The Czechoslovak Capital of West Germany: The Story of Peute Reederei

Jan Štemberk
Charles University
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Ivan Jakubec
Charles University / University of Economics, Prague
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 3  (2021):495-528 DOI 10.38145/2021.3.495

“To Maintain the Biological Substance of the Polish Nation”: Reproductive Rights as an Area of Conflict in Poland

Michael Zok
Deutsches Historisches Institut, Warsaw
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 2  (2021):357-381 DOI 10.38145/2021.2.357

On October 22, 2020, the long-term dispute about reproductive rights in Polish society had a comeback. The Constitutional Tribunal declared the embryo-pathological indication of abortions guaranteed by the law of 1993 to be unconstitutional. The tribunal’s ruling was met with widespread protests, as it effectively forbade almost all reasons for terminations of pregnancies. While members of the Church’s hierarchy and pro-life activists celebrated, politicians began once again to discuss the law, and different suggestions were made (including a draft law similar to laws in effect in other European countries like Germany, and a law which would allow the termination of a pregnancy if the fetus were likely to die, or a law forbidding them in the case that the fetus had been diagnosed as having down’s syndrome). The debates are hardly new to Polish society and history. On the contrary, they date back to the recreation of the Polish state after World War I. This article concentrates on the developments in the Communist People’s Republic that led to the legislation of 1993, which is commonly referred to as a “compromise.” It focuses on the main actors in this dispute and the policymakers and their arguments. It also contextualizes these discursive strategies in a long-term perspective and highlights continuities and ruptures.

Keywords: Catholicism, demography, reproductive rights, Poland

Some Remarks on Actors, Sources, and Figures

In this article, I focus on the last two decades of Communist reign in Poland and the first decade after its downfall as the beginning phase of the country’s transformation from a socialist to a post-socialist society. I have chosen this timeframe because considerable research has already been done on the years immediately after World War II and on the 1950s and 1960s.1 Since this research has tended to concentrate on organizations such as the Polish Family Planning Association2 and the discourses in scientific periodicals3 and advisory literature,4 I focus on other actors and materials. The main agents on which I focus in this study are the institutions of the state bureaucracy, including both ministries and political parties, and Catholic organizations, e.g., the Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia (Kluby Inteligencji Katolickiej; KIK ). I have also had to reframe my inquiry in response to limitations created by the COVID-19 pandemic, which have made it difficult to access archival materials. Luckily, I was able to collect and analyze some sources from the Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw (Archiwum Akt Nowych; AAN) in periods when the circumstances allowed limited access to its collections containing the sources relevant to the abovementioned organizations and institutions. If one wishes to consider the roles of the actors involved in the discourse on reproductive rights, it would be fruitful to examine the materials of the Polish Medical Association (Polskie Towarzystwo Lekarskie) and the debates on reproductive rights and behavior that were held among physicians. Unfortunately, this is not possible, not only due the pandemic, but also because the materials are stored in the organization’s archive—with the exception of medical journals that were analyzed, for instance, by Agata Ignaciuk.5 Thus, this article concentrates on the (at times public, at times behind-the-scenes) discourse among representatives of the state bureaucracy, political parties, and Catholic organizations.

I should make a second remark concerning the statistical data used in this article. After the liberalization of abortion in April 1956 and the implementation of new liberal instructions in 1959 (which made it possible for a woman to get an abortion on request),6 the state-run hospitals kept records of the procedures that were performed. Opponents of the liberalized law often made references to these records in their public statements, but the figures they cite should be called into question given the striking inconsistencies. They also used other figures of unknown origin. For instance, in 1970, the Catholic NGO Polish Committee on the Defense of Life and the Family (Polski Komitet Obrony Życia i Rodziny, PKOŻiR) estimated the number of “Polish citizens who have not been born because of the existing law” at 800,000 in the time period between 1956 and 1970.7 Also in 1970, the leader of the Polish Episcopate, Primate Stefan Wyszyński, wrote in an aide-memoir addressed to the government of the “dangers to the biological and moral substance of the nation.” Wyszyński claimed that every year one million abortions were carried out in Poland.8 These estimates show how difficult it is to determine with any precision how many abortions were actually performed in Poland. Of course, the accuracy of any given figure may well depend on the person who is citing it and his or her political agenda. A study which draws on the experiences of women by interviewing them may yield some insights on this question.9

Another question comes up concerning the number of abortions performed in Poland. Some historians have argued that the decrease in the number of abortions carried out in state-run hospitals in the 1980s was the consequence of the broad commercialization of abortions.10 In my opinion, this statement is rather problematic for three reasons. First, as mentioned above, the figures cited by opponents of the existing law were often very different and perhaps sometimes exaggerated. Second, the 1980s were a decade of economic and political crisis, leading to the downfall of Communism in Poland. Thus, it would be surprising if, under these dire circumstances, (expensive) private clinics had flourished. It is also impossible to give a definite answer to this question because there are no broad studies on the health and welfare systems in People’s Poland during the 1980s and in the first decade of the so-called Third Republic. And third, some statistics include terminations of pregnancies carried out at private clinics.11 However, it is hard to tell if all abortions in private clinics were reported, or if even there was any obligation to report these procedures.

Therefore, in this article, I use the official numbers as indicators, but I keep in mind that there may have been a high number of abortions performed in private clinics.

A Short Overview: Abortions in the First Half of the Twentieth Century in Poland

The recreation of the Polish state after 123 years under Prussian/German, Austrian, and Russian rule made it necessary to reunify political institutions, infrastructure, education, etc. This included the unification of the juridical systems. Regarding the question of the termination of pregnancies, the so-called “Makarewicz codex” from 1932 legalized abortions in extreme cases of danger to the mother’s health or life or if the pregnancy was the result of a crime (rape, incest, or sexual intercourse with minors).12 This legislation was upheld and reestablished (after a short time during World War II, when the German occupiers allowed Polish women to have abortions on request),13 and it remained in force until 1956.14

This changed in 1956 after a public discussion about the necessity of liberalizing women’s access to abortions on request. The main argument for this was the number of illegal abortions performed in back-alley clinics that led to women being injured or dying. An estimated 300,000 of such abortions were performed per year.15 Although met by heavy resistance from the Church and Catholic MPs in the Sejm, who condemned abortions as “murder” and accused supporters of the liberalization of the existing law of being “neo-Malthusians” who sought to pass a “genocidal” law,16 the majority of the Polish parliament voted to change the law in effect and give women easier access to abortion.

Needless to say, this step was criticized by the Church, especially by Primate Stefan Wyszyński, who called the Sejm’s decision a “monstrosity” and declared that it was in contradiction with a woman’s “innate and national mission.”17 In the aftermath, he tried to use his authority as the highest Church dignitary to influence doctors and nurses. Thus, women’s requests were denied, even though they were legal according to the law of 1956.18

The Parliamentary Circle ZNAK (Sign), which was formed after the political liberalization in 1956 and was tightly connected to the KIK, also argued against the new law. At the end of the 1960s, the (all-male) members of ZNAK sent a submission to the Ministry of Health in which they claimed that “a woman’s absolute freedom” would inevitably lead to misuse, and they demanded the introduction of new restrictions.19 Jan Kostrzewski, the Minister of Health at the time, rejected their request. He argued that the law in effect would guarantee “women’s right to self-determination,” and he rejected any restrictions, because “as experience shows, prohibitions and compulsion only lead to illegal procedures and moral as well as biological damage.”20

This is one of the few examples in which there was explicit reference to women’s reproductive rights and a woman’s right to self-determination. The discourse, including the discourse used by the ruling Polish United Workers’ Party (Polska Zjednocznona Partia Robotnicza; PUWP), relied heavily on references to the dangers posed to women’s health and lives.21 Party experts argued that “terminations of pregnancies are not the healthiest method” of limiting the number of children, but they were aware that, because of the prevailing circumstances (i.e., the lack of effective contraceptives due to the Socialist economy of scarcity and the low level of knowledge concerning methods of contraception), abortions were a “necessary evil.” They argued that a ban on abortion would only drive women to seek illegal abortions.22

These examples show the opposing sides in this dispute. In the decade and a half following the Sejm’s decision of 1956, the ruling party defended the law as just and underlined that it was a “necessary evil.” In the 1970s, however, the dynamics of this issue shifted.

Debates on Reproductive Rights in the 1970s: The Perception of “Crises”

The debates dating back to the 1970s saw the rise of different “crises.” Especially in the late years of the decade, “demographic and social disturbances” were addressed, e.g., in the (Catholic) press. Studies by sociologists, e.g., in (new) urban centers, underlined the transformation of the family, which included “decreased size of family, diminished authority of husband/father, increase in extramarital sexual contacts, increased numbers of wage-earning married women, greater personal freedom of family members [etc.].”23 The Church was also alarmed. It saw a “crisis of marriage,” although the numbers of divorces in communist Poland were very low compared to other European or Western countries. In 1960, there were 2.3 divorces per 1,000 marriages. By 1975, this number had risen to 5 per 1,000.24 In fact, the 1970s bore witness in Poland to a rising number of marriages. In the period between 1971 and 1978, 2.85 million couples were married, of whom 85 percent were “young” couples, i.e., both partners were younger than 30 years old.25

The state and party experts on family and demography did not agree with the Church’s interpretation. The Ministry of Justice in particular argued that the new Family and Welfare Code, introduced in 1964, was designed to “ensure the durability of marriage and family.”26 It therefore made it harder for couples who had separated to get a juridically sanctioned divorce. This was especially true if the couple had young children. The Ministry reminded the judges that divorces were “socially undesirable phenomena”27 and should be treated as an ultima ratio to prevent “social pathologies.”28 Thus, the Ministry had a negative stance with regard to divorces which was very similar to (if not as negative as) the Church’s attitude, which considered them a “plague.”29

However, neither the Church’s negative attitude nor the administrative measures stopped the increase of juridically sanctioned divorces in the 1970s.30 In 1979, the courts acknowledged 40,300 demands for abortions. 31 percent of the women requesting a divorce were younger than 30 years old and had at least one child.31

Another threat, according to the Church, was the “disappearance” of the Polish people, because the postwar baby boom had ended, and an average family, especially in urban centers, wanted to have only one or two children.32 Although compared to other European countries, the percentage of the population of Poland that could be considered young was still very high (52 percent was under 30) and the number of young married couples was increasing in the 1970s, the figures regarding childbirth oscillated. In 1970, 546,000 children were born, and this number increased to 582,000 in 1973,33 a higher figure than in 1967, when only 520,400 children were born.34

The Episcopate saw these shifts as a danger to the “biological substance of the nation.” Two aides-memoir, addressed to the government in 1970 and 1977, summed up the Church’s perception of this threat.35 One main reason to which the documents alluded was the liberal law on abortion and working women who could not devote their lives to providing care for their loved ones. The Episcopate also accused the government of willingly limiting the number of children through the means of “anti-natalist” propaganda and “a broad front of contraceptives,”36 although there was a lack of effective contraception in Poland throughout the communist period.37 The Episcopate’s aide-memoir advocated a ban on contraceptives, in particular on the sale of contraceptives to young people.38

As noted above, Primate Wyszyński cited a figure of 1,000,000 abortions per year39 and the allegedly decreasing fertility of Polish women as his main arguments against the existing laws, and he advocated a “proactive demographic [read: pro-natalist] policy.” His contentions are contradicted by the numbers registered by the state-run hospitals: The official numbers of registered abortions dropped from 196,000 in 1962 to 133,000 in 1977.40

But state and party experts also disagreed with the other accusations made by the Church concerning the government and its policies. They argued that, in 1970 and 1977, the Church had offered some dramatically misleading references to the official numbers given by the Main Statistics Office (GUS, Główny Urząd Statystyczny). E.g., Mikołaj Latuch, professor at the Main School of Planning and Statistics (SGPiS, Szkoła Główna Planowania i Stastyki, today the SGH Warsaw School of Economics), was convinced that the aide-memoir had a “propaganda” purpose and was not designed to give scientifically proven answers or interpretations.41 Another expert, Zbigniew Smoliński, who was responsible in the GUS for demographic issues, stated that “the aide-memoir is full of errors with regard to its content” and that, in general, the Episcopate was not able to understand demographic developments or to interpret the numbers correctly. Another expert was convinced that the Church’s aim was to challenge the law on abortion, and that it had made its (selective) arguments in an attempt to discredit the existing legislation, which was “to us a tool of birth regulation, not its cause.”42 Kazimierz Kąkol, the chief of the Office for Confessional Issues (Urząd do spraw Wyznań), who was responsible for maintaining the dialogue and observing the Church’s activities, argued in his statement on the aide-memoir from 1977 that the Episcopate was “doctrinaire” and that it “refuses [to acknowledge] arguments on a rational basis.”43

Furthermore, the state experts stated that the drop in family size, especially in urban centers, was not an effect of the existing laws or the lack of an efficient housing policy. Instead, they argued it was a normal development in industrialized countries. E.g., Kazimierz Romaniuk was convinced that “the 1960s brought Poland back to the [demographic and reproductive] circumstances that are characteristic for all developed countries in Europe,”44 and his colleague Jerzy Piotrowski argued that “a demographic catastrophe has occurred in none of the countries with similar developments.” The latter also contended that “the world’s main problem is rather the excessive growth of the [global] population.” Regarding the aide-memoir, he stated that its authors had chosen the numbers they used in their statement selectively. In particular, the Episcopate’s focus on families with many children was problematic, as Piotrowski explicated, because in his opinion, “having many children was seldom the result of a [willful] decision, [and occurred instead because of] carelessness, alcoholism, inattention to children.”45 He argued that a ban on divorces would not eliminate the problem of couples living separately, and outlawing abortions would lead to illegal procedures. Instead, it was necessary to raise the people’s “culture,” and this could only be achieved through education.46 This was a common argument in defense of the 1956 law.47

Statistics from the 1970s indicated that 45 percent of couples had only one child, and almost 28 percent had two children. Couples without offspring accounted for 18 percent of the total.48 One problem with this statistic is its lack of a subdivision of the numbers according to the ages of the couples and the duration of marriage. As a survey from this period shows, 60 percent of married couples wanted to have two children, which they considered “ideal.” 27 percent wanted to have three children, and only 0.2 percent did not want any children. Unsurprisingly, the number of desired children was closely linked with the educational attainment, especially the woman’s educational level.49 Economic circumstances (particularly housing problems) also played a major role, as did thoughts concerning the ideal way of bringing up children. The government, for its part, advocated the formula “2+3” as the ideal family size.50

But this reasoning convinced neither the Church and its representatives nor Catholic lay organizations like the abovementioned KIK or the Polish Committee for the Defense of Life and Family (PKOŻiR). Although the Committee was a small lay organization, it was closely connected to the Church, and it organized pilgrimages and functioned as a fund-raising group. Its members, mostly men (though there were also some couples), estimated (as mentioned above) that “800,000 Poles” had not been born because of the existing law. The committee argued that the legislation was responsible for the “ill fate of millions of women” who were not able to bear children. Furthermore, its members alleged that there was a connection between the law on abortion and Nazi atrocities during the war.51 The latter became an integral part of the discourse on abortion.

Closely connected to the question of the permissibility of terminating pregnancies on request, infertility was perceived as a threat to the sustainability and growth of the Polish population. The Clubs of the Catholic Intelligentsia estimated that 20 percent of Poland’s young newlywed women were infertile because they had decided to terminate their first pregnancy, although they did not indicate the source or sources on which they based these figures. The Clubs concluded that abortions were the main reason for the “bad quality of children born,”52 and they argued that “with regard to the concern about the quality of the population, the termination of the first pregnancy in particular is extremely harmful, as is commonly known [emphasis mine – M. Z.].”53

The question of infertility was one of the major problems perceived with regard to abortions by the state bureaucracy and the Church, as noted above.54 And it was the core argument for both sides in their support for a ban on abortions in the case of the Church and the liberalization of the law in order to end illegal procedures on the part of the state. Therefore, the Ministry for Health and Welfare had its own numbers, based on its broad network of resident physicians. Although the total number of women who died as a consequence of an abortion was very low (12 cases per year in the 1970s), the alleged effects of the termination of the first pregnancy troubled the Ministry. After the procedure, 2 percent of subsequent pregnancies ended in a preterm delivery and 4 to 8 percent ended in a late delivery. However, the termination of the first pregnancy was estimated to have led to spontaneous abortion of the next pregnancy in 38 percent of the cases. Even if it was not the first pregnancy but rather a later one that was terminated, 30 percent of the next gravidity was concerned. The study came to the unsurprising result that women using contraceptives had less abortions.55

The Clubs accused the government of deliberately trying to destroy the Polish nation by allowing abortions and the use of contraceptives. Functionaries of the state bureaucracy characterized these statements as “absurd” and emphasized the “progressive nature” of the law. Although not denying the negative effects entirely, they highlighted that the number of women assumed to have died in the aftermath of an abortion was very low because the abortions were performed in hygienic surroundings.56

But in the 1970s, concerns about demographic trends began to appear in documents taken from different branches of the party. The Administrative Department of PUWP’s Central Committee, for example, called the abovementioned “dominance of families with only one or two children” “alarming.”57 The figures from this decade showed that while the percentage of children and youth was falling, the number of old people in the “post-productive age” was increasing because of improvements in the healthcare system.58 One document estimated that from 1985 onwards, Polish society would become too old, demographically, to support itself.59 To overcome these problems, voices in the party underlined that it was necessary to restrict abortions to the requirements stated in the law of 1956. This was aimed at private clinics in particular.

During the 7th Party Congress in 1975, party member Barbara Sidorczuk from Kalisz argued that because of women’s double burden (children and work), they decided to have fewer children and at an older age. She referred to the conclusions of demographers who warned that “the decrease in the number of births can become a dangerous trend for the biological future of the nation.” Furthermore, she argued that the decision to have less children “was not taken because of a woman’s genuine convictions” but was influenced by the “problems of fulfilling the many roles” women had.60 Even Edward Gierek, the party leader of PUWP at the time, addressed the demographic problems during a meeting with female representatives in March 1975. The year had been declared an international women’s year by the United Nations Organization; women’s problems regarding in connection with work, children, society, and culture were broadly discussed. During the March meeting, only days before International Women’s Day, Gierek declared that “demographic prognoses indicate that, by the end of the century, the number of Poles should surpass 40 million. To continue the work we have begun, a correct development of the nation and an optimal structure of the population and age are needed. To surpass or even only to reach the figure of 40 million by the end of the century, population growth has to increase. Our state did not always have to introduce an active demographic policy. Today, it has become a necessity.”61 These examples show that, despite their rivalry and ideological differences, Church and party perceived similar threats to the “biological substance of the nation,” especially towards the end of the 1970s.

