Magnate house

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Meeting of the Magnate House in 1894

The Magnatenhaus (Főrendiház) , also known as the Magnate Table , was the first chamber of the Reichstag in the Kingdom of Hungary , the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy created in 1867 , until 1918 . The second chamber was the elected House of Representatives (Képviselőház) .

Development and structure

The largest group of members and therefore namesake were the Hungarian magnates . In the course of the revolution of 1848 , Article IV of the law stipulated that the President and Vice-President of the Magnate House were appointed by the King. The chamber consisted of almost 900 hereditary magnates, some of whom were impoverished. In 1885, Article VIII was passed, which limited the number of members of the magnate house to about half.

Hungarian nobles were not represented in the manor house , the upper house of the Austrian Imperial Council. The Magyar aristocrats eligible to participate in 1861–1866 had mostly stayed away because they rejected the unified state of the Austrian Empire ; their wishes were fulfilled at the compromise in 1867 , when the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy came into being.

In 1904 the 453 members of the Magnate House consisted of the following groups:

  • 16 archduke (föherczeg) of age as princes of the royal house;
  • 273 at least 24-year-old heads of princely, counts and baronial families listed in the law of 1885, who paid at least 3,000 guilders (from 1892: 6,000 kroner ) property and house tax annually ;
  • 13 other hereditary nobles;
  • 19 persons by virtue of office: the banner lords of the kingdom and the Count of Pressburg , the two crown guards, the governor of Fiume , the two presidents of the royal curia and the president of the royal table court;
  • 42 representatives of religious communities: the four Roman Catholic Archbishops, the Greek Catholic Archbishop, the Serbian Patriarch and the Romanian Metropolitan of the Orthodox Church, the two Greco-Oriental Archbishops, other bishops and some other prelates, the Bishop and the Chief Curator of the Unitarian Church , the three senior bishops of the Reformed (HB) and the three senior bishops of the Lutheran (AB) Church and six other representatives from these two churches;
  • 50 members appointed by the King for life and 23 members chosen by the House;
  • three delegates of the Croatian-Slavonian parliament (with voting rights only in matters concerning the Kingdom of Hungary and the Kingdom of Croatia and Slavonia; these were finance, trade, transport, military);
  • 14 other members.

The president and now two vice-presidents were appointed by the king after the reform of 1885, now on the proposal of the prime minister. The official language was Hungarian. Laws only came into being if they found a majority in both houses of the Hungarian Diet and were ratified by the King.

Function of the house

Boardroom of the Magnate's House in the Budapest Parliament Building

Today, the magnate house is mostly rated as a retarding authority in Hungarian domestic politics. It not infrequently rejected resolutions of the House of Representatives that it did not consider conservative enough. Several times, King Franz Joseph I helped to enforce the wishes of the elected MPs by appointing progressive members for the magnate house by means of pair pushes . This was the case, for example, in order to enforce the full reception (state recognition and support) of the Jewish religion in Article XLII in 1895. On the other hand, in the dispute over the mandatory civil marriage, which the magnate house had initially rejected, the king did not make a pair push; the house came to a positive decision after a long time, which made the introduction possible in 1894.

The Magnatenhaus sent members to the delegation of the Hungarian Reichstag, who annually defined in parallel and in the same city, but not together with the delegation of the Austrian Reichsrat, the common affairs of both parts of Austria-Hungary (foreign policy, warfare and their financing) and the related issues in 1867 three joint ministries had to decide, as had been decided in concurrent laws in Hungary and Austria (see Delegation Act ). The two delegations met, alternating annually, in Budapest and Vienna. The Magnatenhaus was also represented in the deputation , which had to decide about every ten years with its Austrian counterpart on the distribution of the costs of common affairs between Cis and Transleithania. All resolutions required the approval of the king to take effect.

After the defeat of Austria-Hungary in the First World War, the magnate house was abolished by the Károlyi government , which proclaimed the "People's Republic of Hungary" in autumn 1918, but experienced a partial resurrection in 1926 under the imperial administrator Miklós Horthy as the upper house ( Felsöház ).

Members of the Magnate House (selection)

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ László Révész, Bern: Party politics, parliamentarism and nationality politics in liberal Hungary , Hungary Yearbook, Munich 1978, p. 123 ff.  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / 209.85.229.132  
  2. ↑ Ilona Reinert-Tárnoky, Cologne prelate Sándor Giesswein. Christian socialism and democracy in Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century , Part I, in: Ungarn-Jahrbuch Nr. 23 (1997), Verlag Ungarisches Institut, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-929906-54-6 , p. 214 ( niif .hu , PDF; 7.7 MB)
  3. ↑ Hungarica, Volume 4  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.arcanum.hu  
  4. ^ EsterhazyWiki
  5. ^ EsterhazyWiki
  6. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon, Volume 2, p. 209 (PDF; 198 kB)
  7. ^ Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, Volume 10, Leipzig 1907, p. 296 f.
  8. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon, Volume 6, p. 20 (PDF; 168 kB)
  9. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon, Volume 7, p. 242 (PDF; 159 kB)
  10. ↑ Austrian Biographical Lexicon, Volume 7, p. 205 (PDF; 164 kB)
  11. ^ J. Loserth: History of the old Styrian manor and count house Stubenberg. 1911
  12. ^ Josef Philipp Graf zu Stubenberg on thepeerage.com , accessed on September 11, 2016.
  13. ^ Meyers Konversations-Lexikon , Volume 16, Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig and Vienna 1888, p. 63