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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 Hungarian 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 oppositional politics, Tamäs Melkovics investigates his generation of politicians, those born between 1770 and 1785. Secret police reports 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.
