17.  The Fight against the “Hatted King”

No other Habsburg is the object of such divergent opinions as Joseph II (1780–90). Was he a great reformer or the leading bureaucrat of his state?—a people’s Emperor and liberator of peasants, or a “purifier of the faith” and “doctrinaire”?—an “imperial revolutionary” or a tragic heir to the imperial throne whose failure still dominates the style and way of thinking of the Austrian ruling classes? Joseph was certainly motivated by true humanism, but was far ahead of his time. His intensely tradition-bound people, especially Catholics who had been infused with devout piety by the Counter-Reformation, could not follow this free-thinker. When he enforced relief for the Protestants, the Orthodox and, last but not least, the Jews with his Patent of Toleration, he was simply met with lack of understanding. He decreed the abolition of serfdom, the extension of personal liberties including choice of profession, promotion of a new type of official, and the extension of education and health care to the entire empire. It has been estimated that during his reign of barely ten years Joseph enacted 6,000 decrees and 11,000 new laws.1

He went down in Hungarian history as the “hatted king” (kalapos király) because, uniquely, he refused coronation with the crown of St Stephen in order not to have swear an oath on the Estate-based constitution, the object of his “campaign of liquidation”. Instead, with lack of both realism and sensitivity, he had the crown of St Stephen and the Bohemian crown of Wenceslas brought to the Vienna Hofburg to be displayed in the jewel room as mere museum-pieces. In order to have a free hand he did not convene the Diet, and replaced the counties and their elected officials with a strictly centralized administration consisting of ten districts, headed by imperial-royal officials.

The ruler’s ideal was a strictly conformist state with a standardized administration, army and political organization. In his “fanaticism for the welfare of the state”, as he himself called it. Joseph tried to convert the multi-faceted monarchy into “a single province, equal in all its institutions and responsibilities… a single mass of people all equally subject to impartial guidance”.2 The most important instrument of this autocratic reform-driven unity was the introduction of German as the sole language of administration on 18 June 1784. Officials had three years to master it.

These measures decreed without consideration for historic idiosyncrasies and entrenched mentalities, together with the census and land surveys to prepare the assessment of taxes on noble landholdings, aroused widespread indignation among the Hungarian nobility. Joseph’s intention was not Germanization but a hierarchically structured, reliable and, of course, German-speaking bureaucracy, a massive enforced coordination of the Monarchy with the help of the predominant German element. Apart from that, it was irrelevant to him what language the Hungarians, Croats, Slovaks or Romanians used for their private affairs. With this goal in mind, he admonished the Hungarian Court Chancellor Count Esterházy in the following cut-and-dried royal memorandum of 26 April 1784:

The use of a dead language such as Latin is surely a disgrace to a nation for its enlightenment, as it tacite [tacitly] proves that either that nation does not have a proper mother tongue, or that no one can speak or write it. […] If Hungarian were prevalent in all of Hungary, then it could serve on its own. […] Therefore no other language besides German can be chosen as that of the Monarchy from both the military and political viewpoints.³

The Emperor’s ill-advised foreign policy, the Turkish war embarked on in alliance with Russia in which Hungary had to bear the main burden, the successful uprising in the Austrian Netherlands and the machinations of Prussian agents, aroused extraordinary resistance from every stratum of the Hungarian nobility Above all the intended introduction in 1789 of a tax of 12.22 per cent for noble landowners sent the Estates into violent uproar, with the counties even refusing to supply the army. The Josephist system of enlightened absolutism suffered shipwreck in Hungary. On his deathbed the Emperor revoked all his controversial reforms with the exception of the Toleration Patent, the Peasant Patent and the Pastoral Patent, promised to convoke a Diet, and ordered the holy crown to be returned to Hungary.

Convoying the crown from Vienna to Budapest took four days, and throughout country, but especially in the counties along the route, people were carried away by enthusiasm. The Calvinist minister József Keresztesi described in his diary the triumphal progress through Kittsee, Györ and Esztergom to Buda.4 He also noted that “untold masses of people assembled in Vienna to see the crowns departure, because here even the Germans believed that the great rise in prices was God’s punishment for having kept the crown.”

When the procession, including an escort of hundreds of horsemen and foot-soldiers, mounted nobles and guardsmen, representatives of the counties and the city council, reached the royal palace, six selected nobles carried the chest with the crown into the great hall, placing it upon a three-tiered dais covered in red velvet:

Károly Zichy, the chief judge, delivered a short speech and wanted to open the chest, but the lock did not yield. He asked for another key in German, whereupon Zsigmond Nemes, a Hungarian gentleman standing nearby, said: “Gracious Sir, this is not a German crown, it does not understand German: should Your Excellency try to address it in Hungarian, not German, it will soon open up!” Everyone had to smile, and the Chief Judge spoke in Hungarian, the chest was opened and the crown taken out and shown to the assembled crowd in the palace hall. The chest was then dusted and re-locked, and when a German lackey wanted to sweep up, a Hungarian youth addressed him: “Away with you, you German, how dare you do that with your German hands?” Then he did the sweeping.

When Joseph II died on 20 February 1790, he bequeathed to his brother and successor Leopold II (1790–2) a reign threatened from several quarters, an almost pre-Revolutionary situation, but the new king succeeded with great tactical skill in improving the relationship between the dynasty and Hungary. At the Diet of 1790–1 the Estate-based national constitution was confirmed and embodied in Law X. Leopold pledged to rule Hungary “in accordance with its own laws and customs and not those of other countries”. While the alarm bells of the French Revolution were already ringing, the Estates believed that they could continue to enjoy their privileges and isolate their country from the new political and social developments by restoring the old administrative system. It was due not only to Leopold’s concessions, but above all to the collective fear of an insurrection, that neither the coalition wars against the Revolution nor Napoleon’s appeal from Schönbrunn in 1809 resulted in a noble opposition movement endangering the Viennese central government. A delegation from the county of Szabolcs expressed a widespread view: “Just as the King’s power is weak if there is no nobility, so the nobility cannot exist without the ruler.” At the same time the Hungarian nobility could bring arguments to bear that were not available to the French nobility: the defence of privileges was synonymous with protecting the interests of the country, whose king resided abroad.

