EOTVOS, JOZSEF, BARON (urt'vursh), Hungarian writer and statesman (1813-1371), was born at Buda on Sept. 13, 1813. He spent many years in western Europe, where he became acquainted with western liberal ideas and with the leaders of the Romantic movement. In the diet of 1839-40 he advocated Jew ish emancipation, and in the columns of the Pesti Hirlap he put forward a plea for responsible government, without which, he maintained, the necessary reforms in Hungary could not be car ried out. His novel, The Village Notary (1844-46), which is a Hungarian classic, was liberal and progressive in tendency, as were the romance Hungary in 1514 and the comedy Long Live Equality. After the February revolution of 1848 he was minister of education in the first responsible Hungarian Government. On the retirement of the prime minister Batthyany, Eotviis retired to Munich for a time, and therefore took no active part in the War of Independence. But he served the cause of freedom by his Influence of the Ruling Ideas of the lgth Century on the State (Pest, 1851-54; German ed. Vienna and Leipzig, simultaneously). After his return to Hungary in 1851 he held aloof from politics. In 18S9 he published his Guarantees of the Power and Unity of Austria (German ed., Leipzig, 1859), in which he sought a com promise in the monarchy which would permit of responsible gov ernment. In the diets of 1861, 1865 and 1867 he gave loyal and effective support to Deak. In_ the Andrassy cabinet of 1867 he was minister of education, the only one of the ministers of 1848 to return to office. He established the system of national educa tion in Hungary. Good Catholic though he was (in matters of religion he had been the friend and was the disciple of Montal embert), Eotvos disliked the proclamation of the dogma of papal infallibility, promulgated in 187o, and when the bishop of Feher var proclaimed it, Eotvos cited him to appear at the capital ad audiendum verbum regium. He was a constant defender of the Ausgleich with Austria, and during the absence of Andrassy pre sided over the council of ministers. He died on Feb. 2, 1871.
Edtvds occupied as prominent a place in Hungarian literature as in Hungarian politics. The best of his verses are to be found in his ballads, but his poems are insignificant compared with his romances. It was The Carthusians, written on the occasion of the floods at Pest in 1838, that first took the public by storm. The Magyar novel was then in its infancy, being chiefly represented by the historico-epics of Josika. Eotvos modernized it, giving prominence in his pages to current social problems and political aspirations. The famous Village Notary came still nearer to actual life, while Hungary in 1514, in which the terrible Dozsa Jacquerie (see DozsA) is so vividly described, is especially interesting because it rightly attributes the great national catastrophe of Mohacs to the blind selfishness of the Magyar nobility.
Eotvos's works were collected in 17 vols. (19o1-13). There is a good English version (London, 185o) and numerous German versions of The Village Notary, while The Emancipation of the Jews has been translated into Italian and German (Pest, 1841-42) , and a German translation of Hungary in 1514, under the title of Der Bauernkrieg in Ungarn was published at Pest in 185o.
See Zoltan Ferenczi, Baron Joseph Eotvos (Hung.) (Budapest, 1903) ; this is the best biography.