474 Chapter XX
aristocratic, which had already largely destroyed the work of Joseph II in the
Hapsburg empire, and combined to annihilate the Polish constitution of 1791.
The Problem of Eastern Europe
There are at least two reasons why it is especially difficult for an outsider to reach a
firm judgment on the state of Eastern Europe in the 1790’s. One is a technical or
historiographical reason. Since 1945, both in Russia and in Eastern Germany and
the other “people’s democracies,” there has been a strong movement of revisionism
among historical scholars, who have generally operated, or attempted or claimed to
operate, within Marxist or “scientific” historical categories. It is stated that bour-
geois historiography has been in error on the matter of revolutionary or potentially
revolutionary sentiment in Russia and Eastern Europe at the time of the French
Revolution. It is held that bourgeois historians—that is, those of Russia, Poland, or
Hungary of an older day, and those of the West even now—have through a natural
bias underestimated the degree of discontent and rebelliousness in Eastern Europe
in the 1790’s, that they have focused their attention too much on the upper classes
and have minimized the extent to which the lower classes were interested in the
French Revolution and dissatisfied in their own countries. The older writers are
said to have been blind to the elements of significant class struggle which existed
in Eastern Europe before 1800.^1
The new tendency, therefore, is to collect all possible evidence for revolutionary
inclination or class consciousness at a popular level, in which a long background
for “people’s democracy” in Eastern Europe may be found. The dangers in this
tendency are apparent, and the ideological interest is as clear in the case of the new
writers as in that of the bourgeois historians. For a Westerner, the evidence is hard
to examine because the difficulties presented by the languages are formidable. And
1 Such is the tenor of M. Shtrange, Russkoye Obshchestvo i Frantsuzkaya Revolyutsiya (Moscow,
1956), Fr. trans, (note the French transliteration, Strange) La Révolution française et la soeiété russe
(Moscow, 1960); B. Lesnodorski, in La Pologne au Xe Congrès International des Sciences Historiques à
Rome (Warsaw, 1955), 212, and the same author in very measured terms in Polscy Jakobini ( Warsaw,
1960), with a summary in French; A. Korta, “Hugues Kołłątaj et les problèmes sociaux et politiques
de la seconde moitié du 18e siècle,” in Przeglad historyczny, XLII (1951), which contains several articles
on the subject with French summaries; K. Benda, “Les Jacobins hongrois,” in Annales historiques de la
Révolution française (1959), No. 155, 38–60, but apparently less is claimed for revolutionism in Hun-
gary in Benda’s introduction to his edition of the sources, A magyar jakobinusok iratai, 3 vols. (Buda-
pest, 1952–1957); K. Mejdricka, “Les paysans tchèques et la Révolution française,” in AHRF (1958),
No. 154, 64–74; S. Vianu, “Quelques aspects de l’influence exercée par la pensée progressiste russe sur
la société roumaine de la fin du 18e siècle,” in Nouvelles études d ’ histoire présentées au Xe Congrès des sci-
ences historiques (Rome, 1955), 285–97; H. Voegt, Die deutsche jakobinische Literatur und Publizistik,
1789–180 0 (Berlin [East Berlin], 1955); and articles on numerous countries assembled in W. Markov,
ed., Maximilien Robespierre 1758–1794: Beiträge zu seinem 200 Gebürtstag (Berlin [East Berlin], 1958).
I should like to acknowledge the criticisms made of some of my previous writings by Shtrange and
Lesnodorski, and make clear that I have no knowledge of East European languages, being indebted
to Messrs. Jeffry Kaplow and William Blackwell for digests of work in Russian (including Shtrange’s
book before its appearance in French), to Mr. André Michalski for a long digest of Lesnodorski’s
Polscy Jakobini, of which a French translation is reported to be underway, and to Mr. Peter Kenez for
reading works in Hungarian.