ABSTRACT
In 1790, the Hungarian diet was convoked after 25 years. This marked the end of an absolutist experiment that spanned the co-regency and sole rule of Joseph II (1765–1790). The crisis into which the emperor’s uncompromising reform programme plunged the Habsburg Monarchy gave the Hungarian estates an opportunity to reassert themselves politically upon the accession of his brother, Leopold II. This chapter discusses the shifting balance of power within the Hungarian estates, as well as between the estates and the crown, from the opening of the diet in June 1790 until its conclusion in March 1791. It argues that initially it was a coherent and assertive group of disaffected Josephists who set the diet’s agenda. This influential minority, which transcended existing social and religious differences within the Hungarian nobility, was motivated by an enlightened belief in the necessity of reform. Based in the Lower House, its members promoted the vision of an economically open, constitutionally independent but noble-dominated meritocracy, with a king reduced to a figurehead. Although Leopold II skilfully neutralized this group, its members found consolation in the incorporation of some key Josephist legislation by the diet, and in the fact that the diet as an institution was successfully re-established as the ‘cockpit’ of Hungarian politics.
