad, was a German-speaking Czech. The same day in Pest the first prime minister, Lajos Batthyány, was shot. Having tried to kill himself with a knife smuggled into his cell, he was shot rather than hanged, and fell crying "Long live my country!" The minister László Csány was executed on 10 October and Zsigmond Perényi, vice-president of the upper house, on the 24th. 39 36 12 23

Görgei was spared at Russia's insistence but lived under surveillance in Klagenfurt until 1867, and Kossuth's letter from Vidin, branding him "Hungary's Judas", left him for decades with the stigma of treason, a judgement that twentieth-century research overturned. Kossuth stayed at Kütahya in the Ottoman Empire until 1851, when an invitation from the US Congress took him on triumphant tours of Britain and the United States. When Haynau later visited London, brewery draymen chased him through the streets shouting "Down with the Austrian butcher!" The revolutionary banners taken at Világos were carried off to Russia, and in 1940 the Soviet Union handed them to the Horthy government in exchange for the release of the imprisoned communist leader Mátyás Rákosi. 35 36 5 40 4

Hungary was placed under martial law. Schwarzenberg dissolved the Hungarian parliament and imposed a constitution that conceded nothing to the liberal movement, and after his death in 1852 the interior minister Alexander von Bach led the era of "neo-absolutism". Adolf Fischhof described the pillars of the Bach system as four armies: "a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of office holders, a kneeling army of priests and a fawning army of sneaks". Archduke Albrecht governed Hungary from 1851 to 1860 and pressed Germanisation, while Hungary answered with nationwide "passive resistance". Yet the emancipation of the peasants of 1848 was not reversed; under neo-absolutism internal customs duties were abolished and the peasants freed from their feudal obligations. 3 41 4

Assessment: Engels's "Magyar Struggle", the national question, 1867 and 1956

The Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which Marx published in Cologne from 1 June 1848 to 19 May 1849, treated the Hungarian revolution as the front line of the European revolution. Engels later recalled its foreign policy as "to support every revolutionary people and to call for a general war of revolutionary Europe against the mighty bulwark of European reaction, Russia". In "The Magyar Struggle", published in the paper in 1849, Engels wrote that "for the first time since 1793, a nation surrounded by superior counterrevolutionary forces dares to counter the cowardly counterrevolutionary fury by revolutionary passion, the terreur blanche by the terreur rouge", and called Kossuth a truly revolutionary figure "who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person". In the same article he applied the term Völkerabfälle to the South Slavs and other small nations he regarded as residual fragments of former peoples, prone to become "fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution", and predicted that the next world war would wipe out "not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward." 42 5 26

This passage became the starting point of a long debate on Marxism and the national question. Karl Kautsky wrote in 1915 that since 1848–1849 the Czechs and the Austrian South Slavs had transformed themselves in a way that refuted the views of Marx and Engels in practice. The Ukrainian-born Marxist Roman Rosdolsky revised his Vienna doctoral thesis of 1929 in 1948 and published it in 1964 as Friedrich Engels und das Problem der "geschichtslosen" Völker (in English, Engels and the "Nonhistoric" Peoples). He argued that the concept of "nonhistoric peoples" was borrowed from Hegel, and that Engels overlooked the class contradiction between the German-Austrian burghers and the Polish and Hungarian aristocrats and landowners on one side and the broad Slav peasant masses they oppressed on the other. According to Rosdolsky, from 1867 at the latest Marx and Engels revised their position of 1849, distinguishing oppressor from oppressed nations, and Lenin built a politics of national self-determination on the principle that a nation which oppresses another cannot be free. The anti-communist literary historian George Watson, for his part, translated Völkerabfälle as "racial trash" and went so far as to conclude that Hitler was a Marxist, a reading others have called an ideological distortion. 26 27

Memory differs from country to country. In Hungary 1848–1849 is the cornerstone of modern national identity; 15 March is a national holiday and 6 October a day of mourning. In Croatia Jelačić is remembered as a hero who separated Croatia from Hungary and abolished serfdom. In Romania Avram Iancu is the "Prince of the Mountains" who led the peasants, and Romanian Marxist historians celebrated the contact between Bălcescu and Kossuth. On the toll of the Transylvanian massacres, Hungarian estimates and the Habsburg court's census of 1850 distrust each other. Kossuth himself came to think in exile that confronting the minorities had been his greatest mistake, and he sketched a Danubian Confederation. The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 restored the April Laws, except those based on the ninth and tenth points, but Kossuth condemned it in his "Cassandra letter". On 23 October 1956 the protest in Budapest began at the statue of General Bem, and that revolution too was crushed by Russian, that is Soviet, troops. 4 36 20 22 30 5 43 25 44