Event: Hungarians

Seventy years ago today, Hungarians risked their lives for the very principles French rioters seek to destroy. Read our latest coverage of the French riots here – paywall-free all of this week.. Maybe it is because 23 October marks the 70th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution that my reflections on the riots in France have been frequently disrupted by my memories of what I saw and experienced in Budapest seven decades ago. Outwardly, these two events share certain characteristics. Both erupted spontaneously and caught the state unawares. Each led to confrontations with the authorities, attacks on symbols of power and the escalation of initially peaceful demonstrations into violence. And just as in 1956, so students today played a central role in initiating the protests. Yet these superficial similarities conceal profound differences. The Hungarian Revolution was directed against the Soviet Communist dictatorship, which denied its citizens fundamental political freedoms and national independence. As a nine-year-old child living in Budapest at the time, I witnessed levels of violence that were far more lethal than those experienced by the French over the past month. The French disturbances have taken place within a constitutional democracy, where citizens possess the right to organise politically, protest, vote and campaign for changes in government. More importantly, the two movements are very different in their objectives, political imagination and relationship to society. In Hungary, the revolutionaries articulated a vision of national liberation and political self-government. In France, the violent disturbances have not been accompanied by a comparably coherent programme for transforming the political order. There is obviously a fundamental difference between a revolution and a school protest that rapidly descended into nihilistic violence. One of the distinguishing features of the Hungarian Revolution was its determination to reclaim the sovereignty and national political authority that had been usurped by…