490 Chapter XX
the 1790’s, that, to exist as a state at all, they had to challenge, without hope of
success, the social order of Eastern Europe.
It is well to give attention to what succeeded, rather than to what failed. The
three eastern monarchies, in annexing their several portions of Poland, established
a mutual interest in the continuing repression of revolution. They committed their
own survival to the exclusion of “Western” ideas. In the long run, they only became
the more susceptible to collapse in the twentieth century. In the short run, certain
features of the European scene that are often dated from the Congress of Vienna
can be more justly dated from the 1790’s. In a way not true of preceding centuries,
a chasm between Eastern and Western Europe had opened up—between a West
that had been animated by “Jacobinism” and an East which, in repressing Jaco-
binism so successfully, became timorous and immobile, fearful of the future, and
afraid of the modern world. This development was furthered by what happened in
the Hapsburg empire.
Agitations in the Hapsburg Empire
It has often been observed, since Pascal’s remark on Cleopatra’s nose, that in
human affairs, unlike the world of physical objects, causes and effects and other
relationships may be fantastically disproportionate. The reminder is useful in ap-
proaching the Danubian countries. In Vienna and its appertaining duchies, and
in the Kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, we enter a world with a character its
own, in which, if a select few responded to the music of Mozart, the surrounding
atmosphere was a kind conveyed in later times by the ideas of Graustark, Dracula,
and the Orient Express. In the division between noble landowner and agricultural
serf, the empire resembled other parts of Eastern Europe, but Italian connections
were strong (Leopold II had spent most of his life as grand duke of Tuscany,
where his son Francis II had grown up), and above all it was the German influence
that predominated. The higher government was more German than anything else,
and the towns also were mainly German, from Bohemia through Hungary into
the elbow of Transylvania, where Klausenburg (the modern Cluj) and Kronstadt
(the modern Brasov) remained German after a period of settlement longer than
the entire history of the United States. Neither the Czechs nor the Hungarians
had yet developed a literary language, and they depended on German; but the
Hungarian nobles, many of whom knew little else, actually spoke and wrote Latin
as a common medium of expression, like the Poles a generation or two before. It
was a world in which German Masonic lodges became even more occult and
mysterious, where popular religion tended to weirdness and disguised Jesuits
could really exist, where hidden revolutionaries conspired with a minimum of
political purpose, and a truly secret police pursued its habits of intrigue. It was a
region not easy to understand for anyone accustomed to French rationality or
Anglo- Saxon common sense.^27
27 For the Hapsburg empire see, in addition to items by Benda and Mejdricka in note 1 of the
present chapter, E. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public