Marriage and Divorce in Hungary after 1945

The development of Hungarian private law was fundamentally determined by the fact that its codification remained unsuccessful until 1959. The area of marriage law was a partial exception to this. After the spread of the Reformation, several other Christian denominations (eg. Reformed, Evangelical) lived in Hungary in addition to the Roman Catholic denomination, which led to legal uncertainty in the field of marriage law, especially in the 19th century. This primarily unfolded around the prohibition and the permissibility of the dissolution of a validly concluded marriage bond. After long social and professional debates, Act XXXI of 1894 on marriage law was born. With this law, the possibility of the judicial dissolution of marriages became common. However, this was possible only if one of the unconditional grounds for divorce was proven and, based on this, the court ordered one or both of the pronounced spouses guilty. This law was in force until the birth of the Family Law Act. A Prime Minister’s decree issued in 1945 broke the fault-based principle, when it allowed marriages to be terminated without the declaration of fault. This decree made the dissolution of the marriage bond easier, but it did not solve many other problems arising from it. On the one hand, the Marriage Act allowed the innocent wife to bear her husband’s name even after the dissolution of the marriage bond, but on the other hand, the guilty husband was obliged to maintain his wife. After the entry into force of the decree, after no guilt had been established, the woman who considered herself innocent could claim maintenance in a separate lawsuit. In the course of the research, an answer was sought tothe question of whether the courts judged cases on the basis of evidence similar to or different from that required by the Marriage Act. Did the courts also take into account the social and economic situation that developed during World War II?