The Catholic actors in this discourse criticized more than the liberal law on abortion. They also held a grudge against “artificial” contraception, like condoms, IUDs, or the “pill.” Their argument was based on the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which banned “artificial” methods of contraception and which had a major impact on Catholic countries.62 Thus, the so-called rhythm method was the only method of contraception that was taught during pre-marriage courses held by the Church and lay persons from KIK. While the courses described the issue in detail using various graphs, for example, concerning the days of a woman’s cycle when she is ovulating, etc.,63 other methods of contraception either were not mentioned or were described as “harmful.” One example is a review by a priest who criticized the proposed outline of such a course to be erroneous, because the part about artificial methods “lacks the basic argumentation against contraceptives[,] that the marital act of connecting and uniting” would suffer.64 Proposed courses and texts by sexologists cooperating with the Clubs were criticized, as one example highlights. The reviewer’s critique focused on the author’s concentration on “artificial” contraception and on the fact that he did not mention “natural” methods. The author’s generally liberal perspective on contraception was perceived as “appropriate for students of medicine,” but not for the courses organized by the Clubs.65 According to one proposal intended for the course instructors which also discussed the structure of the courses, the problem of the termination of pregnancies should be addressed twice: immediately during the first session and during the session about children.66 In the 1980s, the Clubs added that “contraceptives created an anti-natalist attitude among parents,”67 and they advocated “natural methods,” because “they are reliable, cheap, and they do not cause harm.”68

The “Conservative Backlash” in the 1980s and Early 1990s

The 1980s, the last decade of communist rule in Poland and the decade prior to the law of 1993, saw a shift in power. Factors influencing this development included the election of Krakow’s Archbishop Karol Wojtyła as pope John Paul II and the Church’s role first as a sanctuary for dissidents and, later, during the social and economic unrest, as a mediator between the “Party” and “society.” The aforementioned Catholic lay organizations, especially the KIK but also ZNAK as the parliamentary representation of Catholic Social Thought, were very active during this decade. They used their growing influence to challenge the existing law and to submit several draft bills to restrict abortion and, in some cases, even contraception, despite the fact that the number of registered procedures in state-run hospitals had sunk to about 58,000 abortions per year69 and was therefore only a fraction of the figures from the 1960s.

Agata Ignaciuk argues that the decrease in registered abortions in state-run hospitals was accompanied by an increase of procedures in private clinics and that the actual figures concerning the numbers of abortions performed had remained the same or had increased. In one of her articles, she refers to a survey undertaken after 1989 showing that a high percentage of women had an abortion. The 2013 survey indicated that one third of women between 45 and 54 years of age at the time of the study had had an abortion. The percentage for women between 55 and 64 years was even higher (42 percent).70 This is surprising, especially for the 1980s, which was a decade of almost permanent political as well as economic crisis but which interestingly saw growth in the number of private clinics.

The argument provided by Catholic actors was essentially a continuation of the discourse from the 1970s and referred to “biological” reasons. In an aide-memoir from 1987, the Szczecin branch of the KIK repeated the contention that the law in effect endangered the “biological substance of the nation” and its moral foundations. Its wording and content were very similar to the aides-memoir of the Episcopate from the 1970s. The Club’s argumentation also invoked international treaties, such as the United Nations Resolution condemning genocide (1948), and it contended that abortion was a means to conduct such mass atrocities.71 The reference to genocide was commonly used by pro-life-activists in Poland, as noted above. This notion was closely connected, of course, to the experiences of World War II and the Nazi plans to exterminate the Polish elites.

Furthermore, the Szczecin branch argued that it was “a scientific fact that life begins with conception.” Hence, every “artificial termination is a murder with willful intent.”72 In Gdansk, the branch underlined that a law “that enables every person to decide about a human life is injustice,” and it emphasized the personal rights of the fetus, which was seen as an autonomous being independent of its mother. Therefore, the argument went, a pregnant woman should not have any power over the “unborn.”73

These demands were met with resistance from (state-run) women’s organizations. Like other supporters of the status quo, the Women’s League (Liga Kobiet) underlined in its statement dated April 1989 that restrictions on abortion would lead to an increase in illegal termination of pregnancies. It warned of a return to pre-1956 conditions, when the procedures were performed in back-alley clinics instead of “aseptic hospitals.” This return would multiply the dangers to women’s health and lives. As a possible solution, the League underlined the importance of sex education and effective contraception, while at the same time rejecting the Catholic side’s exclusive insistence on “natural methods.” The League’s arguments were based in part on the uncertainties women faced and their “shattered living conditions.”74

However, the modified political system of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was the result of negotiations between the party and the opposition supported by the Church, experienced a power shift that neither side had foreseen.75 After the partly free elections on June 4, 1989, the reestablished Upper Chamber, the Senate, consisted entirely of members of Solidarity (Solidarność), which had been founded as an independent trade union in 1980 and which was converted, after it had become legal again, into a political actor. In addition to the seats won in Senate, its members also won every free mandate in the Lower Chamber, the Sejm, and they made up 35 percent of the total MPs. The result was a political stalemate which could only be solved by electing Tadeusz Mazowiecki Prime Minister. Mazowiecki was the first non-communist government leader in Poland since World War II, and he was a member of ZNAK and the Warsaw branch of the KIK.

In April 1990, the new Solidarity-dominated Senate was working on a new law on abortion. The draft bill that was discussed in the Upper Chamber, which was based on a paper written by an experts’ commission of the Episcopate76 and anticipated a prohibition on abortions (except in the case of a risk to the life of the mother) and contraceptives (such as the pill and IUDs),77 was very similar in its goals to the demands made in the Church’s aides-memoir in the previous decade.78 A few members of the Senate tried to include “social indications” (which was part of the existing law of 1956) as a reason for a request for an abortion, but they were outvoted.79

The beginning of the transformation was perceived as a period of massive insecurity. This probably influenced the Second National Medical Assembly’s decision to vote for a more conservative codex in December 1991.80 Because of this, the numbers of registered abortions decreased even more, from more than 30,000 in 1991 to 11,640 in 1992.81

Two years after the partly free elections, the first free popular vote took place. It was a victory for the traditionalist “Christian democratic” and “Christian nationalist” parties, which would form a government coalition. The question of abortion was central, despite the social and economic hardships which Polish society experienced in this period.

New and Old Supporters of Liberalization and Restriction

After the first completely free elections in 1991, the first two right-wing governmental coalitions sped up the adoption of a new law on abortion. The parties that were members of these coalitions had been founded during the beginning of the political transformation in 1989 and 1990. Most of them saw themselves as heirs to the legacy of the opposition movement Solidarity, and they described themselves as “Christian democratic.” These parties included, for instance, the Centre Alliance (Porozumienie Centrum; PC), the first party of Jarosław Kaczyński, today’s leader of the governing Law and Justice Party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość; PiS). Another example is the Christian Democratic Labor Party (Chrześcijańsko-Demokratyczne Stronnictwo Pracy; ChDSP) which considered itself the reincarnation of the Christian democratic party from the interwar years. Others who joined the coalition explicitly called themselves “Christian national,” such as the Christian National Union (Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe; ZChN).

The new political system and the first free elections in 1991 did not lead to immediate stabilization. Because of the fragmentation of the votes during the election, the formation of government coalitions was problematic and necessary. Therefore, concessions and compromises had to be made. During Jan Olszewski’s tenure as Prime Minister (December 1991–July 1992), when the idea of a new law on abortion was discussed, the coalition consisted of four parties (the aforementioned PC and ZChN and two even smaller conservative parties representing rural interests). Their number in the governing coalition increased during the tenure in office of Olszewski’s successor as Prime Minister, Hanna Suchocka (July 1992–October 1993). The seven (and for a short time eight82) parties83 had very different ambitions. Unsurprisingly, the governing coalition lasted only 15 months.

The parties had different views on the future course of the so-called Third Republic, and they quarreled over specific political problems, e.g., the political system, the competences of the state president, etc.84 However, the “Christian” parties had a common stance on abortions and wanted to outlaw them,85 while the liberal and centrist parties were split when it came to this question. The emphasis placed on the question of regulating terminations of pregnancies is most obvious in a flyer by ChDSP. Here, the party’s pro-life-attitude and its demand for the “protection of life” has the second highest priority, surpassed only by the sovereignty of the Polish state.86 Also, different actors on the political right constructed themselves as representatives of a nation which “is 95 percent Catholic” and which hence had to be ruled by Catholic morals and defended against “secularization,” “communism,” “liberalism,” and “nihilism.”

As noted above, the centrist and liberal parties were split on this issue. One obvious example was the Democratic Union (Unia Demokratyczna; UD) that was part of the governing coalition in 1992–1993. The party’s women’s circle referred to the resolution of the European Council from 1990 guaranteeing women the right to reproductive self-determination, and it advocated a liberal law. Some of the party’s MPs, for instance Barbara Labuda, represented this position in parliament, for which she was attacked by male party members87 and by delegates from the Christian democratic parties.88 On the political left, the parties opposed a more restrictive law. This included the Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland (SdRP; Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polski), the successor of the Communist PUWP, and the Polish Socialist Party (PPS; Polska Partia Socjalistyczna), a reestablished version of the left-wing party that had been forced into fusion with the Communist Party in 1948.

The PPS was strictly against the new law. In a flyer entitled “Down with police law! We are against the ban on abortion [...],” the party stated that the new law would “interfere with a woman’s right to family planning” and that the conservative-dominated parliament, [its attempt to] try to take control over the private lives of individuals, takes the path of Stalin, Hitler, Ceauşescu, dictators who were against the right to abortions.” The PPS concluded, as the PUWP expert had in earlier decades, that “police and prison will not solve the problem.”89 Although the PPS believed that “abortions are a barbaric act,” it was, in its opinion, wrong “to try to have them eliminated by prohibitions based on parliamentary decisions.” It argued that the numbers of interventions prior to the legalization of abortion in Poland in 1956 (and also in other countries) showed the ineffectiveness of such restrictions. Furthermore, the party feared that in an impoverished society like the Polish one, illegal abortions would become a large-scale phenomenon once again. It favored contraceptives and sex education as the only means to master the situation, and it underlined that a ban on abortion would lead Poland back to the Middle Ages, especially in comparison to the rest of Europe.90

In September 1990, the SdRP criticized the aforementioned Senate draft bill to restrict abortions as an “unrealistic promise that nobody is able to realize.” Furthermore, the party stated that this “fatal draft” would turn women into “aboulic birthing machines,” and it lamented the fact that there was no public discussion on the issue.91 It rejected the penalization of abortions and proposed that (sex) education and contraceptives were the best means to limit the number of interventions. It concluded that “the dramatic decision which a woman [in such a situation] has to take should be based on moral and not juridical categories.”92 The party made the following declaration in its election program: “We believe that women should be in charge of deciding how many children they will bear.”93 Instead of a restrictive law, the SdRP was in favor of a solution similar to the German one: the terminations of pregnancies should be legal in cases of medical and criminological indication and non-punishable on request during the first trimester. Furthermore, a pregnant woman was obligated to have a counseling interview before the procedure. The authors of the SdRP draft bill argued that abortions should be regarded as an exception in extreme cases to the fundamental principle of the protection of human life and not as a contraceptive method, as it allegedly had been used by several women in the communist period.94 As a solution to settle the political dispute, the SdRP favored a referendum.95

The “Compromise” of 1993: Science, Conscience, and Faith

The idea of a national referendum on the legislation on abortion was met with heavy resistance from pro-life-activists and Catholic organizations. Both the Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia and the Episcopate rejected the idea of any discussion of this issue because, in their assessment, “the protection of life” was not negotiable.96 The Warsaw branch of the KIK denied the request for a referendum because it argued that such a law belonged in the hands of experts and the parliament. It was convinced that it was unwise to entrust such an “emotional question” to the population, because the “easiest way” was often chosen, and this would “open the doors to human feebleness.”97 Therefore, the different views clashed in parliament, especially during the debate prior to the Sejm’s decision on January 7, 1993.

As noted above, pro-life-activists, right-wing politicians, and publicists used (pseudo-) scientific, biological arguments to underline their demands for restrictions in the case of abortion. As the unauthorized stenograph of the Sejm’s 18th session shows, even before the main clash in January, this argumentation was used. ZChN member Jan Łopuszański insisted that the moment of conception as the beginning of human life did not “depend on somebody’s personal beliefs,” but was “a fact.”98 Here, the supporters of a restriction referred to discursive strategies that had been used in Catholic pro-life-discourse before. The KIK in Gdansk stated in its declaration from 1987 that “it is an objective scientific fact that the life of a human being begins with conception” and that “contemporary genetics proves that the zygote is in possession of all the inherited features of a new human individual.”99 Mariusz Grabowski, also from ZChN, used similar arguments based on “biological facts,” as he told the audience during the parliamentary debate in January 1993. Furthermore, he denied that religious motivation was essential for the authors of the new law. Instead, he enthusiastically contended that the new restrictions would protect women, because they would render it difficult to get an abortion.100

Another example of the “biologization” of the debate was the statement made by the chairwoman of the special commission which drafted the new bill. Anna Knysok referred to the abovementioned “facts” concerning the beginning of life, and she criticized the opponents of the new law and maintained that it would not interfere in a woman’s right to self-determination, and she referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.101 She also rejected the demands for a referendum and stated that it was the parliament’s function to decide on issues concerning the common good.102 Opponents of the new law like Danuta Waniek from the Democratic Left Alliance (Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej; SLD), to which the post-communist SdRP also belonged, argued that the law would lead to an increasing numbers of illegal abortions and, in the worst cases, to infanticide. She concluded that the law had the potential to “turn a child into an enemy of its own mother.”103

Andrzej Wielowieyski, member of the governing UD party and a long-term member of the Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia, was against the law in its form at the time because it was not “well-thought-out.” Regarding questions of biopolitics, he is an interesting actor, since he attended meetings at which pre-marital courses were organized by the KIK, and he had served as one of the editors of the Catholic paper Connection (Więź) since the 1960s. During the parliamentary debate in January 1993, he warned that restrictive laws had led to pregnant women taking trips to countries with liberal laws. Furthermore, he was convinced that, if the Parliament were to decide in favor of the law even though surveys indicated that the vast majority of the Polish society was against it, that this could lead to irreversible damage to the young Polish democracy.104 Jacek Kurczewski, a member of the centrist Liberal Democratic Congress (KLD, Kongres Liberalno-Demokratyczny), which was also a governing party at the time, offered a similar argument. In his statement during the debate, he did something very uncommon in this discourse at that time. He separated the medical procedure and the question of its permissibility from the moral considerations. On the one hand, i.e., morally, he declared that abortions were “bad” and that “nobody could doubt that life begins at the moment of the unification of the male and female cell.” However, he favored settling the question of whether or not someone should be penalized for performing an abortion by referendum. 105

But he did not prevail. Instead, the majority of the Sejm voted in favor of the new restrictive law, which was commonly called a “compromise,” because it restricted the availability of abortions but it did not ban them in general. But a closer look at the wording opens up another perspective: officially entitled Law on Family Planning, the Protection of the Fetus, and the Circumstances of the Permissibility of the Termination of Pregnancies, its wording highlights the enforcement of the Catholic pro-life-discourse of earlier decades. The law refers to its subject almost entirely as the “conceived child.” The term “fetus” is only used once in the text (apart from when it occurs in the title), in the passage concerning abortions because of embryo-pathologic reasons. This passage was deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal on October 22, 2020.

Conclusion

The so-called “compromise” of 1993 can be interpreted as a short “truce” in a long-term conflict which can be called (borrowing a metaphor from international relations) a “frozen conflict.”106 This means that the (in this case ideological, moral, and juridical) conflict has not been solved and is smoldering and can therefore flare up at any given moment. That happened after 1993 on several occasions. On the one hand, the first left-wing government attempted to liberalize the law between 1993 and 1997. They did not succeed, because the draft bills were first vetoed by Lech Wałęsa, who was serving as State President at the time, and then ruled unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal.107 On the other hand, right-wing parties and NGOs tried to enforce a complete ban on abortions and the introduction of the obligation to “protect unborn life” into the constitution,108 similarly to the Republic of Ireland, where such a passage was introduced in 1983.109 Until 2020, none of them succeeded in Poland. But the verdict of the Constitutional Tribunal had a major impact and generated a new dynamic which is observable in the current mass protests.

If one looks back at the decision of 1993, two things might be kept in mind. First, it was the unity of the “Christian” parties (despite their quarrels) that led to the introduction of the restrictive law. As I mentioned, the two right-wing governmental coalitions lasted for only 23 months. But they were successful in transforming their (and their allies’) political aims into reality. This is most obvious in the law on the termination of pregnancies and its wording, which resembles the “Catholic” pro-life-discourse more than it does the discourse of a “compromise.” But this includes not only the legislation on abortion, but also the introduction of religious education in schools (via Ministerial decree, without the parliament’s approval) and the signing of a concordat with the Holy See. These were highly controversial steps which indicate that these political struggles go deeper: they can be interpreted as cleavages concerning the essential nature of the Polish state after 1990. In the aftermath of the 1993 decision, the supporters of liberalization (the SLD was the most active) depended on their partners in the governmental coalition. It was therefore difficult to reintroduce a liberal version of the law, especially since, when one such new law was approved by the Sejm, it was vetoed, either by Wałęsa or by the Constitutional Tribunal.

The second intriguing observation is that the discourse, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, was mainly (or better, observably) shaped by (“Christian”) politicians and publicists. Priests also had an influence on the discourse during sermons “in defense of the unborn,” in pastoral letters, or in the interviews they gave. Even in the later years of the Third Republic, the influence of the Church and its representatives had to be taken into considered, e.g., on the eve of Poland’s entry into the European Union.110 The Episcopate looked skeptically at the processes prior to entry and perceived the EU as “godless” and “not compatible” with “Polish Christian values,” especially on the questions of abortion and marriage.111 Therefore, the then left-wing government had to soothe the Church’s mistrust to avoid imperiling Poland’s entry into the EU.112 Since then, the question returns intermittently.

Quo vadis, Polonia? Whither goest thou, Poland? It is difficult to foresee what the next stage in this ongoing, at the moment “unfrozen” conflict will be.

