It has been a long time since scholars contested the dominating Marxist interpretation of the Enlightenment as a “bourgeois ideology”—at least in France—but the historical narratives of European Enlightenments still have difficulty integrating aristocrats into their picture of the Enlightenment.Footnote
1
It is not helpful to divide an early modern society into clearly separated social classes and attribute to each of them different intellectual currents. Looking more closely, we may infer that representatives of the Enlightenment were recruited from various social groups, including the aristocracy and Catholic clergy. Moreover, even eighteenth-century definitions reveal that the philosophe or Aufklärer had never been identified by his or her social origin, but by his or her intellectual achievements.Footnote
2
Who can we, present-day historians, justly include among “enlighteners”?
For the purposes of historical research, a representative of the Enlightenment was someone who complied with the ethical demands of Enlightenment secular morality and who left some written testimony of his mindset for posterity. This definition does not mean that every philosophe or Aufklärer was a moral saint. Even Kant in his doctrine of radical evil accepted the pessimistic idea that man as a moral being is bound to fail, and that no one can attain moral perfection.Footnote
3
However, man was compelled to keep trying because—having self-perception—he was able to distinguish good and evil. Lastly, an Aufklärer or philosophe was obliged to check the facts before making a moral judgment—this feature of Enlightenment morality has often been overlooked. Yet, it was the metaphysician Kant himself who complained that all precepts of moral philosophy remain vain and empty, unless they are substantiated by an investigation of real human nature.Footnote
4
Studying the facts about man and nature helped man orientate himself in the situation and acquire knowledge of human nature. Thus, the moral philosopher would be able to recognize the limits of human possibility.
The first part of our working definition is a response to the present question of Enlightenment studies as to whether it is possible to exclude any eighteenth-century thinkers from the “happy Enlightenment family.”Footnote
5
The ethical concept makes it possible to exclude thinkers who did not admit the necessity of establishing a secular conception of morality and satisfied themselves with old scholastic arguments.Footnote
6
But it also excludes the nihilists, who rejected the necessity of a viable moral concept.Footnote
7
The “family” may include people of conflicting opinions but who were united in their effort to argue for the same goal—to establish convincing arguments for human morality. The second part of our definition is practical: it focuses on those representatives of the Enlightenment who articulated their ideas in a written text, be it a manuscript, printed book, philosophical poem, play, or essay. It could even have been a piece of music. My definition is based on the assumption that even intellectual historians require evidence, for we can no longer rely on our supernatural Einfühlungsvermögen as Wilhelm Dilthey and nineteenth-century cultural historians did. I also emphasize the significance of the inquiry into real human nature and real human acts, for historians who imagine moral philosophy as a quest in lofty metaphysical questions tend to ignore this. If we do not realize this connection, we cannot understand the connection between the historical works and the Enlightenment quest for secular morality.
I have tackled this theoretical question only to dispel the doubts as to whether aristocrats may be included among the “Enlightenment family” without distorting our understanding of what the Enlightenment was. Another objection I often encounter is that their writings should not be taken seriously because they were not honest with themselves in what they wrote. The logic behind this kind of argument is that—no matter what the evidence says—eighteenth-century aristocrats simply must be taken for enemies of new ideas. This objection implies again that the intention of writers was determined by their social origin and that we should subordinate the facts to our preconceived expectations. This is a methodology that makes me wonder what literary history would be like if the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, or other bürgerlich authors were also scrutinized with such a degree of psychological pyrrhonism.
My insistence on the existence of aristocratic writers is not based on any premeditated intention but on a series of discoveries I have made during my research in family archives and chateaux and manuscript collections. It was only after the discovery of these largely unknown texts that I began to think about their place in the history of literature and in Enlightenment discussions. The inclusion of these handwritten and semi-public works on the history of literature is not possible without changing the common idea of what literature is. On the other hand, literary historians have long recognized that our understanding of literature must be historicized, for the notion of literature as an independent art that follows purely aesthetic goals did not exist before the nineteenth century.Footnote
8
Théophile Gautier asserted it in the most aggressive manner in his seminal essay on l´art pour l´art, in which he defended the right of a creative writer to follow purely aesthetic goals.Footnote
9
In doing so, he sought to liberate literature from its subordination to useful goals and determine its difference from the crafts and sciences. In the eighteenth century, the notion of literature (literarische Welt, belles lettres) comprised all kinds of writings, including philosophy, historiography, and the sciences. Prose fiction was not highly esteemed, and hommes de lettres would often write fictional works that claimed to be true stories, authentic letters, diaries, or essays that would follow some useful purpose (including those on practical topics, politics, ethics, economy, travelling, etc.). To prevent anachronisms, some literary historians suggest that “literature” should include all texts that were used in communication.Footnote
10
Yet some qualifying criteria should be applied. For the present study, I include only those aristocratic authors who left behind an accomplished literary work (essay, novel, poem). Following modern approaches to literary history, I do not ask about the abstract categories to which these works belong, but about the way they were used in communication. In what follows, I will first look at Austrian and Czech literary history and then provide a brief survey of all previously known aristocratic authors from the Bohemian Lands and their works, which I will also set into the context of the debates to which they belonged. In the conclusion, I will seek to explain the communicative function of these texts.
Outside the National Literary Canons
So far, the historiography of Austrian literature in the Age of Enlightenment has not considered aristocrats as belonging to the literary canon. Aristocrats have usually been accorded only the role of sponsors and collectors. However, most of the aristocratic writers were unknown, which is why the classical accounts of Austrian literary history in the Age of Enlightenment do not mention them. The classical surveys of the early twentieth century put forward the thesis that the literature of southern Germany and Austria was anchored in baroque and Enlightenment criticism and therefore lacked the essence of “true Austrianness.”Footnote
11
In these accounts, the eighteenth century served only as a prelude to the nineteenth-century classics such as works by Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Raimund, and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy. The most recent survey by Klaus Zeyringer and Helmut Gollner has added some new names to the list of eighteenth-century authors but it basically retained this structure.Footnote
12
Aristocrats, as authors, first entered Austrian literary history in the specialized volume edited by Herbert Zeman, which includes a study of aristocratic students who published their early literary works written at the Theresianum in Vienna.Footnote
13
The works of these students were published under the supervision of Michael Denis. Leslie Bodi's classical monograph on Josephine literature does not mention any aristocratic writers.Footnote
14
On the contrary, in the literary historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, the old prejudice that eighteenth-century literature was written by middle-class authors persisted.
The same is true of surveys of Austrian intellectual history. In Eduard Winter's Viennese trilogy, which is the only synthesis of Austrian intellectual history from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, the only noblemen that appear are ministers or church dignitaries, who embody the forces opposing intellectual progress.Footnote
15
A slightly better picture is conveyed by the collective volume Suppressed Humanism, Belated Enlightenment, published in 1992, which marked an important turning point in modern research on this subject.Footnote
16
This volume—written by experts on philosophy—dramatically improved the state of research, for it was not a mere enumeration of names and titles but a collection of in-depth studies of particular thinkers and philosophical problems. Nevertheless, it did not widen its social focus beyond university scholars and clerics and did not include any aristocrats as active participants in the Enlightenment project. One new insight, however, was its acknowledgment of the merit of one nobleman, Karl Borromäus Count Harrach, for his introduction of Kantian philosophy to Austria. Harrach organized Kantian lectures by Lazarus Benavides, which took place in his salon.Footnote
17
The reception of Kantian philosophy is a key problem for those who consider intellectual history to be the same academic discipline as the history of philosophy, and Harrach's contribution to the development of the Austrian Enlightenment should not be forgotten. Members of the Harrach family—who were themselves writing journals, essays, and poems—were, however, not mentioned.
The fact that most of the aristocratic writers used French as their literary language may also explain why they were ignored by literary historians in Austria and Czechoslovakia. After 1918, they found themselves outside the nationalist literary canons of the successor states. The situation in Czechoslovakia was much worse than in Austria because Czech literary history excluded even Germanophone literature from what was supposed to be “Czech literature.”Footnote
18
In the interwar period, the literary historian Josef Hanuš sought to integrate patriotic noblemen into his account of the preparations of the Czech national revival, but his attempt was not followed.Footnote
19
Even Hanuš attributed to them only the role of sponsors and collectors and not of active writers. The only exception was the patriotic educator Franz Joseph Kinsky, whose work was appreciated only because he suggested that young cavaliers should study Czech. After the fall of Communist regimes, which had supported nationalist interpretations of history, the liberated Czech historiography began to show an intensive interest in Czech-German bilingualism, but Francophone authors were not suitable for this new conception, either. This was a common situation in most European countries where eighteenth-century Francophone literature fell out of the national literary canon. In the present research, Russia and Poland have done the most to improve the situation. My research owes a lot to the inspiration of the team around Professor Alexander Stroëv and Professor Elena Grechanaya in Paris.Footnote
20
The Development of Aristocratic Literature: Beginnings
Aristocratic literature in the Bohemian Lands appeared quite late, not before the 1760s. However, the formidable edifice of baroque learning, as described by Robert Evans in his splendid work on the Habsburg monarchy, had already begun to crumble around 1700.Footnote
21
Aristocrats had a key role in the collapse of baroque intellectual foundations. They leveled heavy criticism at the poor standards of Jesuit universities and other scholarly institutions and eventually called into doubt the whole of Catholic learning, with its speculative focus on the knowledge of God and its neglect of practical and secular sciences.Footnote
22
Aristocrats expressed this disagreement in their preference for Protestant universities and their refusal to confer their sons to Jesuit preceptors.
