12 - The uncivil origins of civil marriage: Hungary

Summary

And so, if it is there that he is lying, quiet sleeps Count Buttler of Párdány. It is a good place to sleep, that peaceful vault at Dobóruszka. There is a stillness all around. Even in the forests there is no more singing; for the forests are gone. Only from the nearby swamps there is sometimes heard the croaking of the frogs: ‘Clerics are crooked! Clerics are crooked!’

So ends Kálmán Mikszáth's Strange Marriage, which appeared in 1900. In the novel, the unscrupulous Baron Dőry, in order to avoid a scandal, forces the young Count Buttler to marry his pregnant daughter. The young woman is carrying the child of the local priest, who, to make matters worse, also turns out to be an ardent Slovak patriot. Though Mikszáth set the story in the early nineteenth century, its anticlericalism is more a reflection of the bitter church–state struggles that dominated Hungarian political life in the 1890s. Tensions had long existed between the Catholic church and the state, and they intensified following the Ausgleich of 1867 and the subsequent rise to power of the Liberal Party, which governed Hungary uninterruptedly from 1875 to 1905. The spark came in 1890, when the minister of religion and public education, Count Albin Csáky, issued an ordinance calling for administrative enforcement of existing laws concerning the children of mixed marriages, thereby threatening non-compliant Catholic priests with fines and prison sentences.