Abstract
Shingo Minamizuka, A Social Bandit in Nineteenth Century Hungary: Rózsa Sándor, East European Monographs: Boulder, CO, 2008; 233 pp.; 9780880336222, $50.00 (hbk)
Reviewed by: Antal Szántay, Corvinus University Budapest, Hungary
According to family legend, my great-grandfather once met Sándor Rózsa, the famous Hungarian outlaw (betyár), when he, on a hasty ride, stopped in the town of Halas and asked for a drink. My great-grandfather offered him wine and some water, they drank together and Mr Rózsa praised my great-grandfather’s wine and said ‘Bless you and never fear Sándor Rózsa!’ My great-grandfather realized at this moment, whom he had met and remained shocked for some time.
Similar stories are told in many Hungarian families with roots in the Szeged region, between the Danube and Tisza rivers, on the Great Hungarian Plain. Tales, ballads and folk songs, as well as popular bestsellers written in the nineteenth century, depicted episodes from the lives of Hungarian outlaws, especially Rózsa. These stories were also retold again and again by the best Hungarian novelists: Mór Jókai, Gyula Krúdy and Zsigmond Móricz, the last completing before his death in 1942 two volumes of a planned trilogy showing Rózsa as a hero of social rights and national independence. Based on Móricz’s novels a 12-episode TV series appeared in 1971.
Sándor Rózsa (Alexander Rose), or Ruzsa in local pronunciation, is the Hungarian parallel to William H. Bonny (‘Billy the Kid’, 1859–1881), and other legendary outlaws of the American West. Though on a smaller scale, the Great Hungarian Plain offered similar opportunities for the outlaw life, horse thievery, cattle rustling and even train robbery, while fighting with, or hiding from lawmen and other authorities. The background of these dramatic scenes is similar in both areas: rapid socio-economic change during the nineteenth century. The Great Hungarian Plain, under Ottoman occupation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was slowly repopulated during the eigteenth century, and was transformed by water regulation from a wet grazing land for cattle, sheep and horses, into an agricultural area for grain, wine, vegetable and fruit production in the nineteenth century. More effective control by local and state authorities, and efforts to maintain law and order went hand in hand with this socio-economic process.
While the ‘Western’ became an established genre of literature, stage and cinema, stories of the Hungarian Plain and its outlaws, however, gained less attention, and the attempt to create a movie ‘Eastern’ sub-genre failed. Now, thanks to Shingo Minamizuka, there is a reliable scholarly work in English which might generate some interest in this parallel Eastern world.
Minamizuka is a professor at Hosei University, director of the Research Institute for World History (RIWH) in Tokyo, and emeritus professor at Chiba University. Since 1972 he has dedicated his research to Hungarian studies, especially to nineteenth-century agrarian history and social banditism, and in 2005 and 2009 he gained great recognition in Hungary for his Hungarian-history-related scholarly activities. His monograph on Sándor Rózsa was first published in Japanese in 1992.
Sándor Rózsa, the most famous betyár, was born in 1813 in Röszke, in the southern suburbs of the city of Szeged. Little is known about his father, except that he ‘was not willing to give an education to his children’ (11). He was probably a peaceful farmer or horse herder, but possibly an outlaw who died in 1827 while committing a robbery. The son, Sándor, started his career as a bandit in the late 1820s, and was first arrested and sentenced to imprisonment in 1836. He escaped, however, in 1837, and thereafter became a fugitive for much of the rest of his life. In December 1844 he tried to make a deal with the authorities and, first among Hungarian outlaws, addressed a petition to the king of Hungary, the Habsburg emperor, asking (without success) for amnesty. Following the revolution of 1848, Rózsa successfully petitioned the new authorities and was pardoned for all his crimes by the Chairman of the National Defence Committee, Lajos Kossuth. However, he was obliged to form a free corps of 150 armed horsemen to fight against the Habsburg armies in the war of independence. Kossuth’s letter of pardon was delivered to Rózsa by Mór Jókai, the famous Hungarian writer who heroized Rózsa in several of his writings. The Rózsa Corps had a short and chequered history. While operating in southern Hungary, the group was accused of stealing, robbery and killing, and although in mid-December 1848 it was backed by the National Defence Committee with a renewed letter of pardon, Rózsa and his men had abandoned the front by Christmas. While Rózsa had no further interest in the fate of the Hungarian war of independence and returned to his earlier way of life, in the 1850s the pro-Habsburg authorities still regarded him as a dangerous anti-Habsburg rebel and supporter of Kossuth, and offered a high bounty on his head. Rózsa was consequently captured in 1857, and in 1859 he was sentenced to imprisonment: first in Kufstein, Austria, in the jail for political prisoners, and then in Theresienstadt, Austria, and in Pétervárad in South Hungary (now a suburb of Novi Sad in Serbia). When Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary, and pardoned 1000 criminals, Sándor Rózsa was amongst them. Released from prison, Rózsa directly travelled to Pest-Buda and visited Prime Minister Count Gyula Andrássy to thank him for the pardon given by the king. When in early May 1868 Rózsa returned to Szeged, his hometown’s citizens and even notables welcomed him enthusiastically. At first he seemed to have ‘joined the honest people’ (119), but soon realized that all his savings had gone while he had been in prison. He joined Ferenc Csonka’s gang in order to get money and go ‘to some good place where we can live alone’ (123) as he put it. The gang planned a train robbery, and at a second attempt, on December 1868, they derailed the Szeged-Pest train near Kistelek, and fatally shot the driver. But the train carried armed passengers who defended themselves, and the gang ran off without booty. This and other crimes around Szeged forced the government (which was now Hungarian, rather than the former unpopular Austrian authorities) to restore public security. A specific government delegation was formed in 1869 headed by Count Gedeon Ráday, head of the police department in the Interior Ministry. A week later Rózsa was entrapped and arrested. After long interrogation, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in a trial in December 1872. He was transferred to the prison in Szamosújvár (today Gherla in Romania) where he died of tuberculosis on 22 November 1878.
Minamizuka tells this gripping life story in detail based on all available sources, archive materials, contemporary newspaper reports, and fictionalized narratives by famous Hungarian writers and anonymous storytellers. Investigating a rich set of stories and legends he concludes that Rózsa’s popularity derived from the conflicts between local authorities and the poor, as well as between Habsburg Austria and Hungary. Thus, Rózsa became a ‘social bandit’ with strong characteristics of a national hero. In this detailed study, Minamizuka has verified and refined Eric Hobsbawm’s thesis on social banditism, using the case of Rózsa to explore the main trends of change in the society, economy and public administration of nineteenth-century Hungary.