Archival Sources

Archiwum Akt Nowych w Warszawie [Archive of Modern Records in Warsaw] (AAN)

Ogólnopolskie Biuro Komitetu Frontu Jedności Narodowej [All-Polish Bureau of the Committee of the Front of National Unity] (BOK FJN)

Komitet Centralny Polskiej Zjednoczonej Partii Robotniczej [Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party] (KC PZPR)

Centralny Urząd Planowania [Central Planning Office] (CUP)

Porozumienie Centrum [Centre Alliance] (PC)

Chrześcijańsko-Demokratyczne Stronnictwo Pracy [Christian Democratic Labour Party] (ChDSP)

Zjednoczenie Chrześcijańsko-Narodowe [Christian National Union] (ZChN)

Klub Intelligencji Katolickiej [Clubs of Catholic Intelligentsia] (KIK)

Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej, Rada Krajowa [Democratic Left Alliance, National Council] (SLD RK)

Unia Demokratyczna [Democratic Union] (UD)

Ministerstwo Zdrowia i Opieki Społecznej [Ministry for Health and Social Warfare] (MZiOS)

Urząd do spraw Wyznań [Office for Confessional Issues] (UdsW)

Polskie Forum Chrześcijańsko-Demokratyczne [Polish Forum of Christian Democracy] (PFChD)

Polska Partia Socjalistyczna [Polish Socialist Party] (PPS)

Socjaldemokracja Rzeczypospolitej Polski [Social Democracy of the Republic of Poland] (SdRP)

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Doctors into Agents: The Technologies of Medical Knowledge and Social Control in State Socialist Hungary*

Viola Lászlófi
Eötvös Loránd University / École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 2  (2021): 328-356 DOI 10.38145/2021.2.328

In this paper, I analyze different situations in which the doctor-patient relationship, the knowledge/information produced within this framework, and the practices of medical questioning came to the fore in the work of the state security services, one of the typical institutions of social observation and surveillance of the Hungarian socialist state. I examine work and recruitment dossiers opened from 1956 to the 1980s which document either physicians’ uses in state security observation of information which they gained about their patients during their professional (medical) activities in or in which the physician-patient relationship appears as a context of the physician’s recruitment. I discuss how physicians constructed the patient when the gaze of the state security forces was also arguably part of their medical gaze. I contend that medical knowledge and, more generally, information revealed in the professional (medical) context and used in the framework of network surveillance, taken out of their strict medical context, constituted a gray zone of power. On the one hand, this information was a useful tool with which the regime could exert some measure of effective social and political control beyond the borders of healthcare, while on the other hand, it could help physicians develop a certain degree of social resistance.

Keywords: state socialism, history of medicine, state security, doctor–patient relationship, gray zone of power

From end of the 1940s, the developing state socialist system aimed to modernize several facets of social and political life in Hungary. Building on the social and ideological objectives of the new system and conforming to international tendencies, the state engaged in a comprehensive pursuit of modernization which encompassed the provision of welfare benefits, such as universal healthcare, the development, extension and structural reorganization of which began in the early years of the state socialist regime.1 As early as the 1940s, the directive of providing more citizens with health insurance and creating a state-funded universal basic healthcare system yielded the restructuring of healthcare in many countries. This process intensified significantly after World War II.2 By 1961, with the extension of universal health insurance, almost all citizens were eligible for healthcare in Hungary, and after 1975, it became accessible essentially for free to the whole population.3

The de-privatization of the existing healthcare institutions and the establishment of new hospitals, the extension of the network of general practitioners, and the development of outpatient care enabled access to healthcare for both urban and rural populations. Healthcare providers, who previously operated private medical practices, were now employed by the state.4 By introducing these measures, the reigning party’s aims were to advance the medicalization of society and to create an institutional framework which would symbolize the provision of a high level of public care for the workers, the group favored by the state socialist system but marginalized by previous regimes.5 Consequently, medical knowledge and the doctor–patient relationship as a form of social interaction came to play a decisive role in molding socialist welfare. This process and its implications have been addressed in sociological inquiries, but historians have not yet given them adequate study or interpretation.6 However, the cases have not been examined in which doctors, who by then had come to fulfil a fundamental role in welfare provision and thus had a higher number of social contacts than they earlier had had, became the agents of state power not only on account of their medical knowledge but also as the employees of the state security forces, which was one of the key institutions of political repression, responsible for monitoring and controlling individuals in society. In this study, I focus on these rare but all the more significant instances when the state security’s gaze exerted an influence on (and arguably was part of) the medical gaze. The cases under study constitute only a small proportion of the state security files reflecting on the performance of physicians, which means that the position physicians enjoyed in society (as figures in whom trust and confidence was placed), which was clearly considered beneficial for the intelligence network, was little exploited.

As a well-definable group of people possessing specialized knowledge and the related power, physicians have already been discussed in Michel Foucault’s works. Foucault perceived power as a set of techniques, maneuvers, and functions which are distributed based on the strategical positions occupied by individuals or groups within a society. Power, furthermore, is operational, and it thus applies in social contexts and systems of relations in which both bottom-up and top-down processes are observable, and both the dominant and the dominated groups participate in developing power relationships.7 In a medical context, this power could find expression in various phenomena, from medical consultation to health education, and due to the constant presence and operation of power, individuals learn and practice required behaviors, and these processes and rituals of adaptation play a fundamental role in maintaining social order. In short, people become medicalized.8 There are, however, two aspects which weaken the force of this argument in the context of socialist Hungary. Foucault’s observations apply primarily to a capitalist context. Furthermore, he presumes that, although medical and state power are closely related, they cannot be reduced each to each other. The relationship between them should be the subject of further analyses in different social and political contexts.

Taking these arguments as my point of departure, in this study I seek to outline the different aspects and functions of medical activity (institutional, social, responsibility for the production of knowledge) which made doctors and their knowledge of interest outside of healthcare contexts or, the other way round, which impeded the use of this knowledge in new contexts. I also seek to address how the methods used primarily in medical contexts by healthcare experts were used and interpreted during their work within the network of the state security forces. Based on the available evidence, I argue that the methods and practices of the production of knowledge used during medical fieldwork within an institutional context (the development of trust in the doctor–patient relationship, the making of diagnoses) and the social control obtained through such practices produced a certain gray zone of power9 when they were adopted in the framework of state security observation. On the one hand, doctors, due to their social-institutional power, could exert significant social control, but on the other hand, this very power could enable them to put up a certain amount of resistance.

In examining this phenomenon, I explore recruitment and work dossiers, altogether 10, which center on information obtained in a medical context by doctors who had already worked as agents or who were only being pursued by state security.10 All of them were written after the 1956 Revolution in the Kádár era, but their distribution within this period varies between diverse dates. The exact dates are always indicated in the footnotes. As for the content of the dossiers, however, there are no significant differences. Through the lens of the dossiers, we catch a glimpse into a rather heterogenous medical practice, as the doctors in question had a diverse array of expertise (psychiatry, neurology, family medicine, inner medicine), came from a geographically heterogeneous background, and worked in different institutional settings (hospital, local practice, psychiatric institution). Due to the lack of documentation, in several cases it is not known why or how they were recruited by the secret police. The recruited physicians were classified into several categories, such as agents, informants, and secret emissaries.11 As these nuances of classification are unimportant in interpreting the information the doctors obtained and thus in answering my research questions, for the sake of simplicity, I refer to them as informants and/or agents. Their exact functions are summarized in Table 1 (see below).

Social Control and the Production of Knowledge

To be able to grasp how the doctors’ opportunities to become useful informants, their work for the secret police, and the usefulness of their reports were evaluated and how this related to the distinguishing characteristics of their profession, in short, whether a gray zone was indeed supervened, first, it is worth giving a brief summary of earlier research on the “success” of state security observation and the agents whose role was indispensable to this success.

As has been pointed out by a number of studies focusing on the practices of the production and interpretation of state security reports, which are fundamental to any understanding of how the system itself worked, an analysis or discussion of the observational techniques used by the secret police forces, such as the Romanian Securitate, the East German Stasi, or the Hungarian State Protection Authority, may do little to further our knowledge of the actual social realities of the time.12 Secret polices forces were created to strengthen socialist systems and to prevent disruption within society. Thus, one of the tasks entrusted to these police forces was the creation in their reports of a discourse which buttressed both the terminology and the reasoning of the state ideology. The creation of this discourse allowed the regimes to label allegedly disruptive events using terms that reinforced the state narrative (for instance, espionage or sabotage) and to identify perpetrators as culprits from this narrative (for instance, the saboteur, the bourgeois, and the kulak). In course of time, the state security forces were given new missions, and their protective functions, which purportedly were intended to advance the building of socialism through the pursuit of complete control over society and the protection of the social order, were replaced with an all-encompassing ubiquity and the wish to know and monitor every minor secret of each and every citizen.13 According to János Rainer M., in the Hungarian case, this change had been implemented by the 1960s.14 This alteration of functions, however, left the linguistic construction of reports untouched: reports still had to be written in a language interpretable (and acceptable) to both the state security force and the party.

The informants’ ability to fulfil their mission (to observe and to meet the expectations placed on them with regards to their reports) was strongly influenced by their relationships with case officers. Katherine Verdery drew on the analogies between the system of state security and educational institutions, and Sándor Horváth has compared the connection between informants and their case officers to the teacher–pupil relationship.15 Horváth argues that the individuals’ first reports within the state security system and the case officers’ criticism of their form and content could be perceived as part of a process of socialization and learning during which the informants appropriated the fundamental methods of their new “work,” such as the logic and formal requirements of report writing, as well as the perception of their own social environment based on either opposition to or conformity with the system.16 This knowledge, at the same time, could prove flexible, and it could be used by the informants to pursue their own personal goals through the secret police. Moreover, the teacher-pupil concept reflects the (limited) flexibility of this relationship. The success of gathering information and the efficiency of the relationship were determined not only by the officer’s intentions to educate and socialize the informant/pupil, but also by how successfully the two actors asserted their own will in their collaboration.

The teacher–pupil relationship as a metaphor, however, is not only relevant from the perspective of learning and socialization. It is also a great signifier of another, psychologically more sensitive interpretive process, a core element of the paternalistic, almost controlling relationship between informants and their case officers. The primary focus of this is not the report written by the informant, but his behavior, personal dilemmas, and social status. As the textbooks on operative psychology (written particularly for case officers) reveal,17 the individual’s personality and his eligibility to work within the network of state security were considered as early as recruitment plans were written, and recruits were continuously assessed from the perspective of their psychology during their operation within the network, for example, in instances when the sincerity of their reports was evaluated.18 Qualities such as intelligence, good memory, learning ability, politeness, and attentiveness were highly desired, but it was also considered valuable if the individual was ideologically trustworthy and had a wide social network on which he could rely during his work within the network.19 Though timidity or nervousness, which were seen as weaknesses since they might lead to the unmasking of secret activities, were not considered so dire as to disqualify a potential recruit, case officers were trained thoroughly to be able to motivate their informants (who had different personal values and came from diverse social backgrounds) to work efficiently. Since the informants had no insights into the operation and aims of the state security forces beyond the immediate world of their specific tasks, the case officers, taking on the role of “psychologists” and “sociologists,” had to use different tactics to secure the success of the operation. They were responsible for noticing and addressing the mental problems that could arise from stressful situations, and they had to have an extensive knowledge of the informant’s social network and its usability. This knowledge was essential if the case officers were going to give their informants.

Doctor–Patient Relationship as the Situation of Observation

The value of informants in the eyes of the state security forces thus depended not only on the content and form of their reports, but also on their psychological characteristics and social embeddedness as the preconditions of a systematic acquisition of information. Following this line of thought, first I examine the aspects of medical practice that made doctors desirable as informants in the eyes of the state security forces.

The case of “Tarkői”20 sheds light on why and how medical activity could be either the reason, the aim, or the circumstance of recruitment. In October 1957, when the 32-year-old “Tarkői” was approached by the agents of the secret police, he was working as a general practitioner in Miskolc, though he had originally been trained as surgeon.21 He was recruited because of his participation as a physician in the 1956 Revolution: he organized first aid stations in the “counterrevolutionary centers” of Miskolc.22 It was not uncommon for agents of the state security forces to approach someone because of his or her participation in the events of the revolution. In many cases, a person who had participated in the revolution would be under pressure to cooperate with the authorities simply out of fear of the potential consequences of refusal were he or she to refuse. The state security forces, furthermore, were also motivated to approach such individuals in the hopes of uncovering other “counterrevolutionaries.” The case of “Tarkői,” however, is different. The professional and political norms in this case are in stark opposition: as far as the medical explanation goes, as “Tarkői” had taken the Hippocratic Oath, he was ethically obliged to provide each sick or injured person proper medical care during the revolution.23 Thus, he was only fulfilling his professional duty. In the eyes of the state security forces, however, his medical-professional activity was understood as advancing the success of the “counterrevolution.”

The first encounter between the case officer and “Tarkői” occurred in a medical context, when the officer visited him as a patient suffering from a contagious disease. The goal of his visit was to get to know the doctor and to assess his eligibility. The case officer’s two-page report portrays a professionally competent physician with a wide social network, or in other words, a suitable candidate for the role of informant. As the officer reports, “Tarkői” “received him with great politeness,” examined him thoroughly, wrote a prescription, and engaged in pleasant conversation about the local problems of healthcare and his own life and past. The “well-trained” doctor “had a good memory and good conversational skills.” He was not “verbose, but rather direct and friendly.”24 “Tarkői” was thus the ideal type of a socialist physician, and he met all the requirements that a medical professional had to meet to serve both individual patients and society properly. In the medicalization of society, the individual doctor–patient relationships were given great significance, and one of the most important components of these relationships was personal sympathy.25 Furthermore, as pinpointed by studies in the period, this confidential relationship had a substantial impact on the recovery of patients, so “Tarkői’s” behavior would have been a perfect foundation for an ideal doctor–patient relationship if he was visited by a real patient.26

This confidential conversation on “Tarkői’s” professional qualities also offered a good opportunity to evaluate his potential as a good informant: his caring and attentive nature and his proneness to “flattery” made him a trustworthy and ideal candidate in the eyes of agents of the secret police.27 Furthermore, “Tarkői’s” future case officer got a clearer idea of his social network. He concluded that “[‘Tarkői’] knows people from different [social] backgrounds well. Some of his patients have functions either in the party or the state bureaucracy.” Though the officer wished to point out “Tarkői’s” wide clientage and the value of his work for the community, the underlying logic shows the categorization of individuals according to their relationships with the state socialist system. This prefigures the potential aspects of observation.28 Consequently, the case officer’s report shows “Tarkői” as an ideal candidate due to his wide social network and trustworthy nature. His professional qualities could also easily be translated into the new context.

Confidence in the case of an ophthalmologist from Kalocsa in Southern Hungary, who worked under the code name “Siva,” and his case officer was built on an appealing doctor–patient relationship and an underlying existential vulnerability. “Siva” started working for the network in 1953, and by 1962, when his assignment was changed, he was already an experienced informant. From 1962 onwards, he was ordered to observe and report on the activities of W., one of his close acquaintances, who also happened to be his patient. The dossier reveals that W. turned to “Siva” for advice on numerous occasions and even recounted some aspects of his clerical activity that could have been seen by the authorities as seditious.29 This confidentiality in itself could have been exploited by the secret police, but the doctor–patient relationship, which was formed after they had already grown close owing to their common interest in music, added another layer to it. This new aspect made their relationship, which had been casual, in certain respects hierarchical and formal.30 The case officer, realizing this change in power relations, decided that from then on, observation should occur in a new, medical context: “The pretext of the invitation should be a follow-up examination after a previous illness. […] As his doctor, he should reassure him [W.] about his condition. He should point out that with occasional check-ups, he would recover completely. He should offer his services, help, and complete confidentiality. Thereafter, he could get to the point [investigating potential seditious activities].”31 Regular meetings necessitated by the condition of W.—[meetings] that allegedly served [W.’s] interests—secured the opportunity for further inquiries and for maintaining a confidential relationship. W. was thus observed in a delicate situation, in which the patient is both vulnerable and is expected to confide in his caretaker.32 Though vulnerability is not mentioned explicitly in the above passage, by instructing the informant to calm the patient, the case officer implicitly suggests that he expects the patient to be anxious in a situation in which the doctor’s diagnosis clearly would have consequences for his perception of his physical and mental wellbeing, short-term and long-term. And even though questioning about potential seditious activities followed the physical examination, the situation itself and the conscious reflection on the potential feelings it could induce all suggest that the doctor–patient relationship was viewed as more valuable from the point of view of observation than other, even closer relationships (close acquaintance, friendship), as it was founded on (physical) vulnerability.

“Siva’s” case officer considered the doctor–patient relationship useful because of its official, hierarchical nature and its confidentiality, which made it a rich source of information. The information obtained concerning the patients’ activities and social relations during examination and treatment, however, did not necessarily have to be used by the agents of the secret police: the protection of privacy and the prohibition of the use of information outside of the administrative context of healthcare were regulated, and under state socialism, all patients had the right to medical privacy.33 This regulation, which simultaneously served the doctors’ professional autonomy and the protection of patients, even if the extent of medical privacy was not generally agreed upon, encompassed all information (regardless of its nature) that came to light in medical contexts.34 Divergence from the principle of medical privacy because of loyalty to the system or fear of the state security forces will be discussed later. The question of whether the case officers reflected on the norm of medical privacy and its impact on the work of the secret police should be addressed here.

This phenomenon is discussed only once, in the case of a doctor who used the code name “Szentedrei,” though whatever qualms he may have had about protecting patient privacy, they do not seem to have hindered his activities as an agent. “Szentendrei” was a psychiatrist, and at the time in question, he worked as a primary physician at the Institute for Work Therapy in Pomáz. He had a rather wide social network. One of his close acquaintances was a man named György Krassó,35 who was a significant member of the opposition in the Kádár era. At Krassó’s request and with the case officer’s approval, “Szentendrei” examined Krassó’s French female friend. The woman “subjected herself to an almost one-and-a-half-hour medical examination,” the results of which were to be delivered to the French woman’s Hungarian friend, but “keeping medical privacy in mind.”36 In this case, medical privacy not only did not hinder the work of the secret police, but appears to have confirmed “Szentendrei’s” trustworthiness. “Szentendrei’s” willingness to ignore the patient’s right to privacy casts light on his work not only as a doctor, but also as an agent. He shared information with the state security forces that he did not necessarily share with someone who was close to the patient (Krassó).

In conclusion, medical activity and the doctors’ position within this context were associated in the eyes of the secret police’s agents with both social confidence and reliability, as well as exploitable vulnerability. Moreover, physicians, who conformed to the norms of modern medical practice had character traits that were perceived as desirable in their new “work environment” within the network of state security.

The Perception of Medical Knowledge within the Network

Medical diagnosis, social prognosis

So far, we have seen that doctors were considered ideal informants, but we have not touched on how the actual methods they used to diagnose and cure their patients were understood in this new context. How did the medical gaze construct its patient when the state security’s gaze was absorbed into it?37

An agent who worked under the code name “László Kaposvári” was a 45-year-old hospital physician in Sopron. In 1975, he shared the story of a young female neurology patient with his case officer. The composition of the report suggests formal and logical deliberateness. In the first part, relying on the information shared by the patient’s father, “Kaposvári” recounts the underlying reasons for hospitalization and the circumstances of the onset of her daughter’s illness: “According to the father, his daughter was hospitalized because she was recruited by two agents of the state security in Sopron. […] They even gave her money so that she could cover her expenses when she meets suspicious persons [who wish to flee the county].”38 The report then reflects on the need for hospitalization because of an “occupational disease.” Though the following sections of the anamnesis were mostly anonymized, the available details suggest that the condition of the patient was analyzed further.

