Hope
Flooding Budapest would have been no great matter in later generations; Franz had seen news reports of Budapest being submerged by floods several times.
But if dams were deliberately built upstream on the Danube, using the force of the floodwaters to attack Budapest, then the consequences would be grave. Budapest would be finished, but so too would the farmland and cities downstream.
If all the local Hungarian people had supported the revolutionaries, there would have been no need to consider it—the Austrian army would have done it long ago.
But now, the House of Habsburg clearly had more supporters than the Hungarian Republican government. If they flooded the city, it would be like killing eight hundred enemies at the cost of a thousand of their own.
Kossuth did not know what Franz was thinking, but upon hearing that the city might be flooded, he knew Budapest could not be held.
Putting himself in their shoes, if he stood in the Vienna government's position, then no matter how severe the consequences or how terrible the cost, he too would choose to crush the Hungarian Republic. That was how politicians saw things.
"No, General Henryk Dembinski. Politicians have far less integrity than you imagine. What is the rotten Austrian government incapable of doing? Hundreds of thousands of Hungarian people being displaced—would the Austrians consider that any great matter?" Kossuth said solemnly.
At least in his mind, the lives and property of hundreds of thousands of Hungarians were bargaining chips that could be discarded. If final victory could be won, even several times that sacrifice would be acceptable.
This could be seen from the Republican government's suppression of the workers' and peasants' movements. Since the Hungarian Republic was founded in 1848, it had killed more people while suppressing those movements than the