THE FIRST THERESIAN REFORMS 1740-60

Charles VI's efforts to win acceptance of the Pragmatic Sanction, which by recognising Maria Theresa's right to succeed also asserted the indivisibility of the Habsburg realms, had been directed abroad as well as at home. By 1740 most European governments had recognised the Sanction in principle, but in practice this proved no security. The accession of Maria Theresa, with as yet no male heir, meant that the elective dignity of Holy Roman Emperor was contested. Charles Albert of Bavaria immediately put forward a claim to be emperor and was supported by France and Spain. He also claimed, with less justification, the succession to the Austrian hereditary lands. It was in response to this that Frederick II of Prussia offered to 'defend' the Habsburg Monarchy in return for the wealthy duchy of Lower Silesia. When Maria Theresa rejected this transparent blackmail, Frederick marched his troops into the duchy in December 1740. Despite bitter fighting the Monarchy failed to dislodge the Prussians, and by the summer of 1741 an anti-Austrian coalition had been formed, consisting of Bavaria, France, Spain, Prussia and Saxony—Poland. Only Russia offered assistance, but was promptly distracted by a French-inspired attack from Sweden. The coalition's forces invaded Upper Austria in October and had taken Prague by December; in January 1742 Charles Albert was crowned Holy Roman Emperor as Charles VII. The Monarchy appeared to be facing partition.

The Habsburg who met this catastrophe was a heavily pregnant 23-year-old, indifferently educated and previously excluded from affairs of state, whose husband was generally deemed incompetent and whose fractious ministers were for the most part decrepit. Yet Maria Theresa was also stubborn, strong-willed, pragmatic and a shrewd judge of people. Although the first years of her reign were necessarily devoted to the task of ensuring the Monarchy's simple survival, Maria Theresa made a crucial contribution to that survival by signalling so clearly her determination to resist.

In terms of immediate response there was little Maria Theresa could do to reverse the seizure of Lower Silesia. At 80,000 men each the Austrian and Prussian armies were of equal size, but the Monarchy had its enemies in the west to consider too. With the Franco-Bavarian army on her doorstep in the summer of 1741, Maria Theresa chose to concentrate on the more pressing threat. Armed with her six-month-old son Joseph and the allure of a female in distress, she appeared before the Hungarian Diet at Pressburg in September and extracted from the traditionally recalcitrant Magyar nobles a commitment to raise 55,000 troops for the defence of the Monarchy. In reality the number raised did not exceed 10,000, and that at the price of reconfirming the nobles' tax exemption. Yet the political importance of the Hungarians' support was immense: it convinced Frederick II that the Monarchy was likely to survive and led him to seek an armistice with Maria Theresa in October.

As a result the Monarchy was able to go on the offensive in 1742. Not only was Upper Austria retaken, but Habsburg forces also went on to conquer Bavaria, occupying Munich. When Charles VII died in January 1745, his successor was only too glad to negotiate the return of Bavaria, in exchange for supporting the election of Maria Theresa's husband to the imperial throne as Francis I (1745—65). Silesia, however, remained irrecoverable, and the bloody, second Silesian War was finally concluded in December 1745, leaving the Monarchy only a modest corner of what had been its wealthiest province. War with France and Spain dragged on until 1748.

Long before the conclusion of this 'War of the Austrian Succession', Maria Theresa had embraced change. In a series of reforms she and her ministers for the first time gave the Monarchy something like the trappings of a modern state. In administrative terms, centralised institutions brought some coherence into the key areas of foreign policy, the army and domestic affairs. A State Chancellery, in 1742, superseded a bewildering array of bodies hitherto involved in foreign policy. A General War Commissary, from 1746, assumed many of the functions of a war ministry. And in 1749 the creation of the Directory of Administration and Finance meant that, for the first time, there was a single governing body for the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands. Hungary, whose support had been so vital for Maria Theresa in 1741, was tactfully left untouched by this last reform.