If we interpret the report with the state security’s gaze in mind, the story of a de-conspired informant unfolds. However, if we consider that “Kaposvári” also used the specific methodology of medical knowledge production to construct the narrative, another possible interpretation is implied. Reliance on the father’s account could imply that the report was constructed similarly to a heteroanamnesis.39 In this, the patient’s condition is clearly interpreted as an “occupational disease.” This explanation is then mirrored in the doctor’s diagnosis. Therefore, the report highlighted the risks of the agents’ work to the individual’s health, even though the original aim of the report was to indicate possible threats to the state socialist system, for example, seditious behavior.40 This also meant that “Kaposvári” not only ignored the prescribed standards of report writing but also favored the individual’s interests as opposed to the society’s (or the regime’s). Bearing this in mind, it is rather striking that the case officer accepted his report without criticizing its form and content.

“Kaposvári” was not the only person who applied the same methodology used in medical diagnostics to interpret information reported to the secret police. A man who went by the name “Hegyi” also used this method on some occasions between the 1960s and 1970s. “Hegyi” was the primary physician41 of the Intapuszta Institute of Work Therapy, located close to the Austrian border. Owing to his position and wide social network,42 he was considered a potentially “useful” informant, and his recruitment was of great importance to the state security forces. His dossier contains two reports, the subjects of which had valuable relationships with people abroad. He characterized them as follows:

In my estimation, the onset of his lunacy was around ’54 or ’55, with the appearance of paranoid delusions. […] From a psychiatric point of view, his current condition could be evaluated as follows: he is in a balanced state, which means neither recovery nor health. Any unexpected event or trauma, in fact, any curious occurrence could induce remission. […] I do not think he could give any valuable information, as he has been hospitalized for approximately 15–16 years.43

He recounted that at work he had many conflicts because of his drinking, sometimes he showed up to work drunk. […] As we say, he suffers from chronic alcoholism. […] I would say that because of his obscure relations, he could be useful […] though not for obtaining information, rather for some other assignments, as he is an existentially unstable, unreliable person.44

The reports from which these rather expressive passages are quoted can be divided into three lengthy sections. In the first part, “Hegyi” discusses the individual’s past and his or her preceding medical conditions in detail. The wording and underlying logic of these narratives evoke the structure and content of anamneses: they detail the evolution of symptoms and the changes in the individuals’ behavior in a chronological order. The anamnesis in these cases, however, not only functions as a standard medical method of questioning, but is also fundamental to the “social prognosis” presented to the case officer. “Hegyi,” though he does not want to follow the logic of the state security forces in “reconstructing” his patients based what he was told, provides a thorough explanation for his medical observations in order to ensure that his case officer understands it properly. On the other hand, he characterizes the patients, who were potentially interesting for the secret police, in a narrative framework which was, owing to his professional, medical expertise, more “comfortable” for him than for the non-expert case officer. And although unusually an informant’s work was evaluated by his or her case officer, in these particular cases, no evaluations were made, which might suggest that this recurring method was accepted by “Hegyi’s” case officer.

It is rather difficult to determine, however, whether what these methods were part of a general tendency or were simply individual approaches to the composition of these specific narratives. Could medical knowledge play a part in procuring a more advantageous position in a situation when an informant was both an observer and someone under observation? Or did physicians who were also serving as informants simply use the routinized techniques of producing medical knowledge in another context? The doctors, logically, do not reflect on their choices of register in their reports, so a deeper analysis of the problem would require situations in which a possible change or break is detectable which then leads to the conscious use of medical knowledge tailored to new circumstances. I have only found one such case, that of “Orvos.”45

“Orvos” was a radiologist in Budapest and also an emblematic figure of the neo-avantgarde underground musical scene of the capital from the end of the 1950s. In 1960, he wrote a report on the potential spying activities of a clerical figure and employee of Orion, which was a state-owned company manufacturing telecommunications equipment. “Orvos” and the worker were introduced to each other by a friend on account of their common interest in speakers. In his report, “Orvos” described the worker as a well-prepared person in telecommunication. Born in Transylvania, he had a widespread network of friends and acquaintances abroad, and he traveled frequently to repair and sell radios. And even though his activities were suspicious in and of themselves, “Orvos” also added that his new acquaintance had several names, and his ID, which contained false information, was not valid. This report had significant relevance for the authorities, but the structure of the report was so chaotic that “Orvos,” though he had already been working as an agent for nine years, was asked to revise it. Thereafter, “Orvos” made some changes to the report and amended it with a medical evaluation missing from the previous version: “Medical opinion. […] I consider unverifiable and exclude personality change due to trauma or family and genetic inheritance. Though his interests are not monomaniac, his judgements are partly compulsive. Based on this, I consider his stories credible and true.”46 This addition suggests that after his earlier unsuccessful attempt, “Orvos” intended to use his medical knowledge to underline his opinion, assuming that medical knowledge is a socially accepted area of expertise of which he was in possession. His report suggests that the observed spy was, in fact, of sound mind and that his activities could indeed undermine the system. In this light, the value of “Orvos’s” activity as an informant was significantly more valuable. The report was eventually accepted by the case officer and assessed as operationally valuable. Although “Orvos” was a radiologist and his medical description was based on psychiatric knowledge, his report could be considered acceptable and interpretable for two main reasons. First, as I mentioned at the beginning of my article, reflecting on mental problems and the nonconformist behavior of the target person or the informant was one of the recommended methods during state security observation. Second, the information given by “Orvos” may have been acceptable to the officer because, despite the officer’s operational training, the officer presumably saw “Orvos” as having a more profound knowledge of psychology than he, the case officer, had.

Until now, I have focused on procedures and methods which are not strongly linked to the different fields of medicine but are generally true for physicians who work in an institutional context. The last three examples, however, show the significance of psychiatric and neurological expertise, since psychiatric and neurological expertise serve as the technology with which the patients are “reconstructed” in this new narrative context, outside of the medical field. This might be linked to the development of psychiatry as a discipline. Though psychiatry, especially with the broadening of neurological knowledge, was given a strongly biomedical character in the period, diagnosing “madness” required different “tests” that were meant to determine the normalcy or abnormality of the individual’s behavior from the perspective of society at large. The social character of these tests does not mean, however, that they were not medically verifiable methods. They were created precisely to attest to the medical validity of the different technologies of mental normalization.47 From among the three doctors, only “Hegyi” had a confirmed background as a psychiatrist. Still, one does not necessarily have to be a specialist in psychiatry to give an account of the social and political implications of a patients’ psychological functions, as physicians had all been required to appropriate the basics of psychiatry and neurology during their studies. Psychiatric knowledge, however, was one of the rare forms of medical expertise which was seen as enabling a physician to interpret patients’ attitudes towards the norms of socialist society. This knowledge also made these reports valuable for the authorities, but at the same time, it did not expose the patients or the doctors to the discursive and hierarchic logic characteristic of the state security.

Differences in knowledge, social prestige, and hierarchy

As we have seen, the doctors examined so far did not use the expected discursive and logical patterns, but rather recreated the techniques of medical knowledge production in a new context. This seems to have been an accepted, even recurring method, as in most cases, the doctors were not ordered to revise and resubmit their reports, and sometimes the information obtained this way had considerable operational value. But what could explain the approval of these methods? It seems plausible that regardless of the applied discursive techniques, the reports were comprehensible for the case officers. In case of “Hegyi” and “Kaposvári,” this interpretation could suffice. However, “Orvos’s” case does not seem to fit into this logic: he first provided the information, which had considerable operational value, and then he amended his report with a medical explanation, and this explanation led to the acceptance of his report. Furthermore, the content-centric explanation is weakened if we consider that expecting the informants to conform to the discursive logic prescribed by the state security also had a disciplinary aspect: the practice of ordering the informants to revise their reports was important in sustaining a hierarchical relationship. If the relationship between the case officer and the informant is understood more flexibly, taking other factors, for example, social prestige into consideration, we can find further explanations as to why medical knowledge was accepted by the officers as a methodology with which to interpret operationally valuable information.

One possible explanation is the high social prestige of doctors and medical knowledge. Doctors in state socialist societies, owing to their expertise in maintaining and restoring the health of workers, who were seen as the pillars of society, were of fundamental importance, and their positions were linked in both medical and sociological discourses to considerable social prestige.48 The first prestige analyses were carried out, however, only in the 1980s, in 1983 and 1988. The analyses underpinned the high social prestige of doctors: from among the 156 occupations under study, hospital physicians were ranked first and general practitioners fourth.49 As for the amount of expertise required to hold a certain position, hospital physicians were ranked first and general practitioners second, above all other occupations. Therefore, based on a representative sample, medical knowledge was considered the most valuable knowledge.50

A second explanation is grounded on the quality and unapproachability of medical knowledge. Due to the gradual professionalization and specialization of the different fields of medicine and the proliferation of technologies, the production of medical knowledge became more specific and impenetrable for non-experts.51 Thus, the agent-doctors based their work within the network of state security on a form of knowledge and its methods of evaluation that were largely incomprehensible for outsiders. And even though public health policy strove to incorporate some elements of the “socialist self-consciousness” into the discourse and urged the members of society (the patients) to turn to medical ethics committees,52 the task and prerogative of evaluating the complaints and possibly issuing sanctions were still in the hands of medical experts, not laymen. If we accept this explanation, it is likely that even the possibility of criticizing medical knowledge was dismissed by laymen, who, in this case, were the officers of the state security forces.

Opposition in the Wards

The adaptability of medical knowledge and the doctors’ positions, which rested on the solid foundation of the social value of their knowledge, presented something of a conundrum from the perspective of the state security forces. While their position in society was advantageous, as they could operate easily as observers in a wide social network, their expert knowledge made them unreliable, as they could manipulate the obtained information and mask potential seditious activities effortlessly. Consequently, the specific features of diagnostic and therapeutic practice and their social perceptions could enable doctors to elude the interpretive (and at the same time, disciplinary) methods dictated by the logic of the state security forces. What complicates this scheme is that applying the techniques of medical knowledge production in this new context implied the violation of professional norms and disregard for medical privacy. These explanations, however, are still insufficient to give a reassuring answer to my original research questions, because the above conclusions focus exclusively on the possibilities of obtaining information in a medical context. So far, I have not explored the phenomena strongly linked to medical activities that made the presence of doctors as the agents of state security services indispensable. Or to medicalize my inquiry: where did the blind spot of the secret police lie, a blind spot to which only doctors had access?

The secret police, as one of the fundamental networks of surveillance in the Kádár era, strove to uncover the secrets of individuals or certain groups and their attitudes towards social norms and to interpret the implications of their potentially threatening activities. Consequently, the secret police tried to infiltrate alternative spaces in society, for example, meetings among people belonging to intellectual circles or private art events that were for some reason hidden from the public eye.53 As for hospitals, the secret police was supposed to have easy access to any information, considering the public funding and extensive administrative practices of these institutions. Yet this was not always the case. Fortunately, some of the dossiers reveal exactly how permeable the walls of hospitals were and who had access to information produced within these spaces.

“Viola” worked as a physician at the First Department of Neurology of the hospital on Róbert Károly Boulevard. She was recruited because, in the hospital and especially at the neurology clinic, more people who had actively participated in the events of the 1956 Revolution were hidden. By the time “Viola” was recruited, the agents of the state security forces, who played a leading role in identifying and tracking “counterrevolutionaries” until 1963 (when a general amnesty was proclaimed), had already identified three such individuals. This could be seen as a success. However, by this time, already more than a year had passed since the revolution. Also, this particular institution played a particularly prominent role in serving the medical needs of the state socialist elite, especially the Hungarian army and the Soviet troops stationed in the country. These two facts may have cast a shadow on the efficiency of the agents’ work in identifying the potential enemies of the system. Therefore, a doctor was needed to provide an inner perspective and assist the police forces in their efforts to detect those hiding from retribution. That their reasoning in the assignment plan was sound was proven by “Viola” during their first meeting: she immediately named an individual who had successfully eluded the gaze of state security. The further analysis of the assignment plan also reveals that hospitals could serve as “asylums” for those who wanted to escape retribution.54 And as this example testifies, they sometimes hid in plain sight, but owing to the (partial) impermeability of the hospital’s walls, doctors were indispensable in assisting the agents of the state security in exposing potential enemies.

The recruitment of “Viola” in 1958 could be explained either as a consequence of the relative closeness of the revolution in time or the efforts of the authorities to expose the enemies of the system. However, even when these circumstances did not hold, hospitals remained places of interest for the agents of the secret police, as the cases of “Kaposvári” and “Marossi Pál,” a physician at the Second Department of Internal Medicine of the Medical University of Pécs, show.

“Marossi” was first asked to report on a patient in 1960. The patient, K. L., who had been at the clinic for months, was a religious person and had numerous visitors. Though “he was not visited by the priests of the Church of the Order of Mercy, he often called priests for fellow patients and strove to persuade others to follow his example. The directors of the clinic, however, prohibited him from continuing with such activities.”55 K. L.’s religiosity is emphasized throughout the report, and this explains why he was under surveillance. However, “Marossi” tried to divert the attention of the case officer from K. L.’s religiosity by making it seem as if it remained merely a private matter and did not influence the other patients.

Like “Marossi,” “Kaposvári” also gave an account of his patients’ behavior in the wards. He reported that “Mrs. H. A., a teacher from Sopron, listens to Radio Free Europe daily, though she does not share what she has heard with the others.” Upon evaluation, “Kaposvári” added the following: “Mrs. H. A. listens to Radio Free Europe again. However, her roommate is hard of hearing, and thus she does not know which frequency her roommate listens to.”56 According to a 1953 court decision, listening to RFE was not prohibited as long as it was not done in public. “Kaposvári,” who presumably was familiar with the court decision, by referring to the hearing loss of Mrs. H. A.’s roommate, tailored his report to the norms and expectations of socialism, and he used a medical explanation to minimize the possibility of any drastic measures being taken by the police. Although the informants never knew what the State Security Service would do with the information obtained through them and or what consequences their contributions to the system would have for the individuals “denounced,” according to the report issued by “Kaposvári,” the patient had not violated any rules, so the report qualified as operationally valuable, and the agents of the state security remained alert.

The cases of “Kaposvári” and “Marossi” reveal that the individuals under surveillance were already known by the secret police, and their stay in the hospital was seen as a period that could be instrumental in uncovering their potential seditious activities. It was therefore particularly important, from the perspective of the authorities, to keep them under observation on account of their potentially threatening activities and the ideological influence they could exert on other patients. As both cases illustrate, the social space of hospitals was seen as a milieu in which listening to the RFE or engaging in religious activities that were tolerated if done in private could become subversive because of the impact they could have on other individuals. This is something that authorities could not turn a blind eye to. Furthermore, reports on the visitors who came to see these patients could shed light on the patients’ social networks, which in turn could assist the authorities in tracking other potentially dangerous individuals.

Observing the behavior of patients was only one possible reason for the active presence of the secret police in medical institutions. As the cases of “Lénárd Pál” and “Angyalföldi” illustrate, other, more complex problems of socialist healthcare could come to the surface, which, in addition, could shed light on the common violation of norms by either doctors or their patients.57 While “Angyalföldi” reported on the practice of prioritizing Yugoslavian patients, who paid in foreign currency for medical services, to the detriment of insured Hungarian patients, “Lénárd Pál,” a neurologist at the Székesfehérvár hospital, wanted to declare a patient who had already suffered of ill health an invalid. However, in doing so, encouraged by his case officer, “Lénárd” did not follow the usual, official route, but rather bribed other physicians, a seemingly common method for declaring healthy individuals invalids. Though the two situations differ, the aim in both cases was to uncover activities that had already been known broadly, but the authorities were in need of more information (names, venues, dates) to move forward. These were significant details that non-medical personae would not have been able to unearth. The above situations also demonstrate that hospitals, even though they were intended, in principle, to serve the wellbeing of society, could function as institutions in which the evasion of norms was rather frequent.

The last five cases prove that hospitals and wards enabled subversion and could serve as hiding places for enemies of the state and at the same time could effectively conceal these activities. The impermeability of the hospital’s walls is due to its function as a total institution. As Erving Goffman points out, hospitals and similar institutions, such as prisons, monasteries, and schools, have a special, socializing function either to habituate individuals to follow norms or to correct their behavior. If these institutions are going to perform this function successfully, any passage between the inner world of the institutions and the “real” world outside must be severely restricted. The physical and mental separation of the two spaces could mean reformulating the rules and norms of the outside world, all the while creating a new order within the walls of the institutions.58 The agent-doctors, therefore, could offer a glimpse into a segment of social space that would have been impenetrable without their cooperation. At the same time, this impermeability meant that they had some autonomy in selecting the information to be shared or concealed.59

Conclusion

In this study, I have offered several concrete cases illustrating ways in which doctors maneuvered within the network of the state security forces, one of the most significant institutions of state socialist societies responsible for the surveillance and control of individuals. A physician’s adherence to professional norms, expertise, and institutional position made him or her a potentially valuable asset in the eyes of the authorities. It was not as simple to exploit this potential, however, as it may have seemed initially. Though on many occasions, the doctors’ performance as agents was assessed positively by their case officers, the doctors often failed to follow the prescribed norms of construing the enemy. The gray zone between the standard practices of the state security forces and medical activities denotes social spaces which the authorities would have been unable to permeate without the assistance of medical practitioners. At the same time, this points at a specific quality of medical knowledge that made these spaces inaccessible for outsiders, thus facilitating social resistance, at least to some extent.

I have also attempted to underline that, following Foucault’s argument, the affiliation between doctors and their case officers exerted an influence through relationships and institutions. In the framework of the strongly hierarchical operations of the state security forces, the social position of physicians also came into prominence, and in this context, this social position gave physicians a certain amount of autonomy. In the future, this aspect should be explored in further detail, using a wider array of sources which could shed light on the extent to which the publicly funded healthcare system and its publicly financed employees could realize their autonomy from the state in other respects, such as medical education and primary care.

Appendix

Table 1.

Archival Sources

Állambiztonsági Szolgálatok Történeti Levéltára [Historical Archives of the Hungarian State Security] (ÁBTL)

2.8.1. BM Vas Megyei RFK személyi gyűjtők [Ministry of the Interior, Vas County Police Headquarters, Personal dossiers]

3.1.1. B-84186 “Viola”

3.1.1. B-92993 “Tarkői”

3.1.2 M-17361 “Marossi Pál”

3.1.2. M-17764/1 “Orvos”

3.1.2. M-18864/1 “Siva”

3.1.2. M-31222 “Szentendrei”

3.1.2. M-33556 “Hegyi”

3.1.2. M-37256 “Kaposvári László”

3.1.2. M-39489 “Angyalföldi”

3.1.2. M-39640 “Lénárd Pál”

4.1 A-3120. Ivanin, G. I. Az operatív pszichológia néhány kérdése [Some questions of operative psychology]. Moscow, 1973.

4.1. A-3121. Láng György. Operatív pszichológia III. A hírszerzés hálózata vezetésének és nevelésének szociálpszichológiai kérdései [Operative psychology III. Some questions of social psychology on leading and training the members of intelligence services].

4.1 A-4510. Horváth István. A pszichológia és szociálpszichológia felhasználása hálózati munkában [Using psychology and social psychology in the work of intelligence services]. Thesis.

Decree No. 8. Medical Regulation, 1959.

11/1972. (30. VI.), Regulation of medical workers, issued by the Ministry of Health.

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TEKA: A Transnational Network of Esperanto-Speaking Physicians

Marcel Koschek
University of St Andrews
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 2  (2021): 243-266 DOI 10.38145/2021.2.243

The Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio (Worldwide Esperanto Medical Association, TEKA) was founded in 1908 at the Fourth International Esperanto Congress in Dresden and was the international medical association of the Esperanto movement. The aim was to “facilitate practical relations between Esperanto-speaking doctors of all countries.” The interest within the Esperanto movement was immense: after one year, TEKA had more than 400 members all over the world with a focus on Europe; one year later, there were more than 600 members with official representatives in about 100 cities. In Europe, a medical press in Esperanto had already been established. The approach of these journals was both simple and brilliant: the doctors presented the latest medical findings from their home countries in a peer review system and critically examined the articles in their vernacular. This made each issue a compendium of the most important and pioneering findings of national research. The numerous experts also had many other connections with, for example, the Red Cross and similar organizations. Thus, after a short period of time, TEKA brought together the expertise of countless physicians. This paper examines TEKA as a transnational network of experts before World War I. The history of the association and the role of Medicine within the Esperanto movement are briefly discussed. The focus is then on the various association journals and the circulation of knowledge. Finally, the essay offers a look at TEKA’s cooperative endeavors with the Red Cross. It works from a transnational perspective and takes a close view of the actors and their personal backgrounds at appropriate points. Furthermore, lists of members and journal subscribers are provided in map form to make the global spread of the movement within medicine visible.

Keywords: Esperanto, transnationalism, internationalism, network of physicians

Introduction

The end of the long nineteenth century was a dynamic time during which groundbreaking changes were taking place in all areas of life. The decades before World War I were characterized by networking and internationalization as well as inventions and technical progress.1 Even in medicine, the peak of internationalism did not pass without leaving its mark. In 1863, the Red Cross was founded, and in 1881, medical assembly began with the first International Medical Congress in London. At the time, Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist in Warsaw, also had thoughts on medicine, internationalization, and networking. In 1887, he published a brochure entitled International Language.2 This booklet, which he published under the pseudonym Dr. Esperanto (literally meaning, “the one who hopes”), joined the list of numerous inventive and stirring writings of this period. With his idea of devising a simplified language, Zamenhof presented a solution to the problem of communication; his pseudonym quickly became the name for the language itself. Esperanto harmonized with the prevailing zeitgeist among educated elites, who soon began to gather internationally and develop platforms for exchange. The language quickly gained a foothold in medicine, as outbreaks of cholera and typhus and new fields such as bacteriology led to a strong need for exchange in the medical community.3

The majority of Esperantists in the early period before World War I came from urban middle classes, which “had the money and leisure to look beyond their own communities.”4 The exact proportion of physicians among the club members is very difficult to determine. For example, the address book of Polish Esperantists from 1909 provides lists of members but only incomplete professional information. Large university cities such as Lviv (15.6 percent), Warsaw (11.4 percent) and Krakow (6.3 percent) had the highest proportions of physicians among their members. In contrast, rural Esperanto societies only rarely had doctors among their members.5 Nevertheless, the Esperanto doctors hoped that international cooperation with foreign colleagues would foster valuable exchange and progress. One of the arguments for learning Esperanto was the simplicity of the language and the claim that the vocabulary was “three-quarters known to anyone halfway educated.”6 The 1933 Encyclopaedia of Esperanto lists early mentions of the language in medical journals. These mentions include a series of articles in the Russian journal Vrach in 1899 and, from 1900, primarily mentions in French journals. There were also discussions concerning Esperanto at two medical meetings in Russia in 1898 in Borisoglebsk and Voronezh.7

As the language spread internationally and was propagated by and among physicians, there were both positive and negative reactions. The example of The British Medical Journal can even be used to show a shift. In 1904, the language was described as a “body without a soul,”8 and in 1906, it was characterized as useless, since “when learnt nothing has been acquired but a mixed ‘pigeon’ jargon.”9 In later years, the journal devoted more lines to the Esperanto movement. The report on the International Medical Congress in Budapest in 1909 contains a separate paragraph on the attempt to introduce the language. Although the author of the report writes with praise on the number of participants at the meeting of Esperantists, he notes that the group did not arouse any further interest among other participants. Furthermore, he also states that the need for a new language was not felt at the congress.10 The journal also gave space to the following International Medical Congress in London in 1913. The dates of the meetings were announced before the congress, and a report on the meeting was published afterwards.11 In contrast to Budapest, the London Esperanto Club held a reception which was not only attended by Esperantists but also attracted other congress participants.12 Other large, internationally prominent medical journals such as The Lancet also printed submissions on the subject of Esperanto from 1905 onwards and abstained from making any critical remarks concerning the language that might have resembled the remarks found in The British Medical Journal.13

The Esperanto movement took a big step towards international cooperation in 1905 when it held its first World Congress in Boulogne-sur-Mer. After principles of the language and the movement were discussed in Boulogne, expert meetings were held at the congresses from 1906 onwards. At the second World Congress, Henri Dor, who later served as TEKA president, chaired the joint session of physicians and pharmacists. The discussion centered on an anatomical dictionary compiled by a group of French Esperantists.14 In 1907, during the congress in Cambridge, the doctors were already meeting separately. There, the assembled doctors decided to join the Internacia Scienca Asocio (International Science Association), an Esperanto science society founded the previous year, as a specialist section. A proposal was made to contact an existing multilingual medical journal and request that it publish an Esperanto supplement.15 The following congress in Dresden in 1908 led to the founding of TEKA.

The Creation and Development of TEKA

The institutionalization and organized unification of Esperanto physicians were achieved with the founding of TEKA. In TEKA’s self-portrayal, the Polish doctor Wilhelm Róbin16 is often listed as the initiator and founding father.17 The reason for this was his article published in Voĉo de Kuracistoj18 (Voice of Physicians, henceforth VdK) calling for the foundation of an Esperanto Medical Society before the World Congress in Dresden.19 However, Róbin was not present at the congress and Leon Zamenhof took over the presentation of the project there.20 The fact that the idea came from Róbin is not mentioned in the minutes of the Dresden congress. Furthermore, it must also be pointed out that Róbin was not the first Esperantist with the idea of founding an Esperanto Medical Society. This idea had already been advocated by Bronisław Skałkowski, Szczepan Mikołajski, and Izrael Fels in an appeal in the Polish Medical journal Głos Lekarzy (Voice of Physicians, henceforth GL) in November 1907.21 Whether Róbin was aware of this appeal is not known. This is also contradicted by the fact that his name is not found among the subscribers to GL in 1907. Although the first appeal in GL did not lead to the founding of TEKA, the goals were consistent. The authors identified the first and most important task as the foundation of an association of Esperanto physicians in all countries. This association should represent the interests of their members at international medical congresses and advocate the introduction of Esperanto as a congress language. The creation of an international organ for the worldwide members was also planned. At the end of the appeal, it was noted that it should be sent to all the doctors listed in the Tutmonda Jarlibro Esperantista 1907 (Worldwide Esperantist Yearbook). Furthermore, everyone should forward this appeal and publish it in their native languages in national journals.22 We do not actually know the extent to which this suggestion was actually implemented or the idea was circulated in other national medical journals.

Due to the rapid increase in the circulation of VdK in the summer of 1908, an increasing number of physicians formed an alliance in favor of Esperanto. Mikołajski presumably remembered his proposal from the previous year and again suggested the creation of an official association in July.23 In the following issue, which appeared only a few weeks before the upcoming congress in Dresden, Mikolajski’s idea was elaborated by Róbin and presented to the subscribers.24 As the official representative of the Universal Esperanto Association in Warsaw, he approached the headquarters and suggested the creation of the federation. At the second meeting of the Medical group at the Dresden Congress, an association was founded with the name Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio on August 21, 1908. From the report in the official congress records25 and a more detailed version of this report in VdK,26 the founding of TEKA appears to have been a mere formality. Only the discussion about the future of VdK as an organ of the association was extensive, and the association to be founded was mentioned in the course of the discussion as a guarantee for the journal.

TEKA, as formulated in point 1 of its regulations, strived to promote “practical relations between Esperanto physicians of all countries.”27 The reports of the president, Prof. Henri Dor from Lyon, and the secretary, Dr. Wilhelm Róbin from Warsaw, in the first official yearbook of 1909 explained further goals and working methods. Dor reported the hope that all larger cities and health resorts would have at least one TEKA contact person who would supply the local physicians with information.28 Róbin added contacts in university towns to the list.29 He also mentioned the goal of propagating the language at the International Medical Congress in Budapest in 1909. For this purpose, an independent congress commission was formed, which had to demonstrate at the meetings in Budapest that it was possible “to hold a scientific speech and free discussions in Esperanto.”30 As a final goal, Róbin added medical excursions to various health resorts, which were to take place before the Esperanto World Congress in Barcelona or the International Medical Congress in Budapest in 1909.31 The positions already mentioned were supplemented with the addition of two vice presidents and a treasurer. These individuals formed the Central Committee. Ludwik Zamenhof also belonged to the Committee as Honorary President, as did his brother Leon Zamenhof as Honorary Consul.32 Furthermore, TEKA had seven honorary members at the beginning.33 At the national level, TEKA had consuls for 19 countries, including representatives for non-sovereign states such as Algeria and Poland. As further contacts, official representatives in 38 cities are listed in the yearbook.34

The Central Committee and the other members developed their own organizational structure of consuls and representatives. In 1910, the year in which membership was at its largest, TEKA had consuls in 29 countries, including non-sovereign territories, such as Bohemia, Galicia, and the Polish part of Russia.35 Representatives were found in 115 different cities.36 The representatives and consuls had the task of collecting membership fees from the physicians in their regions and sending them to the treasurer. The representatives in health resorts were later highlighted separately, with the indication that doctors could send their patients there. In 1911, 18 representatives from health resorts were listed, most of which were located in German-speaking countries.37

Due to the financial hardships TEKA incurred in order to publish its own journal, membership classes were introduced in 1912. The TEKA membership fee in 1912 was 2 Spesmilo;38 an Esperanto currency where 1 Spesmilo was the equivalent of half a dollar, 2.50 Swiss francs, or one ruble. First, the category of so-called protectors was created, who paid 10 Spesmilo a year.39 By the end of 1912, 28 members of the TEKA had earned the title of protector through their fees.40 In 1913, 21 members received the rank.41 Despite the additional financial support from the protectors, the expenses in 1913 could only be covered with reserves from the previous year. The difference was around 600 Spesmilo, which was equivalent to 300 more membership fees. As the Executive Committee was aware that a doubling of membership was not feasible, further membership classes were introduced. In the form of a “grant fund,” two further categories were introduced in addition to the protectors. The highest level became the patron, with an annual contribution of 30 Spesmilo, and the second highest level was the subventionist, with a contribution of 20 Spesmilo. In return, three issues of Kuracisto (Physician) were sent to the protectors, six to the subventionists, and 10 to the patrons for propaganda purposes. Furthermore, the groups of subventionists and patrons were given the right to elect their own TEKA vice president, who defended the interests of the journal in the Central Committee and cooperated with the editor-in-chief of Kuracisto.42 The last issue of Kuracisto before the war lists five patrons, two subventionists, and 22 protectors as of June 1914, which amounts to a further 410 Spesmilo in income and could have ensured Kuracisto’s continued existence.43

From the outset, the geographical distribution of TEKA members had its main concentration in East Central Europe.44 One of the reasons for this was the fact that the first official TEKA journal, VdK, was based in Lviv and had reached both Polish and Russian Esperantists even before TEKA was founded. As an early Esperanto stronghold with many academic Esperantists, France was the second hotspot. From these centers, a strong propagation of the language took place after the foundation, which is reflected above all in the far reaches of Russia and North America. The subsequent period led to the opening up of new cities and their medical communities and also in increase in the number of TEKA members on the ground. Depending on the activity of the local group and the commitment of the members, the dissemination of TEKA varied. From Warsaw, the method of Wilhelm Róbin is known, who contacted all the Esperanto doctors he knew with the simple sentence: “If you want to subscribe to the newspaper, please sign your name on the list and pay one ruble.”45 Almost all his colleagues signed, and this method was presented as an effective example at the TEKA meeting in Dresden.46

The membership development of TEKA can be traced through the official publications of the association. After the foundation in Dresden in August 1908, the first yearbook with an extensive list of members was published in spring 1909. Another yearbook was published for the year 1910, showing an increase of about 200 new members. A new yearbook with the membership list for 1911 was announced but never published.47 Therefore, for the following years, the list of paid members in the treasurer’s reports is used to trace membership development. What is particularly striking about the overview is the rise towards 1910 and the drastic fall in the following year, which was caused by the discontinuation of VdK as the official journal. The 1909 yearbook presented the membership figures shortly after the foundation of TEKA. In 1909, information about the existence of the association spread worldwide. A decisive factor was the official organ of the association, VdK, which had been in existence since the spring of 1908 and had almost 800 subscribers in 1909. At the end of 1910, however, cooperation between TEKA and VdK came to an end. At the beginning of 1911, the association had a new organ, but it was suspended after two issues. It was not until August 1911 that a new members’ magazine was published. The Oficiala Bulteno de TEKA (Official Bulletin of TEKA) contains a critical report on membership development by Wilhelm Róbin, who was secretary at the time:

The activities of the TEKA Committee were paralyzed48 in 1911 in the full sense of the word. We did not propagate the Association because we could not do so due to the known major obstacles that occurred on the part of Dr. Th[alwitzer] (regarding the Oficiala Bulteno). We did not dare recruit new members and promise them regular delivery of the official organ... We experienced a terrible period. From all sides, complaints, protests, and just demands! […]

The number of TEKA members is constantly growing, but unfortunately, this year we have lost many members who have been offended by the inaccuracy of our Internacia Medicino organ and by the stubborn silence of its publisher, who did not even respond to letters and prepaid telegrams.49

The publication of Internacia Medicino (International Medicine) under Adolf Thalwitzer as editor led to various problems. The first edition was published without proofreading and without TEKA’s consent, resulting in several errors in quotations and mention of authors. Before the second issue, Thalwitzer had already received money in the amount of 186 membership fees for further publication, but he then no longer replied to letters from the committee, so cooperation between Thalwitzer and the TEKA was discontinued.50 Compensation for this long period of declining membership could only be made through the constant publication of the journal Kuracisto from 1912 onwards. For the year 1914, Kuracisto contains evidence of 215 membership subscriptions received; however, the journal ceased to exist in June 1914, so the complete membership figures for the year are not known.

The further general development of TEKA remained unchanged. In 1910, a separate TEKA Congress was held at the UEA Congress in Augsburg.51 The official Esperanto World Congress took place in Washington. It was attended by only a few Europeans because of the long distance. In the period just before the outbreak of the war, TEKA congresses were held during the World Congresses, with frequent visits to local institutions and clinics. Two lines of development were of particular importance: first, the TEKA medical newsletter as a link among the members, and second, cooperation with the International Red Cross.

Esperanto Medical Journals

The Esperanto-speaking medical community urged for correspondence journals early on in order to present their national findings to an international audience through the multitude of different nations. The first medical articles were published in Internacia Scienca Revuo (International Science Review), a generic scientific journal in Esperanto which was published in Paris from 1904. The Parisian Esperantists noticed the lack of a medical journal and began to publish Internacia Revuo Medicina (International Medical Review, IRM) in 1906.52 This journal presented original articles in German, English, or French in one column and the respective translation in Esperanto in another column. Four issues of this journal were published that year before it ceased to exist. The editors’ reports mentioned complaints about high subscription prices. Furthermore, it seemed that the desired number of subscribers and the general scope of the journal had not been achieved, as most of the articles were from French medical publications and thus French subscribers had little reason to subscribe.53 The IRM is mentioned in the dissertation by Pierre Corret about the adoption of an international auxiliary language in medicine. According to Corret, it failed due to the lack of an interested audience.54

Voĉo de Kuracistoj,55 on the other hand, was more successful and long-lived. This journal emerged from an existing Polish medical journal, Głos Lekarzy, which had already been successfully published in Lviv for several years. The editor, Dr Szczepan Mikołajski,56 initially planned only the introduction of an Esperanto section in his journal, but he was then encouraged by the high number of favorable responses to publish an independent journal. Two issues appeared in 1908 as free supplements, and from May 1908, the journal existed until its last issue in November 1911. Mikołajski also made use of the contributions from VdK for his newspaper GL and published Polish translations. He thus enriched his journal with many international contributions. The first issue of VdK from April 1908 was primarily aimed at Polish-speaking doctors, who had already been subscribers to GL. In an appeal to his fellow physicians, Mikołajski therefore formulated the aim of the journal to give Polish medicine and its achievements a proper forum, as it had hitherto been internationally underrepresented.57 Although the journal remained in publication for only about four years, it was one of the longest-lived Esperanto journals before World War I. Between 1908 and 1910, VdK was the official organ of TEKA. However, as there were financial discrepancies in the forwarding of membership fees to VdK editorial office throughout this period and TEKA refused to accept Mikołajski’s new conditions, he resigned from publishing it as the official organ.

Mikołajski distinguished himself as an experienced publicist who had been publishing his Głos Lekarzy in parallel since 1903. The journals provided clear structures and, by listing the coauthors and subscribers, they allowed for a variety of investigations. The year 1909 is suitable as a focus of inquiry since it was the year in which the first complete volume was published and VdK was the organ of TEKA for the entire year. The three areas that will be examined in more detail are: 1. the subscribers to the journal, 2. the authors, and 3. the reviewed journals.

Subscribers

The distribution of subscribers can be visualized with the use of a map.58 In 1909, the magazine listed its subscribers. A total of 1,005 entries can be found, but there are repeated entries and orders for multiple journals to the addresses of Esperanto clubs. Adjusted for these factors, the number of subscribers was 770. The subscribers were be found in 367 different locations. The main focus was clearly in Europe and a broad strip in the north of the USA. When looking at the individual cities, Warsaw leads with a figure of 64 subscribers.

