Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 295
barriers, and class sympathies stronger than national sympathies, among the lower
classes as among the upper. The Magyar peasant looked across an unbridgeable
gulf to the Magyar noble who spoke the same language, particularly detesting the
numerous lesser nobles, landless or nearly landless, who lived from the work of two
or three serfs or from the income of some county office. Only in the sense ascribed
to Joseph II were these peasants “democratic”: they disliked the nobility, they had
no faith or interest in diets or parliaments, and they willingly accepted government
absolutism as favorable to themselves. In fact, the lawyers stationed in the villages
by Joseph II to befriend the rural population now helped to give expression to the
unrest. A Decretum of the Peasants, of unknown authorship, was distributed
through several counties of central Hungary in May 1790. Since it well reveals the
violent tenor of life in this land of servile labor, and has not, I think, been hitherto
published in English—the whole agrarian radicalism of Eastern Europe that coin-
cided in time with the French Revolution having probably been underestimated
further west—it is worth extended quotation.
The Decretum began by complaining that peasants were yoked by the landlords
like oxen, “six days out of the week.” (Six days of robot was contrary to the laws of
Maria Theresa.) The lords, it was said,
want to consider our blood like that of dogs and pigs so as to mistreat,
beat and kill us as they please. They say they have bought us out of their
pockets, like pigs, and can therefore kill us as pigs. They want to force the
king to yield them this power over us....
Are we pigs? Do we not have human blood, too?... Are the armies
that faithfully serve the king not composed of our sons?... Do we not
deserve for all this that each of us should own a small piece of the coun-
try’s soil?
Let us advance... raise up our sticks, pitchforks and axes against the
cruel, parasitic, time stealing, country ruining, king robbing lords.There followed seven numbered demands, of which the first was that no comma
be changed in Joseph’s edicts—“holy, useful and just as if God had dictated them.”
Male servants should abandon their lords within one week; otherwise the lord’s
household would be murdered. Should a village stand by its lord, even the peasant
children would be killed. County officers should go away; those who stayed would
be hung up by the legs and have their flesh torn with pincers. Taxes should be paid
to the King alone. “We elect as king the man against whom they have rebelled
because of Joseph’s justice... the brother of our dear Joseph, Peter Leopold II.” A
wooden column should be built in each village in honor of Joseph, until a stone
one could be provided.
Why should we have a diet? We need none, since we have a king. If there is
nevertheless to be one we had better be informed; otherwise we will arrange for
a diet the like of which was never seen.^1717 Ibid., with thanks again to Mr. Sugar for translation of the Decretum. On the Hungarian diet
of 1790–1791 there is a two- volume work by Marczali which I have not been able to use: Az 1790 –91-
diki Országgyüles (Budapest, 1907).