Béla Grünwald

Béla Ferenc József Grünwald de Bártfa (Hungarian: bártfai Grünwald Béla Ferenc József; 2 December 1839 – 4 May 1891) was a Hungarian nationalist politician and historian active in Upper Hungary, present-day Slovakia. Born in Szentantal, he trained as a lawyer, receiving a degree from the Royal University of Pest. Serving first as administrator (alispán) of Zólyom County, in the 1878 elections he was elected a member of the Hungarian House of Representatives for Szliács (modern Sliač) in that county as a member of the Liberal Party; he subsequently left the Liberals in 1880, serving as an independent before joining the Moderate Opposition party. He was an activist for the assimilationist policies of Magyarisation in the predominantly Slovak region of Upper Hungary, founding and supporting the Upper Hungary Magyar Educational Society. He viewed the construction of a centralised state as a political priority.

As a historian, Grünwald became a corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences after the publication of his 1888 work, The Old Hungary (A régi Magyarország). In his historical works, he pursued a "democratic" method of historiography. He stated in The New Hungary (Az új Magyarország), the sequel to his 1888 book, "The genius, too, is born. He is born in a particular age, as a member of a particular nation, a class and a family, and the stamp these circles press onto his personality in his youth stays on him even if he has later come into conflict with them." He charged the Hungarian nobility with a lack of national sentiment, and feeling greater solidarity with nobles from other nations than with the Hungarian nation; the nobles, he argued, had neglected the development of Hungary as a nation-state. Nevertheless, on 22 April 1889, he accepted ennoblement from Emperor Franz Joseph I, becoming "de Bártfa" (bártfai).

Grünwald committed suicide by gunshot wound to the head in unclear circumstances while visiting Paris on 4 May 1891. Shortly before his suicide, he sent a telegram to Albert Apponyi, the leader of the Moderate Opposition, briefly notifying him of his death: "Béla Grünwald has died after a long period of suffering". In his famous dramatic 1929 account, The Paris Story (A párizsi regény), Dezső Szomory describes Grünwald's death and burial:

He committed suicide on the bank of the Seine, just next to the water, thinking in one final thought that the water current would take him far away. But the water current didn't hurt him; it only washed the wound on his temple ... Grünwald's burial at Montmartre Cemetery was yet more dismal. On this autumnal day, [the cemetery] was like an English landscape, with plenty of grey air, some trees, some shrubs ...

Grünwald's epitaph reads, "Here lies Béla Grünwald, unbreakable apostle of the Hungarian theory of the state."