page_title: Lajos Kossuth
section_title: European federalism
hierarchical_section_title: Lajos Kossuth / Later years: Italy / European federalism
caption_attribution_description: Magyar: Kossuth Lajos 1892-ben Turinban. Ellinger Ede fényképfelvétele
context_page_description: Lajos Kossuth de Udvard et Kossuthfalva was a Hungarian nobleman, lawyer, journalist, politician, statesman and Governor-President of the Kingdom of Hungary during the revolution of 1848–49.
  With the help of his talent in oratory in political debates and public speeches, Kossuth emerged from a poor gentry family into regent-president of Kingdom of Hungary. As the influential contemporary American journalist Horace Greeley said of Kossuth: "Among the orators, patriots, statesmen, exiles, he has, living or dead, no superior."
  Kossuth's powerful English and American speeches so impressed and touched the famous contemporary American orator Daniel Webster, that he wrote a book about Kossuth's life. He was widely honoured during his lifetime, including in Great Britain and the United States, as a freedom fighter and bellwether of democracy in Europe. Kossuth's bronze bust can be found in the United States Capitol with the inscription: Father of Hungarian Democracy, Hungarian Statesman, Freedom Fighter, 1848–1849.
context_section_description: Publicly, Kossuth remained unreconciled to the house of Habsburg and committed to a fully independent state. Though elected to the Diet of 1867, he never took his seat. He continued to remain a widely popular figure, but he did not allow his name to be associated with dissent or any political cause. A law of 1879, which deprived of citizenship all Hungarians, who had voluntarily been absent ten years, was a bitter blow to him. He displayed no interest in benefitting from a further amnesty in 1880. Kossuth wrote a one-volume autobiography, published in English in 1880 as Memoirs of My Exile. It mainly concerns his activities between 1859 and 1861 including his meetings with Napoleon III, his dealings with Italian statesman Count Camillo Benso di Cavour and his correspondence with the Balkan royal courts about his plans for a Danubian federation or confederation
  In 1890, a delegation of Hungarian pilgrims in Turin recorded a short patriotic speech delivered by the elderly Lajos Kossuth. The original recording on two wax cylinders for the Edison phonograph survives to this day, barely audible because of excess playback and unsuccessful early restoration attempts. Recording Kossuth's voice was one of the earliest applications of phonograph, and his few sentences are the earliest known recorded Hungarian speech.
caption: Kossuth in Turin, 1892.
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