Lajos Batthyány

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The native form of this personal name is németújvári gróf Batthyány Lajos. This article uses the Western name order.

Count Lajos Batthyány on paint of Miklós Barabás at 1840's

Count Lajos Batthyány de Németújvár (February 10, 1807 – October 6, 1849) was from a long line of counts and a descendant of The Capet Kings of France. He was born in Pressburg, Kingdom of Hungary (now Bratislava, Slovakia), and died (was executed by firing squad) in Pest, Hungary.

Lajos was born in 1807 to a family of wealthy landowners whose noble blood dated back to 1398. He joined the military in only to leave it in 1827 to pursue a Law degree from the University of Zagreb and to personally manage his estates. Several years later he joined the Upper House in Hungary and was part of the movement to liberate Hungary from the rule of the Habsburgs.

He was the first Prime Minister of Hungary, and was convicted of high treason (being disloyal to the Emperor of Austria), after the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 had failed. On April 7th, 1848 he was appointed by Ferdinand I to be the first prime minister of the new parliamentary government of Hungary.

Batthyány was a very capable leader, but he was stuck in the middle of a clash between the Austrian Monarchy and the Hungarian separatists. He eventually chose the side of the rebels and became one of its leaders. In a battle in the late 1840s he was wounded and captured. He tried to kill himself the night before his execution, but failed. The next day he was executed by means of a firing squad.

He was one of three Hungarian patriots whom Franz Liszt honoured in his great piano work "Funérailles", which is subtitled "October 1849".

Today a square in Buda, facing the Budapest Parliament Building on the other side of the Danube, is named after him. In 2002, the Batthyány Lajos College of Law was founded in Hungary. He is buried in Budapest's Kerepesi Cemetery.