In Hungary the ideas of the Enlightenment fell on fertile soil, and this was linked with the slow but sure development of an intellectual stratum. It is estimated that between 1700 and 1790, 3,000 young men from Hungary studied at universities abroad—primarily in Germany, but also in Switzerland, the Netherlands and even England. According to the census of 1787, the first to enter into such great detail, the number of intellectuals amounted to less than 5,000 (there were 18,487 priests!), but Hungarian historians estimate today that the figure would actually have been nearer 15,000–20,000, albeit from a total population of 9.1 million.5

Freemasonry played an important role, enabling intellectuals to forge close contacts with enlightened aristocrats (Joseph II was a Lodge brother). In 1780 there were something like thirty lodges in Hungary with 800–900 members. The increasing number of subscribers to Hungarian-language newspapers, as well as the presence of 1,500 physicians, lawyers, civil servants and progressive noblemen in Pest-Buda the administrative centre (the two were united only in 1872), formed fertile soil for the growth of anti-feudal ideas.⁶

At the same time the campaign for the national language, which Bessenyei and his friends had placed on the agenda during Maria Theresa’s reign, had a mighty upsurge because of resistance to Joseph II’s regulations, which were regarded as attempts at Germanization. What began as a defence of Latin as an official language soon turned into passionate endeavours to promote the use of Hungarian as the language of state. The Magyars’ growing national consciousness led in turn to tensions with Serbs and Romanians, and later with Slovaks and Croats also. However, in the resulting “nation of nobles” Hungarians still formed a strong absolute majority in contrast to the general population, and their fight for the introduction of Hungarian as the administrative, scientific and educational language overshadowed the conflicts with the Viennese court and its allies. Béla Grünwald, historian of the “old Hungary”, characterized the state of affairs almost a century later (1910) as follows:

A foreign enemy kingdom, an intolerant, repressive clergy, a denationalized high nobility, an uneducated lesser nobility overwhelmingly indifferent to the national interest, a shrunken German bourgeoisie, an oppressed, poor peasantry, an imperialized army, an alienated Protestantism, ethnic masses—Romanians, Ruthenes, Serbs, Germans, Slovaks—lured by other centres, these elements determined the character of public life in Hungary.7

Hatred of Germans was rampant, because at the time Hungarians considered only two types of strangers as “Germans”: the Court and government representatives, with whom the average Hungarian had little personal contact, and as ever the army with its foreign soldiers. The latter could be Walloons, Italians or Spaniards, but as Imperial mercenaries they bore in Hungarian eyes the indelible mark of Germanness. All historians point out that for centuries the Imperial mercenary caused cruel destruction on Hungarian soil, and many reports to Vienna confirmed that “the mercenary wrought worse havoc among the unhappy population than the Turk.”⁸ The Germans in turn regarded the Magyars as “abominable heretics” (because of their Calvinism) and “disloyal rebels” (because of memories of the Kuruc uprisings).⁹ “All the hatred, underestimation and resentment that had been imputed to the Hungarians since the Conquest, suddenly erupted with terrible new vigour,” writes Domokos Kosáry in his monograph on Hungary in the Baroque period.

Leopold Alois Hoffmann, transferred from Vienna to the University library at Budapest where he spied for Leopold II, fought with his pen against the revolutionary spirit of the Hungarian Association of Reformers. He wrote: “A Hungarian village noble knows scarcely as much as a porter in Paris.”¹⁰ Another German author, J. Reimann, said: “It has always been the a nature of the Hungarians to prefer a nimble horse and a naked sword to a rare book.”¹¹ We shall return later to the theory of “cultural difference” and the changeable relationship between Germans and Hungarians. The significant fact is that already in the Enlightenment the literary representatives of Josephism used Hungary’s historical catastrophes, the two-century-long retardation in development, the failure or belated making up of lost time to forge an indictment against the Hungarians. There was no understanding, let alone sympathy for Hungary’s specific circumstances.

On the other hand, the greatest representatives of Hungarian culture were deeply troubled by the dramatic drop in the Hungarian population in both absolute and proportional terms. The poet Sándor Kisfaludy wrote of a journey he took as a young soldier in 1792 when he had encountered so many more Slovaks, Swabians, Romanians and Germans than pure Hungarians that he feared for “the end of the Hungarian nation”.12

It was in that same year, and probably not by accident, that the father of romantic folk nationalism, Johann Gottfried Herder, made his gloomy prophecy about the future of the Magyars in his book Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit: “Here they are now, the minority of inhabitants among Slavs, Germans, Vlachs and other peoples, and after centuries perhaps even their language will have disappeared.”¹³ In the next two centuries probably no other foreign observer was cited as frequently as Herder because of the warning of impending disaster, and also as a beacon for the national War of Independence, by which such a small nation as the Hungarians (“a mere Asiatic fragment”), attempted to assert itself in a strange and hostile environment.

However, there was much sympathy at this time among intellectual circles in Hungary too for the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution—clearly demonstrated by the Jacobin plot (described in the next chapter), a mighty shock in the first years of the long reign of Emperor Francis II (1792–1835), making its mark on the ruler’s mistrustful attitude towards Hungary. In contrast to his gifted and flexible father, Francis was a “narrow, dry, reserved and generally untalented man, whose political achievements consisted chiefly in keeping his head above water in troubled times.”¹⁴