Victories of the Counter-Revolution 499
For the Vienna government these widespread agitations, at the least, were a
serious handicap to its war effort, and, at the most, a threat to the continuation
of Hungary in the Hapsburg empire. The police therefore infiltrated the excited
Francophiles. Among their operatives was Martinovics, who managed to retain
his position after Leopold’s death. It is clear from the documents published by
Kalman Benda that Martinovics, in 1793, was a double or triple agent. He simul-
taneously spied and reported for the police, and moved as a comrade among the
revolutionary group, or rather the two groups, the conservative and nationalist
nobles, and the more radical political ideologists. In 1794, as his position with the
police became more uncertain, and with what seemed to be the great revolution-
ary victories in France and Poland, Martinovics went over, at least temporarily, to
the revolution in Hungary. Making use of a genuine movement that he had in no
sense created, and taking advantage of men like Hajnoczy and Szentmarjay, men
of far more character and principle than himself, he began to organize an actual
rebellion against Vienna. He impressed his Hungarian friends, most of whom
were fairly unsophisticated, by boasting of his important connections in France
with the Committee of Public Safety. Actually he had no such connections. The
revolutionary government in France had nothing to do with the projected revolu-
tion in Hungary.
Facing the fact that there were two kinds of potential revolutionaries in Hun-
gary, the nationalist aristocratic and the equalitarian Jacobin, Martinovics brought
to the problem a simple solution. He organized not one secret society but two: one
for the nobles, and one for persons who did not believe in nobility. The former he
called the Society of the Reformers of Hungary; the latter, the Society of Liberty
and Equality. As a revolutionary tactician, he devised an expedient unparalleled in
the eighteenth century for its “realism,” except in the plans of Babeuf: one society
should have no inkling of the other’s existence; its members, having joined in the
revolution and served their purpose, should later simply be liquidated. It was the
noble society of Reformers who were thus marked in Martinovics’ plan for extinc-
tion. When Hajnoczy and some of the democrats protested, they were told that
such methods were necessary. The idea was not new to Martinovics in 1794; in his
wild fabrications, he had accused the Jesuits of a similar manipulation three years
before.
For each society he wrote a separate call to arms, or a kind of prospectus in
question- and- answer form which he entitled a “catechism.”^42 Both breathed a sav-
age hatred of kings and priests, but it is the differences that are of most interest,
and which serve to identify the two kinds of revolutionary spirit in Hungary. The
tone of the catechism addressed to the noble Reformers was that of long- standing
national opposition to the Hapsburgs, reinforced by the more recent note of a
highly inflamed resistance to the innovations of the tyrant, Joseph II. The nobles
were led to expect a future aristocratic republic without king or taxes, in which
“equality” meant the equality of gentry with great magnates, who together would
42 These are translated in full by R. R. Palmer and Peter Kenez, “Two Documents of the Hungar-
ian Revolutionary Movement of 1794,” in Journal of Central European Affairs, X X (1961), 423–42. The
original texts, in Latin and Hungarian respectively, are in Benda, I, 1,002–36.