The revolutionary principles of France merely infected the people in those parts of Germany where their sufferings had ever been the greatest, as, for instance, in Saxony, where the peasantry, oppressed by the game laws and the rights of the nobility, rose, after a dry summer by which their misery had been greatly increased, to the number of eighteen thousand, and sent one of their class to lay their complaints before the elector, A.D. 1790. The unfortunate messenger was instantly consigned to a madhouse, where he remained until 1809, and the peasantry were dispersed by the military. A similar revolt of the peasantry against the tyrannical nuns of Wormelen, in Westphalia, merely deserves mention as being characteristic of the times. A revolt of the peasantry, of equal unimportance, also took place in Buckeburg, on account of the expulsion of three revolutionary priests, Froriep, Meyer, and Rauschenbusch. In Breslau, a great émeute, which was put down by means of artillery, was occasioned by the expulsion of a tailor's apprentice, A.D. 1793. In Austria, one Hebenstreit formed a conspiracy, which brought him to the gallows, A.D. 1793. That formed by Martinowits, for the establishment of the sovereignty of the people in Hungary and for the expulsion of the magnates, was of a more dangerous character. Martinowits was beheaded, A.D. 1793, with four of his associates.[17] These attempts so greatly excited the apprehensions of the government that the reaction, already begun on the death of Joseph II., was brought at once to a climax; Thugut, the minister, established an extremely active secret police and a system of surveillance, which spread terror throughout Austria and was utterly uncalled for, no one, with the exception of a few crack-brained individuals, being in the slightest degree infected with the revolutionary mania.[18] It may be recorded as a matter of curiosity that, during the bloodstained year of 1793, the petty prince of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt held, as though in the most undisturbed time of peace, a magnificent tournament, and the fetes customary on such an occasion. [Footnote 1: Oberlin, the celebrated philologist, an ornament to German learning, a professor at Strasburg, rescued, at the risk of his life, a great portion of the ancient city archives, which had been thrown out of the windows, by re-collecting the documents with the aid of the students. On account of this sample of old German pedantry he pined, until 1793, in durance vile at Metz, and narrowly escaped being guillotined.] [Footnote 2: At Bonn he had the impudence to say to the elector, "I cannot pay you a higher compliment than by asserting you to be no Catholic."--_Van Alpen_, _History of Rhenish Franconia_.]