The Habsburg Monarchy and the Enlightened Despotism of Joseph II

Solving the post-war financial problems of the 1760s led Maria Theresa into conflict with the aristocracy. In 1764 she tried to force the Hungarians to carry a fairer share of imperial taxes, but the Hungarian Diet blocked her plans. Resistance to tax reform led Maria Theresa in a surprising direction—toward the emancipation of the peasantry from the bondage of serfdom. Maria Theresa’s most influential adviser in the emancipation of the serfs was her son, Joseph, whose reign in Austria would later provide the best illustration of enlightened despotism in eighteenth-century European monarchism.

Joseph was Maria Theresa’s first son, born most inconveniently in 1741 when his mother was confronted with the War of the Austrian Succession. His mother ordered that he not be given a rigorous, military education, and Joseph consequently acquired many of his ideas from reading the philosophes, not from strict tutors. Joseph came to see himself as the embodiment of the Enlightenment, the person who could link reason with absolute powers. When his father died in 1765, Joseph became the Holy Roman Emperor and coregent with his mother in Austria. Maria Theresa shared some of her son’s reformist ideas but tried to keep tight control of him and his friends, whom she called the Aufklärungs (Enlightenment) Party. After her death in 1780, Joseph could enthusiastically write, “I have made philosophy the legislator of my empire,” but the same was not true of Maria Theresa. She had learned to rule in tough circumstances, and her policies often showed this. She believed in the use of torture, she was a brutal anti-Semite who launched a pogrom to drive all Jews out of Bohemia, and she often betrayed a startling insensitivity to the life of a peasant nation. But her stern, and sometimes cruel, policies created the stable, centralized government with a well-regulated army and well-balanced treasury that would make the enlightened policies of her son possible.

The mixed personalities of mother and son launched enlightened despotism in Austria with a compromise version of emancipation of the serfs. Years of famine and periodic peasant rebellion had shown that the serfs needed relief. Joseph urged his mother to act, and Maria Theresa accepted his arguments, writing, “The lords fleece the peasants dreadfully. . . . We know, and we have proof of the tyrannical oppression under which the poor people suffer.” Maria Theresa hesitated to act against the interests of the great landowners, but the tax-resistance of the Hungarian nobles angered her enough to proceed. The emancipation of the peasantry in the Habsburg Empire began with an imperial decree of 1767 named the Urbarium. This gave Hungarian peasants a leasehold on the soil that they worked and the legal freedom to leave the land without the permission of the local lord. It did not, however, abolish the robot, the compulsory labour tax that peasants owed to lords. During the 1770s, mother and son slowly extended this emancipation. Peasant obligations were separately reduced in Austrian Silesia (1771), then in lower Austria (1772), Bohemia and Moravia (1775), and Styria (1778). After a rebellion by Bohemian peasants in 1775, another imperial decree converted the detested robot into a money tax.

Joseph II carried this work to its logical conclusion—the complete emancipation of the serfs—after the death of his mother in 1780. His decree of 1781 (the Untertanspatent) gave peasants in Austria, Bohemia, and Galicia the right to appeal to the state in any disputes with their lords. That same year he abolished serfdom in Austria. Peasants obtained the right to marry, to move to the city, and to learn a trade without permission. Then, between 1781 and 1785, Joseph extended this emancipation to his other domains. Joseph II had practical reasons for his policy, such as asserting royal power against the aristocracy and creating a more efficient economy, but the ideas of the Enlightenment were an important factor. As the Patent to Abolish Serfdom of 1781 stated in its preface, “reason and humanity alike require this change.” That did not mean, however, that Joseph was simply a gentle philosopher: He was both despot and enlightened. He had autocratic instincts, and those around him often commented on his domineering, uncompromising, irritable character.

Maria Theresa’s financial needs and Joseph II’s reforming zeal led to similar policies regarding the Catholic Church. The financial crisis of 1763 convinced the devout empress that she should challenge some of the tax exemptions and privileges of the church. She began by asking the church to make a greater “voluntary contribution” to the treasury and to limit future property donations to the church (which became tax-exempt land), but the Vatican refused. This led to imperial decrees restricting the church’s acquisition of land, beginning with a patent that applied to the duchy of Milan in 1767. Thus, the financial crisis brought the monarchy into conflict with the church just as it had with the nobility, and this led to a variety of reforms. In 1768 the first tax on the clergy was created.

In 1771 a decree established the maximum amount of property that an individual could bring to the church when joining a monastic order. In this struggle, Joseph pressed his mother even harder than he did against the aristocracy, and after her death, he acted vigorously. Between 1781 and 1789, Joseph closed more than seven hundred monasteries with thirty-six thousand members. He seized the lands of the dispersed orders, thereby raising revenues for the state and converting church properties into schools. In all matters, he tried to break the power of Rome over the Catholic Church in Austria, a national religious policy known as Josephinism.

Joseph II also earned recognition for enlightenment by responding to two great concerns of the philosophes: the toleration of religious minorities (see document 19.1) and the Beccarian modernization of law codes. In 1781 he issued the Edict of Toleration that extended the rights of full citizenship to Protestants and Jews. Such minorities were allowed to enter businesses and professions or to hold previously closed offices. They obtained the right to hold religious services, although regulations still restricted such details as the right to have churches with steeples or bells. Joseph’s policy was again a mixture of enlightened ideals and practical politics. Emancipating the minorities brought people of talent into state service and promoted economic growth. Joseph admitted this in the Edict of Toleration, saying that he granted it because he was “convinced on the one hand of the perniciousness of all restraints on conscience and, on the other, of the great benefits to religion and the state from true Christian tolerance.”

Joseph II’s legal reforms came in a series of decrees in the 1780s, chiefly 1787–88. He introduced both a new Civil Code and a new Penal Code. Together they abolished torture and the death penalty (except in military courts martial), introduced civil marriage and burial, ended class distinctions in the law, permitted religious intermarriage, eliminated several categories of crime (such as witchcraft and religious apostasy), and even forbade the ancient aristocratic tradition of primogeniture, which concentrated inheritance in the hands of the eldest son.

These reforms did not make Joseph universally popular, nor the centralized powers of the state (such as strong police) welcome. He had infuriated the aristocracy and the Catholic Church by attacking their traditional privileges. He was hated in many provinces, where he enforced the rule of Vienna over local customs, including the mandatory use of the German language in business and government.