In the middle of the century Europe was shaken by two major conflicts: the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8) and the Seven Years War (1756-63). The Habsburg monarchy was not only one of the main participants in both wars, but its nature was greatly affected by them. The first conflict began in 1740 when Maria Theresa’s right of succession to the Habsburg possessions was challenged by Frederick II of Prussia, who suddenly invaded Silesia. In turn Charles of Bavaria claimed the imperial throne, which Maria Theresa as a woman could not occupy, and the Bohemian Crown, and marched on Prague. A Prussian-Bavarian-Saxon agreement threatened to bring about a veritable partition of the lands of the Crown of St Wenceslas: Bohemia going to the Bavarian Wittelsbachs, Silesia to the Hohenzollern, Upper Silesia and Moravia to the Wettins. In this critical situation Maria Theresa appealed to the Hungarians, who in a dramatic scene at the diet offered their “life and blood” to the ruler. Maria Theresa never completely forgot this Hungarian support just as she never quite forgave the nobility of Bohemia the election of her rival Charles.
The hostilities, which centered mainly on Silesian and Czech soil, showed the superiority of the militarily and financially efficient Prussia over the vast Habsburg monarchy. The outcome was a loss of virtually all Silesia and it was keenly felt. This was one of the economically best developed provinces, with textile and metallurgical production that accounted for some 21 percent of the Habsburg revenue (Hungary excluded). It was also an important customer for grain and semi-finished goods as well as an outlet to, and major component of the northern trade. At this time it still had a significant Polish-speaking population. To strengthen the state after this loss the monarchy introduced a 10 percent increase in the army budget, began a tariff war designed to ruin the now Prussian Silesia, and launched a program for industrializing Bohemia while encouraging Hungary as an agrarian reservoir of the Habsburg lands.
The economic reforms of Maria Theresa and of her son Joseph II were designed not only to compensate for the loss of Silesia, but constituted a response to the mounting economic crisis characterized, among other things, by low productivity and low living standards. The desire to emulate the Dutch and the English had been already present among late seventeenth-century economists. Officials in Bohemia argued for new fiscal policies, a systematic promotion of manufactories, and the bringing in of experts from Protestant countries, which would require religious toleration. It seemed evident that the state needed to interfere in lord-peasant relations not only on humanitarian but also on economic grounds. Early attempts, such as those of Charles VI in 1723, had remained on paper.
Before turning to the developments in Bohemia and Hungary one needs to look briefly at the general character of the reforms of Maria Theresa and Joseph. By and large those of the empress aimed mainly at the preservation and strengthening of the Habsburg inheritance. Its cohesion was to be increased through centralization, greater administrative and legal unity, and educational and socio-economic measures designed to raise the living standards. Josephinism, while pursuing similar goals, was ideologically motivated and hence more doctrinaire. It represented in a way the classic case of enlightened absolutism with the slogan “everything for the people, nothing by the people.” Josephine reforms were novel in the sense of seeking in the name of state interest to limit not only the political powers of the nobility but even their privileges. Rational and utilitarian motives were behind such reforms as civil marriage, equal inheritance rights for women, or the fostering of German language as a uniform vehicle of communication in administration and higher education. Joseph’s zeal and haste in pushing through the reforms were politically unwise and contributed to the noble reaction and the withdrawal of many of his laws. One that remained, although circumvented in practice, was a partial emancipation of the peasantry.
