István Széchenyi

Hungary state institutions Liberalism and republicanism 1791–1860 ✕ Suicide

Reforming count who drove Hungary's modernisation, from the Academy of Sciences to the Chain Bridge, and sat in the 1848 cabinet

Born in Vienna in 1791 into the Széchenyis, an old and influential Hungarian noble family, he joined the Austrian army at seventeen, fought in the Napoleonic Wars and left the service as a captain in 1826. In 1825 he gave a year's income from his estates, 60,000 forints, to found the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and in writings such as Hitel (Credit, 1830) he urged the nobility to give up its feudal privileges. He promoted the regulation of the lower Danube for navigation and the Chain Bridge, the first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest. Envisaging gradual reform within the Habsburg monarchy, he opposed Kossuth's radicalism. In March 1848 he became minister of ways and communications in the Batthyány government, but in early September a nervous breakdown sent him to an asylum at Oberdöbling and out of politics. He shot himself in 1860.

Also known as: Stephen Széchenyi · Count István Széchenyi