JOSEPH II (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (1741–1790; ruled 1765–1790)

JOSEPH II (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (1741–1790; ruled 1765–1790), the eldest son of Empress Maria Theresa (ruled 1740–1780) and Francis of Lorraine (ruled 1745–1765), succeeded his father on the imperial throne in 1765, after which he acted as co-regent with his mother in ruling the Habsburg domains. Although the imperial dignity meant little in the non-Habsburg lands of the Holy Roman Empire, it was of real importance within the Austrian domains. These were held together constitutionally only by the person of the emperor and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1713, in which Emperor Charles VI (ruled 1711–1740) had declared the Austrian lands to be indivisible and that the various titles and thrones would descend to his daughter Maria Theresa. To this minimal constitutional framework Maria Theresa added the Council of State (Staatsrat) in 1762, part of a continuing effort to strengthen the central administration of her lands. Her constant policy, which her son would accelerate, was to increase royal power at the expense of provincial autonomy.

The domains that Maria Theresa and Joseph II ruled were the most diverse in all of Europe. Belgium belonged to the Habsburgs, as did some Italian provinces, the Duchies of Austria, Styria, Carniola, Carinthia, the kingdom of Bohemia, Croatia, the kingdom of Hungary, and other assorted lands and duchies. All spoke different languages, had different histories, laws, and customs, and were accustomed to being ruled according to their own traditions. Maria Theresa and Joseph II made it their overriding political aim to bring together administratively provinces and kingdoms that were otherwise separate, and which defended local privileges and immunities with tenacity and vigor.

Maria Theresa and Joseph II had two aims in their efforts to strengthen the central monarchy at the expense of provincial autonomy. The first, and easier to obtain, was centralization, which involved transferring political decision-making power from local notables to the royal councils. The second, much more difficult aim was uniformity, which meant treating all provinces and all social and legal classes alike in matters of law and administration. These policies constituted the core of enlightened despotism, in which reforms and modernization were imposed from above upon often hostile and unappreciative subjects. As enlightened despots, Maria Theresa and Joseph II had good intentions. For Maria Theresa, the difficulties in achieving centralization and especially uniformity had made her cautious, but Joseph was impatient, and his enlightened rationalism was as absolute as his despotism.

In 1780, the courteous, modest, diligent, and likeable Joseph II became sole ruler of Austria at the death of his mother, which enabled him to push his aims as hard and fast as he liked. He had several programs, which he instituted quickly throughout all of his diverse domains. Joseph disliked the independent power of the Roman Catholic Church. He began his reign with an edict of religious toleration (13 October 1781), fulfilling the Enlightenment ideal that religious persecution was squalid, loathsome, and beneath the moral dignity of a modern monarch. This followed the Edict on Idle Institutions (1780), which began the closure of monasteries—ultimately about seven hundred of them—with their property seized to support secular state schools and charitable institutions. Joseph believed in religious liberty for everyone. His general religious opinions may be discerned from his comment that service to God was the same as service to the state.

Joseph combined secularism with reform of the courts and law within the Austrian crownlands. Centralization and uniformity were the basic principles he used to bring order and coherence to the chaos of multiple legal inheritances. He abolished the law that made mixed marriages a crime against religion, and he closed a number of ecclesiastical courts. Beyond these particular changes, Joseph simply nationalized the judicial system. Manorial and municipal courts had their jurisdiction circumscribed, and they came under much closer governmental scrutiny. He established new appellate courts, which were uniform throughout all his lands. He engaged in a favorite project of enlightened rulers and philosophers: codification of the existing welter of medieval law into a modern and coherent code that would apply uniformly to all the realm. He continued the work begun by Maria Theresa, who in 1770 had issued a criminal code, the Nemesis Theresiana. Joseph reformed this further with the Penal Code of 1787 and the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1788. A notable feature of this code was a substantial reduction in the death penalty. He also reformed civil law, with a code of the law of persons and of property in 1786. Finally, he abolished the patrimonial courts in the kingdom of Hungary, establishing new courts of first instance and bringing Hungarian procedure in line with the rest of the Austrian crownlands. Such judicial reform is rarely easy. Joseph's reforms deeply angered the Hungarian rural nobility, who complained about the loss of their ancestral privileges.

Joseph II departed most dramatically from his mother's pattern of cautious reform in the area of land and the abolition of serfdom. On 1 November 1781, he abolished some of the worst disabilities of serfdom in the lands of Bohemia and Austria, and he extended these reforms to Transylvania in 1783 and Hungary in 1785. In 1789 he abolished the remaining obligations of serfdom and changed the existing tax structure into a single tax on land. This was the culmination of his social reforms, which turned the serfs from patrimonial into royal subjects.

Joseph had tried to reform everything, never learning that politics is the art of the possible, not the perfect. He appears to have been convinced that imperial power was sufficient to change virtually every aspect of social and communal relationships in the crownlands. A flood of decrees would improve everything. In Joseph's world, however, inertia had greater power than command. He attempted to use central power to create the state, whereas it was the state that must come first for the central power to be effective.

JOSEPH II (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (1741–1790; ruled 1765–1790)

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