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Special pages :
From the Theatre of War, May 1, 1849
First published: in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 286, May 1, 1849.
No reports of further victories. On the contrary, we hear now that the Austrians are retreating in the greatest confusion on all fronts.
The brutal butcher Welden has landed himself in a fine mess. He is as good as cut off from Vienna, and the only line of retreat still open to him is that to Styria via Vesprim, along the Plattensee and through the pathless mountains.
Wohlgemuth, completely cut off from the main body of the army, is in a totally indefensible position between Sellye on the Waag and Bös on the Danube, on the Schütt Island. The path to Pressburg is open to Klapka’s right wing, which faces Wohlgemuth there.
Pest is now actually occupied by the Hungarians (on the evening of the 23rd). The imperial forces were given sufficient time for their retreat, since on that condition they promised not to bombard Pest. The pretence of the imperial forces to wish to defend Ofen is without significance, for Ofen could have been held only by threatening to bombard Pest.
Welden has again been in Ofen. He obviously does not know where to turn.
Jellachich’s Croats have had to turn back; the Danube below Pest was occupied by the Hungarians with artillery. But they will nevertheless attempt to break through to Croatia.
Jablonowsky has already passed through Raab with his brigade, which is going to Oedenburg.
There is great excitement in Vienna. The workers are rejoicing. The mail to Hungary has not been dispatched from there for the past three days.
Fifty thousand Russians are said to have received orders to march into Transylvania from the north and south.
The Olmütz Ministry has now certainly requested Russian intervention in Hungary as well.
The Berlin National-Zeitung quotes the following alleged conditions under which the Hungarians would be willing to conclude peace:
(1) Recognition of the Kingdom of Hungary in its old boundaries, hence including Croatia, Slavonia and the Military Border.[1]
(2) Union with Transylvania as resolved and determined last year by the Transylvanian and Hungarian Assemblies .[2]
(3) A general amnesty throughout Austria; the immediate release of all the October prisoners and compensation for the families of those murdered.
(4) Demobilisation to Hungary of the Hungarian regiments still serving in Italy and the other parts of the Empire.
(5) Recognition of the Hungarian Constitution of 1848.[3]
(6) Hungary to remain under the government of a provisional executive power originating from the Assembly, until the succession to the throne is established by law, and the King, who is to be elected, has been crowned in Buda-Pest and has sworn loyalty to the Constitution.
(7) Galicia to enter into the same relationship to the Austrian union of states in which Hungary stands now and will stand in future, and be called the Polish Kingdom of Galicia; hence Galicia will be linked with Austria in a personal union and will have its own army and its own finances.
(8) The share of Hungary in the Austrian National Debt to be determined by the Hungarian Assembly by a simple majority.
- ↑ The reference is to the inhabitants of the so-called Military Border area, i.e. the southern border region of the Austrian Empire under a military administration. The area included part of Croatia and southern Hungary. its population was made up of Serbs and Croats who were allotted land in return for military service, the fulfilment of state obligations and payment of duties. Borderers often rose in revolt against this system of military-feudal oppression. Peterwardein borderers as well as Serezhans and other South-Slav army formations mentioned below performed compulsory military service on the Austro-Turkish border (in the so-called Military Border area). They were named after their regimental or company districts or communities from which the soldiers came. In 1848-49 the Austrian authorities and the Right-wing bourgeois-landowning nationalist elements drew them into the war against revolutionary Hungary. An allusion to the Austrian special border troops who wore red-coats and caps and were recruited mainly from among the inhabitants of the Empire’s Slav provinces (Croats, Serbs of the Voivodina etc.). In 1848 and 1849, they were used by the counter-revolution against the revolutionary movement.
- ↑ The reference is to the decisions taken by the National Assemblies (Diets) of Hungary and Transylvania after the March revolution of 1848 to establish union between the two countries and to introduce a single administrative system. In Transylvania, the decision on the union was adopted on May 30 by the Assembly in Cluj that was elected according to the principle of estate representation which secured the predominance in it of Hungarian landowners. This decision attached a one-sided character to the union, it retained the privilege of the Hungarian minority in local administration and school matters and proclaimed Hungarian as the only official language. The ideas of the Romanian and Hungarian democrats, who regarded this union as the formation of a Hungarian-Transylvanian state based on the equality of nations, were actually rejected. This fact was used by the Right wing of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania.who aimed at a union with the Habsburgs and helped the latter make use of the Transylvanian Romanians in the struggle against revolutionary Hungary
- ↑ The Hungarian Constitution of 1848 — a number of laws promulgated in the second half of March 1848 by the Hungarian National Assembly in the atmosphere of revolutionary upsurge concerned political organisation in the country. These laws proclaimed Hungary independent of the Austrian Empire in financial and military matters; legislative power was concentrated in the elected National Assembly, and the executive body — the Cabinet Council — was proclaimed responsible to the latter. However, Hungary remained bound to the empire by the common emperor of the Habsburg dynasty and suffrage was limited by a property qualification. Though the new Constitution preserved many of the nobility’s privileges, it was an important step towards a bourgeois transformation of the political order in Hungary