Page - 331 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

331Disruption of Old Structures more specifically that “the dissolution of the Jesuit order had almost no impact on the work at the Vienna Observatory.”57 This would have been in conformity with the overall situation of Jesuits in the Habsburg lands after the suppression. Whereas in Western Europe large numbers of Jesuits had been either impris- oned or expatriated and deported to the Papal States, in Austria and its heredi- tary lands the former Jesuits were allowed to stay. As Weltpriester (presbyteri saeculares, “secular priests”), they were given state pensions. In the field of learning, although former Jesuit professors of theology and philosophy proper were in most cases replaced, quite a few professors in other branches of science found themselves in a position where they could continue their careers. The personal trajectories of some of Hell’s interlocutors mentioned earlier in this book may illustrate the complexity of the picture. György Pray at first languished in a rather meager priestly position in the diocese of Esztergom, but then he was accorded by Maria Theresa the title historiographer royal for Hungary, and in 1777 he was appointed first custodian of the University Library in Buda. Both of the two Trnava history professors, Katona and Kaprinai, were initially lodged to parishes in the same diocese, but the former was then able to reclaim his chair at the university relocated to Buda. On a larger plane again, while some former Jesuits of the Austrian province chose emigration, mainly to Prussia and Russia,58 57 Kastner-Masilko, Triesnecker, 47. 58 In the Prussia of Frederick the Great, all former Jesuit gymnasia as well as the Jesuit uni- versity in Wrocław (Breslau) were taken over by the state, but the former Jesuit staff was allowed to continue, meaning that the education system remained effectively unchanged, to the dismay of Voltaire among others. See Hermann Hoffmann, Friedrich ii von Preussen und die Aufhebung der Gesellschaft Jesu, Bibliotheca Instituti Historici S.I. (Rome: Institu- tum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1969); cf., e.g., James van Horn Melton, Absolutism and the Eighteenth-Century Origins of Compulsory Schooling in Prussia and Austria (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 171–99. In the parts of the old Polish assistancy of the Society of Jesus, annexed to Russia as a result of the partition of Poland in 1772, the few hundred Jesuits who were around were never secularized, but reorganized themselves around a new general “in diaspora.” Catherine ii protected them for the same reason as her Prussian counterpart, seeing that they were essential to the school system. Jesuit cen- ters existed in the form of four collegia, in Polack (Polock, Polotsk), Viciebsk (Vitebsk), Orsha and Daugavpils (Dźvinsk, Dvinsk, Daugpilis), and two principal residences, in Ms- tislav (Mścisław) and Mogilev (Mohylów). In the first half of the 1780s, a novitiate as well as a tertianship (house for the third year of probation) was set up in Polack, thus a com- plete program of Jesuit formation was in place. This elicited a certain degree of immigra- tion of former Jesuits from European states where the Society was still suppressed. See Daniel Beauvois, “Les jésuites dans l’Empire Russe 1772–1820,” Dix-huitième siècle 8 (1976): 257–72; Marek Inglot, La Compagnia di Gesù nell’Imperio Russo (1772–1820) e la sua parte nella restaurazione generale della compagnia (Rome: Editrice Pontificia Gregoriana, 1997); Ludwik Grzebień, “ii. Provincia de la Rusia Blanca (1773–1820),” in the entry on “Rusia” in O’Neill and Domínguez, Diccionario histórico de la Compañía de Jesús, 4:3441–49; Daniel R. Schlafly, “The Post-suppression Society of Jesus in the United States and Russia: Two