There are three distinguished figures of this transitional period who openly dissented from the Catholic learning of the time: Prince Eugene of Savoy, Count Franz Anton Sporck, and Count Philipp Joseph Franz Hoditz of Hoditz. However, neither Sporck nor Prince Eugene of Savoy produced their own literary or philosophical work. Sporck expressed his dissenting attitudes by commissioning German and Czech translations of Jansenist and Protestant religious literature, which he printed with his own press and then disseminated throughout the German-speaking area.Footnote
23
Prince Eugene of Savoy collected clandestine manuscripts of the early Enlightenment, which was a significant gesture even if he had not read them.Footnote
24
Count Philipp Joseph Hoditz wrote a philosophical manuscript, Libellus de hominis conviventia, sometime between 1696 and 1700.Footnote
25
In this tract Hoditz reflected on the anthropological foundations of justice, refuting the Hobbesian concept of self-preservation as the driving force of human conduct. However, he never mentions Thomas Hobbes's theses of the natural human right and natural human law, which raises some doubt as to whether he had first-hand knowledge of Hobbes's tract. If he did, it was certainly the Latin translation of Leviathan, which may be inferred from his terminology. Hoditz proceeds from the Cartesian and Aristotelian concepts of man, refusing them both in favor of the biblical doctrine that man is the image of God. On this basis, he elaborates a dualist concept of man, torn between the divine and animal parts of his nature. Hoditz then defines what is just conduct and thereby provides the philosophical foundations of jus naturae.
The flourishing of aristocratic literature came much later, in the 1760s, when several members of the upper aristocracy, as well as members of the Habsburg family, showed some literary ambitions. Among the Habsburgs, Princess Isabella of Parma, the first wife of Joseph II, entertained literary interests. Regrettably, most of her writings were destroyed at the end of World War II.Footnote
26
Though she became famous for her alleged melancholy and lesbian inclinations, she also penned several literary essays and short stories and introduced the sentimental style to the Viennese court, which might have been the reason for her bad reputation. Isabella of Parma died in 1763, and at that time, her literary taste and her attachment to sentimentalism were still rather unusual within the context of the Viennese court.
Public Writers
A few years later, the first literary works by Count Maximilien Joseph Lamberg and Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne were printed in France and Germany. These two men may be considered the founding fathers of aristocratic Francophone literature in the Habsburg monarchy. Lamberg came from a Moravian family, but he had a Francophone mother; de Ligne came from the French-speaking Austrian Netherlands and French was his mother tongue. Lamberg's oldest surviving works were published in Augsburg during the time of his service to the bishop. His literary fame is testified by Giacomo Casanova, who made his acquaintance in 1761 during his brief stay in the bishopric city. Lamberg's first works were parodies of scientific tracts on mathematics, natural sciences, or geometry. He also wrote a parody of an epistolary love novel, which survives only in the second edition of 1776, although he dates it to 1751.Footnote
27
It looks like a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, however, which makes the earlier date improbable. Lamberg left Augsburg after a short time, and after an extended journey through Italy, Corsica, and Tunisia, he settled in Bavaria. In 1774 he published his Mémorial d'un mondain, which is considered his most famous work.Footnote
28
It is an autobiographical account, describing his journey through Corsica and Italy. His main concern is Corsica—its future political constitution and its wild inhabitants. It may be taken for a response to the contemporary discussion started by Rousseau's Du contrat social, in which the Genevan prophet articulated his belief that Corsica was the last nation in Europe that had not been spoiled by civilization and bad laws and that still cherished some hope of drafting a good constitution according to nature.Footnote
29
Many European writers discussed future arrangements for the rebellious island, until the French governor established a new pay d’ états there and decided the question from above.Footnote
30
The romantic leader of the Corsican rebels, Pascoale Paoli, whom the Scottish writer James Boswell venerated in his Account of Corsica (1768), also attracted European thinkers.Footnote
31
Lamberg was provoked by this unfounded adoration, and he aimed to see the “noble savages” with his own eyes and make his own conclusions. His most trusted guide around the island was the French governor Charles Louis de Marboeuf, whom Lamberg admired. He depicts Paoli as vain and simple-minded, with no idea of what was good for his nation. Finally, Lamberg's account implies that the Corsicans were savage, but not noble. Although the novel was a success, Lamberg did not become famous. He stayed in Bavaria for a couple of years and in 1777 he moved back to the Habsburg monarchy, where he lived as an impoverished aristocrat, entertaining his compatriots at the chateaux in Moravia. During the Moravian period of his career, Lamberg wrote some new experimental novels, such as Le canot, or Tableau fantastique, in which he played with the form, changing narrators and breaking the story line.Footnote
32
One of his important activities was his voluminous literary correspondence with Casanova, who lived in the Habsburg monarchy during his second exile from 1783 until his death in 1798.Footnote
33
After a brief career as a secretary to Ambassador Foscarini in Vienna, Casanova settled in the Chateau Dux, where he was employed by Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein as his librarian. Casanova presented the strongest link between Lamberg and the Prince de Ligne, who settled in the nearby city of Teplice, where his daughter Marie Josephine married the Prince Johann Nepomuk Clary-Aldringen. Casanova also established his literary career during his stay in Bohemia. Consequently, the Francophone novels and essays he published in Prague and Dresden belong to the context of aristocratic culture as well.
If we characterize Lamberg as a Francophone cosmopolitan, then his counterpart was the Francophobe patriot Franz Joseph Count Kinsky, who began publishing his works in 1774.Footnote
34
Kinsky wrote his books in German, although he kept his private correspondence in French. He had no sense of humor, and his main concerns were natural sciences, patriotic history, and practical problems of his military service. Kinsky was involved in the establishment of the Bohemian Learned Society, which was formed between 1772 and 1774, and he often contributed to its scientific journal, the Abhandlungen. His contributions pertained to questions of geology and practical service. His books, however, dealt with different problems. His debut was a treatise on aristocratic education, Erinnerung über einen wichtigen Gegenstand, in 1774, in which he proposed a program of military training and education in service to the fatherland.Footnote
35
This tract also vigorously criticized the French education within aristocratic families and called for a patriotic renewal of masculine virtues. Kinsky elaborated on this topic in a sequel, Über die Hofmeister, which discussed the choice and assignments of a preceptor.Footnote
36
Although some scholars devoted poems to him, he never tried his talents at poetry. His intellectual development is quite interesting, however, for he illustrates the general evolution towards conservatism and a return to Christian virtues. After a brief interlude in the position of director of the public university library in Prague, Kinsky was appointed deputy-director of the military academy in Wiener Neustadt, where he became the director in 1785. Here, the patriotic writer turned to the practical problems of military service, writing works on how to polish military boots and how to march in columns. However, his booklet Für die Weltrekruten, of 1781, which implored his recruits to follow their Christian duties, foreshadowed his growing estrangement from the Enlightenment.Footnote
37
This process had begun earlier, as even his Erinnerung had been written as a polemic against Rousseau, not Jesuit education, for which Kinsky, in his private letters, expressed loathing.Footnote
38
This tendency intensified after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Kinsky, now back on the battlefield, penned a lengthy letter to his deputy in Wiener Neustadt, in which he refuted revolutionary ideology and recommended a strict return to elementary Christian morals.Footnote
39
According to his biographer, he then elaborated on these ideas in a programmatic letter, which he sent to the imperial commander-in-chief Prince Friedrich Josias von Sachsen-Coburg.Footnote
40
He died after a series of humiliating defeats in 1805, the result of the deterioration of the military academy due in large part to his conservatism and his frequent absences. Apart from Kinsky, there was another military philosopher, Oberleutnant Georg Count Browne, who published a slim essay, Reflexions politiques et militaires, in 1785.Footnote
41
A much more prolific writer was Franz Anton Count Hartig, who also made his debut in the eventful year of 1774.Footnote
42
He addressed the reading public in an anonymous essay on the advantages of women's education, which was published as a kind of university thesis.Footnote
43
Hartig grew up in Regensburg, where his father served as Bohemia's ambassador to the Permanent Imperial Diet. As there was no university in this city, he received his higher education at the Benedictine monastery, which means that he did not finish his studies with the traditional disputation, the results of which would be published. Consequently, the slim booklet on women´s education might be perceived as a replacement for the disputation or dissertation. The essay was published while Hartig was on his grand tour; after that, his literary activities were halted. He resumed writing in the 1780s when a serious illness constrained him to spend some time at Spa in Belgium. Here he met the physician Jean-Philippe Limbourg, who was himself a man of letters and who encouraged him to start writing again. This event corresponded with the ascension of Joseph II, whose new censorship regulations were understood by many contemporaries as a declaration of freedom of the press.Footnote
44
Hartig felt obliged to celebrate this new liberty with poems and thoughtful books, which made him the most prolific aristocratic writer in Bohemia. He had already recalled himself to the reading public with poems he had been publishing in the Francophone journal Esprit des journaux in Liège. In the 1780s Hartig published two ambitious books of patriotic essays: a French work, Lettres sur la France, Italie et l'Angleterre, in 1785, and, shortly after that, Kurze Betrachtungen über die Aufnahme und Verfall der Landwirtschaft.
