Victories of the Counter-Revolution 495
troublesome foreigners like da Ponte. Mainly, however, under Leopold as under
Joseph, the secret police was an agency of the enlightened and reforming state. The
weakness of enlightened despotism was that its reforms could be carried through
only by bureaucrats; and that the bureaucrats were overwhelmingly drawn from
the very privileged classes whose privileges enlightened despotism sought to re-
duce. Bureaucrats and officials were therefore often slow in the carrying out of
their orders. The main task of Leopold’s secret police was the surveillance of the
bureaucracy itself.
The point is illustrated by Leopold’s dealings with L. A. Hoffmann, editor of the
Wiener Zeitschrift.^36 Hoffmann knew a great deal about the more recondite branches
of Masonry, including its offshoot the Illuminati, who had been defunct for several
years. Their machinations, he claimed, were the true cause of the French Revolu-
tion. He was willing enough, however, to see such methods employed to advance
the Revolution from Above. Under Leopold’s instructions, he began in 1791 to
organize an Association with a hierarchy of four levels of secrecy. The lowest “se-
cret” was to combat the French Revolution, to inculcate obedience in the people,
and obtain “a more secure balance between moderate monarchism and democra-
tism.” The next higher secret was to oppose “aristocratism” so far as it obstructed the
plans of the government. The “highest secret” was to bring the crown prince, Fran-
cis II, to these views; and the top secret of all, the allergeheimster Zweck, was to exert
an influence on foreign states. In the whole program, and especially in the idea of
propagandizing in foreign countries, Leopold and Hoffmann proposed to do pre-
cisely what they imputed (perhaps “projected” is the modern psychologist’s term) to
the leaders of the Revolution in France. It was the second level of secrecy that was
closest to Leopold’s continuing interests—the campaign against “aristocratism”
within his own empire. He hoped to strengthen the bureaucracy whose inadequacy
had caused the failure of Joseph’s plans; to infiltrate the government service with
secret members of his Association, men known only to each other, a disciplined
elite with shared ideas, responding to confidential directives, inspecting, reporting
on, and driving forward the ordinary employees of government; working, in short,
for a Revolution from Above, and in effect realizing what the Illuminati had vainly
dreamed of. Hoffmann managed to recruit various persons for the Association, in-
cluding several professors and a Hanoverian doctor, J. G. R. Zimmermann, who
was a personal physician to the King of England. But Leopold died before the As-
sociation could be really formed, and with his death it was forgotten.
Meanwhile the ordinary police pursued similar aims. If by “Jacobins” in Austria
and Hungary are meant the conspirators of 1794, then the most notable of them
originated in the secret police under Leopold II in 1790 and 1791, and not merely
because of a taste for conspiratorial action, but because there was in fact an affinity
between the Revolution from Above and straight revolutionism, or between en-
lightened despotism and “Jacobinism,” in that both found their enemies in the
nobility and in the prelates of the church. It was possible, therefore, for a man of
some principle both to work for the police under Leopold and to conspire against
his successor. But among those whose services the police accepted were also vari-
36 Silagi, Ungarn, 108–16, 128–31.