Although the reign of Maria Theresa saw the most sustained attempt at modernisation of the century, effecting more fundamental change than
Anything which came after, historians have until recently tended to devote more attention to the dramatic escalation of reform under Joseph II. It is not hard to see why. Joseph's 10-year reign seems a whirlwind of purposeful activity, at its centre the restless, ultimately tragic personality of the man one of his biographers called 'the revolutionary emperor'.8 Maria Theresa in the 15 years of the co-regency issued 700 edicts; Joseph churned out that many every year of his reign, at a rate of about two a day, until by his death he had issued over 6,000.9 And yet, as Joseph lay dying, he offered up his own bitter epitaph for his tombstone: 'Here lies Joseph II, who was unfortunate in all his enterprises.'10
Joseph was literally educated to be an enlightened ruler, and central to his outlook was the concept of the rationally ordered, efficient state. A genuine idealist, he saw himself as the 'first servant' of the state and believed, as he put it in 1785, that 'no constitution should exist if it is contrary to the principles of natural and social justice'.11 The rub was that, since the state was the only guarantor of such ideals, it followed that the good of the state transcended all other considerations: 'Every member of a specific community must contribute to the general good in proportion to his property, to his abilities and to the benefit which he himself derives from his membership of that community.'12 As T. C.W. Blanning points out, 'Joseph's state religion' amounted to a radical break with the historical development of the Habsburg Monarchy; it assumed that the Monarchy could be reformed centrally by decree, without regard for the institutional accretions of past centuries.13 This determination to rule absolutely was characteristic of Joseph's temperament. Intelligent and well meaning, he was also an obstinate, inflexible prig, notorious for his obsession with petty detail and his 'hands-on' approach to government. This ruler of a vast empire would drop in unannounced on his officials and time the speed with which they made decisions. He issued minute instructions to local officials, demanding to know whether the houses in towns and villages were individually numbered. He took a personal interest in the suppression of masturbation among military cadets. Apart from his hankering to emulate his role model, Frederick II, by military conquest, which led to disastrous foreign complications, Joseph's temperamental defects can also be said to have undermined most of his domestic reforms. His methods stirred up opposition in crucial quarters, and in the process the cause of modernisation was dealt a fatal blow. Joseph's reforming zeal extended to every facet of life in every corner of the Monarchy. His main reforms were in the realm of civil liberties, Church-state relations, agrarian conditions and administration. None of the changes that Joseph attempted can be understood without grasping that their central thrust was the creation of a unitary state.
Joseph, although a devout Catholic, was, unlike his mother, a believer in religious toleration. This was in part genuine humanitarianism, but it was also because Joseph shared the view of other enlightened monarchs that discrimination on religious grounds was economically irrational and impeded the efficiency of the state. One of his first acts as sole ruler was to start lifting the humiliating restrictions imposed on the Monarchy's Jews: in a series of edicts in 1781—2 Jews were allowed greater educational and occupational opportunities, freedom of movement and worship, and were no longer required to wear the yellow Star of David on their clothing. In a similar vein was the Toleration Patent of October 1781, which accorded freedom of worship to Lutherans, Calvinists and Orthodox Christians. With this, for the first time, went formal civil equality: members of all these tolerated denominations could own property, enter higher education and join guilds and government employ. There were limits to Joseph's concept of toleration, however: groups falling outside the designated faiths did not qualify, and the clear aim of tolerating the Jews was to facilitate their assimilation.
The relaxation of censorship in 1781 was another eye-catching innovation. In reality complete freedom of expression was not on offer: the prudish emperor was still prepared to ban pornography, violently anti-clerical material and much else, on the ground that none of this contributed to the well-being of the state. Not all Joseph's subjects agreed with him, and despite the controls, the first half of the 1780s saw an astonishing proliferation of publishing. In the latter half of the reign the censor's pen was wielded with increasing frequency, but the important thing was that the freedom to publish, while it lasted, played a major role in politicising the Habsburg Monarchy.
An essential prerequisite of state-building, in Joseph's eyes, was the rationalisation of the legal system and criminal law, but he was also motivated by the spirit of the age. To this end he had already prevailed on Maria Theresa to abolish torture in the Austrian and Bohemian lands in 1776, and this was extended to the rest of the Monarchy when Joseph became sole ruler. Similarly enlightened, on the face of it, was the abolition of the death penalty, of mutilation as a punishment, and of trying witchcraft and magic as capital offences. Joseph was a sincere egalitarian, who denounced the privileges of the nobility, proclaimed the principle of equality before the law, and opened the imperial parks of Vienna to the public. Yet his idea of a just punishment left much to be desired by modern standards: offenders formally spared the death penalty could still suffer it in the end in being condemned to tow barges on the Danube. As an adviser chillingly put it, this was 'punishment useful to the state', a phrase with a ring of the twentieth-century Gulag to it.14 The fact that members of the nobility could be, and were, punished in this way, like any commoner, sent shock waves through the whole of society, but alienated many of the traditional elites.
