Victories of the Counter-Revolution 491
Three points must be made. First, there was a good deal of basic disaffection in
these Hapsburg countries in the 1790’s. Second, Jacobin conspiracies were formed
in Vienna and Hungary in 1794. Third, it was an extreme form of socio- political
conservatism that won out. The three stood in no proportionate relationship to each
other. The Jacobin conspiracies were fairly insignificant. Contrived by handfuls of
intelligentsia, they were far from reflecting the broad discontents that were real
enough. Among historians there have been attempts, on the Left, to set up the Jaco-
bins of 1794 as spokesmen of a latent revolutionism, or predecessors of the revolu-
tion of the twentieth century, and, on the Right, to suggest that because the con-
spiracies were small and ineffectual there was little real dissatisfaction in the empire.
The repressiveness that came to prevail was also out of proportion to any danger
posed by the Jacobin plots. It might logically seem, therefore, that the repressiveness
was hypocritical or hysterical, or that the social order of the Hapsburg empire was
threatened by nothing at all. None of these allegations seems to be true. Pascal’s
principle of disproportion may save us from the errors of misplaced logic.
What happened was a continuation, very much accentuated by the war against
France, of the conflict described in the first part of this book, between the at-
tempted revolution from above under Joseph II and the aristocratic counter- attack
that gathered strength during the reign of his brother, Leopold II.
Dissatisfaction was to be found among both burghers and peasants. The nobles
also had their grievances against a government that had undertaken so many re-
forms, especially in Hungary, where the lesser Magyar nobility had developed a
strong nationalistic feeling against the Hapsburg court. A further source of unrest
lay in the Protestant minorities of Hungary and Bohemia, which had been reduced
to inferior status by the Catholic triumphs of the Counter Reformation; in Hun-
gary the Protestants might be relatively enlightened burghers, but in Bohemia they
included many rude country people subject to queer notions of what happened in
the outside world.
There had been a mass peasant rebellion in Hungary as recently as 1790 and in
Bohemia as recently as 1775.^28 Government and landowners rightly feared re-
newed outbreaks. For the most part the middle class townspeople, radically set
apart from the peasants by language and culture, and debarred from common in-
terests with them because unable to own rural land, were as horrified as their social
superiors by such nameless stirrings of thousands of Calibans. The peasants, how-
ever, were not totally isolated. In Hungary there is evidence that Leopold II him-
self stirred up rural protest, as part of his campaign against the Magyar nobles.
News of the French Revolution reached the villages. As elsewhere, priests or
Opinion in the Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959); Denis Silagi,
Ungarn und der geheime Mitarbeiterkreis Kaiser Leopolds II (Munich, 1960) and id., Jakobiner in der
Habsburger- Monarchie: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des aufgeklärten Absolutismus in Österreich (Vienna and
Munich, 1962); and parts of F. Valjavec, Die Entstehung der politischen Strömungen in Deutschland,
1770 –1815 (Munich, 1951).
28 For the Hungarian peasant rising of 1790 see 488. The present paragraph draws on K. Mej-
dricka’s two articles, “Les paysans tchèques et la Révolution française” in Annales hist, de la Rev. fr.,
No. 154 (1958), 64–74, and“Die Jakobiner in der tschechischen öffentlichen Meinung” in W. Markov,
Robespierre (Berlin, 1958), 423–39, and on F. Kutnar, “La critique de la Rev. fr. dans les brochures
tchèques d’alors,” in Le Monde slave, 1 (1935), 131–58.