The guiding intelligence behind these changes was Count Friedrich Wilhelm von Haugwitz, a refugee from Prussian Silesia strongly influenced by cameralist thinking. Haugwitz soon applied his financial genius to the Monarchy's chronic cash-flow problems. In 1747 he pushed through the crucial reform of persuading the diets to double their contributions and extracted from most of them a fixed contribution. Equally innovative was the imposition of taxation on the nobility and clergy of the Austrian and Bohemian crownlands, a reform Haugwitz argued was essential if the peasantry were not to be driven to revolt. Finally, regularity of income was ensured by appointing court deputations, in 1748, to take charge of the money raised; increasingly the officials responsible for collection were royal appointees. Hungary, again, was unaffected by this reform and the Hungarian nobility remained exempt from taxation. Nevertheless the Hungarian Diet, which already paid a fixed contribution, continued to do so and in 1751 increased the amount.

Other reforms undertaken in this early period show a concern with social and economic change altogether more radical than anything contemplated before. In economic terms Maria Theresa undoubtedly continued cameralist policies pursued by her predecessors. Native manufacturers received subsidies and were protected from outside competition by successive tariff increases in the 1750s. Over land reform, Maria Theresa showed even in the 1740s a concern for protecting the peasantry from the worst excesses of serfdom, which reflected not so much philanthropy as a cameralist view that an oppressed peasantry meant an inefficient economy and hence a weak state. Accordingly, the new tax regime levied half from the 'dominical' land reserved for the nobles' own use and half from the 'rustical' land which peasants farmed for themselves. Nobles were not supposed to shift their share of the tax onto their peasants, nor were they allowed simply to take over rustical holdings to lighten their own tax burden, which lessened tax revenue from peasants. Well-intentioned though these rules were, they proved difficult to enforce.

It was in cultural and educational matters that the Theresian break with the past was most obvious. This was due less to Maria Theresa herself, who though anxious to modernise the machinery of state, was socially conservative, than to the advisers around her from an early stage. Several members of the new State Chancellery had been educated at north German universities and were ardent cameralists. Equally influential were the writings of Italian reformers, who shaped the thinking of a generation of Austrian clergymen and criticised the obscurantism of the Church and above all the powerful Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, for their backward and unscientific approach to education.

A decisive shift occurred in the early 1740s, when control of censorship was taken away from the Jesuits, signalling that there should be a freer flow of ideas into the Monarchy. New faculties of history, philosophy, geography and 'cameral science' were founded at the universities, and the number of Jesuits in faculties was gradually whittled down. The Theresianum school was founded in 1746 to impart a modern education to the Monarchy's civil servants, in 1751 followed the Military Academy for army officers, and in 1754 the Oriental Academy for diplomats, with a speciality in teaching languages. The cumulative effect, traceable within the next few decades, was to create an educated elite capable of carrying the modernisation agenda even further.

The results were remarkable. From a total revenue in 1744 of some 20 million florins (about ?2 million), the proceeds of the new system reached twice that by 1754. The taxes raised from the Austrian crownlands alone, by the early 1760s, were over three times those received at the start of the reign. Increased revenue, moreover, enabled the arm of the state bureaucracy to reach further: whereas there were only 6,000 state officials in 1740, by 1762 their number was 10,000 and by 1782, 20,000.3 Most impressively, the Monarchy's military strength was enhanced in the most convincing way possible: by 1756 it was able to field a standing army of 180,000 men, and at the height of the Seven Years' War, in 1760, the total reached 250,000.4

Renewal of war with Prussia and the reconquest of Silesia were, of course, the ultimate aims of this administrative rationalisation. Diplomacy effected a 'diplomatic revolution' in the Monarchy's traditional alliances, with France and Russia as allies. The Monarchy entered the Seven Years' War in 1756 rich both in cash and in allies; yet the outcome of this conflict was a bitter disappointment. Prussia's military superiority, and Frederick's own skill as a commander, made it a tough nut to crack, despite being vastly outnumbered. The alliance, by contrast, was a shambles: France, heavily defeated by Prussia at the outset, was preoccupied with its colonial war with Britain, and the Monarchy's own military leaders proved no more than competent, for all the improvements in the size and quality of Habsburg forces. The withdrawal of the Monarchy's allies by 1763 meant there was no option but to conclude peace with Prussia and concede Silesia for good; the entire conflict had been for nothing.