A aachen Hungarian Chapel

Ábrahám, Pál

During its first period it had 42 regular and 24 honorary members, and an indefinite number of correspondents, all of them elected by the general assembly and directed by a Board of 25 that represented the four estates of the feudal society. It soon became the motor of scientific and cultural life in Hungary, launching great undertakings one after the other, like publishing the Rules of Hungarian Orthography, the Great Hungarian Dictionary and the Collection of Ancient Hungarian Texts, starting different scientific journals, financing scientific research projects, distributing scientific, literary and artistic awards, publishing school textbooks, bilingual dictionaries, and translations of important foreign works, etc. Its first President was Count József (Joseph) Teleki, its Vice-President Count István Szécheny, its General Secretary Gábor (Gabriel) Döbrentei.

During the 1848-1849 Revolution and War of Independence, the Academy greeted the abolishment of censorship and made its sessions public. When the united Austrian and Russian armies defeated the Hungarian forces, several academicians were imprisoned. During the oppressive absolutist rule that followed, new members could not be elected nor could general sessions be held until 1858. The nation however strived to maintain the spirit of freedom by concentrating on making the arts and sciences flourish in the country, and the Academy became the leader of these efforts. In 1859, a campaign was launched to raise money for a home for the Academy, which until then held its sessions in the National Museum. The construction of a fine neoclassical palace for the Academy on the banks of the Danube in central Budapest was completed in 1864. It houses, in its magnificent assembly hall and fine office and research rooms, the second largest library in Hungary and a number of valuable collections of art and science, as well as the original manuscripts of many Hungarian scientists, explorers, writers of fiction, poetry, drama and music.

In 1870 the Academy adopted new regulations reducing the number of departments to three: (1) Linguistics and Arts, (2) Philosophy and Social Sciences, and (3) Mathematics and Natural Sciences, with altogether 240 members (26 honorary, 64 regular and 160 corresponding), plus a 26-member Board of Directors. Continuing and extending its original activities, the Academy became one of the most important centers of the sciences and arts in Europe, its members contributing to the advance of European civilization with outstanding discoveries and inventions (e.g. the principle of the dynamo discovered by Ányos Jedlik, the proof of the proportionality of inertial and gravitational mass by Count Loránd (Roland) Eötvös, the carburetor of internal combustion engines of Donát Bánki, etc.). However, their most important contributions were in the fields of Hungarian culture, history, linguistics, and arts.

In the first part of the 20th century, before the Second World War, the Academy continued to function as the most important center of scholarship in Hungary, publishing countless studies and essays in all fields of science and culture, nurturing the advancement of knowledge with its numerous publications and periodicals that were printed and published by its own publishing firm. A brief exception was the short lived Communist dictatorship of 1919 in the wake of the First World War, when the dictatorial government took on the managing of the Academy and excluded all the members who expressed their disagreement with the deeds and ideas of Communism. After their fall, the leader of the new democratic regime, Regent Miklós (Nicholas) Horthy, gave all his help to the Academy to regain its self-government and financial independence, so that high standard scientific and cultural work could continue.

Shortly after the Second World War, it was again reorganized after the second communist takeover of 1949, which occurred as a result of the Russian Red Army occupying Hungary and remaining there in accordance with the 1945 Yalta Agreement between the Western Powers and Russia. Again, all members expressing disagreement with communist ideology or being labelled as “idealists” or “bourgeois thinkers” were excluded, deported, imprisoned, or executed, with such great names among them as professor Ferenc (Francis) Orsós, the great anatomist, professor Bálint (Valentine) Hóman, the great historian, and many others. Still others had to flee the country to avoid harassment, like Albert Szent-Györgyi, the Nobel Prize winner biologist, or János (John) Selye, proposer of the “stress” theory in psychology.

As a result of its reorganization, the Academy lost its independence and became an organ of the Hungarian Communist Party, with the Academy’s party secretary as the most important person, and with many new members whose only merit was their association with the Party. The Arts Department was terminated, and the Academy was given administrative functions to become a sort of “ministry of science” of the Communist government. Still, life did not stand still, and as years passed the old members who managed to stay, together with their disciples, slowly raised the standard of scholarship in and outside of the Academy as high as circumstances could allow, and much valuable scientific work was carried out by Academicians or under their management. Many institutes were established under the auspices of the Academy to function as centers of a certain field of study, as e.g. Institute of History, Institute of Mathematics, Institute of Musicology, etc. These usually have their headquarters in Budapest, some of them with offices in other cities as well.

Beginning with the late 1980s, a reform process began to take place with the proposal of a new set of laws for the Academy. In 1989, many of the members, excluded and persecuted by the Communist Party, were rehabilitated. In 1990, new by-laws were adopted and the Academy did not function any longer as an administrative organ of the government. In order to rehabilitate the most outstanding members of the Arts Department that was terminated in 1949, the Academy initiated the establishment of an associated but mainly independent institution for the cultivation of Arts and Literature, as a result of which the Széchenyi Academy of Literature and Arts (Széchenyi Irodalmi