The affinities of French and Hungarian liberal thought in the 19th century.

Summary In two quite different historical and political contexts, French and Hungarian liberals reflect on the same questions. In Hungary, as in all countries where the program of social transformation must be elaborated in the presence of a foreign power, the "classical" objectives of a liberal political conception are complemented by national demands. The elements of the two dominant ideologies of the century, liberalism and nationalism, were combined. In Hungary, the intellectual effervescence that characterized the period 1830-1848, called the era of reforms, was born of the ambition to "catch up" with Western Europe in terms of progress. In the absence of a strong middle class capable of leading the country on the path of progress, the progressive nobility took on this role in Hungary. This reformist generation imbibed the ideas of its time and adopted their way of thinking. Within Hungarian reformist thought, which is generally and often wrongly called liberalism, we can distinguish several currents, as the Hungarian reformist thinkers explored a multitude of directions. One of them is represented by a group of thinkers thinking in European terms, called the centralists. Jozsef eotvos and his collaborators in Hungary, and the political theorists of the July Monarchy in France, were thinking about the same problems. The questions they raise all revolve around three main themes: the problem of revolution and the idea of the need to control passions; the conflicting relationship of the two dominant ideas of the century, freedom and equality; the question of social cohesion and the redefinition of the role of the state in its relationship to the individual and to society