Victories of the Counter-Revolution 497
straightforward personal character, and disapproved of using police spies in the
same way. War with France began in the following month. The war was not popu-
lar in many middle- class and intellectual quarters. To support it, Francis II had to
rely on the aristocracy of his empire. Anti- French and anti- Revolutionary propa-
ganda increased. Men who had worked for Leopold’s police found themselves dis-
trusted, rejected, or unemployed. In addition, as concessions to the aristocracy and
to political churchmen multiplied, and as a clamorous conservative ideology be-
came dominant, people who supported the progressive programs of Joseph and
Leopold—the so- called Josephinists of Austrian history—became increasingly
frustrated. Two years passed, and in the spring of 1794 the French armies were
victorious in Belgium, and the Poles under Kosciuszko seemed on the point of vic-
tory also. It was in these circumstances of frustration suddenly buoyed up by hope
that the Jacobin conspiracies took form in Vienna and Hungary.
The Vienna conspiracy amounted to very little. The accomplices had casual con-
tacts with the burghers of Styria but none with the peasantry or with the simulta-
neous conspiracy in Budapest. Nor did they have any ties with France. No French-
man was ever found in any contact with either the Austrian or the Hungarian
“Jacobins.”
At Vienna the conspiracy began when an emissary of Kosciuszko, Count Soltyk,
came to Austria to seek support for the Poles. He met a Protestant pastor named
Held, who introduced him to a former army officer named Hebenstreit. Hebenst-
reit had worked for the police under Leopold, and was at odds with the reigning
society at Vienna. He in fact hoped that the French would win the war. He was
also something of an inventor, who had developed a new contrivance for defense
against cavalry. He put his idea at the disposal of Soltyk, who sent it on to Kos-
ciuszko, and who also, at Hebenstreit’s insistence, provided the money for Held to
make a secret trip to Paris to offer this military invention to the French. Held
made the trip, successfully passing through the enemy lines and reaching Paris; but
the Committee of Public Safety, far from welcoming either the invention or the
approaches of an Austrian revolutionary society, put Held under arrest as a suspi-
cious enemy alien. Meanwhile, in Vienna, his associates met in small discussion
groups and circulated literature hardly aimed at the lower classes, since Paine’s
Rights of Man was passed around in French, and one of Hebenstreit’s contribu-
tions, a long poem called Homo hominibus, was written in Latin. More popular
pamphlets were composed by Andreas Riedel, former professor of mathematics,
former tutor to Francis II, and former agent of Leopold’s police.^40
The conspiracy in Hungary had more roots. Here, as in Poland, a national feel-
ing gave body to a potential movement of political revolution. The small nobles or
gentry were especially restless, regarding the higher and more cosmopolitan aris-
tocracy, the magnates and prelates, as sold out to the court of Vienna. They blamed
the Hapsburg government for its trend to centralization and Germanization, and
above all for its attempts to interfere with their free control over their serfs. The
40 Wangermann, 132–38. For an unflattering picture of the personalities involved see also Silagi,
Jakobiner, 161 ff. Excerpts from three of Riedel’s writings are published in the appendix to Valjavec,
Entstehung.