Footnote
45
The first book is a collection of letters he had written during his grand tour of 1776, and it contains conventional reflections upon the climate and political constitution of the countries he was passing through. The literary form of these letters is quite interesting, for they were published as an edition prepared by the addressee of these letters, who was the physician Limbourg from Spa. In fact, Hartig rewrote the letters for the sake of this edition, but formally he was neither the author nor the editor of this book.
The last of the “public” aristocratic authors was Count Joseph Nikolaus Windischgrätz, who addressed the reading public in a philosophical contest announced in 1783.Footnote
46
If Hartig was unique because of his wide range of genres, then Windischgrätz was unique for his concentration on serious philosophical debates. He was the only aristocratic writer who wrote systematic philosophical essays and got involved in the international debates of the European Enlightenment. Windischgrätz did not distance himself from contemporary issues by using irony and parody as Lamberg did, nor did he waste his energy writing poems, music, and short stories like Hartig. Unlike Kinsky, who was shunned from the literature of entertainment, Windischgrätz did not write on boring practical issues of state service, but on higher questions of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and political philosophy. Count Windischgrätz's main topic was the sensualist ethics of Claude Adrien Helvetius, which were again becoming fashionable in France.Footnote
47
The main goal of Count Windischgrätz's philosophical writings was to combat this pernicious philosophy, which seemed to threaten the basis of morality. He announced his philosophical program in a book with a telling title, Betrachtungen über verschiedene Gegenstände über die man heute sehr viel schreibt [Essays on various subjects on which people often write nowadays]. It pertained to a wide range of anthropological and political questions, including censorship, torture, the constitution, and sensualist anthropology. In his further more detailed tracts, Windischgrätz followed this program in a systematic manner. First, he investigated the anthropological preconditions for the moral behavior of an individual, then proceeded to questions about a political system in a state composed of more individuals, and finally, he sought to reform international relations. During the peace negotiations in Rastatt in 1797 he proposed a system of international relations between states. His greatest published books tackle the problem of “metaphysique animale” or philosophical anthropology.Footnote
48
The strange feature of his moral philosophy is that he was himself thinking in sensualist terms, and his critique of Helvétius was a sort of squared circle. He sought to deny sensualism using sensualist arguments. Unfortunately, he never finished his great philosophical work, in which he planned to resolve the question of the sensual origin of human ideas. In his terms, he was inquiring into the origin of happiness in our soul and in our senses.
However, his political critique of the premises of enlightened absolutism made some impact because he published it in the Austrian Netherlands during the Brabant Revolution against Joseph II.Footnote
49
Windischgrätz denied the premise that despotic rule is justified by the ruler´s obligation to promote the happiness of his subjects, for the achievement of happiness lies beyond the limits of state power. “Our happiness must be our own work,” he asserted.Footnote
50
Each citizen must pursue happiness with his or her own powers; the state is only obligated to remove any obstacles that would prevent citizens from achieving this goal. His main question—whether the ruler may alone change the constitution of a state—ran even deeper. His assertion that the ruler is not empowered to change a constitution on his own, even when the constitution is manifestly bad, denied the monarchical will as the highest source of legal order. According to new liberal ideas, the source of state power no longer lay in the will of the monarch but in the will of the people.Footnote
51
This issue was passionately discussed during the Revolution of 1848 and was ruthlessly put down by the philosopher's son, Feldmarschall Alfred Candidus Windischgrätz.
Private Writers
The writers mentioned above—de Ligne, Lamberg, Kinsky, Browne, Hartig, and Windischgrätz—all published their work. All of them also had a “hidden” part of their oeuvre that existed only in manuscript form. There were also a few aristocratic scientists, who divided their work into a public, scientific part and private “occult” sciences.Footnote
52
Aristocratic literature evolved from handwritten pieces that originated from daily business in the office, the administration of their mansions, their salon entertainment, or their private sphere. A look at aristocratic correspondence of the 1770s shows that aristocratic women had higher aesthetic ambitions by then, for they adopted the elaborate sentimental style that Princess Isabella of Parma had employed a decade earlier.Footnote
53
Regrettably, none of these women had their works published.
If we include these handwritten sentimental letters in literary history, we need to expand our understanding of literature to include works that were not printed and the public status of which may not have been destined for the general public. It is even more necessary if we consider that there was a larger number of aristocrats who produced complete literary or philosophical works that they never published. The reasons why the “clandestine” authors decided not to publish what they had written were certainly not political or religious. They did not write any subversive or atheistic works. The hitherto known “clandestine” authors wrote either on mysticism or for entertainment. Their writings did not follow the same communicative goal. The authors might have wanted to keep the manuscripts within a closed circle of friends who had been initiated into the secret arts. The writings may also have been destined just for small salon societies. The fact that aristocratic entertainment literature was written in French might have played a certain role as well because Francophone literature sold badly in Central Europe. A case in point is Giacomo Casanova's ambitious novel Icosameron from 1788, which turned out to be a commercial flop.
The first of the mystical authors who left behind a large literary legacy was Leopold Adalbert Count Buquoy. He was one of the first freemasons in Prague, at least if we consider those whose membership has been proved. Buquoy appears on the list of members of the lodge Zu den drei gekrönten Sternen of 1765, and he seems to have been involved in the Rosicrucian order as well.Footnote
54
Buquoy was the younger brother of the famous reformer Johann Nepomuk Count Buquoy, but unlike his elder brother, Leopold Adalbert had to take up a military career. After his dismissal from the military service in 1779 he began to write philosophical poems and essays. Most of them deal with issues of philosophical anthropology and religion, such as the poem Sur l'homme, or short poems on famous philosophers.Footnote
55
His longest work is an incomprehensible literary description of a vision that he had at a hill near Nové Hrady (Gratzen) on 12 August 1794, in which the Holy Spirit revealed itself to him. It bears the confusing title Unfehlbare Existenz des immer treu einigen Gottes im Verhältnus gegen alle Schöpfungen.
Footnote
56
However, he never published anything in any of the reviews published by Prague's or Vienna's freemasons.
A much more prolific author was Franz Joseph Count Thun-Hohenstein, who is known as Mozart's patron and a miraculous physician.Footnote
57
During his lifetime, Thun attracted negative publicity because he organized public spiritual sessions, believing that he was chosen by the ghost Gablidone to be his successor on the earth.Footnote
58
His spiritual pursuits were revealed to the public in 1788 in an anonymous pamphlet that was aimed against Johann Caspar Lavater, who was involved in Thun's mystical work.Footnote
59
Thun was also a freemason, but only for a short time. From 1783 to 1785 he was a regular member of the famous lodge Zur wahren Eintracht in Vienna, where he held two lectures on the mystical vocation of a freemason.Footnote
60
Since this was a “scholars’ lodge,” his ideas were at odds with the prevailing opinions of the leading members, and that might be the reason why Thun left the lodge after a short time, and his speeches were not published in the Journal für Freymaurer. Around that time, Thun became fascinated by the theory of animal magnetism. He believed that he had a magical healing power in his right arm and started organizing public healing sessions. This stage of his career ended with a disastrous attempt to convince the medical faculty in Leipzig that they should examine his right arm and testify that he possessed the magnetic healing power. A series of articles in Berlinische Monatsschrift exposed this scandal and humiliated Thun even more than the Gablidone scandal.Footnote
61
Nevertheless, Thun was a very productive writer. After the last scandal, he retreated to his private residence where he set about writing a huge encyclopedia, in which he described his mystical way of seeing the world. This work was preceded by several essays, a two-volume Skizzen zu meiner encyklopädie, and a lengthy correspondence with the director of his porcelain manufacture Johann Nikolas Weber.Footnote
62
The final work originated between 1796 and 1799; it contains about 2,000 pages and around 350 articles. The mystical philosopher was writing his encyclopedia during the French Revolution and was outraged by the audacity and disdainful behavior of the revolutionary troops, as well as by the despotic manners of their Jacobin leaders. He saw the false egocentric Enlightenment as the main cause of this disaster, and the French encyclopedia as its symbol. His Enzyklopädie was conceived as a counterpart to the blasphemous work of the French philosophes and as a defense of the true Enlightenment. In it Thun delineates the place of man in the infinite universe, urging him to realize that he is not the center of it. Remembering their animal weakness and evil tendencies, humans should be humble.
