Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 287
awareness, and attention to public affairs were in large measure to be found, out-
side the government, only among the nobility. Significant middle- class people
were those who worked for the state. State and nobility were the two big political
forces, the church being successfully subdued. Only between the state and the no-
bility could there be a resounding quarrel. And the state represented only itself,
drawing on no strength but its own. There was no large economically rooted mid-
dle class, pursuing affairs of importance and enjoying a certain independence. In
the Hapsburg empire the extreme case was offered by Hungary, where the aggre-
gate population of all towns was about equal to the number of the nobility—and
not over a tenth of townsmen could be thought of as bourgeoisie. Nor was there
sustained action toward realizable goals. There were numerous agrarian rebellions,
and these might be useful to the government as an embarrassment to the nobles;
but no one could manage or direct them; and they might easily turn against the
government itself. The peasants were neither lawyers nor politicians, and under-
stood nothing of needs other than their own. Freed to move, they objected to the
labor services that remained. Freed of the labor services, they objected to the
money payments that replaced them. Insurrections broke out after the decree of
February 1789, especially as it became clear that landlords would resist its enforce-
ment. Peasants refused to work, refused to pay, plundered manor houses, and com-
mitted atrocities against the landlords—as in France in the same year, and, at least
locally, with even more violence. There was no upper stratum of the Third Estate,
as in France, to make common cause for the time being with the rural masses. On
the contrary, the peasant violence, by threatening actual anarchy, gave new argu-
ments to the landlords, who could say with some truth, though hardly as the whole
truth, that Joseph II had brought the country to ruin.
The only organized centers of opinion or action, outside the government, were
the estate- assemblies or diets. These, it will be recalled, were conventions of land-
lords: Prague was the only city represented in the diet of Bohemia, all Hungarian
cities had one vote in the diet of Hungary, thirty- one towns had one vote in the
diet of Styria. It was the precise opposite of burgher Holland, where there was one
vote for all nobles, and one for each city. The fact that the towns of Bohemia and
Hungary were so largely German, even Budapest in the eighteenth century still
being a German cultural colony, kept them apart from the surrounding life, sepa-
rated the classes, and inhibited the growth of effective public opinion.
Joseph, who if not a mere doctrinaire was certainly a revolutionary, simply did
not believe that the diets had any just or really legitimate powers. He regarded
them merely as vested and special interests, and his propagandists kept repeating
that the vaunted Hungarian constitution existed for only 300,000 persons. He saw
nothing wrong if the Hungarian and other diets never met. And when the Hun-
garian county assemblies, in which the political strength of the country lay even
more than in the diet, protested against conscription, against the cadaster, against
peasant emancipation, and against almost everything else, he tried to suppress
these assemblies also.
He could therefore put through his program only by “despotism,” that is, by
perfecting and enlarging his corps of administrators, inspectors, experts, and offi-
cials. They were indeed numerous, and were generally the most enlightened class in