At the heart of Joseph's agenda was his conviction that it was essential to reshape the role of the Church in society. Under Maria Theresa what has misleadingly been called 'Josephinism' had already got under way, with the recognition that the Church must contribute to the costs of the state through taxation of Church lands, and proceeds from the sale of religious institutions closed down after the dissolution of the Jesuits in 1773 were being used to bankroll the new school system. Joseph went even further than his mother, brusquely rejecting the authority of the Pope in the Monarchy, continuing with the work of secularising monasteries, insisting on state-run training of clergymen, creating 600 new parishes and permitting civil marriage for the first time. In the course of Joseph's reign some 700 monasteries out of 1,700 were appropriated by the state, and the Religious Fund set up to administer the profits resulted in the building of more schools and charitable institutions like the huge General Hospital in Vienna.
Land reform dominated Joseph's reign, as it had Maria Theresa's. Although Joseph had opposed outright abolition of serfdom in the 1770s, by the time of his succession he was convinced that hereditary subjection was not only an affront to natural law and the equality of man but also an ever more obvious impediment to the efficiency of the state and a growing threat to social stability. Most annoying of all, the private nature of the landlord-peasant relationship meant that the noble, not the state, drew what meagre profit there was to be had from serfdom, while the unfreedom of the peasant tied up vast reserves of labour, which would otherwise be available to trade and industry.
In 1781 a series of decrees further regulated the peasant's status. The Penal Patent defined the judicial procedure to be followed by manorial courts against peasants in their jurisdiction and limited the punishments which could be meted out. The Subjects' Patent gave the peasant legal redress against his lord, albeit through a very complicated system, and provided for an appeals procedure to the local administrative authorities. The Buying-In Patent gave peasants the right to buy the holdings they farmed from their lord, although the practical obstacles to such a move remained enormous. Most important of all, the Serfdom Patent abolished 'the servile status of subjects', that is peasants, wherever it still existed in the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands; it also abolished the obligation to perform domestic service.15 In addition peasants were now legally free to marry, to take up a trade or train for an occupation, to migrate and to own property. The Serfdom Patent did not abolish Robot, nor manorial jurisdiction over peasants, but it limited the peasant's obligations to the performance of stipulated Robot and any other payments in cash or in kind already agreed on. Later decrees abolished the nobles' monopolies on milling, brewing and distilling, and limited the nobles' right to hunt over the peasants' crops. The Directive Regulation of March 1783 finally ended Robot on royal estates; it also aimed to extend the Raab system to private estates everywhere except Galicia. In 1784, a separate patent for Galicia finally limited Robot there to three days per week rather than five. A separate Serfdom Patent was issued for Hungary in 1785.
Joseph had no intention of stopping there. In 1783 he initiated a survey of all land in the Monarchy, on the assumption that since all wealth derived from land, so it was essential for the state to tax it equally. None of the preparations for instituting a general land tax was necessarily likely to improve the peasants' conditions. Yet the mere fact that peasants had been granted rights and freedoms gave rise to powerful social tensions, like the lifting of the lid on a cauldron. In Hungary, where the Serfdom Patent had not yet been promulgated, peasant discontent escalated. A rebellion in Transylvania in the winter of 1784—5, led by the Romanian peasants Vasile Korea and loan Cloaca, rapidly attracted 36,000 supporters, who went on a violent rampage against noble landowners and their families, slaughtering thousands. Korea's rebellion was put down with even greater brutality by the army and the Transylvanian nobility, and Korea and Cloaca were executed. Tellingly, however, Korea had raised the following he did on the strength of his false claim to be acting on Joseph's authority. The landowning elite across the Monarchy noted this in horror, even though the uprising gave Joseph all the justification he needed for issuing the Hungarian Serfdom Patent the following year.
Undaunted, Joseph forged ahead with his general land tax, issuing the Taxation and Urbarial Patent in February 1789. The essence of the Taxation Patent was that it required all 'feudal' obligations of the peasants, including Robot, to be commuted into cash, thus making such payments liable to taxation. On the basis of the completed land survey, the peasant was to receive 70 per cent of the gross produce, while 12.5 per cent went to the state and 17.5 per cent to the landowner.16 This amounted to nothing less than the introduction of a money economy. If implemented, it would have revolutionised the various peasant-based societies of the Monarchy in much the same way as the renunciation of 'feudalism' in France, later that year, transformed French society.
