order but in reality a declared atheist, he was a professor of natural
sciences for several years at Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) before be-
ing pronounced incompetent by the faculty in Pest. His recruitment
occurred shortly following Leopold II’s accession to power in 1790.
Requiring greater knowledge of the separatist conspiracies of various
Magyar magnates, the new emperor engaged the former police chief of
Pest, Franz Gotthardi, who in turn secured Matinovics’s cooperation in
submitting confidential reports and trying to influence Hungarian pub-
lic opinion in a manner favorable to the Habsburg monarchy. In April
1793, the head of the Austrian secret police, Johann Anton Pergen,
sent Martinovics on a fact-finding tour of Hungary and Transylvania.
His reports stressed the omnipresence of revolutionary opinions, even
the threat of mutiny by several Hungarian regiments. Further implicated
were a number of Freemasons, Illuminati, Jesuit theocrats, itinerant
Poles, and subversive Americans, although many of his assertions were
found to have been invented.
Unknown to both Pergen and Gotthardi, however, were Martinov-
ics’s own revolutionary machinations. In the fall of 1792, he com-
posed a critical letter to Leopold’s successor, Francis II, supposedly
from the Italian count Giuseppe Gorani (Gorani had published a series
of letters to European monarchs in the Parisian Moniteur earlier that
year). Yet the issue of the Moniteur containing Martinovics’s letter,
which pointedly accused Francis of having betrayed the liberal poli-
cies of his predecessor and threatened his removal from the throne of
Hungary, never reached Vienna, presumably having been intercepted
by Austrian censors. Gotthardi, who continued to regard Martinovics
as his most valuable secret agent, had repeatedly attempted to secure
some additional rewards for his service, but without success. In the
summer of 1793, disgruntled by this rejection, Martinovics circulated
his letter among a like-minded circle of acquaintances.
Recognizing that two types of potential revolutionaries existed in
Hungary, Martinovics organized both the nationalist Society of the
Reformers of Hungary, directed at disaffected nobles, and the Society
of Liberty and Equality for French Jacobin sympathizers. Accord-
ing to his plan, neither group was to know of the other’s existence,
and once the members of the former had served their purpose, they
would be liquidated. Although some 200–300 people were recruited
within several weeks, Martinovics was arrested in Vienna after a plot284 • MARTINOVICS, IGNAZ VON