Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 293
At Milan, for example, Leopold restored the Senate and the Council of Sixty
which Joseph had abolished. These were exclusive bodies of oligarchic patricians.
Reformists at Milan, men like P. Verri, Melzi d’Eril, and F. Visconti, men who for
years had favored the Austrian absolutism as the means of carrying through re-
forms, and who had turned against it only in 1786 when Joseph destroyed Milan’s
ancient political bodies, now favored the restoration of the Senate and Council
which they had long criticized as obstructions to progress. These liberals had
turned from absolutists to constitutionalists after 1786. They did not stand fast,
however, merely on the existing constitution. They wished the magistracies of the
city and duchy to be somewhat broadened and opened up. Verri, when Leopold
solicited Milanese opinion in 1790, asked for a fixed constitution, with inviolable
laws and security of property, but he also went further by asking for some sort of
elected representative body. He and his friends called for more freedom of discus-
sion for the Council within itself, with full participation by all sixty of its statutory
members, not merely by the inner coterie. The dominant patricians refused all such
demands. Leopold took their side, choosing to work with men who had actual
power rather than those who had mere ideas. The Lombard liberals, disillusioned
with the Austrian absolutism in 1786, and with their own aristocracy in the years
that followed, looked with increased sympathy on the French Revolution, and col-
laborated with Bonaparte on his arrival in 1796.
In the empire proper the towns had long since been reduced to political nulli-
ties, and little was to be feared from the urban middle class. The estates, being so
largely agrarian, objected that individual burgher non- nobles had sometimes risen
to high office under Joseph. The Bohemian diet asked for an end to this practice,
“since a whole series of occupations is open to burghers, whereas nobles can look
forward only to a few civil and military employments, which in justice should
therefore be reserved to them.”^14 When it seemed that Leopold, to please the
Hungarian diet, might restrict public office to nobles, he drew sporadic protests
from lesser Magyars, some of whom reasoned suspiciously like the Abbé Sie yes:
“Nature itself has made men equal. It is surely nothing to reproach us with, if we
think ourselves a necessary estate in the country. We are workers who supply all
necessities; craftsmen who furnish comforts; merchants and manufacturers who
bring foreign products into the land; teachers and writers who form hearts and
minds; in a word, we are the estate that teaches, protects, and supports—der lehrt,
wehrt und ernährt.”^15
Even the peasants made efforts to obtain political recognition. Indeed it was
only from the peasants that the estates had much to fear. In Bohemia, early in
1792, by some concerted action that seems not well understood, peasants in many
districts took it into their heads to send uninvited delegates to the diet, and a good
many actually started for Prague. The police and army, alerted throughout the
country, turned back or arrested various rustics on the roads. Self- styled deputies
14 E. Denis, La Bohème depuis la Montague Blanche, 619.
15 Mitrofanov, 660. Compare the sarcastic Latin of an Oratio pro Leopoldo Π at the time of the diet
of 1790: “Populus in hac sanctione sunt praelati, barones, magnates et nobiles; exiguus hie hominum
numerus superbia... inflata sese super humanitatem extollit.” Ibid., n. 2.