"Such a Smoking Nation As This I Never Saw...": Smoking, Nationalism, and Manliness in Nineteenth-Century Hungary

Abstract

Tobacco smoking became an important marker of Hungarian national identity during the nineteenth century. This national symbol ultimately had an economic origin: Hungarian tobacco producers resisted the tobacco monopoly of the Habsburg central government, and led an ultimately successful consumer boycott of Austrian products. Tobacco nationalism, however, became a common theme in Hungarian popular culture in its own right, as tobacco use came to symbolize community and fraternity. The use of tobacco was also highly gendered; smoking as a metaphor for membership shows that the Hungarian nation was a gender-exclusive "national brotherhood."