The form in which these ideas are articulated is extraordinary. The headings of the articles in Thun's Enzyklopädie range from “normal” topics, such as “Enlightenment,” “nobility,” or “monarchy,” to entries such as “doch,” “umsonst,” “Ebbe,” “Flut,” and so on. In the loose and spontaneous structure, we encounter articles such as “Mensch,” “Menschen,” “menschliche Seele,” then “Mensch” again, and a few more articles, which tackle the same problem under different headings. On the whole, Thun's Enzyklopädie reads like a transition towards Romanticism, and a negative reaction to the Enlightenment's overemphasis on the role of man and his reason in the world.Footnote
63
Apart from the mystics, there were also writers of entertainment literature who kept to the manuscript form. In fact, these “clandestine entertainers” were successors to the Prince de Ligne and Count Lamberg, whom we identified as the founding fathers of aristocratic literature in Bohemia. Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, exercised a direct influence on the authors of the Teplice circle in northern Bohemia, for he stayed in that place every winter from 1794 to the end of his life in 1814.Footnote
64
During the summer season he would stay in Vienna. Most of his works were published during this period of exile, and Madame de Staël helped him reach international fame with her edition of his works.Footnote
65
De Ligne's oeuvre contained unpublished manuscripts as well.Footnote
66
These were concerned with salon conversation, social life, and leisure time. Most of those who left behind a notable literary oeuvre belonged to the northern Bohemian circle around Prince de Ligne and Giacomo Casanova. One was Franz Adam Count Waldstein-Wartenberg, brother of Casanova's employer Joseph Karl Waldstein-Wartenberg. The coterie included Karl Joseph Clary-Aldringen, de Ligne's grandson and Casanova's friend; I will devote a separate paragraph to his extensive literary pursuits below. The Waldstein circle also included Vincenz Waldstein-Wartenberg from the Münchengrätzer branch, who was an ardent freemason. In this circle, Franz Adam and his mistress Caroline Wertmüller (or Ferdinandi—her identity is disputed) penned gallant poems and Oriental tales. The main topic of their work was the relation between the sexes, and it is not always clear which of them had a greater part in the authorship.Footnote
67
The most prolific author of the Teplice circle was Prince Karl Joseph Clary-Aldringen, known as “Lolo.”Footnote
68
His literary model was his grandfather Charles-Joseph de Ligne; in his youth he would spend hours in conversation with the aging Giacomo Casanova.Footnote
69
Lolo Clary belongs fully to the age of Romanticism, but his literary work began in the 1790s as a response to questions of the Enlightenment crisis. As a young teenager, he wrote some theatre pieces and short poems and he began to write a long diary, which he kept from 1795 to 1831.Footnote
70
This diary is his greatest literary achievement. It is a vivid portrayal of the aristocratic society of the Napoleonic era, containing many personal descriptions, short stories, theatre posters, and even drawings. In 1810 Lolo was sent to Paris to announce to Napoleon his proxy wedding with Archduchess Marie Louise in Vienna. After three months in Paris, Lolo continued his travels to Switzerland. As a man of letters, he documented this journey in an impressive diary illustrated with many drawings, which depict the persons of Paris salons, the landscape in Switzerland, or various curiosities he had seen on his journey. The French part of this journal was published in 1914 and it constitutes the only public part of Lolo's oeuvre even today.Footnote
71
From 1810 to 1826, Lolo spent most of his time travelling in France and Italy, and his diaries after 1811 were therefore drastically simplified. From 1826 on, his diaries no longer have the form of literary sketches, for he had inherited his father's estates and princely title and therefore had no time for elaborate literary writings. The last volumes of his diary are just simple collections of theatre posters and filled-in forms with daily records.
However, he penned real works of fiction as well. Building upon the legacy of his grandfather, Lolo wrote a variation on the notorious novel Liaisons dangereuses, but he set it in Vienna and ended his story with the victory of religion over selfish feelings.Footnote
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His Roman en lettres was written as an epistolary novel, just as the original had been. His novel Voyage sentimental à Vienne is preserved only as a fragment, but his crowning work—the novel Mémorial de l'arche—has survived intact.Footnote
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Lolo completed it in May 1831, shortly before his death. It is a collection of fictitious memoirs, supposedly written by the passengers on Noah's ark. The letters portray the boredom and monotony of salon entertainment, alluding to the troubles of the aristocratic lifestyle. The ark works as a symbol of a closed aristocratic society whose members do not have a way out of their narrow world. The memoirs adopt the pretense of being written in different historical times; some of them pose as copies discovered in a fictitious “Babylonian library” and some contain fake comments by later historians. In addition to his novels, Lolo wrote short stories, often mocking the fashionable Gothic novels, and did translations of fashionable authors, such as Walter Scott (into German) and Johann Wolfgang Goethe (into French).
Language, Form, and Topics of Aristocratic Literature
By focusing on the novelty of the facts concerning most of our authors and their works, I have reserved the generalizing interpretation of aristocratic literary achievement for the conclusion. Since literary works existed with a certain framework of relationships between the author, the work, and its audience, these new discoveries change our idea both of literature and its audience. As this article has shown, the divide between the private manuscript and public printed literature was an important formal feature of aristocratic literature. Yet this difference was not clear-cut: there were numerous transitory stages and numerous smaller audiences (families, salon societies, counsels of officials at the head of administrative bodies). A text could have been made “public” without being accessible to the general public. In order to grapple with the multitude of literary works, we may organize them according to the categories of form—print and manuscript—and their relationship to the public and private spheres. Literary works may be public or private either in terms of their addressee or of the place or institution where they originated. Therefore, we must differentiate the milieu of origin from the intended addressee, for both sorts of privacy or publicity were different. Finally, each work conveyed some meaning and, therefore, the communicative aim of each text must also be considered. Each literary work, emanating from that distant eighteenth-century culture, may be placed into the communicative situation and characterized by a system of four coordinates: milieu of origin, form, intended addressee, communicative aim.Footnote
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This system of coordinates is necessary because of the otherness of eighteenth-century aristocratic literature, which is at odds with the modern understanding of literature. Even literary historians often assume that literature should be something printed and public. These coordinates make it possible to characterize the body of literary texts produced by our aristocratic writers while avoiding the dangers of anachronism. What is important to realize is that the manuscript and the “public” text are not two opposite categories but transitive stages within a creative process. The difference between public and private is also blurred by the fact that the form and communicative functions of the text are not necessarily combined; in other words, a public text is not always printed, and a manuscript is not always a private piece of writing. Consequently, the communicative aim of the text must be taken as a separate category, which must be inferred from the reading of the text itself on the basis of its contents and form.
This combination of formal and communicative aspects makes it possible to reconstruct the long-term development of aristocratic literature. It shows that this social group did not produce only entertainment literature and that even amusing literature was subject to change. It evolved from autobiographical sketches of the 1770s to literary fiction, which did not appear until the age of Romanticism. It also reveals that the fortunes of the Francophone aristocratic literature were declining, for the romantic generation of Francophone aristocrats in the early 1800s were no longer able to get their works published. The German mystical literature written by masonic aristocrats never managed to circulate even within a close circle of friends; it remained clandestine and later disappeared.
And how should we assess the noblemen's contribution to the Enlightenment quest for secular morality? In the beginning, I argued that the enlighteners did not just inquire about how people ought to act but also how they really acted. The first question pertained to moral principles, the second one to human nature. It was certainly the second question that the aristocratic writers were most interested in. Human nature was the focus of Lamberg's witty satires, de Ligne's fragments, Hartig's travel essays and historical works, Clary-Aldringen's society novels as well as Buquoy's thoughtful poems and Thun's mystical encyclopedia. In this field, where the art of observation was essential, aristocrats capitalized on the experience they gained during their life at court and in the salon. Only Count Windischgrätz ventured to discuss the question of abstract moral principles. Perhaps the literary pursuits of Bohemian aristocrats were only motivated by their efforts to dispel ennui, but even this was not a marginal topic of Enlightenment debates. Let us not forget that Voltaire himself declared in one of his poems: “Notre ennemi le plus grand, c'est l'ennui.”Footnote
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It has been a long time since scholars contested the dominating Marxist interpretation of the Enlightenment as a “bourgeois ideology”—at least in France—but the historical narratives of European Enlightenments still have difficulty integrating aristocrats into their picture of the Enlightenment.Footnote 1 It is not helpful to divide an early modern society into clearly separated social classes and attribute to each of them different intellectual currents. Looking more closely, we may infer that representatives of the Enlightenment were recruited from various social groups, including the aristocracy and Catholic clergy. Moreover, even eighteenth-century definitions reveal that the philosophe or Aufklärer had never been identified by his or her social origin, but by his or her intellectual achievements.Footnote 2 Who can we, present-day historians, justly include among “enlighteners”?
