Enlightened aristocracy: Hungary’s quadrilingual era

There is an old joke: if you speak three languages you are trilingual. If you speak two, you are bilingual. If you speak only one you are Anglo-Saxon. It may be true that many Brits (and especially Americans) are monolingual, but few regions outside Scandinavia have quadrilingual groups in society. And yet in Hungary during the Enlightenment, many in the aristocracy spoke four languages: French, Latin, German and — last, possibly least — Hungarian.

French was the language of the aristocracy. With no educated middle class in Hungary, it fell to the aristocrats to disseminate the ideas of the French Enlightenment. They could do so because they had the time and the money and their writings were not censored. The aristocracy did a remarkably good job, so much so that they created the conditions for their eventual elimination from the political and cultural life of the nation – the ultimate paradox.

In speaking French, the Hungarian aristocracy were not unique. This was true for many other European countries, including Russia, which was ruled at the time by Tsarina Ekaterina (Catherine) the Great: an unsurprisingly conservative leader. The situation was somewhat better in Hungary under Maria Theresa, the Habsburg Queen-Empress (1740-1780), but not all that much better.

Whilst Maria Theresa turned a blind eye to the reformist inclinations of some of the men in her court (Chancellor Kaunitz and her court physician Van Swieten), she was not interested in religious tolerance. She hated the Protestants and regarded them as heretics. Many of them were exiled to Transylvania, many others put in prison. So stark was her religious policy that Maria Theresa’s own son, who became King of Hungary as Joseph II on her death, is said to have condemned it as “unjust, impious, impossible, harmful and ridiculous”.

Nonetheless, Latin was still alive and kicking, the language of the Hungarian Parliament for another hundred years. In the battle for who-speaks-what, Latin fought a good rearguard action. In its import from France, Rousseau’s Social Contract was translated into Latin, not Hungarian. In fact, I believe Hungary may have been the only country in the world where new ideas were translated into a dead language. And this happened not only with highbrow polemics. The sans-culotte version of the French Revolution song “Ca ira”, for example, shared the same fate. Here is the first verse of the original:

Ah! Ca ira! Ca ira! Ca ira!

Les aristocrats a la Lanterne!

Ah, Ca ira! Ca ira! Ca ira!

Les aristocrats on les pendra

And the Latin translation:,

Ah, Ibit hoc! Ibit hoc! Ibit hoc!

Aristocratae vobiscum ad Lanternam,

Ah, Ibit hoc! Ibit hoc! Ibit hoc!

Aristocratae vos pendebitis

And in English:

Ah, It will be alright! It will be alright! It will be alright!

Aristocrats to the lamp-posts,

Ah, it will be alright! It will be alright! It will be alright!

Aristocrats, you will hang.

It sounds bloodthirsty in all three languages. Remarkably, this song addresses itself directly to the aristocrats. Instead of encouraging the lower classes to rise and kill the aristocrats, it tells the upper classes what they can look forward to: lamp-posts as suitable places for them to be hanged.

And what of Hungarian? Once the domain of peasants and coachmen, its role was also about to change. Under the leadership of the scholars Ferenc Kazinczy and Gyorgy Bessenyei, it was reborn, elevated from the common parlance into a literary language. Hundreds of new words were created. Though no Shakespeare (to whom over 1,500 new words are attributed), one prolific linguist ventured to create twelve Hungarian-sounding names for all twelve months, emulating the French: Thermidor, Fructidor, Brumaire, etc.

Alongside these was, of course, the official language of the Holy Roman Empire: German. This was not uncontroversial, however. Whereas Maria Theresa was quite happy to live with several languages, herself speaking at least four, her son’s attempts to “Germanise” the administration were heavily resisted by educated Hungarians. They saw his Enlightenment-inspired reforms as an assault on Latin. And the Hungarian aristocracy resisted that, tooth and nail. Their resistance was so strong that poor King Joseph had to withdraw all his reforms on his deathbed.

Despite this display of traditionalism and their earlier “extra Hungariam non est vita” attitude, the aristocracy soon fell under the influence of the surging Francophone wave. They spoke French, translated from French, and several Hungarian aristocrats even corresponded directly with the giants of French literature and philosophy. Everything written in French was celebrated. The aristocracy tried to absorb not only the French language but French culture too.

The most diligent translator and practitioner of the French language in prose and poetry was Count Janos Fekete. What attracted him to French revolutionary ideas was not so much the idea of equality, of which he did not fully approve, but their spirit of anti-clericalism and libertarianism. He corresponded with Voltaire himself, sending him poems he had written in French for comment. Fekete always got a reply from the great man, although this might have had less to do with the literary merits of the missives and more with the 100 bottles of Tokaji wine accompanying each letter.

Hungary therefore had a particular dilemma in the age of Enlightenment: which language to use for reform. French was short-lived, German had the disadvantage of aggressive promotion by an alien King. Latin’s popularity continued well beyond its natural trajectory elsewhere. Yet it was Hungarian that was eventually chosen by Parliament to be the nation’s official language, though not until 1845.

As an addendum, it is worth mentioning that under Communism all Hungarian schoolchildren had compulsory Russian lessons. Language teachers were told to swap from any other language to teaching Russian. They were only one week ahead of the schoolchildren. Certainly, there was no Latin, no French, and no German. Mind you, there were no aristocrats either.

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation.