The Intelligentsia

The period saw remarkable expansion in the functions and numbers of the intelligentsia. At the end of the era of the principality, Transylvania had a rather well-developed educational system, but its non-clerical intelligentsia was small and marked by little functional differentiation. Ferenc Pápai Páriz was both a lexicographer and an author of medical treatises; Sámuel Köleséri functioned as a mining expert, a physician, and a civil servant before becoming a statesman. The case was similar with less eminent figures, for polymaths were more the rule than the exception. Nor did intellectuals shrink from less rarefied pursuits; no one would deny that the great typographer, Miklós Misztótfalusi Kis, belonged to the intelligentsia.

This pattern survived into the period after 1711, and not just in the case of those who pursued their earlier multifaceted careers, but also with intellectuals such as Mihály Szent-Ábrahámi and Péter Huszti. The low level of functional differentiation was linked to the fact that there was limited demand for a lay intelligentsia in the society of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The clerical intelligentsia, on the other hand, was reinforced by the introduction of monastic orders and the training of Catholic and Uniate priests. The most distinctive segment of the lay intelligentsia consisted of the better educated members of the central administration. This stratum, which numbered no more than 60–70 nationwide, included lawyers, treasury officials, and senior civil servants who had risen by virtue of their professional knowledge and abilities. There was little demand for intellectuals in local government, and, even in urban administrations, there would be no more than one or two people who could be qualified as intellectual.

{2-664.} This social pattern began to undergo significant change in the mid-1700s. Between 1760 and 1771, the central government's functional branches were converted into full-fledged administrative departments; in the case of the Treasury, this change came towards the end of that period. The Gubernium's sessions generally coincided with those of the judiciary; to provide greater continuity, from 1754 onwards, state affairs were supervised by three or four councillors, assisted by a secretary, during the legislative recess. Only in 1760 did it become a general rule that councillors remain permanently at the seat of government. That same year, an attempt was made to put order in the Gubernium's paper work with the introduction of docketing. The first major administrative reform, introduced in 1771 by Governor Maria Joseph Auersperg, was part of a general reform of government administration in the Habsburg empire.

These changes generated a need for more civil servants. At the time of the principality, the chancellery employed no more than two or three secretaries. In the mid-1790s, the Gubernium's staff included fourteen secretaries and the same number of senior clerks. To be sure, most of these posts were given to aristocrats and landed nobles, who do not fit our definition of civil service intelligentsia. But the recorders, clerks, and registrars in the various government offices were career civil servants, even if some may have had landed property. There were between 50 and 55 civil servants of this rank in the Gubernium, ten in the office of the national high commission, and between 35 and 45 (in fact, the entire staff, apart from the chairman) at the national auditing office. There were fewer career civil servants at the Treasury and the appeals court than at the Gubernium. The twenty-odd clerks at the Transylvanian court chancellery and the civilian employees at military headquarters can also be counted part of the civil service intelligentsia. That three-hundred strong group was at least three times the size of the civil service establishment a hundred years earlier. The category can be {2-665.} further expanded to include the growing number of professional civil servants in local government as well as officials in the Treasury's district offices.

Many members of the civil service intelligentsia had legal training, but the legal profession was also in expansion. For centuries, people in Hungary and Transylvania had taken recourse to legal counsel, but these exercises in procuratoria constitutio could involve as many as a dozen names, including influential politicians. In Transylvania, the first professional lawyers appeared in the later 1700s, although most of them preserved the traditional lifestyle of the nobility. The expanding professional civil service also came to include county prosecutors.

The pedagogical intelligentsia showed even faster expansion in this period. The profession of schoolmaster and teacher was not wholly divorced from a priestly calling. The teachers at Catholic and Uniate middle schools and colleges were members of religious orders; and more than one of their Protestant counterparts gave up a teaching position in favour of the better remunerated and more comfortable church ministry. However, expansion of the profession went hand in hand with secularization. Public elementary schools grew in number, partly because the practice of enlightened absolutism favoured general education; people possessed of basic knowledge were better taxpayers and more orderly citizens. To be sure, the French Revolution prompted some second thoughts at the apex of power about the merits of mass education, but the expanded school system was off and running. Some of the Churches (particularly those that felt constrained by official discrimination) also took pains to expand their educational activities. Further support for public education came from the Treasury and the frontier guard organization. These various efforts bore fruit only gradually; in 1820, the majority of local agents of the socage census in Hungarian-inhabited districts was still illiterate. Yet the growing number of teachers was a harbinger of progress.

{2-666.} A major change in the medical profession was the appearance, at the beginning of this period, of city and district physicians and surgeons. Public health was the responsibility of the Commissio Sanitatis, which was presided by the military commander and included medical experts as well as representatives of the Gubernium and the Treasury. Previously, the commission had concentrated on the control and prevention of epidemics. The government had ordered the establishment of municipal medical offices 'to care for the poor tax-paying people' in 1752, and of town physicians soon afterward, but it left it up to local authorities to cover the costs. Between 1752 and 1762, only six local authorities appointed public health officers, and at very low rates of pay, while the rest ignored the order. In 1770, the Gubernium issued a decree setting the pay of public medical officers at 200 forints, and later raised it to 400 forints.

These were the modest beginnings of a national health care system. Apart from those employed as public health officers, a small number of physicians and surgeons carried on a private practice. In 1772, Kolozsvár had four fully qualified physicians (not counting the personal physician of the castle's commander) as well as six surgeons who held certificates from the barbers' guild. The Treasury appointed its own doctors and surgeons in the mining districts.

Enlightened absolutism also brought expansion in the ranks of Transylvania's technical intelligentsia. A national building authority was created in 1788 to oversee public works, and municipal land surveyors (geometra) were appointed. As noted, the reinvigoration of the metal mining sector brought with it a growth in the number of technical experts.

Although the intelligentsia still accounted for only a small fraction of Transylvanian society, it was an essential factor in the spread of the Enlightenment and the emergence of the national movements.