For the purposes of historical research, a representative of the Enlightenment was someone who complied with the ethical demands of Enlightenment secular morality and who left some written testimony of his mindset for posterity. This definition does not mean that every philosophe or Aufklärer was a moral saint. Even Kant in his doctrine of radical evil accepted the pessimistic idea that man as a moral being is bound to fail, and that no one can attain moral perfection.Footnote 3 However, man was compelled to keep trying because—having self-perception—he was able to distinguish good and evil. Lastly, an Aufklärer or philosophe was obliged to check the facts before making a moral judgment—this feature of Enlightenment morality has often been overlooked. Yet, it was the metaphysician Kant himself who complained that all precepts of moral philosophy remain vain and empty, unless they are substantiated by an investigation of real human nature.Footnote 4 Studying the facts about man and nature helped man orientate himself in the situation and acquire knowledge of human nature. Thus, the moral philosopher would be able to recognize the limits of human possibility.
The first part of our working definition is a response to the present question of Enlightenment studies as to whether it is possible to exclude any eighteenth-century thinkers from the “happy Enlightenment family.”Footnote 5 The ethical concept makes it possible to exclude thinkers who did not admit the necessity of establishing a secular conception of morality and satisfied themselves with old scholastic arguments.Footnote 6 But it also excludes the nihilists, who rejected the necessity of a viable moral concept.Footnote 7 The “family” may include people of conflicting opinions but who were united in their effort to argue for the same goal—to establish convincing arguments for human morality. The second part of our definition is practical: it focuses on those representatives of the Enlightenment who articulated their ideas in a written text, be it a manuscript, printed book, philosophical poem, play, or essay. It could even have been a piece of music. My definition is based on the assumption that even intellectual historians require evidence, for we can no longer rely on our supernatural Einfühlungsvermögen as Wilhelm Dilthey and nineteenth-century cultural historians did. I also emphasize the significance of the inquiry into real human nature and real human acts, for historians who imagine moral philosophy as a quest in lofty metaphysical questions tend to ignore this. If we do not realize this connection, we cannot understand the connection between the historical works and the Enlightenment quest for secular morality.
I have tackled this theoretical question only to dispel the doubts as to whether aristocrats may be included among the “Enlightenment family” without distorting our understanding of what the Enlightenment was. Another objection I often encounter is that their writings should not be taken seriously because they were not honest with themselves in what they wrote. The logic behind this kind of argument is that—no matter what the evidence says—eighteenth-century aristocrats simply must be taken for enemies of new ideas. This objection implies again that the intention of writers was determined by their social origin and that we should subordinate the facts to our preconceived expectations. This is a methodology that makes me wonder what literary history would be like if the works of Goethe, Shakespeare, or other bürgerlich authors were also scrutinized with such a degree of psychological pyrrhonism.
My insistence on the existence of aristocratic writers is not based on any premeditated intention but on a series of discoveries I have made during my research in family archives and chateaux and manuscript collections. It was only after the discovery of these largely unknown texts that I began to think about their place in the history of literature and in Enlightenment discussions. The inclusion of these handwritten and semi-public works on the history of literature is not possible without changing the common idea of what literature is. On the other hand, literary historians have long recognized that our understanding of literature must be historicized, for the notion of literature as an independent art that follows purely aesthetic goals did not exist before the nineteenth century.Footnote 8 Théophile Gautier asserted it in the most aggressive manner in his seminal essay on l´art pour l´art, in which he defended the right of a creative writer to follow purely aesthetic goals.Footnote 9 In doing so, he sought to liberate literature from its subordination to useful goals and determine its difference from the crafts and sciences. In the eighteenth century, the notion of literature (literarische Welt, belles lettres) comprised all kinds of writings, including philosophy, historiography, and the sciences. Prose fiction was not highly esteemed, and hommes de lettres would often write fictional works that claimed to be true stories, authentic letters, diaries, or essays that would follow some useful purpose (including those on practical topics, politics, ethics, economy, travelling, etc.). To prevent anachronisms, some literary historians suggest that “literature” should include all texts that were used in communication.Footnote 10 Yet some qualifying criteria should be applied. For the present study, I include only those aristocratic authors who left behind an accomplished literary work (essay, novel, poem). Following modern approaches to literary history, I do not ask about the abstract categories to which these works belong, but about the way they were used in communication. In what follows, I will first look at Austrian and Czech literary history and then provide a brief survey of all previously known aristocratic authors from the Bohemian Lands and their works, which I will also set into the context of the debates to which they belonged. In the conclusion, I will seek to explain the communicative function of these texts.
Outside the National Literary Canons
So far, the historiography of Austrian literature in the Age of Enlightenment has not considered aristocrats as belonging to the literary canon. Aristocrats have usually been accorded only the role of sponsors and collectors. However, most of the aristocratic writers were unknown, which is why the classical accounts of Austrian literary history in the Age of Enlightenment do not mention them. The classical surveys of the early twentieth century put forward the thesis that the literature of southern Germany and Austria was anchored in baroque and Enlightenment criticism and therefore lacked the essence of “true Austrianness.”Footnote 11 In these accounts, the eighteenth century served only as a prelude to the nineteenth-century classics such as works by Franz Grillparzer, Ferdinand Raimund, and Johann Nepomuk Nestroy. The most recent survey by Klaus Zeyringer and Helmut Gollner has added some new names to the list of eighteenth-century authors but it basically retained this structure.Footnote 12 Aristocrats, as authors, first entered Austrian literary history in the specialized volume edited by Herbert Zeman, which includes a study of aristocratic students who published their early literary works written at the Theresianum in Vienna.Footnote 13 The works of these students were published under the supervision of Michael Denis. Leslie Bodi's classical monograph on Josephine literature does not mention any aristocratic writers.Footnote 14 On the contrary, in the literary historiography of the 1970s and 1980s, the old prejudice that eighteenth-century literature was written by middle-class authors persisted.
The same is true of surveys of Austrian intellectual history. In Eduard Winter's Viennese trilogy, which is the only synthesis of Austrian intellectual history from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, the only noblemen that appear are ministers or church dignitaries, who embody the forces opposing intellectual progress.Footnote 15 A slightly better picture is conveyed by the collective volume Suppressed Humanism, Belated Enlightenment, published in 1992, which marked an important turning point in modern research on this subject.Footnote 16 This volume—written by experts on philosophy—dramatically improved the state of research, for it was not a mere enumeration of names and titles but a collection of in-depth studies of particular thinkers and philosophical problems. Nevertheless, it did not widen its social focus beyond university scholars and clerics and did not include any aristocrats as active participants in the Enlightenment project. One new insight, however, was its acknowledgment of the merit of one nobleman, Karl Borromäus Count Harrach, for his introduction of Kantian philosophy to Austria. Harrach organized Kantian lectures by Lazarus Benavides, which took place in his salon.Footnote 17 The reception of Kantian philosophy is a key problem for those who consider intellectual history to be the same academic discipline as the history of philosophy, and Harrach's contribution to the development of the Austrian Enlightenment should not be forgotten. Members of the Harrach family—who were themselves writing journals, essays, and poems—were, however, not mentioned.
The fact that most of the aristocratic writers used French as their literary language may also explain why they were ignored by literary historians in Austria and Czechoslovakia. After 1918, they found themselves outside the nationalist literary canons of the successor states. The situation in Czechoslovakia was much worse than in Austria because Czech literary history excluded even Germanophone literature from what was supposed to be “Czech literature.”Footnote 18 In the interwar period, the literary historian Josef Hanuš sought to integrate patriotic noblemen into his account of the preparations of the Czech national revival, but his attempt was not followed.Footnote 19 Even Hanuš attributed to them only the role of sponsors and collectors and not of active writers. The only exception was the patriotic educator Franz Joseph Kinsky, whose work was appreciated only because he suggested that young cavaliers should study Czech. After the fall of Communist regimes, which had supported nationalist interpretations of history, the liberated Czech historiography began to show an intensive interest in Czech-German bilingualism, but Francophone authors were not suitable for this new conception, either. This was a common situation in most European countries where eighteenth-century Francophone literature fell out of the national literary canon. In the present research, Russia and Poland have done the most to improve the situation. My research owes a lot to the inspiration of the team around Professor Alexander Stroëv and Professor Elena Grechanaya in Paris.Footnote 20
The Development of Aristocratic Literature: Beginnings
Aristocratic literature in the Bohemian Lands appeared quite late, not before the 1760s. However, the formidable edifice of baroque learning, as described by Robert Evans in his splendid work on the Habsburg monarchy, had already begun to crumble around 1700.Footnote 21 Aristocrats had a key role in the collapse of baroque intellectual foundations. They leveled heavy criticism at the poor standards of Jesuit universities and other scholarly institutions and eventually called into doubt the whole of Catholic learning, with its speculative focus on the knowledge of God and its neglect of practical and secular sciences.Footnote 22 Aristocrats expressed this disagreement in their preference for Protestant universities and their refusal to confer their sons to Jesuit preceptors.
There are three distinguished figures of this transitional period who openly dissented from the Catholic learning of the time: Prince Eugene of Savoy, Count Franz Anton Sporck, and Count Philipp Joseph Franz Hoditz of Hoditz. However, neither Sporck nor Prince Eugene of Savoy produced their own literary or philosophical work. Sporck expressed his dissenting attitudes by commissioning German and Czech translations of Jansenist and Protestant religious literature, which he printed with his own press and then disseminated throughout the German-speaking area.Footnote 23 Prince Eugene of Savoy collected clandestine manuscripts of the early Enlightenment, which was a significant gesture even if he had not read them.Footnote 24 Count Philipp Joseph Hoditz wrote a philosophical manuscript, Libellus de hominis conviventia, sometime between 1696 and 1700.Footnote 25 In this tract Hoditz reflected on the anthropological foundations of justice, refuting the Hobbesian concept of self-preservation as the driving force of human conduct. However, he never mentions Thomas Hobbes's theses of the natural human right and natural human law, which raises some doubt as to whether he had first-hand knowledge of Hobbes's tract. If he did, it was certainly the Latin translation of Leviathan, which may be inferred from his terminology. Hoditz proceeds from the Cartesian and Aristotelian concepts of man, refusing them both in favor of the biblical doctrine that man is the image of God. On this basis, he elaborates a dualist concept of man, torn between the divine and animal parts of his nature. Hoditz then defines what is just conduct and thereby provides the philosophical foundations of jus naturae.
The flourishing of aristocratic literature came much later, in the 1760s, when several members of the upper aristocracy, as well as members of the Habsburg family, showed some literary ambitions. Among the Habsburgs, Princess Isabella of Parma, the first wife of Joseph II, entertained literary interests. Regrettably, most of her writings were destroyed at the end of World War II.Footnote 26 Though she became famous for her alleged melancholy and lesbian inclinations, she also penned several literary essays and short stories and introduced the sentimental style to the Viennese court, which might have been the reason for her bad reputation. Isabella of Parma died in 1763, and at that time, her literary taste and her attachment to sentimentalism were still rather unusual within the context of the Viennese court.
Public Writers
A few years later, the first literary works by Count Maximilien Joseph Lamberg and Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne were printed in France and Germany. These two men may be considered the founding fathers of aristocratic Francophone literature in the Habsburg monarchy. Lamberg came from a Moravian family, but he had a Francophone mother; de Ligne came from the French-speaking Austrian Netherlands and French was his mother tongue. Lamberg's oldest surviving works were published in Augsburg during the time of his service to the bishop. His literary fame is testified by Giacomo Casanova, who made his acquaintance in 1761 during his brief stay in the bishopric city. Lamberg's first works were parodies of scientific tracts on mathematics, natural sciences, or geometry. He also wrote a parody of an epistolary love novel, which survives only in the second edition of 1776, although he dates it to 1751.Footnote 27 It looks like a parody of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Nouvelle Heloise, however, which makes the earlier date improbable. Lamberg left Augsburg after a short time, and after an extended journey through Italy, Corsica, and Tunisia, he settled in Bavaria. In 1774 he published his Mémorial d'un mondain, which is considered his most famous work.Footnote 28 It is an autobiographical account, describing his journey through Corsica and Italy. His main concern is Corsica—its future political constitution and its wild inhabitants. It may be taken for a response to the contemporary discussion started by Rousseau's Du contrat social, in which the Genevan prophet articulated his belief that Corsica was the last nation in Europe that had not been spoiled by civilization and bad laws and that still cherished some hope of drafting a good constitution according to nature.Footnote 29 Many European writers discussed future arrangements for the rebellious island, until the French governor established a new pay d’ états there and decided the question from above.Footnote 30 The romantic leader of the Corsican rebels, Pascoale Paoli, whom the Scottish writer James Boswell venerated in his Account of Corsica (1768), also attracted European thinkers.Footnote 31 Lamberg was provoked by this unfounded adoration, and he aimed to see the “noble savages” with his own eyes and make his own conclusions. His most trusted guide around the island was the French governor Charles Louis de Marboeuf, whom Lamberg admired. He depicts Paoli as vain and simple-minded, with no idea of what was good for his nation. Finally, Lamberg's account implies that the Corsicans were savage, but not noble. Although the novel was a success, Lamberg did not become famous. He stayed in Bavaria for a couple of years and in 1777 he moved back to the Habsburg monarchy, where he lived as an impoverished aristocrat, entertaining his compatriots at the chateaux in Moravia. During the Moravian period of his career, Lamberg wrote some new experimental novels, such as Le canot, or Tableau fantastique, in which he played with the form, changing narrators and breaking the story line.Footnote 32
One of his important activities was his voluminous literary correspondence with Casanova, who lived in the Habsburg monarchy during his second exile from 1783 until his death in 1798.Footnote 33 After a brief career as a secretary to Ambassador Foscarini in Vienna, Casanova settled in the Chateau Dux, where he was employed by Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein as his librarian. Casanova presented the strongest link between Lamberg and the Prince de Ligne, who settled in the nearby city of Teplice, where his daughter Marie Josephine married the Prince Johann Nepomuk Clary-Aldringen. Casanova also established his literary career during his stay in Bohemia. Consequently, the Francophone novels and essays he published in Prague and Dresden belong to the context of aristocratic culture as well.
If we characterize Lamberg as a Francophone cosmopolitan, then his counterpart was the Francophobe patriot Franz Joseph Count Kinsky, who began publishing his works in 1774.Footnote 34 Kinsky wrote his books in German, although he kept his private correspondence in French. He had no sense of humor, and his main concerns were natural sciences, patriotic history, and practical problems of his military service. Kinsky was involved in the establishment of the Bohemian Learned Society, which was formed between 1772 and 1774, and he often contributed to its scientific journal, the Abhandlungen. His contributions pertained to questions of geology and practical service. His books, however, dealt with different problems. His debut was a treatise on aristocratic education, Erinnerung über einen wichtigen Gegenstand, in 1774, in which he proposed a program of military training and education in service to the fatherland.Footnote 35 This tract also vigorously criticized the French education within aristocratic families and called for a patriotic renewal of masculine virtues. Kinsky elaborated on this topic in a sequel, Über die Hofmeister, which discussed the choice and assignments of a preceptor.Footnote 36 Although some scholars devoted poems to him, he never tried his talents at poetry. His intellectual development is quite interesting, however, for he illustrates the general evolution towards conservatism and a return to Christian virtues. After a brief interlude in the position of director of the public university library in Prague, Kinsky was appointed deputy-director of the military academy in Wiener Neustadt, where he became the director in 1785. Here, the patriotic writer turned to the practical problems of military service, writing works on how to polish military boots and how to march in columns. However, his booklet Für die Weltrekruten, of 1781, which implored his recruits to follow their Christian duties, foreshadowed his growing estrangement from the Enlightenment.Footnote 37 This process had begun earlier, as even his Erinnerung had been written as a polemic against Rousseau, not Jesuit education, for which Kinsky, in his private letters, expressed loathing.Footnote 38 This tendency intensified after the outbreak of the French Revolution. Kinsky, now back on the battlefield, penned a lengthy letter to his deputy in Wiener Neustadt, in which he refuted revolutionary ideology and recommended a strict return to elementary Christian morals.Footnote 39 According to his biographer, he then elaborated on these ideas in a programmatic letter, which he sent to the imperial commander-in-chief Prince Friedrich Josias von Sachsen-Coburg.Footnote 40 He died after a series of humiliating defeats in 1805, the result of the deterioration of the military academy due in large part to his conservatism and his frequent absences. Apart from Kinsky, there was another military philosopher, Oberleutnant Georg Count Browne, who published a slim essay, Reflexions politiques et militaires, in 1785.Footnote 41
A much more prolific writer was Franz Anton Count Hartig, who also made his debut in the eventful year of 1774.Footnote 42 He addressed the reading public in an anonymous essay on the advantages of women's education, which was published as a kind of university thesis.Footnote 43 Hartig grew up in Regensburg, where his father served as Bohemia's ambassador to the Permanent Imperial Diet. As there was no university in this city, he received his higher education at the Benedictine monastery, which means that he did not finish his studies with the traditional disputation, the results of which would be published. Consequently, the slim booklet on women´s education might be perceived as a replacement for the disputation or dissertation. The essay was published while Hartig was on his grand tour; after that, his literary activities were halted. He resumed writing in the 1780s when a serious illness constrained him to spend some time at Spa in Belgium. Here he met the physician Jean-Philippe Limbourg, who was himself a man of letters and who encouraged him to start writing again. This event corresponded with the ascension of Joseph II, whose new censorship regulations were understood by many contemporaries as a declaration of freedom of the press.Footnote 44
Hartig felt obliged to celebrate this new liberty with poems and thoughtful books, which made him the most prolific aristocratic writer in Bohemia. He had already recalled himself to the reading public with poems he had been publishing in the Francophone journal Esprit des journaux in Liège. In the 1780s Hartig published two ambitious books of patriotic essays: a French work, Lettres sur la France, Italie et l'Angleterre, in 1785, and, shortly after that, Kurze Betrachtungen über die Aufnahme und Verfall der Landwirtschaft. Footnote 45 The first book is a collection of letters he had written during his grand tour of 1776, and it contains conventional reflections upon the climate and political constitution of the countries he was passing through. The literary form of these letters is quite interesting, for they were published as an edition prepared by the addressee of these letters, who was the physician Limbourg from Spa. In fact, Hartig rewrote the letters for the sake of this edition, but formally he was neither the author nor the editor of this book.
