492 Chapter XX
tavern- keepers read aloud from newspapers to their illiterate neighbors. What the
peasants talked about was less the declared principles of the new France than the
fact that in France peasants had revolted, and that seigneurial dues and tithes had
been done away with. Peasants of the Hapsburg countries had been made con-
scious of their even heavier burdens, especially the labor service or robot that might
be as much as six days a week, by the attempts of Maria Theresa and Joseph II to
bring it under regulation. They knew about Joseph II’s granting of personal free-
dom. Agrarian discontent was directed against immediate and visible targets—
nobles, burghers, churchmen, and Jews—but seldom against the Emperor, who
was seen as the loving father of his people. The feeling was confused and amor-
phous; after the war began it was said that the French would come someday, bring-
ing liberation; but there were also Biblical prophecies and visions to the same ef-
fect; and it was thought also, in some quarters, that Joseph II was not really dead,
and would return. The peasants objected both to conscription and to the war
against France. There was a near revolt in 1797, when a group led by Protestant
sectaries conspired to evade military service; in this case, somewhat exceptionally, a
Slovakian burgher named Michal Blazek was involved, and was found to have
Latin and Hungarian pamphlets originating with the Hungarian Jacobins in his
possession. The peasants expected more from the Directory than from previous
French regimes, being more aware of its military successes than of its “bourgeois”
character. The Austrian general, the Archduke Charles, sojourning on his Bohe-
mian estates in 1800, declared that nine- tenths of the people wanted the French to
arrive. “In the country they all say: let them come and we will kill the lords and pay
no more. In the towns they all say: let them come and occupy Vienna so that we
can have peace.”^29 In the following years there continued to be sympathy for Na-
poleon, who, according to some, was really the avenging son of Joseph II.
In Bohemia practically everyone of the literate classes was afraid of the peas-
ants, and an active counter- revolutionary literature developed, replete with the
niceties of argument of Edmund Burke, whose Reflections were read in Gentz’s
German translation. Existing society was said to be natural, necessary, and organic,
and the ideas of the French Revolution were described as abstract and mechanical.
The Revolution itself was attributed to ambitious upstarts, and to the machina-
tions of secret societies. A certain Cornova, who was both an ex- Jesuit and a Free-
mason, wrote a history of insurrection in Bohemia to show how all classes suffered
alike. Peasants were wrong to be so chronically discontented, said a theology pro-
fessor at Prague, because they had the happiness of living close to nature. They
were mistaken, said a writer named Vivak, in expecting anything of the French,
who, if they came, would bring nothing but desolation, barbarity, and atrocity. The
frequency with which these writings justified the robot, as a mere legitimate return
on property, suggests how heavily it was under fire.
The Czech national revival was then barely beginning, and its spokesmen feared
that disputes over social problems would interfere with the national movement.
One of its leaders, V. M. Kramerius, edited the first successful popular journal in
the Czech language. He gave detailed attention to the French Revolution, but his
29 Quoted by Mejdricka in AHRF, loc.sit., 72.