494 Chapter XX
ago been excluded. In the diet of Bohemia no city was represented except Prague.
In the lower house of the Hungarian parliament only one person represented all
the towns of Hungary. In the estates of Styria one person spoke for all the towns
of that duchy, and cast one vote. In such conditions even the Polish constitution of
1791 might seem attractive to the bourgeoisie. The Styrian burghers were the most
successful in their protests, because they were able in a measure to make common
cause with the peasantry; and they could do this the more readily because the
duchy was ethnically homogeneous, town and country alike being German. In
Styria, Leopold ordered the representation of the Third Estate raised from one to
ten. On the whole, the revival of the diets marked a victory for aristocratic counter-
revolution in the Hapsburg empire.^33
On the aims and personality of Leopold II there has been much discussion,
because he made it a matter of policy to be devious. The best explanation is that he
continued to represent, like his brother Joseph, the idea of revolution from above.^34
As Emperor, he favored for the whole empire the kind of modernization for which
he had worked for many years as Grand Duke of Tuscany, and was therefore in
conflict with the aristocratic, privileged, ecclesiastical, and particularistic forces in
his dominions. But his position was complicated by the fact that he came into
conflict with “democratic” forces also. It was not only that political journalism and
criticism of government were developing in Vienna. There seemed also to be an
international secret democratic conspiracy against all kings, himself included. In
June 1790, as already noted in Chapter XVII, Leopold received word from the
elder Metternich at Coblenz, a gathering- place of French émigrés, that a club de
propagande was at work in Paris to bring about revolution in other countries. The
idea of a great secret international Jacobin conspiracy began to spread. It had been
launched by a fabrication of the royalist Comte d’Antraigues. Even the astute
Leopold II, with his supposed Italian cunning, did not altogether see to the bot-
tom of these intrigues, or perceive that the idea of a great democratic conspiracy
was actually only another weapon in the hands of his real adversaries, the aristo-
cratic and privileged classes. He began to take steps for a quarantine against the
revolutionary contagion. In his Declaration of Pillnitz he spoke of intervention in
France under certain conditions. This trend of his policy met with opposition
among his own subjects. In Austria as elsewhere many enlightened middle- class
people, not to mention the peasants, disapproved of interference with the French
Revolution, and of the war against it which might result.
Leopold, beset on all sides, both by aristocrats and by democrats, built up his
own network of secret agents. It was largely from the personnel of this network
that both the Austrian and the Hungarian “Jacobins” were to arise.^35 In part the
secret police watched over democrats; they censored newspapers, and expelled
33 See pages 490–91, above.
34 Here I follow D. Silagi (note 27 above) and A. Wandruszka, “Die Persönlichheit Kaiser Leop-
olds II,” in Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. 192 (1961), 295–317; Wangermann and certain writers of the
Left are less inclined to credit Leopold’s commitment to a “democratic” revolution from above against
the Ständestaat.
35 This point, though not unknown before, is developed with new evidence, and with a new full-
ness and significance, in the two books by Silagi mentioned in note 27 above.