The approach of the state to the peasant question under Maria Theresa was illustrated by her saying that sheep should be well fed in order to yield more wool and more milk. To make the peasantry a productive class in society, furnishing recruits to the army and paying taxes, one had to define the minimal size of serfs’ holdings and the maximum amount of their obligations. This meant encroaching on the rights of noble landowners, who treated the serfs as personal and legal subjects as well as tools for the working of the estate. Through a series of so-called urbarial patents or urbaria—1771 for Austria, 1767 for Hungary, and 1775 for Bohemia and Moravia where a major uprising occurred that year—the peasants were classified and their obligations defined and reduced. Subsequently, the Robot (corvee) was replaced on estates of the Crown by rent, and the personal subjection (Leibeigenschaft) terminated. In his 1781 decree
Joseph made this last provision applicable to all landed estates. It meant that the peasant was free to marry, move, and choose a profession. Judicial dependence on the lord was replaced by a rather complex state-landlord joint arrangement. Joseph’s decree was introduced in Hungary and Transylvania in 1785. In the latter country, where no urbaria had been applied, it came in the wake of a mainly Romanian peasants’ uprising against Hungarian nobles in 1784, and did not prevent another outbreak in 1786. For all the benefits brought by the reforms, they were a mixed blessing, for the peasants had now to pay higher taxes and serve long years in the army, except in Hungary which remained free of military conscription.
Reforms in the administrative field, complex and changing, coupling and decoupling political and fiscal matters, cannot be presented here in any detail. The same is true for a multitude of reforms in ecclesiastical, educational, and other domains. On the all-Austrian level we must note policies aiming at the creation or reorganization of central organs in Vienna, backed by paid bureaucracy and police. By the same token the diets lost their administrative and patronage powers—a crucial development—and were now to be called at royal will. In order to avoid the restraints of the coronation oath, Joseph refused to be crowned king of Hungary or of Bohemia and had the holy crown of St Stephen taken to a museum in Vienna. Going beyond the traditional Habsburg policies of curbing the independent power of the Catholic Church, Joseph practically cut its ties with Rome in all but purely spiritual matters. Acting on his own he taxed or dissolved “unproductive” monastic orders. In 1781 Joseph issued the Toleration Decree that granted the right of open religious worship to Protestants and Orthodox, and access to offices.
A reform of education undertaken by Maria Theresa gained momentum after the dissolution of the Jesuit Order in 1773. Under the 1777 Ratio Educationis the state strove to establish a comprehensive and uniform secular system of education for all nationalities and all denominations. While the emphasis was put on higher and secondary education, primary schools in every parish represented the greatest achievement of the reform.
Let us turn now to the lands of St Wenceslas which had lost, with Silesia, nearly half of its territory and become closely integrated with Austrian lands properly speaking. While ties between Austria and Bohemia (referred to as the “hereditary German crownlands”) grew stronger, those between Bohemia, Moravia, and the small remnants of Silesia weakened. After the abolition of the Bohemian Court Chancellery in 1749, a joint Bohemian and Austrian Court Chancellery was established in 1762. Separate gubernatorial offices in Bohemia and Moravia presided over a local administration composed no longer of dignitaries drawn from the estates but of appointed bureaucrats.
The Czech language was rapidly losing ground in courts and administration as well as in the reorganized school system. By and large the Bohemian schools achieved higher standards than their Austrian or Hungarian counterparts; in the period 1779-91 the number of elementary schools doubled and that of the students tripled. Czech was still the language of instruction at these schools, but not on higher levels. At the university of Prague German was introduced; a Czech language chair existed only at the university of Vienna.
The process of economic integration was assisted by the elimination of all internal tariffs in 1775; the only barrier that remained was that between Hungary and the rest of the monarchy. Cameralist policies were applied more rigidly in the 1750-70 period and more flexibly thereafter. It was not determined whether tariffs were to be purely protectionist or designed to stimulate production, hence there were inconsistencies. The exclusion of imports of better quality merchandise contributed to the growth of domestic production, although not always of comparable standards. Trade as a whole was adversely affected. Nevertheless Bohemia now became the most developed part of the monarchy. Factories were founded, capital accumulated, and both management and labor gained experience even though the Germans of Bohemia, constituting roughly a third of the population, may have profited more than the Czechs from this development.
Textile production, based in the late seventeenth century on a putting-out system and the exportation of raw linen, now entered a pre-industrial stage characterized by concentration in manufactories, although individual producers were still in the majority. About 95 percent of Bohemia’s industrial workers were in textiles, but in 1775 these workers represented only 10 percent of the total population. A similar figure in England covered just the workers in the woolen industry. Another important branch of manufacturing was of glass. Mining and metal products were of lesser significance; iron manufactories and coal mining were still in their infancy.
