Charles III and Maria Theresa

Charles’s chief concern was to secure the acceptance in Hungary of the Pragmatic Sanction, the imperial decree by which his daughter Maria Theresa was to inherit his dominions. After the Diet accepted the Pragmatic Sanction in 1723, Charles convoked the body only once more and Maria Theresa, after her coronation in 1740, only twice—each time to ask for money. Her rule, like her father’s, was essentially autocratic. She was severe toward the Protestants, and she allowed her advisers to exclude Hungary from the subsidized industrialization that was bringing wealth to other parts of her dominion. Internal tariff barriers were introduced between the hereditary provinces and Hungary. Imports to Hungary from outside the empire were hindered by high tariffs, but customs for “imports” from Austria and Bohemia were very low. Hungary’s exports were all but banned to non-Habsburg lands, and only those agricultural and raw materials that were required in the western part of the monarchy received preferential treatment. Hungary became more dependent on, and subordinate to, Austria than before. Agriculture received some incentives, but the road to industrialization was blocked. Lacking modern credit, entrepreneurial attitude, and strong urban markets, Hungary, unlike Austria and Bohemia, was prevented from entering the preindustrial age.

Maria Theresa’s rule was not unduly harsh, even toward the Protestants. Toward the magnates, on whom she lavished many favours, it was positively benign, and she respected the most cherished liberty of the lesser nobles: their exemption from taxation. Exhausted by so many wars and rebellions, the country asked for nothing more, contenting itself with the blessing that her rule brought it an uninterrupted peace that enabled the population to grow once again and the material ravages to be repaired. But a lethargy descended on the country. Political life sank to the parish-pump level, and the towns stagnated. The peasants, into whose conditions the queen introduced some improvements (notably the Urbarial Patent in 1767, which attempted to standardize peasant holdings and obligations), followed their masters in aspiring to nothing more than as much material comfort as could be obtained with a minimum of effort. The national language itself was becoming little more than a peasant dialect, since the language of public administration and the Diet was Latin and of business life was German; like the language, the national spirit seemed near moribund.

Joseph II and Leopold II

The nation was shocked out of its lethargy by the accession of Maria Theresa’s son Joseph II on her death in 1780. Evading the obligation of a king on coronation to swear allegiance to the constitution, by not submitting himself to coronation at all (he had the Holy Crown conveyed to Vienna), Joseph drew Hungary into the Habsburg realm. The counties were transformed into local branches of the state service, taking all their orders from above. German was made the language of government and all education above the elementary level. (A secularized school system had been introduced in 1777.) The land was surveyed in preparation for taxing all estates equally. The position of the peasants was improved, which pleased them but not their lords. When Joseph fell mortally sick, the country was on the brink of open revolt. On his deathbed he retracted his administrative reforms, but his successor, Leopold II (1790–92), was obliged to restore the ancient constitution and to swear to treat Hungary as a wholly independent kingdom, to be ruled only in accordance with its own laws and customs.

Francis I: the reform generation

When Leopold died with tragic suddenness in 1792, his young son, Francis, delivered a coronation oath that went through the motions of conforming, but soon afterward he returned to the old ways. The Diet was convoked simply to supply money and, after 1811, did not convene for 14 years. Social reaction accompanied this political absolutism, and the stranglehold on economic development was not relaxed.

For many years the Diet, composed either of magnates who identified their interests with those of the court or of landowners who had prospered during the Napoleonic Wars, was as nonprogressive as Francis himself. In wider circles the spirit of the age had given birth to a great cultural revival that was now bringing forth its first literary fruits. The new national pride that it at once embodied and enhanced was demanding fulfillment of Leopold’s promises and an end to the veiled but oppressive dictatorship of Vienna. A great reform movement was set in motion by István, Count Széchenyi, the primary advocate of Hungary’s social, economic, and political modernization, who boldly proclaimed that the ancient privileges of the nobility were no bastion but a prison. He argued that the servile state of the peasants was humanly degrading and a source of weakness for the nation and also that the system of forced field labour, as well as the nobles’ exemption from taxation, was economically harmful even to its supposed beneficiaries. Financial stringency had forced Francis to reconvoke the Diet in 1825 and to convoke it regularly thereafter.

Doctrines like these were taken up by a whole “reform generation,” the most prominent figures of which—besides Széchenyi himself—were the legal expert Ferenc Deák, who subsequently became the primary architect of the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867; József, Baron Eötvös, leader of a small group of moderates that opposed breaking with the ruling dynasty; and, above all, the more radical Lajos Kossuth, who largely changed the current of the reform movement by his insistence that social and economic reform could be fully realized only after the achievement of political independence. After Francis had been followed on the throne in 1835 by the luckless Ferdinand—in practice by the government of the two principal ministers, Klemens, prince von Metternich, and Anton, count von Kolowrat—Vienna was driven increasingly into a defensive position. It was forced to make repeated concessions, especially with respect to the replacement of Latin and German by Magyar as the language of the Diet, administration, and education—a demand pressed with especial insistence by many of the reformers.