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The Felsőbüki Nagy family 257
TOWARDS A GENERAL PICTURE
In Chapter 8, Obstinacy or Zeitgeist? Pal Felsöbüki Nagy breaking
with century-old family tradition, Tamäs Melkovics investigates the
career of the best known member of the Felsöbüki Nagy family, the
famous parliamentary orator of the early decades of the nineteenth
century. He was the son of Sändor Felsöbüki Nagy, vicecomes of
Sopron county for two decades. After loyal members of the Felsöbüki
Nagy family had elevated their family into the gentry elite through
careers in judicial authorities and holding royal offices, Päl Felsöbüki
Nagy became the first outstanding representative of the liberal
’reform’ opposition in the early nineteenth century. He belonged to
the 2 per cent of MPs who were present at at least four of the six
diets held between 1825 and 1848, and he was also representing
Sopron county at the diet in 1807 — and his activity there earned
him a royal banishment from representing Sopron county at the
next diet in 1808."°
He clearly had an unquestionable authority in his home county, and
this was so despite his tense relationship with the supremus comes
of Sopron county, Prince Miklés Esterhazy. This fact illustrates the
significant change that happened between the late seventeenth century
and the first half of the nineteenth: the emancipation of the county
gentry from the dominance of the great landholding aristocracy, and
the consequent appearance of the bene possessionati in the diet, the
national arena of politics. By the end of the eighteenth century, the
county deputies emerged as the leading political factor in Hungar¬
ian politics and this fact can be perceived in the background of the
developments in the first half of the nineteenth century, when a
liberal opposition was organized, striving for comprehensive social
and political reform, especially in the Vormdrz period, or the so
called age of reform (1830-1848).
Trying to understand Päl Felsöbüki Nagy’s defection to oppo¬
sitional politics, Tamäs Melkovics investigates his generation of
politicians, those born between 1770 and 1785. Secret police re¬
ports help to select from these the leaders of the opposition at the
diet, resulting in a group of 16 MPs apart from Päl Felsöbüki Nagy
himself. Among them, we find three sub-sections with equal weight:
those coming from families belonging traditionally to the opposition,
to He declined to represent Sopron county in 1811-1812, and then the diet was
not convoked again by the king until 1825.