The government sought to assist economic development by indirect means (for instance, elimination of internal tariffs and tolls), by weakening guilds and by creating inducements to producers. Governmental interventions were not overly successful with merchants and artisans. It was otherwise with the nobility, who frequently assumed an entrepreneurial role; the Waldstein woolen mills, for instance, were the oldest in the country.
While the proto-industrial sector led the way, Bohemia also experienced progress in agriculture. The three-field system was abandoned and there was increased productivity. Potatoes became the main food staple in the second half of the century. At the time of the 1791 census Bohemia, which accounted for 10 percent of the area and 14 percent of the population of the Habsburg monarchy (Galicia excluded) produced 25 to 35 percent of the revenue. Prague reached a figure of 70,000 inhabitants.
Material progress offered a contrast to the modest beginnings of a cultural Czech revival. A few aristocrats showed interest in the Czech language of their ancestors. A private learned society transformed itself in 1790 into the Bohemian Royal Society and gained support from literary German circles including Goethe himself. German was the language in which Josef Dobrovsky published his pioneering History of Bohemian Language and Literature in 1792. Regarded as one of the forerunners of the Czech national revival of the nineteenth century, Dobrovsky was pessimistic about the future of the Czech nation.
Eighteenth-century Hungary differed from Bohemia in most respects. In the economic field, the loss of Silesia early in the century and the partitions of Poland in the last decades adversely affected Hungarian trade. Tariffs introduced by the Habsburgs further shaped its character. External tariffs (in 1754-5) cut Hungary from its traditional northern export markets (of wine) and the southern ones (of cattle). A tariff barrier separated the country (including Transylvania, for the customs border between the two was abolished in 1784) from the rest of the monarchy. It favored the production of Austrian and Bohemian finished goods while encouraging Hungarian wool and especially wheat. Before the middle of the century textiles and metal products already accounted for 56.5 percent of imports; cattle and foodstuffs constituted over 80 percent of exports. Between 1748 and 1782 the export of wheat, grown mainly on large estates, increased fivefold. The ratio between cattle and cereals exports was changing: 2: 1 in 1767, 1.6:1 in 1785. The process was accompanied by the modernization of the big estates, which involved crop rotation and resulted in increased yields.
Trade mainly enriched the magnates, although towns dependent on Austro-Bohemian commerce benefited too. Growth of manufactories was modest. Textile mills (the first cloth manufactory appeared in 1722), ceramic and leather workshops, gold and silver mining, and some coal extraction (1759 onwards) were all on a small scale. Hungarian industrial workers represented less than 1 percent of the total population, proportionately a tenth of the workforce in Bohemia. This period saw the beginnings of accumulation of capital among Greek, Serb, and Armenian merchants, and later on a larger scale by the rapidly expanding Jewish merchant community. Controlling the wool and tobacco trades, and penetrating into agrarian production, the Jews played a major role in the modest industrial take-off. Unable, before the emancipation, to buy land or occupy offices, they reinvested their capital in business. Here was the nucleus of a bourgeoisie, with a few families on the top acquiring noble status.
The Hungarian nobility was unable to prevent peasant reforms and growing state intervention, but it stubbornly refused to be taxed. Repeated government proposals being rejected, Vienna had little incentive in developing the noble-controlled (and tax-exempt) Hungarian economy. Joseph II, however, decided to bring Hungary more strictly in line with the other lands. In addition to certain administrative changes designed to subordinate Hungary to Vienna, he decreed the replacement of counties by administrative districts headed by appointed officials, and then the introduction of German as the official language of administration, courts, and education. Since Latin and Hungarian (only the latter in Transylvania) were official languages, this was a drastic change and received with much indignation. It appeared that Joseph’s next move would be general taxation.
The unsuccessful war against Turkey and the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 forced Joseph to abandon his plans. In 1790 he withdrew most of his reforms, except for the decrees on toleration and the peasantry. Did enlightened absolutism in Hungary fail? Was there another alternative? How should one appraise the contest between the ruler and the political nation? To some historians the monarchy was the carrier of progress while the nobility pursued retrograde policies. Others stressed that the political nation represented a superior form of government and was the true carrier of national interest. Vienna, they said, was guided less by a program of Enlightenment and more by a desire to exploit Hungary, especially in the economic field.
Before looking briefly at contemporary attitudes and programs, a few words must be said about Enlightenment in Hungary. The ideas of Enlightenment were spreading in the country partly as a result of policies from above, for instance in the field of education, partly as a result of exposure to French political thought. French philosophes were avidly read in Vienna, particularly among the Hungarian guards created by Maria Theresa, and at German universities frequented by Hungarians. Freemasonry provided a channel and an organizational form for the dissemination of the new ideas in Hungary. Its first lodge was founded in 1769—a branch of the Grande Loge de Varsovie associated with the Grand Orient. The number of lodges grew rapidly and those in Croatia, influenced later by Count Janko Draskovic, acquired a distinctly political character. Eventually Hungarian and Croatian lodges separated. Joseph II was inimical to Freemasonry, in which he saw outside influences.
While French - and German-speaking aristocrats played a major role in the cultural revival, the Protestant gentry that could, after the toleration decree, enter administration and politics, often affected it in an anti-Habsburg and national Hungarian spirit. Changes in education were, of course, of crucial importance. The Benedictines in Hungary (and Bohemia) attempted to emulate Konarski’s Collegium Nobilium in Poland. In the 1760s the Collegium Oeconomicum was founded. In Hungary the state-supervised system under the Ratio Educationis covered one university (by then situated in Buda), three royal academies, and some 130 colleges and secondary schools with a population of 13,000 students. Instruction on the lowest level was in Magyar, German, Slovak, Ruthenian, Croatian, and Romanian. Textbooks and grammars were published in all these languages. Epitomizing this type of universalist Enlightenment was the pedagogue Matej Bel, who described himself as “lingua Slavus, natione Hungarus, eruditione Germanus.” Public libraries appeared, and there seems to have been a relatively large reading public. The first fortnightly paper in Hungarian came out in the 1780s; the first permanent Hungarian theater was opened in Transylvania a few years later.
Imbued with the ideas of Enlightenment, some members of the nobility and of the nascent intelligentsia favored Josephinism insofar as it stood for secularization of administrative and educational systems, religious toleration, and improvements in the lot of the peasants. The more radical groups viewed enlightened absolutism as leading toward the abolition of feudalism and paving the way for a bourgeois-type society. After 1790 they turned for inspiration to the French Revolution. The moderates, who deeply resented Joseph’s efforts to replace the Hungarian constitutional regime by a centralized government run by a German-speaking bureaucracy, developed an enlightened noble program comparable to and partly inspired by a similar one in Poland. Several figures of the literary world assumed the leadership of the movement. They included Gyorgy Bessenyei, the “Hungarian Voltaire,” whose Tragedy of Agis (1772) marked the beginning of Enlightenment and of national awakening in Hungarian literature. Bessenyei affirmed as a true man of Enlightenment that the world was his fatherland and the human race his nationality. But he also wrote that “every nation has become knowledgeable by [using] its own and never a foreign language,”26 heralding the nascent modern nationalism. Ferenc Kazinczy, a poet and politician, most representative of Hungarian classicism, stimulated and inspired native literary life. Mihaly Vitez Csokonai was the most outstanding lyric poet. Gergely Berzeviczy pioneered classical economic thinking in the country, and may be regarded as the leading theorist of a program that could compete with enlightened absolutism. It opposed despotism, peasant oppression, and the fiscal immunity of the nobility, and strove to reconcile a modernization of the traditional social, economic, and political structures with the concept of sovereignty vested jointly in the nation and the ruler. Translated into a political platform of action the enlightened liberal movement reached its peak during the 1790 crisis that affected Hungary and Bohemia. It needs to be treated jointly with the events in Poland to which we shall now turn.
World History