Table 2. Amount of VdK subscribers in 1909 per city (more than 10) compared to TEKA members in 1909 and 1910

1 T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1909.

2 T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1910.

VdK already benefitted from its function as an official TEKA organ in 1909. The 1909 TEKA Yearbook lists 428 members, which means that about 300 non-TEKA members belonged to the circle of subscribers. The comparison of subscribers and TEKA members shows that, in the cases of Rio de Janeiro, Dublin, and Budapest, many subscribers joined TEKA in 1909. However, it is not yet possible to explain how the high number of 46 subscribers in Rio de Janeiro was achieved. The high number of subscribers in Lviv probably correlates with the place of publication as well as the connection to Głos Lekarzy as the predecessor journal. In Europe, there were many places where only one or a smaller group of subscribers was located. Larger accumulations were found in capitals such as Paris, Stockholm, Budapest, and Bucharest. Furthermore, no coherent clusters can be identified. The subscribers in the German Empire were relatively widely distributed. High subscriber numbers in Warsaw, Lviv, and Lodz provided a high absolute number of subscribers in Polish-speaking lands.

A cluster already noticeable in other visualizations, such as the World Congress participants, TEKA members, or publication sites of other Esperanto journals, can be identified north and along the 50th latitude. This connectivity belt 59 stretched from Dublin via London, Belgium, northern France, and central Germany through Bohemia and the Polish-speaking lands into the Russian countryside and ended around Moscow, at a similar latitude to Dublin.

Contributors

The following table shows the most active collaborators of VdK sorted by the number of their contributions in 1909. The high number of contributions is mainly due to scientific reviews of national novelties. The internist Izrael Fels, who, like Mikołajski, was based in Lviv and was already actively involved in Głos Lekarzy, ranks first. Fels frequently reviewed articles from Polish and German medical journals, but he also wrote reviews of English, Italian, French, and Russian publications in all disciplines; 97 of his articles were reviews and a correspondence. The large gap between Fels and L. Jenny is striking. With half as many contributions, the military physician Jenny submitted the second most articles. Jenny’s contributions are exclusively reviews. He covered solely French medical journals but he dealt with all areas. In third place is the Russian physician V. Sobolev from Poltava, who contributed 36 reviews and one correspondence. Sobolev mainly covered Russian medical journals, and he also wrote on all fields. The places of residence of the authors listed here also correspond to the general distribution of the other contributors. Although there were also submissions from Australia, the Philippines, Japan, and the USA, the focus was clearly on East Central Europe and France.

Table 3. Contributors with more than 10 articles in 1909

However, no first publications of medical findings took place in VdK. In addition to a review section, the journal mainly collected international submissions to surveys initiated by the editor Mikołajski. The surveys were about more general medical matters, such as medical secrecy or the right to Sunday rest. On the one hand, these surveys were passed on to national medical journals,60 but Mikołajski also used the submissions to enrich his Polish journal Głos Lekarzy with international submissions.

Reviewed journals

The last unit of investigation to be considered is that of the reviewed journals. From Mikołajski’s goals for VdK, it is clear that he wanted to give the internationally underrepresented Polish science a larger potential audience through his journal. It would therefore had been reasonable to assume that, alongside Polish medical journals, journals from other smaller countries would also be represented. However, the following overview shows that mainly Russian and German journals were used as sources for the reviews.

Table 4. Overview of reviewed journals with more than 10 articles

Both the overview of the reviewed journals and the following overview of the source languages show that Mikołajski’s goal was only partially achieved. German, French, and also Russian journal articles reflected the leading nations in medicine at the time, and they also corresponded to the backgrounds of the subscribers and contributors to the journal. However, the fact that Polish articles, of which there were 31, are ahead of English articles, of which there were 17, shows an increase in publication, which can, admittedly, be explained by the small number of English-speaking contributors.

These three examples show the reach and influence of a small and young periodical from the province of Galicia. After one year, VdK was able to build a functioning and coordinated editorial team. The two most important units, subscribers and contributors, were mainly based in East Central Europe, and their involvement with VdK ensured the transfer of medical knowledge and the supply of national findings to a worldwide subscriber base. The analysis of VdK exemplifies a platform for international medical cooperation. Although no medical discoveries were first published in VdK, the strength of the journal lay in the reviews of national findings. The coverage of German, French, and Russian articles made medical news from the countries which were leaders in medical research available to an international audience. The circulation of knowledge was successfully pursued in the medical journals of the Esperanto movement. However, it was mainly smaller nations that benefited from the reproduction of medical research in Esperanto. Since medicine, at least in Central Europe, was often dominated by English, French, and German before World War I, the journals served those who did not speak these languages themselves.

After VdK ceased to be the official organ of TEKA at the end of 1910, it was not until 1912 that a new medical journal in Esperanto was published. Internacia Medicino published two issues in 1911, followed by the Oficiala Bulteno de TEKA from 1911 to 1912, which served more as a newsletter of the association than as a medical journal. The journal Kuracisto, which was published in Warsaw from 1912 onwards, was the last prewar journal until the outbreak of war in 1914 and, like VdK, it was in the hands of Polish Esperanto doctors. After World War I, Internacia Medicina Revuo was published from 1923 onwards, and its successor, Medicina Internacia Revuo, is today the official organ of the Universala Medicina Esperanto Asocio, TEKA’s official successor organization.

Esperanto and the Red Cross

While the Polish Esperanto doctors were primarily involved in the work of the journal, cooperation with the Red Cross was largely in the hands of French Esperantists.61 The French Lieutenant Georges Bayol published a booklet in French on Esperanto and the Red Cross in 1906. In this book, Bayol described the necessity of an international language for the Red Cross. The book also contains basic information on the language and its structure, as well as vocabulary lists and possible conversations in French and Esperanto.62 Records of a gathering of Red Cross members at the international Esperanto congress in Geneva also exist for the same year.63 Bayol spoke at the opening session of the Geneva congress on the introduction of the language within Red Cross societies, pointing out the great benefits of language in the societies.64 At the third working session, he addressed the issue again and proposed that Esperanto should be spoken by Red Cross members who were providing or receiving care. Furthermore, he appealed to the English Esperantists to put the Esperanto question on the agenda at the next International Red Cross Conference in London in 1907.65 The congress supported Bayol’s proposal and published the following resolutions supporting the introduction of Esperanto within the Red Cross:

Considering that because of the variety of languages spoken by the wounded, sick, and nurses in war, the use of Esperanto would facilitate the care of the sick, The Congress expresses the wish that the subject of “The language Esperanto applied for Red Cross Services” be included in the program of the next International Conference of the Red Cross to be held in London in 1907 that one or more Esperantists discuss this subject at the London Conference; that very active propaganda be made for Esperanto in all societies helping those wounded in war.66

A discussion of this request at the London Red Cross Conference in 1907 did not take place, as the request was submitted too late.67 Nevertheless, the efforts of individual Red Cross societies to bring Esperanto into their associations did not stop. In 1908, the Société Française Espéranto-Croix-Rouge (French Esperanto-Red Cross Society, SFECR) was founded concurrently with TEKA.68 Starting with the 1908 World Congress in Dresden, maneuvers were carried out in cooperation with the local Red Cross as part of the congress program to demonstrate that basic medical care was possible in Esperanto. Among the participants were local volunteers, who had had to familiarize themselves with the language in the previous months, as well as congress participants and delegates of the Red Cross. The first of these maneuvers took place in Dresden and was continued in Barcelona and Antwerp in subsequent years. Representing the Red Cross at the Dresden Congress was Adolphe Moynier, son of Red Cross cofounder Gustave Moynier, who acknowledged the serious progress of the language and its uses in various fields. Furthermore, he was positively surprised that, in preparing a Red Cross maneuver, the organizers managed to teach the nurses enough Esperanto in ten lessons to enable them to follow instructions and answer questions.69

The procedure of such an Esperanto Red Cross maneuver is described in detail for the year 1909. During the Barcelona Congress, the participants in this maneuver consisted of members of the Spanish Red Cross and the international congress participants. After being transported to the casualty station, the wounded were questioned and examined by doctors and nurses. The diagnoses and personal data were noted on special cards in Esperanto. The next step involved transport to the field hospital, where the wounded were classified according to their diagnosis cards. The last step was the removal of the wounded. As a result, the exercise was perceived as positive by the whole group. According to the report, there were no difficulties in communication among the different nationalities. Due to the events of the Tragic Week70 in Barcelona in the forefront of the Congress, the language training of the Red Cross participants could only take place to a limited extent, but this was not noticed negatively during the exercise. At the Red Cross specialist meeting held during the Congress, the aspiration to introduce Esperanto to the organization was further discussed. The participants were convinced that the success of the exercise should be communicated. The report also indicated that some Red Cross groups had already offered Esperanto courses to their members. In addition, the Russian Red Cross had advised local committees to introduce courses on Esperanto. The US Secretary of War was also reported to have brought Esperanto to the attention of the National Red Cross.71

At the 9th International Conference of the Red Cross in Washington in 1912, the Esperanto issue was successfully presented. Madame Lardin de Musset from the SFECR presented the advantages of using the language in the Red Cross and reported on successful applications in maneuvers during Esperanto congresses. The speech was supported by an Esperantist from Cuba, who reported on the success of Esperanto in his home country. As the proposal to introduce Esperanto in the Red Cross again had not been registered on the agenda, the conference leader announced that it would be forwarded to the Central Committee of the Red Cross.72 An official endorsement of the language was not offered by the Red Cross until a few years after the war. At the 10th International Conference of the Red Cross in 1921, a resolution was adopted that the national societies should encourage their members to learn Esperanto.73 The cooperation of the Esperanto movement with the Red Cross was welcomed by TEKA and mentioned in many places in its publications. However, it is noticeable that most of the supporters came directly from the French Red Cross and had mainly humanitarian backgrounds. As inventions of the same period, the Red Cross and Esperanto are among many other “idealistic internationalisms” the members of which have often been active in several movements, and their networks overlap in many places.74

Conclusion

TEKA was a typical internationally oriented association of its era. In a globalizing world, Esperanto-minded physicians from Europe were looking for an organization for international exchange. By founding an association, TEKA was able to extend its scope to various continents, especially with the help of medical journals in Esperanto, and it benefited from international meetings through the annual Esperanto World Congresses. TEKA also found its way into international medicine outside the Esperanto world and was presented in medical journals or at medical congresses as a solution to the language problem. Due to horrifying experiences of the war, the introduction of Esperanto into the Red Cross was an important concern. A few years before the outbreak of World War I, several initiatives to establish Esperanto officially as a language within the Red Cross failed. It was not until the tragic events of the war that the delegates voted in favor of the dissemination of Esperanto in the Red Cross in 1921. Though TEKA gave stimuli to the medical world in a few instances, it failed in its attempts to introduce Esperanto as a congress language at the International Medical Congresses in Budapest and London and as a language in the Red Cross. The strength was in providing medical information in Esperanto. This was reflected in the success of the journals and the resulting high number of subscribers during VdK period. The attempt to continue the old heyday with and to compensate for the loss of many members was interrupted by the war.

Bibliography

Printed sources

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Anonymous. “An International Language of Medicine.” The British Medical Journal 1, no. 2249 (1904): 320–21.

Anonymous. “Cirkulero al T.E.K.A.-anoj” [Circular letter to TEKA members]. Oficiala Bulteno de T.E.K.A. 1, no. 1 (1911): 1–3.

Anonymous. “Do Kolegów Esperantystów” [To fellow Esperantist]. Głos Lekarzy 6, no. 8 (1908): 6.

Anonymous. “Esperanto.” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2746 (1913): 427.

Anonymous. “Seventeenth International Medical Congress.” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2744 (1913): 262–64.

Anonymous. “T.E.K.A.-Anaro” [TEKA Membership]. Internacia Medicino 1, no.1 (1911): 29.

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Anonymous. “The Sixteenth International Congress of Medicine.” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2543 (1909): 887–90.

Alexander, Robert. “Kasa Raporto, Por Aprilo 1914-a” [Cash report for April 1914]. Kuracisto 3, no. 6 (1914): 92–93.

Bayol, Georges. Espéranto et Croix-Rouge. Paris: Hachette, 1906.

Brzostowski, Aleksander Bolesław. Adresaro de Polaj Esperantistoj por 1909 [Addressbook of Polish Esperantists for 1909]. Warsaw: Jan Günther, 1909.

Dor, Henri. “Al Sinjoro D-ro Thalwitzer” [To Dr Thalwitzer]. In T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1909, edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio, 9–11. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1909.

Dua Universala Kongreso de Esperanto [Second Universal Congress of Esperanto]. Edited by Esperantista Centra Oficejo. Paris: Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 1907.

Jameson Johnston, George, Konstantin Ŝidlovskij, and Karl Weiss. “La centra komitato de T.E.K.A. adresas al ĉiuj asocianoj sekvantan gravan sciigon” [The Central Committee of TEKA addresses to all associates following important notification]. Kuracisto 2, no. 10 (1913): 203–4.

Johnston, George. “Kasa Raporto por Aŭgusto, Septembro kaj Oktobro 1913” [Cash report for August, September, and October 1913]. Kuracisto 2, no. 10 (1913): 204.

Johnston, George. “Kasa Raporto por Septembro kaj Oktobro 1912” [Cash report for September and October 1912]. Kuracisto 1, no. 3 (1912): 47–48.

Krukovski, Samuel. “IV. Kongreso Esperantista en Dresdeno” [IV. Esperantist Congress in Dresden]. Vocho de Kuracistoj 1, no. 8 (1908): 82–86.

Mikołajski, Szczepan. “Organizo de la kuracistoj-esperantistoj” [Organisation of Esperantist physicians]. Vocho de Kuracistoj 1, no. 5 (1908): 45–47.

Moynier, Adolphe. “Raporto de la Internacia Komitato de la Ruĝa Kruco pri la 4-a Kongreso de Esperanto” [Report of the International Committee of the Red Cross at the 4th Esperanto Congress]. In T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1909, edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio, 43–48. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1909.

Neuvième Conférence Internationale de la Croix-Rouge. Edited by The American Red Cross. Washington: Judd & Detweiler Inc., 1912.

Róbin, Wilhelm. “Kelkaj vortoj pri T.E.K.A” [Few words about TEKA]. Oficiala Bulteno de T.E.K.A. 1, no. 3 (1911): 53–58.

Róbin, Wilhelm. “Kion ni faris?” [What did we do?]. In T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1909, edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio, 12–16. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1909.

Róbin, Wilhelm. “Organizo de kuracistoj-esperantistoj” [Organisation of Esperantist physicians]. Vocho de Kuracistoj 1, no. 6 (1908): 63–64.

Róbin, Wilhelm. “Raporto de la Sekretario” [Report of the Secretary]. Oficiala Bulteno de T.E.K.A. 1, no. 2 (1911): 26.

Rosenberg, Artur H. “Der Internationalismus in der Medizin und Esperanto.” Medizinische Reform 18, no. 19 (1910): 202–4.

Sebert, Hippolyte. “L’esperanto et les Sociétés de la Croix-Rouge.” Revue Internationale de la Croix-Rouge 3, no. 32 (1921): 803–14.

Ŝirjaev, Ivan. “Medicino” [Medicine]. In Enciklopedio de Esperanto [Encyclopedia of Esperanto], edited by Lajos Kökény, and Vilmos Bleier, 364–65. Budapest: Literatura Mondo, 1933.

Skałkowski, Bronisław, Izrael Fels, and Szczepan Mikołajski. “Odezwa do Lekarzy Esperantystów we wszystkich krajach” [Appeal to Esperantist physicians in all countries]. Głos Lekarzy 21, no. 5 (1907): 4–5.

Statuts et réglement intérieur. Paris: Société Française Espéranto-Croix-Rouge, 1908.

T.E.K.A.–Jarlibro 1909. Edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1909.

T.E.K.A.–Jarlibro 1910. Edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1910.

Thalwitzer, Friedrich. “Esperanto kaj la Ruĝa Kruco” [Esperanto and the Red Cross]. In T.E.K.A.-Jarlibro 1910, edited by Tutmonda Esperanta Kuracista Asocio, 46–51. Kötzschenbroda–Dresden: H. F. Adolf Thalwitzer, 1910.

Tria Universala Kongreso de Esperanto [Third Universal Congress of Esperanto]. Edited by Esperantista Centra Oficejo. Paris: Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 1908.

Vallienne, Henri, and Charles Verax. “Nia programo” [Our program]. Internacia Revuo Medicina 1, no. 1 (1906): 1.

Whitaker, E. T. “An Esperanto Society for Men.” The Lancet 2, no. 4287 (1905): 1292.

Zamenhof, Leon. “Kuracistoj” [Physicians]. In Kvara Universala Kongreso de Esperanto, edited by Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 145–48. Paris: Esperantista Centra Oficejo, 1909.

Zamenhof, Ludwik Lejzer [Dr Esperanto, pseud.]. Dr. Esperanto’s International Language. Translated by Richard Henry Geoghegan. Warsaw, Samenhof, 1889. Originally published as Международный язык (Warsaw: Kelter, 1887).

Secondary literature

Corret, Pierre. “Utilité et possibilité de l’adoption d’une langue internationale auxiliaire en medicine.” PhD diss., University of Paris, 1908.

Garvía, Roberto. Esperanto and Its Rivals: The Struggle for an International Language. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2015.

Geyer, Martin H., and Johannes Paulmann, eds., The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Guerrero, Javier. “Voĉoj de kuracistoj” [Voices of physicians]. Esperantaj Bitoj (blog) November 19, 2020, https://bibliotekoj.org/esperantajbitoj/vocoj-de-kuracistoj.html.

Golec, Józef. Słownik biograficzny esperantystów polskich [Biographical dictionary of Polish Esperantists]. Cieszyn: Józef Golec, 2010.

Gordin, Michael D. Scientific Babel: How Science was done before and after Global English. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Hernández, José María Rodríguez. “The Esperantist Movement’s humanitarian activities in the two World Wars and its relationship with the International Red Cross.” International Review of the Red Cross 36, no. 312 (1996): 315–22.

Hoberman, John. “Toward a Theory of Olympic Internationalism.” Journal of Sport History 22, no. 1 (1995): 1–37.

Huber, Valeska. “Pandemics and the politics of difference: rewriting the history of internationalism through nineteenth-century cholera.” Journal of Global History 15, no. 3 (2020): 394–407. doi: 10.1017/S1740022820000236.

Lavarenne, Christian. “Espéranto: L’idée interne dans ses origines et quelques-unes de ses expressions et manifestations (aide ou obstacle à la diffusion de la langue?).” PhD diss., University of Paris 13, 2012.

