The phenomenal cost of the Seven Years' War, at some 40 million florins annually, far exceeded even the improved revenue-raising capacities of the Haugwitz system. Well before the conclusion of hostilities, therefore, Maria Theresa agreed to the creation of a new central advisory body, the Council of State. This six-member body had no formal administrative role, and its competence was in theory confined to the Austrian and Bohemian lands; in practice, however, the Council of State advised on the affairs of the entire Monarchy. In the various lands the Representations and Chambers were renamed governorships (Gubernien) in 1763, but continued to be the main arm of government at provincial level. Most local diets had little function after 1763, although their estates continued to approve taxation. By the 1760s, the increase in the number of centrally appointed provincial officials was becoming a significant factor in itself: the state was gradually equipping itself with a bureaucracy responsive to its own demands, not those of local elites.
After 1760 Maria Theresa embarked on a second wave of reforms, which focused more on fundamental changes in the Monarchy's social and economic life. These reforms clearly owed more to the spread of Enlightenment thinking on such issues than the pragmatic, necessity-driven reforms of the 1740s. Ministers by the 1760s were all products of an enlightened education. Above all, these progressive-minded men were joined in 1765 by the new emperor,
Maria Theresa's son and heir Joseph, whom she designated as co-regent and who was, unlike his mother, a genuine child of the Enlightenment in both education and temperament.
Mother and son had a famously difficult relationship: whereas Maria Theresa was all caution and pragmatism, Joseph was impatient, doctrinaire and convinced of his rightness. He was also, however, personally tutored by leading exponents of cameralism, grew up in the company of the enlightened, and was widely read in the works of the French philosophes. Maria Theresa mistrusted his judgement and withheld effective power from him, which was one reason why Joseph became one of the best-travelled Habsburgs, visiting every corner of the Monarchy over the years and returning to Vienna every time bristling with facts and figures, petitions for reform from his mother's subjects and ever more urgent ideas of his own for change. Partly driven thus from behind, partly of her own volition, in the second half of her reign Maria Theresa undertook reforms which struck at the very root of the Monarchy's backwardness, by addressing the conditions in which the vast majority of Habsburg subjects lived.
The most pressing area of concern by the 1760s was land reform. In common with the rest of Eastern Europe, by the mid-century the Monarchy's peasants lived in conditions which had been worsening for generations. Peasants in the Austrian hereditary lands were legally free men, but in the lands of the Bohemian and Hungarian crowns they existed in a state of 'hereditary subjection' or serfdom. Everywhere in the Monarchy, with the exception of the Tyrol, peasants were obliged to perform unpaid labour services, or Robot, on their lords' land as opposed to that they farmed themselves. The number of days' Robot had increased steadily since the sixteenth century, to the point where in some lands of the Monarchy it stood at four days a week, even though the official norm was supposed to be no more than two. Hated by peasants, Robot not only limited the labour they could devote to farming their own plots but ensured that they worked the lord's land with minimum efficiency. Yet the danger inherent in serfdom was increasingly obvious: there were peasant revolts in 1751, 1753, 1755 and 1759. Serfdom was not only inefficient, but it also threatened the stability of society itself.
In response to renewed peasant unrest in the mid-1760s, Maria Theresa and her ministers sought to regulate the landlord-peasant relationship through a series of edicts, known as Robotpatente in the Austrian and Bohemian lands and urbaria in Hungary and Croatia. The principal aim was to reform inefficient usages which so obviously limited the productivity of the Monarchy's population. But Maria Theresa was also motivated by a genuine sense of outrage at rural conditions and a pious determination to do right. The urbarium of 1767 for Hungary prohibited any further enclosure of rustical land and fixed Robot at a maximum of 52 days a year. In 1769 a separate decree was issued for Transylvania: there Robot had been among the highest in the Monarchy at four days a week and was accordingly reduced to three. At the start of the 1770s the government was spurred to renewed action in the western lands by the devastating famine in Bohemia, where an estimated 250,000 people died.5 The Robotpatent for Silesia in 1771, and those for Bohemia and Moravia in 1774 and 1775, limited Robot to three days a week, but not before a revolt had broken out in Bohemia in 1775, which was swiftly put down. Throughout the 1770s further Robotpatente were issued for the Austrian crownlands, with Robot levels varying from none in the Tyrol to four days in Carniola, a reflection of the resistance to the reforms in different provincial diets.
Maria Theresa stopped short of outright abolition of serfdom, which she herself favoured at the time of the Bohemian revolt. The only exception was on royal estates where, beginning in 1775, a reform advocated by Franz Anton von Raab was adopted. The 'Raab system' abolished serfdom and Robot on two Bohemian estates, and parcelled the demesne land out among the peasants, in return for cash rents. So successful was the scheme in raising productivity that by 1777 Maria Theresa authorised its extension to other crown estates. She was dissuaded from imposing the Raab system on private landowners by the counter-arguments of Joseph and her ministers, most of whom baulked at the cost of compensating nobles for the free labour services they would lose.
The second area of reform was education and here the changes wrought were profound. Maria Theresa's own reasons for deploying the state in educational matters were essentially religious: herself no advocate of religious toleration, she was concerned that the Church, still the main provider of education, was not doing enough to maintain the faith and hence the loyalty of subjects to the Monarchy. In addition, however, Maria Theresa was surrounded by enlightened intellectuals who saw the issue of Church, especially Jesuit, control of education as one affecting the efficiency of society as a whole. In 1770 it was specifically proposed to phase out Jesuit teachers and replace them with state-funded lay teachers. Initially shelved because of the sheer lack of qualified teachers, this plan was revived when, in 1773, the papacy itself abolished the Society of Jesus in response to pressure from other Catholic monarchs. Overnight, the Jesuits ceased to exist as an educational organisation, and the sale of their property in the Habsburg lands made it possible to fund an alternative system. Her hand forced, Maria Theresa issued a General School Ordinance for the Austrian and Bohemian lands in 1774, and for the Kingdom of Hungary in 1777.
The purpose of the ordinances was to create a universal, state-run system of education, by which the Monarchy would ensure not only the maintenance of Catholicism but also the inculcation of loyalty to the dynasty and the heightened economic efficiency of the population. Maria Theresa set up three tiers of schooling. There was compulsory primary education for all, with the main stress on religious instruction and vocational skills, but with numeracy and literacy an intrinsic part of the curriculum, especially among the urban population. Middle schools would prepare mainly urban children for either vocational or academic study, and at secondary level the Gymnasium continued as preparation for university. To raise the requisite number of lay teachers, special teacher training schools were established in each provincial capital,
With the curriculum prescribed for both teachers and taught highly centralised, both as to methods and textbooks.
I n practical terms the Theresian school reforms were probably the single greatest stride towards modernity made anywhere in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century. By 1780 some 500 schools had been founded in the Austrian and Bohemian lands, and even more in Hungary, and the number increased the more teachers were produced by the training schools. By the end of the reign the Monarchy had 6,000 schools, teaching 200,000 pupils.
This represented a socio-economic change with important consequences. An entirely new class of literate subjects was being created, which made social and hence economic diversification, urban growth and political ferment all more likely. Just as significant was the impetus given to nationalism, even if the results were fully evident only in the nineteenth century. Primary education, after all, was necessarily in the local language, whether German, Czech or Hungarian, but where the necessary teachers in that language were not available, the question immediately arose: in what language should elementary education be conducted? The very fact that there were no dictionaries or grammars in certain languages, that they did not even exist in literary form, prompted a growing awareness of the need to formalise them. Herder's insistence that language reflected the 'spirit' of a people meant that the 'revival' of language became an overriding preoccupation for some. In the meantime the logic of existing conditions determined that elementary education among the rural masses was perforce conducted in the vernacular or not at all.
Maria Theresa's reign saw three territorial additions to the Monarchy, one of which had major implications for the future. The annexation of Galicia from the Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth, in 1772, was in cameralist terms a valuable acquisition, with 83,000 square kilometres, 2.5 million inhabitants, vast mineral resources and fertile land.6 Yet Galicia was economically backward: Polish landowners, bitterly resentful of the Partition, lorded it over a peasantry which, whether Catholic Polish in the west and north or Uniate Ruthene in the east, was among the most oppressed in the Monarchy, with five days Robot per week. Galicia also contained a Jewish population of over 200,000, far in excess of the 30,000—40,000 in each of Bohemia and Hungary.7 The takeover of this largely Slav province represented a considerable shift in the Monarchy's ethnic balance. Of similar significance was the annexation of the Bukovina from the Ottoman Empire in 1775; this was another ethnic kaleidoscope of Romanians, Ruthenes and Jews. Finally, as a result of the largely bloodless but enormously expensive Austro-Prussian War of the Bavarian Succession, in 1778—9, the Monarchy was awarded the Innviertel, a strip of Bavarian territory on the right bank of the River Inn.
World History
