Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 289
innovation. On the one hand there was the crown, with a program of centraliza-
tion, looking toward a kind of equal though entirely passive citizenship for all
persons as individuals. On the other hand were the historic and constituted bodies,
committed to a society of stratified orders, to local autonomy, regional liberties,
states rights, or estates rights in which local and class privileges were inseparable.
The dilemma, abstractly considered, was not peculiar to the Hapsburg empire.
Something like it had occurred in America in 1774, when the British government,
in the interests of equalization within the empire, had annulled the charter of
Massachusetts. Something like it occurred in France in 1788, when Brienne sup-
pressed the Parlement of Paris. The dilemma as between despotism and purely
historic liberty was broken in France and America by revolution. Neither horn was
accepted. The subjects of the Hapsburg empire were tossed from one horn to the
other.
Leopold II: The Aristocratic Counterattack
Joseph II died in February 1790, before his forty- ninth birthday. During his last
illness the empire was in an uproar. Belgium had asserted its independence, and
there were revolutionary manifestations in Hungary, where some of the leaders
solicited foreign intervention, in this case Prussian, in support of independence, as
Van der Noot was doing in Belgium. By the time of Joseph’s death there was also
general excitement over the French Revolution, from which various classes drew
contradictory inspiration. To some, the French Revolution, as seen in 1790, meant
above all the assembly of the Estates General and the ending of royal despotism
after almost two hundred years. This view could fire the enthusiasm of men inter-
ested in the Hungarian and Bohemian diets, for whom other aspects of the French
Revolution were excesses. Burghers and peasants saw French events in a different
light. The former, few as they were, began to talk of the droits de l ’homme in the
various languages of the empire. The peasants were in enough touch with the
world to hear of French peasant rebellions and of the abolition of feudalism. The
news from France, however, only inflamed a situation already agitated by internal
causes. It was their emancipation by Joseph II, not an imaginary future emancipa-
tion by French example, that the peasants of the Hapsburg empire fought to pre-
serve. And it was the control over their peasants, and other political liberties, of
which Joseph II had deprived them, that the upper classes wished to regain.
Leopold, on succeeding Joseph, did not differ much from him in the substance
of his ideas. His private opinion of nobility and clergy, and his hopes for a mod-
ernized Hapsburg empire, were much the same. Where Joseph, however, was will-
ing to rely on himself and his own subordinates, and had only contempt for op-
position, Leopold preferred to enlist support as widely as possible, if only, as
Valsecchi has said, to divide up the responsibility. Leopold was something of a
constitutionalist. I have already quoted the letter he wrote to Marie Christine at
his accession, called forth by the revolution in Belgium, but expressing his actual
principles, and applying to the disturbed condition of the whole empire as he
found it. Here he stated, somewhat en philosophe, his idea of the social contract: