Joseph's brother and successor, Leopold II (1790—2), bade fair to continue the modernisation agenda by subtler means. As Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold had practised an enlightened rule the equal of Joseph's, but unlike his brother, he was a genuine believer in constitutional rule as well. He was both astute and pragmatic, and his brief reign as emperor is one of the great might-have-beens of East European history. In short order the new ruler displayed all the political skills which Joseph had lacked. He suspended the land tax within weeks of his accession; signified his willingness to accept that landowners had the right to refuse commutation of Robot; convened not only the Hungarian Diet but all the others as well; ostentatiously went to Hungary to be crowned king and swear the coronation oath; cut a diplomatic deal with Prussia agreeing the reimposition of Austrian rule in Belgium, subject to the restoration of Belgian liberties and an end to the Turkish war; reoccupied Belgium with minimum resistance in December 1790; and in August 1791 concluded the Peace of Sistova with the Ottomans. Leopold's readiness to make such concessions was rooted in conviction as much as necessity. He simply did not agree with Joseph's project of the unitary state and could see virtue in the Monarchy's diversity. At the same time he clearly wished to continue modernisation, but within the context of existing laws and institutions, modified if possible through negotiation.
There is no denying the skill with which Leopold confronted the witches' brew of discontent stirred up by Joseph. The Hungarian Diet, when it met in September 1790, voiced quite novel demands for a separate Hungarian army and administration, for annual diets, for the reincorporation into Hungary of Transylvania and the Military Frontier and, ominously, for Hungarian, not Latin (let alone German), to be the language of state. In response to this, other nationalities within Hungary for the first time voiced counter-demands. The Croatian Sabor (diet) denounced the proposal to make Hungarian the language of state and protested that neither diet should be able to enact laws for the other. A congress of Hungarian Serbs, which Leopold cannily permitted to convene at Sremski Karlovci in September 1790 and to call itself a 'diet', demanded a separate national territory within Hungary and vilified the Hungarians as 'orang-utans whom Vienna has turned into men'.18 In Transylvania there were similar demands, led by the Romanian Orthodox hierarchy, for recognition of the Romanians as the 'fourth nation' of the province, in addition to the Hungarians, Szeklers and German 'Saxons'.19 Leopold exploited this subsidiary unrest to negotiate a deal with the Hungarian Diet that restored stability. In addition to his coronation, he recognised Hungary as a separate state with its own constitution and confirmed the non-taxation of nobles and abandonment of the land tax. In return the Diet formally accepted as Hungarian law the Toleration Patent and the urbarium of 1767.
In foreign affairs, Leopold was less successful after Sistova, in that he was unable to avert a declaration of war by France on Austria and Prussia in April 1792. Leopold had not wanted war; on the contrary he welcomed the French Revolution, urged his brother-in-law Louis XVI to accept constitutional rule and refused to support French emigre efforts to stir up reaction abroad, replying to one such appeal that he was 'neither a democrat nor an aristocrat'.20 His alliance with Prussia, however, and a joint declaration to the effect that the two states were ready to intervene in France to protect the royal family, provoked the hostility of the French National Assembly. Shortly before the outbreak of war, Leopold died suddenly on 1 March 1792. His passing was a demonstration of the importance of the individual in history, for under his son and successor, Francis II (1792—1835), the half-century of modernisation in the Habsburg Monarchy faltered and ground to a halt.
There is not much point in dwelling on the decade and a half of conflict with revolutionary France which followed. Suffice it to say that, in the words of Charles Ingrao, 'the French Revolution was nothing short of a catastrophe for the monarchy'.21 This was not just because the Monarchy went from one humiliating lost war to another, culminating in defeat at Austerlitz in 1805 and the abolition of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. These reverses were compensated for only partially by territorial gains, in the shape of 'New' Galicia, the Habsburg share of the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, and the former Venetian Republic, awarded to the Monarchy by the victorious General Bonaparte in 1797 and including Venetia, the west coast of Istria and Dalmatia. Both acquisitions increased the Monarchy's Slav and Italian populations still further. The revolutionary period was equally catastrophic, however, because it entrenched reaction in Habsburg government, in the person of
Francis II and the conservative ministers he chose. Personally likeable if unimaginative, Francis was 24 at his accession, and through youth and inexperience was disinclined to continue with the grand reshaping of his realms prosecuted, in their very different ways, by his two predecessors. He was even less inclined to experiment while waging a war of survival against the French Republic and then Napoleon, who claimed to be the heir and executor of the Republic's principles. Economically, socially and politically the Monarchy remained frozen in time for the next two generations.
This reactionary trend was only reinforced by the discovery, in 1794, of the so-called 'Jacobin conspiracy' led by the Hungarian academic Ignac Martinovics. Recent scholarship has played down the significance of this phenomenon, and certainly Martinovics and his handful of associates were guilty of no more than sympathising not only with the ideals of the French Revolution but also with the enlightened agenda of Joseph II and Leopold II. Martinovics, a translator of Tom Paine and Rousseau (into Latin), was actually on the payroll of Leopold's police minister until 1792, and the republic he then started advocating was one where nobles would still be politically dominant and receive their dues from peasants. The 'Jacobins' paid for their somewhat confused radicalism on the scaffold in 1795. Their real importance lay in the impetus their apprehension gave to even fiercer censorship and political repression on the part of Francis II's government.
World History
