Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 291
stitutional liberties. He offered reconciliation to the estates of Belgium. He invited
the Milanese to inform him of their desires. And on May 1, 1790, during his jour-
ney from Florence to Vienna, he summoned the estates of Bohemia, Moravia,
Silesia, Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia, Carniola, Gorizia, and the
Tyrol, each to meet in its usual provincial capital, and to bring in each case, accord-
ing to the ancient custom, its lists of gravamina, complaints, grievances, and pro-
posals, as the French Estates General had brought their cahiers de doléances to Ver-
sailles a year before. He prepared himself to hear from the diets of Hungary and of
Transylvania, to whose meeting Joseph had been forced to consent shortly before
his death. He made peace with Turkey, and reached enough of an agreement with
Prussia to restrain the Hungarians.
The year 1790 may therefore be thought of as a time of active parliamentary life
throughout much of the Western world. Not only was the French National As-
sembly busily at work, and of course the Parliament of Great Britain (as we have
seen in discussing the Test Act), but the Congress of the United Belgian States
was enjoying its brief year of life, the First Congress of the United States of Amer-
ica was assembled, and the great Four Years’ Diet was sitting in Poland. And in
every part of the miscellaneous Hapsburg empire indignant deputies were conven-
ing to uphold their rights.
What rights did these deputies wish to uphold? This question is fundamental to
an understanding of the European counterrevolution of the 1790’s. It is also read-
ily answerable, for the cahiers de doléances of the Hapsburg empire, though very
unlike those of France in 1789, were equally explicit.
All the diets made broad statements of constitutional principle. A constitution,
declared the Estates of Bohemia, was “a treaty or agreement between the sovereign
and the nation which... must bind both parties equally.” There must be an “inde-
structible constitution,” with government by “consent” and security for “the per-
sons and property of inhabitants of the kingdom.”^10 The Bohemian diet drew on
Montesquieu’s doctrine of intermediate powers: “There can be no simple abstract
idea of the State as consisting only of the monarch and a single class of sub-
jects.... Between the two there must be unrestricted intermediate orders, each of
whose individual members governs a portion of the people. In the kingdom of
Bohemia these are the estate- owners, who, through their influence over their de-
pendents, form a vigorous instrument of the Ruler’s executive power.”^11 In short,
each seigneur should govern his own peasants. Above the local level, the estates
interpreted the separation of powers to mean that the diet possessed legislative
powers; the ruler, executive.
Hungary, which had retained far more of its autonomy than Bohemia, was even
more constitutionally minded. The Hungarians were fond of comparing them-
selves to England in the matter of parliamentary liberties; a hundred copies of
Delolme’s Constitution of England were sold in one day on October 14, 1791. The
Hungarians insisted that their diet or parliament was the legislature, the King the
executive. They claimed, however, more than Delolme would have ever conceded,
10 Kerner, Bohemia, 130–32.
11 Mitrofanov, 628.