292 Chapter XII
namely, the right to make a new contract with each King at the time of his corona-
tion. Since Joseph II had refused to be properly crowned as King of Hungary, and
had even removed the crown physically from the kingdom, the Hungarians took
the position that they owed him no allegiance. Coronation, announced the county
assembly of Bihar, was no empty or superstitious ceremony, but the sign “that the
Nation confers power on the King it crowns,” and that “he can become King only
by our consent and by the force of the laws.” Or as the county of Pest affirmed, in
the language of the day: “By the social contract which creates the state, sovereignty
lies in the hands of the people; Mother Nature has written this maxim in all hearts,
and no right minded Ruler could bring it into doubt.”^12
Even the Tyrol said it should crown its ruler in return for a confirmation of
liberties, and little Upper Austria insisted on the distinctiveness of its own consti-
tution and privileges.
Leopold was not personally inclined to doubt the social contract in principle.
He retorted, to justify absolutism in the empire, and echoing his late brother, that
none of the diets really represented its “nation.” In Bohemia, with almost 3,000,000
people (excluding Moravia), there were only 174 noble family names, most of
them not even Czech, but a medley of O’Kelleys, Desfours, Schwarzenbergs,
Trautmannsdorfs, Vrbnas, and Haugwitzes, deposited in that country by the
Hapsburgs after the revolt of 1618. Only these nobles, with a few clergy, sat in the
diet, the peasants and cities (except Prague) having no representation of their own.
The Magyar nobility was more numerous, running from great magnates to small
county gentry. If, as said, there were 300,000 of them, in a country of 7,000,000
(without Transylvania), they constituted over 4 per cent of the population. In this
case they were over twice as numerous proportionately as the French noblesse, and
more numerous than the more genteel classes in England.^13 They were still, as
Leopold said, hardly identical with the nation. Nor were the Magyars as a whole
identical with Hungary. One of the worst features of the peasant revolts of 1789
was the ethnic hatreds they revealed. When the Vlach peasants rebelled in Tran-
sylvania they spared Rumanian or German landlords but turned ferociously against
those who were Magyars.
In Belgium, when the estates revolted against the Emperor, a recognizably dem-
ocratic party soon took form, which wished an enlargement of representation in
the estates as well as mere liberation of existing estates from the central power. We
have seen the rise of these Belgian democrats, and their annihilation by the estates
party. It has been explained, also, how Leopold and his advisers in Belgium, though
sympathetic in a way to the democrats, were unwilling to give them any support,
partly from an alarm caused by the French Revolution. Something of the same
development was evident, though less marked, in the other Hapsburg lands.
12 Ibid., 30 0 –1.
13 Kerner, Bohemia, 70–71; Marczali, Hungary, 104, 164. The highest estimate for the French
nobility is 400,000 in a population of 25,000,000. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on Indigence (Lon-
don, 1806), in his careful tabulation of social strata, put 314,000 people in the classes down through
“gentlemen and ladies,” higher civil servants, the law and “eminent clergymen,” but excluding all
merchants, out of a total estimated English population of 9,344,000. It may be that relatively more
had a role in political life in Hungary than in England.