Victories of the Counter-Revolution 493
purpose was to present it as sinister and destructive. He made no mention of the
abolition of seigneurial dues, but dwelt on the downtrodden state of peasants in
France, besides whom, he declared, the Bohemian peasant lived as a veritable
“count.” He developed a kind of demographic theory of the Revolution: France in
the eighteenth century had become overpopulated; and its National Assembly,
having purposely decided to conquer territory in Europe, had invented slogans of
liberty and equality to soften up neighboring peoples for subjugation.^30
The upper classes of the towns had reasons for looking on events in France with
favor. In Hungary they were very weak. In Bohemia their voice was muted by eth-
nic fears and problems; but it seems significant that the only literate Bohemian
known to have strongly sympathized with the French Revolution was a banker, J.
F. Opiz, who in his private correspondence expressed the hope that the French
would defeat the Coalition and justified the Reign of Terror.^31 In the solidly Ger-
man areas the position of the burghers was less precarious. A certain political con-
sciousness developed at Vienna. It included a class consciousness, which the pro-
gram of Joseph II had done much to arouse. Mozart thought himself as good as
any count, and he approved of the social message of Beaumarchais’ Marriage of
Figaro when he set it to music. As early as 1790 his librettist, da Ponte, was or-
dered out of the country, with a number of other Italians and Frenchmen, whose
views were thought unsuitable by the police. The governments of Joseph and Leo-
pold, the examples of “enlightened despotism” par excellence, intended to keep care-
ful rein over the privileged classes and so were willing to equalize the status of
peasants and burghers within certain limits; but it was no part of their program to
do away with nobility itself, and still less to surrender any authority. Non- nobles,
however, especially among intellectuals, journalists, and government officials in the
capital, were beginning to outgrow the mere paternalism of enlightened despo-
tism, to demand more latitude for expression, discussion, and debate, more free-
dom from censorship and from guidance by the police, more opportunity in their
careers and even more of a role in decisions affecting taxation, foreign policy, and
war. The idea got abroad that absolutism should be checked, not merely by the
privileged classes, the nobility, and the prelates—the old idea in the Hapsburg
empire as elsewhere—but also by persons of suitable substance who did not hap-
pen to belong to “the aristocracy.^32
It was discontent among nobles that any monarchy viewed with really serious
concern. Leopold II, on coming to the throne in 1790, had found the nobilities of
his duchies and kingdoms in a state of rebellion, in consequence of Joseph’s re-
forms of serfdom and his movements toward equality of legal penalties and taxa-
tion. The years beginning with 1790 were a time of revival of the traditional con-
stitutionalism, that is, of the powers of the diets as against the ruler. These diets
were bodies of nobles. In part because of religious troubles two centuries before,
and in part because of agrarian predominance in the society, the burghers had long
30 On Kramerius see Mejdricka in Markov, Robespierre, 426–30, and Kutnar, 135.
31 Mejdricka in Markov, 435–38.
32 Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials, 5–35. For the state of political feeling in Vi-
enna see also W. C. Langsam, “Emperor Francis II and the Austrian ‘Jacobins,’” in American Historical
Review, L (1945), 471–90.