Victories of the Counter-Revolution 501
to the French Revolution, but some ten years before in the aristocratic and ecclesi-
astical resistance to Joseph II. The Jacobin trials could be taken (like the English
state trials of 1794) as evidence of conservative fears, but the Austrian and Hun-
garian Jacobins, unlike those of England, were in fact guilty as charged: Held had
offered aid to the enemy, and the Hungarians had plotted armed insurrection, in
time of war. The trials were secret, but not egregiously unfair. Two Austrians and
eighteen Hungarians were executed, and others condemned to prison.
The need of supporting an unpopular war led not only to a dramatization of the
Jacobin menace, but to repression of all groups or shades of opinion that might be
critical of the government. The continuing unpopularity of the war is attested by
many sources (such as the statement of the Archduke Charles quoted above), and
is especially emphasized by one recent student of the subject, Ernst Wangermann,
who remarks that the Hapsburg government could not carry on the war after 1795
except with financial aid from Great Britain; that in 1796 the chancellor, Thugut,
feared the peace sentiment in Vienna more than Bonaparte’s successes in Italy;
and that when the French broke into the empire in 1797, reaching as far as Leoben
in Styria, they met with no popular opposition. The Austrian government, the only
important Continental state remaining at war with France after 1795, was obliged
to resort to more stringent controls over its own people. The war therefore, in
Wangermann’s view, was the “gravedigger of enlightened despotism in Austria,”
and marked the true beginning of the Vormärz.^43 In addition, the government had
to deal with what happened in Poland, kill off the sympathy for Kosciuszko, dis-
parage the Polish constitution of 1791, discredit the Polish moves toward abolition
of serfdom—and justify the Third Partition. The French Revolution was denounced
because it succeeded; the Polish, because it failed.
The rising tide of counter- revolutionary activity was not peculiar to the Haps-
burg empire. Those who pressed for it pointed to the example of England, where
the formation of voluntary associations against “levellers and republicans,” and the
suspension of habeas corpus, were seen as desirable models. But matters went fur-
ther than in England, if only because Austrian bureaucrats were more expert and
professional than English squires, and the Catholic prelates in Austria less easygo-
ing than those of the Church of England. Church and State, recently estranged in
the Hapsburg empire, joined hands for mutual protection. There was great alarm
over professors, who, in truth, had proved to be less content than those of Oxford
or Cambridge. The bishops extended their influence over the schools. Experiments
in rural education were given up, lest peasants by learning too much become dis-
contented with their station. The censorship clamped down, the police became
more potent, more omnipresent, more unchecked by liberal protest. A police power
originally designed to facilitate progress was now used to restrain it. On recom-
mendation of the police, in 1794, measures were even initiated to prevent eco-
nomic expansion, to discourage the growth of cities and the building of new man-
ufacturing plants, since both the business and the industrial laboring classes were
feared as sources of disaffection. The Josephinists were reduced to silence; and the
43 Wangermann, 107, 169. Silagi, Jakobiner, 200–1, sees less of a “turning point” than Wanger-
mann in the Jacobin trials, but there is not much disagreement between them on the depth and scope
of the reaction.