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Hungary Enlightened Absolutism
Joseph II (1780-90), a dynamic leader strongly
influenced by
the Enlightenment, shook Hungary from its malaise when he
inherited the throne from his mother, Maria Theresa.
Joseph
sought to centralize control of the empire and to rule it
by
decree as an enlightened despot. He refused to take the
Hungarian
coronation oath to avoid being constrained by Hungary's
constitution. In 1781 Joseph issued the Patent of
Toleration,
which granted Protestants and Orthodox Christians full
civil
rights and Jews freedom of worship. He decreed that German
replace Latin as the empire's official language and
granted the
peasants the freedom to leave their holdings, to marry,
and to
place their children in trades. Hungary, Croatia, and
Transylvania became a single imperial territory under one
administration. When the Hungarian nobles again refused to
waive
their exemption from taxation, Joseph banned imports of
Hungarian
manufactured goods into Austria and began a survey to
prepare for
imposition of a general land tax.
Joseph's reforms outraged Hungary's nobles and clergy,
and
the country's peasants grew dissatisfied with taxes,
conscription, and requisitions of supplies. Hungarians
perceived
Joseph's language reform as German cultural hegemony, and
they
reacted by insisting on the right to use their own tongue.
As a
result, Hungarian lesser nobles sparked a renaissance of
the
Magyar language and culture, and a cult of national dance
and
costume flourished. The lesser nobles questioned the
loyalty of
the magnates, of whom less than half were ethnic Magyars,
and
even those had become French- and German-speaking
courtiers. The
Magyar national reawakening subsequently triggered
national
revivals among the Slovak, Romanian, Serbian, and Croatian
minorities within Hungary and Transylvania, who felt
threatened
by both German and Magyar cultural hegemony. These
national
revivals later blossomed into the nationalist movements of
the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries that contributed to the
empire's ultimate collapse.
Late in his reign, Joseph led a costly, ill-fated
campaign
against the Turks that weakened his empire. On January 28,
1790,
three weeks before his death, the emperor issued a decree
canceling all of his reforms except the Patent of
Toleration,
peasant reforms, and abolition of the religious orders.
Joseph's successor, Leopold II (1790-92), recognized
Hungary
again as a separate country under a Habsburg king and
reestablished Croatia and Transylvania as separate
territorial
entities. In 1791 the Diet passed Law X, which stressed
Hungary's
status as an independent kingdom ruled only by a king
legally
crowned according to Hungarian laws. Law X later became
the basis
for demands by Hungarian reformers for statehood in the
period
from 1825 to 1849. New laws again required approval of
both the
Habsburg king and the Diet, and Latin was restored as the
official language. The peasant reforms remained in effect,
however, and Protestants remained equal before the law.
Leopold
died in March 1792 just as the French Revolution was about
to
degenerate into the Reign of Terror and send shock waves
through
the royal houses of Europe.
Enlightened absolutism ended in Hungary under Leopold's
successor, Francis I (1792-1835), who developed an almost
abnormal aversion to change, bringing Hungary decades of
political stagnation. In 1795 the Hungarian police
arrested an
abbot and several of the country's leading thinkers for
plotting
a Jacobin kind of revolution to install a radical
democratic,
egalitarian political system in Hungary. Thereafter,
Francis
resolved to extinguish any spark of reform that might
ignite
revolution. The execution of the alleged plotters silenced
any
reform advocates among the nobles, and for about three
decades
reform ideas remained confined to poetry and philosophy.
The
magnates, who also feared that the influx of revolutionary
ideas
might precipitate a popular uprising, became a tool of the
crown
and seized the chance to further burden the peasants.
Data as of September 1989
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