Page - 322 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 7322 other internal factors played a part.32 The decisive blow, however, was dealt by the Patent on Freemasonry, issued on December 11, 1785 by Joseph ii, who was always ambivalent about the movement, and decided to bring it under stricter control in line with the general thrust toward greater surveillance over the public sphere. There was to be only one lodge per provincial capital, obliged to regularly report to the police about meetings, membership, and so forth. According to the German naturalist, philosopher, traveler, and later “Jaco- bin” Georg Forster (1754–94), who joined Zur wahren Eintracht during a visit to Vienna, “the first occasion for the reform of freemasonry in Austria arose from the secret gatherings of the Hungarians, who wanted to work against the system of the emperor. Namely, these gentlemen used masonic meetings as the pretext to discuss the principles of their opposition.”33 This observation leads us to the last contextual aspect we briefly need to consider before resum- ing the narrative of Hell’s trajectory in the 1770s and 1780s: the Hungarian Enlightenment,34 whose relevance to this section arises from Hell’s newly con- ceived interest in the Hungarian language and history, and more generally in his country of origin. As regards freemasonry in Hungary, by 1775 it had developed its own, full- fledged “Constitutional System”—the Draskovich Observance, so named after one of the founders35—and soon enough it united “the best brains of all the counties,” as eminent writer Ferenc Kazinczy (1759–1831) wrote of the Pest lodge Magnanimity in his recollections.36 Besides organizational issues, one noteworthy feature of the constitutions is the assignment of various tasks to different classes of the brethren, while all of them were required to seek the 32 Morrison, “Harmony and Discord in the Sciences,” 120–21; Karstens, Lehrer—Schriftsteller— Staatsreformer, 269–75. 33 Forster (conveying the account of a Galician official) to Christian Georg Heyne, October 12, 1786, cited in Reinalter, “Ignaz von Born und die Illuminaten,” 364. Cf. Wangermann, Waffen der Publizität, 126. 34 For overviews in Western languages, see Moritz Csáky, Von der Aufklärung zum Liberalis- mus: Studien zum Frühliberalismus in Ungarn (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akad- emie der Wissenschaften, 1981); Domokos Kosáry, Culture and Society in Eighteenth-Century Hungary (Budapest: Corvina, 1987); Gábor Vermes, From Feudalism to Revolution: Hungar- ian Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Monarchy, 1711–1848 (Budapest: Central European Press, 2014). 35 János Draskovich (1740–81). Previously, the Hungarian lodges had been under the direc- tion of the Grand Landlodge of the Freemasons of Germany. An excerpt from the new “system” has been published in the valuable source collection Réka Lengyel and Gábor Tüskés, eds., Learned Societies, Freemasonry, Sciences, and Literature in 18th-Century Hun- gary (Budapest: mta Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont, 2017), 157–61. See also Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 137–42. 36 Cited in Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs, 270.