Clashes with Monarchy 79
administration.... Other sovereigns seek increasingly to limit the nobility, because
the true strength of the State lies in the greater numbers of the common man, who
deserves the chief consideration and yet is oppressed more in Bohemia than else-
where.... I need not recall the unpleasant memory of what happened in past years
with the nobility and estates of Bohemia, but will only remind Your Majesty of the
obstacles to desirable measures that we meet with from the nobility and estates of
Hungary, Transylvania and the Netherlands.”
He might have added the patriciate of Milan.
In Bohemia, as in eastern Europe generally, the peasants were in effect serfs
owing uncompensated labor service to their lords. The dispute between the Vienna
government and the Bohemian diet was a battle for jurisdiction over the mass of
the Bohemian population. The Vienna government drew up urbaria, written docu-
ments limiting and specifying the kind, the amount, and the timing of labor due to
the lords. The lords preferred for all such matters to remain under their own discre-
tion. The peasants themselves took a hand by unorganized and violent rebellion;
fifteen thousand of them besieged Prague itself in 1775. The government sup-
pressed them, but at the same time gave up all pretense of conciliation with the
nobility and the diet. The urbaria in 1775 were officially declared to be the law. The
Bohemian aristocracy remained disgruntled but silenced, since the diet was not
allowed to meet for the next fifteen years.
The Hapsburg government, like others, was in need of money after the Seven
Years’ War. It sought, like others, to increase its revenues, in part by reaching un-
tapped sources of taxation, in part by raising the productivity of its territories. To
stimulate production it campaigned against gilds and gild restrictions, and sought
to merge small local units into larger trading areas with freer internal circulation of
labor, goods and investment. The tariff of 1775, for example, brought Austria, Bo-
hemia, the Netherlands, and the Milanese—the whole monarchy except Hun-
gary—into a single protected tariff union.
Resistance was of course met with everywhere. In the Austrian Netherlands in
these years it was sporadic, though incidents were numerous, as when the estates of
Luxembourg, in 1768, refused to make any accounting for their financial activities,
fearing that certain hidden tax exemptions might be exposed.
At Milan certain younger members of the patrician class were beginning to feel
the need of a change. Foremost among these was the economist, Pietro Verri.
With a few others, including Beccaria, he founded the club called Il Caffe in 1761,
which for a time published a journal of the same name. He was well acquainted
with the French philosophers of the day. Indeed, a letter from the abbé Morellet to
Beccaria, whose work on crimes and punishments Morellet translated into
French—a letter in which Morellet described in highly unfavorable terms the poli-
tics of the Parlement of Paris in the 1760’s—suggests the affinities between Milan
and Paris, and the way in which reformers felt both their own efforts and the
forces opposed to them to be of more than national scope.^20 Verri was to live to
see, and accept, the Cisalpine Republic of 1797. At this time he pinned his hopes
on the enlightened absolutism of Vienna. He entered into relations with Kaunitz
20 This letter of September 1766 is reprinted by Glasson, Parlement de Paris, II, 304–6.