Saunier, Pierre-Yves. Transnational History. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Tonkin, Humphrey. “Invented cities, invented languages: Esperanto and urban textuality, 1888–1914.” Language Problems & Language Planning 40, no. 1 (2016): 85–99. doi: 10.1075/lplp.40.1.06ton.

Pilch, Andrzej. “Mikołajski.” In Polski Słownik Biograficzny [Polish biographical dictionary], vol. 21, edited by Sobiesław Mieroszewski, and Władysław Morsztyn, 156–57. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1976.

Wincewicz, Andrzej, et al. “Language and medicine in the Zamenhof family.” Acta Medico-Historica Adriatica 8, no. 2 (2010): 287–92.

Map 1. TEKA members around the world in 1909 (black dots) and new members in 1910 (white dots).

Table 1. Development of TEKA membership 1909–1913

Map 2. Global distribution of VdK subscribers in 1909

Table 5. Original languages of articles reviewed

Rebellious Priests? The Catholic Clergy and the Diet, 1764–1765*

András Forgó
University of Pécs
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Hungarian Historical Review Volume 10 Issue 1  (2021): 73-95 DOI 10.38145/2021.1.73

The study of the eighteenth-century parliament has intensified in Hungary over the past decade and a half. This tendency is part of a larger European historiographical trend which has revalued the role of the Diets in the study of eighteenth-century political decision-making and political culture. The Hungarian Diet of 1764–1765 is traditionally seen as an outstanding political event in the century, and at the same time as a turning point of the reign of Maria Theresa. After the bitter experiences gained here, she did not convene the estates of Hungary during the remaining fifteen years of her reign, she rather ruled the country by decrees with the help of the institutions of the estates in Hungary. This study is looking for the answer to the question of how the clergy’s opposition to the politics of the court is represented in the sources and how the “change of sides” by the chapter representatives can be grasped in the parliamentary debates.

Keywords: Hungarian Diet, Catholic clergy, political culture, lower house, Corpus Juris Hungarici, Tripartitum, pasquillus, constitution, estates, eighteenth century

The study of the political activity of the ecclesiastical order in the eighteenth century is not a recent trend in Hungarian historiography. It has long been known in the secondary literature that the advancement of Catholic confessionalization, or in other words the massive support of Catholicism in the era, was accompanied by an increase in the role of the clergy in public life. This public role can be examined mainly through an analysis of the clergy’s activity in the parliaments. The study of the activities, composition, and decision-making mechanisms of the eighteenth-century parliament has intensified in Hungary over the past decade and a half. This tendency is part of a larger European historiographical trend which has revalued the role of the Diets in the study of eighteenth-century political decision-making and political culture.1

The Diet of 1608 passed an article which specified who would be entitled to participate in the work of the parliament, a matter previously regulated exclusively by customary law. Article I included the groups of the prelates (praelati), barons or magnates (barones/magnates), the nobles (nobiles), and the free royal cities (liberae regiae civitates) among the estates (status et ordines). It then specified the composition of the upper house (tabula superior) and the lower house (tabula inferior). As for the members of the clergy, the diocesan bishops were given the right to sit and vote in the upper house, while the representatives of the cathedral and collegiate chapters could vote in the lower house. The abbots and provosts infulati and possessionati were guaranteed a personal appearance in the Diet, but among the ordinary inhabitants of the country (inter regnicolas), i.e. in the lower house.2 As a consequence, the clergy enjoyed substantial representation in the parliament, and if they coordinated their activities, they could influence decision-making in both the lower and the upper houses. For precisely this reason, it is important to consider how members of the ecclesiastical order behaved during the parliamentary debates.

István Szijártó has placed eighteenth-century Hungarian estate politics in a new context when he applied the theorems of “confessional corporatism” and “constitutional corporatism” to the political life of the period. The first parliaments of the eighteenth century were dominated by religious debates. The Catholic majority and the followers of the legally authorized Protestant confessions, the Lutherans and the Calvinists, were in irreconcilable conflict. Taking advantage of the new situation after the expulsion of the Ottomans, the Catholics, led by the clergy, demanded the complete suppression of Protestantism, while the Protestants demanded free religious practice based on the 1606 Treaty of Vienna.3 These debates often paralyzed the work of the parliament for months. As it became almost impossible to make the decisions that were important to the court, beginning in 1715, Vienna sought to exclude the religious issue from parliamentary discussions. Eventually, this led to the regulation of religious affairs in 1731 and 1734 and the issuing of the two Carolina resolutio.4 Although this was not a reassuring solution for either party, the fact that the confessional issue was no longer a subject of debate in the Diets opened up the possibility not only for the negotiation of the reforms, but also for the defense of the constitutional order. As a consequence, an alliance of the estates across confessions could be established, which began an era that Szijártó has labelled the period of “constitutional corporatism,” when the parliament could deal more and more with the protection of the rights guaranteed by the Treaty of Szatmár (1711). This process culminated in the resistance movement of the estates at the Diet of 1764–1765. The next parliament, however, which met in 1790–1791 (after the death of Joseph II and following a 25-year pause), stirred up confessional tempers again. At this point, the Hungarian estates had to take a position on whether to codify Joseph’s policy of tolerance or to return to the religious conditions of Maria Theresa’s reign. The parliament eventually passed a law with the same meaning as the Edict of Tolerance, so religion once again could be removed from the agenda and the estates could continue to focus on the protection of the constitution.5

In his work on the eighteenth-century history of the Hungarian episcopate, Joachim Bahlcke formulated a definitive thesis about the relationship of the prelates to the court and thus, indirectly, about their role in public life. The central idea of the monograph is that, in the first half of the century, the prelates worked closely with the court on building the Catholic institutional system and at the same time resolutely supported the policy of the rulers in Hungary. In the middle of the century, however, there was a sharp turn: cooperation turned into opposition. Maria Theresa’s measures to reform the Catholic Church and to reduce the influence of the ecclesiastical order in Hungary provoked fierce resistance from the prelates. According to Bahlcke, the change in the relationship was first made noticeable by the Viennese reception of the famous Enchiridion de fide by Bishop Márton Padányi Biró of Veszprém.6 The document, which was extremely anti-Protestant, was banned by Maria Theresa, mainly due to its turbulent reception abroad. However, the real clash, according to Bahlcke, took place in the Diet of 1764–1765, when the clergy joined the clerical resistance generated by the writing of Adam František Kollár, director of the Vienna Library, which is to be discussed in more detail later. Unsurprisingly, the conflict only became really aggravated during the reign of Joseph II. When Pius VI visited Vienna, the Hungarian prelates took joint action against the ruler’s measures affecting the Catholic Church. Thus, in Bahlcke’s wording, cooperation became confrontation. In other words, by the end of the century, the Hungarian prelates turned against the politics of the court. 7

Bahlcke’s thesis has previously been criticized by many in Hungarian historiography,8 but it is noteworthy in his argumentation that, like István Szijártó, he considers the parliament of 1764–1765 an important stage of open confrontation. The work of Mihály Horváth discussing the same parliament refines the picture outlined by Bahlcke on the clergy’s role. According to Horváth, the clergy was united in the support of the opposition put up by the estates in the Kollár case, and the lower house clergy backed the opposition even at the beginning of the debate on the tax increase. At one point, however, they shifted to the side of the court, and that changed the balance of power in favor of the “ruling party.”9 Thus, in the following, I am looking for the answer to the question of how the clergy’s opposition to the politics of the court is represented in the sources and how the “change of sides” by the chapter representatives can be grasped in the tax debates.10

Political Debates of the Parliament of 1764–1765

In accordance with old traditions, Maria Theresa summoned the parliament on June 17, 1764 to Pozsony (today Bratislava, Slovakia). The laws set a four-day deadline for the estates to assemble. As the celebration of Corpus Christi fell on June 21 of that year, the first day of the meeting was held on June 22, with the presidency of Personalis Ferenc Koller in the lower house and Palatine Lajos Batthyány in the upper house. As usual, the estates invited the ruler to the parliament through an elected delegation, which marched into the city on July 3. Already the queen’s itinerary and her entrance to Pozsony signaled that a new era of governance had begun: while the ceremonies before the opening of the coronation parliament in 1741 took place with the usual solemnity, in 1751 and 1764 the members of the dynasty travelled to Pozsony without the usual night stop at Petronell, and the ceremonial elements of the entry into the city were also dramatically shortened.11 After receiving the propositions, the estates met again on July 5 in a so-called mixed session (sessio mixta) where they were all present to acquainted themselves with the text of the proposal. According to the plans, the lower house would have begun the detailed discussion on July 9. At this moment, however, the biggest scandal in the history of this parliament broke out, the outrage over the aforementioned work by Adam František Kollár.12

Maria Theresa wanted to use the Diet of 1764–1765 to implement reforms in Hungary that had already been introduced in the Czech and Austrian provinces. These reforms were primarily aimed at the transformation of taxation. Although the queen had managed to achieve a tax increase in the past,13 the estates did not want to consent to the voluntary waiver of their declared tax exemption. On the one hand, reference was made to István Werbőczy’s legal book, the Tripartitum (1514), which, although not officially part of the Hungarian Corpus Juris, was still highly esteemed among the nobility, mainly for the description it contained of the privileges of the estates. The Tripartitum stated that one of the fundamental privileges of the estates was that they were exempt from the payment of all gifts, taxes, and duties, and in return, they were obligated to provide military protection for the country.14

In defense of their tax exemption, they could also rely on Article VIII of Act 1741, in which Maria Theresa, in exchange for their financial and armed assistance in the Austrian War of Succession, reaffirmed the privileges of the Hungarian estates, first openly declaring their exemption from taxes by stating that property could not be a basis for taxation (ne onus fundo quoquo modo inhaereat). Thus, at the beginning of Maria Theresa’s reign, the court failed to switch to land-based taxation in Hungary, as it had already done successfully in Austria. After that, Vienna had no choice but to increase the amount of the war tax (contributio) from parliament to parliament, and these costs were passed on to the serfs by the nobility.15

The tax reform emerged in 1764 in connection with the question of military supply: Maria Theresa considered it necessary to put an end to the obsolete noble uprising (insurrectio) and to establish a permanent army maintained by the nobility instead. This was contained in the royal proposals. Moreover, the settlement of the serf-landlord issue was also put on the agenda in Vienna. For tactical reasons, however, it was not included in the royal proposal, but was intended to be submitted to the parliament when, in accordance with the traditions, the estates would come forward to lament the burdens of the poor taxpaying people (misera plebs contribuens), that is, the peasantry. As the estates invoked historical reasons to preserve their tax exemption, the court also needed such arguments to introduce reforms. These arguments were provided by Kollár’s work, which was written in Latin.16

The main purpose of the work, which stirred up a great storm, was to show that the rulers could exercise their legislative power without the consent of the estates and also that their power over the church extended to ecclesiastical property and possessions. In support of his propositions, Kollár analyzed the decrees of the Hungarian rulers from the Árpád era onwards, thus illustrating that the estates had only been able to intervene in government during the period of late medieval anarchy, and that the kings exercised power over the church without restriction. The Tripartitum, to which the nobility had since referred as the primary source of law, had been written during a period of anarchy, and it had never been accepted by a parliament and had even been revised by the estates themselves a few decades after its publication. The tax exemption for the nobility was rejected by Kollár on the grounds that the nobility had already been called the protector of the realm by Saint Stephen, and in the decree of Andrew II, it was stated that the nobles owed loyalty and service to the ruler in exchange for their privileges. Here Kollár refers to Article XXXI of 1222, which states that, in order to preserve their liberties, the estates owed obedience to the crown. The piquancy of this argument is that the next paragraph of the Article is the famous resistance clause, which the estates, on the basis of the Tripartitum, considered the legal guarantee of any legitimate action against the ruler.

The estates understood the message of Kollár’s work very clearly: the Habsburg government wanted to put an end to the uniquely strong rights of the Hungarian estates and intended to launch reforms which threatened to undermine the noble privileges in this hereditary province, too. As Kollár attacked the prerogatives of both the first and the second estates, both the ecclesiastical and the secular nobility rejected the conclusions of the work. Thus, the alliance of interests already discussed in the introduction of this paper was formed. The lower house began open resistance on July 9: it refused to discuss the royal proposals until its grievances had been remedied, which included the public burning of Kollár’s work and even the punishment of the Kollár himself to set an example. Although the intervention of the upper house poured oil on troubled waters, Vienna eventually had to back down: the distribution of Kollár’s work was banned, copies already sent to Hungary were confiscated, and Maria Theresa ordered an investigation on August 16 to clarify the matter. Although the lower house was still busy compiling the grievances, the work of Adam Franz Kollár was eventually taken off the agenda.17

Tempers, however, continued to flare: even though the queen was eagerly awaiting the estates’ response to the propositions, the estates were now busy collecting their grievances. This was followed by the tractatus diaetalis on the issue of taxation. As we have seen, it was not possible to raise the idea of a formal tax reform because of Article VIII of 1741. One of the queen’s confidants, Miklós Pálffy, the later Judge Royal, also warned the queen before convening the parliament against attacking this noble privilege, though he himself considered it harmful.18 There is no doubt that in rejecting land-based taxation, the nobility was clearly confronted with a European practice that increasingly involved privileged social groups in bearing the burden of the state, and thus for a long time prevented the reduction of the financial burdens of the common people.19 Therefore, it is no wonder that the Viennese government circles also condemned the privileges of the Hungarian estates. Wenzel Anton Kaunitz had a particularly negative opinion of the freestanding of Hungary, and he likened Hungarians to ticks.20 However, the court had no choice but to continue to focus only on raising the tax rate instead of on implementing comprehensive reforms.

However, in the tense atmosphere caused by Kollár’s work, the estates even refrained from raising taxes, and some county deputies even wanted to reduce taxes by the same amount as had been suggested by the previous parliament in 1751. Maria Theresa, on the other hand, stood her ground: in her response to the grievances of September 19, she insisted on the need for a tax increase. The upper house also sided with the queen this time, giving up the earlier anti-government position it had adopted during the tug-of-war around Kollár’s book. As a consequence, only the lower house needed to be softened and persuaded to give up its oppositional stance. This work was carried out, as usual, by the Personalis Ferenc Koller and the Royal Court of Justice. The main argument in favor of abandoning the position of the lower house was that the estates could only expect a positive assessment of their grievances if they, too, made concessions from their position on taxes. Persistent work was ultimately crowned with success: the lower house first withdrew its insistence on the restoration the level of taxation before 1751, and it eventually consented to an increase in taxes. Moreover, Maria Theresa even managed to extort support from the estates for the Royal Hungarian Noble Bodyguard. However, the court could not by any means record the outcome of the tractatus diaetalis in 1764–1765 as a success, as no results had been achieved with the estates on either the issue of the insurrection or the issue of feudal duties. 21 It is well-known that the latter was regulated by decree by the queen, but the former had not been satisfactorily settled for the court for a long time.22

The Role of the Clergy in the Parliamentary Debates

The ceremonial events surrounding the opening of the parliament were not a harbinger of the subsequent behavior of the clergy: according to a report by one of the county deputies, the prelates, together with the secular dignitaries, received Maria Theresa at the border with “great honor.” The head of the Hungarian prelates, Prince-Archbishop Ferenc Barkóczy of Esztergom (1761–1765), gave a nearly half-hour-long, “unspeakably beautiful” speech in Latin to the queen.23 A note from one of the court officials, which has survived in the official documents of the parliament, also highlights the primate’s ornate speech, interspersed with expressions appropriate to the solemnity of the event.24 In this speech, he contended that the country was lucky threefold, because Maria Theresa had visited Pozsony for the third time, after her coronation in 1741 and the parliament in 1751. Barkóczy emphasized that this time the husband of Maria Theresa, the co-ruler Francis of Lorraine, the Holy Roman emperor, and the heir to the throne, Archduke Joseph, had also come to Hungary. The primate also repeated the offering of vitam et sanguinem, which became famous in 1741.25 At that time, thus, there was no indication of a conflict.

However, on July 10, an unknown source had already notified Kollár that a discussion of his book had begun in the upper house. Primate Barkóczy now personally accused him of trying to question the privileges and rights of the nobility and of wanting to stir up a conflict between Maria Theresa and the estates. 26 In the Kollár case, Barkóczy remained an advocate of the clergy, whose positions were closely followed in the court. In addition to Barkóczy, Bishop János Gusztinyi of Nyitra (1764–1777) was active in the fight against Kollár’s work. He was elected to the twelve-member committee which had the task of investigating the so-called illegal allegations.

It was Gusztinyi who presented the results of the investigation to the estates, in which he made serious accusations against Kollár. According to Gusztinyi, Kollár had moved away from the faith by attacking the divine origin of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He had also supported a misguided view of ecclesiastical property, according to Gusztinyi, as this property was not owned by the ruler, who was only a guardian and protector of it. The report also refutes Kollár’s attacks on the Tripartitum, which are seen as a defamation of the Hungarian nation, and it states that Kollár was deceived by “a-Catholic authors.” Finally, Gusztinyi contends that Kollár had disregarded the laws, the liberties of the estates, and the principles of canon law, and thus he had significant threatened to infringe on the public good and the “res publica.”27

However, not all of the prelates lined up behind the opposition. Archbishop József Batthyány of Kalocsa, the second dignitary of the episcopate, played a mediating role in the conflict from the outset, thus trying to address the tense situation. As soon as the conflict broke out, Kollár turned to the archbishop, asking him to represent his interests in the parliament. In his reply, Batthyány did not deceive Kollár: he explained that it would be difficult to pacify the offended Hungarians, and he also drew Kollár’s attention to the statements from his work directed against the papal power, the church, and the nobility. He encouraged Kollár to try to clarify his position and reconcile with the participants of the parliament by writing a letter in his own defense, and he promised to do everything to help him.28 Batthyány also contacted Corneille de Nény (Cornelius Franz von Neny), the cabinet secretary of Maria Theresa (1763–1776).29 Nény seems to have played a significant connecting role between the Hungarian parliament and the court, because in addition to the archbishop of Kalocsa, letters in his estate survived from Palatine Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Balassa, count of Szerém county, Pál Festetich, councilor of the chancellery, and József Demkovich, deputy of Szerém county.30 Archbishop Batthyány wrote his reports to the cabinet secretary between October 3, 1764 and January 4, 1765. He wrote most of them in October and November, when, as we have seen, the debate on taxation was becoming increasingly intense. The archbishop tried to strike a balance between the estates and the court so that the queen’s intention could prevail. He sought to gain the support of the estates both in the cases of the amount of taxes which Maria Theresa sought to levy and the noble uprising. He also mentioned the contentions made by Barkóczy in opposition to the court on several occasions, but overall, he was optimistic about the clergy’s supportive attitude.31 Incidentally, the resistance of Archbishop Ferenc Barkóczy of Esztergom and Palatine Lajos Batthyány to the wishes and will of the court was an extraordinary shock, even for the contemporary public. Their deaths in 1765 were attributed to them having fallen into disfavor with Maria Theresa as a result of the events in the parliament.32

The next question is when and under what circumstances the opposition attitude changed in the parliament and what role the members of the clergy played in this. Following Mihály Horváth, the scholarly literature tends to concur that the lower house gave up the rejection of the tax increase at the 41st session of the parliament on October 10, 1764. József Bajzáth, canon of Esztergom, gave a long speech in which he said that the members of the upper house had already agreed to the tax increase, so if the estates were to insist on their negative position, they would anger the queen, thus completely turning her heart against the nation. However, if they were to agree to some tax increase, she would also respond to the grievances of the estates. After this, the representatives of the clergy also espoused Bajzát’s views, and seeing this, the other members of the lower house withdrew their insistence on a reduction in taxes, and the majority accepted the tax increase.33 Therefore, according to Horváth, the clergy in the lower house changed their mind during the debate and switched from the oppositional view of the lower house to the view of the court and the upper house, thus reversing the position of the whole lower house. Now, I will turn to sources which offer some insights into the ways in which the figures of the clergy who were involved in these shifts experienced the events.

