498 Chapter XX
makings existed here for a national revolution of marked conservative and agrarian
social content.
There were also smaller groups, with very different objectives, who favored re-
form and Westernization in Hungary. Intellectuals, lawyers, government employ-
ees, they regarded the Magyar nobility as backward and narrowly selfish; most of
them were themselves nobles (since the noble class in Hungary was far more nu-
merous than the burghers), but some were from the towns, and some were Protes-
tants. (The names are known of about 700 Hungarian Protestants who attended
German and Swiss universities in the half- century after 1750.) In the 1780’s these
men supported Joseph II, and from 1790 to 1792 some of them worked for the
government or the secret police under Leopold. The accession of Francis II, and
the beginning of war with France, for the first time estranged many of them from
the authorities at Vienna. Some were not estranged, but remained faithful to the
idea of imperial centralization; this was especially true of non- Magyars such as
Samuel Kohlmayer, a lawyer from an old German burgher family in Pest. Kohl-
mayer disliked the Magyar nobility, suspected Hungarian nationalism, joined Leo-
pold’s secret police, wanted immediate abolition of serfdom, and was generally
more radical than those who turned Jacobin. Ethnic Hungarians who shared
Kohlmayer’s anti- aristocratic views found it easier to cut the tie with Vienna. For
example, Kohlmayer’s friend, Joseph Hajnoczy, the son of a Calvinist minister, was
able, thanks to Joseph II’s policies, to become the first non- noble to hold the office
of vice- sheriff in a Hungarian county. He lost it in the aristocratic reaction after
Joseph’s death, which was unfavorable both to non- nobles and to Protestants. He
became the leading non- noble among the Hungarian Jacobins, most of whom, as
already said, were of the noble or gentry class themselves.
To a larger mass of Hungarian nobles, who were hostile to the Hapsburg dy-
nasty anyway, were therefore added smaller circles who turned against it because
they opposed the increasingly aristocratic trend of its policies. Together they
formed an incipient party of Hungarian revolution and independence. They ex-
pressed their feelings in clubs and reading societies, and in demonstrations of en-
thusiasm for France and its revolution. They read and translated the Paris Monit-
eur. They sang the Ça ira and translated the Marseillaise into Latin, Hungarian,
and Slovakian.^41 Ferenc Szentmarjay, well known as one of the creators of the Hun-
garian written language, made the first Hungarian translation of Rousseau’s Social
Contract (which had been known in Latin before); in doing so, he designed the
modern Hungarian terms for citoyen, peuple, souveraineté, égalité, etc. Revolutionary
tracts appeared in Serbo- Croatian, and at the University of Zagreb the students
affected short Jacobin haircuts and planted a liberty tree in 1794 at the time of the
French victories, nailing the words “Liberty and Equality” to its trunk. When
French prisoners of war were brought to Hungary for internment, Hungarian
sympathizers flocked to meet them. Szentmarjay traveled fifty miles to see these
Frenchmen, embraced a few of them, it is said, with tears in his eyes, and obtained
from them a small tricolor which he kept as a kind of idol, allowing others to see it
only if they would kneel before it in reverence.
41 Benda, I, 1,049–54.