496 Chapter XX
ous opportunists and adventurers. The most extreme of these was Ignaz Martinov-
ics, who ended his life as the chief Hungarian Jacobin.
Both the actual facts of Martinovics’ career, and the wild imaginings which he
declared to be true, suggest a wonderland in which the difference between proba-
ble and improbable has disappeared.^37 Born in Hungary of Serbian background,
trained for the church but a declared atheist, at one time the friend of the Polish
patriot Ignace Potocki, for several years professor of natural sciences at Lemberg,
by his own avowal a philosopher of international repute, but pronounced incompe-
tent by the faculty at Budapest after deliberate consideration, Martinovics was
pretty clearly a megalomaniac and pathological liar, who in 1791 began to work for
the Vienna police. He became the panegyrist of Leopold II, and, as such, in de-
nouncing the resistance of privileged bodies, could even say a good word for the
French Revolution;^38 but mostly he spied on the disaffected Hungarian nobles,
and submitted reports on revolutionary conspirators. In these reports, unlike those
of the Abbé Barruel a few years later drawn from somewhat similar sources, nu-
merous Jesuits and high- churchmen were as dangerous as Freemasons and Illumi-
nati. The Belgian van Eupen, for example, a canon of the cathedral at Antwerp,
was a real person and a real intriguer, one of the Statist party in the Austrian
Netherlands, and a confirmed clerical reactionary. His name haunts Martinovics’
pages as that of an incorrigible revolutionary, endlessly scheming against the
Hapsburgs Joseph and Leopold. It is doubtful that Leopold’s police believed much
of the phantasmagoria that Martinovics submitted to them. Who could believe,
even in Europe in 1792, that a combination of Jesuit theocrats, Illuminati, Freema-
sons, the Abbé Maury, itinerant Poles, and subversive Americans was at work to
overthrow kings, priests, and aristocrats, turn the Holy Roman Empire into a re-
public, give all Europeans equal access to India, introduce Cagliostro’s projects at
Rome, where the papacy would disappear, and “put all states on the footing of
North America”?^39
THE JACOBIN CONSPIRACIES AT
VIENNA AND IN HUNGARY, 1794Leopold II died in March 1792. His successor, Francis II, though more conserva-
tive and aristocratic in his sympathies than his father, was a young man of more
37 On Martinovics see Silagi, Jakobiner, 65–86 ff.; but I am especially indebted to an unpublished
senior thesis at Princeton University, by Peter Kenez, “The Conspiracy of the Intellectuals: the Hun-
garian Jacobin Movement” (1960), which draws on the documents published by K. Benda, A magyar
jakobinus mozgalom iratai, 3 vols. (Budapest, 1952–1957). This work is edited in Hungarian, but many
of the documents are in German and Latin.
38 “Oratio pro Leopoldo II,” Benda, I, 559. Here tota Europa admires the “metamorphosis” in
France against “magnates and monopolists,” but about the same time (Benda, 575), Martinovicz ex-
pressed to Leopold the more characteristic attitude of supporters of enlightened absolutism: “The
Americans and the French made good laws through bloody upheavals, but Your Majesty, without any
revolution, has made laws which the learned world marvels at, and humanity adores.”
39 Martinovicz’ reports to the police chief Gotthardhi, Benda, I, 440–507 and 787–89. The quo-
tation is from 788.