The last of the “public” aristocratic authors was Count Joseph Nikolaus Windischgrätz, who addressed the reading public in a philosophical contest announced in 1783.Footnote 46 If Hartig was unique because of his wide range of genres, then Windischgrätz was unique for his concentration on serious philosophical debates. He was the only aristocratic writer who wrote systematic philosophical essays and got involved in the international debates of the European Enlightenment. Windischgrätz did not distance himself from contemporary issues by using irony and parody as Lamberg did, nor did he waste his energy writing poems, music, and short stories like Hartig. Unlike Kinsky, who was shunned from the literature of entertainment, Windischgrätz did not write on boring practical issues of state service, but on higher questions of philosophical anthropology, ethics, and political philosophy. Count Windischgrätz's main topic was the sensualist ethics of Claude Adrien Helvetius, which were again becoming fashionable in France.Footnote 47 The main goal of Count Windischgrätz's philosophical writings was to combat this pernicious philosophy, which seemed to threaten the basis of morality. He announced his philosophical program in a book with a telling title, Betrachtungen über verschiedene Gegenstände über die man heute sehr viel schreibt [Essays on various subjects on which people often write nowadays]. It pertained to a wide range of anthropological and political questions, including censorship, torture, the constitution, and sensualist anthropology. In his further more detailed tracts, Windischgrätz followed this program in a systematic manner. First, he investigated the anthropological preconditions for the moral behavior of an individual, then proceeded to questions about a political system in a state composed of more individuals, and finally, he sought to reform international relations. During the peace negotiations in Rastatt in 1797 he proposed a system of international relations between states. His greatest published books tackle the problem of “metaphysique animale” or philosophical anthropology.Footnote 48 The strange feature of his moral philosophy is that he was himself thinking in sensualist terms, and his critique of Helvétius was a sort of squared circle. He sought to deny sensualism using sensualist arguments. Unfortunately, he never finished his great philosophical work, in which he planned to resolve the question of the sensual origin of human ideas. In his terms, he was inquiring into the origin of happiness in our soul and in our senses.
However, his political critique of the premises of enlightened absolutism made some impact because he published it in the Austrian Netherlands during the Brabant Revolution against Joseph II.Footnote 49 Windischgrätz denied the premise that despotic rule is justified by the ruler´s obligation to promote the happiness of his subjects, for the achievement of happiness lies beyond the limits of state power. “Our happiness must be our own work,” he asserted.Footnote 50 Each citizen must pursue happiness with his or her own powers; the state is only obligated to remove any obstacles that would prevent citizens from achieving this goal. His main question—whether the ruler may alone change the constitution of a state—ran even deeper. His assertion that the ruler is not empowered to change a constitution on his own, even when the constitution is manifestly bad, denied the monarchical will as the highest source of legal order. According to new liberal ideas, the source of state power no longer lay in the will of the monarch but in the will of the people.Footnote 51 This issue was passionately discussed during the Revolution of 1848 and was ruthlessly put down by the philosopher's son, Feldmarschall Alfred Candidus Windischgrätz.
Private Writers
The writers mentioned above—de Ligne, Lamberg, Kinsky, Browne, Hartig, and Windischgrätz—all published their work. All of them also had a “hidden” part of their oeuvre that existed only in manuscript form. There were also a few aristocratic scientists, who divided their work into a public, scientific part and private “occult” sciences.Footnote 52 Aristocratic literature evolved from handwritten pieces that originated from daily business in the office, the administration of their mansions, their salon entertainment, or their private sphere. A look at aristocratic correspondence of the 1770s shows that aristocratic women had higher aesthetic ambitions by then, for they adopted the elaborate sentimental style that Princess Isabella of Parma had employed a decade earlier.Footnote 53 Regrettably, none of these women had their works published.
If we include these handwritten sentimental letters in literary history, we need to expand our understanding of literature to include works that were not printed and the public status of which may not have been destined for the general public. It is even more necessary if we consider that there was a larger number of aristocrats who produced complete literary or philosophical works that they never published. The reasons why the “clandestine” authors decided not to publish what they had written were certainly not political or religious. They did not write any subversive or atheistic works. The hitherto known “clandestine” authors wrote either on mysticism or for entertainment. Their writings did not follow the same communicative goal. The authors might have wanted to keep the manuscripts within a closed circle of friends who had been initiated into the secret arts. The writings may also have been destined just for small salon societies. The fact that aristocratic entertainment literature was written in French might have played a certain role as well because Francophone literature sold badly in Central Europe. A case in point is Giacomo Casanova's ambitious novel Icosameron from 1788, which turned out to be a commercial flop.
The first of the mystical authors who left behind a large literary legacy was Leopold Adalbert Count Buquoy. He was one of the first freemasons in Prague, at least if we consider those whose membership has been proved. Buquoy appears on the list of members of the lodge Zu den drei gekrönten Sternen of 1765, and he seems to have been involved in the Rosicrucian order as well.Footnote 54 Buquoy was the younger brother of the famous reformer Johann Nepomuk Count Buquoy, but unlike his elder brother, Leopold Adalbert had to take up a military career. After his dismissal from the military service in 1779 he began to write philosophical poems and essays. Most of them deal with issues of philosophical anthropology and religion, such as the poem Sur l'homme, or short poems on famous philosophers.Footnote 55 His longest work is an incomprehensible literary description of a vision that he had at a hill near Nové Hrady (Gratzen) on 12 August 1794, in which the Holy Spirit revealed itself to him. It bears the confusing title Unfehlbare Existenz des immer treu einigen Gottes im Verhältnus gegen alle Schöpfungen. Footnote 56 However, he never published anything in any of the reviews published by Prague's or Vienna's freemasons.
A much more prolific author was Franz Joseph Count Thun-Hohenstein, who is known as Mozart's patron and a miraculous physician.Footnote 57 During his lifetime, Thun attracted negative publicity because he organized public spiritual sessions, believing that he was chosen by the ghost Gablidone to be his successor on the earth.Footnote 58 His spiritual pursuits were revealed to the public in 1788 in an anonymous pamphlet that was aimed against Johann Caspar Lavater, who was involved in Thun's mystical work.Footnote 59 Thun was also a freemason, but only for a short time. From 1783 to 1785 he was a regular member of the famous lodge Zur wahren Eintracht in Vienna, where he held two lectures on the mystical vocation of a freemason.Footnote 60 Since this was a “scholars’ lodge,” his ideas were at odds with the prevailing opinions of the leading members, and that might be the reason why Thun left the lodge after a short time, and his speeches were not published in the Journal für Freymaurer. Around that time, Thun became fascinated by the theory of animal magnetism. He believed that he had a magical healing power in his right arm and started organizing public healing sessions. This stage of his career ended with a disastrous attempt to convince the medical faculty in Leipzig that they should examine his right arm and testify that he possessed the magnetic healing power. A series of articles in Berlinische Monatsschrift exposed this scandal and humiliated Thun even more than the Gablidone scandal.Footnote 61
Nevertheless, Thun was a very productive writer. After the last scandal, he retreated to his private residence where he set about writing a huge encyclopedia, in which he described his mystical way of seeing the world. This work was preceded by several essays, a two-volume Skizzen zu meiner encyklopädie, and a lengthy correspondence with the director of his porcelain manufacture Johann Nikolas Weber.Footnote 62 The final work originated between 1796 and 1799; it contains about 2,000 pages and around 350 articles. The mystical philosopher was writing his encyclopedia during the French Revolution and was outraged by the audacity and disdainful behavior of the revolutionary troops, as well as by the despotic manners of their Jacobin leaders. He saw the false egocentric Enlightenment as the main cause of this disaster, and the French encyclopedia as its symbol. His Enzyklopädie was conceived as a counterpart to the blasphemous work of the French philosophes and as a defense of the true Enlightenment. In it Thun delineates the place of man in the infinite universe, urging him to realize that he is not the center of it. Remembering their animal weakness and evil tendencies, humans should be humble.
