“Lawful” Revisionism? The Lawful Revolution and the Revision of 1848 in Hungarian Historiography

Abstract

The article dissects the reception of István Deák’s The Lawful Revolution within Hungarian historiography. It argues that strangely the book was a precursor of a deeper revision of the history of 1848, and still it is not a major reference. Deák’s ambiguous position as a US-Hungarian historian made possible to read his work less with an eye of the broader historical revisionism it promoted, a nonnationalist reading of Habsburg history, and to use it instead to make various arguments within the field of the politics of memory.