János Szily, canon of Győr and the first bishop of the newly established diocese of Szombathely from 1777, represented his chapter in the parliament of 1764–1765 with his fellow canon György Herman. He regularly informed the members of his chapter about the events between July 6, 1764 and March 21, 1765, or in other words for almost the entire duration of the Diet, thus forming a picture of the whole course of the parliament. His fellow deputy is also relevant to this discussion because he is commemorated in several parliamentary satires, as we shall see, not in a particularly flattering way. According to Szily’s report, the clergy, as had been the case in previous years, held special meetings during the parliament, partly with the involvement of monks.34 Kollár’s work is mentioned in the first letters, which also confirm that the discussion about of his work erupted in the Diet on July 9. It is also clear from Szily’s letters that, in accordance with existing practice, the palatine, the personalis, and the protonotaries sought to expedite the work of the parliament, especially in compiling grievances, and that they urged the estates to discuss royal propositions.35 The two envoys also wanted to address the grievances of their chapter in the parliament, and to achieve this, they negotiated with Archbishop Ferenc Barkóczy as well. However, Barkóczy asked them not to submit their grievances to the joint committee responsible for compiling grievances or to the parliament at the time, because, as the archbishop argued, internal conflicts should be set aside due to the fact that Kollár’s book now threatened the whole ecclesiastical order. Thus, the two canons of Győr did not raise the grievances of the chapter for months.36

Szily had also following the tax debates since the beginning of September. Since the lower house initially demanded a reduction in the tax amount, on September 5, the 28th session, according to Szily’s report, after the departure of the upper house delegation, Personalis Koller asked the clergy’s opinion on the matter of the tax. Pál Kiss, the deputy of the cathedral chapter of Veszprém, replied with a long speech in which he indicated that the clergy agreed with the estates on everything. On the question of the noble uprising at the meeting the next day, however, the lower house clergy was no longer so united. Szily’s fellow deputy, canon Herman, represented the position of the estates, while Gábor Gloser (Gloszer), who spoke on behalf of the canons of the cathedral chapter of Kalocsa, was in favor of the ruler’s proposal.37 The latter should not surprise us. Gloser’s letter of commission explicitly stated that the chapter of Kalocsa would support the ruler’s propositions.38 The next day, on September 7, canon Herman again spoke in agreement with the county deputies about the noble uprising. This concord was also demonstrated at the next sitting, which was held on September 10. Canon Szily pointed out that the estates had every reason to be satisfied with the clergy, since the clergy did not oppose them, but, as they had promised at the previous parliament, the clergy had joined them on every issue.39

At the 39th session, which was held on October 1, the upper house again proposed raising the tax through the usual delegation, after which the personalis turned to the cities and the clergy for their opinion. At the time, János Szily himself spoke, arguing that since the estates knew the misery of the taxpaying ordinary people, they would join them with their vote. In contrast with Szily, György Malenich, canon of Zagreb, argued in his long speech in favor of the tax increase. This was also supported by István Bartha, canon of Eger, which is not surprising, because the abovementioned delegation of the upper house was led by Bishop Károly Eszterházy of Eger.40 The canon József Bajzáth from Esztergom proposed to offer the sum which had been paid in 1751, but in the end, the majority wanted to vote for the amount reduced by the surplus from 1751, and so this position was communicated to the upper house.41 In the days that followed, according to Szily’s report, there was no parliamentary session, but the deputies discussed the tax issue with the palatine and the personalis in private talks. Chancellor Ferenc Esterházy then arrived in Pozsony with three of his officers,42 which indicated that the pressure to accept the tax increase had grown. In the end, this increased pressure prevailed: at the meeting on October 17, which Szily apparently mistakenly calls the 54th day of the meeting, the lower house offered the abovementioned 100,000 forints for the costs of the Royal Bodyguard. At that point, even the deputies of the cathedral chapter of Várad supported raising the amount.43 From then on, the issue of the tax was touched upon only sporadically in Szily’s accounts, which is a clear sign of the victory of the court. On the other hand, though he was young, the canon of Győr suffered from a serious illness during this period, and although he tried to inform his chapter about the events which were taking place in parliament, he was repeatedly forced to apologize for his less and less frequent letters.44

Thus, unlike Mihály Horváth, Szily mentions neither the session of October 10 nor the speech given by József Bajzáth. However, according to the official diary of the parliament, which was certainly Horváth’s main source, Bajzáth surely gave a speech.45 This is confirmed by the note to the court cited above, which reports not only on the speech but also on its effect on the lower house.46 Compared to the scenario drawn by Mihály Horváth, Szily presents the position of the chapter deputies on the tax increase in a more nuanced way. According to him, there were canons who represented the position of the court from the outset. However, Szily’s records also indicate that the majority of the clergy, together with the majority of the lower house, changed their previous opposition position mid-October and accepted the tax increase.

We get a similar picture from the diary of Károly Fejérváry, deputy of Sáros County, about the events which took place in parliament. He also dated the outbreak of the Kollár case to July 9, and he even states that it was canon Szily who suggested to the estates that the two houses set up a joint commission of inquiry into the matter and recommended that Kollár be punished and that copies of his book be burned. Pál Kiss, provost of Veszprém, the canons József Bajzáth from Esztergom, József Herman from Győr, and István Bartha from Eger were also elected to the committee. Fejérváry also mentions the speech held by Gloser on September 6, in which he supported the reform of the noble uprising advocated by the court. However, according to him, at the time, Szily behaved in a manner that suggested that he was opposed to the reforms recommended by Gloser, much as he also did at the meeting on September 28, when he interrupted Gloser’s speech, and the two canons debated the issue of reforms before the lower house. Fejérváry also confirmed that Malenich’s speech, which he dated to October 2, called for the adoption of the tax increase. According to Malenich, on October 10, even canon Pál Kiss of Veszprém urged a compromise with the upper house, although he had previously spoken out several times in defense of the “poor taxpaying people.” The phrase, which, as we have seen, is typical of the era, was used to encourage rejection of the tax increase. Fejérváry claims that canon Bajzáth also joined him. Pál Festetich also reported in his letters to cabinet secretary Nény on the division of the canons, although his account differs somewhat from the two cited above. He mentioned István Bartha, canon of Eger, as the leader of the “opposition” canons, alongside Pál Kiss.47

After the Christmas break, the work of the parliament continued in January 1765. The drafting of the articles had begun, but other domestic issues had also come to the fore. From the point of view of our topic, it is worth mentioning the tensions around the anonymous pamphlet written by György Richwaldszky, canon of Esztergom, entitled Vexatio dat intellectum. The work was met with great resentment in court circles because it drew attention to the attack on the liberties of the estates and the dangers of the introduction of foreign legal practices. Richwaldszky called on the estates not to give up any of their rights, and he called on the Locumtenential Council to ensure that the ruler’s instructions did not violate the laws of the country or the prerogatives of the church. He also suggested that those who violate the “sovereignty” of the estates should be prosecuted for crimes of high treason. Railing against the spread of the teaching of natural law, which in his assessment threatened both the church and the old state system, he also emphasized that the interests of the nobility were the same as the interests of the clergy. All in all, he summarized the opposition of the estates to the issues raised by Kollár. It is a telling fact that the pamphlet still spread in manuscript form during the 1764–1765 parliament, but in 1785 it was printed in a Latin-German bilingual edition, so its points also served as weapons against the politics of Joseph II.48

Because of the pamphlet, which was publicly burned in Pozsony in 1765 at the order of the ruler, military forces were ordered to come to the town in which the Diet was held, and several members of the ecclesiastical and secular communities were interrogated. A sum of 2,000 gold was offered to anyone who could provide information about Richwaldszky’s whereabouts. In his report, however, Szily did not consider it probable that the investigation would produce results.49 And indeed, although Richwaldszky was suspected of having been the author of the pamphlet, the authorities failed to prove that he had written it. Nor did he lose the favor of the court, as proven by the fact that he was later involved in the preparation of the diocesan reform in the 1770s.50 This case is interesting from the perspective of the discussion here because in the person of Richwaldszky we find a canon who rebelled against the royal politics as early as 1765, albeit not during the lower house meetings, but in the form of an anonymous pamphlet.

Opposition to the policies of the court among members of the clergy was seen as exceptional even by contemporaries. According to general opinion, they were supporters of the “ruling party.” This view is reflected in particular in the pasquilli, that is, in the pamphlets which attacked the individual participants of the Diets. The Parliament of 1764–1765 abounds in pasquilli of this kind, which attacked the chapter deputies mainly in their person. Of these, the satire written against the aforementioned canon György Herman of Győr stands out. In addition to his allegedly immoral way of life (he was brought into disrepute because of a claim according to which he had had affairs with several girls and women from Győr), he was accused of supporting the issue of a tax increase in the parliament from the outset. According to one of the pasquilli, he agreed with Adam František Kollár that the priesthood should pay taxes, and allegedly, he could not even speak Latin properly.51 As we have seen, the records of canon Szily do not substantiate these accusations either, and it is particularly difficult to believe that the deputy, who had been elected to serve as the orator of the lower house delegation in August 1764,52 could not word his sentences precisely. On the contrary, Herman was known as a distinguished speaker,53 many of whose speeches survived. It was he who spoke at the funeral of Archbishop Barkóczy in 1765 in Pozsony.54 It is easy to imagine that Szily blunted the edge of his fellow deputy’s speeches in his accounts, but we can still assume that the author of the (anonymous) pasquillus exaggerated the weight of Herman’s pro-court manifestations.

The most fervent opposition among the canons was undoubtedly shown by József Bajzáth, the deputy of the Esztergom chapter. In most cases, he led the lower house delegation and, according to Szily’s accounts, he expressed his views innumerable times, or more narrowly, his rejection of the court’s demands. It is no coincidence that he, too, was suspected of having authored the Vexatio.55 Among the opposition, however, he was particularly popular. According to one of the verses celebrating him, he deserved the bishop’s mitre because he spoke with the voice of the people and even of God in his speeches.56 His oppositional conduct, however, did not jeopardize his political or ecclesiastical career, as a few months after the closure of the parliament, he became court councilor and officer of the Hungarian Court Chancellery, while at the same time he was also granted the title of bishop of Ansaria. By 1773, he had already been vice-chancellor and secret councilor, and in 1777, he was appointed bishop of Veszprém by the queen.57 Similarly, canon Pál Kiss of Veszprém was an oppositional voice in September 1764, when, according to Szily, his aforementioned speech was made, and Mihály Horváth has confirmed this in his research as well.58 Yet one of the pasquilli condemns him along with Herman and says he is of humble descent, though he most probably was the descendent of a noble family.59 These two cases remind us that the anonymous pamphlets can only be use with caution as expressions of “public opinion,” and we cannot always decide with certainty how far the accusations against the people ridiculed reflect the real facts and how many of these accusations were just clichés attributed to the social group to which the people targeted belonged. According to Festetich’s report, canon István Bartha of Eger, in agreement with several other county deputies, suggested keeping the Kollár issue on the agenda on August 7,60 and he even led the delegation of the lower house in September,61 but as we have seen, at the October 2 meeting, in agreement with his bishop, he opposed the tax reduction.62 On October 12, he was one of the deputies who called for a tax increase.63

Szily himself can also be classified as one of the canons who initially supported the opposition, and this did not ruin his career either, as his aforementioned appointment to the seat of Szombathely clearly testifies. These nuances are interesting because, according to contemporary opinion, the deputies of the cathedral chapters, in the hope of an episcopal mitre, supported the ruler’s politics.64 These examples, however, show that espousing a position in opposition to the wishes of the court did not necessarily lead to one being ignored when appointments were later made.

Among the consistently royalist canons, the aforementioned Gábor Gloser from Kalocsa and György Malenich from Zagreb stand out. Gloser was also targeted by one of the pasquilli, in which he was rebuked for his allegedly common origin.65 It is no coincidence that ignoble origin was an rebuke made in many pasquilli: historical research has also confirmed that the number of canons of humble origin in the chapters increased greatly in the eighteenth century.66 Gloser, whose pro-court behavior, as we have seen, was in accordance with his letter of commission, later held minor ecclesiastical and secular offices: in 1775 he was appointed to serve as provost of Felsőörs and, in 1777, as a prelate of the royal court.67 Canon György Malenich of Zagreb won the provostship of Buda from Maria Theresa in 1754 and the title of abbot of Zselicszentjakab in 1760, but later he did not advance in the hierarchy of the church.68 It is noteworthy, then, that a show of support for the court by the canons was not an absolute guarantee for later career advancement either.

Returning to our question, we can state that the sources only partially confirm the general conclusions in the secondary literature in connection with the parliament of 1764–1765. On the one hand, the unified opposition of the prelates in connection with the Kollár affair seems exaggerated. It is quite clear that the clergy acted in an organized manner against Kollár’s work, which, quite unsurprisingly, was coordinated by Archbishop Barkóczy himself. The claim, however, that all prelates adopted an oppositional stance cannot be substantiated. This conclusion seems to be refuted by the activity of József Batthyány and the role of Bishop Károly Eszterházy of Eger: canon Szily mentions the upper house delegation led by Eszterházy eight times, and in each case this delegation represented the position of the court. As usual, these delegations were led by clerics, and according to Szily’s accounts in 1764–1765, Eszterházy was the most active among the bishops.69 This is reinforced by an anonymous source from the royal court.70 Thus, even if Maria Theresa was disappointed with Archbishop Barkóczy, the second and third dignities of the Hungarian Catholic Church remained loyal to Vienna. It also seems an oversimplification to claim that the canons initially took a completely united position in opposition to court in the lower house tax disputes and then unexpectedly switched as a group. In fact, there were lower house clerics who supported the position of the court from the outset, while the majority of those who were against the proposal made by the court changed their minds gradually before supporting the court’s aims, along with the other lower house representatives.

Concerning the political affiliation of the county deputies, István Szijártó has convincingly refuted the popular opinion that the counties with Protestant majorities beyond the Tisza River were the leaders of the opposition in the eighteenth century parliaments, while the counties with Catholic majorities were supporters of the court. Much as in the whole course of the second half of the century, in 1764–1765 most of the deputies of in the counties which were in opposition to the court were Catholics.71 Similarly, it is not clear that in 1764–1765, at the initial phase of the discussion of the Kollár affair and the tax issue, the clergy as a whole belonged to the opposition. Like the county deputies, the clergy was also divided and represented different political positions. The parliament of 1764–1765 differs from the previous ones in that we find among them speakers who (temporarily) spoke openly against the aspirations of the court. More precisely, this phenomenon is not new either, since earlier (and later, in 1790–1791), part of the clergy opposed the ruler’s position several times, but only on matters of religion.72 In 1764–1765, however, several of them also became political supporters of the oppositional positions represented by the estates.

Archival Sources

Győri Egyházmegyei Levéltár [Diocesan Archives Győr] (GyEL)

II. Káptalani Levéltár [Chapter Archives]

1. Theca XLII

Kalocsai Főegyházmegyei Levéltár [Archdiocesan Archives Kalocsa] (KFL)

II. Kalocsai Főszékeskáptalani Levéltár [Arch-Chapter Archives Kalocsa]

1a) Főkáptalani magániratok, Jegyzőkönyvek [Private documents, protocols]

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár [Hungarian National Archives] (MNL)

Heves Megyei Levéltár [Heves County Archives] (HML)

XII. Egyházi szervezetek és intézmények [Ecclesiastical organizations and

institutions]

2. Az egri káptalan magánlevéltára [Private Archives of the Chapter of

Eger]

Országos Levéltár [National Archives of Hungary] (OL)

A) Magyar Kancelláriai Levéltár [Hungarian Chancellery Archives]

57. Libri regii

Országgyűlési Könyvtár [Library of the Hungarian Parliament] (OGyK)

Magyar Parlamenti Gyűjtemény [Hungarian Parliament Collection] (MPGy)

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (ÖStA)

Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (HHStA)

Kabinettsarchiv

Kabinettskanzei

Nachlass Nenny

Länderabteilungen

Ungarische Akten

Comitialia

Obersthofmeisteramt,

Ältere Zeremonialakten

Bibliography

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Enchiridion Martini Bironii Padáni episcopi Weszprimiensis, de fide, haeresiarchis, ac eorum asseclis, ... deque constitutionibus, atque decretis imperatorum & regum, contra dissipatores catholicae ecclesiae editis: diotrephi seu Acatholicis in Hungaria commorantibus, ad ... Mariam Theresiam, ... exhibitum, Jaurini 1750.

Kollar, Adam Franciscus. De originibus et usu perpetuo potestatis legislatoriae circa sacra Apostolicorum Regum Ungariae. Vindobonae, 1764.

Kollár Ádám Ferenc levelezése [Correspondence of Ádám Ferenc Kollár]. Edited by István Soós. Commercia litteraria eruditorum Hungariae 4. Budapest: Universitas, 2000.

Vexatio dat intellectum. Manuscriptum sub diaeta Regni Hungariae anno MDCCLXIV, vulgatum, et mox XII. Kal. Mart. an. MDCCLXV. Posonii in foro publico per manus carnificis combustum, cum omnia illa, quae nunc regno huic accidunt, in eodem praedicta habeantur, una cum facta super eodem scripto Apologia ad perpetuam rei memoriam nunc primum typis excusum. S. l. 1785

Werbőczy, István. Tripartitum. A dicsőséges Magyar Királyság szokásjogának Hármaskönyve. Latin-magyar kétnyelvű kiadás [Customary law of the Renowned Kingdom of Hungary in Three Parts] Budapest: Téka, 1990.

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Bahlcke, Joachim. Ungarischer Episkopat und österreichische Monarchie: Von einer Partnerschaft zur Konfrontation. Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Mitteleuropa 23. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005.

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