The form in which these ideas are articulated is extraordinary. The headings of the articles in Thun's Enzyklopädie range from “normal” topics, such as “Enlightenment,” “nobility,” or “monarchy,” to entries such as “doch,” “umsonst,” “Ebbe,” “Flut,” and so on. In the loose and spontaneous structure, we encounter articles such as “Mensch,” “Menschen,” “menschliche Seele,” then “Mensch” again, and a few more articles, which tackle the same problem under different headings. On the whole, Thun's Enzyklopädie reads like a transition towards Romanticism, and a negative reaction to the Enlightenment's overemphasis on the role of man and his reason in the world.Footnote 63
Apart from the mystics, there were also writers of entertainment literature who kept to the manuscript form. In fact, these “clandestine entertainers” were successors to the Prince de Ligne and Count Lamberg, whom we identified as the founding fathers of aristocratic literature in Bohemia. Charles-Joseph, Prince de Ligne, exercised a direct influence on the authors of the Teplice circle in northern Bohemia, for he stayed in that place every winter from 1794 to the end of his life in 1814.Footnote 64 During the summer season he would stay in Vienna. Most of his works were published during this period of exile, and Madame de Staël helped him reach international fame with her edition of his works.Footnote 65 De Ligne's oeuvre contained unpublished manuscripts as well.Footnote 66 These were concerned with salon conversation, social life, and leisure time. Most of those who left behind a notable literary oeuvre belonged to the northern Bohemian circle around Prince de Ligne and Giacomo Casanova. One was Franz Adam Count Waldstein-Wartenberg, brother of Casanova's employer Joseph Karl Waldstein-Wartenberg. The coterie included Karl Joseph Clary-Aldringen, de Ligne's grandson and Casanova's friend; I will devote a separate paragraph to his extensive literary pursuits below. The Waldstein circle also included Vincenz Waldstein-Wartenberg from the Münchengrätzer branch, who was an ardent freemason. In this circle, Franz Adam and his mistress Caroline Wertmüller (or Ferdinandi—her identity is disputed) penned gallant poems and Oriental tales. The main topic of their work was the relation between the sexes, and it is not always clear which of them had a greater part in the authorship.Footnote 67
The most prolific author of the Teplice circle was Prince Karl Joseph Clary-Aldringen, known as “Lolo.”Footnote 68 His literary model was his grandfather Charles-Joseph de Ligne; in his youth he would spend hours in conversation with the aging Giacomo Casanova.Footnote 69 Lolo Clary belongs fully to the age of Romanticism, but his literary work began in the 1790s as a response to questions of the Enlightenment crisis. As a young teenager, he wrote some theatre pieces and short poems and he began to write a long diary, which he kept from 1795 to 1831.Footnote 70 This diary is his greatest literary achievement. It is a vivid portrayal of the aristocratic society of the Napoleonic era, containing many personal descriptions, short stories, theatre posters, and even drawings. In 1810 Lolo was sent to Paris to announce to Napoleon his proxy wedding with Archduchess Marie Louise in Vienna. After three months in Paris, Lolo continued his travels to Switzerland. As a man of letters, he documented this journey in an impressive diary illustrated with many drawings, which depict the persons of Paris salons, the landscape in Switzerland, or various curiosities he had seen on his journey. The French part of this journal was published in 1914 and it constitutes the only public part of Lolo's oeuvre even today.Footnote 71 From 1810 to 1826, Lolo spent most of his time travelling in France and Italy, and his diaries after 1811 were therefore drastically simplified. From 1826 on, his diaries no longer have the form of literary sketches, for he had inherited his father's estates and princely title and therefore had no time for elaborate literary writings. The last volumes of his diary are just simple collections of theatre posters and filled-in forms with daily records.
However, he penned real works of fiction as well. Building upon the legacy of his grandfather, Lolo wrote a variation on the notorious novel Liaisons dangereuses, but he set it in Vienna and ended his story with the victory of religion over selfish feelings.Footnote 72 His Roman en lettres was written as an epistolary novel, just as the original had been. His novel Voyage sentimental à Vienne is preserved only as a fragment, but his crowning work—the novel Mémorial de l'arche—has survived intact.Footnote 73 Lolo completed it in May 1831, shortly before his death. It is a collection of fictitious memoirs, supposedly written by the passengers on Noah's ark. The letters portray the boredom and monotony of salon entertainment, alluding to the troubles of the aristocratic lifestyle. The ark works as a symbol of a closed aristocratic society whose members do not have a way out of their narrow world. The memoirs adopt the pretense of being written in different historical times; some of them pose as copies discovered in a fictitious “Babylonian library” and some contain fake comments by later historians. In addition to his novels, Lolo wrote short stories, often mocking the fashionable Gothic novels, and did translations of fashionable authors, such as Walter Scott (into German) and Johann Wolfgang Goethe (into French).
Language, Form, and Topics of Aristocratic Literature
By focusing on the novelty of the facts concerning most of our authors and their works, I have reserved the generalizing interpretation of aristocratic literary achievement for the conclusion. Since literary works existed with a certain framework of relationships between the author, the work, and its audience, these new discoveries change our idea both of literature and its audience. As this article has shown, the divide between the private manuscript and public printed literature was an important formal feature of aristocratic literature. Yet this difference was not clear-cut: there were numerous transitory stages and numerous smaller audiences (families, salon societies, counsels of officials at the head of administrative bodies). A text could have been made “public” without being accessible to the general public. In order to grapple with the multitude of literary works, we may organize them according to the categories of form—print and manuscript—and their relationship to the public and private spheres. Literary works may be public or private either in terms of their addressee or of the place or institution where they originated. Therefore, we must differentiate the milieu of origin from the intended addressee, for both sorts of privacy or publicity were different. Finally, each work conveyed some meaning and, therefore, the communicative aim of each text must also be considered. Each literary work, emanating from that distant eighteenth-century culture, may be placed into the communicative situation and characterized by a system of four coordinates: milieu of origin, form, intended addressee, communicative aim.Footnote 74
This system of coordinates is necessary because of the otherness of eighteenth-century aristocratic literature, which is at odds with the modern understanding of literature. Even literary historians often assume that literature should be something printed and public. These coordinates make it possible to characterize the body of literary texts produced by our aristocratic writers while avoiding the dangers of anachronism. What is important to realize is that the manuscript and the “public” text are not two opposite categories but transitive stages within a creative process. The difference between public and private is also blurred by the fact that the form and communicative functions of the text are not necessarily combined; in other words, a public text is not always printed, and a manuscript is not always a private piece of writing. Consequently, the communicative aim of the text must be taken as a separate category, which must be inferred from the reading of the text itself on the basis of its contents and form.
This combination of formal and communicative aspects makes it possible to reconstruct the long-term development of aristocratic literature. It shows that this social group did not produce only entertainment literature and that even amusing literature was subject to change. It evolved from autobiographical sketches of the 1770s to literary fiction, which did not appear until the age of Romanticism. It also reveals that the fortunes of the Francophone aristocratic literature were declining, for the romantic generation of Francophone aristocrats in the early 1800s were no longer able to get their works published. The German mystical literature written by masonic aristocrats never managed to circulate even within a close circle of friends; it remained clandestine and later disappeared.
And how should we assess the noblemen's contribution to the Enlightenment quest for secular morality? In the beginning, I argued that the enlighteners did not just inquire about how people ought to act but also how they really acted. The first question pertained to moral principles, the second one to human nature. It was certainly the second question that the aristocratic writers were most interested in. Human nature was the focus of Lamberg's witty satires, de Ligne's fragments, Hartig's travel essays and historical works, Clary-Aldringen's society novels as well as Buquoy's thoughtful poems and Thun's mystical encyclopedia. In this field, where the art of observation was essential, aristocrats capitalized on the experience they gained during their life at court and in the salon. Only Count Windischgrätz ventured to discuss the question of abstract moral principles. Perhaps the literary pursuits of Bohemian aristocrats were only motivated by their efforts to dispel ennui, but even this was not a marginal topic of Enlightenment debates. Let us not forget that Voltaire himself declared in one of his poems: “Notre ennemi le plus grand, c'est l'ennui.”Footnote 75