One of the reasons why this most fundamental of Joseph Il's reforms remained stillborn was the way in which he approached the administration of the Monarchy. Joseph took the absolutist element of enlightened absolutism seriously. To him it was axiomatic that the Monarchy could be ruled efficiently only if it were centrally organised and controlled; the historic institutions and customs of its different provinces were mere annoying baubles. Accordingly Joseph not only refused a formal coronation as king of Kungary, as the coronation oath would have obliged him to uphold Kungary's laws and constitution, but he also refused to convene the Hungarian Diet, which had not met since 1764. With even more offensive symbolism, signifying his centralising intent, he then had the Crown of St Stephen brought from Pressburg, the Kungarian capital, to Vienna and consigned it to the imperial treasury chamber; a similar fate befell the Bohemian Crown of St Wenceslas.
In practical terms the main agents of Joseph's absolute will were the imperial bureaucracy and the army, the principal unifying elements in the Monarchy. Certainly the increased training and professionalism of the army owed much to Joseph's personal interest. The problem with the bureaucracy, however, was that trained officials, whose first loyalty was to the state, were few in number even in the 1780s; it took time to create a class of dedicated bureaucrats. Joseph can also claim to be one of the godfathers of the modern police state: in the latter part of his reign especially, as his difficulties multiplied, he proved more willing to resort to surveillance and denunciations as a means of controlling his subjects. A secret police was established in Lower Austria in 1782, was centralised in 1786 and finally applied to the whole
Monarchy in 1789. Originally for supervising the bureaucracy, this police network was gradually extended to watching the general public and foreigners.
Most explosive were Joseph's attempts to refashion the civil administration generally, which brought him into head-on collision with the Hungarian nobility. In 1784 he decreed that German was to be the language of state and administration in Hungary forthwith; officials throughout the Monarchy, with the exception of Belgium, the Italian provinces and Galicia, would be given three years to become proficient in this language or lose their positions. For Joseph this was only rational. As he replied to the protest of the Hungarian chancellor, 'You can easily work out for yourself just how advantageous it will be when there is only one language for written communications in the Monarchy and how conducive that will be to binding all the different parts to the whole and to creating a sense of fraternity among all the inhabitants.'17 The likelihood that peoples across the Monarchy, in an age of dawning national consciousness, might resent this logical proposition was, for Joseph, hardly worth consideration. On the contrary, he sought to expedite this transition by decreeing that German would also become the language of instruction in all educational institutions above elementary level, in all parts of the Monarchy.
At the same time Joseph took the decisive step towards a truly central government. Beginning in Transylvania in 1784, and ignoring historic county boundaries, he redivided the province into 11 new districts, headed by officials directly responsible to Vienna. In 1785 it was the turn of Hungary, divided into 10 similar units. The crucial provocation here (the language issue aside) was that these changes bypassed the 52 Hungarian counties and two 'free districts'. Each of these sent two of their representatives to the Diet, if it met; more importantly, they elected their own officials every three years, who formed the real administrative backbone of the kingdom. It was the county officials, nobles all, who still carried out government decrees, collected taxes, administered justice and raised recruits. To the Hungarian nobility, Hungary's separate status as a kingdom, governed by its own laws and constitution, and agreed by successive pacts with the dynasty, was sacrosanct; sidestepping the fundamental laws in this fashion not only broke the compact between crown and nation but also entitled the nation, that is the nobility, to resist. In reality there was little sign of insurrection in Hungary in the first years of Joseph's reign, but resentment was high after 1784, compounded by Joseph's urbarial decrees and the land tax of 1789. The real danger would come if Hungary's nobles received encouragement and support from a foreign power.
1 n 1789 this is precisely what happened, as Joseph Il's involvement in foreign affairs rendered him vulnerable to pressure both foreign and domestic. The unravelling began when Austria joined Russia in its war against the Ottoman Empire in 1788, more for the purpose of limiting Russian expansion in the Balkans than for any specific territorial ambitions on Joseph's part.
The Turkish war was unsuccessful to start with, with Austria's formidable army ill-deployed and hindered, rather than helped, by Joseph's personal command at the front in the first campaign. At the same time, a full-scale revolt was brewing in the Austrian Netherlands against Joseph's abolition of ancient laws, and when violence did break out in the course of 1789, with much of the army tied down in the Balkans, there was little Joseph could do to counter it. In Hungary, emboldened by the sudden increase in Joseph's financial needs, the nobles refused to cooperate with revenue collection and clamoured for the Diet to be called. Worst of all, the Prussian government in 1789 established contact with the forces of opposition in both Belgium and Hungary, and at the start of 1790 it concluded an alliance with the Ottomans.
Faced with the threat of Prussian invasion, Joseph caved in. Mortally ill with tuberculosis, he first revoked his edicts concerning the Austrian Netherlands in November 1789. In January 1790 the emperor conceded defeat in Hungary, agreeing to convene the Diet and revoking all his decrees for Hungary except the Toleration Patent, the Serfdom Patent of 1785 and some of his ecclesiastical decrees. Joseph died on 20 February 1790, embittered by the lack of understanding which had greeted his reforms and blind to the way in which his own obstinacy had imperilled them.
World History
