Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 299
Three Charters of the North
The problem in this book is not to give equal attention to the separate histories of
all countries, but to indicate trends on the eve of the Wars of the French Revolu-
tion, and in particular, in the present chapter, to show the point at which disputes
between crown and nobility had then arrived. It is to set forth also the limitations
of enlightened despotism, or disadvantages or unacceptable choices inherent in
that form of polity: namely, either that the monarchy prevailed over nobility and
other kinds of privilege, at the cost of arbitrary power, as in the case of Joseph II;
or that the monarchy, in order to govern at all, and to assure itself of necessary sup-
port, granted concessions, as in the case of Leopold II, to the very feudal or aristo-
cratic interests that enlightened despotism made it a principle to oppose.
Little has been said of Spain in the present pages. It is not that Spain was unaf-
fected by currents of the time. On the contrary, a good many Spaniards were alive
to some of the main ideas of the European Enlightenment; but what mainly con-
cerned them was to reverse the long deterioration in Spain itself, to revive Spanish
commerce, to improve mining technology, to make administration more efficient,
and stress the practical arts and the ideal of social utility as against the older reli-
gious outlook of the country. In Charles III Spain possessed one of the most cel-
ebrated and successful of the “enlightened despots.” Compared to France or the
Hapsburg empire, however, it was a non- political kind of “despotism”; there was
less conflict between the monarchy and constituted or corporate bodies represent-
ing the nobility or other privileged interests. Nor does any acute class conscious-
ness between bourgeoisie and aristocracy seem to have developed. Even so, accord-
ing to a recent study, the effect of the French Revolution, in Spain as elsewhere,
was to throw doubt on enlightened despotism as a means of social progress.^25
The limitations of enlightened despotism, the lengths beyond which it could
not go in the reconciling of social classes, may be seen in Sweden, Prussia, and
Russia. They become particularly evident in connection with three important doc-
uments contemporaneous with the French Revolution: the Charter of the Nobility
in Russia in 1785, the Swedish Act of Union and Security of 1789, and the Prus-
sian General Code of 1791. Since apparently none of these is available in English,
though all were of lasting significance in their respective countries, they are printed
as an appendix at the end of this book, together, for contrast, with the preamble to
the revolutionary French constitution of 1791.
It has been told in preceding pages how the young Gustavus III, in 1772, put
an end to the Freedom Era in Sweden, supplanting a half- century of noble domi-
faction from recent Hungarian Marxist studies, which blame the Hapsburgs for “arresting our bour-
geois national evolution,” find their “so- called enlightened absolutism” designed to preserve feudal-
ism, and assert as a dogmatic principle that “absolute monarchy is the highest stage of feudal society.”
See Études des délegués Hongrois au Xe Congrès international des sciences historiques à Rome (Budapest,
1955), 18, 19, 73. For these writers the Hapsburgs were colonialist exploiters, and it was the broad
masses, not the aristocracy, that represented the desire for national independence. There is more evi-
dence for Mitrofanov’s repeated statement that the peasants in all parts of the empire remained Kai-
sertreu. Maria Theresa, Joseph, and Leopold represented the highest stage of “feudalism” in that feu-
dalism was precisely what they did not want—but could not wholly get rid of.
25 R. Herr, The Eighteenth- Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, 1958).