500 Chapter XX
remain the sole owners of rural land, after acquiring all the properties of the
church, and would continue to enjoy the forced labor of their peasants under the
“feudal system.” In this catechism the war with France was deplored because it had
let democratic ideas seep into Hungary, and because, if the French won, “nobility
perishes.” The catechism written for the Society of Liberty and Equality was of a
contrary tenor. Addressed to men without experience or institutional connection
with each other, widely departing from the traditions of the Hungarian diet and
constitution, it moved on a level of high- flying philosophy, elucidating the nature
of “man” and “reason”; but it also denounced the evils of serfdom, it referred to the
“feudal system” as “awful,” and it expressed contempt for all nobles, who were por-
trayed as brutal and vicious. France was pointed to as a model to emulate.
Both catechisms issued a ringing summons to rebellion. For the democratic So-
ciety for Liberty and Equality the call was “To arms, citizens! Let us swear free-
dom or death!” Such was the formula of the French Revolution. But for the noble
Society of Reformers, the appeal was more dignified, in its modernized Latin, and
perhaps less likely to stir up revolutionary fanaticism: Ad arma, cives patriae nobiles
et ignobiles!
Armed with these catechisms, and with other similar literature, Martinovics
and his followers set about recruiting for the two societies, and within a few
weeks may have obtained two or three hundred members in various parts of the
country. Given the prevalence of discontent, it seems likely that, had there been
more time, a much larger number might have been brought in. The police, how-
ever, learned of Held’s mission to Paris, and arrested various members of the
Vienna conspiracy. Martinovics, in Vienna at the time, was also taken into cus-
tody, and whether because he thought the secret was known, or because he still
hoped to ingratiate himself as a police agent, revealed the identity of the chief
Hungarian Jacobins. The movement in Hungary was thus stopped sooner than it
might otherwise have been.
Neither conspiracy, as an organized bid for revolution, posed any serious threat
to the government. Both vividly illustrated, if anything, the impossibility of any
groundswell of revolution in the Hapsburg countries, where social classes and eth-
nic groups were too separated to allow for common action, nobles and burghers
had few shared ideas, and few educated persons could establish any contact with
the peasants. Serious disaffection existed—noble complaint at the reforms of en-
lightened despotism, middle- class annoyance that these reforms had been com-
promised or abandoned, peasant resentment against poverty and servitude, all
compounded by the unpopularity of the war—but on this sizeable body of discon-
tent the “Jacobin” conspiracies were no more than tiny specks. Denis Silagi insists,
indeed, that the two conspiracies, far from being the products of revolutionary
ferment, or forerunners of a later liberal movement, were only the last erratic epi-
sodes of enlightened despotism in its decline, manned as they were by former ser-
vants of Leopold’s police, and using the same kind of mysterious apparatus that
Leopold himself had employed.
The discovery of actual Jacobin plotters nevertheless contributed greatly to the
growing counter- revolutionary mentality in the Austrian empire, a mentality
which had arisen, not from the fear of Austrian Jacobins, nor even from opposition